- I'm Kate Snow,
and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
- Nothing had been missing from the house.
This was clearly a premeditated murder.
- Why would anybody want to shoot Jan?
- Makes no sense to me.
- He was there in the room with Jan when this happened.
- The word divorce being thrown around.
- From the beginning, they had one suspect.
It was Chris.
There's another person here that could have done this,
and it's Jeremy.
- That would be a motive for murder.
- He was a concern.
- You see it on TV happening to other people.
Didn't ever think that this would be something
that we would go through.
- Two shots in the dark.
Then 1,001 questions in the light of day.
- I guess you just don't think bad things will happen
in a small town to good people.
And it did.
*
- Hello and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
Chris and Jan Kruse seemed like the salt of the Earth.
Married for more than 20 years,
they loved their kids, their neighbors,
and the simple pleasures of a small town.
But that quiet life was shattered
when gunfire ripped through their home.
Now Jan was dead, leaving investigators
to untangle the secrets of a family
more complicated than it seemed.
Here's Keith Morrison with Far From Spider Lake.
- It was--
this was where happiness lived.
Happiness and memories and desire.
The wishes of dreams just out of reach.
Its name is Spider Lake,
one of those thousands of lakes
that filled up the rocky gouges the glaciers left behind.
Maybe that's why they sparkle the way they do,
why this one in Minnesota spread out every which way.
And here, near the tip of its northern arm
is the Spider Lake Resort.
Family cabins by the day or week,
calls itself one of northern Minnesota's
best kept secrets.
Secrets,
a word that will certainly apply
to what you're about to hear one way or the other.
- I went with them a couple times up there.
Them being Chris and Jan Kruse.
This is Jan's sister, Kay.
- They would like to go fishing,
just stay at a cabin, just relax.
It was just quality time together.
And they did. They both enjoyed being there.
In fact, they had a fantasy, did Chris and Jan,
a dream to live here all the time,
to buy this resort and make it uniquely their own.
- That was brought up a lot. Yeah.
- Jan's dad, Terry, could see
how they loved being here.
- About every evening,
Jan and Chris would take the boat,
and Jan liked to take pictures of the loon
and the wildlife along the lake
and the sunsets off of the lake.
- That was the kind of life they would have liked.
- And if they owned it, said Jan's mom, Mary Jean,
frugal Jan could use her accounting skills
to keep the place in business.
And Chris?
- Chris is very much an outdoors person.
Jan is a people person
with the people coming in and out
all through the week
and keeping them all content, happy, busy,
all of those things.
Chris's brother Josh.
- It would have worked out good for Chris and Jan,
because Chris is a really good handyman construction guy.
He could take care of the resort,
and Jan's pretty business smart.
It would've fit 'em.
- Would have, until...
until the events of the summer of 2015.
By the time all this happened, Chris and Jan Kruse
had been married for two decades
and lived here in a tiny place
called Brewster, population 473,
in the rural southwest corner of Minnesota.
A good, apparently happy marriage,
a happy life.
- What they had was what I hope to have someday.
I loved our family.
- Isaac, their eldest, was 20 then.
His sister Bailey was 15 that summer.
That was the year, spring of 2015,
when Isaac's parents discovered
that Spider Lake Resort was for sale.
And the buzz of excitement filled the house.
Did you ever fantasize about the family owning that place?
- Absolutely.
When I found out that they were talking about buying it,
I was starting to look for my line of the work
up in that area,
and I thought it'd be really fun to help own
and help work out on the resort.
- Well, that's the sort of place
that becomes multi-generational, too.
I mean, you can look forward to association with it
for your whole life. - Yep.
- So come August,
Chris and Jan drove the six hours
from Brewster to Spider Lake
to engage in some serious negotiating.
And there were obstacles. Of course there were,
as Jan told her sister Kay.
- It was just the timing with Bailey
having a couple of years left in school.
So it wasn't that she--
yes, she did want to buy it.
There was just a lot that went into that whole decision.
- Mostly, of course, the money.
Jan, the bookkeeper, ran the numbers.
They offered as much as their bank would allow.
But it wasn't enough.
Was it Jan who faced it first,
that they'd have to move on?
Chris would never own the resort
he'd set his heart on.
What they said to each other
on the long drive home is not recorded,
nor is what happened two nights later,
middle of the night,
in Jan and Chris Kruse's bedroom.
- 911 emergency.
- My mom told me Jan had been shot
and I said, okay, I'll--
I'll be there. Am I going to the hospital?
And mom was quiet.
I said, she's going to be okay, right?
She's going to be okay?
Mom said, no.
She was dead.
And I think I just kind of collapsed on the floor
and screamed.
- Why would anybody want to shoot Jan?
It mustn't make any sense to you.
- It doesn't.
It makes no sense to me.
Now I know what you might be thinking,
but maybe it wasn't that at all.
- There was a hole through the wall of the bedroom.
- And was this a sign of a possible intruder?
- I've noticed a broken window in a bedroom downstairs.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
*
- What happened to Jan Kruse
in the early morning hours of August 19th, 2015,
was dreadfully obvious at first look,
as Chris Kruse told the 911 operator.
- Jan had taken the fatal shotgun blast to the chest
while in bed beside her own husband, Chris.
- As Chris called 911,
he checked on 15 year old Bailey
in a downstairs bedroom.
She had heard the gun, of course, but she was unhurt.
Then the rush of first responders and police
and terrible emotions.
Chris and Bailey huddled in the garage,
and deputies secured the scene
and then as dawn was approaching,
Chris himself spread the news to the family.
He called his son Isaac, off in South Dakota.
- He said that Mom had been shot,
and he didn't really know how to tell me that.
And I just said, okay, I'm packing my stuff.
I'm on my way.
- Did you know that she was-- that she was dead?
- Assumed, I guess, and assumed it wasn't good
from the sound of his voice.
