New footage from car could be relevant in case of student killings

Police reportedly received extensive surveillance footage Tuesday of a gas station in the rural college town of Moscow, where four University of Idaho students were murdered in early November.

Corresponding Fox News, the footage in question spans more than eight hours. The relevant excerpt is said to have been recorded at around 3:45 a.m. on the night of the fatal stabbing, at least for the time being. In this clip, a white sedan drives past the said gas station.

An image of the car from the footage is mirrored onto an image from a mobile phone, showing a white car driving at night – clearly recognizable by its powerful and visible headlights.

Late last week, police in the until recently sleepy community said a white 2011-2013 Hyundai Elantra was seen in the area on the night the students were stabbed. Pictures of the vehicle singled out by police are not yet available.

Surveillance footage from the gas station may provide the first glimpse of the vehicle that caught investigators’ attention.

During an overnight interview with the network, the assistant manager said she’s been slowly reviewing surveillance footage during her downtime for the past few days.

“I felt weird walking in front of the cameras,” the clerk, who remains anonymous for security reasons, told Fox News.

After the discovery, she reportedly said, she contacted police through a tip hotline set up specifically to deal with the mysterious murders.

The clerk also said the car passed “really quickly” before turning onto a side street off Highway 8.

Perhaps the most crucial update comes in a case that has been painfully slow for many of those closely involved.

In the early morning hours of November 13, 2022, University of Idaho students Ethan Chapin20, Xana Kernodle20 Kaylee Goncalvesand Madison Mogen, 20, were stabbed to death at an off-campus shelter in the tiny, college-centric community. According to the Latah County Coroner, some but not all of them were killed in their sleep.

The three young women lived together in the three-story house that has long housed class after class of university students in the area; Chapin, Kernodle’s friend, stayed the night in question. Two other roommates who slept on the first floor were unaffected by the killer or killers.

Goncalves’ father, Steve Goncalveswho has frequently criticized law enforcement, called police “cowards” on Monday for the small amount of information shared and also noted the size of the wounds suffered by his daughter and speculated on the culprit.

Moscow police recently said investigators “believe the resident(s) of [the Elantra] potentially important information to share.”

Public details about the case are all but negligible. Acknowledging the slow pace of investigations so far, local authorities have eventually backed down and vacillated from previous statements about the extent to which the victims themselves were “targeted” in the shocking, unusual quadruple murder.

It’s currently unclear if the car on the gas station footage is actually the Elantra the police are after.

According to Fox News, spokesman for the Moscow police Robbie Johnson couldn’t confirm if the two cars are one and the same – but continued to urge the public to provide any help they can.

“If you saw something weird that night… anything you need to report, even if you think it’s nothing, we still encourage people to send that in,” she told the network. “Sometimes when we get that information, even if it’s small, it can piece the timeline together, put those pieces of the puzzle together, and we get a bigger, bigger picture of what was going on.”

[image via screengrab/Fox News]

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