Bryan Kohberger case: Idaho court releases surviving roommates’ text messages from night of student murders
Retired NYPD inspector Paul Mauro joins ‘Fox & Friends’ to discuss the unsealed hearing transcript of the Idaho murder case against suspect Brian Kohberger.
FIRST ON FOX: Text messages between two surviving roommates from the home in Moscow, Idaho, where four university students were killed in a home invasion stabbing attack have been revealed publicly for the first time in a newly unsealed court filing.
The roommates, identified in court documents only as DM and BF, appear to have been awake and discussing the possibility of a masked trespasser approximately five minutes after the attack.
DM has previously been identified as the only eyewitness who saw the intruder – a masked man with “bushy eyebrows” – in the six-bedroom house on King Road. Based on her statements to police and audio from a security camera next door, the attacker is believed to have left the house shortly after 4:17 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022.
The attack left four people dead – Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20.
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Madison Mogen, top left, smiles on the shoulders of her best friend, Kaylee Goncalves, as they pose with Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, and two other housemates in Goncalves’ final Instagram post, shared the day before the four students were stabbed to death. (@kayleegoncalves/Instagram)
The filing reveals text messages that DM and BF exchanged between 4:22 and 4:24, as well as texts DM sent to some of the victims before dawn and again around 10:20 a.m. Prior to the texts, DM tried to call BF and three of the victims. None of her calls were answered.
“No one is answering,” DM wrote to BF, according to the filing. “I’m rlly confused rn.”
Read the excerpts from moments after the slayings:
“Kaylee,” DM wrote in another text. “What’s going on?”
DM also appeared to reference the intruder she later told police she encountered when peering out of her bedroom door. She referenced something “like a ski mask almost.”
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Read the excerpts from morning after:
“Like he had soemtbinfover (sic) is for head and little nd mouth”
BF urged her to “run” downstairs. According to other court filings released this week, DM spent the night in BF’s room and an unnamed person called 911 from BF’s phone around noon the next day.
At 10:23 a.m., DM texted both Mogen and Goncalves. “Pls answer,” she wrote. “R u up??” She then called her father around 11:40 a.m.
Prosecutors are asking the court to allow them to introduce the texts as evidence.
Read the redacted 911 call transcript
Prosecutors allege that police found a Ka-Bar knife sheath under Mogen’s body that had DNA on it that led them to the suspect, Bryan Kohberger, a 30-year-old former Ph.D. student who was studying criminology at the nearby Washington State University at the time of the crime.
Separately, the court also released a transcript of a frantic 911 call that reveals multiple callers spoke with the dispatcher trying to explain they had found Kernodle unresponsive and someone had seen an intruder the night before.
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Additional filings made public Thursday evening include a list of records that prosecutors plan to introduce as evidence and another defense motion seeking to have the death penalty removed as a potential sentence if there is a conviction – this time arguing that prosecutors have failed to meet discovery deadlines.
“Striking the death penalty is the only remedy that begins to adequately address the prejudice to Mr. Kohberger,” defense attorney Anne Taylor wrote. “Even with a ‘hot documents’ list and detailed expert disclosures— the minimum necessary for this case to proceed to trial—counsel is at a massive disadvantage given the limited resources as compared to the State and the fact that only five months remain before trial.”
The proseuction’s evidence ranges from Kohberger’s banking and shopping records to surveillance video on the night of the crime.
Prosecutors also plan to introduce National Weather Service reports from Nov. 12 and Nov. 13, 2022 – which could potentially challenge Kohberger’s alibi about driving around looking at the moon and stars during the time of the crime.
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Court also releases transcript of frenzied 911 call from King Road house some 8 hours after murders believed to have taken place
Timeline of Nov. 13, 2022:
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‘I’m Freaking Out’: New Texts Detail Key Minutes of Idaho Murders
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Newly released messages reveal that two roommates in the home where four college students were murdered were alarmed by a masked person in the house that night.
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Text messages shed light on timeline of Idaho college killings: Court documents
Texts offer insights as to what was said and seen prior to four fatal stabbings.
