Bryan Kohberger may not have spoken in court or revealed his motive for murdering four University of Idaho students during his sentencing hearing July 23, but newly unsealed police reports are shedding new light on the crime.
In an interview with the Moscow Police Department shortly after the murders of her friends, surviving roommate Dylan Mortensen said that Kaylee Goncalves said she was being watched in the weeks before she was stabbed to death.
Goncalves saw a shadow while out walking her dog Murphy a month before her murder, said Mortensen, and approximately two to three weeks before she was killed mentioned that “an individual was following her.”
In another interview, one of Goncalves’ former sorority sisters, whose name is redacted, told police “Kaylee saw a dark figure staring at her from the tree line when she took Murphy out to pee,” a month prior to her death.
Murphy survived the massacre that claimed the life of his owner, and managed to wake up neighbors in the area from his barking at around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022.
In a press conference after Kohberger’s sentencing, police said that they do not know if Kohberger had targeted a specific individual in the house.
Representatives from the MPD, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador spoke at the press conference, and revealed that after an investigation that has spanned close to three years, there is still nothing to link Kohberger to any of his four victims.
A few hours earlier, however, Alivea Goncalves claimed in her victim impact statement that Kohberger had been stalking her sister and friend Madison Mogen for months prior to the murders.
“Which do you regret more?” Alivea said to Kohberger. “Returning to the crime scene five hours later or never ever going back to Moscow, not even once, after stalking them there for months.”
Goncalves’ injuries were also much different than her roommates’ injuries, as Kohberger left her face “disfigured” from stab wounds, according to Officer Corbin Smith.
She and roommate Xana Kernodle — who, according to her autopsy, was stabbed over 50 times — were both completely unrecognizable.
The two women suffered such severe wounds that Mortensen initially identified Goncalves as Kernodle and Kernodle as Goncalves when the first officers arrived at the scene, despite the two young women looking strikingly different prior to the attacks.
Kohberger is now in the custody of the Idaho Department of Corrections for the murders of those students, undergoing evaluations to determine the prison where he will serve his four life sentences.
The quadruple murderer appeared nonplussed and emotionless in court on Wednesday as victims read their statements, and after learning his fate, he exited the courtroom without acknowledging his mother Maryann or sister Amanda.
Mortensen, who came face-to-face with Kohberger for the second time at that hearing, said of her friends’ killer: “He is a hollow vessel. Something less than human. A body without empathy or remorse.”
