In the sleepy cradle of Moscow, Idaho—a town where the Palouse hills roll like frozen waves under endless skies, and the University of Idaho’s campus hums with the unhurried pulse of small-town academia—the night of November 12, 2022, began like so many others: a mosaic of fleeting joys and youthful indulgences. The six young women sharing the creaky three-story rental at 1122 King Road had scattered into the weekend’s embrace—bar crawls along Main Street, where neon signs flickered like distant stars; late-night grub runs to the Corner Club’s greasy spoons; and the kind of laughter that echoes only in the company of chosen sisters. Ethan Chapin, 20, the affable Sigma Chi pledge with a grin wide as the wheat fields, had crashed there with his girlfriend Xana Kernodle, 20, turning the house into a temporary haven for five souls under one roof. Upstairs, best friends Kaylee Goncalves, 21, and Madison Mogen, 21— inseparable since high school, their bond a tapestry of inside jokes and shared dreams—collapsed into Madison’s bed after a 1:40 a.m. Uber drop-off, their phones buzzing with selfies from the night’s revelry. Down the hall, Dylan Mortensen, 19, and Bethany Funke, 20, the quiet anchors of the household, had retreated to their first-floor rooms, the house settling into a fragile hush broken only by the distant hum of Highway 95.

What unfolded in the hours that followed would etch itself into the nation’s collective memory, a tragedy so visceral it reshaped conversations about safety on college campuses and the fragility of young lives. Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology PhD student from nearby Washington State University in Pullman—just a 10-minute drive across the state line—slipped into that hush like a shadow detaching from the wall. Tall and unassuming, with a scholarly air honed by years dissecting the minds of killers in textbooks and seminars, Kohberger had circled the neighborhood in his white Hyundai Elantra for weeks, his cell phone pinging towers in obsessive loops. On that fateful predawn, between 4:00 and 4:25 a.m., he jimmied the kitchen slider’s lock with gloved precision, ascending the stairs in black tactical gear and a face-obscuring mask, a Ka-Bar knife gripped like an extension of his will. The attack was methodical, merciless: over 50 stab wounds in total, inflicted in the sanctity of sleep, leaving behind a tan leather sheath snapped open beside Madison’s body—a careless artifact that would later betray him through its DNA-laced clip.

But in the fractured timeline of horror, it was Dylan Mortensen’s account that would become the case’s spectral heartbeat—a survivor’s fragmented recollections, pieced together through police interviews, court affidavits, and the relentless churn of therapy sessions, that painted not just the killer’s silhouette but the eerie prelude to the blade’s descent. Nearly three years later, as November 2025’s chill seeps into Moscow’s evergreens, Mortensen’s voice—once muffled by trauma’s fog—has emerged in raw detail through unsealed documents and her first public testimony at Kohberger’s July 23 sentencing in Boise’s Ada County Courthouse. There, amid a gallery thick with purple ribbons (the victims’ shared sorority hue) and the weight of unspent rage, she recounted those 10 minutes of prelude terror: the cries piercing the walls, the stranger’s voice cooing false solace, and the thud that sealed four fates. “I heard crying from the room next door,” she told the hushed courtroom, her words a bridge from that night to this reckoning. “And then a man’s voice, soft and unfamiliar: ‘It’s okay; I’m going to help you.’”

Mortensen’s ordeal began in the limbo between sleep and awakening, her first-floor bedroom a cocoon of posters and half-read novels, the door cracked against the hallway’s chill. Around 4:00 a.m., she stirred to what she later described as “noises upstairs—like someone playing with Murphy,” Kaylee’s fluffy golden retriever pup, whose playful yips often echoed through the thin walls. The house, a sprawling 1990s build with its labyrinth of stairs and shared bathrooms, amplified every creak: the third-floor shuffle she mistook for late-night antics, perhaps Madison and Kaylee winding down with a TikTok scroll or Ethan’s gentle snores from Xana’s second-floor room. But as the sounds sharpened—footfalls heavier, a muffled gasp—Dylan’s haze cleared. “I thought I heard Kaylee say something like, ‘There’s someone here,’” she recounted in a probable cause affidavit unsealed in early 2023, her initial confusion a shield against the encroaching dread. Peering out, vision blurred from the remnants of a few drinks and exhaustion, she caught a fleeting shadow: a figure in all black, bushy eyebrows arching above a pulled-up mask, clutching what looked like a bulky vacuum but registered in her gut as something far deadlier.

The crying came next, a keening wail that clawed through the drywall from the adjacent bathroom or perhaps Xana’s room—Mortensen couldn’t pinpoint it then, and even now, in hindsight sharpened by grief, she wavers. “It sounded like Kaylee at first,” she told detectives in those first chaotic hours after the bodies were discovered, her voice trembling in the affidavit. “High-pitched, scared—like she was hurt.” But as details emerged—the autopsy confirming Xana’s desperate flight down the stairs, her phone unlocked at 4:04 a.m. in a futile bid for help—Mortensen revised: “Probably Xana, realizing what was happening, crying out.” The voice that followed was the gut-punch, a male timbre alien to the house’s familiar chorus of Ethan’s baritone or the guys from their circle crashing post-frat parties. “It’s okay,” it soothed, laced with a calm that now chills her recountings. “I’m going to help you.” Then, the thud—a body hitting floorboards, or perhaps the knife’s hilt against bone—and Murphy’s frantic barks, sharp as accusations, shattering the illusion.

