He's Right Behind You

I'm John Quiñonez.

Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old soldier, vanishes while on duty at an Army base in Texas.

Her family demands answers.

How can she go missing on a military base?

That's too ridiculous.

The search goes on for months.

Where is Vanessa?

And a dark story starts to unfold.

She told her family that she was being sexually harassed and wasn't reporting it out of fear of retribution and retaliation.

What investigators finally uncover is horrifying.

Find out how one soldier, a beloved sister and daughter, ignited a movement and sparked a reckoning in the U.S.

military.

Listen to Vanished: What happened to Vanessa, a new series from ABC Audio in 2020.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

I don't think this is an emergency, but this feels really weird.

My wife isn't responding to phone calls.

We've had threats against us.

Can I get a maybe a wellness check at the house?

We do offer checks all the time.

Most of the time, it's uneventful.

What's your wife's name?

Chris Field.

K-R-I-S-T-I-L.

We have both been targeted by a stalker.

The report from Dan was, we have been involved in this stalking case.

Threats have been made against my life

and threatening to like kidnap her, which is why I'm

nervous that she's not answering me.

I have not been able to reach my wife for, I think you said, two or three hours.

And I just want somebody to go check on her and make sure she's okay.

We'll also send officers over to the house just to check the house and see what's going on.

The goal was to make contact with Christie and to make sure she was safe.

Officer O'Hara went over to the house.

Very kind of textbook response.

He parks down the street, walks up.

He came across one of the neighbors

who was at the front door of Christie's house to check on her.

Hello.

Oh,

I was just on their neighbor and they called me like, can you go see if she'll answer this oh yeah he sent us as well so

just next door

okay all right well you got this all righty man appreciate it he basically told her he would take over from there

he had knocked on the door couldn't see anything obvious through the windows

goes around to the garage the windows are at the very tippy top of the garage you can't see into them officer o'her decided to pull his vehicle up into the driveway.

He used his patrol car to climb up on so he could see in the garage.

And saw Christie laying there in what he appeared to be blood.

151, send medical, and 110.

I need a fourth sentry.

I got a female down in the garage.

So when he finds her, he immediately runs around to the front door.

He kicks open the front door.

Rotten police!

Road tail police!

You can see there's a good amount of blood that's kind of on the wall behind her, some blood coming from her head that you can see.

And he immediately starts trying to conduct life-saving measures.

Is he thinking that maybe there was an accident?

Initially, he thought, well, I'm not sure if this is a fall or what, because it's near the stairs and there's like a little concrete ledge.

Female has some sort of head wound.

She is warm.

I'm on CPR.

He went above and beyond to try to save her.

Yes, and that is priorities, you know, one, two, and three.

Officer O'Hare refuses to give up with chest compression after chest compression, nearly 500 of them.

151, let me know when the next unit is closed and I'll open the garage door, particularly medical.

Carbony, I have three units coming your way.

What do you remember about the morning of December 14th?

Dan said, I can't find Christie.

I thought, oh, she's probably just not answering your phone.

Let me go over and I'll find out what's going on.

Linda gets to her daughter's home just as Officer O'Hare is letting the medics into the garage.

Garage is open now.

Hello, man.

I need you to stay out, please.

Officer O'Hare does kind of direct her away at that point in time.

I need you to come over here for a minute, okay, so we can work.

I can.

She's okay.

What are you thinking has happened?

You know, you go to a place, it's like, what is happening?

This can't be happening.

Okay, okay.

I need to tag out, man.

She's got a head wound.

I don't know if it's from falling or something else, but probably falling, but I don't know, man.

I'll be right back, guys i'm just going to the car here hey man just run interference for me i don't know if that's a relative or neighbor or what any of them coming in slow down we're gonna clear the house medics are in the garage brookfield police anybody inside make yourself known brokefield police anybody inside

brookfield police third and final warning anybody inside

I got a couple rooms to the left over here.

Only knowing you're coming around.

The RP said there was a stalker threatening kidnapping, so just heads up on that.

Clear here, coming out.

Brookfield Police!

They do a quick clearance of the house to ensure that nobody else was in the home.

You go one way, I got the other.

I'm going straight.

Another one on the left.

Clear here.

No real sign of anything.

CPR being done in the garage.

He's got a good head wound.

I think it's from falling down, but I'm going to reevaluate that right now.

They started to realize that something was off, that

there was foul play.

Guys, you see anything other than a fall type of wound?

That's That's a stab wound in the chest.

Damn it.

Paramedics unfortunately locate the stab wound to Christie's chest.

And it was catastrophic head trauma to the back of her head.

So you have a visible stab wound, you guys?

Yes.

They do declare her time of death shortly afterwards, having seen no signs of life.

Once you start to look at this and you think this is a homicide, there's an assailant out there.

Yes, let Henry know that.

When we do have a homicide, everybody who was here kind of sprang into action right away.

I am a victim advocate with the Broomfield Police Department.

We're on scene with victims that are dealing with the worst day of their life.

Oh my God.

So we were directed towards Chris Dee's family.

This can't be true, Kenneth.

Can it be true?

How did you even wrap your mind around it?

Just a lot of denying, like, this can't be happening.

This can't be happening.

You just go completely numb.

There aren't words to describe it.

If he's in charge, you'll be indoctrinated.

We'll pretend to know what happened.

We hear a very,

very large, very loud scream coming from up the street.

Hey, family's here.

Tell them to park on the side.

And we see a man running down the street.

It ducks into the first level of crime seam tape and runs towards the house and is yelling, that's my house, that's my house.

Hey, stay back, stay back, stay back, stay back.

This is my house.

And just runs into the arms of one of Christie's family.

And we realize that that was Dan, that that was her husband.

This girl's mess for the husband.

They kind of embraced him in a hug.

And then Detective Wait started speaking with Dan.

I was tasked with making sure Dan was okay.

He

had gone weak in the knees, he couldn't stand anymore.

Dan is almost hurtled over with his hands on his stomach, bent over.

So I placed my hand on his back and his shoulder just so he knew I was there, that somebody was there.

This man right now has just lost his everything.

He's lost his wife, he's lost the mother to his children, and now he has to do everything.

And that was...

That was heavy.

This doesn't happen in Broomfield.

My first priority was, let's get this person.

Police are jumping into action, trying to figure out who'd want to kill this wife and mom of three.

Let's huddle up here for a second, figure out what we got.

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The neighborhood, usually quiet, is suddenly startled as police swarm the area.

And I immediately saw her at the base of the stairs.

