Transcript of The After Show: He's Right Behind You

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Hi there, everybody. Deborah Roberts here, and welcome to 2020, The After Show. Today, we are going to be taking you to the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, to the scene of just a chilling crime. A mom of three found dead in her garage, fatally stabbed. And at first it seemed like the killer was somebody that they knew, an old flame of hers from decades ago, but he turned out actually to be much closer to home. This is a story that I reported on, and I still think about it. It was featured on our most recent episode called He's Right Behind You. It was a case that actually spanned a few years. And one of our producers, Jonathan Balthazer, was all over this story. Hey, John. Hi, Deborah. Our editor, Rob Ferrari, who I never see outside the edit room.

No. Always sitting in a dark room.

But Rob, you're here. And thank you for coming to talk about the the program because what's so fun about this podcast or interesting about this podcast, is we get a chance to loosen up a little bit and bring the listeners and our viewers of 2020 into our stories and how we report them, how you help edit them and tell these stories. But you and I have known each other, and you reminded me much longer than I remember that we've known each other.

A long time ago.

Yeah, we worked together.

That was at Leksheim Live, Captain Story Studios. Long time with Dana Reeves. My first job at ABC.

Yeah, Will Reeve's mom, by the way, who works here at ABC. And you're an editor that I've worked with for years here in 2020. And I have to say you're so talented. And you bring such vision and creativity to these stories, which is so important. And you have to find what viewers don't necessarily always know, and our listeners don't, is you bring it all to life. When John goes out in the field and we shoot these stories, you You have to find the appropriate music. You got to help convey the mood and the feeling of what we're doing. We come back with hours and hours of footage. A lot of footage. You actually get a chance to see much more about the lives of these folks that we cover than I do, which I think must be intriguing because it really helps you understand the story, right?

You get into it, I guess, more emotionally. You're sifting through the material. We got a lot of photos from the family of Christine as an infant, child, young adult, adult. You go through those and you see it. She always with the smile on. Even when she was studying, there's photos of her studying, and she's got this smile on. She's with her dad, her brother. You do get this sense of who she is. Then as you're putting it, like you said, into the cut itself, adding the music and listening to what your questions you're asking, trying to put the right photo in the right spot, the question that always goes through my mind doing a lot of these is, why? Why would someone do that to this woman?

Yeah, whom you've had a chance to see as a child.

Yeah, and that's the thing. When you see them as little babies, if we get home video sometimes on shows, and you really get a sense of who they are in a little swimming pool, a baby in a swimming pool on a chair. Everyone, I think, can relate to that. Of course. Then, like I said, you start to think, why would someone do this? You just get, yeah, you do. There There are times I tell Jonathan, you get very emotional on shows, just watching this and learning who they are.

It comes through in your editing. In this story in particular, Jonathan, we call you JB, so I'll just go by JB, and that'll make it a little easier here. But you and I have worked on numerous stories together. You've done the podcast before. But this particular story, Christine Krug, out in Colorado. I remember when you came to me about this story. Tell the listeners a little bit about her and what it was that struck you when you first learned about the story?

One of the unique things about this story is the Broomfield PD actually provided hours and hours of footage, including footage of Christine. So you got to know her as she was, leading right up to her death. So you really start to, I feel like, get to know her very well as she was. And then, of course, you interviewed Christie's parents, Lars and Linda, extensively. And the more time I spent with both of them, the more I was impressed with what a dynamic person Christie was. She was a scientist. She had a scientific brain, but she was also a fabulous dancer. We spoke to a friend who described her dancing like she moved like water. And then her father would just tell us about she was into models, sailing, art. She worked with her father repairing cars. She was a true renaissance woman. So many hobbies, but then a mother at heart. I mean, her children, her world really revolved around her children.

You could tell.

Revolved around her children.

And that engineering brain, we talked a little bit about that in the story about how that factored into leading up to this crime. But Rob, how do you start? Because sometimes when we are starting these pieces, they literally start off with a lot of picture and music just to draw you in. So how do you decide what to do?

