Kaylee Goncalves reportedly saw someone in her backyard one month before she was killed alongside three other students at her University of Idaho house, roommate Bethany Funke claims.
In a newly released police interview with Funke, obtained by Brian Entin Investigates on Monday, September 9, the surviving roommate recounted the events that led up to the night Bryan Kohberger killed Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, in 2022.
“I woke up and was half asleep and thought I saw a firework or something. A sparkle under my door,” Funke told the detective in the November 2022 interview, referring to what she heard the night Kohberger, 30, attacked her roommates inside their college home. “It sounded like a little firework and then there was a spark.”
Funke explained that she didn’t see anyone inside the house, like the second surviving roommate Dylan Mortensen later recounted. Funke, however, did tell investigators that Goncalves thought someone was watching the home just weeks before she was killed.
“Everyone was, like, gone. It was only Kaylee, and she was taking [her dog] Murphy out to pee,” Funke recalled. “This was a while ago. And she said she swears she saw someone staring at her while she was taking the dog out to pee from the backyard.”
When she was asked when the sighting occurred, Funke said “maybe like a month” before the slaying.
“She could see a man’s silhouette staring at her,” Funke remembered Goncalves telling her at the time.
Goncalves was one of four students killed by Kohberger in November 2022 while they were inside their Idaho residence. Funke and Mortensen were the only ones at 1122 King Road in Moscow who survived the attack.
In July, Kohberger pleaded guilty to all four murders as part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty.
He was given four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole during his July sentencing in Boise. Kohberger was also given another 10 years in prison for burglary.
Following his conviction, lead prosecutor Bill Thompson revealed that experts pinpointed how many times they think Kohberger was in the vicinity of the Kings Road house leading up to the murders.
“We think that Kohberger was certainly stalking that neighborhood,” Thompson said during a July 30 interview on CBS’ 48 Hours.
The prosecutor claimed that phone-tracking experts “were able to show that he was in that area of some 20-plus times other times at night, between like 10 and early morning hours … 10 in the evening, when there would be no legitimate reason for him to be over here to shop — here being Moscow — which was his routine practice.”
Thompson added, “So we certainly believe that those trips … involved Mr. Kohberger looking and surveilling or stalking, whatever the case may be.”
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