On the night four Idaho college students were stabbed to death in a shared off-campus home, two of the victims’ surviving roommates were frantically trying to reach their friends, according to excerpted text messages included in court documents that became available on Thursday.
The filings in the case against suspect Bryan Kohberger also shed new light on the timeline of events that transpired on Nov. 13, 2022, in an off-campus student residence near the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho.
The court documents — which were filed by prosecutors last month, but posted to the docket Thursday — showed that the four victims, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin and Madison Mogen, were believed to arrive at the house on King Road address at approximately 1:45 a.m.
One of the two survivors, who were roommates, is shown to have messaged an Uber driver to take them from a bar to the house at 2:10 a.m. At that time, the other surviving roommate was shown to be awake and texting.
At 4 a.m. Kernodle received a DoorDash order, according to prosecutors, and one surviving roommate said that she thought she heard Goncalves playing with her dog.
“A short time” after, the roommate said “she heard someone she thought was Goncalves say something to the effect of ‘there’s someone here,'” prosecutors previously said.
At 4:17 a.m. a security camera less than 50 feet from Kernodle’s room picked up sounds of a barking dog and “distorted audio of what sounded like voices or a whimper followed by a loud thud,” according to prosecutors’ earlier court documents.
Just before 4:30 a.m. both roommates were texting back and forth, according to filed transcripts, and they appeared to grow frightened as their calls and texts to the four victims went unanswered.
“No one is answering,” the roommate identified in the documents as “D.M.” texted “B.F.” between 4:22 a.m. and 4:24 a.m. “I’m rlly confused rn.”
“Kaylee,” D.M. texted Goncalves. “What’s going on.” And then to B.F. they said, “I’m freaking out rn.”
D.M. makes reference to someone in “like a ski mask almost” to B.F., who responds, “Stfu.”
“I’m not kidding,” D.M says, adding that they are “so freaked out.”
“Come to my room,” B.F. says. “Run.”
While the chilling exchanges don’t explain the whole story, they offer a first glimpse at what was being said in the King Road home where the killings had, according to prosecutors, just occurred.
Prosecutors leading the case against Kohberger have asked the court to admit the exchanges, saying they “present sense impressions and excited utterances” as they describe in-the-moment reactions to what was happening.
The roommate said “she looked out of her bedroom but did not see anything when she heard the comment about someone being in the house,” earlier pretrial documents said. “She opened her door a second time when she heard what she thought was crying coming from Kernodle’s room.”
She “then said she heard a male voice say something to the effect of ‘It’s OK, I’m going to help you,'” according to the previously filed documents.
The roommate said she opened her door again and saw a man in black clothes and a mask walking past her, according to an affidavit. She stood “frozen” and in “shock” as he walked toward the house’s sliding glass door, the affidavit said.
The roommate said she didn’t recognize the man, the affidavit showed. She described him as at least 5-foot-10, and “not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows,” according to the affidavit.
Both surviving roommates are expected to testify at the upcoming capital murder trial, prosecutors said in the latest unsealed court documents.
Included in the new filings is also a redacted transcript of the 911 call placed at 11:58 a.m. — nearly seven hours after the intruder was spotted — after the “unresponsive body” of Kernodle was discovered.
The emergency call was placed after a flurry of texts to the victims’ phones, a text exchange between one of the surviving roommates and her father, and another call placed to number whose owner was not identified in the filings.
They also stated that the two surviving roommates were told by someone else at the scene to call emergency dispatch, which they did.
“Um, one of our — one of the roommates who’s passed out and she was drunk last night and she’s not waking up,” one of them tells dispatch, per the transcript.
“Oh, and they saw some man in their house last night,” they added.
The command for an “all ambulance” response was given to respond, and the phone was being passed around among several people on scene, the transcript indicated.
“Is she breathing?” Dispatch asked, and was told, “No.”
“I think we have a homicide,” someone on the scene said.
Kohberger was arrested as a suspect in the four stabbing deaths in December of 2022, after a six-week manhunt, and he was indicted in May 2023.
He was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. At his arraignment, he declined to offer a plea, so the judge entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.
If convicted, he could face the death penalty in Idaho.
His trial is set to begin in August.
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