It's just minutes after Christie Krug's body has been found in her garage.

Home security video and police body cameras capture the action.

Did you check your ring footage?

She had a stab wound in her chest.

Christie Krug is dead.

We were on high alert.

We had just kind of wrapped up our holiday party.

Everybody had ran back to their desks and were grabbing their radios and we're heading out.

Let's huddle up here for a second and figure out what we got.

Any more photos?

Yep.

I got hang out for just a minute.

So the response is pretty much everybody, all hands, on deck.

Okay, so you went all the way across the street.

Is that far enough?

Alright, let's go see if we look.

The next

thing we as we walked into the house was there's just not a lot of

disarray.

There's nothing nothing that would jump out to you as oh, a crime happening in here.

No struggle.

Typically, if there's an intruder, there's signs of that.

Some drawers being left open, things overturned, kind of a mess.

There wasn't anything

like overtly unusual in here.

Now they looked ransacked, looking like that.

Yes.

There wasn't anything ordinary until you got into the garage where Christie's body was.

Do you see that blood?

Yeah.

When someone is killed in our city, we're gonna drop everything and do whatever we need to do to figure out what happened.

That green light skeets probably back.

Broomfield is a beautiful city just outside of Denver here in Colorado.

You can have the downtown area as well as escape to the mountains.

I like to call it like a little big town.

Once people find their place in this town, they stay.

Lots of development in the last few years.

We have just under 80,000 people who live in Broomfield.

When you look at our crime stats, very low crime.

So the Krugs lived in Anthem neighborhood, which is a highly hot after neighborhood.

Pretty quiet, I would say.

We don't probably respond to a lot of calls there.

Christiel's dad, Lars, immigrated from Norway back in the 70s, moving to Colorado for a job in the aerospace industry.

He meets and marries Linda, who worked in IT at the time.

What was life like for you those early days of raising a family here?

We started out very modestly in a mobile home not far from here.

You know,

Crystal hated that idea.

She was born in a mobile home.

Yeah.

She hated that narrative.

No middle name, just Crystal?

Yeah.

It's a Norwegian name and such a unique name anyway.

So everyone's going to know who Christie is.

She doesn't need a middle name.

Christie's parents split up when she and her brother were young, but they're on good terms.

So she continues to spend time with her dad, even helping him restore his classic cars.

I'd go drag racing, her and her brother would be my pit crew.

We had a lot of fun with that.

So it was clear that she had maybe an engineer's type mind early on.

But she also had a very artistic mind as well.

She loved to paint and dance, of course.

What were her hopes and dreams?

She had a big interest in chemistry and biology.

And then, of course, the dance side and the artistic side would kick in, and then he'd have a talk with her about, well, that's not really going to make you very much money.

So, you know, think about that.

Practical side.

Look at the practical side.

So she did both.

Christie got her degree in chemical engineering.

And along the way, she met Dan Krug.

What was it that connected them?

Well, she was excited about the relationship.

She thought she found someone that was compatible intellectually.

It was that kind of relationship where they did everything together.

After seven years of dating, they tied the knot.

So was this boxed away for the longest time?

Yeah, it's been boxed away since their wedding, which was in 2007.

So we went looking for her wedding dress and we tried on so many.

This one is just so gorgeous.

It's in satin.

You fell in love with this.

Oh, yeah.

She did.

Beautiful.

She was just so happy.

She tried to stay within a budget, but she saw this one and I saw this one and got to tears about it.

So I said, you know what, I'll just pay for it.

Christie and Dan appeared to be a very successful couple.

She was a global project manager.

She was born to be a mother and an engineer.

She could do everything, and she was an extraordinary parent.

Dan Krug worked for the state of Colorado.

He was a budget finance type of guy for them, pretty high up.

Dan and Chris Steele settled in this tidy suburban neighborhood outside Denver with their three children.

The picture of happiness.

Then there was the first hint of trouble when Dan says he spotted an intruder running from their garage.

Hi there, my name is Dan Cruz.

I'm reporting a trespasser on my property.

Okay, I'll throw it ahead over there, okay?

Okay, thank you.

It was just three months before Chris Steele's murder, September 2023.

Hey, how's it going?

Yeah, definitely.

I'm officially Johnsy.

I'm Dan.

Nice to meet you.

His garage door was open and he saw an individual, which he could not provide a lot of detail about, running from the garage.

I think it was a guy, but it was so fast.

Blue jeans, ray shirt.

run out,

jump over my gate, and take off that way.

Got it.

Break-ins are somewhat common around that area and when people leave their garages open, but usually tools and valuables that are kind of visible are what's taken.

Everything seems to be there

except asparagus.

Dan says he was especially concerned about the intruder because his kids were just a few feet away in the house, on the other side of the door to the garage.

I cared less about following him than getting inside and checking on my kids.

Yeah, absolutely.

My daughter is adamant.

No one came in the house.

Okay.

She never heard the garage door open.

She was in the living room right next to it.

We kind of went over

this area, yeah.

Okay.

I went that way.

So, yeah, if anything else comes up missing, anything weird, somebody coming up and trying the door, anything like that, just give us a call.

Okay.

Okay.

The patrol officers that took that report kind of did an area canvas, but couldn't find anybody.

Then a few days later, Chris Steele gets an unnerving blast from her past.

Chris Steele begins receiving text messages in 2023.

The person identifies themselves as Anthony Holland.

The initial text message starts off innocent enough.

And it said, hey, this is Anthony.

I come to Boulder every few weeks.

Do you want to hook up?

And the only Anthony she knew of was Jack Anthony Holland.

Chris Dale met Anthony when she was in high school.

Anthony and Chris Dale met while working at the JCPenneys.

Tell me about Anthony Holland.

He was a very nice guy.

He was fun.

We liked him.

Everybody liked Anthony.

They went to parties and hung out together.

For Halloween, the two dressed as Raggedy Ann and Andy.

But the relationship didn't last for more than a year, probably.

Well, he had dropped out of of high school.

She was headed to college.

It sounds like they were on different paths.

Well, exactly.

Their life goals and ambitions were two completely different tracks.

Anthony had tried to contact Christie a number of times over the years to kind of rekindle their romance.

Every time she was very kind, but also rejected him.

Christie told Anthony that she was happily married, that she had children, and she wasn't really interested, and so they stopped communicating.

But now, seven years later, it seems Anthony may have returned.

And soon, a second message.

You should say yes when I offer pity.

Saw your pics.

You got fed.

You should kill yourself.

Anthony had never been violent.

