There should be no confusion surrounding the greatest accomplishments of Barbara Walters, who died on Dec. 30 at 93. An icon of journalism, Walters busted barrier after barrier for women in the field, joining NBC’s Today show in 1964 without her starlet predecessors’ diminutive title of “Today Girl” and building a reputation that led ABC to hire her away, in 1976, as the first woman to co-anchor a national network’s evening news program. Over the course of a career spanning more than half a century that eventually brought her to the forefront of 20/20 and dozens of high-profile primetime specials, she coaxed revelatory insights out of the world’s most powerful heroes, villains and stars.

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“If I had told my young self that I would have the opportunity to interview every American President and First Lady since Richard Nixon, be able to do the first joint interview with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin, or my unforgettable sit-down with Cuban President Fidel Castro, I would not have believed it,” Walters reflected in TIME after her 2014 retirement. “Yet, I knew I was driven to interview world leaders and icons.”

These were inarguably her most indelible achievements. But in the final decades of her singular career, Walters made another crucial contribution that is sure to outlive her: she created The View. Indeed, for many viewers too young to have watched much broadcast news in the 20th century, the long-running daytime talk show and controversy magnet is the program they most associate with her name. “How ironic is it,” her producing partner Bill Geddie asked in an interview for Ramin Setoodeh’s gossip-packed 2019 The View history Ladies Who Punch, “that whenever somebody talks about Barbara Walters in articles, it’s never the Barbara Walters as the first lady of journalism, or the Barbara Walters specials, or Barbara Walters of ABC News, or Barbara Walters the first female anchor. It’s always Barbara Walters creator of The View.”

The comment comes off as rueful. What a shame to see all that hard work, breaking stories and owning narratives and punching through glass ceilings, overshadowed by a chat show whose constantly feuding cohosts seem to spend just as much time making headlines as debating them. And doesn’t it just figure that a woman who clawed her way out of the pink-collar daytime trenches would finish up her career at a table cluttered with coffee mugs in ABC’s 11 a.m. time slot? But that’s an awfully reductive way of thinking about The View, which—despite its many chaotic low points—created a new, more ambitious, paradigm for talk shows aimed at a female audience.

Walters often framed its origin story as an accident. “The View sneaked up on me,” she recalled in her 2008 memoir Audition. “The last thing I was thinking about was daytime television.” But in 1997 ABC had a hole in its morning schedule and asked her for ideas. Drawing on a diverse set of influences including This Week With David Brinkley, Virginia Graham’s syndicated ’60s series Girl Talk and her own conversations with daughter Jacqueline, Walter pitched a show in which a multigenerational panel of women from a variety of backgrounds would discuss current events. Though the network wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the concept, it wasn’t flush with ideas, either. When Walters agreed to appear on it a few times per week, The View got the greenlight.

Her aim in recruiting the first panel, she wrote, was to “find four smart women of different ages and different personalities who could disagree without killing one another and, better still, might actually like each other.” That search yielded moderator Meredith Vieira, already a respected journalist; comedian Joy Behar; lawyer turned TV personality Star Jones; and 22-year-old Debbie Matenopoulos, who’d been working as a production assistant at MTV. Walters described their process for selecting The View’s trademark Hot Topics in Audition: “Talking and laughing, we decide which subjects we want to tackle. If it starts a discussion or better still an argument, we know we are onto something, but we are careful not to leave the argument in the dressing room. We save it for the broadcast so we can let the chips fall where they may.”

The View got off to a bumpy start, with disappointing viewership numbers and some ABC affiliates declining to air the show. As the show grew more popular—a shift that paralleled the public’s increasing fixation on then-President Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, one that played to the panel’s strengths by virtue of its combination of sex and politics—tabloids and late-night writers picked cohosts to scrutinize. Matenopoulos, the first original cast member to get fired, was too ditzy. Jones, the only Black panelist at the time, was too fat and then too circumspect about the weight-loss surgery she’d only admit to having had years later, as well as too much of a shill for the companies that underwrote her fantasy wedding.

