One of the roommates who survived the University of Idaho stabbings last fall has agreed to an interview with the suspect’s attorneys, court documents revealed.
Bethany Funke, 21, will meet with attorneys for Bryan Kohberger in Reno, Nevada, where she now lives, according to NewsNation.
The news comes after Funke filed a motion to dismiss a subpoena submitted by Kohberger’s defense team which demanded she appear at a preliminary hearing in Idaho in June.
Kohberger, 28, is in custody on four counts of murder and one of felony burglary. He was arrested in Pennsylvania on Dec. 30 — six weeks after the bodies of Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20, were discovered at their off-campus home in Moscow.
Both Funke and another roommate, Dylan Mortensen, were home at the time of the early morning slayings. According to a police report, Mortensen woke up around 4 a.m. and was shocked to find a masked intruder outside her door.
The terrified undergrad locked herself in her room, and neither she nor Funke reported the crime to the police for another eight hours.
While Mortensen’s account of what happened on the night of the murders was later included in a search warrant for Kohberger’s property, Funke’s recollections have never been made public.
They were both interviewed separately by the police and cooperated with the murder investigation, but Funke’s description has never been made public.
At the time of the killings, Kohberger was a doctoral student in criminal justice at nearby Washington State University in Pullman.
In the subpoena filed in Nevada, Kohberger’s legal team argued that Funke had “exculpatory” knowledge that “cannot be provided by another witness.”
Funke’s attorney fired back that the defense’s claim was “without support.”
“There is no further information or detail pertaining to the substance of this testimony, its materiality or the alleged exculpatory information of Ms. Funke or why it would be entertained at preliminary hearing,” the filing stated.
Throughout the course of the investigation, investigators insisted that Funke and Mortensen were cooperative witnesses. The pair now have matching tattoos of their slain friends’ initials.
Kohberger’s preliminary hearing is set to begin on June 26. He has not entered a plea, but is reportedly “eager to be exonerated.”