He'd never been lewd or threatening.

And so this really was different than all of those times.

It went from a minor kind of annoyance to pretty serious fear and alarm as things continued.

That's when she receives the photo.

He was right around the corner.

And she's worried about her safety and her husband's safety, her kids' safety.

This is a little obsessively strange.

Halloween 2023.

Kids everywhere are trigger-treating.

Christie Krug's text messages have been run of the mill for three weeks.

Then she gets another disturbing one, upping the stakes.

It refers to her husband and also has an attached photo of Dan Krug.

This your husband?

Drives like slow old lady.

He needs to drive safe.

That picture signified to Christie

this person is actively following not only me, but my family.

And that's where you really see her level of concern and alert raising.

Now it appears that her ex-boyfriend Anthony is actually stalking her in person and this latest message is even darker.

Don't want a clear rubber hose in his tailpipe.

That sounds like a threat and it's also something that she had already noticed had been in her car.

A month earlier, Christie found clear plastic tubing sticking out of her car from a hole in the trunk.

She says like initially I didn't think anything that much of this, but now I'm concerned that this was like an attempt to cause harm to me or my family.

While one end stuck inside the car, the other apparently had been inserted into her tailpipe.

But she found it had like kind of been charred a little bit probably by the exhaust.

She went to the Mazda dealer.

My name is Jordan.

I'm a service advisor here at Silter Har Mazda.

I was always excited to see her name on the schedule.

She was always really nice and kind and patient.

Good morning and thank you for bringing your Mazda in for its 5K service and tire replacement.

This is the mechanics routine video inspection of Christile's car from that day.

Nothing concerning today in terms of wear.

Just looks about normal and everything's looking good there.

When my technician was doing his inspection of the car, we noticed that the plug underneath was missing.

So there's just a big hole.

You don't want gunk getting up there, so we're gonna want to replace that.

That's when Christie asks about that tubing.

The plug hole would have been in this general area where the spare tire swoops down and she described

hosing like this in the hole sticking out of the bottom of the car.

Well she wanted to know if it was normal for a car to have any tubing like this going in or out of it.

Which no, it should not have any tubing going in or out of the car.

She seemed just a little frazzled and scared.

Did you think that this was potentially a dangerous situation?

Yes, we were really concerned like somebody was trying to pump carbon monoxide into her car.

When I read the story of what happened, it just kind of brought it all back.

Just didn't feel good.

It is very disturbing.

Very disturbing.

And then three days later, she gets yet another strange email.

The stalker mentioned that her registration was expired.

And so that really threw her into a tailspin.

I mean, to her, he was right around the corner endangering her family.

Christie also gets this photo of a shirtless man with another message.

Are you interested?

The impression is that the person knows a lot about her whereabouts.

She said,

I need to let you know I'm...

I'm being stalked.

I'm getting emails from Anthony.

He's threatening me with things.

He's saying just bizarre things.

Did this sound like the Anthony that you knew?

Holy cow,

what the heck happened to Anthony here?

The guy went off the rails.

It's around this time that Christie contacts police.

That call is captured on the officer's body camera.

Hi, this is Officer King.

How can I help you tonight?

I have

an ex

from a very long time ago.

I have received numerous text messages.

And then today I got an email threatening against both me and my family.

My My question for you is, is there a course of action to possibly take that could potentially safeguard me from this individual?

You can always go and apply for a civil protection order.

Have never even seen him.

It's just,

this is a little obsessively strange.

She told me she'd hired a private investigator to find out where Anthony was.

There was no record of him being in Colorado.

Not knowing where Anthony is only adds to Christie's paranoia.

So, Dan installs security cameras in the house and both buy dash cams for their cars in case he's following them while they're driving.

And now,

something more bizarre.

She soon starts getting messages from a flood of men with really sort of intense responses to what they thought was a post online offering to have sex with her and really sort of depressing stuff.

That had to to be very disturbing.

Very disturbing.

She was just beside herself.

Ultimately, she was able to locate this ad that had been placed that did include her phone number.

It was asking for men to send photographs of their genitalia.

And it was soliciting multiple sex partners to be with Christie at the same time.

It's time now for a full-out police investigation.

She wanted the stalking to stop.

This is exhausting.

It's a lot and it has definitely made me like hair going everywhere I go.

She was terrified, absolutely terrified.

I need to report threatening emails and phone calls from a stalking ex.

I reached out to Christie and arranged an interview with her.

She agreed to come in and meet with the police because these messages are still continuing.

Thank you.

And Christie met with me for the first time.

She was vibrant, full of character, but also very direct and to the point.

It has definitely made me like paranoid everywhere I go, unfortunately.

No, I can completely understand that.

Yeah.

And I keep trying to remind myself this is intending to be terrorizing.

This is intending to scare me.

So like I'm like, okay, take it a bit more.

The intention to make your life miserable and cause disruption and some sort of emotional turmoil is exactly what he's going for.

The problem is there's not enough evidence connecting Anthony to those messages.

So police have got to tread lightly.

If I get involved too early and

start trying to be like, hey, knock it off, this isn't okay.

It usually throws fuel on the fire and kind of emboldens.

Because look at me.

This cop.

I'm getting no consequence.

Right.

This cop came to me and I have no consequence.

He just told me to knock it off.

Like, whoop'd you do, you know?

Like.

Yeah.

You'll see how this escalates without me responding or saying anything.

You'll see in, even in the timeline and the order of things, like this is not someone who's thinking at all.

It's one of those things who are just like, I'm not dealing with somebody who's who can ever be reasoned with.

She first and foremost wanted the stalking and the behavior and the contact to stop.

So if that's civil protection order, if that is criminal charges, I don't care.

Like, stop this.

And don't ever keep thinking that you're going to contact me again in another six years from now then the ever-organized engineer surprises detective martinez with her own fully detailed spreadsheet

so i have to wait a bit

this makes it so much simpler okay i did a timeline for you okay and in this timeline we dated summer of 99 okay very briefly she really had details of what had gone on kind of came to be referred to as the stalker log which was a comprehensive document of every contact she received from the stalker.

That spreadsheet is just so organized and meticulous.

It really gives you a sense of who Chris Steele was as a person.

Chris Steele also explained to him all of the background of her relationship with Anthony, who he was and kind of who he had been previously in her life.

I was going to college.

I was like on an engineering track.

There was just totally different lifestyle choices.

We did, we argued, but never like in a violent way.

It was just, he was super, super emotional.

So anyways, I broke it off with him

and we ended fairly amicably.

