♪♪
-My name is John O'Hayre, I am a police officer
with the Broomfield Police Department.
-Officer, how did this case begin for you?
-On December 14th of 2023...
I was dispatched to a welfare check at the Krug household.
Dan Krug was calling
and asked that we check on his wife, Kristil.
♪♪
Said that he had not been able to reach her
for about three hours.
♪♪
Dan said that this alleged stalker had made threats to
both him and his wife, Kristil.
♪♪
The first thing I did was walk right to the front door,
kind of peek inside.
Everything looked orderly, quiet.
I gave it a loud knock.
My thinking at the time was,
it's very possible she's not even home.
So I wanted to see if I could peek into the garage.
Quickly realized that I'm not tall enough
to see in those windows.
[ Police radio chatter ]
I went back to my patrol car,
and I pulled it into the driveway
so that I could get my push bumper
close to the garage and use it as a -- as a step up.
I stepped up on it and looked in the window.
I immediately see Kristil, apparently lifeless.
She had some type of wound to the head.
♪♪
[ Metal clangs ]
♪♪
Immediately I just check for any signs of life at that point.
-Does she have a pulse? -She does not.
I immediately started CPR.
There was a stab wound on her chest.
As the paramedics arrived, I opened the garage door
and a woman came up.
And I believe this woman was Kristil's mother.
-I arrived.
I said that's my daughter.
-She came running up to me and said, Kristil is dead.
-It's just shocking.
Oh, my god.
Oh, my god. [ Sobbing ]
You don't want that to be your reality.
Oh, my God, this can't be true.
This can't be true, can it?
-It was chaos.
I heard screaming coming from the top of the hill.
-Hey! Stay back, stay back, stay back, stay back.
-This is my house. -I understand.
-They see a man come running down the hill.
This is Dan.
This is her husband.
-[ Dan weeps ]
-This man just lost his wife...
and he is beside himself.
I'm with Dan and he's on the floor and he's crying.
-[ Dan cries ]
-They all just kind of said,
"I can't believe this happened. He did it. The stalker did it."
-We were on heightened alert.
We were very, very concerned for Dan's safety.
-This is after Kristil was murdered?
You're worried that Dan may be next in this --
in this stalker's sights?
-Correct. We thought Dan Krug was next.
-The community was very alarmed.
There's a killer out there, and we're going to go after him.
♪♪
-[ Dan cries ]
-It's a weird feeling standing there
when somebody is being told,
"I'm sorry but your loved one has died."
-Victim's advocate Heather Aites is trained
to comfort those in emotional agony.
Like Dan Krug,
who dashed home from work
and learned his wife Kristil
had been found murdered in their garage
in suburban Broomfield, Colorado,
on December 14th, 2023.
-This man has been going through
a stalking case with his wife.
He's being stalked as well, and now she's gone.
-As investigators searched the crime scene for clues...
Heather drove Dan to the police station.
An officer's body camera recorded the ride.
-He was crouched over to the side of the passenger door,
and it was very much...
[ Mimics sobbing ]
-I'm comforting Dan by rubbing his back.
-Dan and Kristil had been married for 16 years.
The couple, both 43, had three young children.
-What did he say in the car?
-In the car he was pretty focused on the kids.
He was very adamant about wanting to be the one
to tell his children.
-Under the command of Broomfield Police Chief Enea Hemplelmann,
investigators were doing everything in their power
to find the killer.
-We immediately started doing interviews,
talking to neighbors, canvassing.
-Several hours had passed since Dan Krug's emotional ride
to the police station.
He had settled down and he told detectives there was nothing
out of the ordinary that morning.
♪♪
He said they got the kids to school,
and Kristil seemed fine when he left for his job
at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
♪♪
-Dan said Kristil texted him asking
if he could pick up one of the kids after school.
But when he texted back and asked what time,
he said, Kristil never responded.
-So weird.
So out of character for Kristil,
Dan called police and asked them to check on her.
-There are not words that can describe
what you feel as a parent at that point.