Some of these critiques happened to be legitimate. Others were, in retrospect, nothing more than coded expressions of misogyny, racism, ageism. And they set a tone for coverage of the show and its stars that persists more than two decades later. It’s hard to name a long-running TV hit that isn’t a mess of egos, feuds and contract-negotiation melees, but only The View got branded a catfight. Stars like Rosie O’Donnell (who did two short stints on the show years apart) and Whoopi Goldberg challenged what was, by some accounts, Walters’ unilateral power. Token conservatives from Elisabeth Hasselbeck to Meghan McCain, who left the show in 2021, turned up the heat in political debates.

Although McCain—who joined the show in 2017, three years after Walters retired—had made it easy to forget with her teary, fact-deficient tirades, this engagement with hard news and hot-button political controversies set The View apart from its rivals. Amid an increasingly polarized cultural conversation driven first by the Clinton impeachment saga and then by the 2000 election, 9/11 and the Iraq War, the ladies of The View often tackled the same subjects as the bellowing men who dominated cable news. As Setoodeh puts it: “The show offered a venue where opinion wasn’t just as important as news, it was the news in some cases.” Meanwhile, morning talk-show rivals such as Regis and Kelly and Rachael and Ellen and Maury stuck to painstakingly apolitical fluff: celebrity interviews, cooking and lifestyle segments, paternity tests.

It’s true that Walters wasn’t the first to introduce serious subjects into the realm of daytime coffee talk; Oprah and Phil Donahue deserve the credit for that. Neither was the panel format unprecedented. (Crossfire, which debuted on CNN way back in 1982, was probably never derided as a catfight.) The revelation was the sense it created of real, multifaceted women—who gossiped and voted, who read People and the newspaper—having more-or-less informed conversations about a wide variety of things that genuinely mattered to them. As James Poniewozik noted in a TIME feature on The View from 2000: “Previous morning shows were aimed at permanent housewives, offering a simulated coffee hour of chitchat in a fake living room with fake neighbors. The View recognizes that its viewers—still 72% female—include part-timers, telecommuters and maternity-leavers. Trying to get through the day without murdering the kids, they want to escape not to a surrogate home but to a surrogate office.”

While the permanent-housewife demographic probably also deserved less condescending TV programming than it was getting, what’s crucial here is the idea of treating women, no matter how they pass the hours between 9 and 5, not as cosseted helpmates confined to the domestic sphere, but as full, educated participants in public life. The show may, more often than one would prefer, conform to certain gendered stereotypes, but it also confirms that women talking to each other can have conversations of substance. That, more than anything else, is the legacy Walters brought to The View in 1997 and left with it in 2014. She set a standard that a generation of lesser copycat panel shows, from NBC’s short-lived Later Today to CBS’s The Talk to The Real, in syndication, scrambled to meet. (The View also begat The Other Half, which briefly convened Dick Clark, Danny Bonaduce and Mario Lopez to provide a male point of view to a female audience. Who could possibly have predicted women’s apathy to such a premise?)

Oprah may have claimed the lyrical slogan “I’m every woman,” but over the course of 24 years on television, Walters’ vision of culturally literate, politically opinionated panel discussion among women of all ages, races, faiths and sexual orientations has most expansively embodied it. In the world of The View, women—even women who vote for the same candidates or represent the same generation—are never a monolith. There is no one “female take” on any given issue. And now that it has become a requisite stop for just about everyone with something to promote, including politicians on the campaign trail, those visits offer novel perspectives on public figures. You can tell a lot about a person, of any gender, by surrounding them with opinionated women.

I think this all goes a long way toward explaining the show’s continued appeal. It’s why I secretly tuned in during high-school vacations in the late ’90s, as a teen too angsty to stomach the saccharine of Kathie Lee Gifford, and why I still occasionally watch on slow work days two decades later, as an adult whose appetite for its daytime competitors and cable-news counterparts vanished long ago. It’s also probably why The View is one of just a few topics I can discuss at length with both my 60-something mom and my 90-something grandmother.

