Moscow police chief who guided department through Kohberger investigation says killer’s life sentence provides ‘finality’

The seven weeks between the slayings of four University of Idaho students and the killer’s arrest was a stressful time for the man leading the Moscow Police Department.

The life prison sentence for Bryan Kohberger on Wednesday provided a sense of relief for James Fry, who now serves as West Richland’s police chief.

“That’s a finality for us,” said Fry, who attended Kohberger’s sentencing hearing and then spoke with reporters outside the Ada County Courthouse in Boise.

Fry was thrust into the national spotlight after the November 2022 student killings at their off-campus rental home.

He provided updates on the case at news conferences packed with national and local media that was watched across the country. He and his department faced criticism by some who said Fry did not provide enough information, and that his department was not equipped to handle a quadruple homicide investigation.

He acknowledged Wednesday he should have held a press conference sooner to relieve fear in the community.

“I think it was overwhelming at first,” Fry said.

Moscow Mayor Art Bettge told The Spokesman-Review in January 2023 that the critics’ tone rapidly changed when Kohberger was arrested.

While Bettge said he, Fry and other city officials took heat, they received many letters and emails from people after Kohberger’s arrest, apologizing for their rush to judgment on how the case was investigated.

“The police department did a really good job of managing the entire case and sucking it up, weathering a lot of criticism,” Bettge said at the time. “And in the end, they were justified and proved that they had done this thing exactly right.”

Fry said Wednesday he pulled from his training learned at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, in 2019 and had great partnerships with Idaho State Police and the Latah County Prosecutor’s Office.

Other than the public relations mishap, Fry said he has no regrets about the case, which he relied on his department, state police and the FBI to solve.

“We had people telling us this (case) is gonna go cold and I kept saying, ‘No, it’s not. It’s not,’ ” he said. “But part of that is you just have to keep believing that we’re going to eventually find something that’s going to help solve this.”

Fry said he ran on adrenaline the first seven weeks of the case when he and investigators worked day and night trying to find the killer. Kohberger was arrested in late December at his family home in Pennsylvania.

“I really didn’t feel normal for quite a while,” he said.

Fry said some of the pressure of the investigation lifted when investigators learned Kohberger’s DNA was on the knife sheath left at the scene.

Fry, who spent 30 years with the department and the previous eight years as chief, retired last year and ran unsuccessfully for Latah County sheriff. He was recently hired as police chief at West Richland on the edge of the Tri-Cities.

He said the UI killings will never leave him.

“I don’t think any of them do,” said Fry, noting he remembers the first suicide and homicide scenes he worked.

“Those don’t leave you because when you get invested into peoples lives, or their tragedies, you can’t shut that off, and you shouldn’t shut it off,” he said. “We need to remember those victims.”