He called his in-laws,
Terry and Mary Jean Pigman.
- Chris called us early morning
and was extremely broken up.
I couldn't understand what he was saying.
I could tell he was in tears,
which wasn't a usual thing for Chris.
Pretty-- pretty stoic.
And, he's telling me she didn't make it.
We lost her. I didn't protect her.
- But of all the people in the world,
and especially this tiny world,
Brewster, Minnesota, population 473,
why would Jan need protecting?
Why would someone shoot her,
the least likely murder victim?
- She was just a very, very true and very genuine person.
She just enjoyed spending time with her family
and her kids and her husband.
And when she interacted with people,
it was real. Like, she cared.
And you wanted to spend timewith her.
Isaac, a young man of few words,
said a lot with a little.
- She was pretty amazing.
I was probably a pain in the ass growing up,
but she was always really nice about it and understanding.
- Jan's always been outgoing, friendly.
She was the one that brought soup
to somebody that was sick.
- Jan had run a daycare in their home years earlier,
but time of the murder
had a front office job in a local plant.
And here's the thing,
said Jan's younger sister, Vonnie,
she was just a regular person,
uncontroversial.
Nobody didn't like her.
- She's great.
Just a good person.
Loved to quilt with her neighbors.
Loved her family.
That was definitely very important to her.
- Now she'd never see her children get married
or welcome grandchildren into the world
or be with Chris at Spider Lake.
And so to say her family was in a state of shock
would be to profoundly understate
the feelings of that awful morning,
unaware of the activities of this man.
- I believe I received a call about 3 a.m..
Derek Woodford is a senior special agent
with the State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,
the BCA in southern Minnesota.
- I know most of the local investigators.
When they have a violent crime or homicide
or death investigation and need assistance,
they call me.
- So he got dressed and drove to Brewster,
and before dawn, Agent Woodford was staring intently
at the carnage in Chris and Jan's bedroom.
- What I found was the victim
on a backboard, she was deceased.
- What was the nature of her-- of her injury?
- It was a shotgun slug
that had entered kind of the lower right shoulder
and exited out her back.
- Was it your sense
that she would have died very quickly?
- We want to know, obviously,
was it right away, or could it have been minutes?
And I spoke to the medical examiner
and he had thought that she could have stayed alive
for 3 to 5 minutes after the injury.
- It was as he approached that bedroom
Woodford found two spent shotgun shells.
- Right outside the door.
Obviously, those I don't pick up at that point.
They'll stay for Crime Scene Team to process,
but I noticed they looked to be 12 gauge shot shells
that were spent.
- Two of them? - Two of them.
- So two shots.
Two loud shots.
One obviously hit Jan,
but the other one?
- There was all hole through the wall of the bedroom.
And so it appeared one round had been fired and missed.
It went through the headboard along the wall
where their heads would have been laying,
and then it went out the wall of the house outside.
- Well, that was strange, given where the bullet holes were.
It looked like the person
sleeping on the side of the bed
closer to the door would probably have been hit.
Would it be possible for him
to have been lying in the bed beside Jan,
and not be hit by whatever this bullet was
that went flying past?
- I thought that bullet could have hit him
prior to going through the headboard.
- Preliminary, of course, but he thought about it
as he looked around the house.
Nothing obviously missing.
This did not appear to be a robbery,
but had somebody broken in?
- I've noticed a broken window in a bedroom downstairs.
- Could somebody have gotten through the window that way?
- Someone could have got through the window.
It was broken and opened.
But it had rained pretty heavy off and on.
And so the ground was wet.
There was a little bit of dirt or a leaf that had blown in,
but there were no muddy footprints below that window.
- So probably no entry through the window.
But somebody was in here, not to rob, not to rape,
but to kill Jan Kruse in cold blood.
Why would anyone want to do that?
Derek Woodford got in his car,
drove to the local sheriff's office.
Someone he needed to talk to right away.
No idea then how often they'd be talking
or how confounding their conversations might be.
- An enraged husband
with his family apparently under attack.
- Their garage had burned down,
and he had said that he was concerned.
Could have been part of now Jan being shot.
*
- This is Senior Special Agent Derek Woodford
with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
The man sitting with Agent Derek Woodford
in the county sheriff's office was Chris Kruse.
And this is how they began these perplexing interviews.
The investigators repeated efforts to match
what they had seen
to what they were hearing in here.
Our task too, in a way, as we watch and listen
to Chris's many interviews and those of the others
to try to piece together what happened
to Chris's wife, Jan, who made it happen, and why.
- What happened, said Chris, was confusing.
He was in bed, asleep,
curled up in the way he always slept with Jan.
- He described it as kind of like spooning,
like where she's laying on her side
and he's laying on his side kind of next to her.
I guess his-- the front of his body
would be alongside the back of her body.
- "The" bang?
But as Woodford knew, there were two loud bangs,
two shotgun blasts.
- And again, on fire? What fire?
That was two months earlier, said Chris,
in June,
just before he and Jan and the family
were due to depart for their annual trip
to Spider Lake.
- Their garage had burned down,
and he had said that he was concerned.
Was it the same or could have been part
of now Jan being shot?
- At the time, said Chris,
the insurance inspector said it looked like
the fire may have been deliberately set,
but by whom? Nobody could say.
- Interesting.
But it was something else about the fire story
that occurred right away to Agent Woodford.
- It was concerning to me, because a fire in a garage
smells a lot different
than a spent shotgun shell in a house.
- He would know that, would he?
- He does a lot of trap shooting and hunting,
and so he would know the difference between a shotgun
and smoke from a house or a garage fire.
- Woodford made note of that
and went on with this question.
What happened after Chris heard
what he said was a single loud bang
and saw that his wife had been shot?
