True Crime Campfire - Counterfeit Son: The Murders of Bart and Krista Halderson

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

It's not that unusual for people to bend the truth a little to show themselves in a good light, especially when they're young. Maybe you want to impress a crush, maybe you just want to add a bit of glamor to an otherwise normal life. It's mostly harmless...unless the lies get out of control. If someone lies with every beat of their heart, builds an entire alternate reality around themselves, then what happens when that alternate reality is threatened by the truth can get pretty ugly. Join us for the story of a golden-boy son turned double murderer. Sources:CBS's "48 Hours," episode “The Snapchat Clue” Trial footage, People v HaldersonWMTV15 News: https://www.wmtv15news.com/2021/12/22/halderson-trial/ https://www.wkow.com/news/prosecutor-haldersons-father-about-to-expose-sons-lifestyle-lies-before-homicide/article_4385f8b0-6d96-11ec-bcd0-6b683767931a.htmlRolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/fake-spacex-job-murder-dismemberment-lies-1278750/Channel 3000 News: https://www.channel3000.com/news/crime/analysts-say-phone-of-chandler-halderson-was-tracked-in-areas-where-parents-remains-found/article_4779b795-67a1-53ba-81d0-3b0261ce3688.htmlWKOW News: https://www.wkow.com/news/crime/chandler-halderson-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-without-parole-for-the-murder-of-his-parents/article_1ec0c0b4-a626-11ec-b6d8-a303892e68f7.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. It's not that unusual for people to bend the truth a little to show themselves in a good light, especially when they're young. Maybe you want to impress a crush, maybe you just want to add a bit of glamour to an otherwise normal life. It's mostly harmless, unless the lies get out of control. If someone lies with every beat of their heart builds an entire alternate reality around themselves, then what happens

when that alternate reality is threatened by the truth can get pretty ugly? This is counterfeit son, the murders of Barton Krista Hollerson. So, campers, for this one, we're in Windsor, Wisconsin, a little town just north of Madison, July 7, 2021. People were getting really worried about Bart and Krista Haltersson, a popular couple with two grown sons. Their 23-year-old son Chandler had just reported them missing. They hadn't been seen since the previous Friday, July 2nd. Chandler, who'd recently moved back in with Bart and Krista, told police they'd gone out to the family cabin up north near Green Bay to deal with some kind of property emergency. He'd spoken to them over the weekend, he said, and he'd been expecting them to come back home on Monday.

But there was no sign of them. No sign of them on Tuesday or Wednesday either, which was when Chandler went down to the police station to file a missing person report. Bart and Krista seemed to have an enviable life, with solid careers in a beautiful house in a leafy suburb. Bart was a high-flying accountant, and after her two boys left home years earlier, Krista had gone back to work as a customer service rep at an auto shop. And their two sons seemed to be thriving, too. Mitchell Halterson, who was 24, was right at the start of a successful career in IT, and he'd just gotten engaged.

Chandler had just graduated from college and had a long-term girlfriend, Kat. He had a part-time job working from home for an insurance company and volunteered as a scuba diver for the local police department. But he also had a dream career all lined up and ready to go. He'd been offered a job down in Florida with SpaceX, the Astrospace Engineering Company. Bart and Krista weren't the type of people to just drop off the map, and Krista certainly wouldn't just not show up to work for four days without telling anybody. But that was what had happened, from Friday onwards.

In fact, it was so unusual for Krista to miss work that her work buddy Daniel had gone over to the Holderson's house on Friday afternoon to check if everything was all right. When nobody answered the door, he walked all around the house and peeked in the windows, and it didn't do much to put his mind at ease. A coffee table was on its side in the living room, which is not the kind of thing you want to see when you're checking up on a friend. Both Bart and Krista's cars were in the garage, which was weird if they weren't answering the door. As Daniel was walking around to the back of the house, Chandler suddenly popped out of a side door,

shirtless with a towel around his waist. Oh, I just got out of the shower, he said. I don't know about y'all, but if somebody knocks on my door when I'm just getting out of the shower, I'm still going to, like, pull on pants and a shirt before I answer it, if I even bother to answer it at all. At least a bathrobe or something, damn. But Chandler has more shirtless picks out there than you would really expect for a kind of skinny guy who doesn't smile much. So maybe he just liked to give people a show, such as it was. He told Daniel that Bart and Krista had gone up north to the cabin.

