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Moscow, Idaho

W hen Steve Goncalves pulls up to the house of attorney Shanon Gray, he feels so at home, it’s weird.

Gray is covered in tattoos and wears a trucker hat. He drives a maroon Mercedes G-Wagen and complains that the Moscow cops are endlessly stopping him because of it. Even before Steve knows anything about Gray’s career, he decides he’s going to hire Gray to be his lawyer.

He’ll later say that it wasn’t really his decision at all. “The girls”—meaning Kristi and his daughters Alivea, Autumn, and Aubrie—had already decided. They’d told him the family needed a lawyer because they were worried Steve would go and say something he shouldn’t.

“They know I’m willing to break rules,” he said.

“I don’t want to catch the wrong person, but I don’t want to sit in a line of five people and wait for my turn to figure out justice.

” He added, “There are things that we can request and things we can do to get to the truth faster. You have to fill out forms to get this evidence released to you. I don’t know how to do that. ”

Jack DuCoeur’s aunt Brooke Miller knows Gray’s wife, Tiffany, an Instagram influencer whose account describes the ups and downs of their large family. Miller introduced the Grays to the Goncalves women, but they sent Steve to close the deal.

Steve applauds the dynamism his girls showed in getting Gray, though he might have gone in a different direction and hired a civil lawyer. Gray is a criminal lawyer.

To Steve, there is much to appreciate about Gray, an unlikely lawyer who cannot let a perceived injustice drop. He feels positive about Gray’s “prosecution experience… more experience than Thompson”—specifically “way more murder cases,” he said.

“I’ll spend as much money as I got to to make sure that we get to the bottom of this,” Steve said.

The girls have in fact already thought about how to pay Gray— and a private investigator.

To get out in front of any controversy over the Goncalves family online fundraiser that Brooke has advertised on the University of Idaho—Case Discussion Facebook group page, Alivea posts: By no means do we expect anything at all but for those looking to specifically help with legal and independent investigation fees, this fundraiser has been started for us.

Steve wants Gray, a former prosecutor in the Multnomah County (Oregon) DA’s office who’s aggressive and “not afraid of a microphone,” to go shake some trees to pressure the cops and Thompson.

Steve explains that his frustration with the cops started to build on the third day following the murders, when, thanks to Alivea, the Goncalves family discovered who Kaylee had been in touch with on the phone, had gotten hold of the Grub Truck video, and had been in touch with the rideshare driver, a fraternity house–designated driver.

Steve says he asked the cops: “Do you know about the food truck? Do you know about the Uber driver?” When the answer to both was negative, he says he exploded. “These guys don’t even know what the fuck’s going on.”

The family expected to be interviewed by police.

Instead, they received a questionnaire to fill out about Kaylee.

They’d also gotten hold of video of the crime scene from a neighbor that the cops didn’t pick up from them.

And they’d asked the owner of a local vape shop, where Kaylee had talked about a stalker, if he’d given the CCTV footage of that to the cops.

The answer was no. And now it was too late.

The recording had looped. So when Bill Thompson appeared to be muddled about whether the house, a victim, or no one had been targeted, Steve snapped.

On December 13, Steve told Fox News Digital he’d hired Shanon Gray because he was frustrated with the police’s lack of communication and what he saw as missteps in the investigation.

“I have a lawyer for a reason,” he said. The police talk to his lawyer now. “They’ve messed up a million times,” he continued. “But I don’t get to say that because what experience does Steve have? He doesn’t know. He’s just a dad who woke up one day and had his life turned upside down.”

Gray started giving TV interviews in which he said he sat down with investigators and Thompson and asked for more transparency and accountability.

When Chief Fry first saw Shanon Gray on the news, he was bemused.

Who is this guy? he wondered. Most people in Moscow had never heard of him.

The more the police chief sees of Gray, on TV and off, the less he trusts him.

It doesn’t help that back in January, Gray was suspended from the Oregon State Bar for misconduct. (He was reinstated thirty days later.)

Gray moved to the outskirts of Moscow from Portland earlier in the year.

In one of life’s ironies, he bought the house next door to Nate Wilson, the screenwriter son of Christ Church pastor Doug Wilson and the father of the two boys arrested for putting SOVIET MOSCOW stickers on lampposts in the middle of the night during COVID.

Nate Wilson is completely mesmerized by his new neighbors.

Gray’s wife, Tiffany, strikes Nate as an “emotional, passionate” person, and he listens raptly to Gray’s life story, which includes an earlier career as a bouncer in a bar and a row with the Moscow City Council over a halfway house opposite the junior high school that lacked, he felt, appropriate oversight.

He told Wilson he’d uncovered all sorts of corruption and self-dealing inside city hall, but Nate never gets to the bottom of that story, partly because Gray is always on the road, defending clients in Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai County.

And now Gray is swept up in the murders, because he started representing the Goncalves family.

Gray is, understandably, given his stalemate with the police, very sympathetic about the Wilson family’s clashes with law enforcement. Nate remembers finding it difficult, borderline impossible, to trust that the MPD could get anything done.

The chief wants to help the Goncalves family. He wants to get justice for Kaylee.

They are getting closer with the investigation. But the battle lines have been so clearly and aggressively defined by Gray that the police chief feels unable to share much, if anything, with them. It’s a shame.