Bryan Kohberger Allegedly Whispered Kaylee Goncalves’ Name During Campus Bloodbath

The night four University of Idaho students were slaughtered inside their off-campus home, a surviving roommate told police she heard the killer call out one of the victims by name.

Newly unsealed police records reveal chilling details from Dylan Mortensen, the only eyewitness to the November 13, 2022 massacre in Moscow, Idaho. Mortensen told investigators she awoke in the early morning hours to a male voice inside the house.

“It’s okay, Kaylee, I’m here for you,” she claimed she heard.

The revelation came as Moscow police unsealed hundreds of investigative documents after Bryan Kohberger, 29, struck a deal to avoid the death penalty. The former criminology PhD student at Washington State University pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder. He will spend the rest of his life behind bars without parole.

The murders of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, shocked the nation. For months, the public—and the victims’ grieving families—asked one haunting question: Why them?

The new documents suggest Kohberger may have had a particular fixation on at least one victim.

Idaho State Police Trooper Jeffory Talbot recorded Mortensen’s statements shortly after the crime. According to his report, Moscow Sgt. Dustin Blaker told him Mortensen was woken by the sound of crying.

“She opened her door and heard a male say, ‘It’s okay, Kaylee, I’m here for you,’” Talbot summarized.

At the time, Mortensen believed she heard Kaylee crying and running down the stairs. Later, she corrected herself, saying it might have been Xana. Still, she insisted the intruder called Kaylee’s name.

Detective Victoria Gooch later noted in her own report: “She advised she knows what she heard… especially the male voice telling her he was there for Kaylee.”

In her interviews, Mortensen recalled opening her door again and locking eyes with the masked man as he left the home. He brushed past her on the second floor and vanished through a sliding glass door.

“I was frozen in shock,” she told police. “I didn’t know what to do.”

Mortensen did not call 911 until hours later. That detail has fueled debate and criticism, though experts stress trauma and terror often paralyze victims.

Kohberger was arrested weeks later at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania after investigators tied him to the crime scene through DNA left on a knife sheath. Cell phone records placed him near the victims’ home a dozen times before the killings.

The surviving families are still left without answers. Kaylee’s father, Steve Goncalves, has long argued his daughter was a specific target. “This was personal,” he told reporters last year. “Somebody was hunting.”

With the new revelations, that theory appears more plausible than ever.