The show didn’t mark the apex of Walters’ career, and you would have to be on the ABC payroll to deny that it has declined quite a bit in the eight years since she exited its cozy set. But its insistence on taking women seriously changed daytime TV just as profoundly as her ascendance as a serious woman in the anchor’s seat changed the face of broadcast news. How fortunate we are that, in the final decades of a historic life, Barbara Walters took a little time to enjoy the view.

Barbara Walters, one of American television’s most prominent interviewers and the first woman to anchor an evening news broadcast, has died at 93, ABC News reported on Friday.

Jade Rodriguez

• Jade Rodriguez said her family had a “surreal” trip to Japan planned for her son’s 21st birthday.
• But after Southwest cancelled their flight from Tuscon to LAX, they missed their flight to Tokyo.
• “Had we just been notified sooner, we would’ve driven and made it,” Rodriguez told Insider.

A family from Arizona was “in shock” and “devastated” after a last-minute Southwest flight cancellation caused them to miss their trip to Japan and left them out thousands of dollars.

Jade Rodriguez told Insider she, her husband, and their two children planned a “surreal” trip to Tokyo, Japan, because her 20-year-old said that was where he wanted to go to celebrate his 21st birthday on January 2. They were going to visit Tokyo Disney and the Pokemon Cafe in Tokyo, take a train to Kyoto and go sightseeing at historic temples.

They planned to take off from Tucson on Christmas Day for Los Angeles, where they’d catch their flight across the Pacific. They say they were notified their flight was slightly delayed but had no indication it was in serious jeopardy of not taking off at all, and were unaware of the ongoing disruptions Southwest was already experiencing.

But when they arrived at the airport in Tucson, they were met with confusion and miscommunication from the airline.

Southwest employees said were still working on assembling a crew, but told passengers they should check in their luggage anyway. “It was just a lot of miscommunication. One attendant was saying, ‘We’re not getting to LAX,’ another was saying to check in our bags,” Rodriguez said. “It was utter confusion.”

After all the conflicting information the flight was finally canceled altogether about seven hours before their American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo was scheduled to take off. The drive from Tucson to Los Angeles was about seven and a half hours.

“Had we just been notified sooner, we would’ve driven and made it,” Rodriguez said, adding they tried everything they could to get on another flight but could not make it work.

Their flight could only be rebooked on Wednesday at the earliest, but it would be 20 hours of travel and would include covering the difference in flight cost. It would also only leave them about five days in Japan, upending their 8-day travel plan.

“We were just devastated. We’re just in shock,” Rodriguez said, adding that as of Friday they had yet to unpack all of their luggage because they were still struggling to process the situation.

Now they are trying to get as much of the trip refunded as they can, including from Southwest, American Airlines, the hotel in Japan, and Tokyo Disney, where they had already purchased tickets, among other expenses.

Rodriguez said they have received conflicting information from Southwest, with one email saying they would be getting a full refund and another saying they’d only be getting flight credits to be used in the future.

They did purchase travel insurance for the American Airlines flight to Japan and are hoping that means the full price will be covered. But Tokyo Disney, which is not owned by The Walt Disney Company, generally does not issue refunds.

Altogether, Rodriguez said they are out around $7,000.

They are still hoping to reschedule a trip for next year, depending on how much they can get refunded or rescheduled, but are unsure when they will be able to make a trip work for the whole family.

Rodriguez is a teacher, so she had this time off work, but would likely have to try to get work off in the spring because her break does not align with her son’s. Her husband, who is a retired member of the military but still teaches classes on the base, took off work for this trip and would have to try to do so again if the vacation is rescheduled.