- Everyone reacts to disaster, grief, stress
in different ways,
but though Chris was clearly distraught,
Woodford was listening very carefully
to the words he was usingm
descriptions of the incident
that Woodford already knew were not accurate.
- Chris seemed to be saying that Jen was shot
as she was lying down in bed, and then she sat up.
- But if he did lay her down, thought Woodford,
surely his hands would have been covered in blood,
and they weren't.
- Did he have any idea who that might have been?
- No, not at that time,
because he didn't see anybody,
didn't hear anything but that one shot,
and then just noticed the back door being wide open.
- But the idea that a stranger had walked in,
killed Jan, and just walked out again
didn't make sense.
In fact, that morning after,
nothing about the murder of a loved local
in a tiny hamlet in the middle of America
made any sense at all.
- Questions for the other person in the house that night.
*
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Kate Snow.
Chris Kruse told investigators
he awoke to a gunshot blast,
then found his wife next to him covered in blood.
But there was a problem.
His story didn't match evidence from the scene.
Was he confused or covering a secret?
It was time for police to talk to Bailey Kruse,
a teenager with secrets of her own.
Back to Keith Morrison with Far From Spider Lake.
- We cannot begin to imagine,
nor possibly describe,
the shock and grief that descended that first morning
on Jan's parents, Mary Jean and Terry Pigman,
to pick up the phone
and hear from their son in law
that their daughter was dead
and he, Chris, had been taken to the sheriff's office
for questioning.
- We threw on some clothes and went out there.
- When we first walked in,
the first thing they were concerned about
was how we found out that he was there.
The next thing out of their mouth was,
"Well, you know, 85% of the time the spouse done it."
And at that point I felt, okay,
I know where you guys are going with this.
And I'm-- I felt like telling them,
you're full of it.
- I mean, we've never felt he was the one that did it.
- No, they didn't.
And so right after that first interview with Agent Woodford,
Jan's parents invited Chris and Bailey
to move in with them.
That's where Chris's brother Keith found them
later that first day.
- You know, we've never really been an emotional family,
and we don't wear our emotions on our sleeves, I guess.
But I remember looking at Chris,
and I had never seen Chris as devastated as he was.
I mean, he was in complete and utter shock.
- How did he look that was different?
- Well, his eyes were welled up.
He was kind of biting on his bottom lip a little bit
and just kind of shaking his head back and forth.
I'd never seen him so devastated ever.
- Bailey was there too, of course, also a mess.
Earlier at the sheriff's office,
she'd had her turn to tell the investigators
what she saw and heard early that morning.
It wasn't quite the same story as the one her father told.
While both Chris and Bailey have hearing deficits,
Bailey said she heard loud and clear
not one, but two shots.
- So Bailey, who had a digital clock by her bed,
had just put the murder at, "like, 2:30."
Chris called 911 at 2:39.
Might be an issue.
Why the delay?
- Of course, those deputies were right
when they told Bailey's grandparents
that a significant other is quite often
the prime suspect in cases like this.
So they had to ask,
what did Bailey know about her parents' marriage?
- So here in the sheriff's office,
it was Bailey who told the investigators
how she worried about the resort at Spider Lake.
It was making her anxious, she said.
- To help her cope, Bailey said,
she confided in her friend,
an older boy named Jeremy Majerus.
He'd been coming around to see Bailey
quite a lot that summer.
- A resort they couldn't afford,
an apparent arson fire in a garage,
and an unapproved, maybe inappropriate older boy
in their daughter's life.
There were issues in this home,
and a kid who needed talking to
Jeremy Majerus.
*
- What happened in the Kruse house
here in tiny Brewster, Minnesota
was a truly terrible thing.
The loss of that woman, Jan Kruse,
a genuinely tragic event made even more so
because it just seemed pointless.
Why would somebody go into the house,
shoot some sleeping woman?
That didn't make any sense.
So did she have any enemies who would want her dead?
- Oh, that was a question that we asked often
was who would have wanted Jan dead?
And we could not find one person
that didn't like Jan
or that thought she wasn't a good person.
- There was, however, that young man,
Jeremy Majerus,
the not quite boyfriend, unapproved by Bailey's parents.
Passions can run high in a situation like that.
Jeremy's place,
his family's farm, that is,
was a 20 or 25 minute drive away
from the Kruse house.
Deputies drove out to talk to him,
recorded the conversation.
- So, asked the deputy,
when was the last time he talked to Bailey
or communicated at all?
Jeremy said he met Bailey while helping out
with the high school marching band.
He had graduated but continued to volunteer,
and somehow during those band practices,
he and Bailey had grown close.
It was all very innocent, he said,
but they really, really liked each other.
So they just talked, said Jeremy.
And the deputy asked, what about lately?
Jeremy said the arguments, according to Bailey,
were about trying to buy the Spider Lake Resort.
So Bailey was having trouble dealing with all that,
said Jeremy.
Was it true, what Jeremy was saying?
Bailey hadn't said anything like that
when she talked to investigators
a few hours after her mother was killed.
So the very next day, they brought Bailey in again
to ask about her parents.
At first, they didn't tell her they've been talking to Jeremy.
No disagreements?
Then they told her about the Jeremy interview.
And then she painted a slightly different picture
of what had been going on at home.
Things had been difficult lately.
There was that upsetting garage fire,
but also Jan had a hysterectomy,
Chris had his appendix out, and then on top of it all,
they were trying to figure out the whole resort deal.
So once again, they asked Bailey
what happened the night her mother was shot,
what she heard from her bedroom
one floor below her parents' room.
- We asked Bailey, did you hear anybody
running out of the house or-or moving around?
And she said she only heard
one set of steps from upstairs,
and that was Chris.
He was the only one that was moving around upstairs.
She did not hear anybody else.
- Now, what did that mean?
And what would it mean when paired
with CSI reports now coming in
about curious little particulars of the crime scene.
- Coming up...