Anthony had reached out to her several times in the 20 years since they broke up over both email and Facebook.

Usually it's just like light, easy, like what's going on.

Yeah, like trying to like, yeah, just kind of start a conversation.

She made it clear she wasn't interested.

I'm married, happily married with children.

You need to stop.

And he got like real emotional, real hurt.

It wasn't angry, but it was hurt and then and then blocked me.

With these new texts and emails flooding in, Christie can't figure out how she was found after all this time.

I shut down Facebook entirely before the pandemic.

So like there was no way to get a hold of me on any kind of old email address or old way-in.

She wanted an order of protection filed to keep Anthony away from her.

Why wasn't that done?

Temporary protection order was what she was going to seek, which would require him to be served with paperwork in person.

Because I don't have an address, I can't submit that civil protection order, unfortunately.

For him?

Yes.

And there are tons of addresses.

He moves everywhere and between like three different states.

Christiel took great ownership and her personal protection.

And then like locking doors everywhere and being super hyper vigilant of everything that's around.

I do have weapons in my home.

I am intending to to register for a course here to relearn.

It's been a long time since I've shot my guns, but to relearn and get familiarized with my handgun.

How much did the kids know what was going on?

Were they aware that she was getting these stalking messages?

So she was telling them all about what they needed to do if an intruder came in.

I mean it was

awful.

I want them to also know that they can stand up for themselves in situations that might be threatening and that I have a handle on it and that they don't need to worry.

So I think there's something there that they're like, my oldest said, she's like, I'm glad that you told me something.

She's like, because this is making me, she's like, it was making me feel worse when we've just heard you guys talking in hushed tones.

With Christie struggling with anxiety, a victim's advocate connects her to a support group and counseling.

I think a lot of this is the

trying intentionally to scare me as opposed to actually trying to approach me.

But my fear is when does that switch happen where he suddenly gets emboldened because I'm not responding.

Her fears seem to be realized as the messages now turn into direct threats.

I'll get rid of him and then we can be together.

Give me the signal and he won't come home.

Christians carrying a firearm.

Tell me about that.

I think it made her feel safer.

Yeah.

And, you know, that she had some measure of control in that whole out-of-control situation.

She throws herself into firearm training and then turns to a relative who sells concealed carried purses for help.

So when she came to you, what was she looking for?

She was looking for a purse to conceal her firearm that Lars, her dad, had given her.

She told you she was very nervous.

She was really rattled when she got there.

Usually, Christie is bubbly and, you know, just lively and, you know, loves life, but she knew she was in trouble.

She chose this bag.

Yeah, this is the purse that she chose.

It looks very unassuming.

I would never know what you know.

That's what concealed carry purses are supposed to be discreet.

Nobody, yeah, you don't want people to know that you are carrying, you know, a firearm.

When you're, you know, you're walking and you look at something suspicious, you're supposed to unzip the zipper and put your hand

in this pocket and just look around in your surrounding.

And if you see something dangerous, then

you're ready for it.

And then you can just

draw, you know, really fast.

She was absolutely terrified.

She was terrified primarily for her children and then for her husband, Dan Crow.

Still, for Christiel, the anxiety has been unrelenting.

He will never stop.

He will never stop.

The pressure is rising, and it's now Dan's turn for a police interview.

I'm panicking, and I'm here to offer to protect my wife.

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Christie expressed immense frustration with the fact that the police couldn't locate the ex-boyfriend.

It seemed that he was very elusive and very good at hiding his tracks.

The cat and mouse game goes on.

Just days after meeting with police, Christie's phone lights up with another creepy message.

Saw you at the dentist.

See you soon.

When he says he sees her at the dentist,

she's really concerned because she believes Anthony is in Colorado and is watching her.

She calls police because this message brags that bodily fluids were left on her car.

A police officer takes a look.

Nothing jumps out at me.

I know.

I heard that.

The in-person stuff that's scaring the crap out of me and my logos was starting since last Tuesday, and it's been almost every day since.

Okay.

Christie has found out from her private investigator that Anthony is driving a silver Toyota Cameron.

And now she's on constant lookout for it.

I don't know if you've seen these Toyota Camerons.

Oh yeah, they blend.

They blend.

They are the most anonymous car I've ever seen.

I call them wallpaper cars.

And the silver, like, it's like a cloud.

Like, literally, you see right through it.

It's unreal.

Christie tells the officer that she's doing everything she can to keep herself safe.

I've got a buddy system, especially with things that are coming up here.

My oldest is dancing in the Boulder Valley's Nutcracker, and there's going to be long rehearsals late at night on CU campus.

So yeah, no, I'm going to be...

I'm going to buddy up and I already talked to some people that will help escort me to my car.

Since she's always loved dance, Christie has passed that passion on to her oldest daughter.

She was so active in all of her daughter's performances and would be backstage and would be like a mom backstage helping all the little dancers get out to the stage on time.

Christie is crushed.

She can't attend her daughter's performance for fear she might attract unwanted violence from her stalker.

How hard was that for her?

It was devastating to her.

So how does this stalker seem to know Christiel's every move?

One theory is that he might be using a tiny GPS tracker like this because it's magnetic and can easily be hidden in her car, transmitting her whereabouts.

So investigators bring her vehicle in for a closer look.

She drove a Mazda little hatchback, but we can use this as an example.

What we did is we put it on the lift so we could see under it.

If you look under the vehicle, check in and around the tires, because if it's magnetic, it'll pretty much stick anywhere under the car.

Another concern area

is

these door panels.

Anywhere here, you can easily remove these door panels and check under where the computer port is.

There's some that you can buy that just plug right in there.

Anywhere, pretty much, where you can get something the size of an air tag into.

Five men spent two hours pouring over every inch of Cristile's car and come up empty.

Despite all their efforts, the threats against Christiel and Dan continue.

Dan?

So Dan also comes in to talk to Detective Martinez.

What's his name again?

We call him Kickman.

Anthony.

Anthony, that's right.

Kickman, that nickname was coined by

one of the Krug children.

The email address that it came from had the word kick in it, and they also thought that if he ever came to confront Christie, the kids even said this, that

she would kick his butt.

My panic level has gone considerably higher.

And Dan is afraid.

He is on edge.

I'm panicking.

And I'm doing a job of protecting my wife.

He expresses concern and kind of helplessness.

Get yourself in a place where

you're not overly paranoid,

but still vigilant.

I'm failing.

I'm failing.

Did you feel your daughter's life was in danger?

Yes.

I just felt like,

how is this going to end?

