The Setup Murder of Kristil Krug | Post Mortem | Forensic Files

[Music] Welcome back to Postmortem. I'm your host, Ann Marie Green, and today I'm
joined by 48 Hours correspondent Peter Vans and journalist Sheila Flynn. We are discussing the murder of Christ 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. Um, 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 uh this 48
hours episode here on Postmortem. >> Yes. In in honor of the Daily Mail, I'll say hello and welcome Sheila.
>> Is that that's your best British accent? >> Uh, it's pretty good. I lived there for
a while, so I 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, Christile's husband, Dan Krug, requested a welfare
check on his wife, uh who wasn't responding to his text messages or his phone calls. Krug also told police that
there was an alleged stalker that had been threatening them. When police arrived at the couple's home, they found
Christile 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. Here 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 wretching and making all of these
sounds. It was an extraordinary performance and we know now it was a performance and 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. And it was really
interesting to watch him watch that without any reaction as he was on trial for Christile'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 Ace. So, she's seen
people in situations like this many, many times. Um, and we want to play for uh the listeners here some unaired
footage from Peter your interview with her and she talks about when she actually first started to suspect Krug.
>> The car ride from his house to the police department seemed like an eternity and it felt as if
something had switched. I I 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? How what happened? And I turn and I look at him and I get this weird feeling. And
it's a it's a it's a feeling of are you really crying? Are are you really is this happening?
Did you do this? You didn't know. You didn't do this, Heather. You're watching You watched too many 48 hours episodes.
You're watching too much TV. This is This man has lost his wife. Why are you thinking that? But it was it was a gut
instinct. How interesting. But Peter, it's not just a gut instinct. He'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 had
really settled down. Then he started to make this very strange whimpering sound and she felt it was invented that it
just wasn't uh genuine. So, to bring people some of the background that we already know about if you watch the
hour, for months before her death, Christile had been receiving threatening text messages and photos that appeared
to be coming from an exboyfriend, Anthony Holland. Christile brought her concerns to Detective Martinez, who at
the time chose not to contact Anthony. Uh, 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 uh downto-earth individual. There's a sadness about him. Christile uh was somebody that um he
deeply cared for. They'd met in high school, but they were such different people. Christile was this intellect, a
a truly genius level intellect. An engineering future awaited for her. She was very ambitious. she was going to go
to university. And um Anthony on the other hand had no plans. He had no academic interest. These two split up
and it haunted him. He he just felt like a big part of his life was missing. >> Anthony is just very very earnest, very
honest, genuine, softspoken. Uh and he just really loved Christ. And when he describes to me, you know, they
had met, they were both working at J C Penney 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. And you could tell he was really trying to do Christile'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 uh 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. Then Christile, he thanked me for sharing her
story as well as his because it was his great love. >> So seeing as you know she had been his
his great love. Sheila had Anthony actually contacted her over the years. >> He had you know I think in that way
sometimes you reach out with whatifs etc. He 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 rockolid alibi. He he
literally and figuratively had the receipts. >> Yeah. It's it's an incredible twist in
in this story that on the day that Christile was murdered, he'd gotten up and uh he now thinks this voice in his
head was Christile 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 um in Colorado uh not not in
the area at all, not in the neighborhood to have committed this murder. And he thinks somehow Christile's uh spirit um
helped save him, exonerate him in in this case. >> Wow. So more and more often with these
cases though, we are able to use uh surveillance footage or you know body cam footage, but it it's not often that
we have so much of the victim before the crime. In the hour we see Crystal'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. She 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 colorcoded 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 stepmom'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 that was a 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. And think about that cuz it wasn't that long after she revealed that to him that she ended up being
murdered. >> I mean, she was she was petrified as well. She, you know, she broke down in
tears in a parking lot to her mother once. She was, you know, 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 it was really tragic and infuriating. Dan was aware that uh she had armed herself um
when she was attacked and authorities came into that garage. Her 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 her habits and he was able
to uh to ambush her. And all of that gun training and all that preparation uh ended up being for nothing cuz 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 Christile's family felt about Krug. Did they give you any indication as to whether or not they liked him or
not? >> They did in the interview. Uh her 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 um gatherings. He at times could be uh
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. Um we we wanted to leave that decision up to her as to who the person, her partner in life would
be, but from the very beginning, it just didn't feel right to them." >> They said in court that they were aware
that the marriage was disintegrating. Um, and I just think what united them in the weeks running up to Christile's
death was this stalker. I mean, there was family testimony during trial that at a family birthday party in the weeks
before Christile'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 in the vicinity. And I 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 very 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? [Music] And I have nothing and I'm terrified to bring my children
home. >> What are you terrified of? >> If it wasn't him, was it? What gets me in all of this is um I covered the Lacy
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 and all of a
sudden it just falls off and you'll you 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 and 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, um moving gingerly, you know, holding a cup of coffee or water as if