-It's probably some parent's worst nightmare.
-These are some memories, aren't they?
-Kristil's parents, Lars and Linda Grimsrud.
-She was an engineer.
She had incredible skills in math,
sciences, chemistry, physics,
but she also had the talents in the arts.
-She loved to just get out and live life.
-Throughout her life, Kristil spent countless hours
working with her dad
on classic muscle cars in his colorful garage.
[ Engine revving ]
-We'd work on the cars. We'd race the cars.
Kristil always felt very comfortable coming over here
if we needed to talk or whatever.
This is where we would sit and just enjoy each other's company.
-But those fun, casual conversations
suddenly turned disturbing in the fall of 2023,
when Kristil first told her father
that she was living with intense fear.
-She sat here and told me that she was being stalked,
and that just shocked me.
When I asked her, "Well, have you talked to the police?"
-Kristil had called the police
and met with Broomfield Detective Andrew Martinez.
-She came into the interview room
and just kind of took over
and just told me everything without hesitation.
-Their conversation was recorded.
Kristil told Martinez that on October 2, 2023,
she received an unsettling text from someone named Anthony,
who said he would be coming to the area
and asked if Kristil wanted to hook up.
And how does she respond to that?
-She did not respond.
-The following day,
Kristil told Martinez she got more texts from Anthony
that included obscenities and said,
"you should kill urself Dont waste my time"
Somebody wants to hook up now is saying, "Go kill yourself."
How do you interpret that -- that second text?
-It's a pretty extreme reaction to not getting a response.
-Kristil told Martinez she knew an Anthony from her past --
Anthony Holland, a boyfriend she dated
for about a year after high school and into college.
The two broke up in the fall of 2000.
Lars and Linda say back then, Anthony made a good impression.
-Very friendly, very courteous.
He always had good manners.
-In 2002, out of the blue, Anthony contacted Kristil.
According to Kristil,
Anthony never seemed to take no for an answer,
contacting her again in 2005, 2010, and 2016 via Facebook.
Kristil deleted Facebook
and thought she'd heard the last of Anthony Holland.
But then came the texts in 2023.
Over the next two months,
Kristil said she received alarming message after message
through text and email.
They included threats to her and Dan,
including this disturbing photo of Dan
getting out of his car at work,
which prompted Kristil to first come forward and call police.
A few days later, this text to her.
That suggests he might be surveilling them both.
Right? -Correct.
The harassment is just constant,
and she's just believing that every corner
presents some sort of danger for her.
-To gather evidence and locate Anthony Holland,
Detective Martinez was required to file search warrants
with the phone and email companies -- a slow process.
Getting that information takes time.
Sometimes those companies are reluctant
or they slow-walk getting that information to you.
Correct? -Yes.
-Kristil had been searching
for Holland on her own.
She hired a private investigator
and eventually located him living in Utah
about 500 miles away.
Kristil shared her discovery
with Detective Martinez, who chose not to contact Holland.
-I explained to Kristil
that we wanted to gather as much evidence as possible
and ideally obtain an arrest warrant,
so when law enforcement does go to Anthony's door,
we can take him into custody and not have to walk away.
-But Lars says Kristil
had been losing patience with the investigation.
-She made the comment that she felt they had abandoned her,
that they weren't doing things aggressively enough.
-Kristil had taken steps to protect herself and her family,
including installing security cameras.
-She was scared. I said, "Well, this sounds serious enough
that you need to start carrying.
You'll use one of my guns for right now."
-Is this the very gun that she took?
-That is the actual gun that she initially then carried.
-Dan was also interviewed.
The threats were taking a toll on him as well.
Dan told Martinez the stalker had a nickname.
Where did that name come from?
-Kickman Dan had told me it was because the suspect email
that was initially contacting Kristil
was a.holland.kicks@gmail.com.
-As the weeks went by
and Martinez's investigation continued,
Lars and Linda say the constant threats
were ruining their daughter's life.
-It was just heartbreaking. She was just in tears.
She was just like, "What am I gonna do?
How am I gonna live?"
