Documentaries to Watch

Just days before the July 11 premiere of  “One Night in Idaho: The College Murders” on Prime Video, the coda to the four-episode docuseries had to be rewritten. Initially, the final card stated that Bryan Kohberger, the man accused of murdering four University of Idaho students in November 2022, would face trial in 2025. But on June 30, Kohberger shocked those following the case by accepting a plea deal that spared him from the death penalty on the condition he plead guilty to the murders and waive his right to appeal. He will spend the rest of his life in prison, without the chance for parole.

The news stoked anger in some of the victims’ families, while others  accepted the prosecutors’ decision, with the second group including the families of Ethan Chapin and Maddie Mogen, who are featured in the docuseries, co-directed by Liz Garbus and Matthew Galkin. For Galkin, who was in attendance for Kohberger’s July 2 plea hearing, the sudden assemblage of everyone involved in the case was surreal. The families barely had 36 hours notice to get to Boise to be in the courtroom for the hearing. Galkin says he was on the first flight he could get.

“The atmosphere in the courtroom was harrowing,” he tells Variety. “It was a combination of emotionally charged, obviously, but also extremely dramatic because you had basically every main player in this horrific saga in one room, finally, facing each other because, logistically, that’s the way the courtroom is set up. All the families and the prosecutors were looking one direction, but the plaintiff and his legal team were off to the side, looking back towards the families. So there were a lot of crossed eyelines going on, and it was a really, really intense thing to witness.”

Galkin and Garbus began documenting the case mere months after the murders, first contacting the Chapins (including Ethan’s triplet siblings Hunter and Maizie) in April 2023 and later the Laramies (Maddie’s parents). The families of the other two victims, Xana Kernodle and Kaylee Goncalves, did not participate in the series, but Garbus confirms they were approached. While the Chapins and Laramies had largely avoided talking to the media about their lost children and the horrors of the circumstances surrounding their deaths, Garbus and Galkin pitched a victim-forward style of filmmaking. In the years since the murders, the fascination surrounding Kohberger has been eclipsed only by the intense internet sleuths who thought –– and in many cases, still think –– they could solve a case with so many unanswered questions. Through it all, the victims were often pushed out of their own stories.

“We wanted to reclaim them from this maelstrom of social media,” Garbus says. “I will say a lot of those people on social media are very well-meaning. But there is a fervor around this case in which the victims can get lost.”

Garbus, one of the co-founders of the series’ producer Story Syndicate, took a similar approach earlier this year with Netflix’s “Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer,” which chronicled the decades-long killing spree of sex workers in and around the Gilgo Beach area of Long Island . In that case, the victims had been dismissed by the institutions meant to protect them and the communities meant to shelter them because of their professions. Their families spent years just trying to get attention paid to their unsolved cases.

The opposite happened for Maddie, Kaylee, Xana and Ethan after the news broke that they had been murdered in an off-campus house on a Saturday night.

“In this case, it was the entire world wanting to solve this, casting aspersions on boyfriends and developing conspiracy theories that really overtook those who were living through the heart of this darkness,” Garbus says. “What I’m so proud of is that we were able to not just talk about them as victims, but get to know them as people. Who they were and what their dreams were, and how they were loving life in this incredible friend group.”

Also featured in the documentary are members of that friend group, including Hunter Johnson, Emily Alandt and Josie Lauteren, all of whom were among those who first discovered the bodies on November 13, 2022. Johnson and Alandt, specifically, became the subjects of cruel and targeted conspiracy theories online questioning their involvement, taking an emotional toll they address head-on in the series.

But last week’s abrupt end to the two-year legal effort to give the families and friends their day in court leaves one question unanswered –– why? Why did Kohberger — who was arrested in Pennsylvania on Dec. 30, 2022 — stalk, and then enter the off-campus apartment at 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho and stab four friends he did not know personally to death, while also leaving two others alive under the same roof? Why did he choose this close-knit group of friends, and who among them was his intended target?

None of these are questions the docuseries could answer, especially since law enforcement and the surviving roommates Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke have been under a gag order since the murders and remain so until a verdict is reached (that date will now be the July 23 sentencing hearing). But Galkin says the answers many outside observers hoped the trial would offer were never the only priority for the families.

“I think anyone interested in this case, obviously, would like to have an answer of why this happened at all,” Galkin says. “I don’t want to necessarily speak on behalf of the Chapins or Laramies, but they were never involved in the investigative details of this case. They were focused on their own grief, and ultimately their own healing. I’ve had the conversation with Stacy Chapin before, and she said, ‘Well, who cares? It’s not going to bring Ethan back.’ So answering the question of why is not foremost on her mind.”