Daniel was relieved, but got back in touch with Chandler that weekend when he couldn't get hold of the couple on the phone. But Chandler told him that was normal. The cell phone reception of there was garbage. When Krista still wasn't back at work for the first three days of the following week and missed an important doctor's appointment she'd been talking about, Daniel decided he'd had it. He pressured Chandler, who seemed weirdly reluctant for some reason, into making a missing person's report. There were a lot of roads through deep forest up around the cabin. If Bart and Krista had had an accident and gone off the side, they wouldn't necessarily be spotted. And the cabin was right by a lake. Maybe Bart and Krista had gotten into trouble out on the water. Detectives first went to the Holderson's house to get the story firsthand from Chandler.

He walked them around the house, pointing out things his parents had taken with them on their trip. He didn't know what the emergency up at the cabin had been, but he said another couple, who he didn't know had picked his folks up to drive them north, which was why both their cars were still in the garage. Now, y'all, are your parents likely to drive off with a strange couple that you've never seen before and not tell you who these people are? Obviously, I guess the answer to that depends on how close you are with your folks, but, like, Chandler was young and he was still living at home, and they told him about the trip. They're not going to tell him who is picking them up. Strange. Except for a couple years when he shared an apartment with a friend, Chandler had lived at home his whole life. He and his parents must have known more of each other's business than they wanted to.

He showed the detectives a text he'd gotten from his mom on July 4th, saying she and Bart were going to go to the parade at White Lake rather than come home. Chandler's older brother, Mitchell, hadn't heard anything about a trip to the cabin, and when Bart and Krista were reported missing, he drove up there with his fiancé to look around. Deputies from the local sheriff's office met them there. Krista's grandfather had built the cabin by the lake in the 1940s, and it was a vacation spot that the whole family shared. and had dark wooden walls, moss on the roof, and had an antler deer skull hanging over the front door. It could only get more Wisconsin if they put a cheese hat on the skull. When Mitchell and the officer got there, the cabin was dark.

The grass out front was overgrown and it didn't show any tire tracks. A tree had fallen across the driveway and looked like it had been there a while. Mitchell didn't have a key, but he gave officers permission to crowbar open the doors to the cabin in the shed. the inside of the cabin was very obviously unlived in. There was a layer of dust on everything, and that musty smell old houses get when they're left empty for months at a time. The boat was still in the shed. Clearly, it had been a while since anybody stayed there.

Back in Windsor, Chandler went door-to-door around his neighborhood, asking people if they had seen any sign of his parents. No one had. In one neighbor's ring doorbell video, you can see him asking if he knew which neighbors had security cameras. Maybe the cameras had caught something. Up until now, Chandler-Halderson's life had been both kind of generic and kind of idyllic at the same time. He was a Boy Scout.

He was on the swim and soccer teams. He fit in. He was reasonably good-looking. He did well in school, but not spectacularly well. He had a reputation as a prankster, always looking to joke around and make fun of people, which is the kind of thing that can make you the star of the school when you're like 14 and then gets progressively less fun every year after that. that. For everybody but you, anyway. Chandler's girlfriend, Catherine, or Cat, as everyone called

her, was a couple years younger than him. They'd gotten together two years earlier right after Kat started college. She was cute, sweet with a little bit of an edge, and she got along great with Bart and Krista Halterson. They were warm and welcoming, especially Krista, and Kat always liked visiting there. Sometimes they'd all play Mario Kart together after dinner. It was fun. Her relationship with Chandler, though, had gone through something of a rocky patch. See, Chandler liked bragging to his buddies about how he was hooking up with other girls behind her back. Whether he really was or not, who knows. As we'll see, as the story goes, Chandler was absolutely the kind of guy who would cheat on his girlfriend without thinking twice about it.

