On Thursday afternoon, December 14, 2023, 43-year-old Dan Krug called the non-emergency line for the Broomfield, Colorado police department, asking for a welfare check for his wife, 43-year-old Kristil Krug. He explained that they were in the midst of a stalking case & was concerned since he hadn’t been able to get ahold of her for the past 2-3 hours. Since he was 40 minutes away at work, he wanted an officer to go to their house to check on her.
Officer John O’Hayre pulled up to the Krug’s home at 3132 Promontory Loop in Broomfield at 12:28 pm. As he reached the porch, he found the couple’s next-door neighbor standing at the front door. She explained that Dan had called her, asking if she could walk over to check on Kristil, but she left as Officer O’Hayre took over.
After his knocks went unanswered, he shined a flashlight through the front windows & peeked through the slats of the opened blinds, but he didn’t see anything concerning.
As he made his way toward the garage, he realized that the windows that lined the top of the garage door were positioned too high for him to see through. After moving his patrol car up, he stood on the bumper, shined his flashlight through the window, which was when he saw Kristi lying inside in a pool of blood.
After Officer O’Hayre requested medical & back-up, he immediately ran to the front door, kicked it open & went straight to the garage. Blood streaked down on the lower wall that bordered the three stairs that led from the house into the attached garage. Kristil’s body lay motionless at the base of the stairs & as he reached her to start CPR, he could feel that she was still warm to the touch. While he continued to communicate with in-coming first responders, he could see that she was bleeding from a visible head wound.
When he opened the garage door for arriving paramedics, Kristil’s mom, Linda Grimsrud, was on her way up the driveway after she’d gotten a call from her son-in-law that day. As he had with the police & their neighbor, he asked Linda to check on her. Linda assumed her daughter was likely preoccupied & just hadn’t answered her phone, but she offered to drive over to their house to check things out.
As Linda peered into the garage, she was understandably horrified at the sight of her daughter’s bloodied body lying on the garage floor as Officer O’Hayre instructed her to stay back. He initially assumed that Kristil had likely fallen & struck her head, but police officers did a clearance of the house to be sure no one was inside.
This theory quickly fell to the wayside as paramedics saw that in addition to a horrific head wound, Kristil had also been stabbed in the chest. They were sadly unable to save her & Kristil was pronounced dead at 12:43 pm.
By this time, Kristil’s dad, Lars Grimsrud, had arrived & victim advocate Heather Aites was tending to Kristil’s grieving parents when she heard a scream coming from up the street. As Dan Krug sprinted toward them, he screamed, that’s my house!
Dan fell to his knees in grief when he was told that his wife of sixteen years & the mother of his three children had been murdered.
Kristil Grimsrud Krug was born on November 24, 1980 in Boulder, Colorado. In 1974, her father Lars had immigrated from Norway to Colorado for a career in aerospace engineering. It was here he met & married Linda, who worked in IT & they had Kristil & their son together, also named Lars. When Kristil was 5, the couple divorced, but Linda & Lars maintained a good relationship.
Kristil had always been passionate about the performing arts, modern dance & from a young age, she found a strong connection to science, specifically chemistry & biology. After graduating valedictorian of her high school in 1999, she was awarded an academic scholarship to the prestigious Colorado School of Mines. She began her studies here in biochemical engineering before transferring to the University of Colorado (Boulder) where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemical Engineering.
Kristil met Dan Krug online while she was in college in Colorado & he was in college in Washington D.C. They carried on a long-distance relationship before he moved back to Colorado after graduation. After seven years of dating, they were married in 2007.
After graduation, Kristil worked as a global project manager for Agilent Technologies, a company that provides instruments, software & services for laboratories. Beyond her professional accomplishments, her three children, two daughters & a son who were 8, 11 & 14-years old, were the center of her world.
While Dan worked in operations & administration at the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, the family of five lived in a beautiful 3,500 square foot home outside of Denver in the affluent Anthem neighborhood.
Officers found the Krug home to be tidy & organized with no sign of a struggle outside of the violence found in the garage. Since there were only eleven days until Christmas, the house was cheerfully decorated with a Christmas tree in the front area of the house while garland wrapped its way up the bannister that led to the second-floor.
