Students Uncover Chilling News: Four Housemates Found Stabbed to Death in Shocking University Alert

KAYLEE Goncalves and Madison Mogen were inseparable. Best friends since childhood, they did everything together – even attending the same university in Idaho.

When they shared an apartment off campus with three other girls – and Xana Kernodle – they felt like soul mates.

Bryan Kohberger has never given any reason why he carried out such atrocious murders Credit: Getty Victims Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, who were killed in their off-campus home Credit: Alamy

Xana’s likeable boyfriend and fellow student, Ethan Chapin, was also there for much of the time and they would all socialise together.

It was known as a fun, party house, where people would come and go, when not studying. But their dreams for the future were brutally ended for four of them in the early hours of the morning of 13 November 2022 when an intruder entered and before making his escape.

The incident shocked the community, the country and the world as word spread about this night of horror.

Four years on, the harrowing Sky documentary, The Idaho Murders, features extensive police bodycam footage at , new insights and the lasting impact on the wider community in this quiet college town of Moscow in .

Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle, a young couple whose lives were also brutally cut short Credit: Instagram The Steptoe Village at Washington State University, where Bryan Christopher Kohberger, the graduate student at the school accused of first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students, rented an apartment Credit: Reuters Ka-Bar similar to the weapon which the killer used in 2022 Credit: Rich Bowen/CC BY 2.0 Cops released photos of the crime scene, including a photo of two handprints on the window Credit: Moscow Police Department

“They’ve demolished the house in King Road, where it happened,” says former student at the University of Idaho, Taylor Dolezal.

“The owner of the house gave it to the university and the university decided, ‘We are tearing it down. We’re just going to demolish it. It really helped with the closure of this case.

“Moscow will always be changed because of this. I think, ultimately, the spirit of the university, the fact that it is a college town, means it will bounce back. But there will always be kind of a heaviness surrounding the place, unfortunately.”

On the day before the murders, the local football team had a match. As usual on such Saturdays, there was drinking and socialising by excited fans, before and after the game.

An ominous fog swept in early evening and the temperature dropped. After the football had ended, the five friends made plans to go out.

Bethany and Dylan went home to 1122 King Road earlier than the others and went to bed. and Madison returned together in the early hours, as did Xana and Ethan.

The last one to bed was Xana, who had ordered a food delivery that arrived around 4am.

Tragically, there was another arrival – a tall, slim man dressed in black with a balaclava that just showed his eyes and “bushy eyebrows” as Dylan recalled.

A tired Dylan was awoken several times during the night – first by Kaylee’s dog, whining, then somebody crying and later thumping and a female saying “I think someone’s here.”

Then she heard a male voice say, “It’s okay. I’m going to help you.”

Thinking that it was one of the other girl’s boyfriends staying over, she went back to bed until she was awoken by more moving around. When she opened her door to look out, she was terrified to see a man in black walking towards her.

She shut her door, frozen in fear, locked it and heard him leave out of the glass, sliding door, in the kitchen.

Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were killed in Kohberger’s rampage Credit: Instagram/kayleegoncalves Cara Northington, mother of victim Xana Kernodle, wipes a tear at the sentencing hearing of Bryan Kohberger Credit: AP

Calling her roommates, she got no answer but met up with Bethany downstairs.

After finding Xana lying on the floor, the girls made a panicky emergency call, saying: “Something’s happened in our house and we don’t know what. One of the roommates is passed out. She was drunk last night and she’s not waking up. And they saw some man in the house last night.”

Police arrived and saw blood soaking into the carpets and mattresses and splattered on the walls.

Anthony Dahlinger, Chief of Police, Moscow Police Department, recalls, “It was an horrific scene. Something I will never forget.”

Kaylee and Madison had been repeatedly stabbed to death as they slept in the same bed together. Ethan was in bed, with his jugular slit.

Xana had begun to eat her food when she had been disturbed by the intruder. She had been stabbed over 50 times, with lots of defensive wounds, indicating that there had been a struggle.

“They were just young college kids, going to school to get an education and go out and enjoy their lives,” says Anthony.

“There was nothing obvious as to why someone would want to harm them.”

While survivors, Bethany and Dylan sat outside the house with some friends, police searched the house. At this stage, they did not know that their housemates were dead.

It was only when their university sent a text alert to all students that police were on site investigating a quadruple homicide that they knew.

Devastated Benjamin Mogen (R), father of Madison Mogen, cries at the court Credit: EPA Dylan Mortensen survived the horrific ordeal Credit: EPA

The documentary shows them at the moment of receiving the text, crying in horror and disbelief.

With the killer still on the loose and the police with no idea who it was, fear rapidly spread throughout the town. Would the attacker strike again?

“We all felt incredibly heartbroken and scared and we wanted to make some sense of how something like this could happen,” says Taylor Dolezal.

“It was inconceivable. We were terrified that there were going to be more. That it wouldn’t stop at the four.”

believed the intruder had entered through the sliding glass door in the kitchen. No viable fingerprints on it were found but the killer had left behind something that proved to be crucial – a tan-coloured knife sheath on Madison’s bed.

Desperate to find the murderer as quick as possible, fearing he might strike again, Moscow Police got the and state police involved.

They were jubilant when the sheath was found to have single male on it. Another vital discovery was CCTV footage of a car, identified as a white Hyundai Elantra, making multiple passes around the house for almost an hour on the day of the murders.

