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Rathdrum, Idaho

A livea Goncalves is sitting in the home office the family calls the “yellow room” at her parents’ ranch house in Rathdrum, Idaho, hunched over her laptop. The shelves are piled higgledy-piggledy with boxes.

She keeps looking impatiently at the clock.

What’s the holdup?

It’s now the afternoon after she got to her parents’ house, and two days after the police knocked on their door and delivered the chilling news of Kaylee’s murder but absolutely no details. She had walked in feeling like she was already behind.

Jack DuCoeur is sitting with her parents, clearly in shock.

She feels terrible for him and not just because of the shock.

She knows he’d never hurt Kaylee, but there’s nasty speculation about him flying around on social media.

Some people are suggesting that drugs were involved and that Kaylee and her friends deserved to be murdered.

Alivea wants to do whatever she can to put an end to this narrative.

She wants to tell the world that they were good kids, that they’d done everything right, and that she can feel in her gut that whoever did this was unknown to them.

Her parents still don’t have a contact at the Moscow Police Department, so at around noon Alivea had gotten hold of a detective, Lawrence Mowery; he’d asked her to put all her findings from Kaylee’s call log into a secure electronic file and send it, which she did.

Alivea expected the police to take a little time to verify it all, but she can’t understand why it’s now hours later and not only are the police saying nothing about the information she gave them, but they are still putting out the wrong time that Kaylee and Maddie returned to the King Road house. “It diminished us,” she later said.

Time, Alivea knows, is of the essence in murder investigations.

It’d be good for the public to know the details of Kaylee’s last hours so they can start phoning in tips.

It would also be good if the police shared anything they knew about what happened to Kaylee with the family, but the Goncalveses are just as much in the dark now as they were two days ago.

It’s beginning to feel as if the family is being iced out.

And it’s also starting to feel like the only person bringing in information is Alivea.

Alivea particularly hoped that the police would publish the video she’d found on Twitch of Kaylee and Maddie ordering food at the Grub Truck.

The video shows her sister standing on the sidewalk at around 1:30 a.m., Maddie beside her. Speaking slowly and haltingly, Kaylee orders: “I think I would like the… um… the… carbonara.”

On the video, Alivea noticed a group of guys standing behind the girls, chatting, and another group off to the side. Maddie recognizes one of the latter, wanders over, and embraces him affectionately.

But in the group behind them, one of the guys, whose face is obscured by the light gray hoodie he’s wearing, seems to be watching the two girls quietly.

And when Kaylee and Maddie walk off to get in their rideshare, he breaks away from his friends and goes after them. It’s not clear from the video footage why.

Alivea has already discovered who “Hoodie Guy” is. He’s called Jack Showalter, and he is in the same fraternity as Jack DuCoeur.

She’s told the police this and she’s hoping they will post it to get answers from anyone who saw the girls and the group they were with that night.

So again she looks at the time. Afternoon is turning into evening.

Why isn’t the video up on the Moscow PD Facebook page yet?

She hits refresh again. Still nothing.

She knows that the police need to protect the investigation. Of course she does.

She understands how police investigations are run and how the media works. But the more people out there looking for this murderer, the quicker he—she feels it’s a he—can be found and brought to justice. So she’s frustrated.

And then someone—it takes her a while to learn it’s the mayor of Moscow—gives an interview calling what happened a crime of passion.

For Alivea, this is a tipping point. It presents a completely misleading picture of Kaylee and her friends.

She is not going to sit idly by while all this misinformation gets out there and while the police continue to tell her family nothing.

By early evening, Alivea makes a decision. It’s time to take control of the narrative. It’s time to tell the public who Kaylee really was, and it’s time to spur the public into action to help find the killer.

She’s going to start talking to the press.

The first interview she does is with Hayley Guenthner, a local TV reporter for an NBC affiliate station in Spokane. Seated in her parents’ living room on their black leather sofa, her face white with tiredness, Robbie by her side, Alivea makes a direct plea for the public’s help.

“I would say if you know anything, if you think anything, if you heard anything, if you saw anything, just call it in,” she says.

“I know it’s important to protect family.

It’s important to protect friends. And I know that those ties of loyalty are strong, but you should be scared.

And this isn’t someone that should be protected.

So if you noticed odd behavior, if you noticed something in the shared bathroom trash can, if you noticed a weird smudge on the fridge after your roommate came home late, call it in.

Any injuries, anything at all. Because, worst-case scenario, the police talk to them and they get to go home.

If they have nothing to hide, then you just did your job. Call it in anonymously.”

She feels better afterward. She’s doing her part; she’s upset that the police don’t seem to be doing theirs. It feels too slow, too little, too late. “If I can’t sleep at night, how can you, Chief Fry?” she asks herself rhetorically. She wants people to know how frustrated she and her family are.

So she speaks to Steven Fabian of Inside Edition, airing her vexation with the police. “We’re not getting any answers, and we’re not going to settle for that.”