Officers could see multiple cameras around the property & they also canvassed the neighborhood, asking neighbors about possible security cameras they might have at their homes.
Three months before Kristil’s murder, Dan contacted the Broomfield Police in September 2023 to report a trespasser on his property. He told the responding officer that everything happened so quickly so he could only guess that it had been a man he’d caught in his garage. He was very concerned about his children’s safety as they had been inside the house, just on the other side of the door.
The man wore blue jeans & a gray shirt & when he ran from the garage, he jumped over their gate & took off. Outside of a spare key to their home, nothing else had been taken.
After the officer took a report, he canvassed the neighborhood, but he didn’t see anything or anyone suspicious.
Only days later, on October 2, 2023, Kristil received a text message from someone named Anthony. He said that he looked her up & since he comes to Boulder every few weeks, he thought they could hook up. The only Anthony that she knew was an ex-boyfriend that she hadn’t heard from in years, but regardless, she ignored the message & didn’t respond.
The slew of messages came through the next day that shocked & confused Kristil when Anthony wrote, U should say yes when I offer pity f*ck. Whatev saw ur pics u got fat. Bet ur loser husband wont *** ur fat ***. Dumb** u should kill urself. Dont waste my time.
Kristil had met Anthony Holland during high school in 1999 while they worked together at JCPenny. When she left for college, it was clear they had different life ambitions so Kristil ended their relationship in the fall of 2000 after a year of dating.
In the 23 years since their breakup, Anthony had reached out to her several times via email as well as on Facebook in 2002, 2005, 2010 & 2016, but it had always been very casual. Each time, she made it clear that she wasn’t interested since she was happily married with children. Although he seemed hurt, he never seemed angry, so this type of messaging was not at all in line with their previous communication.
Kristil was so confused by what was going on. Not only had they not spoken in seven years, but this was not the Anthony she’d ever known since he’d always been a good guy.
Moving forward to Halloween 2023, she got an email from a.holland.kicks@gmail.com with an attached photo of Dan standing next to his car outside of his office. The email referenced him driving slow like an old lady which made Kritil’s fear ramp up since Anthony was clearly stalking her family in person.
He also sent a message informing her that her license plate was expired.
The next message was even more concerning, threatening, Don’t wanna clear rubber hose in his tailpipe. One month earlier, Kristil had actually found a piece of plastic tubing sticking out from a hole in her trunk that had been connected to the tailpipe. The end had been slightly charred, likely from her car’s exhaust. She was confused when she initially found it, but now she was connecting it to Anthony.
When Kristil brought her car into the Mazda dealership for service, the technician noticed a missing plug that was situated under the spare tire in the trunk that left a gaping hole. Since the hole could collect dirt, she was told they had replaced it. When she asked the technician if there would be any reason that the dealership would have put rubber tubing through the hole, they told her no.
When she talked to her parents about it, they were shocked since they’d always found Anthony to be such a nice young man. They could only assume he must be going through a mental health crisis while they worried terribly for their daughter’s safety.
To amp up their security, Dan installed cameras around their property & both he & Kristil had dashcams installed in their cars in case Anthony was following them.
Out of the blue, Kristil began receiving a slew of messages from men who were offering to have sex with her in reference to an online post they’d seen. As she began digging, she found an online ad that listed her phone number, saying that she was looking for a number of well endowed men to run a train on her at a hotel for her birthday celebration.
On November 7, 2023, Kristil met with Sergeant Andrew Martinez at the Broomfield police station about the stalking, telling him that she was terrified & exhausted from living in a constant state of fear. She came prepared with a file folder that included a detailed spreadsheet of the timeline of all of the contact she’d received from Anthony. She also detailed the background of their relationship & who she’d known him to be in their younger years.
Since Kristil was working with a private investigator as well, she was given a list of possible addresses for him as he’d moved between Utah & Idaho. Through her PI, she was told that Anthony drove a silver Toyota Camry & was living 500 miles away in Utah. However, he found no record of him having been in Colorado.
She told Detective Martinez that she hadn’t actually seen him, but his texts & emails that threatened both her & her family also reminded her that he was nearby & watching.
