How can police not have a suspect in a brutal quadruple homicide after nearly two weeks?
It has been 12 days since someone brutally killed four University of Idaho students in their own beds and it seems unbelievable to say it but apparently police still don’t even know who they’re looking for:
Ten days after four University of Idaho students were found stabbed to death in an off-campus house in Moscow, police have not identified any suspects or persons of interest. Police and community leaders continue to ask the public for tips -- and for patience.
"We believe we owe this to the surviving families to get this right," Col. Kedrick Wills of Idaho State Police said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
This is kind of incredible. I suppose it’s possible that the police in Moscow, Idaho are just completely inept and have botched this whole thing. But remember that the state police, the FBI, and the county sheriff have all dispatched investigators to cover this beat—dozens and dozens of homicide examiners from federal, from state, from local. All of these people, all of that expertise, and still no suspect?
There are only three possibilities here. The first is that everyone has screwed this up—the local investigators, the federal agents, the state troopers, everyone has missed every crucial bit of evidence and the whole thing has just been botched from the lowliest beat cop to the highest DSAC. That doesn’t seem at all likely, but it is most assuredly possible. The second is that the killer just got extraordinarily lucky, somehow managing to carry out a crime of shocking brutality without leaving any readily identifiable evidence or clues behind.
The third possibility is that whoever did this crime is an exceedingly sophisticated criminal, one with a unique ability to travel to a crime scene without being seen, enter without force, kill four people apparently with little trouble and/or resistance, leave no immediately evident forensic traces, depart once again without being seen, vanish without a trace, and dispose of any and all criminal evidence—including the murder weapon and the clothes he was wearing—without anyone noticing.
This is not unprecedented in the world of criminology; some serial killers, Ted Bundy most famously among them, develop keen abilities to commit crimes and leave behind little evidence to show for it. That may be the case here. Serial killers seem to not be as prevalent as they used to be, but it’s worth pointing out that a fellow who can commit four murders in one home and baffle police over it for two weeks has probably killed at least once before. Indeed police are already exploring the possibility that the attack may be connected to a similar murder in Oregon last year.
Well, they can’t really afford to ignore any leads at this point. And I mean, again, this could just be an example of monumentally poor police work. It happens, regularly. But the redundant layers of investigation—the sheer number of cops working on this case—make me think it’s more likely one of the other two options. I suppose we’ll know one way or the other soon enough, though given that it’s been two weeks already, I guess I’m not so sure.