Without the insight of law enforcement and the eyewitness accounts directly from Dylan and Bethany, Galkin and Garbus leaned even more heavily into the stories of the victims. To assist them, they combed through years of social media posts that unintentionally immortalized a friend group that was chronically online.

“People are obviously curated and selective with what they post on social media, so that’s the forward-facing image that everybody wants to project,” Galkin says. “We were trying to look under the hood as much as we could with the access that we had to their family and friends. But it is a fascinating component of this story, because they were so well-documented that it lent itself to millions of people feeling like they knew these kids.”

The mountain of visuals also offered the filmmakers an opportunity to faithfully and meticulously rebuild portions of the house at 1122 King Road, which was torn down in December 2023 after it had become a gruesome tourist attraction. Using social media posts, insight from their friends and even blueprints of the original home, the series’ creative team rebuilt the main entryway and staircase, the living room, Xana’s bedroom, Maddie’s bedroom and a small part of Dylan’s bedroom to scale on a soundstage in Brooklyn.

To put the viewer inside the home, the team sourced all of the furniture and wall treatments for each room from the original vendors. The set build and shoot took about a week, but the entire process –– including research, drafting and prep –– took months.

“We took that very seriously,” Galkin says “It was uncanny to the point that when we showed the series to the Chapin and Laramie families, they both turned to me and asked, ‘How did you guys get inside the house?’ Obviously, this was a house they knew really well.

“We had the ability to do this really accurately,” Galkin continues, “and so we decided to capitalize on that — because it’s important to get the details right.”

Even armed with intense research, the directors were still confronted with surprises as they interviewed the families. In the final episode, Ethan’s father Jim unexpectedly shares what happened to his son’s cremated remains. The family couldn’t decide where he should be buried, so they brought him home. As Jim explains, now they visit with him every day and, when one of them passes, he will be buried with them. Until then, they didn’t want him to be alone.

The Chapin family had told Galkin nothing was off the table when they agreed to the interviews –– “If they were going to do this, they wanted to do it,” he says. But even he was taken aback at this admission.

“I didn’t know that Ethan’s remains were in the house at all,” he says. “It was nothing that had ever come up in some of our pre-interviews or earlier conversations. So when Jim said that to me, I mean — I started crying in the interview. The way he tells that story is so moving. I’m glad that we were able to capture it on camera. It is truly such a beautiful moment. Obviously, you feel the loss through the whole series, but that’s really a moment that crystallized it for me when we were shooting. It’s really heartbreaking.”

Both the Chapins and the Laramies were able to watch the series with Galkin and Garbus before its release, and prior to Kohberger’s plea deal. “As filmmakers, it was what you hope for,” Galkin says. “Karen Laramie described feeling a kind of lightness that she hadn’t felt since the murders. So I think there’s something very healing there.”

When news of the plea deal broke, questions circulated about what would happen to the docuseries. Should it be shelved out of respect? Does it even matter now, because the ending is already written? But Galkin is adamant that because their focus was always the victims, Kohberger’s plea deal only changed one thing.

“It changes the ending,” he says. “We changed the final card. But I don’t think knowing the ending completely changes the way you should look at these four hours.”

The filmmakers had planned to cover the trial, and potentially revisit the story with a possible second installment of the documentary. Without a trial, though, Galkin says they don’t know what is next. He remains close with the Chapins, with whom he attended the July 2 hearing. As for new interview subjects, he says they are interested in talking to law enforcement about the investigation, and would consider reaching out to the survivors to tell their story, which remains something that’s been revealed only through affidavits. But as of now, there is no formal plan in place for a followup.

“If there is an appetite, if there is more story to tell, 100% yes,” Galkin says. “But until then, we’re not going to put that kind of media attention on people, because you are entering their lives when you reach out to someone who has been going through something like this. So if we did it, we would want to do it as gently and delicately as possible. And without an actual production, there’s kind of no reason to reach out to them. So we’ll wait and see what happens.”

For now, Galkin will be in the courtroom on July 23 for the final appearance of Kohberger for sentencing. It will be the last time families can give victim impact statements and address the man who, on July 2, confirmed to a judge that he accepted the plea deal because he did, in fact, kill Xana, Ethan, Maddie and Kaylee. It isn’t known whether Kohberger will speak during the sentencing, to share his motive or what really happened in the King Road house. But Galkin says decisions are being made as to who among the Chapin or Laramie families might take the opportunity to do so.

“I’m glad I could be there for the families,” Galkin says of the July 2 hearing. “Both of them were incredibly brave to be there and to face all of this and to come out publicly and support this, even though there are other families that don’t necessarily feel the same way. Because they are finding peace in this decision, it brings me peace. That’s all I care about. If it’s good with them, then it is good with me.”