What's going to happen here?

There's real concerns of safety.

Probable cause did exist to believe that Anthony was the stalker.

So an arrest warrant was put out for Anthony.

It wasn't that anybody was going to his home to go serve him the warrant.

Correct.

But if he got stopped or pulled over or something, he could be arrested.

He could.

He would be held.

During Thanksgiving, that was kind of a different time for you all because usually you're so together, but that year was very different.

Yeah, it was.

They decided to split up the family for Thanksgiving so they weren't all in the same place at the same time.

That had to be heartbreaking.

Oh, yeah, it was.

Police dispatched patrol cars to watch over the family during the holiday.

What toll was this taking on her emotionally and mentally?

I don't think she was sleeping.

She was just exhausted.

I've never seen my daughter like that before.

She went from a very light-hearted woman with a really wicked sense of humor to someone who was watching her every move.

You can see that last day, the day before she was murdered, on her own dash cam.

You can just see that she's exhausted, that this has taken a toll on her, and she just looks like a shell of her former self.

Then, a message for Detective Martinez that could change everything.

That message said that Christele Krug lies.

That she has been having an affair, and that the whole stalker situation is something that she and this affair partner have concocted.

The Krug family is now facing its worst-case scenario.

She keeps disappearing for

hours.

What sort of sequence was she keeping?

And the investigation hits a roadblock.

Blue tape had been placed over the ring doorbell.

Blue tape?

Yes.

Covering camera.

It was very shocking.

Ropelle police!

Ropeville, police!

Aim outside, hit yourself bell.

Email has some sort of head wound.

And immediately I thought, this doctor got her.

He did it.

He said he was going to.

He did it.

And Christie had gotten an ominous email with a picture of Dan indicating that the stalker was also stalking her husband.

My immediate mission is to sit with a man who just discovered his wife had been murdered.

The message said that Christie proved lies.

That she has been having an affair.

I just can't begin it.

I felt like I was looking at the wrong person the whole time.

What started as a months-long case of stalking and psychological torment has devolved into a chaotic scene

captured on body cameras in Broomfield, Colorado.

Christine Krug, a 43-year-old mom of three, is found murdered in her garage.

What's going through your mind, Linda?

I'm just thinking she's down, she's down.

You know, he got her.

And I was running towards the house and I said, that's my daughter.

Linda was standing right there and said,

she's dead.

They killed her.

Well, we immediately conducted all hands on deck.

So the investigations unit got paged.

All my detectives came out.

My first priority was, let's get this person.

We do think he's been here before.

We knew she had a stalker.

We believed it to be her ex-boyfriend.

And he would be still at large.

We started canvassing in the neighborhood.

Detectives were assigned to track down Jack Anthony Holland, who was our prime suspect.

We have a lot going on at once.

We quickly learned that there are cameras all over the Krug residence.

So of course we are taking high priority to try to get access to any footage from those cameras.

Some detectives were working on authoring search warrants.

Others were responsible for digital forensics.

Looking into the accounts where Christie had received messages from her stalker, we need this information right now.

There's not really anything out of place in this house.

For a family with three kids, it was very clean, very well organized.

There was no immediate signs of any struggle, of the house being burglarized.

Everything seemed to be in place.

Everything was contained to the garage.

Christiel had been hit in the head and was knocked unconscious.

So she was bludgeoned with something with exceptional force, and then she was rolled over and stabbed directly between two ribs and into her heart.

Stabbing someone in the heart is extremely evil and extremely personal.

The attack happened right there.

This is not something that happened somewhere else and then she was placed there.

She was in her very initial stages of coming home.

She had her coat on.

It was not like she had had time to settle back into her house.

We knew that she had a concealed carry permit for a gun and we noticed that the gun was still in the purse.

It makes you wonder why she wasn't able to access it.

Christie had been receiving harassing messages for months and believed they were coming from her ex-boyfriend from two decades ago.

And it appears her stalker had even trailed Dan and took a photo of him arriving at work.

Dan was potentially the next victim, so we really wanted to talk to him.

That's the husband.

I remember having to help him to the car because he was very weak.

He was very shaky.

I could feel him tremble.

Police bring Dan here to what they call a soft room where they interview victims.

It's the very place he and Chris Steele had sat just weeks prior, talking to detectives about their stalker.

We can have a seat on the couch.

It's only a bit more comfortable than everywhere else.

So

we set up our conference room so that we can watch Daniel Krug's interview.

He was upset and sad as the detective started.

God, I can't think.

It's all right.

It's all right, Dan.

Your home security system.

Can you access that through your personal phone?

Google, Google this.

Detective wait and Dan start to go through the camera app on his phone.

Home shows all four.

Oh, perfect.

Home.

I was assigned with speaking with Dan because of my handling of the stalking up to this point.

When I walked in, he became very emotional.

I did what you said.

You called the police.

Could we choose to call the police?

I did what you said.

That girl.

Is that your fault?

Once he calms down a bit, detectives begin asking Dan questions about his wife of 16 years.

What's your business interactions been like leading up to this?

Just it.

She didn't tell me about that man.

She keeps disappearing for

hours.

Dan felt Christile was keeping secrets and there was just an unaccounted for time that Dan was concerned about.

She kept leaving early,

last

where was she

told me?

Then the investigator trying to access video footage from the Krug household notices something curious.

So you said the the cameras are on all the time.

Yeah.

Looks like about 8.15, a lot of them go off.

Signal gets weak.

Dan was very unsure as to how they were shut off, but he was aware that the only way that they could be shut off is through his device, Christie's device, or their oldest daughter's device.

Most of the cameras had been turned off around 8:15 a.m., except for the one on the garage, which captures Dan leaving that morning.

As he tries to explain things to the detective, another strange discovery, this time with the doorbell camera.

Why is it blue?

Why is it

blue very much at the table?

Some type of blue tape had been placed over the ring doorbell.

Apparently there's a blue tape over the ring doorbell.

It was very shocking.

The entire camera feed covered, and it was impossible to see who had put the tape there or when.

Meanwhile, detectives are hunting down Christie Stalker, who they believe to be her ex-boyfriend.

We had a name and we had some identifying information and we found her.

This discovery

just kind of earth-shattering.

When Chris Steele and her brother were a lot younger,

we would do the Shirley temples and things to continue to share a little togetherness with grandkids.

I pick them up from school, we have some snacks, and we have a mocktail fun drink and we have some fun conversations about school.

How about the children?

How did you break the news?

They're at the police station.

They say we have people that are trained in breaking this kind of news.