Anthony had been an emotional guy when she knew him, but she had never known him to be unstable or violent. When they broke up, things had been amicable so she couldn’t wrap her head around why this was suddenly happening. The last she’d heard from him was in 2016 & since the pandemic, Kristil had shut her Facebook page down & had new contact information, so she couldn’t understand how he even found her after all this time.
She wanted to file an order of protection to keep Anthony away from her, but since he would have to be served with papers in person & she had no address for him, this was never done.
She explained that they’d upped the security at their home & she planned to register for a course to get more comfortable with using the handgun that her dad had given her. Her children were aware of what was going on & they’d been instructed as to what to do if an intruder did come into their home.
Detective Martinez wanted to collect as much information as possible to build a solid case before they made an arrest. By mid-November, he submitted digital search warrants to Verizon & TextNow, the service providers for the messages, but because this was a slow process, Kristil often felt unprotected & isolated.
At one point she told her dad, Someone’s going to die. It’s either me or him. Either I’m going to have to kill him, or he’s going to kill me.
She continued to live in terror & on the police’s advice, she bought a 9 mm Sig with an optical red-dot sighting system, she took shooting lessons, got a concealed carry permit & carried the weapon everywhere she went in a concealed carry purse. All the while she was growing more & more frustrated that the police hadn’t made any attempts to contact Anthony.
Days after she went to the police department, she got a sexual message from Anthony that said he saw her at the dentist & had left bodily fluids on her car. She was terrified to think that he was so close by so she called the police & an officer responded to her home to inspect her car in her garage.
She told him that she was doing everything in her power to keep herself & her family safe; she’d set up a buddy-system for nights when she was out late at her daughter’s dance rehearsals so that someone was there to walk her to her car. She sadly decided that she couldn’t attend the performance itself for fear that she would attract violence from her stalker, something that left her feeling devastated.
Since Anthony seemed to know where Kristil was, investigators brought her car in for an inspection, thinking they might find a GPS tracker attached. They put the car on a lift & pulled the interior doors away, but after five men spent two hours combing over the car, they found nothing.
An arrest warrant was put out for Anthony, but no one would be going to his house to serve him the warrant, he would just be held if he were to be stopped.
When Dan was brought into the station for an interview on November 16, he said he’d been carrying a gun as well as pepper spray with him, but he felt he was doing a terrible job of protecting his wife.
Thanksgiving 2023, which just so happened to be one day before Kristil’s 43rd birthday, was a difficult time for the family since they decided to split up for safety purposes. Patrol cars were dispatched to watch over them during the holiday & all the while, her loved ones could see that Kristil was becoming a shell of herself.
On December 5, 2023, nine days before her murder, Detective Martinez got an email from a John Doe saying that Kristil had lied & there was no stalker. It went on to say that she had been having an affair & detectives hadn’t been able to find Anthony because he wasn’t in Colorado. She had concocted the whole stalking scenario as a way to get rid of Dan. He went on to write that he & Kristil had been dating for over a year & she paid him in sex as well as a promise for a portion of Dan’s life insurance if he helped her frame Anthony & kill Dan.
Moving forward nine days to Thursday, December 14, 2023 when Kristil was found dead on her garage floor, investigators immediately believed that Anthony Holland was responsible & a team worked to track him down.
Meanwhile, a digital forensics team looked into all of the accounts that Kristil’s stalker had used for communication. They also hoped that footage from the Krug’s security cameras would give them answers.
According to her autopsy, Kristil had been bludgeoned in the back of the head with a blunt object. Her killer then rolled her body over & stabbed her between two ribs, the blade penetrating her heart.
She had no doubt been taken by surprise as she climbed out of her car after dropping the kids off at school. When she was found, she still wore her winter coat & hat while her car keys were found just past her open hand. Since she hadn’t had a moment to react, her gun was still inside her concealed carry purse.
Dan was brought down to the Broomfield Police Department & taken to the interview room that afternoon where both he & Kristil had sat only weeks earlier to discuss her stalking case. He & a detective began looking through his phone to check the footage from his home security system. According to Dan, the system continuously recorded.
As Detective Martinez came into the room, Dan began sobbing as he said, I was supposed to protect her.
