MOSCOW, Idaho (NewsNation) — A month after the gruesome quadruple homicide of four University of Idaho students, a dark cloud still hovers over the university as police have yet to name a suspect or locate the murder weapon as hundreds of students prepare for winter break.
There’s a growing concern from within the community that this case may turn cold.
The students, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, were likely asleep when they were each stabbed multiple times in the early morning hours of November 13, authorities have said. Some of the victims had defensive wounds, a coroner has said.
Police say they’re sifting through hundreds of hours of videos and tips for clues, but as no motive, suspect or weapon has been found, families and the community are demanding answers.
The four University of Idaho students who were killed reportedly had their hands bagged at the murder scene to preserve possible DNA evidence.
Forensic expert Joseph Scott Morgan told NewsNation’s “Banfield” that it’s common for perpetrators to unknowingly leave behind hair strands on the victims’ hands. The killer’s skin cells can also become embedded under the nails of their victim.
This news also comes as a former cop revealed online that he that he discovered a glove at the crime scene, and a retired Moscow police captain told DailyMail.com they believe the killer was seeking vengeance against at least one of the students.
Bobby Chacon, a former FBI agent, said he doesn’t think former investigators or detectives should be at the crime scene.
“We would hope that they turn that over to investigators, and the investigators can assess its value. But you have a problem with chain of custody, you have a problem with the verifiability of whether that glove was there when it was there, when it’s found by a third party or a private party, you have to go through an extra layer level process to determine its validity,” he explained.
“So in other words, it’s not found by the crime scene investigation team at the scene. It’s found by a third party, you have to figure out who this third party is where they found it, whether they’re telling you the truth about where they found it and when they found it. So there’s this extra layers of work to do when you have private people out there snooping around,” he added.
Meanwhile, a neighbor of the students reported hearing a scream the night of the killings. Inan Harsh, who lives in an apartment building next to the off-campus home, said he returned from his job as a cook around 1:30 a.m. Nov. 13 and later heard someone yell, he told the Idaho Statesman.
Chacon said he thinks this was probably an off-campus party house and it may not have been uncommon for roommates to hear people coming in at very late hours making noises that others could have passed off just as commonplace for that house.
“It’s also an explanation of why the two roommates downstairs — everybody saying they didn’t wake up, they haven’t heard they didn’t hear anything. We don’t know that, they may have heard something and just dismissed it as drunk roommates coming home later than they they stumbling around into furniture or whatever,” he said. “So we don’t know what those two surviving roommates heard or didn’t hear.”