Slow Books, Fast Highway
True Crime in the Internet Age
When the Idaho 4 story broke in November 2022, I was too busy moving to a new state to pay more than passing attention to the troubling deaths of four college students in Idaho. A few years later I read that someone named Bryan Kohberger pled guilty to the murders, but I didn’t realize that the evidence against him was flimsy.
Unbeknownst to me, in the years since the murders, an entire ecosystem of YouTubers, such as Custody Queens Off the Clock, J. Embree, Bubbly Waters, BIRDIE, Julez, Murder Metal Mayhem, and Neeks Peeks had begun uncovering numerous holes in the official narrative and floating alternative theories. More recent contributions by Amber Vance are what brought my attention to the case. Other YouTube channels, such as True Crime Design, Idaho Four Revealed, and Operation GCD (Substack writer JJ Vance) have investigated the case more heavily from the angle of parapolitics, a term first coined by Peter Dale Scott. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I haven’t seen any evidence of this same skepticism towards Bryan Kohberger’s guilt in the mainstream media.
BIRDIE and Amber Vance recently discussed how various details regarding the Idaho 4 have already been scrubbed from the internet, a topic BIRDIE had discussed in depth with a prior guest. This scrubbing feels like the digital version of the house demolition.
In April of 2026, the book Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders, by former FBI agent Christopher Whitcomb, was released. For those who hadn’t followed the case closely, the shakiness of the official narrative might have come as a bombshell revelation, but the online YouTube investigators had already sussed out many of the same problems with the case and thus were well-positioned to interview the author (Custody Queens off the Clock, BIRDIE) and review the book (Julez. Murder Metal Mayhem, Amber Vance).
The only Broken Plea book review I have listened to in full was the series by Amber Vance (warning: this case is a time suck). Vance was very appreciative of the wealth of new information in the book, some of which would have been extremely difficult to find otherwise, but she was frustrated by what Whitcomb got wrong, left out, or scrambled. This frustration led her to occasionally question his motives.
One might reasonably assume that the slow, methodical process involved in writing a book, the credentials and expertise of the author, and the vetting by a publisher would lend much more weight to the printed page than to unvetted YouTube videos, but that is no longer a safe assumption. On the other hand, YouTubers also get things wrong, present skewed information, and have agendas.
Perhaps the future of true crime will be an ongoing, collaborative dialogue between the digital and the printed word. Especially when, as in the Idaho 4, the case becomes less and less clear over time.
Top Image: Wikimedia Commons, ID-4.svg
This is a long-standing dynamic in the case of controversial and disputed crimes--notably the cottage industry of independent JFK assassination researchers who spent years and decades refuting the Warren Commission Report by writing their own books and producing documentary films. For the uninitiated reader who've never heard of this case (like myself) it might have been worthwhile to provide more details about the case and what exactly is in dispute.