Haunting new footage shows Idaho murders survivor tearfully recall hearing roommate scream before coming face to face with masked intruder
Newly released police bodycam footage reveals a haunting glimpse into the heartbreaking aftermath of the University of Idaho murders – as the surviving roommate tearfully recalled hearing a scream before coming face-to-face with the masked intruder.
College students huddled together outside 1122 King Road around noon on November 13, 2022, as police arrived at the Moscow home, initially responding to a report of an “unconscious individual.”
Instead, they found four students – Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin – stabbed to death. Last month, Bryan Kohberger was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murders.
In the 52-minute video, obtained by Law & Crime, one of the responding officers is heard sighing heavily as he moves through the house after viewing the gruesome scene and noting the number of fatalities. The scenes of the bodies are redacted from the video.
Loud wails could be heard outside the house as friends and surviving roommates Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke huddled together under blankets, waiting for answers.
As the officer approaches the group, Mortensen is hysterically sobbing as she reveals that she heard Kaylee scream and that she “saw the guy.”
“They were in the main room dancing and laughing, Kaylee went upstairs and she screamed that someone’s in the room and she ran downstairs and I kept calling her name and she wouldn’t answer,” she says through her tears.
“And then I saw the guy. Oh f**k. I actually locked the door and then I ran downstairs. We don’t know what’s going on.”
Mortensen is pulled to the side by police where she gives her account of the tragic events.
Through her tears, she tells police she was in her room when she heard Kaylee announce that she was going to bed.
“I heard her go upstairs and then she screamed because said she saw someone and she ran downstairs and I kept calling her name and she wouldn’t answer,” Mortensen says.
Investigators later said it’s believed Mortensen heard Xana, not Kaylee.
“I heard her in the bathroom and I heard her crying and I heard some guy say that, ‘You’re going to be OK. I’m going to help you,’” she recalled.
In another interview later in the footage, she describes how the intruder sounded when he said those words to her roommate.
“I don’t know how to explain it. Like it wasn’t in a nice way. It was a weird way. Like a weird tone.”
Mortensen said that moments after she heard his voice, she opened her bedroom door and came face-to-face with a masked intruder.
She described the man – later identified as Kohberger – as dressed in all black, with a mask covering his forehead and mouth and said that he was “not insanely tall,” but taller than her and compared his body to a basketball player.
“I just shut the door and locked it ’cause I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
She says it was about 4 a.m. when she called Funke and ran down to her room where they stayed until late morning.
Mortensen admitted she and Funke initially convinced themselves they were overreacting.
“We didn’t think anything of it. We’re like ‘Nothing happens in Moscow,’ so we just tried to go to bed and then we woke up and it was weird because none of our roommates were up and we called all of them. They were not waking up,” she said.
That’s when she said they called friends to come over, leading to the discovery of their roommates’ slain bodies.
After Kohberger, a former PhD student at nearby Washington State University, pleaded guilty to the murders last month, in a deal to save himself from the death penalty, Idaho investigators released troves of evidence from the case.
This week, hundreds of photos from the crime scene were released, revealing a college off-campus apartment frozen in time.
Images show red solo cups stacked up for a beer pong. A lone combat boot stands in the middle of the living room. Xana’s half-eaten DoorDash order sits in a crumpled paper bag on the counter in the kitchen. A footprint in the snow suggested the killer’s escape route.
Days before the murders, Kaylee Goncalves had told friends she felt someone was watching her from the trees near the house. Investigators later revealed Kohberger’s phone had been in the area at least 23 times before the murders, mostly at night.
After more than two years of insisting he was innocent, Kohberger pleaded guilty last month to four counts of first-degree murder. On July 23, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
He is now behind bars at Idaho’s maximum security prison in Kuna. According to documents first obtained by People, he has already filed several complaints about his fellow inmates.
Kohberger has reportedly demanded a transfer after he complained that he was the target of “verbal threats/harassment” and “recent flooding/striking.”
“Not engaging in any of the recent flooding/striking as well as being subject to minute-by-minute verbal threats/harassment and on that and other bases [sic] Unit 2 of J-Block is an environment that I wish to transfer from,” he wrote.
Kohberger also filed a second complaint alleging he was the victim of sexual threats.
His request to be transferred out of J block’s restrictive housing unit to B block, where inmates are also held in single cells, was denied with the official telling Kohberger to “give it some time.”
