Post Mortem | The Setup Murder of Kristil Krug

0:09Welcome back to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green, and today I'm joined by 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant and journalist Sheila Flynn. We are discussing the murder of Christelle Krug, a Colorado mother of three. Sheila, you actually reported on this case for the Daily Mail, and you were also in the courtroom during the trial. So we're going to get into that. And we're really, really appreciative that you're here to give us your perspective on this case. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. Hopefully I can help. And Peter, it's always great to have you here with us to break down this 48 Hours episode here on Postmortem.

0:49Yes, in honor of the Daily Mail, I'll say hello and welcome, Sheila. Is that that's your best British accent? It's pretty good. I lived there for a while, so I'm all right. It's better than mine. So we'll take it. So before we get into it, a reminder to everyone, if you haven't actually listened to this 48 Hours episode yet, head on back to your podcast feed. You'll find the full audio version of this in your feed right below this podcast. So go take a listen and then come on back for this conversation. So in December of 2023, Christelle's husband, Dan Krug, requested a welfare check on his wife, who wasn't responding to his text messages or his phone calls.

1:30Krug also told police that there was an alleged stalker that had been threatening them. When police arrived at the couple's home, they found Christelle dead in the garage. An autopsy later revealed that she had been bludgeoned to death in the back of the head, and she'd also been stabbed in the heart. There was a tremendous amount of police body cam footage from the crime scene for this case, and we use it a lot in the hour. And we see also just how emotional Krug was at the scene. Peter, when you watched that video, what did you think about his behavior at the scene? I had never heard anything like that before.

2:09Here was a man you could hear before you saw him on these body cams. He was shouting and wailing as he ran down the street. It seemed so unnatural. And by the time he got in front of that house and he was bent over and he was retching and making all of these sounds, it was an extraordinary performance. And we know now it was a performance, but it was completely over the top. You know, I first viewed it actually sitting just feet behind Krug himself, who was sitting as a defendant in court at the trial. And, you know, Peter used the word performance. It seemed so much like a performance to me, just very overblown, not asking why, just almost seeming like he was trying to make himself seem scattered, like he didn't know what to do as he wailed.

2:56and it was really interesting to watch him watch that without any reaction as he was on trial for Chris Steele's murder. I'm glad that both of you guys said that because when I watched the video, I felt like I was judging him, but I just wasn't convinced with his behavior, the way he was sort of hunched over. And then we see that he's actually with a victim's advocate. Her name is Heather Aitz. So she's seen people in situations like this many, many times. And we want to play for the listeners here some unaired footage from, Peter, your interview with her. And she talks about when she actually first started to suspect Krug.

3:40The car ride from his house to the police department seemed like an eternity. And it felt as if something had switched.

3:54I was starting to look at him a little differently, especially since he was very adamant about telling the children. And he wasn't asking any other questions. He wasn't asking, where was she? What happened? And I turn and I look at him, and I get this weird feeling. And it's a feeling of, are you really crying? are you really, is this happening? Did you do this? No, you didn't do this. Heather, you're watching, you watch too many 48 hours episodes. You're watching too much TV. This man has lost his wife. Why are you thinking that? But it was a gut instinct. How interesting. But Peter, it's not just a gut instinct.

4:44He's not asking any questions about what happened to his wife. Yeah, bizarre behavior. And she followed her instincts, which was great. Heather has a lot of wisdom in all of this. At one point, she said, you know, he'd really settled down. Then he started to make this very strange whimpering sound. And she felt it was invented, that it just wasn't genuine. So to bring people some of the background that we already know about, if you watch The Hour, for months before her death, Christelle had been receiving threatening text messages and photos that appeared to be coming from an ex-boyfriend, Anthony Holland.

5:20Christele brought her concerns to Detective Martinez, who at the time chose not to contact Anthony. He said that they were compiling enough evidence against him to actually obtain an arrest warrant. You both interviewed Anthony. What was your impression of him? He was a very down-to-earth individual. There's a sadness about him. Christele was somebody that he deeply cared for. They'd met in high school, but they were such different people. Christelle was this intellect, a truly genius level intellect. An engineering future awaited for her. She was very ambitious. She was going to go to university.

6:04And Anthony, on the other hand, had no plans. He had no academic interests. These two split up and it haunted him. He just felt like a big part of his life was missing. Anthony is just very, very earnest, very honest, genuine, soft-spoken. And he just really loved Chris Steele. And when he describes to me, they had met, they were both working at JCPenney's as teenagers, and he described their first date and their first kiss as magical. And it almost sounded like he was recounting scenes from a teen movie. And when I saw him testify at her trial, he was so anxious. He was clutching fidget toys.

