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Puerta Aventuras, Mexico

E mily Alandt comes down to the kitchen in her pajamas. Hunter Johnson and her parents are already sitting there talking.

“They found him,” her mom says, and she hands Emily her phone.

Emily looks at the photo. She’s never met this guy. She and Hunter feel certain that neither had Xana or Ethan.

Josie and Linden check in, and it turns out they never met him either. It’s mystifying.

Josie immediately searches for Bryan Kohberger on Instagram, but she’s too late. If he had a real footprint there, it’s gone.

But there’s a plethora of fake accounts.

She even gets a DM from one of them: Hey, it’s Bryan, sorry for killing your friends.

Although she’s heard the news she’s been hoping for, Emily doesn’t feel the emotional release she expected to. Although “there was someone arrested, there was no fear that had left my body,” she said.

She doesn’t really believe it can be this guy, some random stranger.

It’s the one possibility she hadn’t thought about: Why would someone unconnected to any of her four friends have murdered them?

“Just like everybody else out there,” she said, she “expected it to be someone they knew.”

Over and over again she reconstructs the events of that night—this guy entering the house—and replays them in her mind.

Why Xana? Why did he ignore Dylan?

“I have wondered a million times over why he walked away and didn’t look in the other rooms… if Xana and Ethan, if Maddie and Kaylee, why not the rest?” she said. “I also just try to keep a positive mindset and say, ‘Thank God, not the rest.’”