In December 2023, Daniel Krug, a father-of-three, was found guilty by a Colorado jury for the murder of his wife and the prolonged stalking campaign leading up to the tragic event.
Krug, 44, had pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, criminal impersonation and stalking in connection with the death of his wife Kristil, 43.
She was found bludgeoned and fatally stabbed in the garage of the family home in Broomfield, Colorado on December 14, 2023.
Prior to the murder, the victim had been receiving distressing and explicit messages through email and text for over two months. These messages were believed to be from an old ex-boyfriend attempting to reconnect sporadically over the years.
During the trial, lasting eight days, prosecutors revealed that the messages actually originated from Krug, who had fabricated emails using the name of the ex-boyfriend, Jack Anthony Holland from Utah. Investigations determined that the emails were sent from Krug’s workplace Wi-Fi and the stalking texts were linked to a phone bought with a gift card registered under Krug’s name.
Their marriage was deteriorating – with Kristil planning on divorcing her husband.
His desperation drove him into a murderous rage, prosecutors said, that culminated in unimaginable violence.
Kristil Grimsrud Krug was found bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the garage of her family home in 2023
Broomfield father Daniel Krug was today found guilty of his wife’s murder
As the verdict was read, Kristil’s family members – who sat in the front row behind the prosecution for the duration of the trial – nodded their assent and patted each other.
Her mother cried quiet tears, while Kristil’s stepmom buried her head in the victim’s father’s shoulder as he hugged her.
A quiet sob rose up from Krug’s family, who were sitting behind him in court. His father, who testified earlier in the week for the defense, put his arm around his wife as she held her hand over her mouth.
Krug, wearing a gray suit and dark tie, was silent. He briefly stood and held out his hands for court officers as they handcuffed him.
His parents stared as he was soon led out of the courtroom – and he could be heard crying behind the doors as he left, a witness told DailyMail.com.
It was a bittersweet but vindicating end for Kristil’s relatives, who’d been clamoring for justice since the arrest of her husband two days after her murder in December 2023.
Family members hugged prosecutors, who were also shedding tears, as they exited the courthouse on Thursday. Krug will be sentenced on Friday.
The court heard during the trial how Kristil’s final months were filled with anxiety and fear.
She’d started receiving texts from a sender she believed to be Holland at the beginning of October of that year – around the same time she was planning to end her marriage. Kristil and her husband had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for more than a year and were in discussions about splitting assets and custody.
Kristil’s mother and brother testified that the engineer had been separating her finances, moving up her timeline for divorce from Krug and ‘couldn’t stand the man.’
By Halloween, however, she was more concerned for her family’s well-being than any marital separation. She called police after contact from the ‘stalker’ began to escalate – with messages including photos and details indicating that she and her family were being watched.
One email included a picture of Krug at his workplace and threats to his safety – a photo that forensics experts testified had been taken in selfie mode by Krug himself.
Kristil was found stabbed to death in the garage of her home in Broomfield, Colorado
On November 2, 2023, Kristil presented police with a spreadsheet and dossier documenting the ‘stalking,’ including possible numbers, addresses and license plate information for the man she believed was behind the campaign.
Nobody ever contacted Holland, a Texas Roadhouse server living and working in Utah while blissfully unaware that Kristil was being terrorized in his name.
In addition to the messages, jurors heard how one of the emails Krug created on the workplace wifi was also used to set up an ad on a hookup site. The poster, pretending to be Kristil, invited strange men to ‘run a train’ on her and send pictures of their genitalia to her phone number – which was included in the listing.
Kristil bought a new gun, practiced shooting and concealed the firearm in a specially-made purse she bought from her aunt’s store.
Despite their failure to contact Holland, investigators drew up an arrest warrant for the Utah man, conducted counter-surveillance on Kristil and her husband and searched her car for bugs.
But she complained to family that she felt ‘abandoned’ by police, jurors heard, and continued living in fear as the ‘stalker’ mystery deepened.
And by December, she was beginning to suspect her spouse.
‘She’s figuring it out. She is telling family members: “I can’t even rule out my husband,”’ Senior Deputy District Attorney Kate Armstrong told the court during closing arguments.
Kristil even confronted Krug, who denied it, Armstrong said.
But by that point, the prosecutor argued, Krug ‘knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s going to be in not only legal trouble for stalking …but he’s also going to be exposed to his friends and his family and everyone he’s trying to present this picture [to] as this great family man and great father.
‘At this point in time, all hope of rekindling the relationship is over …. His ruse has not worked,’ she said.
‘Then the only thing left to do was to end Kristil’s life, both to silence her and to punish her for not wanting to be with him.’
Prosecutors argued that, on the morning of December 14, Krug lay in wait for his wife after she dropped two of their children at school.
They told jurors that he caught her by surprise in the garage, turning off security cameras before knocking her unconscious and stabbing her in the chest.
Then he set up delayed messages to himself from her phone, they argued, to help build an alibi and make it seem like she was alive when he’d already killed her.
After that, he stopped at a local coffee shop, knowing security cameras would catch him, and corrected a barista about his order before going to work.
He told investigators he’d been late arriving at his job that day because he’d been suffering from diarrhea.
After getting to work, Krug called police for a wellness check because he said he’d been able to reach his wife for several hours. He also called her mother, who arrived as a responding officer attempted CPR on Kristil upon discovering her unconscious in a pool of blood, her car keys and purse – which held her recently purchased 9mm – still beside her.
Within hours, Utah police had approached a surprised Holland at his home, an eight-hour drive from the scene of the crime. He’d been buying a sweatshirt at Kohl’s at the time of her murder, Holland testified during the trial.
Broomfield detectives confronted Krug with this damning alibi information in the immediate aftermath of Kristil’s death. As he sobbed and issued worried exclamations about his three children, they posited their theory that Krug, in fact, had been the one behind his wife’s stalking.
Holland, they told him, had been ruled out. He could not have killed Kristil.
‘There must be somebody else,’ Krug protested.
But as it became clear that he was emerging as Suspect Number One, Krug threw his head back and rolled his eyes.
‘It has to be the husband,’ he sighed.
He was arrested and charged two days after her murder.
During the trial, the defense argued that investigators had been ‘lazy, incompetent and arrogant.’ They pointed to search warrant delays and lack of follow-up on Holland.
They also argued out that no physical evidence like blood or DNA tied Krug to the crime.
But the prosecution countered those allegations during closing arguments, describing Krug to jurors as ‘methodical’ and ‘analytical.’
‘Do you think this man, who’s been planning and stalking his wife for months, is going to be so sloppy [at] the crime scene?’ Chief Deputy District Attorney Stephanie Fritts said Wednesday.
‘He was too prepared to do that.’
Prosecutors argued that gaps in Krug’s dashcam footage and December 14 timeline gave him ample opportunity to dispose of the weapon and any other bloody evidence.
