By Jackie Annett
A sleepy US town was rocked to its core when four college students were brutally murdered in the middle of the night – and their grieving families are still desperate for answers. It was November 13, 2022 when news began to emerge that college students Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, had all been stabbed to death at around 4am in Moscow, Idaho. At the time of the quadruple killings, two other roommates, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen were inside the home, but weren’t harmed. And according to the police reports, Mortensen came face to face with the masked killer. As Bryan Kohberger pleads guilty to the murder of four college students to avoid the death sentence , we look back at the victims’ flatmate’s terrifying account of the moment she came face-to-face with the killer. Mortensen told police how that night she’d gone to sleep in her bedroom on the second floor of the three-storey home and was woken by what sounded like her flatmate Goncalves playing with her dog in one of the third-floor bedrooms. A short time later, the student said she heard someone believed to be either Goncalves or Kernodle saying, “There’s someone here.” It was this which spurred her to look out of her bedroom for the first time – but she couldn’t see anything. She later opened her door a second time when she heard what she thought was crying coming from Kernodle’s room. At that point, she said she heard a man’s voice saying, “It’s OK, I’m going to help you,” according to police documents. Just a few minutes later, when she opened her door for a third time, she saw “a figure clad in black clothing and a mask that covered the person’s mouth and nose” walking towards her. As she stood in a “frozen shock phase,” the man who she did not recognize walked past her and headed toward the back sliding glass door of the home before she then locked herself in her room. Terrified, Mortensen desperately tried to call and text her roommates and friends in the house but only Funke responded. ‘No one is answering,’ Mortensen texted Funke, according to court records. ‘What’s going on?’ she then sent to Goncalves. And in another message, Mortensen texted Funke, ‘I’m freaking out rn’. After exchanging text messages, Mortensen then bolted from her room on the second floor down to Funke’s room on the first floor where they stayed until daylight. Mobile phone records, released in court documents, show that the two women called and texted their roommates and accessed social media platforms over the next eight hours. Then at around 11.50am and with still no response from any of the four victims, Mortensen called another friend and asked her to ‘come over and check the house because she was scared.’ Emily Alandt and her boyfriend Hunter Johnson came to the home and met Mortensen and Funke where the students saw Kernodle lying on the floor. What happened that night rocked the small town, but it wasn’t until December 30, 2022 that an arrest was finally made. Kohberger – a 30-year-old criminology PhD student over the border at Washington State University – was taken into custody. He was connected to the murders after his DNA was found on a Ka-Bar leather knife sheath found next to Mogen’s body at the scene. Prosecutors also found cellphone records placing him outside the student home multiple times prior to the killings, as well as surveillance footage showing a vehicle matching his car speeding away.