You start out with the script, Jonathan give you a script, and then you start to You watch it down just raw, and then you start to get your beats and your feels of emotion through it and how you want to start. And me, personally, I usually will pick my first track of music to set the tone, and then you start Just going through footage and footage and footage, listening to the interviews, replacing bites, moving bites, talking with the producer.

Bites being like the interviews.

The interviews that you do. Can we add this? Can we add that? This is too much. Then you just start weaving it together and trying to bring out that emotion in the entire piece of drama, of tension, of happiness, of sadness. When she was a child, you try and keep the music a little upbeat and stuff. And then there could be a dark turn. You bring that down and you go into what photos, what footage. And like Jonathan said, there was a ton of footage from Broomfield Police. To go through all of that is just... It's amazing because you're picking out the little Nuggets. You get the script, but you just fill in, Oh, this will work with that. And then you build out these scenes and stuff.

That will help tell the story. That'll help tell it. Well, let's talk about the story, JB, because this woman is living her life out in the suburbs of Colorado, as we said, and she's suddenly found dead in her garage. And the first question is who would want to kill her? But there had been some talk about a former boyfriend that she dated when she was a teenager, Anthony Holland. And she had every reason to believe that he was stalking her.

She got these- He was sending threatening messages.

Yeah. So talk about that, because in the story, we talk about she got another one, and then she got another one. And it was out of the blue. He had reached out to her years ago, and then he regrett it that they broke up. But then she was very clear, I've got a family now. I'm moving on. And then suddenly he appears again in her life.

It started as innocuous, and she ignored it, and they got more and more threatening. And then eventually, a photo was sent to her of her husband, Dan, going to work. And she really freaked out. But she was very proactive about it. She contacted the police, and they brought her in. And this is some of this video that I was talking about. You see her coming into the Broomfield police and they are going through. She brings in this stalker log.

I mean, a spreadsheet that she's created herself.

A huge spreadsheet. Every message at every time, from texting, from emails, from whatever source. And the detectives are amazed. You're doing our job for us. And she says, Okay, well, help me. I don't know what to do. I mean, this guy says he's my ex-boyfriend, but I can't. I'm terrified. Yeah.

And we have to talk about the whole notion, and we hear so much about stalking in our society today. And it's a very hard thing to prove. It's a hard thing for police to be able to track down. So they suggested that she try to protect herself. She and her husband set up cameras in the home. He seemed to be very much involved, too, in terms of making sure they were okay. She even got a firearms.

She's proactive, yeah. She trained herself in firearms. She read these books. These detectives gave her. She set up a buddy system. So when she was alone as infrequently as possible. So she was ready. She was prepared. So it was all the more shocking to everyone when she was discovered dead in her basement.

Yeah, after she had done all this stuff.

In her garage, excuse me.

After she'd done all these things to protect herself. And one of the things we showed in the piece was that she even got an attractive purse that could conceal a gun that one of her relatives had sold. We talked about that and how that tells you the extent to which she was really very nervous about her life. But she thought there was a danger outside her home. Of course, in our piece, you find out the danger was really lurking inside her home. Anthony was not stalking her. It was her husband, Dan Krug, who had actually turned the tables to try to make it look like that. So when he gets to the scene after she is found, initially, police just see him as a distraught husband before anything else goes awry. Let's take a listen to a clip from that. Tell them to park on the side.

We see a man running down the street.

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

That's my house. Hey, stay back, stay back, stay back, stay back. Stay back. Stay back. That's my house. I understand. This is my house.

It just runs into the arms of one of Christie's family, and we realized that that was Dan. That that was her husband. That's probably her husband.

That's her husband. They embraced him in a hug. Which is your grace. We're up together. We're coming together. 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 heavy.

What was your reaction to his reaction?

When I was going through that footage and cutting it in, I just felt horrible for this guy. I was like, he did all the right things. He called the police. They were being stalked, and he goes home and finds that. And I found him very realistic. I to think that he was acting then.

Yeah, but then, J. B, he goes in for a police interview, and they begin to have some questions, don't they? Yeah.