-Did she feel she was being hunted down by Anthony?
-Yes. -Yeah.
-Kristil also shared her fears
with siblings Jenna Erickson and Josh Adamson.
-She was terrified.
-Did she ever express to either of you
the fear that "this man, I think, is gonna kill me"?
-Yes, she said, "It's either gonna be me or him that's dead,
and I'm gonna do everything in my power
to make sure it's not me."
♪♪
-When Kristil Krug was found dead in her garage,
Detective Martinez had only one suspect in mind.
-My initial assumption was that Anthony Holland
had gone to her home and murdered her.
-Within hours, local police descended on Holland's home
in Eagle Mountain near Salt Lake City.
So you were alone in the house. What do you hear?
-Pounding at the door. -Like [pounds table]
-Yeah. -Big time.
-So I go to the door. I see like eight cops.
I had no idea what was going on.
They asked me if I knew Kristil Krug,
and I told them I did know her.
-When was the last time you had reached out to Kristil?
-It was around 2014, 2016.
-Anthony says he'd reached out to Kristil
on Facebook years before.
What are you thinking?
Why would they come all the way here to ask me about Kristil?
-I thought it was for that message
where I said I missed her.
That's the only thing I could think of 'cause I was like,
I haven't contacted her since then.
-They didn't tell you that Kristil Krug had been murdered?
-No, they did not tell me.
-Police were there to gather information from their suspect,
not give it.
-They asked me, where was I that day?
Can I prove where I was?
-Anthony had made a purchase just hours earlier
at a Kohl's store near his home.
What'd you buy?
-A sweatshirt. This one right here.
-And he still had the receipt.
The purchase was made at 12:16 p.m.
Investigators say Kristil was attacked around 8:00 a.m.
Turns out that was one of the most important purchases
you have ever made.
-'Cause it was my alibi.
'Cause there's no way I could have made it from Colorado
back to Utah to buy the sweatshirt.
It was an eight-hour drive.
-Anthony also showed police some of his employment records.
They proved he'd been in Utah all along,
never traveling to Colorado,
as the messages from Kristil's stalker led cops to believe.
-I had a bunch of receipts from my work showing the days
that I worked, and they took those,
took my receipt from Kohl's, and went to the squad car
and made a phone call.
Came back in and told me I was free to go.
-Back in Colorado,
Dan was still face to face with investigators.
He told them his theory of the crime.
Earlier in the interview,
Dan requested he tell the children
what had happened to their mother.
-Watching their response is just heartbreaking.
-Investigators were working every angle.
They checked those security cameras
Kristil had installed on the house.
-The doorbell camera, the side camera,
and the side house camera were all manually turned off.
-Except for that one Nest camera near the garage.
Police canvassed Dan and Kristil's neighbors
in search of anything
their home security cameras might have recorded.
-I saw you had a Ring doorbell camera.
You mind reviewing that camera? -Oh, goodness. Absolutely.
-If possible, if you guys can review the last 3 to 5 hours.
-They also enlisted Randy Pihlak,
a digital forensic examiner
with the Broomfield Police Department,
to take a closer look at those disturbing messages to Kristil.
-I think it was probably four hours,
five hours after the murder was reported to us.
-Now that the stalking case had become
a murder investigation, Pihlak was able to file
new expedited requests for information.
He quickly discovered that messages from two accounts
used to harass Kristil had been sent from the same location.
-Both came back to the same IP address.
That IP address was
the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment,
which is where Dan worked.
-The messages to Kristil threatening her,
threatening her husband,
had been sent using the Wi-Fi system at Dan's office.
For the first time, detectives believed Kristil's stalker
could be sitting right in front of them.
Could he be her killer as well?
-The entire air was just kind of evacuated
out of our investigations room,
and we realized that we need to focus on Dan
and where he's been and what he's been doing.
-Martinez, along with Detective Jennifer King Sullivan,
confronted Dan.
But even as Dan claimed ignorance,
the detective saw that his body language told a different story.
What were you seeing with Dan?
