BOISE, Idaho — The Moscow Police Department on Wednesday released hundreds of previously confidential documents from its investigation into the murder of four University of Idaho students, just hours after the killer was handed multiple life sentences for his crimes.

The trove of documents, which included a general summary of the case and more than 300 “supplement” documents — some of those simply lists of photos and evidence, among other things — offer a glimpse into the full brutality of the scene of the fatal stabbings, including narratives from police officers who wrote about blood-soaked bedding and blankets, pools of blood on floors and “traumatic injuries.”

The details of the murders have been kept largely out of the public eye since the killings nearly three years ago.

The records were released several hours after the sentencing hearing for 30-year-old Bryan Kohberger, who earlier this month agreed to plead guilty to all charges to avoid the death penalty.

Kohberger admitted to killing seniors Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, both 21; junior Xana Kernodle, 20; and freshman Ethan Chapin, 20. He entered an off-campus home the women shared with others early on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2022, and stabbed the victims to death.

Numerous police statements described arriving to the scene at 1122 King Road to find distraught friends and roommates outside before entering the home, where they found the bodies of the four victims and encountered something that couldn’t be explained.

“I was unable to comprehend exactly what I was looking at while trying to discern the nature of the injuries,” one officer wrote.

One of the friends outside, in an interview that same day, described to police going over to the house with another friend after the surviving roommates called them saying something “was not right.”

That friend entered the code to the front door of the home and went up the stairs to Xana’s room on the second floor, according to one of numerous reports released Wednesday. Chapin and Kernodle, who were dating, were found in Kernodle’s bedroom.

The friend told police the door was partially open, and when he went in, he thought the mess was from a drunken night out. As he stood there, he began to realize what he was seeing, the report said.

The splatter he saw across her bedroom was dried blood. That’s when he told the roommates who survived, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortensen, to get out of the house and call 911. Next, he grabbed a knife from a kitchen drawer and checked Kernodle’s closet to make sure no one else was there.

He checked their pulses, but both of their bodies had rigor mortis and were cold to the touch, with no breath or pulse, the report said.

He said “he believed the two had been deceased for a while.”

Kernodle, who was lying on her back, was covered in “numerous wounds” across her arms, hands and face, the report said. Her boyfriend, Chapin, was still lying in bed with a blanket pulled across him. Investigators noted “two large cuts” to the back of his legs, which were deep into the tissue, a report said.

On the third floor of the home, Goncalves and Mogen were in the same bed in Mogen’s room. Mogen had a wound on her face and wounds on her upper body, officials said.

In several police accounts, officers described the wounds to Goncalves’ face and upper body as so extreme that they “made her unrecognizable,” one report said. Goncalves’ family told reporters she was stabbed 34 times.

One officer’s report included information from the Spokane County Medical Examiner on each victim’s cause of death.

Chapin was killed by a stab wound to the neck that severed his jugular vein, and subclavian vein and artery.

Kernodle died from lacerations to her heart and lungs, and she had been stabbed more than 50 times. Most of her wounds were defensive, the medical examiner said, as she fought the killer.

Mogen’s fatal injuries were lacerations to her liver and left lung.

Mogen, Kernodle and Chapin had only sharp-force wounds, according to documents.

Goncalves had sharp and blunt force injuries, according to the report, and had fatal injuries including a lung laceration, liver laceration, and severed subclavian vein and artery.

The police report said the medical examiner noted the weapon was “single edged, very sharp, and said a lot of force was used by the suspect.”

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