Mother-of-three Kristil Krug still had her concealed weapon in her purse – which she’d recently obtained in fear of the man who’d been stalking her for months – when she was fatally bludgeoned and stabbed in the heart in the garage of her family home, a Colorado court heard Friday.
The man stalking her, prosecutors allege, was the defendant now sitting charged with with her murder: Her husband of 17 years, Daniel Krug.
A jury of nine men and six women heard opening arguments on Friday in the trial of Krug, 44, on charges of first-degree murder, stalking and criminal impersonation in the December 2023 death of his wife.
‘Daniel Krug, over the course of two months prior to his wife’s murder, posed as her distant ex-boyfriend,’ Senior Deputy District Attorney Kate Armstrong said. ‘He utilized a numb of different phone numbers as well as email accounts to terrorize her, as well as her children, by claiming to be actively surveilling her as well as threatening Kristil, as well as himself.’
A tall and rail-thin Krug, wearing a brown jacket, glasses and neatly trimmed white hair, occasionally took notes during proceedings. He has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors argued that the marriage between Kristil and Krug was crumbling; she had moved her belongings out of the bedroom they shared and was sleeping in her son’s room.
‘She had told her family that she had no love left for the defendant and, while initially she intended to remain within the marriage until the child turned 18, by October of 2023, it was time for a bolt,’ the prosecutor said.
That’s around the same time Kristil began receiving messages claiming to be from a boyfriend she’d broken up with in 2000.
Krug knew that this man, Jack Anthony Holland, had made several attempts to reconnect with Kristil in the intervening years, including during their marriage, according to the prosecution.
The last time Kristil had heard from Holland was in 2016, and they’d mutually blocked each other on Facebook, the prosecutor said.
Colorado mother of three Kristil Krug, 40, was found bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the garage of her home in December 2023
The victim’s husband, Daniel Krug, now 44, is charged with first-degree murder, stalking and criminal impersonation in her death; prosecutors alleged he posed as her ex-boyfriend and executed a stalking campaign before murdering Kristil and attempting to deflect blame
But messages started coming through beginning on October 2, 2023 by text and email that purported to be from Holland – including some that noted details, like Kristil’s expired vehicle tags, implying she and her family were being watched.
There was an emailed picture of Krug at his workplace. One message referred to a dentist’s appointment Kristil had recently attended.
Kristil didn’t initially tell her husband – since the parents were ‘essentially cohabitating and coparenting’ but not romantically involved, the prosecution said – but by November, a terrified Kristil had told Krug and involved police.
Police had completed wellness checks on both based on frightening information and had even conducted undercover operations to catch the ‘stalker,’ the prosecutor said.
Also at the beginning of November, Kristil began receiving an array of unsolicited ‘d*** pics’ – and traced them to an ad placed in her name, and listing her phone number, on a hookup site.
Investigators would later discover the ad had been placed by a fake Holland gmail account ‘and on the wifi at the defendant’s workplace at the Colorado Department of Public Health,’ Armstrong said.
Kristil was returning home from the morning school run when her husband, ‘lying in wait for her … assaulted her from behind, hitting her several times in the back of the head with a blunt object before stabbing her in the heart,’ the prosecution argues
Prosecutors now say that Krug had sent many of the text messages from a ‘track phone,’ or burner phone, which he’d purchased at a local Walgreens with a gift card registered to himself.
When Kristil didn’t immediately answer the first text he sent posing as Holland, the prosecutor said, Krug texted his own cell phone number ‘test’ and ‘shortly after he responded to the track phone: “yeah,”‘ she said.
The prosecution argued that Krug made google searches on his phone the day before the murder that were ‘all related to head trauma’ – including ‘when is a head injury cause for concern,’ what happens when you’re knocked unconscious’ and ‘how hard for head trauma to go unconscious.’
On the morning of December 16, Kristil dropped two of her children at school before returning home and pulling her car into the garage – but she ‘never made it back into the house,’ Armstrong said.
Instead, she argued that Krug had disabled three of the four security cameras in the home and ‘was lying in wait for her.’
‘When she walked by him, he assaulted her from behind, hitting her several times in the back of the head with a blunt object before stabbing her in the heart,’ the prosecutor said.
Krug also scheduled delayed messages to himself from Kristil’s phone after killing her to help with an alibi, the prosecution alleged.
Kristil’s body was discovered after Krug called police on December 16 for a wellness check, saying he hadn’t heard from her in three hours.
The discovery of Kristil’s body prompted authorities to immediately track down Holland, who had a solid alibi and was an eight-hour drive away in Utah, the state where he now resides. He also had alibis for the times when the messages had been sent, Armstrong said.
When presented with this information during interviews after his wife’s murder, Krug responded: ‘If it’s not him, I have no other suggestion … maybe she was having an affair. Maybe she was having multiple affairs,’ Armstrong said Friday.
‘And, when pressed a little further, the defendant rolls his eyes and says: “It’s always the husband.”‘
After seeing evidence like Krug’s video interview and hearing from witnesses during the trial, including the ex involved, jurors will be left with ‘no reasonable doubt that he stalked his wife and children for months before planning and deliberately and violently taking her life on December 14, 2023,’ Armstrong said.
Krug’s defense, meanwhile, painted a picture of a police department that had ignored the concerns of Kristil and her husband.
‘Incompetence, sloppiness, arrogance, abandonment and lack of motivation is why we’re here,’ Krug’s lawyer said Friday. ‘It was not what Kristil or Mr Krug wanted from them.’
The defense told the court that the police department was celebrating a holiday party when Kristil’s body was found and highlighted issues with investigative processes and search warrants, repeating and dwelling heavily on the five above accusations.
An autopsy conducted the day after Kristil’s death found preliminarily that she’d suffered ‘wo or more blunt-force trauma wounds on the back of her head and one stab wound on the left side of her chest.’
Krug was arrested two days after his wife’s murder.
He was conspicuously left out of Kristil’s obituary, which remembered the Colorado native ‘for the joy she brought into our lives, the beauty she shared through her art, and the intellect she brought to the scientific community.’
A GoFundMe was set up in December 2023 for the Krug children which had raised $64,226 as of Friday.
Another crowdfunding page, which had been set up by Krug’s family and supporters after his arrest for ‘mounting a vigorous defense, countering these terrible accusations’ – which had raised $6,225 by May 2024 – appeared to have vanished.