-He took a defensive posture.
He sat back in the couch a little bit.
He crossed his arms, kind of like, I have nothing to explain.
-I think his head is spinning,
thinking about what else are they gonna find?
♪♪
-Moments after detectives told Dan Krug
they had eliminated Anthony Holland as a suspect,
Dan calmly insisted he was not the one who stalked
and murdered his wife, Kristil.
Martinez and King Sullivan didn't believe a word of it
and were struck by how stoic, how unmoved Dan was.
-He had no reaction and really no explanation.
-Within minutes,
Dan Krug had gone from sympathetic victim
to murder suspect.
-It's a pretty frightening idea
that the biggest threat to you and your safety
is actually living in the same house as you.
He knows that we're on to him.
We just didn't have enough evidence
at that point to take him into custody.
-On his way out, Dan kept insisting
the real killer was still on the loose,
and he made a desperate plea.
-When did you find out
that Dan was now a person of -- of interest in this case?
-I think in his interview.
So that same day when they held him
and they held him pretty late.
-An autopsy revealed what happened to Kristil.
She had been attacked from behind with a blunt object.
-Bludgeoned to death in the head
and rolled over and then stabbed in the heart.
-With Dan now the prime suspect,
the detectives wanted to know more
about his relationship with Kristil.
According to Kristil's parents, it wasn't good.
-She said, "Well, I'm sleeping on the couch, Mom."
-But you knew there was trouble in paradise, right?
-Yeah, and especially in those last few months.
-Kristil's family says those troubles were caused
by Dan's fiery temper. -What set him off?
-It could be -- It could be anything.
But it was usually if he was losing control.
-Kristil's sister, Jenna Erickson,
says she could always tell when Dan was angry.
-His face would get really red when he was getting frustrated.
I vividly remember seeing his face get red.
-They had a thing where they'd go, okay, walk away.
You need to walk away.
And so, you know, they were trying to manage it.
-But in the weeks before her death,
according to her parents,
Kristil was getting ready to leave Dan.
-She didn't want to have this marriage anymore.
-She had decided that she needed to get a divorce.
-As the detectives methodically built their case,
more evidence was uncovered on Dan and Kristil's cellphones
by digital forensic expert Randy Pihlak,
including texts from the morning of the murder.
-So, on Kristil's phone, we see text messages
to Lars, Detective Martinez, and then a text message to Dan.
-The one Dan said he received while driving to work
about picking up one of the kids at school.
But Pihlak discovered those texts had been set on a timer.
It was a new feature on the phone Kristil had.
Who do you believe pre-programmed those messages?
-Dan Krug.
-And he did it to do what?
-To hide his actions.
-Pihlak says the messages were pre-programmed
before Dan left the house.
-And we believe Kristil was deceased.
-That, for him, then would establish an alibi that,
"Well, I had already left and my wife is alive."
Right? "She's texting me."
-Correct.
-All while Dan casually arrived at work.
Pihlak discovered more damning evidence from Dan's phone.
Internet searches like...
-All searches were the day before the murder.
It was rather damning.
-Just two days after Kristil had been murdered,
Detectives Martinez and King Sullivan
felt they had enough evidence to charge Dan Krug
with stalking and murdering his wife.
-We begin following him.
-Coming up to the stop sign now.
-How many cars are we talking about?
-Probably eight cars.
We're, like, that's him. He's alone in the car.
-Hey, be ready to pop that once he gets it into park.
-We follow him all the way to the grocery store.
-Pulling into King Soopers parking lot.
-We wait for him to park.
We quickly converge on his car.
-Go, go, go, go, go, go.
-Show us your hands! -Hands! Hands!
-Show us your hands. -Hands on your face!
Hands on your face! Hands on your face!
-So we surround him.
Pull him out of his car and tell him he's being arrested
for the murder of his wife.
-Under arrest.
-I asked him just one question.
-Do you want me to tell your kids
that you killed their mother, or do you want somebody else to?
-That's quite a line.
That goes back to when he said he wanted to tell his kids
that their mother was dead.