I do like to nerd out on an interview, interrogation police videos, because it's such a fascinating interesting way to see how people are reacting in these high pressure situations and the way it unravels. When Dan first comes in, he's a victim, and police are treating him as such. It's fascinating watching his reaction. Then, at the beginning, he can barely speak. He's giving one-word answers. In fact, there's one part that we didn't include in the show, but they're asking what he does for a living, and he just goes, Money, money. And he does finance stuff.

But he's giving the impression that he's maybe just distraught.

He's so traumatized.

He seems like he's in shock, like genuine shock.

Yeah. As the interview progresses, there's active investigations going on. The police are looking and find Jack Anthony Holland.

The guy that they think is responsible.

The prime suspect, and they discover that he is in Utah. There is absolutely no way he could have done this. So at some point, the police come back, and then they read him as Miranda writes. Now, they don't go after him immediately. The interview continues for for a long time, but it's really just fascinating to watch how he goes from this crumpled traumatic mess to then as he starts to understand that they're starting to look at him a little more. He becomes much more withdrawn, and he starts rolling his eyes and gets a little bit more dramatic and just withdrawn. Defensive posture. Defensive posture, exactly.

Then begins to suggest that all wasn't great in the marriage and that Christine might have been having an affair.

Yeah, he starts throwing out insinuations that, Oh, Christine's been going. She leaves early. She comes on late. She won't tell me where she's going. Just trying to throw out alternate theories as to, Well, if it wasn't Jack Anthony Holland, maybe she's having affair, and maybe that affair partner has killed her. And the cop, one of the detectives, really challenges him on that and says, Why would her affair partner kill her? Wouldn't you be And he... That's when he starts to get more involved, when you realize he doesn't have as many excuses.

Yeah, he didn't have much to add to that. Well, when we come back, we're going to hear more about how police were able to figure out that the stalker and the killer was not Christine's long ago boyfriend, but actually her husband, Dan, and how they used Dan's own actions against himself.

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We A case that I think people will be talking about for a long time of mom of three just outside of Denver, Colorado, who was killed. Jb, let's talk about what I think intrigues viewers. Good old-fashioned police work. I mean, yes, you talk about the interrogation video. They see things. It give them a sense that something may not be right. But the Broomfield police did a quick investigation that started to reveal things.

Yeah, they were on top of this. The entire house looked orderly. There was no robbery. And that's when they start to really get into the digital forensics almost immediately.

Immediately, police investigators become suspicious when they realize that the cameras, the door ring camera-The cameras or the four-ring camera.

The cameras had been shut off. Three of the four cameras were shut off.

About the same time, Dan would have gone to work. And so they start to look at him suspiciously. And then they realize that he stopped at a construction area five minutes from their house.

And so they went to- That's where they think he may have discarded the murder weapons, which they never found, but it was an active construction site in this big area. But that was a very suspicious thing that they keyed in on quickly as well.

But Detective Randy Pylaak was fascinating because he's a digital forensics guy, and he was a very interesting character, too, just to talk to. He's the guy who's behind the scenes. I mean, I think- And a mild manner. Mild manner. Maybe thought it was a little strange to be talking on television because that's not what he does. But he really jumped in right away and was able to help figure out the computer and put Dan basically in the middle of all of this. Tell us about that.

This is one of the pieces of evidence that they found while Dan was still in his interview with police. He was able to trace back the IP address where these messages had been sent to Christine back to Dan's office.

Well, he told me all about this. So let's just take a listen to a clip of that. And it's just A lot of digital work on the computer.

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

Detective Randy Pylaak 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. Christine 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? Yeah. How does that work?

There was the 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 to have been alive. I got this text from her.

He also programmed her phone to send false confession messages to her to her other and to a detective about committing an affair, an affair that she never had. That was important for me to receive, to put the pieces in place for Dan's alibi. So Dan was pretty clever, right?

Dan was savvy, but Detective Pylik was more savvy. Savvier. Yeah. I mean, his big alibi, Dan's alibi, was that he received a message from Christie's phone after he's seen leaving work while he's on his way to work at the office. And so it's the question, How would Christine have texted him? How would he have killed her once he's already left? And Detective Pylik discovered that there were no input It was on the phone when the message went out, meaning it was a scheduled sentence. So Dan had scheduled a message on Christine's own phone to himself to make it seem like it was giving him an alibi.