Chris seems to change his story.
- The way people say goodbye
can tell you a lot about a community.
And about the person they gather for.
The funeral for Jan Kruse.
- The visitation was at the Lutheran church,
and there were people lined up down the block
waiting to get in. Because Jan was so liked
and respected in the community,
it was a long, long day, and--
but it was...
I don't know, heartwarming.
Or that many people cared-- cared about her
and about her family, and Chris, and Isaac, and Bailey
to come pay their respects to her.
- Whole town was probably pretty upset.
- Yes, she'd lived here all of her life,
so she knew a lot of people.
They had good things to say about her.
- And so there was a respectful pause.
And then a couple of days later,
Chris Kruse was once again at the sheriff's office,
with Senior Special Sgent Woodford.
Some things had been bothering Woodford.
Like why Chris said he'd only heard one gunshot,
when obviously there had been two.
But that first slug, the one he said he did not hear?
Agent Woodford explained to Chris
that one would have hit him
had he been lying in bed beside Jan as he said he was.
Then Agent Woodford told Chris that the autopsy revealed
that Jan was actually sitting up when she was hit,
with her right arm stretched out toward the shooter.
In fact, her right hand was grazed by the shot.
- To me, almost like she saw it coming.
- Yeah. - And so that was a concern
based on what Chris had told me the first time,
that she was shot when they were laying down.
- And here Chris seems to alter the narrative.
Says he awoke to find his wife sitting up beside him.
So was this man changing his story?
Then Agent Woodford asked Chris again
about what he heard Jan say that night.
Chris was not under arrest, of course,
though he had to know he was under a microscope.
So the answers he was giving, was he just confused?
What was going on here?
Agent Woodford was all too familiar
with the worst of human behavior.
Very aware, too, that he was talking to a grieving husband,
but aware also that grieving spouses
and relatives and friends are fully capable
of the most determined mendacity when hiding culpability
for the worst thing they've ever done.
So he and his fellow investigators
were certainly not finished with Chris Kruse
and things that seemed, to them, odd.
- Another puzzling detail.
If his wife is bleeding to death,
how is Chris so clean?
Coming up...
When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Kate Snow.
Chris Kruse was in the hot seat.
Detectives were challenging his story
about the night his wife, Jan, was murdered.
And the interrogation was far from over.
Pressure was mounting,
and Chris was about to offer police a new name,
someone he suspected had a motive to kill Jan.
Here again is Keith Morrison with Far From Spider Lake.
- Chris Kruse had buried his wife of 20 years
along with their dream of owning a lakeside resort.
Now he sat in an interview room in the county sheriff's office
facing questions from Agent Derek Woodford.
Chris said he was lying right beside his wife
when she was shot. And as Woodford knew,
Jan bled rapidly and profusely.
Yet somehow, there was surprisingly
little blood on Chris.
It didn't make any sense to Woodford.
- We believe with the amount of blood at the scene,
we felt there should have been
blood on Kruse.
- Especially because Chris said he wasn't just lying beside Jan.
He actually laid her down flat on the bed
after she was shot.
- I want to say my left hand was just--
- No blood on his hands,
but an odd mark on the front of his shirt.
- From how he describes being in bed with Jan,
we were trying to figure out where that mark came from
because it didn't make sense from--
just by laying next to her in bed.
- More like something was imprinted on the shirt,
not like it was blood splatter
or anything like that. - Right. Right.
- Despite what some people like to claim,
it can be quite hard to tell if the stranger
sitting in front of you is lying or telling the truth.
But in this case, said the investigators,
what Chris was telling them wasn't adding up.
They hooked up Chris to a polygraph.
The test revealed deception, they told him.
And then Chris offered up a possible suspect.
Lisa? Who was Lisa?
- Hints of a rare conflict in Jan's life.
Did it play a part in her death?
Coming up...
- We had gotten further information
that she had maybe had some friction with Jan.
- A possible lead.
And Jeremy says this was not a happy family.
- Bailey had told him they had mentioned the word divorce.
- People talk, and in a town like Brewster,
everybody knew about the murder of Jan Kruse.
Everybody had opinions,
and one the investigators heard about was
that one of Jan's neighbors,
a woman who lived just down the block,
might have been nursing a grudge.
- We had gotten further information
that she had maybe had some friction with Jan.
- This woman, Lisa,
had apparently been upset about Jan
shutting down the daycare center she had been running
because her son went there.
And it wasn't like she and her husband didn't have access.
So, of course, the investigators talked to Lisa.
They found her at work.
- Anyway, the daycare incident was practically ancient history.
Didn't make sense.
- She was not involved.
- They looked at other people too,
other possible suspects.
- We had interviewed over 40 people.
Some people multiple times.
- They even took a hard look at two of Chris's own brothers.
But they and all the others were cleared.
All but one.
Almost a year after the murder,
investigators went back to Jeremy Majerus,
the not quite boyfriend.
Possible motive? As old as first love.
Chris, Jeremy had told them, was really the one
stopping him from dating Bailey.
So the investigators had to consider,
maybe Jeremy tried to take revenge on Chris
and shot Jan by mistake.
Jeremy had already admitted he sneaked in
to see Bailey in her house many times that summer,
unbeknownst to her parents,
and he knew if they bought the Spider Lake Resort,
they'd be taking Bailey hundreds of miles away from him.
So where was he the night of the murder?
- Initially, he had told investigators
that he did not leave his house that night.
- But that was a lie.
- And then in further talking with Jeremy,
he had admitted to us that he did leave the house
to-to go check on Bailey and was concerned about her.
- His story?
Bailey had texted him after she heard those two shots,
and there was indeed a text, one word.
Jeremy!
That alarmed him, he said, so he drove to Brewster,
texting her along the way, asking her what was wrong,
but when he arrived, Bailey's street
was filled with emergency vehicles,
so he returned home.