it was going to hurt him. uh 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 it be pretending to be afraid? Uh it was all it was all a
facade. Welcome back. Well, after a digital forensics expert traced the stalker's
messages to Krug's office wifi 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, uh, 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 this is like a Hollywood movie at this at this point. And as more
and more local law enforcement gets into the get into the body cam technology, we're seeing uh incredible moments like
this unfold before our eyes. The 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. Um,
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 uh 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 it and he
says basically, "Hey, you want me to tell the kids that you murdered their mother or someone else?" And it was, I'm
paraphrasing there, but it was it was such a powerful moment there. Uh, and I I felt good for the detective that he
finally got one jab of the sword at this at this creep. >> Absolutely. Um, let's go to the trial.
No cameras were allowed in the courtroom until closing arguments. Uh, but Sheila,
you were there in person for pretty much most of the trial. >> Mhm. >> What was Krug's demeanor like? A, 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, meek, sitting there quietly at the defense table. Um, his 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 Crisil's blood
on Krug's clothes or in his car. That is something you would expect uh when someone has, you know, a stab wound. So,
it 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, um,
there just wasn't that. >> And you know, that was a cornerstone of the defense really, that there was no
DNA. And 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. Well, let's talk about the digital evidence. I mean,
I don't know when people are going to learn like 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 uh
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 wifi system. That is as good as a fingerprint. That who else could have have done that? Now, the
defense tried to say, well, 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. Also, they were able to determine that there was a a iconic
picture in the course of this where the alleged stalker had taken a photograph of Dan as he was getting inside uh a
vehicle. Well, their digital expert was able to determine that that had been that picture had been taken on Krug's
phone at in selfie mode on a timer, and they were even able to figure out the bumper that was 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. He 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 Christile. 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. Um, and a a jury uh finds him guilty. Uh, he's found guilty of
firstdegree murder as well as stalking and impersonation. Sheila, what was the reaction like in the courtroom when the
verdict was read? On Krug's side, his uh 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. You know, they later spoke about how they felt this was some
semblance of justice for Christ. After he was convicted, we get more fascinating video uh and we include this
in the hour of a jail house 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. >> We 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. Not a single photograph, not a single drop of blood,
not a single scrap of DNA. Not a single recording. Identity 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 um to this jury
and uh 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. That 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 gling.
>> Yeah. So Dan Krug, he is sentenced to life in prison um without the possibility of
parole on the murder charge and an additional nine and a half years for the stalking and impersonation counts. And
Sheila, you were talking about the victim impact statements um at at sentencing. And Christile's
sister-in-law also got up and made a victim impact statement and 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 Christile's sister-in-law and the children speaking. It was a long line of
friends and family members. Whether they were school friends of Christ'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. And you could see how much Christile touched so many people's lives
and how angry they were that she was so needlessly stolen. >> Yeah. Um, how's Christelle's family
doing? They are um they're such incredible people. Um Lars um Christile's dad is Norwegian. Uh he's
from a family of engineers. Christile followed in that tradition. In that uh workroom they have at the house where he
has these 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 that uh shop. He can hear her voice. He can
see her there. Um they're trying to continue that tradition with the children. Lars is and he's desperate uh
and and will never let her memory die. >> The kids, the oldest is about 16 now. And you know what they do have around
them is a very large and loving extended family. And the crowds who stood up for
Christile 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 Christile and her family. So I 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 Christile and the many others out there.
>> Absolutely. It's a community that they will need moving forward and it, you know, it makes me feel at least a little
good to know that they are well loved and well protected and supported. Um, well, Peter, Sheila, this has been a
great conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks, Anmarie. >> Thank you. >> If you like this episode, please rate
and review us on Apple Podcast or on Spotify. [Music]

Join "48 Hours" correspondents Anne-Marie Green and Peter Van Sant, who speak with journalist Sheila Flynn about the murder of Kristil Krug, a Colorado mother of three. They explore the threatening messages Kristil received for months before her death by an alleged stalker.

Crime. Social justice. Impact. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

Christ Krug was murdered by her husband, Dan, who was later convicted based on digital evidence and suspicious behavior.

Key points

The Emotional Crime Scene. Witnesses describe the emotional turmoil at the crime scene, particularly Krug's behavior.
Christile's Precautions. Christile took extensive measures to protect herself from a stalker, but it wasn't enough.
Digital Evidence Uncovered. Digital forensics reveal chilling searches on Krug's phone leading to his arrest.
The Shocking Verdict. Krug is found guilty of first-degree murder, leaving his family in disbelief.
The Impact of Identity Theft. Identity theft can ruin lives without any physical evidence. "That's it."
Victim Impact Statements. Family and friends share their grief and memories of Christile, highlighting her vibrant life.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It was an extraordinary performance and we know now it was a performance.

Peter's reaction to Krug's behavior at the crime scene.

2:36WatchDec 6, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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