Rodriguez said her older son is a college student who is “dedicated” to ROTC, a program that trains university students for military service, so he has limited time in which he can take a trip. He is also a big fan of Disney and Pokemon, which would’ve been the big highlights of the trip for him, so when they offered to take him somewhere else at the last minute, he just said “no.”

Rodriguez said that in the future she may consider getting travel insurance for the entire trip, rather than just the big international flights, even though they already have travel medical insurance through the military. She also said she knew some others may have had even more challenging experiences with the chaotic flight cancelations.

“I’m grateful we lived close and were with family,” she said. “But it was devastating really.”

The family was among thousands of Americans who experienced flight cancellations this week after Southwest had an operational meltdown. The airline canceled more than 2,900 flights on Monday, accounting for around half of all canceled flights across the world that day. The disruptions rippled through the travel industry, leading to rental-car shortages and higher flight prices.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Southwest said: “We apologize to all of our Customers who were affected by this disruption. Customers whose flights were canceled are eligible for a refund and are encouraged to submit requests for reasonable reimbursements for incidental expenses. Those will be processed on a case-by-case basis.”

The spokesperson also said impacted passengers can get assistance through a travel-disruptions portal on their site.

Tokyo Disney, which is owned by The Oriental Land Company, could not immediately be reached for comment. The Walt Disney Company, which licenses intellectual property to Tokyo Disney, did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Have a news tip or a travel story to share? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@insider.com.

Barbara Walters, one of American television’s most prominent interviewers and the first woman to anchor an evening news broadcast, has died at 93, ABC News reported on Friday.

The open and airy playground provided plenty of room for the children to enjoy themselves and have fun. Only that was not what was happening. The mood inside the playground was restless, noisy, and horribly muddled. There was no oversight and no adults in the room to make sure the children behaved themselves.

So anarchy reigned. Children ran about, untethered, mud falling from them, squabbling with each other, as the hardscrabble grounds echoed with rude, angry quarrels and a symphony of childish mudslinging. And that, dear friends and readers, is what the House of Representatives will look like next month.

The GOP is set to take over, and boy, oh boy, are they fighting. And it isn’t just about Kevin McCarthy; over and over and over, new fights are emerging among the pesky children. The GOP needs a chaperone. It;’s evident that they lack the adult skills to know how to conduct themselves.

Everybody has turned on everybody. It’s a shitshow of crazy confusion. It’s like recess started for the children but never ended. Will they start throwing food at each other next? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who for years was the darling of the alt-right, is becoming the focus of lots of GOP anger for supporting McCarthy. And Greene herself is raging against anyone who would dare to call out George Santos. Oh, my, the fun just never ever ends!

It is being said that in private many in the GOP want Santos to resign, but he hasn’t so far. And his fibs are multiplying.

Many in the House have turned on Moscow Mitch. And now, there is a new focus on anger. Sean Hannity is in the mix.

Mike Lindell — you know, the guy running for Republican chair — has labeled Hannity disgusting, as has other friends of trump. That is because Hannity admitted in a deposition that he did not believe the election was stolen.

It’s going to be utterly fascinating — not to mention amusing — to see this crying, screaming, red-faced bunch of nutcases — little children really — take their places as heads of the House.

They have, at this time, no candidate for speaker who has the votes, no agenda, and no idea what they’re doing. It’s the Republican playground of babies, and who knows what they’ll do next.

The post House Republican dumpster fire prepares to explode appeared first on Palmer Report.

Barbara Walters, who died Dec. 30, 2022, at the age of 93, has a secure place in history as the first Jewish co-host, as well as first female co-host, of an American TV news program.

The success that accompanied her through the decades in stints for Today, ABC Evening News, 20/20, and The View, was the product of a childhood spent in intermittent fear for her father’s livelihood. Lou Walters (born Louis Abraham Warmwater to a family from Łódź originally named Waremwasser, was a nightclub manager who had extreme career ups and downs.

He owed favors to gangland figures, among them Roy Cohn, the McCarthy Era supervillain portrayed in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and puppet master to the [current occupant of the White House.

