Dateline NBC
Survivors' haunting texts in Idaho. Questions for a New York prosecutor. And a spring break mystery.
Thu, 13 Mar 2025
Listen to this week's episode of the Dateline: True Crime Weekly podcast with Andrea Canning. Unsealed court documents reveal chilling texts sent by the roommates of four murdered Idaho students. The family of a young woman murdered in New York wants to know why the arrest of her suspected killer took so long. And we've got an update on the investigation into a student who went missing from a beach in the Dominican Republic. Plus, what's fair game when attorneys call on expert witnesses? Find out more about the cases covered each week here:www.datelinetruecrimeweekly.com
Chapter 1: What chilling details were revealed in the Idaho murder case?
Megan's family and the New York State Police say that one person really stood in the way.
We've got our roundup of the latest crime headlines, a verdict in the third murder trial of Dana Chandler, the latest on the search for a college student who disappeared on spring break in the Dominican Republic, And an update from the prosecutor handling the Menendez brothers' case.
He says the brothers haven't taken responsibility.
Plus, expert witnesses in the courtroom. After Karen Reid's defense team came under fire recently for their use of expert witnesses, we wondered, what are the rules? NBC News legal analyst Danny Savalos breaks it down for us.
Not only do they take money, they take a lot of money.
But before all that, we're heading to Idaho, where we learned terrifying new details last week about the night four students were murdered in 2022. It's a case you know well by now. Four University of Idaho students stabbed to death in their beds in November of 2022. Brian Koberger, the man charged with their murders and who has pleaded not guilty, is set to go on trial in August.
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Chapter 2: Who are the survivors in the Idaho student murders?
But many details in the case have been filed under seal, kept out of the public eye, until last week when Judge Stephen Hippler ordered more than a dozen filings be unsealed. And what those filings revealed are harrowing details from the night and morning after the murders, as told in real time by the two roommates who survived.
Here to help us break down what we've learned is NBC News Senior Legal Correspondent Laura Jarrett. Hey, Laura. Always happy to be with you. Thank you for coming on. So this is pretty big. It hasn't been often in this case that we've gotten these sorts of documents unsealed. Any idea, first of all, why these court filings are being unsealed now?
Yeah. So I think partly the background here is that there is a relatively new judge on the case who is acting a lot more expeditiously on everything and has a much different approach to sealing. Some judges are very lenient with sealing. Some judges really don't like it. Given that these two surviving roommates are likely going to be called to testify at trial—
I'm sure the judge's position is all of this is going to come out pretty soon anyway. So there's really not the same urgency in keeping it secret. What are the big new things that we've learned from these motions being unsealed?
The biggest revelations are the transcript of the 911 call and the text messages that are being sent between the two surviving roommates around four in the morning of the night that the students were killed. And all of that we had never seen before.
The text messages and phone calls really help give a timeline of what these surviving roommates experienced. It's very terrifying. Around 4.19 a.m., one of the roommates, Dylan Wardenson, is woken up and has presumably seen a stranger in the house. And the filing reveals that she calls her housemates out of fear and really to warn them, right? And she was clearly freaked out.
You see her even say, I'm so freaked out right now. And then a few minutes later, according to the filing, Dylan, who is on the second floor, texts the other roommate, Bethany Funk, who is in the basement, about what she sees the stranger wearing. She says it's like a ski mask almost.
It's also clear they're not quite sure what they saw. You know, by all accounts, this was a party house, right? There's a lot of people coming in and out. And so I don't think it was that unusual for them to probably see someone that they didn't know in the house. But they were scared enough that it appears from their text messages that they hunker down together in the bedroom.
Because you can see one saying the other, come here, run. And then you don't see them say anything until the next morning around 10.30. They start texting their deceased roommates, not knowing, of course, that they had been killed, saying, please answer. And then they finally call 911.
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Chapter 3: Why is the New York prosecutor under scrutiny in the Megan McDonald case?
And so I'm not sure that the prosecutors would have intended to use those terms anyway. And then they also want to keep out the phrase bushy eyebrows, which is going to be a big fight. The surviving roommates, at least one of them, reported to authorities that she saw a masked man with bushy eyebrows.
That's going to become an important fact, I think, later on at trial, as that's sort of the only person who's still living that's going to be able to ID Brian Koberger in some way. Now, of course, bushy eyebrows, it's not like a tattoo or a birthmark or something. There's lots of people with bushy eyebrows, and I'm sure he's going to say that's not enough to ID him.
