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Moscow, Idaho

C hief Fry reads through his script one more time before heading to the podium in the police conference room.

He and Thompson have gone through the boundaries of what he can say again and again.

The key thing he is not going to tell the media (and, indirectly, the perpetrator) is that they’ve got the knife sheath found next to Maddie and that it has been booked into evidence and gone to a laboratory for analysis.

His job is to keep the mob happy.

So he puts his game face on and pats Bill Thompson on the back, and together they head into the room of panting press.

Chief Fry has never done a live press conference before, much less one in front of the national media.

He makes sure the rest of the “PR team” is flanking him before he begins introductions.

Beside him and Thompson are UI president Scott Green, provost and vice president Torrey Lawrence, Dean Blaine Eckles, Latah County sheriff Richie Skiles, Latah County chief deputy Tim Besst, and head of the ISP, Colonel Kedrick Wills.

Each one of them has been advised either by counsel or communications teams or both as to what to say and what not to say if questioned.

Eckles’s wife, Shelley, begged him not to say something aggressive like We are gonna get whoever did this.

The assumption they are all going on is that the guy is watching.

Is it possible he’s even in the room?

Evan Ellis is shocked to see Thompson up there. Bill Thompson never attends press conferences. Does the rest of the media realize the gravity of the situation that this implies? Ellis looks around at the stony faces. Probably not.

Fry begins the substance of his spiel, mangling the pronunciation of Chapin and Goncalves .

His news nugget is not really anything new. And he knows it. It’s simply that the four victims were stabbed and that law enforcement hasn’t found the weapon. There also appeared to be no forced entry into the home.

Fry confirms what everyone already knows. The ISP, FBI, and Latah County Sheriff’s Office are all helping with the investigation.

Then he drops the powder keg in the room.

“We believe this was an isolated targeted attack on our victims. We do not have a suspect at this time, and that individual is still out there. We cannot say that there’s no threat to the community, and as we have stated, please stay vigilant, report any suspicious activity, and be aware of your surroundings at all times. ”

He knows that come the Q and A session, there will be pandemonium.

And there is.

He gets the same question put four different ways from four different reporters.

“You guys have said repeatedly that there’s no threat to the public,” one of them says. “Why did you say that and why are you changing your mind?”

Fry rewords his answer four different ways, knowing as he does so that each one sounds worse than the one before.

The first: “In these cases, we take the totality of the things that we see and they’re very dynamic, right?

And they’re very big and there’s a lot of information and we try to take that information and some of what we can’t share with you, correct.

But we try to take that information, we try to make the best educated decision we can…

so we at that time believed that there was not a threat. ”

The second: “Like I said, we took the information that we had at the time, but we do need to be aware the individual is still out there. We need to be vigilant.”

The third: “Like I said, we take the totality of the situation. We try to make the best bit of information we can with everything that comes in, and then we make our decision off of that. So at this time, I’m not going to expand upon that.”

The fourth: “We still believe it’s a targeted attack, but the reality is, is there’s still a person out there who committed four horrible, horrible crimes. So I think we got to go back to there is a threat out there still, possibly, we don’t know.”

It’s brutal. He knows this is not going well. Understatement.

Over in Pullman, Mayor Glenn Johnson, who has a PhD in communications from WSU, watches and shakes his head. He says, “James is a nice guy; he got overwhelmed, I think.”

When he hears about that, Fry thinks that the criticism is both fair and unfair.

Fry is just trying to do his job. And his job, until now, has been to catch the bad guys, not to feed stories to the press. But he’s learning the hard way that, apparently, feeding stories to the press is now a major part of his job.

Irritatingly, there’s the inevitable question about Art Bettge’s statement.

“The mayor has called it a crime of passion. Is there any indication that that’s true?”

“We’re looking into every aspect of this. I’m not going to speculate whether it’s one thing or another…”

His audience can see how uncomfortable he is. Worse, his audience isn’t confined to this room. This is being beamed to TV screens around the country. His own mother is watching.

Someone brings up the Twitch video, mentioning that the Goncalves family has verified Maddie and Kaylee are in it.

Fry tries to sound a lot more patient than he feels.

“We are aware of that video and it has helped. It gives us a time and space where we know that two of our victims were, and that helps us a ton and we’ll continue to follow up all leads that we can and continue to gather those.”

And, inevitably, the questions about the two surviving roommates come thick and fast.

Why was there such a long delay before they called? Are they suspects? Then one reporter refers to them as witnesses.

They are now in dangerous territory, Fry knows. Bill Thompson will be bristling.

Protect the investigation. Protect the investigation.

“I don’t think I ever said that they were witnesses. I said they were there.”

When he gets the question about whether he’s interviewing boyfriends, it almost comes as a relief. For once, he’s got a strong answer.

“I will tell you, we are looking at everyone. Every tip we get, every lead we get, there’s no one that we’re not going to talk to.

There’s no one we’re not going to interview.

There’s no one that we’re not going to look into and we’re going to do our due diligence.

We’re going to make sure that nothing goes unturned and that we do everything we can with the assistance of all the resources we have to get a final answer. ”

What Fry doesn’t realize is that the country’s true-crime internet mob will now take it upon themselves to “look into” anyone and everyone connected to each of the four victims, and those people will now have to deal with not only shock and grief but also an online onslaught of hate mail, trolling, and worse.

They will begin to fear not just the darkness of night but daylight and social media too. Some nutters will even accuse Fry of being the murderer. He’s highly visible.

By the next afternoon, Chief Fry sees at least ten FBI agents scurrying around.

“Do I know you?” he asks when one of the female agents introduces herself.

“No, sir,” she replies. “But I’ve seen you on TV.”