Murder In Moscow: What We Knew About The Surviving Roommates In The Early Stages

In the immediate aftermath of the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, attention quickly turned to the two roommates who had survived the attack: Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke. Both women had been inside the King Road house when the killings occurred but had not been physically harmed, a fact that initially created enormous public curiosity because so little was known about what had happened inside the residence. Early reporting identified Mortensen and Funke as University of Idaho students who lived with the victims and noted that police did not consider them suspects. At that stage, authorities were still saying the surviving roommates had been asleep during the murders and had awakened later that morning, when friends were eventually summoned to the house and a 911 call was placed from one of the roommates’ phones. The identities of the survivors and the simple fact that two people had been left alive inside a house where four others had been stabbed to death became one of the earliest mysteries surrounding the case.

The reporting also underscored how incomplete the public understanding of the case was during those first days. There was no publicly identified suspect, no known motive and no explanation for why Mortensen and Funke had survived while the other four were killed. Police said they had spoken with the surviving roommates and were working to reconstruct the timeline, but they released very little about what the women may have heard or seen. Much of that early narrative would later change dramatically after Bryan Kohberger’s arrest, when court records revealed that Mortensen had actually been awake, had heard activity inside the house and had seen a masked man dressed in black walking past her bedroom. Looking back, the early reporting on Mortensen and Funke captured just how little investigators were willing to disclose at the beginning and how substantially the known story of the surviving roommates would evolve as the case developed.



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