Kind of something he should have told you right off the bat.
- Yes. And we-- - How did he explain that?
- What he had indicated to us is that based on everything
that had been going on at the Kruse residence,
his dad had told him that he thought
he should stay out of it and not get involved.
Thus not telling us that he left
to go to Brewster that night after Bailey had texted him.
- Jeremy took a polygraph.
He also showed deception,
but not about where he was, Jeremy swore.
No, the deception, he told them, was something else.
He didn't tell them earlier, he said,
because Bailey swore him to secrecy.
It was about the state of her parents' marriage.
Which was what? - Which was that
Bailey had told him they had mentioned the word divorce.
- Divorce? Chris never mentioned that.
In fact, he said he and Jan got along well.
And he told them something else about Bailey.
That's because Bailey had told him...
Was he making all this up to protect himself,
or was this devastating evidence against Chris?
- Coming up...
Chris points his finger at Jeremy.
When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
- The letters turned up a year and a half after the murder.
It was Chris Kruse who found them,
offered them up to investigators.
Disturbing letters, said Chris,
sent purportedly
by Jeremy Majerus to Bailey.
But Chris had an idea
it might have been creepier than that,
given this phrase in one of them.
"Love you, daughter."
- Chris had a concern that maybe Jeremy's dad
had been writing some of these letters to Bailey.
I followed up on that, and that was not the case.
- They were simply Jeremy's love letters,
said Woodford. Nothing more.
But Chris was not satisfied.
Might Jeremy be Jan's killer, he wondered.
But did he himself really think Jeremy killed Jan?
No. And after four interviews with Jeremy,
Agent Woodford came to the same conclusion.
Lies or no, Jeremy didn't do it.
That conclusion was bolstered by Jeremy's father,
who said he was up watching TV with his son
when Jan was shot 25 miles away.
He saw that Jeremy text just after it came in.
But if Jeremy was out of the picture, Chris wasn't.
In fact, the day Chris turned in those Jeremy letters,
Agent Woodford steered the conversation
back to a question he had not been able to resolve.
The implication was impossible to miss,
especially after they found the murder weapon
in Chris's own construction company shop,
a minute's drive from the house.
Bailey, remember, had said she heard gunshots,
quote, "at, like, 2:30,"
and Chris called 911 at 2:39.
Was nine minutes enough time to stash the gun?
- I actually drove that at speed limit
to the shop and back, and taking a count,
it would take a minute to go into the shop.
It was only three minutes.
- Woodford broke the gun news to Chris.
- But his mind may not have raced for long.
Even though they were clearly suspicious of him,
they still had more investigating to do.
So Chris was free to go,
and nothing happened for months, for years.
The whole family tried to let it go
as they settled into the hard business
of learning to live without Jan
and without knowing who killed her,
except that they were sure it wasn't Chris.
- There's nothing to think that
Chris had any involvement in this.
- Nobody could fake anything that much
and not slip up.
- What's more, they all said they never saw Chris
get violent or be mean to Jan ever.
- I mean, they truly loved each other.
And he never had a harsh word about Jan ever.
And the same with Jan towards Chris.
- So maybe they'd just never know who killed Jan.
Did you have an expectation that this was just going to go away
and they'd never find out who did it?
- We were emotionally set that this--
no one would be brought to justice in this world.
It'd have to be by God, and-and--
that they'd have to answer to.
It wouldn't happen here.
- And then in March 2019,
three and a half years after the murder,
something did happen.
The county attorney's office decided to take the case
to a grand jury.
And that grand jury indicted Chris Kruze
for first degree murder,
to his family's utter dismay.
And insult to injury...
- They would-- could've simply asked him
to come down to the police station
and arrested him there. But they made a big scene.
It was actually about a block from where I work.
You know, guns drawn, and it was just totally blown.
I mean, I didn't understand that at all.
- Once he got arrested, I mean,
we all came together as a family
and figured out what we had to do
to help get an attorney lined up.
- That would be Tom Hagen and Steven Groschen.
This would be their first ever first degree murder trial.
- I got a call, I believe, on a Friday night, late.
Chris just got arrested.
He didn't know what was going on.
He didn't understand how this happened.
- And they couldn't understand it either.
They went through the evidence looking for an answer,
but couldn't find one.
- Painstakingly going through the videos,
painstakingly going through the interviews.
When he spoke to law enforcement,
he seemed to be, to me, very truthful
and just trying to be extremely helpful.
And his stories was fairly consistent
all the way throughout.
- But Braden Hoefert, then the assistant county attorney,
said Chris was not only not consistent,
there were serious problems with the stories he told.
- The thing that I remember sticking out to me the most
upon watching the version of events
as described by Mr. Kruse was the difficulty
that I was having making sense of exactly
how this would have occurred,
without him seeing
or being able to offer any description
of the supposed perpetrator.
- So, in other words, did his stories make sense?
- You know, as a prosecutor, you always think about
how it's going to make sense to a jury.
- Mm-hmm.
- And it's not necessarily important what I think,
or even what the investigator thinks,
but what is the average person in Nobles County
going to think about this?
The impression I walked away with it was-- that, um,
I didn't believe it would make a lot of sense
to the average person in Nobles County.
- Would it?
A jury of those average people
was impaneled in late January 2020.
But what's an average person anyway?
Can you ever really know what average people will do?
*
- Coming up...
the prosecution's case.
- The word divorce being thrown around.
Either he's killed by the first shotgun blast,
or he's covered in blood,
and Mr. Kruse was neither.
This was clearly a premeditated murder.
*
Welcome back.
Chris Kruse was heading to trial
for the murder of his wife, Jan.
The prosecutor was ready to explain
not only how Chris shot Jan,
but why, and her family, who had stood by Chris,
would be in court for every agonizing moment.
Could their opinion of a man
they loved like their own be swayed?
