While social media puts forth speculation and false information, channels like NewsNation are making a name in true-crime coverage.
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Corner Club owner Marc Trivelpiece was starting to hate reporters. As a rule, he condemns violence—anyone who throws punches in the Corner Club gets booted—but three weeks into the media storm surrounding the murders of four college kids in his town, Trivelpiece was beginning to think that people don’t get punched in the face enough.
Read Part 1 of this story on the lives of the four murdered college students in Idaho, and that of their alleged killer.
On
November 13, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves, and Maddie Mogen had been stabbed to death in the girls’ off-campus house in Moscow, home to the University of Idaho. Trivelpiece’s bar is where two of the victims, Goncalves and Mogen, spent their last evening on earth. When the murders made news, the media swarmed, and Trivelpiece’s business in particular came under siege. “I want the Corner Club to be famous,” he said. “But not for this.”
When reporters barged in, talking about the murders in such a casual way, Trivelpiece was like, “Whatever you guys want to talk about at home is fine. But their friends [the victims’] are sitting right there. So let’s not do this.” He turned down location fees from NBC. Ignored calls from TMZ. Banished journalists from as far away as the
London Telegraph. But they kept coming. Someone claiming to be from Fox News had recently followed a Corner Club employee’s roommate to work.
Like other Moscow business owners, Trivelpiece’s workforce and customer base are heavily composed of students, who make up about half the town’s population. After the murders, Fox estimated that
25 to 40 percent of those students fled home. There was a killer on the loose. But Trivelpiece wondered if media harassment played a role in the mass exodus. “How many students aren’t going to come back because Fox News is sitting out in front of their house?”
Trivelpiece knew I was media as soon as I walked into his bar. The tell was not just that he didn’t recognize me—Trivelpiece isn’t great with names, he says, but he knows most patrons by their drink orders (Busch Light Pint; Whiskey and Coke; Keeps His Straws)—but more so that newcomers usually take a moment to admire the impressive collection of sports memorabilia, whereas my eyes went straight to the security cameras. Before agreeing to speak to me, he asked for my driver’s license and set about making sure that I was not with Fox News.
“We’re in mourning and we’re a small town—and we know what’s going to happen,” he said to me. “You guys are going to go home and you’re going to write your story, and if you write something that maybe puts us in a negative light, it doesn’t matter to you. But it matters to us, and we have to sit around and deal with the repercussions of that and explain to the rest of the community, ‘I was misquoted’ or, you know, ‘They didn’t understand what I was saying.’ And we don’t want to do that. We just want to be there for each other right now.”
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