The Idaho Student Murders Review: Everyone’s Talking, No One’s Saying Anything

Peacock| 1 Episode | 2025

Rating: 1 out of 5

A documentary dressed for court but built for clicks. All performance, no prosecution.

Spoiler Warning:

This review contains spoilers. I’m not sugarcoating or tiptoeing. This documentary doesn’t deserve that kind of grace, and I’m not wasting energy trying to hide what it freely gives away in the first few minutes.

Everyone Wants a Piece of King Road

While nosing around Peacock a couple weeks back, I stumbled on a quietly dropped documentary titled The Idaho Student Murders. No press push, no splashy banner; just there, like it had slipped in through the back door. I paused, confused. Wasn’t Prime Video the one with the July release of this story, the brutal 2022 stabbings of four University of Idaho students in their off-campus home?

Turns out, I wasn’t wrong. Prime did release One Night in Idaho: The College Murders on July 11, 2025. But they weren’t the only ones.

There’s also:

• The Idaho College Murders on AppleTV/HBOMAX (2023)

• #Cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders on Paramount+ (2024)

• The Terrible Night on King Road from Dateline

• Horror in Idaho from 20/20

And in podcast/book land? Flooded. Everyone has their angle, their theory, their take.

So I asked myself: what could Peacock possibly add? With a gag order in place until this week, unless they had a leak or an exclusive, I had doubts.

Still, curiosity wins. I hit play.

Shock Before Substance

This documentary opens with a jarring montage. Two minutes and forty-one seconds of dramatic voiceovers, crying interview clips, and news footage, not to inform, but to sell. Like a trailer for a movie I’ve already bought a ticket to. All of these moments are shown again later in the show. So now I’ve watched the same emotional clips twice. Once as bait, once as padding.

Then finally, the actual credits. And they’re good; moody and haunting, with projected images of the victims in a symbolic house. It sets a tone the rest of the documentary fails to match.

And then they drop Bryan Kohberger’s name right in the middle of the intro. If you were expecting suspense or narrative arc, forget it. That moment should’ve been a climax, not a footnote in the intro trailer.

Tone? Never Heard of Her

We jump straight into the strangest setup I’ve seen in a true crime doc. Four of the victims’ friends walk into a large room... only to be seated at a round banquet table. Not a casual roundtable interview setup, this was full-on tablecloths, candles, plates, napkins, and assigned seats. Thanksgiving dinner style.

One of the women even laughs about the seating chart. And honestly? Same. It felt so oddly staged, I half expected someone to carve a turkey. Who made this choice? Who thought a formal dining setup was appropriate for a grief interview?

It wasn’t just a one-off. Later in the documentary, we get forensic science professor Joseph Scott Morgan seated at a completely empty bar. One cocktail napkin. One glass. Zero explanation. It looks like he’s had a few, not discussing a quadruple homicide for a documentary.

The Sound of Confusion: Music, Graphics, and That Weird Exhale

There’s one date graphic they use over and over again, and every time it appears onscreen it’s always accompanied with the same odd sound effect. A dramatic breath. An exaggerated exhale sound. The first time it happened, I blinked. The fifth time, I winced. By the tenth, I was laughing out loud.

The soundtrack is pure chaos. Haunting tones that turn into horror movie stings, followed by stock suspense tracks that sound like they were pulled from a thriller film. And yes, they play dog whining sounds when discussing the victims’ pet. Repeatedly.

The b-roll? Relentless. Farmland, street signs, highways, shoes hanging on wires, cell towers, interior car shots, more farmland, lakes, and the same five seconds of road footage played again and again. It’s filler. A lot of it.

Faces Without Context

In most documentaries, when an expert shows up to give an interview, they’re given a proper introduction. Name, credentials, a line about their relevance to the case. Sometimes they even share a short anecdote or moment that humanizes them, helps you build a little trust. “Here’s who I am, here’s why I’m here, and here’s why you should listen to me.” You know, the basics.

Not in this one.

In The Idaho Student Murders, people simply appear. No warm-up, no context. One person finishes a thought, and suddenly a completely different voice picks up where they left off. Not one person tells a full story, it’s just snippets of audio from multiple different interviews in amalgamated form. There’s no handoff, no introduction. Just a quick cut, a random face, and maybe a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it lower third that says something like “defense lawyer” or “retired FBI” and no explanation of how this person is connected to this case.

Our experts for the film included:

• Defense Attorney

• Journalist

• Retired FBI Special Agent

• Forensic Science Professor

• Homicide Prosecutor

• Social Media Journalist (the only one with a proper intro)

• Former University of Idaho Student Editor

• Book Author (The subject of his book was this case, but you’d never know that from the documentary. They didn’t say it. They didn’t explain it. They just dropped the book title into a lower third and moved on. If you bothered to look it up yourself, you’d discover it’s about this very case, the book written while all the actual evidence was still under a gag order.)