In a 2008 memoir, Walters revealed that Cohn managed to get an arrest warrant filed against her father dismissed, and her gratitude was such that she dated the closeted Cohn while at college, and remained an ardent friend, even testifying as a character witness in 1986 when Cohn was disbarred for “unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients’ funds, lying on a bar application, and pressuring a client to amend his will.”

When asked why she remained so close to Cohn, Walters would refer to the number of influential people he knew, his power and effectiveness, and other related pluses.

Jews in American Politics lauded Walters as a “journalist-as-popular culture icon,” while noting that “television does not distinguish between movie stars and political stars.”

In truth, Walters herself often chose not to make the distinction. When meeting public figures, she conveyed personal impressions based on appearance and charm, qualities that might be expected in professional entertainers. Playing along with the supposed charisma of the powerful was a key to her constant access to the mighty.

In an autobiography, Walters recounted a family story that on her deathbed, her grandmother, who had given birth to seven children, claimed to be a virgin. When her family objected, reminding her of all the children, Bubbe insisted, “I know, but I never participated.”

Walters had her critics as well as admirers, but all must admit that through her long career, she always participated.

Barbara Walters, circa 1976. Photo by Getty Images

In a 1970 book, she recounted her experience interviewing then-President Richard Nixon: “I find that he has sex appeal — he’s slim and suntanned and well, he’s just sexy, that’s all. And I call that charming.”

Lest readers simply dismiss this as mere flattery of those in power, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer quoted an unnamed friend of Walters who asserted that the latter was indeed drawn to men who were “dark in temperament, dark in negotiation and maneuvering, dark in manipulation.”

Yet was Walters sincere about Tricky Dick? During an October 2014 public appearance at Harvard, when asked onstage about her impressions of Nixon, she declared: “He seemed to me constipated. He wanted to be liked, he wanted to reach people, and he had no idea how to do that.”

She may have revised her impressions later. Not so her loyalties to Cohn and Nixon’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger, considered a war criminal by some for having authorized atrocities in Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor.

In January 2016, Walters gave a speech at a gala dinner of the World Jewish Congress, which presented its Theodor Herzl Award to Kissinger. She spoke in somewhat wooden terms, but doubtless approved of the message, that Kissinger had learned “first-hand that antisemitism was a cancer that will grow and spread if not removed … A Jewish boy from a small German town who experienced discrimination because he was a Jew grew up to become one of the most esteemed and respected secretaries of state of the greatest nation on earth.”

Walters stands beside a dishwasher on the ‘Today’ show set, with Hugh Downs. Image by

At her best, Walters did stand up against antisemitism, as in May 1976, when she confronted Nixon’s ex-vice president Spiro Agnew driven from office after pleading no contest to a felony charge of tax evasion. Agnew had published a novel rife with antisemitic tropes.

Walters inquired, “You have characters in the book talking repeatedly about the Jewish cabal, the Jewish Zionist lobby having too much influence in Congress. Is this how you see it?”

She was less convincing in challenging Louis Farrakhan another fount of antisemitic invective, calling him, in April 1994, a “very intelligent man and can be extremely charming and soft-spoken.”

As recently as December 2011, Walters had kind words to say about Bashar al-Assad, stating that the Syrian dictator and his wife were “very charming and intelligent.” In their interview, Walters did not mention the accusations of antisemitism against Assad dating back to 2001.

Walters at the final episode of “The Late Show with David Letterman” in 2015. Image by

Her ingratiating approach to interviewing world leaders did occasionally run aground in utterly charmless occasions such as a July 1977 session with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

In the dizzying confusion of world politics, network executives used Walters as a common thread for viewers, tying together national leaders by having her interview them one after another. Her presence was not as reassuring as that of Walter Cronkite, but she brought an allure that male TV personalities of the era, who had started in radio days when physical appearance was of secondary importance, notably lacked. The fact that a Jewish woman was used as a litmus test for these world leaders and the events they precipitated was a point of pride.

