The parents of Idaho murders victim Ethan Chapin have revealed their heartbreak after having the ‘most amazing weekend’ with their children – only for their world to be ripped apart seven days later.
Stacy and Jim Chapin spoke out in Prime Video’s new four-part docuseries ‘One Night in Idaho: The College Murders’ about the final moments they shared as a family with their son and his triplet siblings Maizie and Hunter, just days before Ethan, his girlfriend Xana Kernodle and two friends Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen were murdered by Bryan Kohberger.
In a clip from the series, exclusively obtained by the Daily Mail, the parents reveal how – in that moment – they felt so proud of their children that they ‘literally high-fived each other’ and told themselves ‘we’ve done it.’
‘We’ve done it. We’re good,’ Jim says.
‘And that’s such a huge satisfaction as a parent you feel.
‘And then to have it taken away in seven days. It was very short-lived.’
The weekend of November 5, 2022, was parents weekend at the University of Idaho where Ethan, Maizie and Hunter were all in their second year of college.
The Chapins went to Moscow, Idaho, to spend time with their children and recall seeing how much they were all ‘starting to adult.’
‘It was the most amazing weekend,’ Stacy says proudly.
‘We could tell that Ethan was serious with Xana,’ she adds.
Jim adds: ‘It was so fun. You could just see where they were starting to adult.’
Gut-wrenching photos capture that happy moment in time, with the family-of-five beaming, arms around each other as they pose in University of Idaho ‘Vandals’ caps and shirts.
Other photos from that weekend show a smiling Kernodle enjoying the weekend with her boyfriend’s family.
The Chapins look back fondly on the moment they left Moscow on the morning of Sunday November 6, 2022, to head back home.
‘We left Sunday morning and literally as we were driving out of town Jim and I – and I mean this – we literally high fived each other,’ Stacy says. ‘We’ve done it.’
Jim recalls the ‘huge satisfaction they felt in that moment’ – before it was ‘taken away’ from them just one week later: ‘It was very short-lived.’
‘You’re supposed to raise your kids so that they fly,’ Stacy says.
Her eyes brim with tears as she adds: ‘And we’d literally had a weekend of that… one week.’
It was exactly one week later when – in the early hours of Sunday November 13, 2022 – Kohberger went on his murderous rampage.
The 30-year-old criminology PhD student at Washington State University broke into the off-campus student home at 1122 King Road that Kernodle, Mogen and Goncalves shared with two other roommates Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen.
At around 4am, Kohberger entered the three-story home and went straight up to Mogen’s room on the third floor, Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson said during the killer’s plea hearing last week.
There, he found Mogen and her best friend Goncalves sleeping in the same bed, stabbing both of them to death.
On his way back downstairs or on leaving the property, he encountered Kernodle on the second floor, who was still awake and had just received a DoorDash food order.
He fatally attacked her with the knife and then also murdered Chapin who was sleeping in her bed.
Kohberger then left through the back sliding door on the second story of the property, passing Mortensen who had been woken by the noise and peeked around her bedroom door.
Mortensen and Funke – whose bedroom was on the first floor – were the only survivors.
Terrified after seeing a masked man inside the home, Mortensen and Funke desperately tried to call and text their friends but got no response.
Ultimately, Mortensen ran down to Funke’s room on the first floor where they both stayed until daylight.
Around eight hours later, when they still couldn’t get in touch with the four victims, they called their friends Hunter Johnson, Emily Alandt and Josie Lauteren over to check the home.
Johnson found the bodies of his best friends Chapin and Kernodle, and a haunting 911 call was placed by the students.
In the Prime Video series, Hunter Chapin also spoke out about the devastating moment he learned of his brother’s murder from his friends – and then had to break the news to his family.
It was around midday when he said he was woken by one of his Sigma Chi frat brothers ‘shaking me’ and saying there was police over at the King Road home.
At first, he thought nothing of it.
‘Okay, that’s probably normal. There’s more noise complaints there than anywhere else on campus,’ he recalls thinking.
But when he walked over to the home and saw several of their friends outside, he knew something terrible had happened.
‘So I was walking over to the King Road house and I saw a group of people sitting on the ground and it’s all the people that I have been hanging out with,’ he says.
‘And they all just had this look on their face when I walked up like the world had ended.’
His friends struggled to break the news to him that they had found his brother dead.
‘I’m like “what the hell’s going on. Like where’s Ethan?” And they’re like “Ethan’s not here anymore,”’ he says.
Hunter remembers asking: ‘What do you mean Ethan’s not here anymore? Like where did he go?’
When they told him ‘your brother’s dead,’ he says he thought it ‘can’t be true.’
‘I didn’t even know how to respond to it as it’s just so unreal that someone I had spent almost every minute of my life with… I just don’t know,’ he says, breaking down mid-sentence.
Hunter then had to break the devastating news to his family members.
First, he called Maizie – telling her to immediately get someone to drop her off at the home.
‘I just knew,’ she says, remembering the gut feeling she had as she made her way to the property.
When he then called his mom, she was at the grocery store.
Stacy recalls her son repeatedly telling her ‘Ethan’s not here’ and ‘Ethan and Xana are not here’ as he couldn’t bring himself to say the words that he was dead.
‘They’re not on this earth anymore,’ he told her.
Stacy abandoned her shopping cart and left the store, calling her husband Jim and racing to Moscow together.
Another six weeks passed before Kohberger was arrested at his parents’ home in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania – where he had returned for the holidays.
During that time, he finished out his semester at WSU where he had embarked on a PhD in criminology.
He also meticulously scrubbed his Pullman, Washington, apartment and his car – the white Hyundai Elantra he had driven to and from the crime scene – clean of evidence.
Investigators tracked him down, however, after he left a KaBar leather knife sheath next to Mogen’s body at the scene. Through Investigative Genetic Genealogy, the FBI managed to trace DNA on the sheath to Kohberger.
His motive for the murders still remains a mystery, with Kohberger having no known connection to any of the victims or their friends.
Prosecutors believe Kohberger did not intend to kill all four victims that night – but did intend to kill and had planned his attack for months, buying a KaBar knife from Amazon to use as his murder weapon in March 2022.
After two years of protesting his innocence, the 30-year-old criminology PhD student finally confessed last week to the murders as part of a plea deal to save himself from the death penalty.
Under the terms of the plea deal, Kohberger will be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole and will also never have a chance to appeal his conviction or sentence.
The plea deal divided the victims’ families with the Chapin and Mogen families supporting it and the Goncalves and Kernodle families opposing it.
For the Chapins, the hearing on July 2 where Kohberger changed his plea marked the first time they attended one of his court appearances – as a show of support for the agreement.
Now, the families of the victims will be given the opportunity to deliver impact statements at his sentencing hearing on July 23.