Listen To The FULL Kohberger 911 Call For The Idaho Four

Whispered Terror: The Idaho 911 Call That Changed Everything

A panicked voice. A desperate plea. The moment that shattered a college town’s sense of safety. On November 13, 2022, a young woman called 911 in tears, her voice shaking as she told the dispatcher, "Something happened in our house, we don’t know what." What she didn’t know yet was that she and her roommate had just discovered one of the most brutal crime scenes in recent history—the murders of Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, and Madison Mogen in their home on King Road in Moscow, Idaho.

That 911 call has now been made public, not by the courts, but through media outlets like KXLY in Spokane, which released the full recording. Idahonews.com quickly filed a Public Records Request with the Ada County Courthouse to obtain an official copy but was denied. The judge ruled that the recording was still under seal. Yet, somehow, it was out there.

WHITCOM 911, the agency responsible for dispatch services in Moscow and Pullman, found itself at the center of the controversy. Facing multiple requests from media outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, WHITCOM 911 filed for declaratory relief. Their argument? Since the prosecution had already included a transcript of the call in legal filings related to suspect Bryan Kohberger, the audio itself no longer needed to be restricted. A judge in Whitman County agreed, allowing the release of the recording to the public.

Shortly after the audio surfaced, the Goncalves family issued a heartbreaking statement: "The 911 call? It is not the neatly rehearsed dialogue of a well-crafted story, not the polished performance you might expect from a Hollywood script. No. It is raw. It is jagged. A searing, unvarnished truth that no camera could ever hope to capture. Every breath. Every cry. Every tremor in the voice reveals a reality so cruel, so brutally honest, it cuts deeper than anything fiction could devise."

That’s the brutal reality of this case—no script could ever make sense of the sheer horror those roommates walked into that morning. The recording paints a devastating picture. A young woman sobbing into the phone, "Something happened in our house." Another voice, more composed but still shaken, takes over: "One of the roommates is passed out. And she was drunk last night and she’s not waking up."

Then, the moment that sends a chill through the recording: "Oh, and they saw some man in their house last night."

That man, police believe, was Bryan Kohberger, the criminology Ph.D. student from Washington State University who is now charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. According to one of the surviving roommates, she saw him—black clothing, a mask, bushy eyebrows—walking through the house that night. She stood frozen in shock as he moved toward the sliding glass door and disappeared into the darkness.

The timeline of that night is a nightmare puzzle. Police say the murders occurred between 4 a.m. and 4:25 a.m. But the 911 call didn’t come in until 11:58 a.m.—almost eight hours later. In that window of time, the surviving roommates called and texted their friends multiple times, trying to reach them. No one answered. At 11:50 a.m., they reached out to someone outside the house. Minutes later, the emergency call was made.

The content of that call—and the fact that it was sealed for so long—raises questions about the delicate balance between transparency and the integrity of an ongoing case. Kohberger’s defense team has fought to block discussions of key details, including the roommate’s description of his "bushy eyebrows," arguing that it could bias potential jurors. Meanwhile, the prosecution is building a case centered on DNA evidence, surveillance footage, and cell phone data that allegedly places Kohberger near the house in the ho