By COLLEEN SLEVIN
DENVER (AP) — A Colorado man was convicted Thursday of killing his wife after prosecutors say he posed as her ex-boyfriend and stalked her.
With his marriage falling apart, prosecutors said Daniel Krug, 44, decided to play “puppet master” by scaring his wife and then trying to win her back by protecting her from the fake stalking, uniting them against a common threat.
As soon as the verdict was read, a police officer put handcuffs on Krug, who was wearing a gray suit. Krug is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday.
Kristil Krug, a biochemical engineer, kept a log tracking the increasingly threatening texts and emails that suggested she was being watched. As police investigated the messages, prosecutors said Daniel Krug began to realize that he could face criminal charges and began plotting how to kill his wife to silence her and because she didn’t want to be with him anymore.
Prosecutors said he waited for her to return to their suburban Denver home on Dec. 14, 2023, after taking two of their children to school and then knocked her unconscious and stabbed her in the heart.
“He didn’t love her. He hated her. Think about what he did to her,” Senior Deputy District Attorney Kate Armstrong said during closing arguments Wednesday.
At the time of the killing, the ex-boyfriend was an eight-hour drive away in Utah, where he was living, according to investigators.
The defense stressed there was no physical evidence linking Daniel Krug to the violent killing, noting that there was no blood found in his car or his clothes, which his daughter said were the same he was wearing when he drove her to the bus stop that morning. None of Daniel Krug’s DNA was found at the scene, though partial DNA from an unknown person was found on her neck, the defense said.
Daniel Krug’s lawyers alleged that sloppy police work had failed to keep Kristil Krug safe before she was killed and then bungled the investigation into her death. The detective who investigated the stalking that Kristil Krug had first reported in October 2023 was lazy and incompetent, they said. The defense also stressed that police failed to test Kristil Krug’s phone for fingerprints even though they alleged Daniel Krug sent texts from it after killing her.
Shortly after the time when authorities said Krug killed his wife, he was at his usual coffee shop buying his morning latte. He complained that he had been given an iced drink instead of a hot one and waited for a replacement. During closing arguments, defense attorney Philip Geigle questioned whether that is something a “cold-blooded killer” would bother to do.
Prosecutors said that he wanted to be seen as “cool as a cucumber” getting his regular morning coffee before heading to work and also likely planned to wear gloves so he would not leave any DNA linking him to the killing.
According to investigators, the email account that was used to send messages to Kristil Krug was created on the computer network at Daniel Krug’s workplace. A burner phone used to send some of the texts, purchased with a gift card registered to Daniel Krug, was often found to have been in the same general location as his phone, Armstrong said.
Three of the home’s surveillance cameras, which Kristil Krug’s mother said she installed because of the recent stalking, were not recording when she was found, according to Daniel Krug’s arrest affidavit. The one in the garage was covered with tape. The defense said the tape also had DNA from an unknown source.
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