Page 74

Moscow, Idaho

C hief Fry is looking at the TV in bewilderment.

He’s watching Moscow’s coroner, Cathy Mabbutt, his longtime friend and colleague, appearing via Zoom on yet another news program to discuss the autopsy findings.

Cathy, seventy-two, is a local wonder. On top of being the county coroner, she’s a public defender and a nurse who has worked in the ER for sixteen years.

In 2015, when John Lee shot his mother and two others at an Arby’s, she acted simultaneously as a nurse for the wounded and as a coroner.

In 2005, when the Wells brothers murdered UI football player Eric McMillan, the judge asked (tongue in cheek) if she could be both their defense lawyer and their health-care provider.

She started as coroner back in 2006, and the job had a steep learning curve for the first six months—there were seven homicides in the county.

On her very first call, she and Chief Fry examined a body that hadn’t been found for three days.

Fry smeared Vicks in and under his nose, an old cop trick to avoid the smell.

But Cathy was a rookie; she didn’t know the trick.

Eventually, Cathy could bear it no longer and told him she couldn’t focus because he had extremely large boogers hanging out of his nose.

So Cathy and Fry go way back. He knows that she knows what she’s doing. She understands procedure.

And yet… here she is on national TV.

Fry said later that this was the moment he realized how truly big this story was, how impossible it was for everyone around him to avoid getting caught up in it. “They say when people riot, they don’t even know sometimes what they’re rioting for. They just get caught up in the frenzy.”

On TV, Cathy is telling interviewers that when she got to the scene at 1122 King Road at around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 13, she determined that the victims had died from multiple stabbings. She knocks down suggestions of a murder-suicide.

“Most of them just had one [wound] that was the lethal one,” she tells NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield, adding that in each case, the lethal cut was to the chest area or above.

Banfield asks if the victims were slashed, and her answer echoes the mayor’s comments earlier in the week: “It was a pretty large knife, so it’s really hard to call them puncture wounds…

it was a stabbing… it has to be somebody who was pretty angry to stab four people to death. ”

What Mabbutt doesn’t say on TV but does say in private, which perhaps explains why she felt moved to speak out, is that in all her years on the job, the scene she found when she got to King Road was “right up there” among the worst. She’d dealt with multiple homicides, but she’d never come across a scene like that, where all the bodies were “right there” together. “And then, just their ages too.”

You’d have to be inhuman not to be affected.

But there’s plenty about the autopsy results that she shares with law enforcement and the victims’ families only. Telling the families the autopsy details—that’s the worst part of her job.

For instance, she doesn’t say on air that Ethan was stabbed once in the buttocks and once in the carotid artery, but that’s what she tells Stacy. (Stacy doesn’t want to know anything other than that Ethan died fast and without suffering. She never even reads the autopsy report.)

Cathy doesn’t tell reporters that Xana’s fingers were almost severed, a sign she fought back hard before dropping to the floor. But that’s what she tells Jeffrey Kernodle.

She doesn’t tell anyone that Kaylee’s wounds suggest that she woke up and struggled. But that’s what she tells Alivea Goncalves on the phone—when, that is, Alivea reaches her, after she’s seen Cathy on a local news channel. It’s the first time Alivea gleans that the killer was likely angry.

Cathy Mabbutt’s reports of a frenzied stabbing trouble many locals, too. This is a hunting community. Most people have large hunting knives.

Rand Walker, the local psychologist whom Fry asks to counsel PD members, notices that his friends and neighbors start staring at his arms—and he starts staring back.

Who among them has knife wounds? The problem is that many people do.

It’s common to nick yourself when skinning an elk.

Most people return on Sunday nights after weekend hunting trips looking somewhat worse for wear.

Until now, no one had thought twice about it.

Blaine Eckles, the UI dean, can’t keep this question out of his mind: Was it one of his students who wielded the knife? He’s worried because he needs to plan a vigil for some time after Thanksgiving, when the students are back. But by then, he naively assumes, police will have caught the suspect.

But when, a few days into his planning, he asks Moscow Police Captain Roger Lanier how he’s doing, Lanier answers: “Each morning I wake up excited and each afternoon I go [home] dejected, because it doesn’t feel like they’re getting anywhere.”