Book #92 of 2024:
While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students by J. Reuben Appelman
This true-crime title is pretty slim, despite how much time author J. Reuben Appelman spends on describing the victims’ backstories. He painstakingly walks through the police bodycam footage from when officers were called out to their house earlier in the year on a noise complaint, for instance, even though that has nothing to do with the students’ subsequent murders or their suspected assailant. He even delves into their old social media posts, dragging out Facebook quiz results, tween Instagram captions, and high school essay responses as though they’re at all relevant for understanding the four college-aged adults who were killed one night in 2022. (He also drastically overestimates the fame of this incident, saying at one point that a particular event happened “before most of the world knew” the name of one of the murdered girls.)
But there’s not much else to this book, either due to the writer’s own limitations or the inherently scant material available. A suspect was arrested only six weeks after the killings, and while the circumstantial evidence that Appelman describes seems convincing, the individual in question hasn’t confessed or even been brought to trial yet. Meanwhile, the sensationalized account of the crime scene reconstruction is grisly, but not especially distinctive against other reporting from this genre.
The most interesting thing about this volume may be its brief discussion of the horde of ‘citizen sleuths’ who took up the matter, swarming on the small Idaho town to record self-promotional podcasts and TikToks, interview/harass potential witnesses, and gleefully speculate about the dead and their surviving loved ones in dedicated subreddits. That’s an ugly side of modern society that could help differentiate this case from similar previous slaughters, both causing undue suffering and interfering with official law enforcement investigations, but Appelman doesn’t really dig into it any further, let alone grapple with his own role as a part of that ecosystem. With more distance and time, this could have been a significantly stronger work.
★★☆☆☆
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