It was happening at the time.

It was the burner phone, too, which was interesting with the locations. He was with the burner phone sending messages, and his phone was there. And then the burner phone, from what I understand, also, he had to register his email address?

Six months prior.

And that's the other thing you realized six months ago, this guy was doing this.

It was in the planning stages.

So Dan thought he was savvy. He bought the burner phone with a with a gift card. But as they researched back, they found Dan's own email address, register to That Gift Card.

To the gift card.

To the gift card, yeah. But there's always something- It seemed like he had his teeth crossed and dotted the eyes.

But they were able to unravel this and connect the dots. And that's what was so fascinating about this, I think, that the police investigation really zeroed in on this tech part of it. But then there is the family, and we talk about this all the time on this podcast, that at the core of these stories, there are victims, people who are hurting. And the family here really, really are still reeling from this. So we're going to come back and talk more about that. So stay with us.

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I am back now with J. B. And Rob talking about the Christine Krug case, one that I think people not only in the Colorado area, but really all over the country who may have followed this case are still talking about. For me, what was really, I guess, something that will stick with me and just an emotional part of the story was talking to the family, because this is a young woman who was loved dearly by her mother and her father, and she has three children now who are motherless. J. B, what I thought was remarkable, not not only their loss, but the betrayal. I mean, they have this son-in-law, Christine Krug's father and mom. They wanted to be careful how they characterized their feelings about him because Christine left behind three children, and they don't want these three children to feel so horrible about their family life and their father.

Yeah. I mean, this was obviously devastating to Christine's parents, Lars and Linda. I think they wanted to tell their story, but also be protective of the kids. I mean, as you said, it's such a tragedy for them to lose their mother, and now their father is a convicted murderer. But they were able to share some interesting details about the kids. They gave a statement to us saying that they're living with Christie's brother and his wife, that they were very loved by the family. I spent some time with Lars. He told me this really touching story that didn't make end to the piece, but Christie did models, like I talked about, and she would do models with her father, and she built a sailboat. She built sailboat models. And there was one that Lars had purchased for her that they didn't get to complete. And one of Christine's daughters found it. She said, I'd like to. She's working on it. And now Lars and his granddaughter are working on this model boat together. He says their granddaughter has the same engineering skills. The capacity that her mother had. She has the skills of tools that her mother had.

That's sweet. It was a really sweet story.

I think for us, the goal is always not to just tell these stories, and sometimes they're very chilling stories, but maybe if there is some a redeeming moment there for the family or something that they have been able to find to help them go on. And Dan was convicted, as you said. He maintains his innocence. He does. Yeah. And the family now is trying to go on. Rob, what were you left with? I mean, what stood out for you in this story? Because you edit so many of these stories, and many times they have similar themes. What stood out for you in this one?

What stood out with me was thinking you could get away with this in this day and age, with the digital forensics and everything. You really wonder, and like I said before, first, why would you do it? That always sticks. Then with all the shows, as an editor, you want to hope that you honored the deceased to show her in a light of like, this is what's gone from the world now. Her kids are going to miss and people that just knew her are going to miss. You try and bring that through with the editing, too, to honor the deceased.

Well, you did a terrific job doing that this time, and you always do. Thank you. Rob, this was fascinating to hear from you. It was great to see you outside of the dark edit room.

Our legendary editor, Rob. Exactly.

Well, you did a fabulous job on the story, helping us bring it to life and to help shine a light on this woman, Rob. And J. B, as always, you just do a fabulous job producing.

Great working with you, Deborah.

You too. Well, that does it for us today on The After Show. You can stream this 2020 episode. It's called He's Right Behind and it is on Disney+ and Hulu. The 2020 After Show is produced by Susie Lou, Noah Richie, Emily Shatz, Sasha Oslanian, and Trevor Hastings of ABC Audio, with Joseph Dias, Brian Mzeersky, and Alex Berenfeld of 2020. Theme music by Evan Viola. Janice Johnston is the executive producer of 2020. Josh Cohen, the director of podcasting at ABC Audio, Laura Meyer is the executive producer.

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