He's also absolutely the kind of guy who would make up stories about fucking around just to impress his friends. So who knows? Yeah. Which do you think is worse? Like, not for the relationship, but just worse. actually cheating or being so much of a dweeb that you lie to your friends about cheating. Like, I'm not sure. They're both toe-curlingly cringe in their own special way.

And to make matters worse, in the first of a long list of failing to understand how the world actually works, Chandler didn't seem to grasp that people in the same social group, you know, talk to each other. Yeah, Chandler's a special one. Kat found out about Chandler bragging about slam and ass all over Windsor, and she confronted him about it. He denied ever cheating on her and was kind of sort of able to convince her, as in like, sure, babe, I believe you.

Also, you're going to need to keep your Snapchat location on so I can always see where you are. And Chandler wasn't only having trouble in his romantic life. He was super unlucky when it came to work. He was theoretically supposed to be paying rent for staying with his parents, but never did. In fact, despite supposedly working remotely for an insurance company,

he never seemed to have any money at all and was always asking for some from his folks. Initially, the company had mistakenly had Chandler down as an hourly worker instead of a salaried employee, and getting that sorted out delayed him getting paid. Then, it turned out, Chandler hadn't gotten his bank account information right for the direct deposits, which just delayed things even further. And when the company finally tried to deposit the months of back pay Chandler was owed, the sum was so high that Chandler's bank thought the deposit was fraudulent and froze his account. all those months and months of work and he still hadn't been paid a dime.

What an unlucky guy! But this was nothing compared to the misfortune around Chandler's big opportunity was SpaceX. At the start of June, he and Kat were all set to drive down to Titusville, Florida, so that Chandler could get a start on his glittering new career. He'd already rented an apartment down there and a rental car for the two of them to drive down together. It was an exciting time for both of them. Chandler and Kat would be living together for the first time, and Chandler would be working with rockets and space exploration.

What could be cooler? He could go to fancy parties and smugly tell brain surgeons that what they did wasn't exactly rocket science. But tragically, while he was home alone one day, Chandler fell down the stairs and hurt himself real bad. He was somehow able to get himself to the emergency room, which was downright heroic, given the severity of the injuries he sustained,

primarily a brain bleed so bad that a surgeon had to drill a hole in Chandler's skull. to relieve the pressure, which apparently they were able to do without shaving any hair off Chandler's head. Pretty advanced medical technology they have up there in Wisconsin. He also suffered spinal damage and nerve damage which weakened his legs so much he could barely walk and meant he had to use a colostomy bag. This must have been a new type that no one could see when he went in the pool to exercise his poor wrecked legs. Again, very advanced medical technology up there in Wisconsin. Obviously, he couldn't drive and his doctors told him he wasn't allowed to fly either. Chandler's dream job at SpaceX had just been scrubbed before launch and he was stuck at his parents' house in a neck

brace. Again, what an unlucky guy. Chandler Halterson's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad life. Similar to all the difficulties Chandler had had with his employers, he kept running into trouble with Madison Area Technical College, where he'd just graduated from. He needed a copy of his school transcript and still hadn't received his diploma. But every time he tried to use the college's online portal, it crashed. He was stuck in a frustrating email loop with a couple of school administrators, Alyssa Brandt and Daniel Spithe, who kept giving him the runaround and making excuses for the college. Chandler had shown the emails to his dad when Bart Holderson wanted to know where his son's diploma had gotten to. And now's about the time we need to take a step back and take a look at actual

reality, because if you believed all of that, you need to put a post-it on your mirror reminding you every morning that wallet inspectors aren't real. It was lies. All of it. Very nearly, the entirety of Chandler-Halderson's life was one big pile of dairy state cow poop. He dropped out in his first semester at the Technical College and hadn't told anybody, not his girlfriend, not his parents, none of his buddies. He hadn't done one iota of work for any insurance company.