Eventually it parked, off camera and then around 4.20am, the car took off
at speed, out of the neighbourhood and almost hit a rubbish bin on the side of the road.

There was no match of the DNA on the databases but experts in DNA genealogy were able to create a genome, identifying that it had above 80 per cent of Italian lineage.

They began to build a family tree until they found one couple whose child
was likely to be the person with the DNA found on the sheath. That couple only had one child – a son, named .

He was 28, from Pennsylvania, and a graduate student at Washington State University, studying criminology. He owned a white Hyundai Elantra and lived in student housing at WSU, in the Pullman area.

Gary Jenkins, former chief of WSU Police Department, was asked to meet with the Moscow Police Department.

“They said, ‘We have a suspect who is a graduate student at Washington State University and his name is Bryan Kohberger,” he says.

“When they told me the name, it rang a bell but I didn’t immediately know why. It took me thirty seconds or so and then I said, ‘I’ve talked to Bryan Kohberger before. I interviewed him for a research assistant position at Pullman Police Department in April. I have his resume and his cover letter.’ Their ears pricked up.

“When I interviewed him, he was kind of an odd guy. Not enough to raise a red flag that he would go out and do something horrible. But his personality was a little bit off. I thought that he probably couldn’t relate well to people and I didn’t select him.”

During the course of their investigation into Kohberger, it became apparent that on 14 October 2022 – one month before the murders – a cop had pulled him over in his car for jumping a red light.

Bodycam footage of their conversation is shown in the documentary, revealing Kohberger’s, long, gaunt face and scary, bulging eyes.

A month after the murders, he was stopped again by traffic cops. This time on his way to his parents’ house in Pennsylvania, to spend the break there, accompanied by his father in the passenger seat.

This time, the offence was for driving too closely to the vehicle in front.

Police bodycam of this, too, was captured. Six weeks after the murders, police went to his parent’s house in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, almost 3,000 miles away from Moscow, where they saw the white Hyundai Elantra.

It had almost been taken apart inside and had been scrubbed to
get rid of DNA. Police grabbed a rubbish bag from the kerb outside the house. Inside, they found a Q-tip which had some ear wax on it.

This provided them with a DNA sample which, one hundred per cent, had to be the father of their suspect. On 30 December 2022 they went back and arrested Bryan Kohberger.

During his police interview, Kohberger refused to answer any questions
Delving into his background, they learned that he was a loner, known to be sociallyawkward and disconcerted people by staring at them with his big, bulging blue eyes.

He invaded their space and was not very good at talking to women.

His master’s degree in criminal justice in Pennsylvania was under the tutelage of an expert in serial killers. He then moved to Washington to pursue a PhD in criminology and justice and, as part of his studies, he had been a teaching assistant at WSU.

But this ended after growing complaints about his behaviour and conduct towards women.

“Many people came forward to say he was a strange individual and off-putting, who thought very highly of themselves. Almost narcistic,” says Anthony Dahlinger.

“He would be very demeaning to others based on his level of education versus theirs.

“He had a lot of interest in people who had committed heinous crimes – serial killers, and the like.

“We learnt that he bought the knife and sheath off Amazon a couple of months before he moved to Washington. According to his digital footprint and his mobile ping, he had been in or around the area of the King Road house 23 times before the killings. It was always late in the evening or early morning between 10pm and 4am.”

Police found a disturbing selfie on his phone after he had driven home from the murders and scrubbed himself in the shower. It shows him smiling and giving a thumbs up to the camera.

In Idaho, he was facing the death penalty. He maintained his innocence and his defence team did all they could to delay the case and try to get it kicked out. Then he took a plea deal.

He pleaded and agreed to waive his appeal rights in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.

Kohberger has never given any reason why he carried out such atrocious murders.

“No one knows why he did it or whether he even knew them,” says Anthony.

“He had been in the area of the house, circling it, from as early as July 2022.”

On 23 July, 2025, he was given four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. He declined to make a statement himself and sat impassive during the victims’ family impact statements.

Looking across the courtroom at his daughter’s killer, Kaylee’s father, Steve
Goncalves, said, “In time, you will be forgotten to the wind. No visitors. Nothing more than initials on an unmarked tombstone.”

“Police officers tell us within minutes they had your DNA. Like a calling card. You were that careless. That foolish. That stupid masters degree? You’re a joke.”

Ben Mogen, Madison’s father, said she was much more than his only child.

“She was the only great thing I ever really did. And the only thing I was ever really proud of.”

He described struggling with addiction and substance abuse and how her daughter helped him.

“When I wasn’t wanting to live anymore, she was what would keep me from not caring.”

Scott Laramie, Madison’s stepfather, read a statement on behalf of him and her mother, Karen, saying their daughter was “Our gift of life, our purpose and our hope.”

Xana Kernodle’s stepfather, Randy Davis, told Kohberger, “You’re gonna go to hell … you’re evil … you took our children … you are gonna suffer, man.”

, saying they wanted to move on.

Bethany Funke wrote a statement, read aloud by a friend: “I hated and still hate that they are gone, but for some reason, I am still here, and I got to live,”

“Why did I get to live and not them? For the longest time, I could not even look at their families without feeling sick with guilt.”

An emotional Dylan Mortensen, was in court and read out her statement in person: “He didn’t just take their lives, he took the light they carried into every room. He took away the ability for me to tell them that I love them and that I’m so proud of them.”

The Idaho Murders. Sky Crime, Sunday 26 July