6:50And you could tell he was really trying to do Chris Steele's memory well up on the stand as well as stand up for himself. And he told me that he stared down. And I could see this, that he stared down Krug at the defense table, kind of going, man, you tried to frame me for murder. And he thanked me later after I ran a story, an interview with Anthony about his past and Chris Steele. He thanked me for sharing her story as well as his because it was his great love. So seeing as she had been his great love, Sheila, had Anthony actually contacted her over the years? He had. I think in that way, sometimes you reach out with what ifs, et cetera.

7:36He sent a few messages, I believe the last, I think in 2016, just saying, seeing how she was doing, nothing malicious or anything. You know, he had kind of a rock solid alibi. He literally and figuratively had the receipt. Yeah, it's an incredible twist in this story that on the day that Christele was murdered, he'd gotten up and he now thinks this voice in his head was Christele sending him a message. He got this urge to go to a Kohl's department store and to buy a sweatshirt. And when I did the interview with him, I didn't realize he was wearing that very sweatshirt. And he had the receipt. And it proved that he was 500 miles away in Utah and could not have been in Colorado, not in the area at all, not in the neighborhood, to have committed this murder.

8:30and he thinks somehow Christelle's spirit helped save him, exonerate him in this case. Wow. So more and more often with these cases, though, we are able to use surveillance footage or body cam footage, but it's not often that we have so much of the victim before the crime. In the hour we see Christelle's interview with police, when she's reporting that someone is stalking her. She seems to be taking all the right steps to protect herself and her family. Do you think that she would have maybe eventually uncovered the truth that it indeed was her husband behind these threatening text messages? You know, I think she absolutely would have.

9:17She was so smart and it was so frustrating to see her in that footage talking to the detective with everything laid out before him. I mean, she had spreadsheets and color-coded files and mountains of evidence. And he joked that she had done his job for him. And she had, I mean, she did everything. And she had even told her step-mom's sister, I can't even rule out my husband. This is someone used to using the scientific method to solve problems. And she had done that looking at the facts of this case. And we know now, because Dan Krug, whether this was a slip-up or whatever, he actually admits during the course of one of these interviews that she had mentioned to him that he could be the stalker.

10:06And think about that, because it wasn't that long after she revealed that to him that she ended up being murdered. I mean, she was petrified as well. She broke down in tears in a parking lot to her mother once. She was re-upping her shooting skills. She was arming herself. This was all discussed in court when they were outlining witnesses on the stand as well as the prosecution. So to know that she was in fear and literally carrying a gun at the time of her death and just always looking over her shoulder and still died, it was really tragic and infuriating. Dan was aware that she had armed herself when she was attacked and authorities came into that garage.

10:54Her gun was inside her purse. She may have felt a little bit of safety going into that garage. Dan obviously knew the garage. He knew her habits and he was able to to ambush her. And all of that gun training and all that preparation ended up being for nothing because he he got to her first. You mentioned that she had mentioned that she couldn't rule out her own husband. Most people don't say that about, you know, their partner. I'm kind of curious about how Christelle's family felt about Krug. Did they give you any indications to whether or not they liked him or not? They did in the interview.

11:34Her mother, Linda, in particular, didn't really like him from the beginning, and she just had a bad feeling about him. He was very awkward in family gatherings. He at times could be quiet. And I asked them, did you ever just mention it to her that you were concerned about it? They said, no, she's very smart. We wanted to leave that decision up to her as to who the person or partner in life would be. But from the very beginning, it just didn't feel right to them. They said in courts that they were aware that the marriage was disintegrating. And I just think what united them in the weeks running up to Christiel's death was this stalker.

12:18I mean, there was family testimony during trial that at a family birthday party in the weeks before Christiel's murder, Dan was really playing up the stalker angle. He kept looking out the window in case the stalker might be surveilling them or in the vicinity. And I just think that his behavior, looking back now, must anger them so much more seeing that deceit. I want to talk about the footage of Krug's police interrogation. We see the moment, really, where the tables turn on him, where police reveal that Anthony has an alibi. And I want to play a clip from the show. What if I told you that we had already spoken with Anthony and there's no way that he was in town today?

13:12And I have nothing. And I'm terrified to bring my children home.