But that's really all authorities have for someone spotting him in the house. And so there's going to be a fight about that.
Do you expect these motions to possibly get approved or when can we expect another ruling given that the judge is moving quickly?
I would think in at least the next few weeks or so, because so much of this just has to get wrapped up to keep the trial date, which the judge intends to keep at least so far. And it seems like, you know, August is a while out from right now. But these these things have a way of taking a while. And so I would imagine the judge is going to get all of this wrapped up pretty soon.
Fascinating case and very scary and sad case as well. Laura, thank you for breaking this all down for us as we inch closer and closer to trial. Anytime. Coming up, as a murder trial begins in a more than 20-year-old cold case, the victim's family says the local prosecutor has some explaining to do.
On March 13th, 2003, 20-year-old Megan McDonald did what any college student might do on a Thursday night. She went to a friend's house to watch TV. She stopped by a birthday party. But the next day, her family and friends couldn't reach her, and her body was later found on a dirt path in Orange County, New York. The cause of death, blunt force trauma with multiple fractures to her skull.
In April 2023, there was finally an arrest in the case. Here's our affiliate NBC4 New York.
State police revealing this afternoon that DNA evidence linked the alleged killer to the crime scene. McDonald's family telling us that they've been waiting for this day for 20 years.
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Chapter 4: What led to the arrest in the Megan McDonald cold case?
And this week, the trial of Megan's alleged killer finally began. But Megan's family wants to know what took so long. And they aren't the only ones. In a startling turn of events, New York State police investigators are also pointing the finger at a man they say stood in the way of justice. And that is the local district attorney.
Dateline Digital producer Veronica Mazzaca is here to bring us up to speed. Veronica, welcome back to the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, so let's just start with, tell us about Megan McDonald.
Who was she? Yeah, absolutely. She, you know, was a student at SUNY Orange Community College. I've spoken with her sister, Karen, and her brother-in-law, James, and they both describe her as warm, loving, compassionate. You know, she was the life of the party, big, bright smile.
So, Veronica, what do we know about the last day of Megan's life? Yeah.
Yeah. So Megan was actually a waitress. She was working a shift and then she spent the evening hanging out with friends. And then the following day she was scheduled to work again at that cafe at about noon. And then so her family and friends really knew something was wrong when she didn't show up for work.
Investigators learned that Megan had stopped by a birthday party that Thursday night, but she didn't go inside.
Yeah, so it was a birthday party for someone's 21st, and she had driven by the party before she went to go hang out with her friend and watch the TV show Friends. And she had said to two people that she didn't want to go inside. because there was someone there named Edward Hawley who she did not want to see.
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Chapter 5: How does Edward Hawley fit into the Megan McDonald investigation?
So Holly was interviewed by police all those years ago, and at some point, the investigation hit a wall of But they took another look at him.
Holly, kind of the statements that he had been making to police through the years, they realized that there were inconsistencies.
So Edward Holly became the prime suspect. But investigators also say Holly wasn't the only one at the scene of the murder, right?
So they believe that he was in the backseat of her car and that there was someone else also in the car who they refer to as suspect number two. Suspect number two is someone that actually died many years ago, but he had come forward to a defense attorney and said he had details about the night of Megan's murder and he wanted to take a plea deal. Why didn't that go anywhere?
You know, I'm not sure why that didn't go anywhere at the time.
All right. So Edward Hawley was indicted in January 2024. He is pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges. And his defense says the prosecution's looking in the wrong place, that they should really be looking at a different ex-boyfriend. So we'll learn a lot more over the coming weeks at trial, but one really important thing looming over all of this is Megan's family.
Her family says the case against Holly should have been made years ago. They want answers. Why did this take so long?
So Megan's family and, you know, the New York State Police say that one person really stood in the way of getting these answers sooner. And they say that person was the Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler. Did he feel like there was not enough to go after Holly? That is something that he has said previously. He felt there wasn't enough to bring the case before a grand jury.
But Hoovler is the person who was the defense attorney that suspect number two had come to. back in 2008 before Hoovler was the district attorney. When Hoovler became the DA, he did have an opportunity to recuse himself from the case at the time, but he did not. So the New York State Police, there was an internal report that found that as DA, he deliberately tampered with the investigation and
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