-After I asked that question, he just said that he wanted
to speak with his attorney and then looked away from me.
All right. Good luck.
And I shut the door and he went to the county jail.
-Get one leg up and then kind of swing around.
-I felt a huge relief.
They got him.
It felt like a burden had been lifted,
that he had been arrested.
-And soon, Kristil's family would come face to face
with the man detectives say murdered her...
-He looked right at me and smiled at me.
-...and hear, for the first time, Dan's side of the story.
♪♪
-When Deputy District Attorneys Kate Armstrong
and Stephanie Fritz
were assigned to prosecute Daniel Krug,
they say they were struck by his downright stupidity
in believing he could get away with murdering his wife
by impersonating her ex-boyfriend.
-The audacity
with which he thought he could manipulate not only his family,
his loved ones, but also the police department.
-And some of this is sophisticated, is it not?
-It's sophisticated,
but not too sophisticated
because we were able to figure it out.
-The trial began in April 2025.
-When he first came in,
he smiled at me like he was saying,
"Hey, thanks for being here for me."
I believe my facial expression made it very clear
that I was not on his side.
-The prosecution laid out Kristil's
final hours of life for the jury.
-On December 14th of 2023,
Kristil Krug started her day like any other day.
She took her younger two children to school.
-And when she returned...
-Kristil pulled back into her garage.
She gets out of the car when she is attacked from behind.
-And did she ever see him approaching, do you think?
Or was this an ambush?
-It was an ambush.
She had two or three skull fractures.
As she's laying on the floor bleeding,
he pushes her over, gets over her,
and stabs her just above her heart.
-And why do you suppose he had to do that vicious last stab?
-I think it was rage. I think it was control and power
that he wanted to exert over Kristil.
-Dan had been losing that control for a long time,
say prosecutors.
Their theory of the crime
is that Dan sent Kristil those disturbing messages
in an attempt to drive her closer to him and not leave,
hoping she'd see him as her heroic protector.
-It was not working.
The stalking was not leading her back to him.
I think it then turned to "I'm still losing her."
Kind of a "If I can't have you, nobody can."
-The prosecution says that in the last days of her life,
Kristil had begun to suspect
that her stalker was possibly her husband.
-We know from Dan's own interview
that she confronted him and said,
"I can't rule you out as the stalker."
-He felt the walls closing in. -Closing in.
He was going to lose Kristil anyway.
He was going to be exposed as the stalker.
So he did that last fatal act and murdered her.
-Prosecutors say Dan tried to outsmart investigators,
pre-programming those text messages on Kristil's phone
before he left the house, assuming he wouldn't be caught.
-Were we not able to discover
that that was a delayed send text,
it would have appeared as though Kristil was still alive
when he left the house.
-At trial, the long list of digital evidence
against Dan was laid out.
The threatening texts, the e-mails,
the Internet searches.
Also included -- that photograph of Dan arriving at his office,
attached to a menacing e-mail seemingly sent
by Anthony Holland to Kristil.
But there was one problem,
according to the state's digital expert.
Who took this picture, do you believe?
-Dan. Dan took this picture.
-Pihlak discovered that the phone
which snapped that photo was in selfie mode using a timer,
a fact that Kate Armstrong reminded the jury about
in her closing argument.
That's when the judge allowed cameras into the courtroom.
-The phone was propped
on the back of this vehicle next to him.
The defendant took this photograph,
and then he sent it to his wife.
-We respectfully disagree with the prosecution in this case.
-Defense attorney Philip Geigle argued
the murder investigation was poor.
The blunt object used on Kristil's head
and the knife used to stab her were never recovered by police.
The defense also zeroed in on the fact
that Kristil's phone was not tested for fingerprints or DNA.
-Why not the phone?
The prosecution wants to believe
"Well, you know, there may not be a lot to be found there."
Well, you won't know if you won't try.
-Geiggle said other forensic tests supported
his claim that Dan is innocent.
-They submitted the chest swabs.
And you know whose DNA wasn't there?
