House where four Idaho students murdered to be torn down

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The house where four University of Idaho students were brutally murdered will be torn down as a “healing step”, it has been announced.

Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kerndole and Ethan Chapin were all stabbed to death in an off-campus rental home in Moscow, Idaho, on 13 November.

Bryan Kohberger, 28, was arrested on 30 December at his family home in Pennsylvania. He is now in custody at Latah County Jail in Idaho, awaiting his 26 June preliminary hearing after being charged with the quadruple slaying.

In a statement on Friday, officials said that the owner of the house where the murders took place has given it to the university and that they hoped to demolish it “this semester.”

The university said that doing so “removes the physical structure where the crime that shook our community was committed” and “removes efforts to further sensationalise the crime scene.”

“We’re just working through the processes that it takes to do such a thing,” university spokesperson Jodi Walker told the Idaho Statesman. “But from the university standpoint, and in talking with the families, the sooner, the better.”

The university says that it has not yet planned what will be built where the house stood.

Mr Kohberger was linked to the murders through DNA found on a knife sheath left behind at the scene, cellphone data and surveillance video of what prosecutors believe to be his white Hyundai Elantra leaving the scene after the slayings.

One of the victims’ surviving roommates was also able to partially describe the killer to investigators after she apparently came face-to-face with him in the aftermath of the murders.

The murder weapon – a fixed-blade knife – was not recovered during the searches and it is still unclear where it may be.

As a criminal justice PhD student at WSU, he lived just 15 minutes from the victims over the Idaho-Washington border in Pullman. He had moved there from Pennsylvania and began his studies there in August, having just completed his first semester before his arrest.

The university says that it plans to build a memorial garden on campus for the murdered students, with designs contributed by students.

Scholarships have also been set up in the names of three of the four students, with work to establish a fourth scholarship already underway.