Once again, Keith Morrison with "Far From Spider Lake."
- Prosecutor Braden Hoefert had a story for the jury
in the trial of Chris Kruse.
A true story, he told them, and pretty simple.
The killing of Jan Kruse was an inside job.
- Nothing had been missing from the house,
and so this was clearly a premeditated murder.
- Committed by the one person in the position to do it,
said the prosecutor, the husband, Chris Kruse.
The evidence?
Well, for one thing, he told the jury
there were all those hours of police interviews full of,
he said, inconsistencies.
He played them for the jury.
- The version of events changes over time,
and it also does not appear to be possible
based off of the physical evidence.
- So break that down a little bit.
He gave a similar version in the first two interviews.
Jan was asleep or lying down
when she is shot.
But the ME's report clearly established
that she, uh, had her hand outstretched
in the direction of the assailant,
which of course meant that she was awake
and saw the person who did this to her.
- It was only after the autopsy report
was explained to Chris, the prosecutor said,
that Chris changed his story,
and said Jan was sitting up when she was hit.
As for that first bullet,
the one that plowed through the pillows, the headboard,
the wall...
could you see any way where he could have been
lying in that bed beside her
and not be touched by that passing slug?
- The, uh...
description that Mr. Kruse gave of their sleeping position,
in effect, spooning with Jan,
that they were lying in the center of the bed,
and he had his arm underneath her,
and they were facing away from the door.
So with the door to their back, um,
it would not have been possible
for him to be in that position without being killed
by the first gunshot.
- Anyway, he said, the pillows on which
Chris said he had been lying,
were filled with tiny fragments of the slug
that went through Jan.
And yet...
- Mr. Kruse did not have any scratches
or pieces of metal in his face, uh,
during his first interview with police, which was, uh,
later that morning.
- And it wasn't just lead on and in his pillows.
- The crime scene team counted 15 to 25...
uh, droplets of blood that were in the position
that Mr. Kruse claimed to have been in
at the time that the, uh, gunshot went off.
- So magically, these blood drops
would have gone through him
and landed on the mattress of the bed or on the pillows
without touching them.
- What I argued to the jury,
was that depending on his position in the bed,
he either gets blood or bullet.
He either, um, is killed.
Killed by the first shotgun, uh, blast,
or he is covered in blood.
And Mr. Kruse was neither.
- Which meant, said the prosecutor,
that Chris could not have been in bed, as he said he was
when those shots were fired.
Hoefert also pointed out steps Chris did not take.
- He did not arm himself, despite there being
a firearm in the bedroom. - Mm-hmm.
- He did not barricade the back door.
He did not help Jan.
He did not attempt first aid or to...
try to stop the wound from bleeding,
did not hold her hand or to try to comfort her.
He indicated that he went to the doorway,
and quickly looked at her
and decided that she was dead,
and then he left her there,
which was problematic from our perspective,
because the medical examiner had opined that
she would have lived 3 to 5 minutes
after being shot.
- This, said the state, was the murder weapon,
a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun,
as determined by a forensic scientist
with a nationally accredited state investigative agency,
the BCA.
She said that because she had to analyze
seven 12-gauge shotguns found in Chris's home and shop,
on this specific one, she first did a test
with just two shells, not the usual 3 or 4.
- Based on those two first test fires,
it was not immediately apparent that...
that the 12-gauge shotgun... was the gun.
- In fact, she indicated in her notes
it might not be the murder weapon.
She then went back and performed additional test fires,
um, to see what she could find out.
And it became obvious that that was,
in fact, um,
the firearm that had fired the two shot shells
that were found at the scene,
- All part of the testing protocol, Hoefert said,
given all the weapons she had to process.
- Forensic scientists don't complete tests, uh, with a goal
of convicting or acquitting any specific person.
And so the conclusion which was reached,
and the only conclusion has to be verified
by other scientists there at the BCA.
- And it was.
So this was the murder weapon, he told jurors.
And it had been found just a minute's drive away
in Chris's shop, where he must have put it
before calling 911.
- The shotgun was found in a way
that it was propped up against the wall,
and it was the only shotgun in the house or the shop
which was not put away or in a case.
- But why would Chris do it?
Why would he kill the only woman he had ever loved?
Maybe, said the prosecutor,
maybe it was this Spider Lake Resort.
The dream he could not let go,
and she said they could not afford,
even if they sold all they owned.
- Sell his house, sell his shop,
sell his business,
cash out retirement accounts, um, you name it.
- But about 36 hours before the shooting,
Chris alone presented another offer.
It was much more than the $550,000
Jan and Chris thought they could offer
if they sold everything.
In fact, Chris's last offer
was $150,000 more than that,
which just happened to be the amount of insurance
on Jan's life.
- The defense admitted in their opening statement
that Mr. Kruse had, in fact,
offered $700,000 for the purchase of this resort,
which I found to be important because
Mr. Kruse had previously denied under oath
ever making that offer.
- And then there was the secret, he said,
that secret Bailey entrusted to Jeremy,
the secret he'd spilled to investigators
and testified about at trial.
- That, uh, her parents were fighting more than ever,
that she had heard the word divorce being thrown around,
and that she had asked him not to tell the police.
- But there was something very unusual about this trial.
Almost everyone in the spectator's gallery
supported Chris,
believed fervently that he was innocent,
including witnesses like Jan's sister Kay.
- At grand jury, she indicated that
the marriage between Mr. Kruse and Jan
was not overly affectionate.
At trial, she testified that it was affectionate.
- And when Bailey, up on the stand,
was asked about the secret Jeremy revealed...
- She indicated that her parents arguing would not be something
that a 15-year-old would pay attention to,
and so she denied that that had occurred.
- But Bailey did confirm
that even though she's a heavy sleeper,
and hard of hearing, and slept without her hearing aids,
she definitely heard two gunshots.