Those 10 minutes, from first stirrings to the figure’s glide past her door, compressed eternity into agony. Mortensen froze, her body a traitor in the face of fight-or-flight, heart hammering as the intruder locked eyes—or what she perceived as eyes—through the mask’s slits. “He just… kept walking,” she whispered in court, the memory a scar that therapy has softened but not erased. No scream escaped her; instead, she barricaded her door with a dresser, dialing Bethany Funke in a frenzy of texts at 4:21 a.m.: “I’m freaking out.” “No one’s answering.” “Saw someone in a ski mask.” Funke, roused from her ground-floor slumber, met her in the hall, the two huddling in Funke’s room until dawn, their phones dark for three fitful hours as panic ebbed into numb denial. They didn’t call 911—not then, not when the sun crested at 7:43 a.m.—convinced it was a nightmare, or a prank gone wrong. Only at noon, when friends Ethan and Xana’s Sigma Chi brother arrived for a casual hangout and stumbled into the blood-streaked silence, did the horror crystallize: the 911 call’s fragmented pleas—”There’s blood everywhere; she’s not waking up”—ushering in a siege of squad cars and yellow tape.

Kohberger’s shadow had loomed long before that night, a specter pieced from digital detritus and forensic sorcery. His Elantra, captured on 50 feet of grainy surveillance weaving through Moscow’s alleys, had idled near King Road a dozen times in the preceding month—stalking disguised as scholarly curiosity, perhaps, given his thesis on decision-making in violent crimes. The sheath’s DNA, a paternal match from a curbside trash pull in Pennsylvania during his December 2022 holiday visit home, sealed his fate: a 1-in-5.37 sextillion probability, amplified by Amazon logs of the exact Ka-Bar model purchased months prior. Arrested in the Poconos amid his parents’ stunned silence, Kohberger’s impassive demeanor during interrogations—monosyllabic answers, a vegan’s disdain for the offered cheeseburger—only deepened the enigma. Was the voice Mortensen heard a ploy, Kohberger mimicking concern to lure Xana or Kaylee into vulnerability? Prosecutors theorize yes, a predator’s script to quell resistance, his criminology background furnishing the empathy facade. “He knew their names,” Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson argued in pretrial motions, citing Mortensen’s initial affidavit. “From watching, waiting.”

The aftermath for Mortensen was a descent into survivor’s purgatory, a fog of therapy and seclusion that pulled her from UI’s quads to anonymous classrooms elsewhere. “He shattered me in places I didn’t know could break,” she testified at sentencing, tears carving paths down her face as Kohberger sat feet away, gaze averted like a thesis avoiding its flaws. “I should have been discovering myself, not decoding death.” The voice—”It’s okay; I’m going to help you”—haunts her still, a siren in nightmares where the thud repeats eternally. Funke, the other survivor, echoed in a read statement: panic attacks crashing “like tsunamis,” trust eroded to ash. Together, they’ve become inadvertent icons, their texts—unsealed in March 2025 filings—a timeline of terror: 4:22 a.m. pings unanswered, 10:23 a.m. wake-up pleas ignored until the unthinkable dawned.

For the families, Mortensen’s words are both balm and blade. Steve and Kristi Goncalves, Kaylee’s parents, have channeled fury into the Voyconic Foundation, funding campus panic buttons and self-defense grants, their home a shrine of her Coors Light tees and adventure journals. “That voice? It’s him mocking her last breaths,” Steve rasped in a July podcast, his voice gravel from endless interviews. Xana’s father, Jeff Kernodle, clings to her marketing mockups, the “help you” phrase a cruel irony against her 4:04 a.m. phone grasp. Ethan’s mom, Stacy Chapin, plants dogwoods in Rathdrum memorials, whispering that the dog’s barks were Ethan’s unseen alarm. Madison’s parents, the Laramies, advocate for knife-trace laws, the sheath’s legacy a legislative push.

Kohberger’s July 2025 plea—guilty to all counts, life without parole in a Kuna supermax cell—spared the spectacle but not the scars. His allocution, a clinical dissection of “envy as compulsion,” drew gasps but no closure; the knife remains lost in Blaine’s woods, a final taunt. Moscow heals unevenly: King Road razed to a purple-planted park, UI enrollment rebounding with safety surges—blue-light poles every 100 yards, roommate-check apps mandatory. Mortensen, now 22 and studying remotely, emerges sporadically: a Boise vigil hug with Kristi, a whispered “He won’t take my voice” at sentencing’s end.

As November 2025 blankets the Palouse in frost, Mortensen’s 10 minutes endure—a prelude’s whisper louder than screams. The crying, the coo, the thud: fragments of a night when help came cloaked in horror. In Moscow’s quiet valleys, where wind sifts through wheat like unanswered questions, her testimony stands sentinel—not just for four lost lights, but for the fragile line between awakening and oblivion. “I heard it all,” she says now, voice steadying. “And I’ll keep saying it, until the echoes fade.”