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The college friends who found four University of Idaho students dead in a bloody crime scene just steps off campus have broken their silence — years after the slayings and weeks before the suspect’s trial.
Hunter Johnson, now 24, and Emily Alandt, 23, were called to the house at 1122 King Road on Nov. 13, 2022 by two surviving roommates, identified in court documents only as DM and BF.
Johnson and Alandt’s names were also redacted, but they broke their silence in an interview with People over the weekend and are both expected to appear in an upcoming documentary about the case.
Johnson was staying at Alandt’s off-campus apartment the night of the murders and told the magazine he had an unusual gut feeling to lock their door that night. It was something he usually didn’t think about, he said.
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“That’s something I’ve never done in my life there,” he told the outlet. “There was no noise. I don’t know why, but something in my soul told me that I should go lock my door.”
That was at 3 a.m. An hour later, an aspiring criminologist named Bryan Kohberger allegedly crept into the victims’ home up the street and killed Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20.
The suspect agreed to a surprise plea deal in the case, two sources told Fox News Digital Monday – sparing him from the potential death penalty and the families the trauma of a trial that was expected to stretch on from August until November.
DM saw a masked intruder but did not call 911 until hours later. Instead, she waited for him to leave, then ran downstairs to BF’s room. It was DM who asked Johnson to come over when they woke up.
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“I was like, what is going on? Is this real?” he told People. “Then you realize the gravity of what you just walked into. At that moment, you don’t really realize what you walked into until you really look at it and process it.”
What they entered was a bloodsoaked and brutal crime scene.
All four victims had been stabbed multiple times by what authorities described as a large knife, likely a Ka-Bar.
At least two were believed to have been asleep at the start of the attack.
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The Moscow Police Department investigation dragged on for weeks, with help from the county sheriff, state police and the FBI. By Dec. 19, authorities had secretly identified Kohberger, then 28, as a suspect — based on DNA recovered from a knife sheath under Mogen’s body.
They also allege his white Hyundai Elantra is the suspect vehicle.
They arrested him on Dec. 30 at his parents’ house in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. Kohbeger had driven home cross-country with his dad riding shotgun ahead of the Christmas break.
At the time of the crime, he was studying for a criminology Ph.D. in Pullman, Washington, 10 miles from the University of Idaho.
Kohberger’s trial was set to begin in August. He could have faced the death penalty if convicted of any of the four counts of first-degree murder.