Once he calmed down, the detectives asked him questions to get a better understanding of what his 16 year marriage to Kristil had looked like. He said that she’d been disappearing for hours at a time & he felt that she was keeping secrets from him. She would leave early & come home late, but when he asked her where she’d been, she wouldn’t tell him. He admitted that they hadn’t been in a good place for some time & although they lived together, shared finances & co-parented together, they had separate bedrooms.
According to Kristil’s family, there was tension in their relationship since Dan struggled to keep a job. Kristil had confided in her mom that she felt she was carrying the relationship, in charge of it all, while Dan directed his outbursts at her & the kids. She told her mom that she had been sleeping in her son’s room & she only stayed in the marriage for the sake of their children.
Dan told Detective Martinez that he felt hurt that Kristil hadn’t told him about the stalking situation until Anthony sent her a photo of him on Halloween. When she did tell him, he told her that he didn’t want to die for someone who no longer loved him & he wanted a divorce.
According to Dan, nothing had been out of the ordinary that morning. While Kristil packed the kids’ lunches, he got their backpacks ready before they got them off to school.
When he left for his job at the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, Kristil seemed fine. She texted him at 8:56 am while he was on his way to work, asking if he could pick one of their daughters up after school since she had to meet with Detective Martinez. When he texted her back at 10:03 am, asking what time, she never responded which was out of character for her.
When he still hadn’t heard back from her after his meeting, he called the police for a welfare check.
While Dan was at the police station, he broke the news to his three children that their mother was gone. They were understandably devastated as Kristil had been everything to them.
While Dan & Detective Martinez continued to speak, another detective in the room held his phone as he tried to access footage from his security cameras. He discovered that with the exception of the camera above the garage, all of the other cameras had gone off at 8:15 am. Dan explained that the cameras could only be turned off from either his phone, Kristil’s or their 14-year-old daughter’s.
When they looked at their doorbell camera, they saw nothing but blue. Officers at the home who were notified found blue painter’s tape over the lens, but they weren’t able to determine who had put the tape there or when.
While Dan remained at the station, a group of officers arrived at 41-year-old Anthony Holland’s Eagle Mountain, Utah home where he lived with elderly family friends. The home was 516 miles from Broomfield, a drive that would take a little over 16 hours roundtrip.
As they approached the man’s home on Thursday afternoon & began pounding on his front door, they could see him through a window, laying on his bed, watching TV.
After Anthony answered the door, he was asked if he knew Kristil Krug. He said that he did, that she was his first girlfriend, but they hadn’t spoken since 2014 or 2016. Since they didn’t tell him why they were there or that she’d been murdered, he seemed to have no idea what was going on.
When they asked where he’d been, he said he went to work at Texas Roadhouse the night before until 9:25 pm & that afternoon, he’d been at Kohl’s in American Fork, Utah buying a sweatshirt. He had a receipt that was printed at 12:16 pm & digital search warrants quickly proved that Anthony had been nowhere near Kristil.
Anthony later said that the shopping trip had been very much out of the ordinary for him, but it thankfully established a solid alibi that proved he was not involved in Kristil’s murder. He also had an alibi for when the stalker took the photo of Dan outside his office on Halloween which made it clear that he was not Kristil’s stalker either.
If Anthony wasn’t her stalker or killer, who was?
While Linda was at the police station, she confirmed that her daughter’s marriage had fallen apart & Kristil had told her that it was over, that she loathed her husband, but Dan was in denial about it. In the weeks before her death, Kristil had been preparing to leave him.
The digital forensics team continued to gather information as to where the messages & emails had originated from. They soon learned that they had been sent from two accounts from the same location, the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, Dan’s place of employment.
When Dan was told this information, his demeanor immediately shifted, going from devastated to annoyed. He insisted that it had to be someone else because he would never do such a thing to his children.
After he said he was tired & wanted to go home to hug his children, the interview ended for the night. He continued to maintain that their theory was wrong & he urged detectives to find the right person. Before he left, his clothing & a sample of DNA was taken & he was monitored 24/7.
Kristil’s family didn’t yet know about the IP addresses linking Dan to the stalker’s messages so he joined his grieving in-laws at his brother-in-law’s house after he left the station. Dan & the kids slept there that night & the next morning, when he sat with Linda on the porch, she was surprised when he told her that he planned to get rid of all of Kristil’s things, but maybe keep her wedding dress.
