Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Creep Stalked His Own Wife - The Daniel Krug Story

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

In December 2023, 44-year-old Daniel Krug of Broomfield, Colorado murdered his wife, Kristil Krug, in the garage of their home after months of secretly tormenting her with fake messages from a made-up stalker he created using burner phones and multiple online identities. Posing as her ex-boyfriend Jack, Daniel sent harassing emails and photos to both himself and Kristil to convince her she was being watched, all while portraying himself as her protector.

On December 12, Disney Plus invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six-episode docu-series. I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book. The End of an Era. And Don't Miss Taylor Swift, The Era's Tour, the final show, featuring for the first time the tortured poets department. Streaming December 12, only on Disney Plus. guy really wants to win his wife back and you're not going to believe the way he tries to do it. Now the guy's name is Daniel and Daniel's about 43 when the story starts and he's living in Colorado,

but the dude has a big problem. His wife doesn't love him anymore and she wants to leave him. Now his wife is this woman, Christiel. And Christel is a very sweet person, but she's done with this marriage. I mean, this has been a long time coming. But Daniel, he doesn't want her to leave, and he ain't about to let that happen. So one day in 2023, he comes up with an insane plan to scare her into staying with him. He's going to create some fake identities and use them to stalk and harass her, thinking that she'll be afraid and she'll turn to him as a protector, and that she won't leave him. So he gets to work. First, he decides to impersonate one of Christel's old ex-boyfriends from 20 years ago. That ex-ex-boyfriend. That ex-execkels.

boyfriend is this guy, Jack, and he makes a fake email account and he gets a burner phone. So Daniel, pretending to be Jack, sends his first stalkery message to his wife, Christiel, over text. Basically, he's saying he's going to be in town soon and asking if she wants to hook up. And so Christel sees this text and she just ignores it. So the next day, Daniel, pretending to be Jack, sends her even more texts. But these, they're like angry ones. And Christel sees them. And she ignores these too.

But Daniel, he's not about to give up. He keeps going. He's sending creepy messages. And a few weeks later, he stages a candid photo of himself in a parking lot. And he sends it to her to make it look like Jack is now stalking him too. He also sends her messages, pretending to be Jack, and he tells her that she's being watched. Like he says, I noticed your license plate has expired, or I saw you go to the dentist today. And if that isn't bad enough, then he decides to get even more creative.

He posts an ad on some horny classified website, and he puts Christiel's phone number on it so that random people start texting her, and she starts getting dirty, explicit messages and photos from strange men in response to this ad. And so by this point, Christiel, she can't ignore this anymore. She's feeling super afraid and paranoid about all of this. So she goes to the police, and she gives them a detailed spreadsheet showing every time that she's gotten an unwanted message from her stalker, who she believes is Jack. But here's what's crazy. Daniel talks to the police too. And of course he doesn't tell them that he's the one secretly harassing his wife.

No, no. He doubles down on his lies, and he tells them how all this stalking from Jack is making him paranoid and angry. anxious too. And a few weeks go by. And for whatever reason, Daniel decides to escalate things again. He hits up his wife again, pretending to be Jack. This time he basically says, get rid of your husband, and then we can be together. Now, I don't know what Daniel's long-term plan was with this whole thing, because if he keeps harassing his wife and he keeps escalating things, eventually the real Jack will come forward and he'll probably say something like, uh, none of this was me. But I guess Daniel isn't thinking of these things. So he just keeps this

whole act up. And eventually police get warrants to investigate the phone numbers and email addresses that the messages are coming from. And they hit up Google and text now and Verizon, but weeks go by and these companies don't respond. And so I believe when police start to investigate the source of these messages, that is what pushes Daniel over the edge, because he knows that they're eventually going to trace all this back to him. And so here is where the story gets dark, because Daniel decides that now he's going to murder his wife, Christiel, and let Jack take the fall. So another month goes by, and Daniel knows that if he's going to unalive Christel, he'll need an alibi. So when she isn't paying attention, he takes her

and he schedules text messages to himself and to other people so that they look like they're coming from Christel at certain times of the day, so that it looks like he was texting back and forth with her instead of murdering her. He also disables all the security cameras from outside the house, and he puts blue tape over their ring doorbell camera so as, you know, not to accidentally record himself committing this crime. Then a day passes, and so today is the big day. It's time to pull off this murder. So it's early in the morning and Christiel leaves the house to drop their kids off

at school. Then she comes back home and she parks her car in the garage. And Daniel is there. He's waiting for her. And suddenly, boom, he jumps out and he hits her over the head with a blunt object and this knocks her down. Then he takes a kitchen knife and

bam, he stabs her. And this, unfortunately, unalives her. Then Daniel leaves the house and he goes to work, like it's a normal day. And while he's there, he calls police. And he says that he hasn't heard from his wife in a while, and he requests that they do a welfare check on her.

Hi there. My name is Dan Krug. I don't think this is an emergency, but this feels really weird. Okay. My wife isn't responding to text messages or phone calls. Okay. We've had threats against us. And so police, they send an officer out to their house to check on Christine. And when the officer gets there, he's looking around and he looks into a window into the garage, and that is where he sees her.

And so police, they let Daniel know, and he comes home from work, and he pretends to be all upset, and he gives an Oscar-worthy performance at seeming devastated that his wife was attacked by someone. So now, police are like, yeah, we got to find this jack guy. I mean, he was stalking her, so clearly he's responsible for this. and they get a warrant for his arrest. And they actually do go and find him, but not in Colorado where all this is happening. They actually find him all the way over in Utah, where he lives. And in their investigation, they discover that Jack wasn't in Colorado at the time of the murder,

and he couldn't have made the eight-hour drive from Utah in time. It would have literally been physically impossible. So Jack is fully cleared as a suspect. So then police turned to the only other man in Christiel's life. Her husband, Daniel, and they start questioning him. And Daniel, he starts making himself out to be the victim. He says that his marriage was deteriorating, and he admits that he and Christel were sleeping in separate bedrooms,

and that he says that he was actually the one asking for a divorce. And so now, of course, Daniel is thinking that he's successfully looking like a victim, and this whole thing is just going to blow over and he's about to get away with murder. Until. Until police reach back out to Google, TextNow, and Verizon. Now, these three companies still haven't responded to the warrants that were filed months ago. But this time, because a murder was involved, they get back to police within like an hour. And they send them back a bunch of data and call records.

and police look at it, and they see that a lot of these harassing texts and emails were actually sent from the IP address of where Daniel works. Not only that, they see that the burner phone that was used was bought with a gift card registered to Daniel. So, only two days after Daniel murdered his wife, bam, police arrest him. Here's his mugshot. And he goes to trial, and he's found guilty on all charges, and he's sentenced to life in prison.