She told the jury, "A gunshot is pretty loud.
"You'd have to be on the other side of town to not hear it."
So Prosecutor Hoefert was confident.
But...
- Anytime you have a case where...
the family of the victim does not want it to be prosecuted,
and they maintained from
the morning of the murder that Mr. Kruse, um,
could not have been involved in this case.
That was a concern of ours.
- Was it something the jury could see as well?
*
- Coming up...
the defense says investigators rushed to judgment.
- From the beginning, they had one suspect.
It was Chris.
- Why would you murder someone you were going to...
start a resort with?
Now he's going to start the resort by himself?
- It never, to me, was a sound motive of what took place.
- So who did they say the killer could be?
- Jeremy Majerus.
*
- They were a confident pair,
the lawyers who came to defend Chris Kruse,
despite never before defending anyone charged
with first degree murder,
Tom Hagen and Steven Groschen.
Their biggest objection to the state's case?
Two words, they said.
Tunnel vision.
- From the beginning, they had one suspect.
It was Chris.
I don't think that they looked any further.
And what they did is,
they used the fact that he was trying to be helpful,
trying to push them to give more information,
to give more facts.
And Chris was just trying to--
to fill in the blanks as he went,
you know, trying to remember what happened,
trying to piece everything together.
- Besides, they said, Chris was not so inconsistent
during his many hours of police interviews.
- In my opinion, the foundation
of what took place remained the same.
It was it was approximately the same story.
He was in bed, he heard a shot,
he popped up, um, and from there,
then he went and grabbed his phone.
That portion never changed.
- And of course, anyone's story could change a little,
given...
- From a dead sleep, you get woken up by gunshots,
and you look over and you see your wife is bleeding.
I think it's reasonable to believe the fact
that you're not going to remember everything clearly.
I mean, the memory is a... - Yeah.
it's an amazing thing.
But I think one thing that everybody's found out
is that it doesn't remember everything the same
every time you talk about it.
- How do you explain how he didn't hear
or see or find any evidence
of an intruder in the house?
- It's a small home, and it wouldn't take somebody,
you know, more than just a second
to get out of that house,
and to hop in the car and to take off.
- Even the forensics were off,
they said, like, the string that was
put up to calculate the path of the first bullet.
- If you saw the photograph that actually has a dip
in the string, they didn't pull the string taut
when they were doing the measurements.
- Which, to the defense expert,
meant this.
- There's room in the bed for two people,
and that first shot to miss. Is there a ton of room?
No, be upfront about that.
But there was room for the shot to miss him.
And that's the testimony we brought out at trial.
- Why would he not have had more blood on him?
- My opinion is after he heard the shots,
he got of the bed fairly quickly.
And as for Chris hearing only one shot,
when there were two? - He thinks that first shot's
the one that woke him up. He doesn't recall hearing it,
you know? But he certainly recalls
hearing that second shot. - When he called 911,
why didn't he go back, and tend to his wife,
and see how she was, and try to do... CPR?
She was probably alive for a few minutes.
- And I think that's one of his regrets,
is that he didn't go back and do more.
But I think his attention turned quickly
to his daughter, who's downstairs,
and trying to figure out if anybody's in the house
to make sure that his daughter's fine.
And I think he realized fairly quickly,
with all the blood, that it was a fatal wound.
- Chris' lawyers fought the evidence
that Chris' own shotgun was the murder weapon.
They emphasized the state expert first thought it wasn't,
before concluding after more tests
that it definitely was.
But that seemed pretty subjective,
they told the jury.
- Our expert, who was very credentialed,
had reviewed the evidence.
He concluded the answer was inconclusive,
meaning you can't say "This isn't the gun."
You can't say, "This is the gun."
*
- And the lawyers strongly challenged
the prosecutors claim that after shooting Jan,
Chris quickly drove the gun to a shop before calling 911.
They were critical of the investigators,
saying they should have gone back to Bailey
to confirm the time she said she heard the shotgun blasts.
What Bailey stated was it happened
around approximately 2:30.
Law enforcement never cleaned up
what time it took place.
They never came back and said, "Was it closer to 2:30?
"Was it closer to 2:40?"
- During the trial,
four-and-a-half years after the shooting,
under cross-examination by her father's lawyer,
Bailey agreed she probably heard those shots
closer to 2:38 AM.
Remember, Chris' 911 call was at 2:39.
- So there's really not this 8 to 9 minute block.
It was the timeline, the timeline, the timeline.
I mean, it was tight.
- And, really, was a resort at Spider Lake
such a huge issue, such a motive.
- Why would you murder someone you were going to
start a resort with?
Now he's going to start the resort by himself?
- It never to me was a sound motive of what took place,
because the reality of it was, is he needed Jan
to run the resort with him.
And of course, they didn't have to present
a possible alternate suspect,
but they did.
There's another person here
that could have done this, and it's Jeremy Majerus.
- Jeremy Majerus, who by the time of the trial
was still with Bailey, was her boyfriend.
And yet the defense went there,
said "Maybe Jeremy did it."
Why would Jeremy want to kill Jan?
Part of the motive would have been Bailey
leaving town and moving up north for the cabin,
and then she would have less interaction with Jeremy.
And I'll be the first to tell you.
Do I think it's a strong motive? No I don't.
Does it make more sense than Chris'?
In some ways, it actually does,
because I can see him becoming the jealous boyfriend,
and he perceives this cabin as a dream
that Chris is pushing through.
"If I remove Chris, then...
"this will no longer happen."
And Jeremy would have never been trying to kill Jan.
That would have been an accident.
- What's more, Jeremy was on the record
lying to investigators.
His story changed. It was never consistent.
It never made sense.
And that's the part that I think
was the big red flag for us.
- Jeremy eventually admitted he did drive to Brewster
after the shooting, he said, after Bailey texted him.