Detective Random Pihlak, a digital forensics expert with the Broomfield PD, began to put a picture together of the morning of Kristil’s murder based on her phone. After she got back home from taking her kids to school there was a period of inactivity before someone logged into Google Home to take all the cameras off the network with the exception of the driveway cam.
A text message was scheduled to be sent to Dan at 8:56 am that detectives believed he’d done to build an alibi & make it appear that Kristil had still been alive when he left for work.
He also programmed her phone to send false confession emails, one to a detective at 8:19 am & another to her brother at 8:21 am that said she could no longer keep up the lies, that she had been having an affair for the past 18 months & she was framing Anthony.
Detective Pihlak also determined that the photo that had been sent to Kristil on Halloween that depicted Dan standing next to his car at work had been taken in selfie mode using a timer after Dan propped his burner phone on the back of the car that was parked next to him.
When many of the threatening messages had been sent from a burner phone, Dan’s phone had been in the exact same location at the same time.
Nothing was found on Kristil’s phone that proved she’d been having an affair or had placed ads online for hookups with several men.
One night before her murder, Dan made a slew of damning internet searches that included: How hard a hit for head trauma to go unconscious, How durable is the human head to withstand trauma?
Three days after her murder, on Saturday night, December 16, 2023, officers followed Dan as he drove alone in his car from his daughter’s Nutcracker performance. He was surrounded by officers & arrested when he stopped off at a local grocery store. As he was being guided into the patrol car, Detective Martinez said, Hey Dan, do you want me to tell your kids that you killed their mother or do you want somebody else to?
He pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, stalking & criminal impersonation & the trial began on April 4, 2025.
The prosecution painted a picture of Kristil’s final moments for the jury as well as the overwhelming evidence that all pointed directly at Dan Krug.
By the spring of 2023, Dan was growing desperate as he came to the realization that his marriage was falling apart. This was when he began concocting his stalking plan. Eight months before Kristil’s murder, he purchased a burner phone from Walgreens with a Visa gift card that was registered to himself. He created fake email accounts & phone numbers, hoping the ordeal would bring them closer together. Instead, Kristil hadn’t even confided in him about what was going on until she received the photo of Dan on Halloween.
As things ramped up & police got involved, he realized that his plan wasn’t working & his wife wasn’t running back into his arms. If anything, she was that much more determined to divorce him.
Thursday, December 14, 2023 had begun like any other weekday for Kristil. Dan had taken their 14-year-old daughter to the bus stop & came back home at 6:47 am before Kristil left to take their other two children to their middle school just down the road.
When she pulled her car back into the garage at 7:58 am, Dan had been lying in wait. As she climbed out of her car, he ambushed her from behind, striking her multiple times in the head with a blunt object with as much force as he could which caused multiple skull fractures.
As she lay on the floor bleeding, he rolled her body over & stabbed her in the heart. At 8:15 am, he used her phone to turn the cameras off one-by-one, he grabbed a roll of blue tape from the kitchen drawer & put a piece over the doorbell camera. He set her phone to text him at 8:56 am to establish an alibi & create the illusion that she was still alive when he left for work. Finally, he sent Kristil’s phony confession emails to her brother & a detective. Digital forensic evidence proves that Kristil’s phone hadn’t been used since 8:22 am.
Dan left for work at 8:24 am, two minutes after Kristil’s phone was last used, which was 20 minutes later than his normal departure time. On his way, he stopped off at an open field that was under construction for about five minutes. Although the murder weapons were never found, investigators believe he disposed of them here.
He deactivated his car’s dashcam before getting coffee from a drive-through & headed to work, arriving at 9:27 am. He seemed to walk through specific areas to be sure he was seen on security footage.
When Kristil’s auto text came through at 8:56 am, he sent several responses & called her multiple times. Since he didn’t want to be the person to find his wife’s body, he contacted the police, his nextdoor neighbor as well as his mother-in-law to go to their house to check on her.
Dan’s defense attorney, Joe Morales, accused the police of sloppy work leading up to Kristil’s murder, failing to do anything to track down Anthony Holland. They also hadn’t tested Kristil’s phone for fingerprints or DNA after her death.