We can help you with that.

Dan says, No, I'll go in there and I'll tell them.

The heart-wrenching moment of Dan Krug breaking the news to his children about the loss of their mother was recorded and released by police.

What happened to mommy?

Mommy got her.

Is she okay?

No.

Mommy's not okay.

Mommy's not going to be okay.

Mommy died today.

Mommy died today.

Those kids are devastated.

They love their mom.

Their world shatters.

The kids came out to us.

I just remember my one granddaughter just hugging me and sobbing.

Shocking for everybody.

It was a hard scene.

Awful.

Although emotions are raw, investigators have more questions for the grieving husband.

Detective Jennifer King Sullivan joins Dan in the room.

My immediate mission is to sit with a man who just discovered his wife had been murdered.

Do you need anything right now?

Do you want some water?

Still with our main goal in mind of finding out who did this to Christie.

Dan tells us about his his interactions with Christie that morning and describes it as pretty typical.

Christie packs lunches.

I pack the backpacks while she gets her ready.

I took

to the bus stop and I went home.

She left to take them to the bus.

I went to the bathroom.

I came out

after Christie had come home.

She was telling me that I had to get going.

Just weird.

I said goodbye

and I left.

I drove into the office.

Dan tells police that his wife had sent him a text asking him to pick up their daughter because Christie was going to meet with Detective Martinez.

I texted her asking what time

and she didn't answer.

Big whoop.

I finished my meeting and I still didn't have an answer.

And that's when I called the

non-emergency line.

Detectives then asked Dan for more details about Christie.

And it turns out their marriage was on the rocks.

We have not been in a good place for a while.

We live together.

We have joint finances.

We obviously co-parent the kids.

We do maintain separate bedrooms.

They were sort of disconnected.

It didn't sound like there was a lot of love left in their relationship.

It hurt me

that

she didn't tell me about

the stalker when it started,

but she brought me in right away once he sent her a picture of me.

I

told her I didn't want to die for someone who didn't care about me anymore.

That's really hard.

And I told her I wanted a uniforms.

As officers interview Dan, other detectives are tracking down Christie's ex-boyfriend, who she believes has been stalking her, sending disturbing messages for the past few months.

Our immediate priority was to find the stalker.

And we had a name, and we had some identifying information.

We started digging into anything that could give us a clue as to his whereabouts.

We issued a bolo.

We believe this person to be involved in homicide, armed or dangerous.

They utilize license plate readers to determine that his most recent activity was in Utah and not in Colorado.

They coordinated with the local sheriff's office that polices Eagle Mountain, Utah.

They go and contact Anthony, who they saw from outside just sitting in his house.

Make yourself known.

We track down Anthony ourselves for an interview.

On December 14th, 2023, you get a surprise visit from police.

What happened?

I was just hanging out in my room, watching TV like I always do.

All of a sudden, I hear loud knocking on the door, like pounding.

They asked me if I was...

Jack Anthony Holland.

I told them I was.

What are you thinking is happening?

I had no idea.

Anthony was very confused.

Didn't not have any idea what they were talking about.

And what are they telling you?

Nothing.

They asked me if I knew Christie Crew.

And I said, yes, I knew her.

She was my ex-girlfriend.

He remembers that when they first met, he and Christie were both teenagers working at JCPenney.

I thought she was beautiful, yes.

We kind of hit it off right away.

We would talk occasionally in the break room.

And we went to this party.

The music was going, lights were going.

And we kind of, we kissed.

And it was every day after that.

And then the relationship didn't last.

Why?

I was lying to her all the time.

And she kind of sensed that I was lying to her.

Anthony did make an effort to stay in touch with Christie after the breakup.

The communication kind of was too much.

And so around 2015, they kind of stopped communicating.

Christie had been complaining to police in October that she was getting texts.

She thought from you.

Did you text her in the month of October?

Nope.

Did you text her as the month went on into the next month?

Never.

Nope.

Where were you on December 14th?

At Cohl's buying a sweatshirt.

And me going to Cole's was not normal.

I just got up and I was like, I'm going to go shopping today.

So you had an alibi?

I had two alibis because I was at work the night before as well until late.

Even better for him, Anthony's got an alibi for when the stalker took that picture of Dan at his office.

My sister has pictures with me at the exact time and the date on Halloween.

So the alleged stalker, who in fact was never a stalker, hadn't stalked Christie Krug at all.

Anthony had all but been eliminated from being the person who killed her.

Around that same time, we had started to collect more and more information about the phone numbers where all these messages originated from.

What did you find when you began to look at the IP address and where these messages came from?

They came from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment,

which I know was also where Dan worked.

The IP address is connected to Dan's place of employment?

Yeah.

That's when we recognized maybe Dan had never been a victim of stalking.

Maybe he is the stalker.

I felt like I was looking at the wrong person the whole time.

What if I told you that

we had already spoken with Anthony and there's no way that he was in town today?

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We eventually all ended up at the police station.

They don't want you to talk too much together initially, so they very quickly separated us and put us in individual interrogation rooms.

I sat down with Linda, and that's Christie's mother.

She's very, very emotional.

I just can't begin it.

She had told me that Christie married Dan in 2007, and as of late, their relationship became rocky.

Her life was hell these last months and last year.

Her husband and her were not good good terms.

He was in complete denial.

She told me their marriage was over.

Here in the last few months, she just loathed him.

I kept thinking, why are you staying?

Did you should go?

There was this gut feeling that she couldn't shake.

What's that feeling telling you?

I just...

I can't shake this question.

Is he the one that's been doing this with Anthony?

In your interview with the police, you told them you had a gut feeling.

I couldn't rule out Dan.

I kept saying, I don't know.

Maybe not.

So it was just one of those you didn't want to believe it.

It did raise flags.

I'm thinking there's a possibility that Dan can be involved.

The alleged stalker had an airtight alibi.

He did not commit the murder.

As soon as we ruled out our prime suspect, we had to start looking at other suspects.

And that's when we turned to Daniel Kruk.

Who do you think killed her?

I think it's Kikman.

I think it's Anthony.

Okay.

I'm sorry, this if we still completely said that sentence.

He's still thinking that he has the upper hand and knows all of the information.

What if I told you that

we had already spoken with Anthony and there's no way that he was in town today?

That I have nothing.

And I'm

terrified to bring my children home.

What are you terrified of?

If it wasn't him who was it

then, detectives drop another bomb on Dan Krug.

It turns out they know that some of those disturbing messages being sent to Christie have been sent from a place Dan knows all too well.

