On the day before Christmas, the New York Post published this story: Vilified ex-boyfriend of slain Idaho student Kaylee Goncalves is devastated: family . The “vilified” ex-boyfriend mentioned here is Jack DuCoeur, a young man and University of Idaho student who lives now with his parents in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.
The article
addresses concerns of his family through the voice of his aunt, Brooke Miller,
who describes DuCoeur as a devastated innocent who has lost the love of his
life. This needed to be said, in the
interest of fairness, and in the context of presumed innocence.
It is wise
to protect the innocent from false accusations. However, suspicions of Jack DuCoeur,
in the context of his relationships, are inevitable. In fact, he’s not the only
one hurt by unfair insinuations of guilt. The attention focused on the case is immense.
Few people have been spared from
suspicion of committing the murder or assisting.
One Inan Harsh, a garrulous restaurant chef,
is but one example. One Jack Showalter
is another. The driver who drove Kaylee and Madison home was suspected. Fanciful 'suspects' seem to crop up everywhere. In one of
the most egregious examples, even the
two women who lived on the first floor have been suspected of participating in
the murders.
They too
must be “devastated.” Some reports have them traumatized from discovering the
crime. Rampant
speculation about the murders has also suggested serial killers, cult killers,
boastful fraternity bros, and even a parent or two.
No one
is safe from suspicion of murder in this case, a condition that creates massive
problems for police who have to sift through a massive adulterated crime scene
to separate DNA, thousands of tips, conduct hundreds of interviews, and who
knows what else.
Yet the slaughter
of four young people at the dawn of their lives is an occurrence so horrible
that wounded feelings must be secondary to the task of finding the killer(s)
and making him/them pay. I don’t think
Jack DuCoeur has been any more the subject of suspicion than others.
Quite the
contrary. Even alternative media has been largely silent about him. There has
been little mention of where he lived and what he was doing the morning of the
murders, except to say he was playing video games and then fell asleep.
Similarly,
there is no mention of how and when Murphy (the dog) went from the apartment in
the video of Adam L. (cleared by police) and dog Murphy (cleared by police) (and
some have conjectured that DuCoeur lived there too) to the murder victims’ house.
Much of the suspicion stems from the end of his his long-term relationship
with Kaylee Goncalves. This is not unusual. Close family members and friends
are first to be interviewed in many murder cases. Too, some suspicions arise from the vagaries
of police public statements.
Some of the
principals in this nightmare of a case have been ruled out definitively, others
less clearly. With regard to Jack
DuCoeur, the New York Post story mentioned above quotes a Facebook post by Moscow police: “Detectives do not believe the male Kaylee
and Madison attempted to contact numerous times on November 13th is involved in
this crime.”
The ‘male’ in the Facebook post is said by Kaylee’s sister Alivea
to be “Jack.”