the one he claimed to be working for remotely had never heard of him. He wasn't a volunteer scuba diver for the police department. Not only wasn't he a licensed diver, the local PD didn't even have a scuba dive team, which you'd expect because there was literally just four deputies working there. And of course, there was no SpaceX job. Of course there wasn't. There were no job listings that read,

Wanted, completely averaged nobody from rural Wisconsin for important work in space. Why Chandler had picked such an enormous lie that was obviously going to bite him in the ass, who knows, but it's something we've seen so many times with the weirdos in our cases, like just a complete indifference to future consequences of their current words and actions, no matter how heavy those consequences are going to be. It was when reality started catching up to his SpaceX lie. When he and Kat were supposed to get in the car he had definitely rented

and drive to the Florida apartment, he had also very definitely rented. that Chandler, you know, fell down the stairs. He wasn't hurt at all, of course, but he complained so much about phantom neck pain that a doctor finally, like, threw a neck brace at him to use when things got real bad. He was like, here, shut the fuck up. So if he wasn't studying and he wasn't working and he wasn't scuba diving for the popo, what was Chandler doing all day? Well, pretty much just playing video games and jerking off until his mom came home from work and made him dinner, probably with some like chicken duggies. God. Dino-shaped, I'm assuming.

Definitely dino-shaped. Basically living like a teenage kid on permanent summer break. His favorite game was Escape from Tarkov, a multiplayer first-person shooter that builds itself as kind of a more realistic and hardcore version of Call of Duty. While he was playing Tarkov, Chandler befriended another player. a guy named Andrew Smith, who was stationed overseas with the army. Unbeknownst to him, Smith probably inspired one level of Chandler-Halderson's great ziggurat of bullshit. He suffered a serious head injury in a Humvee crash, got an honorable discharge, and moved

back home to Kansas. Hmm. Okay, so hurt his head and immediately got out of his army commitment and got out of it honorably at that. Like, nobody's mad at you if you just have a head injury, right? And I think there was one other thing that might have inspired this little fake out. about the head injury. His brother had been diagnosed with diabetes like a year or so earlier. And it was really scary. And, you know, it was like adult onset. I think it was type 1, which is really rare and like scary. And so, you know, he got a lot of attention, obviously, from his family. And they were very worried about him. And, you know, for somebody like Chanman, that makes an impression. Ben. There's like a, there's like a, there's like a Venn diagram of like pathological liars and

Munchausen's people. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Like, I just think that's, I think it's so fascinating because you can see the exact thought process he went through. It was like, huh, how do I get out of this without anybody being mad at me? Well, exactly. I just, I just pretend to be sick. It's fine. Yeah. In June of 2021, just before Chandler faked falling down the stairs and injuring his head, Smith visited his buddy in Wisconsin and brought him a gift, a Soviet SKS semi-automatic rifle. This was Chandler's favorite weapon in Escape from Tarkov. And we're not going to pretend that giving a military rifle to your weird online buddy shows great judgment. But Smith was at least smart enough to take a photo of Chandler's ID alongside the rifle serial number so he'd

have record of the transfer. June was also when Bart Holderson started investigating Chandler's problems with his insurance job and with Madison Area Technical College. Chandler had given his dad printouts of his emails with college administrators, but they really just raised more questions. For one thing, one of the administrators, Alyssa Brandt, kept spelling her own name wrong. In every email from her, there was about a 50-50 chance that she'd forget the tea on the end of Brandt. How many of y'all spell your own name wrong on a regular basis? Yeah, I'd say that's a red flag. And how many times in your job do you actually type out your last name? Like, you have email signatures. Yeah, that's true. They're just on,

they're at the bottom of your email. I worked at a, you. university for a while. That was exactly what happened. I had a little email signature. I never had to think about it. Yeah. I didn't even think about that. Well, and then on top of that, all of the college emails came from Gmail accounts, as of the messages the insurance company Chandler was supposed to be working for, including one from a guy whose signature line said, Department of Human Recourses. Oh, boy. Man, if you're going to live a lie, you've got to come a little bit correcter than this. Okay, this is just a pitiful display. It's honestly, like, really sad.