Those originated through their IP addresses, uh-huh, at your office.

Doesn't make any sense.

Well,

he took the photo of me at my office.

Right.

But both of those accounts originated from IP addresses that list back to your office.

I don't know what to do with that.

Do you know anything about the network or anything at your work?

There's public Wi-Fi access throughout the entire facility.

After I confront him with those two big facts, you could see his physical reaction.

Sitting back in the couch, he kind of brings his knees to the side and takes a defensive posture.

There's no physical way that

Kickman could have been involved in this based on where he's at right now.

So,

you know, the mystery continues, and I ask you the husband.

He leans back in his chair, he rolls his eyes, just like you guys are a bunch of idiots.

I get the narrative you're putting together, but it alleges that I would do this to my children.

Provide us a different explanation, then.

There has to be someone about this.

The demeanor had changed.

And Daniel was hesitant and not as responsive and not as upset as when the interview had first begun.

I saw a lot of dramatics.

He rolled his eyes a lot.

He seemed bothered by our questioning.

Well, tell me.

Mate, help me make sense of it.

I don't know how I'm not the one who does this.

I don't do.

I don't do crime drama.

But Dan,

the end of the interview was reached because he said he didn't want to talk to us anymore, that he wanted to go home.

I'm tired.

The last task that we have is to collect physical evidence.

Which includes his clothing.

Dan was let go that evening because we didn't have enough physical evidence to prove our case.

I walked Dan to the lobby of the police department and we're in conversation.

He was really just trying to plead with me about maintaining an open mind.

Just don't stop looking elsewhere.

I know

he took

my children's mother

for Christmas.

I know the truth, and I know you need to find the right person.

You question him, and then he walks home that night freely.

We had a lot of information pointing his direction.

We had a lot of work to do.

And O'Krug had left digital fingerprints, and we started finding the trail.

He was searching this the day before she died.

When Dan is released, we arranged for a 24-hour surveillance.

So you were watching him?

We were.

We are always aware of where he's at at any time while the rest of the detectives are building the case.

And it's just digital work on the computer.

A lot of digital work, a lot of specialized software and programs.

Detective Randy Pilack is a digital forensics expert at the Broomfield Police Department.

We were able to find inconsistencies with events that happened the morning of December 14th.

Christeel comes home, there's a period of inactivity on the phone, and then suddenly her phone then logs into Google Home, takes several security cameras offline, except for the driveway, and then there's a scheduled send message that goes to Dan later.

A scheduled message?

How does that work?

There was an ability to schedule a text message in the future.

So all you have to do is hold the button down and it gives you a prompt for when you want this text message to go out.

What is that saying to you?

Dan was building his alibi that he's going to get this text message saying, hey, I got a text from her while she had been alive.

I got this text from her.

He also programmed her phone to send false confession messages to her brother and to a detective about committing an affair, an affair that she never had.

That was important for me to receive to kind of put the pieces in place for Dan's alibi.

Investigators are piecing together what they believe actually happened that morning at the Krug house.

First thing in the morning, Dan takes the oldest to the bus stop,

comes home.

Christie takes the younger two kids to the middle school just down the road.

And then Christie gets home shortly after that.

I believe that Dan sat and wait and he surprised her.

She bought a pistol.

She was ready to defend herself.

He used some sort of weapon to hit her over the head as hard as he could.

He knew that he had to incapacitate her.

Once she fell to the ground, he stabbed her right in the heart.

And then you see Chris Dele's phone being accessed.

Whoever is accessing her phone is downloading the app to the cameras.

Three of the four cameras go off seconds after each other.

Dan does whatever process he needed to do to clean things up, puts the tape on the camera, does the messages on the phone,

and is off to work.

He stopped for about five minutes.

There's an open field there which would have allowed him to dispose of the murder weapon.

We have a gap of missing time.

We knew that if he took took the murder weapons, whatever other items he had to conceal his guilt with him, he'd probably be looking for the first opportunity to get rid of those things.

This area being under construction certainly seems like a great opportunity for him to do that.

We check this area extensively.

I mean, unfortunately, we didn't find anything that was involved.

And then he goes to a nearby drive-through coffee shop, gets a coffee like any other ordinary day, and proceeds to drive to work.

In looking back at his work cameras,

he took very specific routes at his work so that he was seen on camera to build his alibi.

He receives the text message he sent himself.

He starts trying to communicate back with Chris Steele.

He doesn't want to be the one to find the body, so he calls the non-emergency line at the Broomfield Police Department and asks for a welfare check.

I don't think this is an emergency,

but this feels really weird.

My wife isn't responding to text messages or phone calls.

Daniel Krug had left digital fingerprints, and we started finding the trail.

Around Halloween, Christiel had gotten an ominous email with a picture attached of Dan, and that was indicating indicating that the stalker was also stalking her husband.

What did you learn about that picture?

That it was taken in like selfie mode, propped up on a car.

So your suspicion then was what?

That only person that could have taken that picture was Dan.

With a burner phone.

With a burner phone at his work, making death threats to himself.

Another pivotal piece of evidence, the location information from Dan's phone and from the account associated with the stalker.

There were moments, Dan's phone and the stalker's phone, where you were at the exact location.

So it all went back to Dan.

Everything's gone back to Dan.

What about the hookup ads?

Did you see any evidence that Christie had placed those ads?

There was no evidence that she had placed them.

Everything on her phone was searching how to take them down.

There's no communication records from Christie to any kind of boyfriend.

And then, police say they are able to access Dan's internet searches from the night before Christie's murder.

There were searches for how much head trauma do you have to cause to knock someone unconscious, how long can you be unconscious before you have brain damage.

There were really concerning searches consistent with the way that Christie died.

He was searching this the day before she died.

Yes.

The digital evidence was really the nail in the coffin.

Okay, you spam.

heading towards you

we came up with a plan of how we were going to arrest him we had arranged for dan to be followed to and from his daughter's nutcracker performance make sure we're code four on this investigation's behind us i was two cars behind him coming up onto zunai i'll hit to work probably having a little bit of adrenaline and man i could feel it in my body oh here let's go with the traffic step hey be ready to pop that once he gets in in the park gotcha and he'd stop at a local grocery store.

No good for the pinch.

He's on the island.

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

Just go.

Shut your hands!

Shoot your hands!

Hands on your face!

Hands on your face!

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

Just go.

Shut your heads!

Shut your heads!

Hands on your face!

Hands on your face!

Hands on your face!

We pulled him over in the parking lot of a grocery store right down the road from the family's house.

