“Police Chief Fry said that the roommates were not necessarily witnesses to the crime.”
Well, were they or weren’t they?
Former witnesses.
See 14. Sleeping in the basement, or unable to get out by a blocked door.
Similar crimes have happened before.
“Eight nurses slain in Chicago dorm, one survives by hiding under bed as her friends get held hostage, raped, murdered”
The Chicago Nurses mass murder, done by the evil Richard Speck.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nurse-hides-8-friends-raped-murdered-1966-article-1.2705565
The nightmare started at around 11 p.m. on July 13. Amurao, asleep in her locked bedroom on the second floor along with two other Filipino nurses, heard a knock on her door.
When she opened it, a tall man, dressed in black, his face pockmarked with acne scars, was pointing a gun at her.
He rounded up the two other Filipino nurses, Merlita Gargullo, 23, and Valentina Pasion, 24, and three American-born students who were in other rooms — Pamela Wilkening, 20, Pat Matusek, 20, and Nina Jo Schmale, 24.
Somehow, Amurao, Gargullo, and Pasion managed to break away and hide in a closet.
A short time later, Amurao said, she heard a woman’s voice, one of the other nurses, urging the girls to come out. She said the stranger was not going to harm anyone; all he wanted was cash for a trip to New Orleans. When the three nurses emerged from the closet, they found the man and the American nurses sitting in a circle on the floor. He was holding a gun on them.
Other dorm residents — Gloria Davy, 22, Mary Ann Jordan, 20, and Suzanne Farris, 21 — walked in on the hostage scene later and immediately became part of it. The women thought he was going to take their money and leave until he pulled out a knife and started ripping bed sheets into strips, wrote Dennis Breo and William Martin in “The Crime of the Century.” He used those strips to bind hands and feet and gag his captives.
The Wichita Horror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_Massacre
On December 14, the brothers broke into a house at 12727 E Birchwood Drive in Wichita. Inside the property, which they had chosen at random, were Brad Heyka, Heather Muller, Aaron Sander, Jason Befort, and his girlfriend, a young woman identified as “Holly G.”. Befort was a local high school teacher; Heyka was a director of finance with a local financial services company; Muller was a local preschool teacher; Sander a former financial analyst who had been studying to become a priest; Holly G. was a teacher.[5]
First, the Carrs searched the house for valuables. Befort had intended to propose to Holly, and she found this out when the Carrs discovered an engagement ring hidden in a popcorn box. After burgling the house, the Carrs forced their victims to strip naked and bound them. The brothers then repeatedly raped the two women and forced the men to engage in sexual acts with the women and the women with each other. After taking the victims in Befort’s truck to ATMs to empty their bank accounts, they drove them to the closed Stryker Soccer Complex on the outskirts of Wichita, where they shot all five execution-style in the back of their heads. The Carrs then drove Befort’s truck over their bodies and left them for dead. Holly G. survived because her plastic barrette deflected the bullet to the side of her head. She walked naked for more than a mile in freezing weather to seek first aid and shelter at a house. Before getting medical treatment, she reported the incident and descriptions of her attackers to the couple who took her in before the police arrived.
After the killings, the Carrs returned to the house to ransack it for more valuables; while there, they used a golf club to beat Holly’s pet dog, Nikki, to death.[6]
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nurse-hides-8-friends-raped-murdered-1966-article-1.2705565