Newly released police body camera footage shows the University of Idaho murder survivor heard screams and saw the Masked Intruder Night of Killings.
The video, obtained by Law & Crime, lensed outside the off-campus house on King Road in Moscow on 13 November 2022. Initially, officers had been dispatched to reports of an “unconscious individual.” They discovered four students, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin, inside the house, who had been brutally stabbed to death.
The bodycam footage is availabe one YouTube
Uploaded on YouTube, in the 52-minute footage, one officer can be heard letting out a heavy sigh after moving through the home. Outside, friends and the two surviving roommates, Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke, huddled together under blankets, sobbing.
Mortensen, visibly shaken, told officers through tears that she had heard Kaylee scream before seeing a masked intruder inside the home. “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 said.
{{/usCountry}}Mortensen, visibly shaken, told officers through tears that she had heard Kaylee scream before seeing a masked intruder inside the home. “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 said.
{{/usCountry}}“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.”
Survivor recalls hearing killer’s Eerie words during Idaho massacre
Later in the footage, she explained, “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.
“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 opened her bedroom door and saw a man dressed in black, wearing a mask that covered his forehead and mouth. She recalled he was a taller than her but “not insanely tall,” comparing his build to that of a basketball player. “I just shut the door and locked it ’cause I didn’t know what to do,” she told police.
“We didn’t think anything of it. We’re like ‘Nothing happens in Moscow,’ so we just tried to go to bed,” she said. But by late morning, when none of their roommates stirred, they called friends to the house.
Investigators later determined Mortensen had likely mistaken Xana’s scream for Kaylee’s. Evidence showed Kohberger’s phone had been in the area at least 23 times before the murders, often at night.
Bryan Kohberger, a criminology PhD student at Washington State University, pleaded guilty earlier this summer to four counts of first-degree murder. On July 23, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.