Inside the hours of terror among surviving roommates the night of the Idaho student murders

(CNN) — It was around 4 a.m. when University of Idaho student Dylan Mortensen said she was woken up by strange noises in her off-campus house.

She and her roommates had returned earlier from a typical Saturday night out in the college town when the sounds spurred a night of terror with a flurry of panicked texts and unanswered calls.

Three of Mortensen’s roommates and a boyfriend of one of the students would be found dead inside the house the next morning on November 13, 2022 — stabbed to death with no signs of a break-in.

DNA from the brutal slayings ultimately led to the arrest of 30-year-old criminology graduate student Bryan Kohberger. A not guilty plea has been entered on his behalf for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.

Mortensen and another roommate, Bethany Funke, are the only two from inside the three-story Moscow, Idaho, house to survive.

Now, as Kohberger’s trial nears over two years later, the personal accounts and phone activity from the two surviving roommates provide more insight into what they say happened in the early morning hours of the murders as the defense attempts to discredit their testimony and call into question why they waited eight hours to call 911.

Court documents paint a picture of a night filled with odd sounds, unknown voices, panicked texts, unanswered calls and a shadowy figure in the hallway – all in the setting of a college town that hadn’t experienced a murder since 2015.

Not much is known about Mortensen and Funke, whose phone activity and personal accounts were revealed in court documents in the last several weeks. A wide-ranging gag order in the case prevents them from speaking publicly about their experience.

While the defense tries to show through their filings the two surviving roommates spent an inordinate amount of time on their phones before calling 911 – an attempt to call into question their timeline of events – a psychological expert says a multitude of factors could’ve played into this delay.

“When we are faced with trauma or fear, we all have different response systems, and there’s no one right response system,” said Elizabeth Cauffman, a psychological science professor at the University of California, Irvine.

While a complete picture of that morning has yet to form, the surviving roommates’ accounts and documentation shed light on what the housemates endured in a case shrouded with mystery and speculation.

Here’s how the night of the murders unfolded, according to court documents:

Roommates return home after a Saturday night out

After a busy Saturday night out, the roommates returned to the three-story, six-bedroom Moscow house in the early hours of November 13, 2022.

Kernodle and her boyfriend had been at a party at a frat house. Mogen and Goncalves were at a local bar then stopped at a food truck for late-night carbonara before making their way back home.

The roommates began arriving back home and heading to their rooms in the early morning hours, with Kernodle briefly leaving her room to grab a DoorDash order around 4 a.m., Mortensen and Funke told police, according to court documents.

The third floor housed Goncalves and her dog in one room and Mogen in another. Kernodle and Chapin were on the second floor, where Mortensen also had a bedroom, according to the affidavit.

Funke was the lone occupant of the first floor, where the front door was.

Roommate on second floor says she heard crying

Around 4 a.m., Mortensen, who shared the second floor with Kernodle, woke up to noises upstairs, telling police she thought Goncalves was playing with her dog on the third floor.

Shortly after, Mortensen said she thought she heard Goncalves say “something to the effect of ‘there’s someone here,’” the affidavit says. She looked out her bedroom door but didn’t see anything.

Then she heard crying coming from the direction of Kernodle’s room and looked outside once more, she told investigators.

From above, she heard a male voice that wasn’t Chapin’s say something like “It’s ok, I’m going to help you,” according to court documents. It’s not clear where the male’s voice came from.

Mortensen heard crying again and opened the door, this time seeing “a figure clad in black clothing” with a mask covering their mouth and nose walking toward her, the affidavit said.

She froze, Mortensen said, and the person walked past her and to a sliding back glass door, according to the affidavit. She then locked herself in her room.

She didn’t recognize the man. Mortensen later described him in grand jury testimony as being around her height “or a few inches taller,” having a “lean build” and wearing all black, according to court documents. She also noted in the same testimony she saw one bushy eyebrow. She told police during several interviews after the murders her memory was a bit blurry since she had just woken up and may still have been drunk, according to the documents.

Around 4:17 a.m., a security camera less than 50 feet from Kernodle’s bedroom wall picked up distorted audio of what sounded like voices, or a whimper followed by a loud thud, according to the affidavit. A dog can also be heard barking.

‘No one is answering … I’m freaking out’

At 4:20 a.m., Mortensen started frantically calling her roommates – Kernodle, Goncalves, a brief 41-second call with Funke, then Kernodle again. She called Mogen again before texting Funke saying, “No one is answering.”

Funke had also tried calling Mogen, Kernodle and Chapin during that time.

“Kaylee,” Mortensen texted Goncalves. “What’s going on”

The text message remained unanswered. Investigators believe the four roommates were killed sometime between 4 a.m. and 4:25 a.m.

“Ya dude wtf,” Funke replied, with Mortensen describing someone in “like ski mask almost.”

Mortensen and Funke, identified by their initials in the court documents, continued texting back and forth about the man in the hall, typos growing more frequent as their panic rose.

BF to DM: “Stfu”

DM to BF: “Like he had [something] over is for head and little nd mouth”

DM to BF: “I’m not kidding [I] am so freaked out”

BF to DM: “So am I”

Mortensen indicated her phone was about to die, and Funke texted “Come to my room,” which was below on the first floor. “Run,” she said.

