Bethany Funke, one of two surviving roommates in the University of Idaho murders, has spoken publicly about her grief and fear, more than two years after the murder of her roommate Kaylee Goncalves, for the first time since the heartbreaking killings rocked the country.
Funke read her victim impact statement aloud, in a tear-stained letter, read out by a friend, at the sentencing hearing of Bryan Kohberger, the man who has confessed to killing four of her roommates in a horrific machete stabbing spree in November 2022.
Funke wrote, visibly trembling, that she was afraid the perpetrator would next turn on her, as she was read to a crowded courtroom in Boise, Idaho, by her friend Emily Alandt. The fear does not go away.
In Bethany, Funke was a college student whose free spirit is now burdened with a survivor and a trauma. Madison Mogen (21), Kaylee Goncalves (21), Xana Kernodle (20), and Ethan Chapin (20), her roommates, were all viciously stabbed to death in their off-campus residence, with the whole college town of Moscow, Idaho in a state of shock and sadness.
The world watched every development in the case of the arrest and investigation of Bryan Kohberger, a Ph.D. student in the criminology department of the Washington State University that is close to Bethany, but Bethany was not as easy to see.
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She refused to talk to the press, opposed attempts by the defense to subpoena her and wanted to get over her trauma without being under the limelight.
However, she could not keep quiet anymore at the sentencing of Kohberger.
When Funke made her statement, she narrated how the night of the killings, which she termed as the worst day of her life, left her in pieces both mentally and emotionally.

Since this occurred she wrote, she has not slept one night through. It is always like something bad is going to happen again. That someone that I love will be lost to me.”
Nevertheless, despite her severe wounds, Bethany hangs on to meaning the memory of her friends.
She said to me, every day I remind myself that I need to live for them, the four lives that were lost much too soon.
Through Alandt, her voice broke with recollections of the taunts and innuendo, inside jokes and daily college rituals that had ended abruptly in a single night of horror too terrible to describe.
A Night That The World Turned Over
Funke slept during the massacre, and it was only after her other surviving roommate, Dylan Mortensen, texted her after hearing some weird sounds and getting no reply to the text to their other housemates when she discovered something had gone wrong.
What had occurred upstairs neither girl could have conceived.
The testimony claims that the two sequestered themselves in the bedroom of Bethany that night- frightened yet oblivious of what really happened just a few steps away. Hours after, they were texting their friends, hoping they would respond. None came.
Not until almost noon the next day did they venture upstairs—and were confronted by a fact that would never leave them.
The two were only known as B.F. and D.M. in court documents until this hearing. Today, they are written in full in the history of the tragedy that shocked the world.
A Coming Day of Reckoning
On July 2, Kohberger entered a guilty plea on four counts of first-degree murder. His death penalty was not to be sought by prosecutors, and a deal was arrived at by them and the defense so that he would never get out of prison in all of his life.

During the sentencing hearing, Funke and Mortensen both delivered victim impact statements the first time either had spoken publicly about what had happened to them.
Mortensen relayed the same trauma, commenting that she had wondered frequently whether she should have done more. But now I know that we could do no better than we did, knowing what we knew.
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What they said created a grim but all too human image not only of the lives lost but also of the lives transformed.
Living Through the Unthinkable
The statement by Bethany Funke is not meant as an emotional testimony. It is a glimpse of what lies behind the unseen scars left when disaster hits—the loss of sleep, the fear that it will happen to them, and the guilt of living when someone else has been killed.
Silent yet unquestionable was the strength in the same statement.
She added, I shall never forget them. And I know they would not want me to stop living because of what happened. I am trying then. I am trying everyday.