As American government began to become indistinguishable with reality television, Walters’ confidence in finding star quality charm and pizazz in public figures was sometimes confounded. A March 1999 interview with Monica Lewinsky, a suddenly notorious former White House intern, showed Walters in the unaccustomed role of disapproving aunt or implausibly virginal grandmother.

The interviewer’s facial expressions, probably intended to communicate compassion or commiseration, radiated pity and nausea at Lewinsky’s breezy replies. Walters’ facial expressions gave her away, but she was even more candid when responding to Lewinsky’s claim that she would tell her children that “Mommy made a big mistake,” by interjecting: “And that is the understatement of the year.”

The uneasy confrontation was partly between two generational approaches by American Jewish women to political scandals. Lewinsky’s highly public approach contrasted with the more discreet precedent of Walters’ 1970s affair with Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, only revealed when she wrote about it decades after the fact.

It may have been a loss to American society that this high profile Black-Jewish alliance was unknown for so long, given Brooke’s closeness to the Jewish community — he was awarded the Jewish Theological Seminary of America’s Herbert H. Lehman medal. Brooke’s sensitivity to the ongoing status of Blacks and Jews as minority populations enduring oppression in America suggests that amid Barbara Walters’ multiple career accomplishments, there was at least one tantalizing missed opportunity for further societal advancement.

The post How the iconic Barbara Walters led the charge against antisemitism and social injustice (sometimes) appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) — Barbara Walters, the legendary journalist and longtime ABC News anchor, has died. She was 93.

ABC announced Walter’s death in a tweet Friday night, saying she “shattered a glass ceiling and became a dominant force in an industry once dominated by men.”

Walters was at ABC News for most of her career, anchoring “20/20” from 1979-2004. She was also a host on “The View” from 1997-2014.

Outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro landed in Florida on Friday, after delivering a teary message to his supporters less than two days before his fierce leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is set to take office.

An official Brazilian plane landed in Orlando, Florida late on Friday, flight tracking website FlightAware showed. Although Bolsonaro’s destination has not been officially confirmed, his security staff were already in place in Florida.

Bolsonaro’s exit from Brazil came after he repeatedly said he would not hand over the presidential sash to Lula at Sunday’s inauguration, breaking with Brazil’s democratic tradition. He may also face legal risks from remaining in Brazil as his presidential immunity expires when Lula takes office.

His departure followed an emotional final address on social media earlier on Friday, in which he ran through the highlights of his time in office, sought to defend his legacy, and tried to inspire his followers into keeping up the fight against Lula.

Vice President Hamilton Mourao is now acting president after Bolsonaro left the country, his press office said. But Mourao will not pass the presidential sash to Lula, a spokesperson noted, raising doubts about who will do the ceremonial handover.

The presidential plane departed Brasilia shortly after 2 pm local time.

“I am in flight, back soon,” Bolsonaro was quoted as saying by CNN Brasil earlier in the day. His press office did not respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. embassy in Brasilia referred questions about Bolsonaro’s trip to the Brazilian president’s office.

Bolsonaro’s exit follows weeks of silence, after he lost Brazil’s most fraught election in a generation.

Some of Bolsonaro’s supporters have refused to accept Lula’s victory, believing his baseless claims that the October election was stolen. That has contributed to a tense atmosphere in the capital Brasilia, with riots and a foiled bomb plot last week.

In his social media address, Bolsonaro labeled the bomb plot a “terrorist act” for which there was no justification. He sought to distance himself from George Washington Sousa, the man who confessed to making the bomb, and who told police that Bolsonaro’s call to arms inspired him to build an arsenal of guns and explosives.

“The man had ideas that are not shared by any citizen, but now they classify him as a ‘Bolsonarista’,” the president said.

Yet Bolsonaro also praised protesters who have been camping outside army barracks across the country, urging the military to stage a coup.