There was no resistance or anything like that.

Placed him in cuffs.

Hey, Dan,

do you want me to tell your kids that you killed killed their mother or do you want somebody else to?

Not important.

I'm just trying to keep their turn.

April 4th, 2025.

Opening statements begin in the trial of 44-year-old Father Dan Clue, who's charged with murder in the first degree, stalking, and criminal impersonation.

He's pleaded not guilty.

This was a premeditated murder.

So we wanted to lay out for the jury all of this evidence that overwhelmingly pointed to the only suspect in the case, and that was Daniel Krug.

In trial, prosecutors lay out what they say was Dan's motive for murdering his wife.

In the spring of 2023,

Daniel Krug was losing control.

And his marriage was falling apart.

Chris Steele wanted out.

But Daniel Krug was in denial.

He decided that he was going to play puppet master by impersonating Jack Anthony Holland, stalking and terrorizing his family for months before murdering Chris Steele 11 days before Christmas.

This stalking and the planning for it began in early 2023 when he was buying burner phones, creating these email accounts and fictitious phone numbers.

Dan was hoping that this would bring them closer together.

I think he was surprised that Chris Deal hadn't told him.

And so then on October 31st, you really see him ramping it up and making himself the object of the stalker's threat.

And then police got involved, things start to spiral, get more serious.

All of these things were going to start pointing back at him.

Chris Dele was not coming back to him, you know, if anything, was more confident she was going to divorce him.

The evidence in this case says something far different from what the prosecution has told you.

Mr.

Krug

did not kill his wife.

He did not commit these crimes.

Dan's defense attorney argued that sloppy police work leading up to the murder damaged the credibility of the investigation.

She relied on you.

Detective Martinez did absolutely nothing with Holland to try and find him.

Nothing.

As a law enforcement officer, I'm very used to criticism and people second-guessing my decisions.

Throughout the investigation, I was relying on my investigative instinct and following the facts.

The defense argued that the police department did absolutely nothing to try to find Anthony Holland.

Did the police department fail her by not exposing sooner that Anthony Holland had nothing to do with this?

Certainly in a perfect world, we would have known much sooner.

The

evidence that we needed to prove that Anthony Holland wasn't involved, there wasn't very many steps left for us to do.

We did fall short, but there just was.

He fooled us too.

Among those testifying were Broomfield detectives, Christie's former boyfriend, Anthony Holland, and an ex-girlfriend of Dan's.

I was really nervous

and then as I was leaving I glared at him.

I stared him down.

You stared down Dan.

Yeah.

Why did you want to look at him like that?

I wanted him to just look at me in the eye but he wouldn't look at me.

You learned that it wasn't the first time that Dan had been accused of stalking that he had been accused by an ex-girlfriend of stalking.

Yeah, she had dated Dan for

a couple years, high school into college, and after she broke up with him, he started to stalk her in a very similar similar way.

She started getting all these different communications from phone calls, email accounts, aim messenger, pretending to be different people.

It was messages to encourage me to either talk to Dan, reach out to Dan.

Shortly after that, I started to get these really disturbing phone calls where I was being called like a whore in a slut and things like that, because that's when it got scary for me.

Police eventually traced those messages back to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where Dan was enrolled.

When I got the IP address, I was like, oh my gosh, it's been him

this whole time.

Ultimately, trying to get her to come back to him.

So she actually filed a protection order against him, and all the contacts stopped.

During cross-examination, the defense established that there was a three-month gap between the last communication and the temporary protection order, which was later dropped, but didn't challenge those claims against him.

Dan was never charged with any crime regarding those allegations.

When we heard her full testimony, it was just so shocking because it was exactly mirror to our daughter.

The trial was a very tense experience.

The tension in the courtroom was thick.

There's no blood found on that car, inside or out.

It's searched three times.

They submitted these things for testing and you know whose DNA wasn't there.

The person who lived in the house, the person who ate in the kitchen with them, the person who shared the living room, that idiot right there.

There was no blood on the defendant.

There was no blood on his vehicle.

Do you think this man who's been planning and stalking his wife for months is going to be so sloppy on the crime scene?

He was too prepared to do that.

The fate of a broomfield man is now in the hands of a jury.

Jurors take these cases very seriously, and that's what this jury did.

Every hour that ticked by increased my anxiety, and certainly that of my team.

So, the jury comes back in.

It is a very quiet and tense courtroom.

Jury verdict count number one, charge of murder.

We the jury find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.

Guilty, guilty, guilty on all four counts.

And it was like a relief.

This is good.

This went the right way.

Dan Krug is found guilty.

and remains silent while being taken away.

But he has much to say during his jailhouse phone calls.

With Christiele, she always loved the piano.

There was a lot of complexity and breadth to her.

She was just a very interesting person.

It was just fun to have conversations with her, even as her dad, just

talking to her.

God, I miss that.

A jury returned a guilty verdict in the trial of a Broomfield man accused of killing his wife, Danielle Krug, is found guilty of first-degree murder, stalking, and criminal impersonation.

Today, the court sentenced Mr.

Krug

to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

It's a just and appropriate sentence for a horrific crime.

Dan Krug spoke to his parents in a recorded phone call after his conviction.

I sat through an hour and a half

of sentencing

where people that I considered my family

railed against me.

I don't understand how you're supposed to show remorse when you deny you did it.

You are our child.

We love you no matter what.

We are not going to abandon you.

Every day is a difficult day.

You wake up and you feel the pain and then you just try to go on with your day.

But you always feel it.

You have been very careful and very protective of your grandchildren.

We want to protect them.

They're very surrounded by their mother's family's love.

They're in a loving environment.

They're given everything that Christie would have given them.

How much is she with you

even now?

I always feel her all the time.

This area was where we would take walks all the time.

And we'd talk about the kids, you know, and her life.

I loved her when she'd call and say, Mom, let's go for a walk.

She loved geraniums,

they just represent her spirit.

You know, that she's just

still alive in some way on some plane.

You know, she's still here with us.

Her spirit's still here with us.

So, when we see that, that's kind of what we'll think of.

Chris Steele's spirit living on in her three children.

Her parents tell me that the children are happy in school and in their activities, just as their mom had hoped for them.

Meanwhile, their father, Daniel Krug, tells 2020 that he maintains his innocence and will, quote, fight this wrongful conviction on appeal.

That is our program for tonight.

Thanks for watching.

I'm David Muir.

And I'm Deborah Roberts from all of us here at 2020 and ABC News.

Good night.

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