Sadly, had investigators discovered sooner that Anthony wasn’t Kristil’s stalker, she might still be alive today. According to Detective Martinez, this case has haunted him since it happened while Lars & Linda believe that nothing would have stopped the murder from happening.
Defense Attorney Morales argued the lack of physical evidence that connected Dan to the murder as no blood was found on either the inside or outside of his car nor on his body. His eldest daughter confirmed that the clothing he wore later in the day was what he’d been wearing when he drove her to the bus stop that morning. Prosecutors argued that because he’d so meticulously planned this murder, he took every measure to avoid this.
A woman named Carrie testified during the trial, someone who had previously dated Dan for a couple of years through high school & college. After she broke up with him, he began stalking her in an eerily similar way that Kristil had been stalked. The messages were ultimately tracked to Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. where Dan was a student. After Carrie filed a protection order against him, the contact stopped & Dan was never charged for these allegations.
Since more than two decades had passed, Carrie thought little of Dan until she saw his face on the news. Although she wasn’t surprised that he’d stalked again, she was surprised that he’d gotten this violent.
According to the prosecution, in the last days of her life, Kristil began suspecting that Dan could be the stalker, something she had told her stepmother’s sister. When Kristil directly confronted him about it, he denied the accusation. Her family also had their suspicions.
The trial lasted three weeks & after about 5 to 6 hours of deliberations over the course of a day & a half, the jury was back with their verdict on April 17, 2025. They found Dan guilty of first-degree murder, stalking & criminal impersonation in connection with his wife’s murder. The following day, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole with an additional 9 ½ years for the stalking & impersonation counts.
According to Lars & Linda Grimsrud, their three grandchildren are living in a very loving environment & they’re given everything that Kristil would have given them.
Kristil’s stepsister, Jenna Ericson, hopes that her sister’s story might serve as a cautionary tale to give them someone in a dangerous situation the strength to make a move since oftentimes, things can escalate very quickly.
Had the digital evidence come back sooner, Kristil’s death could have likely been prevented. In mid-November, Martinez ordered the information to be provided within 14 days, but investigators didn’t get replies to the original warrants until weeks after Kristil’s murder. Yet after she was killed, the companies were able to provide the information almost immediately, two of them, in only minutes.
According to Verizon, they receive over 325,000 demands from law enforcement annually as well as 75,000 emergency requests when officers can prove that there is an imminent risk. On the day of Kristil’s death, they provided Broomfield investigators with their requested information within seven minutes.
Within a six-month period, Google receives over 245,000 requests worldwide & they keep a team available 24/7 to address requests involving an imminent threat to life. They provided Broomfield detectives with their requested information within six minutes on the day of the murder.
Tragically, Kristil had done everything right & she still got killed. Her family has since developed proposed legislation that they’re calling Kristil’s Law which would require all communications companies within the U.S. to respond to domestic violence & stalking cases within 48 hours.
They don’t want her death to be a complete waste, something that’s just swept under the rug & forgotten. It’s their goal that something positive can come from their tremendous loss.
Kristil had been terrorized by a person she shared her life with, a sixteen year marriage & three children. She died at her home, the place she should have been the safest. The fear & threats that had haunted her days & nights for months before her violent end hadn’t been coming from a man lurking in the shadows, they were coming from the man meant to protect her.
Dan Krug didn’t just take Kristil’s life, he also stole her sense of peace & safety. Now three children are left to live without a mother or a father because Dan chose control over love, manipulation over honesty & violence over letting her go.
References:
- Horan & McConaty Funeral Service & Cremation: Kristil Grimsrud Krug
- 20/20: S49.E1: He’s Right Behind You
- Wikipedia: Agilent Technologies
- AP: A woman killed after reporting stalking by an ex thought her husband might be behind messages
- CBS News: Utah man eyed in Colorado murder believes victim’s spirit urged him to buy sweatshirt that helped clear him
- CBS News: Who killed Kristil Krug? Slain Colorado mom received menacing threats weeks before her murder
- District Attorney Adams & Broomfield Colorado: Update: Broomfield defendant sentenced to life in prison without parole following conviction for murdering, stalking wife after multi-week trial
- 5280: Kristil Krug’s stalker could have been caught weeks before her murder – so why wasn’t he?