“I did not encourage anyone to enter confrontation,” he said, adding that his supporters had merely been seeking “freedom.” He said the protests had been “spontaneous,” with no leadership or coordination.

Bolsonaro’s swift exit was a disappointment for many on the right, where his reputation has taken a beating for his post-election silence. Some of his diehard supporters at the entrance of the Alvorada Palace, the presidential residence where he lived, called him a “coward” during his speech, according to a Reuters witness.

Others felt abandoned by his departure.

“It feels as if my boyfriend has left me,” said Deise Casela, a 57-year-old widow, touching the Brazilian flag that was lowered after Bolsonaro left the residence. “I am mourning again.”

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A grad student seeking a criminal justice degree from Washington State University has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students more than six weeks ago, officials said on Friday.

Police in eastern Pennsylvania acting on a fugitive arrest warrant took Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 28, into custody on Thursday night, according to James Fry, chief of police in Moscow, Idaho, where the University of Idaho campus is located. Fry said Kohberger resides in Pennsylvania.

Kohberger was arraigned in Pennsylvania and remained jailed without bond awaiting a hearing on Tuesday to determine whether he will waive extradition and return voluntarily to Idaho to face charges in the high-profile case, said Latah County, Idaho, prosecutor Bill Thompson.

Thompson said Kohberger was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and felony burglary in a crime that unnerved the small college town in Idaho’s northwest panhandle where the four victims – three women and a man in their early 20s – were slain.

The four were all found fatally stabbed on the morning of Nov. 13 inside the off-campus house where the three women lived, two of them staying in one room, and one sharing her room with the fourth victim, her boyfriend.

Two other female roommates in the house at the time were unharmed, apparently sleeping through the killings. Police said the cellphone of one of the survivors was used to call emergency-911 when the bodies were first discovered.

“This is not the end of this investigation. In fact it is a new beginning,” Thompson told a news conference.

The victims – identified as Ethan Chapin, 20, of Conway, Washington; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Avondale, Arizona; Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum, Idaho – all suffered multiple stab wounds, Fry said. Some of the bodies also showed defensive wounds, Fry said, suggesting they had tried to fend off their attacker.

Chapin and his girlfriend, Kernodle, had attended a fraternity party the night before, while Mogen and Goncalves, who were best friends, had visited a local bar and food truck. Both pairs returned to the house shortly before 2 a.m. The two other roommates had gotten home about an hour earlier.

Authorities say they believe the slayings occurred between 3 and 4 a.m. on Nov. 13.

The victims appeared to have been killed with a knife or some other “edged” weapon, police have said. Fry said the murder weapon has not been recovered, though police had found a car they were searching for in connection with the killings.

Authorities said Kohberger was a graduate student at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, Washington, about 10 miles from the University of Idaho campus.

WSU issued a statement on Friday saying its police department and Idaho law enforcement officers searched both Kohberger’s apartment residence and his office on campus.

It said Kohberger “had completed his first semester as a PhD student in WSU’s criminal justice program earlier this month,” suggesting he had remained on campus, just miles away from the crime scene across the Idaho state line, for a number of weeks before returning to Pennsylvania.

Asked at the press conference in Moscow whether authorities there were seeking additional suspects, Fry said, “We have an individual in custody who committed these horrible crimes, and I do believe our community is safe.”

Fry said his department had received more than 19,000 tips from the public and had conducted more than 300 interviews as part of its investigation, assisted by state police and the FBI. He and Thompson urged anyone who knew anything about the accused killer to come forward.

He declined to offer a possible motive for the crime or to give any details about the investigation, such as how authorities traced Kohberger to Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, a small community in the Pocono Mountains resort region about 90 miles north of Philadelphia, where he was arrested.

Thompson said more details would emerge publicly from a probable-cause affidavit that summarizes the factual basis for the charges but remains under court seal until the suspect is physically back in Idaho to be served his arrest warrant.

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