"But what if he actually got there earlier?"
suggested the defense attorneys.
Got in through that broken basement window, ran upstairs,
aimed to kill Chris,
but missed and hit Jan before running out the back door.
The theory, however, was problematic.
Police had looked hard, at Jeremy and ruled him out,
and...
Bailey didn't think Jeremy did it either.
- That's correct.
- That must have been extremely awkward.
- She was in a bad predicament either way.
On one hand, she has her father up for murder
and the other hand you have us lawyers saying,
you know,
there's as much evidence or more evidence
that Jeremy committed this murder than your dad did.
And she was in a no-win situation.
- What was an attentive jury to think about that?
- Coming up...
- If that doesn't speak volumes.
I don't know what does. - The verdict.
It wasn't easy.
- One guy was not going to give up.
And the judge said, there is no hung jury.
You will keep at this until you're done.
- And Chris Kruse speaks.
- I miss everything.
I miss her smile, and the sound of her voice.
*
- The courtroom was crowded.
- I sat through every day of that trial.
- Every available seat filled,
mainly by family and friends of the victim,
and all were here to support the man
accused of killing her.
Why was that so important to you?
To support Chris?
- He is innocent. I never doubted that.
- Hmm.
- He's... He's my brother in-law.
I mean, we've known him longer than the 20 years they dated
for several years before that, and--
- Sure.
- That's family.
- It's unusual for everybody in the family to support
the person who is accused of killing your sister.
- I think that says a lot right--
and I think that says a lot right there.
- Would it make a difference?
At 3:10 PM,
on the ninth day of the trial, the jury left the courtroom.
Alex McGraw was the foreperson.
- Throughout the whole trial, to see the support
from Jan's side of the family, for Chris, was very telling.
And we found out that he lived with Jan's parents
for a full year
after this happened. So if that doesn't
speak volumes, I don't know what does.
- Right away, Alex took a poll.
- I think there was like 5 or 6 of us right away
that were "not guilty."
And there was 2 or 3 undecideds,
and the rest were firm that they-- that he--
that he did it, that he was guilty.
- So then, line by line, they debated the evidence,
even performed a sort of reenactment
said juror Amber [indistinct],
minus the actual bullets, of course.
- We actually reenacted the scene on the tables.
We pushed them all together, and we took the pillows,
and we had two people on the bed.
- But after hours of talk and debate,
it looked like it was going to be a hung jury.
- One guy was not gonna give up,
and the judge said, "There is no hung jury.
"You will keep at this until you're done."
It went quickly after that,
and finally, end of the second day,
they reentered the courtroom.
- And that was nerve wracking.
We prayed for the best,
and we knew the truth, that it wasn't Chris.
- And the jury...
found Chris Kruse not guilty.
- I was actually kind of surprised at how much
they were lacking in full proof evidence.
- And when they said not guilty?
- I remember Bonnie, like, squealing.
- It was-- it was absolutely wonderful,
because I just, I mean, we were all just cheering
and-and hugging each other.
- All the weight of the world was off my shoulders.
- I think I hugged everybody in that courtroom
before I got out of there.
- Including the man from whom
the clouds were suddenly lifted, Chris Kruse.
- You know, I-- you-- you can't--
I don't know how to put that into words.
- It's hard finding words for things sometimes.
- Yeah.
- What have the last five years been like for you?
- It's been a real rough five years.
Unimaginable.
- And now, finally, he could face his family,
and the world, as an innocent man.
Vindicated.
Except... after the verdict,
the county attorney issued a statement saying
while they respected the jury's verdict,
they firmly believed,
after a long and thorough investigation,
that Chris did indeed kill his wife.
- As of this point, there are no other suspects,
and there are no other leads
in the investigation of-of Jan's murder.
- Not even Bailey's boyfriend, Jeremy Majerus?
Just no, said the prosecutor.
- He is someone who was concerned
about confessing to texting while driving.
Trying to make Jeremy Majerus the perpetrator here
is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
- Even the defense attorney who pointed the finger
at Jeremy, didn't here with us.
- I'm not going to insinuate or say that, you know,
Jeremy did this.
I mean, I'm not going to do that.
- So where does it all leave Chris Kruse?
Not in a very good place.
- I'm frustrated.
These days, I'm mad now.
The way this was handled, it's upsetting to hear
the prosecutors can say the jury was wrong.
They made the wrong decision.
Chris is the guy.
I don't know how they can say that.
I don't feel they put any effort into this.
*
- So now in the family,
a question hangs in the air like a bad smell.
- I would like to talk to Jeremy, yeah.
- What would you ask him? What would you say to him?
- Like, to know what-- why he said the stuff about me
that he did, I--
Yeah, I got lots of questions.
- When we last spoke, Chris told us
that he and his family believe Jan's murder
deserves further investigation.
And they would continue to seek justice for Jan.
Jan, whom they all remember lovingly,
even as they cannot help but be angry at the people
who accused Chris of killing her.
- My sister loved her husband,
and we should never have had to go through that trial ever.
There was no-- no grounds for that.
And had they done their job and looked at the facts
in front of them, we would have never been
in that courtroom for that reason.
To make matters worse, to put us all through this...
how this could be.
- Now, there are only memories.
- I miss everything.
I miss watching her get ready for work in the morning.
I miss my...
have a good day kiss, and...
"Hey, honey," when I come home from work,
Miss her smile, and...
the sound of her voice.
Jan was the best.
*
- And Spider Lake resort?
That magical place they'd hoped to own someday?
Did you ever go back to Spider Lake?
- Yeah.
I go back every year. Yeah.
We take our vacation in June.
I go back in September.
Jan's birthday's the 24th of September.
She loved her birthday.
- And so, in a way, he still takes her with him
out here on Spider Lake.
- That's all for this edition
of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Kate Snow. Thank you for watching.