Recording of 911 call made in Moscow murder case released to media

An audio recording of the 911 call that notified authorities of the murder of four University of Idaho students in November 2022 was released to media outlets and others Friday.

The Moscow-Pullman Daily News and Lewiston Tribune received a copy of the recording. It can be found at bit.ly/4iqlp0X or by scanning the QR code that accompanies this story.

Those who listen to the recording, which is a bit more than four minutes long, will hear a chaotic moment frozen in time. The call was placed by the two surviving roommates who were in the Moscow house when the murders occurred. The voices on the call don’t seem to grasp exactly what happened, but they understand it was horrific.

A few different voices are heard on the recording, and the dispatch officer asks those on the other end to stop passing the phone.

The call was placed to Whitcom, the regional emergency dispatch center that serves several agencies on the Palouse in both Idaho and Washington.

Whitcom had previously declined to release the recording because of the nondissemination order that was put in place in the Bryan Kohberger case. Kohberger is awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges in the deaths of Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Kaylee Goncalves.

Last week, a court document that included a transcript of the 911 call was released publicly.

In light of that disclosure, Whitcom determined the revised nondissemination order no longer prevented the release of the recording, so it honored public records requests made by media outlets and others. That was according to a letter that accompanied the recording of the 911 call.