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A newly released bodycam video reveals the moment the first police officers entered a Moscow, ID, off-campus rental home to discover the bodies of four University of Idaho students murdered by Bryan Kohberger.
Kohberger, 30, was sentenced in July to four consecutive terms of life in prison plus 10 years after pleading guilty to four counts of first-degree murder for the stabbing deaths of Madison Mogen, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20.
The 52-minute video recording documenting the beginning of the quadruple murder investigation, first obtained by Law&Crime, shows law enforcement officials responding to a distress call from 1122 King Road just after noon on Nov. 13, 2022.
Outside the now-demolished three-story house, police encounter a huddle of visibly shaken students, some wearing shorts and T-shirts despite the November chill.
The first officer enters through the open front door adorned with a lighted wreath and follows a young man up a flight of stairs, past a living room littered with red Solo cups, to the second-floor bedroom of Kernodle. The man informs the officer that he had checked to see if the 20-year-old woman was breathing.
Significant portions of the video inside the house are redacted, and the faces of the victims’ surviving roommates are blurred, but it is known from previously released court records that during that initial house search, police found Kernodle and Chapin, her boyfriend, dead inside the second-floor bedroom.
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Mogen and Goncalves’ lifeless bodies were found in bed in Mogen’s third-floor room.
As a second officer makes his way up the stairs, the first officer instructs him to slow down.
“There’s two. Looks like fatalities,” he tells his arriving colleague, before letting out an expletive.
During a second sweep of the house, the first officer could be heard muttering, “Oh, man,” under his breath while apparently observing the crime scene on the third floor.
The officer then heads downstairs and out the door as additional officials show up wearing respirators and surgical gloves to take over the bloody crime scene.
The video then captures a visibly distraught college-age woman, identified in court documents as Dylan Mortensen, one of the two surviving roommates, recounting to a friend what happened inside the house the night before.
“I heard them dancing and laughing,” Mortensen says. “Kaylee went upstairs and screamed ‘cause someone was in the room. She ran downstairs, and I kept calling her name, and she wouldn’t answer.”
At that moment, Mortensen says she spotted an intruder.
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“I just locked the door and I ran upstairs,” the sobbing roommate adds, before being called over by the officer to give him a statement.
After being handed a blanket for warmth, Mortensen again recounted the events of the night, explaining that she was getting ready to go to bed around 4 a.m. when she heard Goncalves running and screaming, “Someone’s here.”
“She screamed and just ran downstairs,” says Mortensen. “And I called her name, and I jumped up and locked my door because I was so scared. I then heard someone in the bathroom and heard her crying, and I heard some guy say, ‘You’re gonna be OK. I’m gonna help you.’ And I kept calling her name, but she wasn’t answering.”
Revisiting that moment in a later conversation with the officer, Mortensen pointed out that the stranger’s voice was not addressing Goncalves “in, like, a nice way. It was, like, a weird way, a weird tone.”
After staying in her locked bedroom for some time, Mortensen says she briefly opened her door and saw “this guy.”
She described the stranger as “not insanely tall” and wearing all black and a mask that partly obscured his face.
“He was a little bit taller than me, and I couldn’t really see much of him, but I’m almost positive he was wearing a full black outfit,” says Mortensen. “And he had this mask that was just over his forehead and over his mouth, and he didn’t say anything to me, like, at all. I just shut the door and locked it.”
Mortensen eventually ventured out of her room and ran downstairs to the first-floor bedroom of her roommate Bethany Funke, who was the only person in the house still answering her calls.
While speaking with the officer, Mortensen revealed that on her way to Funke’s room, she glimpsed Kernodle lying seemingly “passed out.”
“I thought maybe she was just, like, sleeping or something,” she says.
Mortensen and Funke then turned in for the night in Funke’s downstairs room.
“We wouldn’t think anything of it. We’re, like, ‘Nothing happens in Moscow.’ We tried to go to bed,” she says.
When the two women woke up around 9 or 10 a.m., they tried calling their four roommates, but “they were not waking up,” says Mortensen.
Finding the situation “very weird,” Mortensen says she called a friend to come over for help.
“And then that’s when all this happened,” she adds.
Court documents later revealed that Chapin was knifed to death in his sleep, and that Goncalves was stabbed so many times that Mortensen could not identify her.
Meanwhile, Kernodle was found covered in defensive wounds, suggesting that she desperately fought for her life in her final moments.
Kohberger, a former doctoral student in criminology, was arrested in Pennsylvania more than a month after the shocking killings and was extradited to Idaho to face murder charges.
Prosecutors announced in June 2025 that they would be seeking the death penalty against the accused.
Just days later, Kohberger accepted a plea deal, avoiding having to go to trial and facing the prospect of capital punishment.
At his sentencing hearing on July 2, Kohberger declined to address the court packed with victims’ family members, prompting Judge Steven Hippler to brand him a “coward.”
“We are now certain who committed these unspeakable acts of evil, but what we don’t know, and what we may never know, is why,” Hippler said, referring to the fact that no motive for the brutal killings has ever been established.
The privately owned six-bedroom rental house where the heinous murders were carried out was demolished in December 2023 and the land donated to the University of Idaho.