13:24You're already terrified of him. If it wasn't him, who was it? What gets me in all of this is I covered the Lacey Peterson murder case many years ago. And at the time we did a story about deception and signs of deception. One of them is whisper talking. And you noticed it there. It's in that audio. It is dramatic. He's talking. All of a sudden it just falls off. and you'll you hear him speak in this whisper talk which is which is for these these psychological experts a sign that that he's lying and telling a story um the frustrating part in all of this too is that they had to release dan after this interview even though he was their number one suspect and at that point they were pretty convinced that he is the killer he knew they were on to him.

14:13And that whisper talk just said it all to me. You know, even throughout his police interviews that we saw during the trial, he was always presenting himself as completely harmless and non-threatening. He's very tall, very skinny. He was stooped, slouched on the couch, hunched over, moving gingerly, you know, holding a cup of coffee or water as if it was going to hurt him, just constantly putting out this vibe of I'm harmless, don't look at me. And even there, when he was still protesting his innocence, who could be pretending to be afraid? It was all a facade.

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16:07Welcome back. Well, after a digital forensics expert traced the stalker's messages to Krug's office Wi-Fi and uncovered chilling searches on his phone, like, do people really go unconscious when hit in the head? Police move in to arrest him. It's rare that we see this moment, you know, the hands up, you're under arrest moment, but we actually get it from multiple angles here. We get it from six different angles. This is like a Hollywood movie at this point. And as more and more local law enforcement gets into the body cam technology, we're seeing incredible moments like this unfold before our eyes.

16:50The tragedy, he was out at that supermarket because his daughter was going to be performing in the Nutcracker that night and they wanted to get some flowers. But on the day of the murder, Dan insisted to police that he wanted to be the one who told his three children that their mother was dead. Well, at the time of arrest, you flip the script here, and Detective Martinez, who had such enormous frustration during the course of this investigation and some self-doubt whether he should have acted earlier to pursue Anthony Holland, reach out to him earlier. He finally had a moment where he's looking at him, and he says, basically, hey, you want me to tell the kids that you murdered their mother or someone else?

17:33And it was, I'm paraphrasing there, but it was such a powerful moment there. And I felt good for the detective that he finally got one jab of the sword at this creep. Absolutely. Let's go to the trial. No cameras were allowed in the courtroom until closing arguments. But Sheila, you were there in person for pretty much most of the trial. Mm-hmm. What was Krug's demeanor like? And was there family there to support him through the trial? There was. You know, he his demeanor was very similar to how it was in police interviews and on that footage where he stooped over. He moved slowly, presenting himself as harmless, me sitting there quietly at the defense table.

18:24His older brother was there for much of the trial. His elderly father was one of the last witnesses called, and he and his elderly mother were there for the verdict as it was read. His brother seemed shell-shocked when he addressed the judge. But Chris Steele's family, meanwhile, was there right behind the prosecution every day at the trial, active, engaged, just supporting her every step of the way. The prosecution's biggest hurdle in this case was really the lack of DNA evidence tying Krug to the murder. The murder weapon was also never recovered, and investigators didn't find Priscilla's blood on Krug's clothes or in his car.

19:07That is something you would expect when someone has, you know, a stab wound. So it begs the question, just how is it possible to have no DNA evidence in a case like this where there's clearly a lot of blood? Well, for all the mistakes that he made, perhaps it's blind luck in his case. It is something that, you know, the prosecutors and Sheila knows this very well. They all want a CSI moment in a case like this. You know, the DNA, her DNA found in his car to really lock this down for jurors. But in this case, there just wasn't that. And, you know, that was a cornerstone of the defense, really, that there was no DNA.

19:49And how could that be? I mean, investigators were told that he, by his children, that he was wearing the same clothes that morning that he was when he came after she was murdered. So truly, how did he manage it? But I always wondered. I mean, Krug worked for the Department of Health here in Colorado. Who knows what he had access to? And when you think about it, even though he made a number of really elementary and unbelievable mistakes when it came to digital evidence or emails or phones, he did have a lot of time to plan this over a matter of months as he was carrying out that stalking campaign.

20:31Well, let's talk about the digital evidence. I mean, I don't know when people are going to learn. Your Google searches will become part of the case against you. The Google searches, first off, were incredible, where he was asking about, you know, basically, I'm paraphrasing, what does it take to knock somebody out? And if you strike somebody on the back of the head, which, of course, is what happened to his wife, when they were able to determine that messages had been sent from his company Wi-Fi system, that is as good as a fingerprint. Who else could have done that? Now, the defense tried to say, the person that was stalking him may have been in the building at the time, and that's how this occurred, but they really had him on that.

