In response to an increase in “true-crime tourists” coming to the neighborhood, the home where four University of Idaho students were fatally stabbed in November will be demolished.

The owner of the Moscow residence offered it to the university, which it accepted, the university revealed on Friday.

University President Scott Green informed students and staff in a message that “the House will be demolished.” Removing the physical structure where the crime that shocked our community was committed is a healing step. Destruction also gets rid of attempts to make the crime scene more spectacular.

The university is working with students and other community members to develop a plan for the property’s future development that would honor the four killed students: Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20. Walker told the Idaho Statesman that the university is working with students and other community members to develop the plan.

Although a deadline has not been established, Walker stated that the house will be demolished by the end of the current semester.

A petition urging the university to protect the land has since been started. The petition’s creator, David Nitz, stated that all of the victims “had fun and formed memories in that house and probably wouldn’t want their house demolished.” We’ve reached out to Nitz for comment.

In the early hours of November 13, the bodies of four students were discovered on the second and third floors of the residence. There, Goncalves, Mogen, and Kernodle shared a residence with two other survivors in a room, and Chapin—Kernodle’s boyfriend—was also in town.

Late in December, a suspect was taken into custody. Bryan Kohberger has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of criminal burglary. At the time, he was a criminology Ph.D. candidate at Washington State University in neighboring Pullman.

Although he hasn’t yet entered a plea, the Pennsylvania attorney who previously defended him claimed that he was “ready to be exonerated.”

The murders enthralled cyber sleuths, who submitted theories while police searched for a culprit.

Several people who were intrigued by the story even made the trip to Moscow to visit the residence, which is close to the university campus. According to NewsNation, numerous individuals have been observed taking pictures of the King Road home recently.

Sites connected to horrific murders have traditionally drawn tourists, a trend often referred to as “dark tourism.”

Philip Stone, executive director of the Center for Dark Tourism Studies at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K., told Newsweek that crime scenes have, regrettably, long drawn “tourists” or the “morbid observer.”

He mentioned the Jack the Ripper murders in London in 1888, when “enterprising landlords” charged people to see one of the victims’ corpses.

More recently, a Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix documentary inspired some to go to his childhood home.

“We aim to capture “fatality moments” in today’s social media-connected society, where “Big Brother” surveillance is often carried out by the public on their smartphones,” Stone added.

“True-crime tourism” refers to the practice of visiting places of suffering and shame, and the reasons for doing so will be as varied and divisive as the visitors themselves. People will engage in so-called “true-crime tourism” as they reflect on their own personal lives and mediate their own sense of mortality at fatality sites.

According to Stone, some people can reject the advice of authorities and media sources and look for their own solutions.

“For many people, we now turn to the Internet rather than the priest or other religious authorities for moral direction.” “We look for morality in our own way,” he declared.

We now live in an era of information and “exposure,” where institutions like the government, media, church, and academia are no longer the sole holders of data. Instead, regular people frequently regard information as knowledge because they lack the means or the mental capacity to analyze and contrast it critically.

“As a result, we look for explanations for situations that disturb the general consensus.” To that aim, we frequently engage in “dark tourism” and go on tours of the homes of the dead in an effort to find our “legacy that aches.”

The preliminary hearing in Kohberger’s case will start on June 26 and last for five days.

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