Former police chief defends Idaho student homicide record in bid for Latah County sheriff
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Fresh off his retirement in May, former Moscow Police Chief James Fry toasted a lunchtime Pilsner to his three decades in law enforcement. One of his first acts off the decision was figuring his way back in.
The downtime has been nice, Fry admitted, but no longer being a police officer has also left him eager to realize his next purpose. Before his successor was even named, Fry announced his campaign for sheriff of Latah County.
“I do feel like some of the weight’s off,” Fry said in an interview with the Idaho Statesman. “I don’t have to worry about my phone so much anymore, when it pings I don’t immediately run over and look at it. But I’m not done yet, and I knew I wasn’t done when I retired.”
In Tuesday’s election, Fry, 55, who lives in Troy, is challenging two-term incumbent Sheriff Richie Skiles, 59, a Potlatch resident, for the job. Christopher Middleton, 55, of unincorporated Moscow, a former Latah County Sheriff’s deputy and Idaho State Police trooper, also threw his hat in the ring for sheriff.
Across Idaho — and well beyond — Fry became a household name when he helmed the investigation into the November 2022 stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students. The case instantly captured the nation’s interest, and Fry again took center stage almost seven weeks later on Dec. 30, 2022, when he announced the arrest of a 28-year-old man in eastern Pennsylvania on suspicion of murder. Bryan Kohberger’s name and image have proliferated ever since.
In the process, Fry gained a following, and now hopes to parlay that platform into the elected post. During lunch with a Statesman reporter at an outdoor patio in Moscow, more than one passerby stopped to greet him. “James!” the driver of a red SUV shouted, briefly holding up traffic on Main Street to await Fry’s reply wave.
And yet, Fry’s handling of the homicide investigation also drew criticism. The four victims were Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene; Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Post Falls; and Ethan Chapin, 20, of Mount Vernon, Washington. They were each stabbed to death at a house on King Road near campus in Moscow, where the three women lived with two other female housemates who went physically unharmed in the early morning attack.
Along with other local officials, Fry was accused of not being upfront with the public about timely information, including waiting more than three days to hold an initial press conference about the students’ violent deaths. Despite having no one in custody or a suspect, he also told the local community it was safe, because of an unspecified belief the homicides were targeted.
“Those two things, I wish I’d have done differently,” Fry told the Statesman. “I can’t change them, but I can sure learn from them, and I can sure help others learn from them.”
As the investigation persisted over several weeks ahead of Kohberger’s arrest, questions intensified — including from the family of at least one of the victims — over whether the rural college town police department was up to the task. Fry had quickly called on the Idaho State Police and FBI to assist.
“I just think that they were under such stress and were scrambling to get evidence, and they were stretched,” U of I President Scott Green said in an interview with the Statesman. “There was a lot of pressure on them, and I think that they proved kind of the world wrong on that one, that they did know what they were doing, that they did handle it the right way, and they did solve it.”
Kohberger’s capital murder trial was moved from Moscow to Boise and is scheduled to start next summer.
Nearly two years after the student homicides, Fry is banking on voters in Latah County concurring that his unique experience, and its end result, warrants a change in local law enforcement leadership.
‘It doesn’t hurt to have been on TV’
A self-professed lifelong Republican, Fry chose to run for sheriff as an independent, which afforded him more time to get his message out to voters, he told the Statesman. The decision also guaranteed Fry a spot in Tuesday’s general election against Skiles, a Republican, rather than have to beat him in the party primary this past May.
Skiles is a former U.S. Marine, Troy police chief and sheriff’s deputy for the county in which he has held his elected position for eight years. He and Fry have maintained a solid professional relationship during their tenures of equal years as top cop of their agencies, both told the Statesman.
“You pick a party to run or whatever, but I don’t think that’s ever really mattered too much,” Skiles said. “We work together as a team no matter what your party affiliation is, and we move forward getting things done for the people.”
Within an hour of learning of the four U of I students’ deaths, Skiles said, he texted Fry to offer any of his department’s resources to the investigation. The sheriff’s office ultimately took over some campus security and also backfilled patrols of Moscow while the city police worked the homicide case.
Skiles, a Moscow native, was diplomatic about his election opponent’s handling of the student homicide investigation. Such a tragedy was unprecedented for the community and “would have been overwhelming for anybody to deal with,” he said.
“I’m not sure who could have done a lot better, so how do you judge or condemn?” Skiles said in an interview, between sips of a honey breve. “And I’m not a guy who sits back and determines how somebody did or didn’t do something right or wrong in a case like that.”
It’s “super important,” Skiles added, for law enforcement to be honest and transparent with the public. The local community should be given as much information as possible, so long as it doesn’t risk jeopardizing an investigation, he said.
Middleton, also running as an independent with conservative leanings, was more pointed in his assessment of how Fry performed during the homicide investigation. His opinion is informed by conversations with the public and current members of local law enforcement, he said.
Fry has oversold his importance to cracking the case and finding the suspect, Middleton told the Statesman. His management of the investigation, which on the first day included enlisting the help of the state police and FBI, was what anyone in Fry’s position would be expected to do, he said.
“Just because he made those decisions doesn’t make him the smartest guy in the room,” Middleton said in an interview. “I’ve talked to a lot more people that think he did a horrible job than I have that think he did a great job.”