21:17Also, they were able to determine that there was an iconic picture in the course of this where the alleged stalker had taken a photograph of Dan as he was getting inside a vehicle. Well, their digital expert was able to determine that that had been, that picture had been taken on Krug's phone in selfie mode on a timer. And they were even able to figure out the bumper that was used to hold the phone to take that photograph. It would be laughable if it hadn't involved the loss of a life. I mean, it's just astonishing. He bought a burner phone, but with a gift card that was registered to himself.

21:55He also, in one of the really wow moments of the trial, on October 2nd, when he sent a text, one of the threatening stalker messages to Christelle, she didn't answer. And it was the first stalker message he sent. And when she didn't answer, he clearly was worried that the message wasn't getting through. So he texted his own cell phone, test, and then responded to that text with his cell phone to the burner. Yeah. So, I mean, he absolutely, absolutely kind of condemned himself with that interaction. Clearly. And a jury finds him guilty. He's found guilty of first-degree murder, as well as stalking and impersonation.

22:42Sheila, what was the reaction like in the courtroom when the verdict was read? On Krug's side, his parents, his mom slumped into his dad. A supporter put a hand on her back. They were just clearly in disbelief and bereft. On the other side of the courtroom, people were tearful for different reasons. They later spoke about how they felt this was some semblance of justice for Christio. After he was convicted, we get more fascinating video, and we include this in the hour, of a jailhouse call that Krug makes to his family. We want to play for you now an extended clip of that call that was not in the show.

23:25We are in a digital and monitored age. they never produced a single photograph of me with phones they never produced a single photograph of me buying anything they never produced a single piece of hard evidence just identity theft that's it that's it and we're in a world today where that's enough DNA exoneration doesn't mean because someone can do things with a cell phone

24:20not a single photograph not a single drop of blood Not a single scrap of DNA. Not a single recording.

24:37Identity theft is all it takes to destroy somebody. This almost sounds like an attorney performing closing arguments. It's quite dramatic with all those pauses and such. They don't have that hard physical evidence, but the evidence that was presented was compelling to this jury and I think to the community. You know, you could tell that his brother who got up, Jeremy, who spoke at trial during victim impact statements, you could tell that he was caught off guard, that he still had no idea how to handle this. Because the point he made was that the family hadn't been privy to all the evidence until it was presented at trial, that they were holding on to a glimmer of hope.

25:25That hope had been very quickly shattered once they saw the case that was presented. and his brother also expressed anger at Dan for doing this to his family and putting them through it and talk about driving his elderly parents home as they collapsed against each other in the car. So not only did he put his children through it, now he's putting his parents and extended family through it and continuing to do it is galling. So Dan Krug, he is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on the murder charge and an additional nine and a half years for the stalking and impersonation counts.

26:06And Sheila, you were talking about the victim impact statements at sentencing. And Christelle's sister-in-law also got up and made a victim impact statement. And she talked about what the children will have to deal with. She did. She actually read out statements from the kids themselves who spoke of their grief. And it was not just Christelle's sister-in-law and the children speaking. It was a long line of friends and family members, whether they were school friends of Christelle's or friends she'd met in adult dance classes or cousins, relatives, siblings. Everyone spoke of what a bright light she was, how smart, how quick, how she would amuse them with self-deprecating humor.

26:50And you could see how much Christelle touched so many people's lives and how angry they were that she was so needlessly stolen. Yeah. How's Christelle's family doing? They are such incredible people. Lars, Christelle's dad, is Norwegian. He's from a family of engineers. Christelle followed in that tradition. in that workroom they have at the house where he has these old vintage cars. They used to work on them together. Lars can rebuild an original Corvette carburetor. He's a brilliant guy. He misses her so desperately as he looks around that shop. He can hear her voice. He can see her there. They're trying to continue that tradition with the children, Lars is, and he's desperate and will never let her memory die.

27:47The kids, the oldest is about 16 now. And what they do have around them is a very large and loving extended family. And the crowds who stood up for Chris Steele for victim impact statements were just, I think, the tip of the iceberg. and the judge even acknowledged at sentencing what a pleasure it was despite being an awful, tragic, and bittersweet circumstance to get to know about Christele and her family. So I guess despite this horrific situation, the kids are lucky in that regard to have all of them around her, all the people who turned up at the trial for Christele and the many others out there.