The person who lived in the house.
The person who ate in the kitchen with them.
The person who shared the living room.
That idiot right there.
There is absolutely no physical evidence
on Mr. Krug's clothing.
There's no blood found on that car, inside or out.
It's searched three times.
-In week three of the trial, the jurors began deliberations.
After a day and a half, verdicts were reached.
-Please rise for the jury.
-Judge Priscilla Loew read the verdicts.
-"We, the jury,
find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.
We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of count number two,
stalking, extreme emotional distress."
-Krug was also found guilty of stalking with credible threat
and criminal impersonation.
-Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
And at that point, I think I started breathing again.
-Krug was later sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole on the murder charge,
and an additional 9 1/2 years
for the stalking and impersonation counts.
But right after his conviction, in a video call from jail...
-How are you?
-Uh, been better.
-...Daniel Krug told his family that the jury got it wrong,
saying the real killer remained at large
and that his children could be the next targets.
-I need them safe.
I don't know where or who did this,
where he is or who he is.
I need my children out of Colorado.
♪♪
-As Daniel Krug began serving his life sentence,
he continued making video calls to his parents and brother
in the days immediately after his conviction.
The man who viciously murdered his wife,
terrorized his own children, and lied to everyone
was seeking sympathy from his side of the family.
-I'm probably sleeping like 16 hours a day
because of the depression.
-Mm-hmm. -I sleep, I read, and I cry.
That's about it. -Okay.
-Despite overwhelming digital evidence against him,
Krug fell back to his old ways --
lying to his loved ones,
now claiming he was wrongly convicted.
-They never produced a single piece of hard evidence.
-His brother Jeremy gave Krug a much-needed reality check
that the foundation of the family's loyalty
had started to crack.
-Support is dwindling.
You know, Mom and Dad want to believe you very much.
I want to believe you very much.
There's a lot that's come out. Um...
And as imaginative as I can be
with finding explanations and ways to theorize how,
you know, this or that could have been the reality,
some of it is beyond even my creativity.
-The case that ended with a murder had begun with stalking
and criminal impersonation of Anthony Holland.
Which begs the question,
what if Detective Martinez had acted on the information
Kristil and the private investigator had uncovered?
-They should have found me right away.
They should have found me.
They should have came to my house.
They should have approached me. They should have talked to me.
-But Detective Martinez chose not to call,
telling us he didn't have enough evidence to do so,
and was concerned a phone call could exacerbate the situation.
Is this something where you've kicked yourself about this?
-This case has haunted me since it occurred.
And the outcome of this case
has haunted me for the past two years.
-And if you could get in a time machine,
perhaps you'd make that call today.
-Absolutely.
-And Kristil's parents sympathize with Martinez
and believe their daughter was doomed
no matter what the outcome of his investigation.
-Inevitably, I think he was going to kill her.
When someone sets their mind to do something like that,
and that's what the plan was,
I don't think that would have stopped
the murder from happening.
-Kristil's death has left a hole in the lives of those
who experienced her love and joy for life.
-I've had lots of other girlfriends,
and I've never been in love with anybody else like her.
-She was the love of your life.
-Yeah.
-Jenna hopes her sister Kristil's story will serve
as a cautionary tale.
-If it can help just one other person
who's in a dangerous situation like she was in,
that it gives them the strength
to make a move, because it can escalate
and it can escalate really, really fast.
-What was lost when she was taken from us?
-Her light, you know? Her light.
-That's a tough one to talk about
because there's so much.
I want her to jump out of that car and say, "Hey, Papa."
-Lars still passes his time restoring parts
for vintage cars.
That father-daughter hobby is now being passed
down to Kristil's children.
-They're in here.
They run that same electric screwdriver
and they can tear a carburetor apart.
-So in that way, you're honoring her memory, aren't you?
-Well, that's the whole idea.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the whole idea.
She would get such a kick out of seeing the kids doing the stuff
that she was involved in.
-I look at my grandkids,
and I find a moment of peace because I see her.
♪♪