Other issues have bubbled up during the campaign, including the candidates’ approach to matters concerning Christ Church, the Moscow congregation whose members own and operate a number of businesses around town. Upgrades to the Latah County Jail totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs is another, and requires a longer-term solution estimated to cost about $14 million, The Spokesman-Review reported.
A recent inspection found problems that could force closure of the jail, which falls under the sheriff’s office and has been overseen by Skiles the past eight years. The Idaho Sheriff’s Association previously found the county jail out of compliance for annual certification as recently as 2022, InvestigateWest reported.
With voter approval for a bond, Fry oversaw the city police department’s move to a new $10 million headquarters on the south side of Moscow in 2022. If elected, he, Middleton and Skiles all said they plan to address the jail issue in the coming years.
“They need a new jail facility,” Fry said. “This should have been talked about eight, 12 years ago.”
Meanwhile, in the campaign’s battle for name recognition, Skiles leads the three candidates with almost $7,500 in fundraising, most of it going toward yard signs and other political advertising. Middleton has self-funded his campaign with about $1,100, according to secretary of state records.
At the same time, Fry has raised about $5,700, the majority of it spent on signs and advertising. Among his backers is Stacy Chapin, mother of student homicide victim Ethan Chapin, who gave Fry a campaign maximum contribution of $1,000. Unprompted, she approached him about donating, Fry told the Statesman, which he called “very humbling.”
Moscow Mayor Art Bettge told the Statesman he expects a tight race for sheriff in the county. Skiles ran unopposed in 2020, and won by just 72 votes in 2016 in a race with no incumbent. Before that, in the 2012 Republican primary, in Skiles’ first bid for office, he lost to incumbent Sheriff Wayne Rausch by just over 100 votes.
Skiles and Fry are each well known around the community, Bettge said. In the fight to claim votes from the county population of more than 40,000 residents, though, Fry may have a built-in advantage this election.
“It doesn’t hurt to have been on TV and in front of a national audience,” Bettge said in an interview. “And that’s something where it’s trial by fire to a certain extent. You’ve got experience that others fortunately have never had.”
Fry: ‘That stuff will come out later’
On a list of credentials on his campaign website, Fry boasts bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminal justice from the U of I, and training at the FBI’s National Academy. He also included having led the city’s police department through a high-profile case with national media attention.
But other critiques of Fry’s management of the department’s investigation into the student homicides remain.
Just days into the investigation, Moscow police visited local businesses asking about any recent sales of a Ka-Bar brand fixed-blade knife, the Statesman previously reported. Investigators found a leather Ka-Bar knife sheath located next to one of the victims, police later revealed in the probable cause affidavit for Kohberger’s arrest.
Unsealed police search warrants, released a few months after Kohberger’s arrest, later disclosed that detectives filed for their first of several warrants for Ka-Bar knife sales a week after the homicides.
But at the time, police denied being focused on a Ka-Bar knife as the possible weapon used to kill the four students. In an interview with the Statesman more than three weeks into the investigation, Idaho State Police spokesperson Aaron Snell, who helped with investigation communications, joined by now-Moscow Police Chief Anthony Dahlinger, again claimed no specific focus on a Ka-Bar knife in the investigation.
“Our detectives were talking to various business owners during the course of the investigation,” Snell told the Statesman at the time. “My understanding was they were asking more generically about fixed-blade knives.”
Any reference to a Ka-Bar knife by police in those discussions “was used in a generic term,” Snell added.
A week into the investigation, temporary police spokesperson Rachel Doniger also incorrectly told the Statesman that each of the two surviving housemates lived on the first floor of the three-story King Road house. The probable cause affidavit, released after Kohberger’s arrest, showed only one of the two lived on the first floor, and the other on the second. The second-floor housemate awoke at the time of the killings and saw a masked man in the house, according to the affidavit.
Later, in the investigation’s fourth week, Moscow police requested the public’s help to identify the driver of a white Hyundai Elantra from the years 2011-2013 seen near the King Road house around the time the victims were killed. Kohberger drove a 2015 white Elantra, and Fry’s department never updated its request for tips from the public with the model years 2014-2016, even though an FBI analyst had later revised his assessment of the vehicle in question.
Citing a judge’s ongoing gag order in the case, which still applies to Fry as an agent of the prosecution, he declined to address those specific issues from the investigation. “That stuff will come out later on,” Fry said.
Police also long held they had not identified a suspect in the case, including in daily releases issued to the public and media, through Dec. 29 — the night before Kohberger’s arrest.
“The information we had at the time was the information we put out to be the most accurate that we could be,” Fry told the Statesman. “We weren’t trying to deceive anybody or anything on anything. Like I said, that will come out later in the investigation.”
Generally speaking, he added, police, in consultation with prosecutors, never tell the public everything they know in the thick of an investigation.
“Every case you have, no matter if it’s this one or anything, you’re not going to give all information, ever,” Fry said. “So you just give what you can give, you give what you feel you can give and what you need, and you go from there.”
Looking back in hindsight at the investigation that gripped the nation for almost seven weeks at the end of 2022, Bettge defended Fry and the city police department’s overall handling of the situation.
“The police actually did everything as well as could possibly be expected, and better than most. They kept their head down, they kept their mouths shut, they did their job — even in the face of a lot of public scrutiny and demands for information about where things were going,” Bettge said. “They could have communicated a little better, but there comes a point when the public’s need to know is outweighed by the necessity of the case and keeping information close to the vest. And they did that beautifully and resisted a lot of pressure overall about, ‘Tell us everything you know.’ ”
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