• An anonymous woman who had Bryan Kohberger as a Teacher’s Assistant

• Senior Digital Forensics Examiner

• DNA Expert

• Doctor of Optometry

  
  

The only people directly connected to the victims? Four friends and one brother. Everyone else felt like they wandered in from another show. We never learn how, or even if, any of these people are actually connected to the case. Slapping a title under their name like “Journalist” or “Homicide Prosecutor” doesn’t clear that up. It doesn’t build trust. It doesn’t tell me why their opinion matters. All it does is assume that a job title is enough to earn credibility.

Surface-Level Sorrows

At a round banquet table sat four women, presented, as friends of the victims. Whether they were best friends, classmates, or casual acquaintances is anyone's guess, because the documentary never made it clear. The entire segment was so lacking in depth that by the end, I couldn’t even tell how close these women actually were to Maddie, Kaylee, Ethan, and Xana.

Maybe this was meant to be a tribute, or maybe it was just filler designed to check off a “victim perspective” requirement. Whatever the intention, the result was emotionally hollow and painfully shallow.

Xana was described as “free-spirited,” and Ethan, her boyfriend, was said to be “her opposite.” Maddie was happy to turn 21. Kaylee went on a boat one time and had a nice day. That’s the kind of substance we got.

Meanwhile, the screen was absolutely drenched in photos and videos of the victims. Dozens of them. Smiling, posing, laughing, dancing. Many of these pictures and videos look as if they were taken straight from social media, which anyone can do. It does not look as if these were private photos shared to the documentary by the families. If the goal was to show what they looked like, the mission was accomplished. But if the goal was to help viewers understand who they were, what made them tick, what they loved, what their dreams were after college, then this was a complete miss.

Even the structure of the segment was baffling. The women at the table would begin to talk, then suddenly the scene would cut to a speculative reenactment of the killer’s supposed path through the house, timestamped as if these movements were somehow verified facts. Then it would bounce back to the women, then off to a different thread, and back again. There was no throughline, no rhythm, and certainly no depth.

Whatever this segment was meant to be, it wasn’t a meaningful portrait of four young lives lost. It was fragmented, shallow, and frustratingly devoid of purpose.

Grief for Show

The documentary includes what looks like the victim's memorial service footage. No source. Just family members crying into microphones. It felt invasive. Like eavesdropping on private grief. There’s no clarity on how this footage was obtained, and no indication that it was given with consent.

It didn’t feel like a tribute. It felt like a cheap emotional pull to patch over a lack of meaningful narrative.

Speculation, Sensationalism, and the Art of Saying Nothing

Despite the gag order, this documentary throws out speculation like candy at a parade. The experts dive into areas far outside their expertise:

• A forensic scientist comments on city layout.

• The FBI agent analyzes online statements from Bryan Kohberger that may or may not be real.

• They show texts from the roommates without saying if they’re real or dramatized.

  
  

The FBI agent says killers of this nature "lack empathy." No kidding. That’s not insight. That’s crime show filler.

They speculate the suspect may have targeted the victims because they were blonde. That he might’ve returned to the scene. That he could’ve been an incel. That he had visual snow and tinnitus. They even dramatize what he likely wrote online as a teen.

I had to rewind to make sure I heard it right.

By the end, I didn’t believe a single word of it. Every sentence is dressed in qualifiers: "could be," "possibly," "allegedly." It feels like this entire documentary was stitched together by people who had no access to the law enforcement actually involved with the case, no connections to the families, and no business pretending otherwise. Just a handful of talking heads pulling from headlines, spinning what-ifs, and pretending they had answers. What they really had was time to fill. And they filled it with noise.

The Killer Gets a Biography, the Victims Get Vibes

While the victims get surface-level snapshots, Kohberger gets a full backstory:

• Vegan

• Heroin addiction

• His interests

• Rehab

• Educational history

• Health conditions

• His parents’ careers

• And on and on.....

Very little to none of it is sourced. And all of it is presented with the tone of an upcoming courtroom saga. Only there won’t be one. He took a plea deal.

Still, they gave him the full character arc. Meanwhile, the victims stay distant, symbolic, aesthetic.

B-Roll, Bullshit, and Birthing Hips

Once Kohlberger’s life story wraps, the rest is just noise. They speculate about where he met the victims. They reference a restaurant with vegan options that 2 of the victims worked at. They guess at motives. They spin out courtroom fantasies that will never come to pass.

A former student agrees to an interview but doesn’t want her face shown. So they film her standing, back to the camera, in a library aisle. It’s the weirdest anonymity choice I’ve ever seen.

They find a TikTok date story where the woman says Kohlberger texted her that she had “great birthing hips.” That’s it. That’s the anecdote.

The Verdict: The Idaho Student Murders Review

The Idaho Student Murders feels like content for content’s sake. No access. No insight. Just a mess of b-roll, vague voiceovers, and speculation. A documentary built on filler, disguised as storytelling.

Final Rating: 1 out of 5 stars.

Case closed.🔍 Verdict delivered. ⚖️

Stay hydrated.💧 

Just because they’ve got a title doesn’t mean they’ve got the facts. 🧩

🕵️‍♀️The Emerald Sleuth, calling it a night. 💚

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