DM to BF: “Im scRwd tho”

BF to DM: “Ya IK but it’s better than being alone.”

The defense says in court filings Mortensen ultimately went to Funke’s room.

Mortensen and Funke launch another round of calls to their roommates at 4:27 a.m. without answer. “Pls answer,” Mortensen texted Goncalves at 4:32 a.m.

Records indicate Funke accessed Snapchat at 4:34 a.m. and Instagram at 4:37 a.m. before all phone communications from the two roommates stopped for about three hours.

Prosecutors have indicated they plan to use the testimony of the two surviving roommates and want to use their text messages to illustrate the timeline of the night.

But defense attorney Anne Taylor has pointed out that while the roommates claim they were panicked and worried about the other roommates, they didn’t attempt to get help.

Roommates were active on phones, social media before calling 911

Prosecution filings previously asserted Mortensen and Funke woke up around 10:23 a.m. to discover their messages from their roommates were unanswered. But the transcript shared by the defense shows phone activity more than two hours before they started reaching out to their unresponsive roommates and more than four hours before calling 911.

Several hours after the panicked text exchange, records show Funke’s phone activity started again with a phone call to her dad at 7:30 a.m. Both she and Mortensen used their phones that morning, with Funke calling her parents and Mortensen accessing several social media apps. It is unclear from the records what exactly she was doing on the apps.

During that time, Funke had a phone call with her dad and took photos, while Mortensen was on Instagram for over two hours, court documents show. She also spent time messaging on Snapchat and on Indeed.

At 10:23 a.m., Mortensen begins reaching out to her roommates again.

“Pls answer,” she texts Goncalves. “R u up,” she asks Mogen.

“R u up??” she texts Goncalves again.

The two roommates continued using their phones for the next hour, including messages and calls to people only named through initials, until Funke called 911 at 11:56 a.m. to report Kernodle unconscious at the residence, records show. Two other friends could be heard with them on the call.

Heavy breathing and crying can be heard in audio of the 911 call as the surviving roommates pass the phone between them and what sounds like two other people, answering the dispatcher in fragmented responses.

“Something has happened in our house, we don’t know what,” one of the roommates says.

On the call they reported 20-year-old Kernodle unconscious, telling the dispatcher she had come home drunk the night before. “She’s not waking up,” one of them says.

Police arrived to find Kernodle and Chapin dead on the floor of the second floor. Upstairs, Goncalves and Mogen were dead in one of the beds with visible stab wounds.

A tan leather knife sheath was on the bed next to Mogen. Male DNA was later found on the button snap of the knife sheath and Kohberger was found to be a “statistical match” to the sample, according to court documents.

Prosecutors plan to use testimony from surviving roommates

As Kohberger’s trial looms, expected to begin in August, filings show the defense team intends to zero in on the discrepancies in the timeline and why the roommates waited eight hours to call 911.

“Neither of them left the house,” a filing from Taylor submitted this week said. “Neither of them called friends, family or law enforcement for help. Instead, both have a substantial amount of activity beginning in earnest less than 4 hours after DM made her way to BF’s room. BF and DM communicate with friends and parents and DM is on social media.”

Kohberger’s defense team appears to be “taking great pains” to keep out Mortensen’s testimony – especially because she identified the person in the house that night as having bushy eyebrows, attorney Misty Marris told CNN’s News Central.

“Essentially the defense is trying to diminish some of the credibility of potential witness testimony of those roommates and also trying to question the timeline of when these murders could have taken place,” Marris said.

But the roommates’ delay in calling 911 is not entirely surprising as there are many factors that go into responding to a stressful situation like this, Cauffman, the UC Irvine professor, said.

The amygdala, a part of the brain which acts as its alarm system, triggers the fight, flight or freeze response, Cauffman said. The prefrontal cortex, which helps with decision-making, isn’t fully developed until around age 25, and can be overwhelmed by the amygdala in a decision-making process like this, she added, which is especially relevant in this case as they were all young college students.

“If you’re in a dangerous situation, and your amygdala is flooding your emotional response system, that’s going to overwhelm your prefrontal cortex. So just from the brain response system, we know 18- to 25-year-olds would respond differently,” according to Cauffman.

In addition, a psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, which helps the brain rationalize a situation to the least threatening explanation, combined with the way women are socialized to downplay fear, could lead to delayed reaction to the situation, she said.

“Women are typically just socialized to downplay fear,” Cauffman said. “They’re often seen as overly dramatic or reactive. And so, if they were discussing the situation together, they might have reinforced each other’s doubts instead of escalating to call 911.”

But she emphasized there is no way to know exactly what was happening to the two roommates at the time, and there are many reasons why they could’ve reacted that way to the situation.

“It could be because of our amygdala response. It could be to socialization of women. It could be to our cognitive processing, from cognitive dissonance,” she said.

“This can be explained in so many different ways, it’s hard to just even pick one.”

CNN’s Jean Casarez, Lauren del Valle and Holly Yan contributed to this report.

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