Twin projects have been a part of the entertainment industry from the very start of filmmaking. Whether coincidentally or intentionally, competing studios find themselves developing similar projects at the exact same time and end up with close release dates – typically inspiring both confusion and comparison. This happens in all genres, including documentaries, and audiences got to experience the phenomenon twice this summer about two notable recent horrors: the Oceangate submersible disaster, and then the shocking 2022 murder of four students at the University of Idaho.
In the case of the latter, both titles are now available to stream on the 2025 TV schedule, though the true crime series is packaged in different ways. The Idaho Student Murders is a 90-minute feature that is available with a Peacock subscription, while One Night In Idaho: The College Murders (featured in the library for those with a Prime Video subscription) is a three-part limited series.
The former premiered on July 3, while the Amazon title came out about a week later on July 11 – but this is an instance where faster doesn’t equate to better. If you’re only going to watch one of the two, it should definitely be One Night In Idaho.
Both projects center on the horrific crime that occurred on November 13, 2022 in Moscow, Idaho. In a rented off-campus residence, five University of Idaho students – Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle – were killed when a person broke into the home and stabbed them to death. The event shocked the typically quiet local community and became a focus of online sleuths who were quick to point figures and suggest suspects as the police department examined evidence and potential motives.
The discovery of a knife sheath left at the scene (which was found to have trace DNA) and the search for a white Hyundai Elantra spotted in the area at the time of the homicides eventually led investigators to 28-year-old PhD student and teaching assistant Bryan Christopher Kohberger, who lived right across the state border in Pullman, Washington.
Kohberger was arrested on December 30, 2022, and with prosecutors seeking the death penalty, he entered a guilty plea on July 2, 2025 (the day before the release of the Peacock documentary). On July 23, he was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without parole for the murders and 10 years for burglary.
With both documentaries, certain details and interviews are limited due to the fact that a judge issued a gag order preventing some people from publicly speaking about the case; a consequence of the release dates timed to Kohlberger's guilty plea. That being said, there is no question as to which of the two projects are more thorough and informative.
One Night In Idaho: The College Murders has an obvious advantage in terms of runtime real estate (watched back-to-back, the four episodes together are 173 minutes), but it more significantly has something that The Idaho Student Murders doesn't: participation from the victims' roommates at the house and their families.
The Peacock documentary isn't without any commentary from those close to Mogen, Goncalves, Chapin and Kernodle, as it features a roundtable interview with fellow students from the University of Idaho. But, the Prime Video series provides a vastly more intimate and respectful perspective, specifically in featuring interviews with Mogen's mother and stepfather, Karen and Scott Laramie, and Chapin's family, including his twin brother Hunter, his sister Maizie, and his parents Stacy and Jim. There are, additionally, friends interviewed who were called to the scene the morning that the crime was discovered, which delivers powerful insight about what happened and the aftermath.
Both documentaries take equally substantial looks at the investigation into Kohberger, but one arena that only One Night In Idaho examines is the damage that was done by online sleuths. Fingers were pointed wildly by people with limited access to facts and evidence, and the series not only spends time examining the negative consequences of this behavior for those innocently accused, but for the family and friends of the victims, as well.
The Idaho Student Murders isn't what I would call a bad documentary, and it's worth noting that it goes into deeper details about certain elements of the investigation (for example, the process involved in discovering and analyzing the trace DNA found on the knife sheath), but as far as providing meaningful and sympathetic insight into the lives of the victims and respectful analysis of the why and how behind their deaths, One Night In Idaho: The College Murders is the superior work
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