Like, I, like, it's just every, every mistake you could make as a liar he made. Oh, absolutely. He crossed the streams. He lied too many times. He didn't have enough backup. Like, it's just stupid. Yeah, you ain't say nothing yet. Yeah, I mean, like, you guys are getting the gist.

But of course, all these emails were actually from fake accounts Chandler had set up. So he'd have something to show his dad. Like, that's obvious. Sometimes he'd take a little effort to make them seem slightly official, like adding MATC after the names of supposed college admins. But most of the time, he wouldn't bother. Bart, who was a human being with a working brain, was suspicious. Suspicious enough that he called up the technical college pretending to be Chandler.

He asked to speak to Alyssa Brandt and surprise, surprise. learned that there was nobody there by that name. He also learned that Chandler owed $2,000 in tuition and had barely spent any time at the college before dropping out. He certainly hadn't received a degree. Bart arranged a meeting on July 1st for himself and Chandler with college administrators. Actual real ones, not just Gmail ghosts. Around 2 p.m. on that day, he sent Chandler a text. I'm ready whenever you are.

And then he vanished. A little later, Chandler text. at his mom, Dad's phone died, text or call and get soda on your way home. I've got an extra hour of work. Her reply was, Kay, I can, smiley face. Christa Halterson got home just after five, and no one heard from her again, except for that text message he supposedly sent Chandler on July 4th. Later, Cat wanted to hang out, but Chandler said he was too busy doing chores for his parents. This was, to say the least, out of character for him. When Cat came over the the next day, he asked to borrow her swiffer wet jet and for her to bring over some hydrogen

peroxide because he'd cut his foot on broken glass. On July 8th, the day after Bart and Krista Halterson had been reported missing, police got a call. On July 4th, Chandler and his girlfriend Cat had visited the farm just outside of town where Kat's mom Dolce lived with her girlfriend. They had a pool, so of course Chandler and Kat liked to visit in the summer, especially now that Chandler's legs were hurt, and he needed to gently exercise them in the water. The next day, Chandler called Kat's mom and asked if he could come over by himself to swim. This was kind of weird. Chandler had never asked to come over by himself before, but she said, sure. She was going to be out most of the day, but he could come over whenever.

When she got home, Dulce noticed the cover of the pool was still on. She couldn't see Chandler, but his SUV was parked by the woods out at the back of the property. The back of the car was open. Then she saw Chandler coming out of the woods, looking really down, a droopy dog expression on his face. He went into the pool, but to Dulce, it didn't look like he was swimming, so much as cleaning himself off. Dulce's girlfriend later testified that she was kind of annoyed by the whole thing.

Chandler said he needed to exercise his legs, but he took forever to actually get in the pool, and then he didn't even seem like he was exercising. She wanted to get in the pool herself and cool off, and she liked getting in there topless, of course she didn't want to do in front of Chandler. The whole thing struck she and Dulce is weird, but it wasn't until they heard that Chandler's parents were missing,

that weird and irritating graduated too alarming, and Dulce called the police. When they'd spoken to Chandler the day before, they'd asked him what he'd done each day since his parents had left for the cabin. He told them about going to the pool with Cat on July 4th, but not the second visit. So they brought him down to the police station for an interview at the same time as deputies went to live.

look around the farm. When they got there, they saw right away that turkey vultures were circling over the woods at the back of the farm. Back there, they followed a trail of flattened grass, like something had been dragged on a tarp, and under a small pile of branches and twigs, they made a horrifying discovery, the torso of an adult man. The head and arms were missing, and the legs were cut off at mid-thigh, the cuts going right through a pair of pants. Whoever had done this had been perfectly willing to cut up a human body, but apparently was skeved out at the idea of having to look at this poor guy in his underwear while doing it. The police didn't have much doubt about whose torso they had found,

and DNA would soon confirm this had been Bart Halterson, Chandler's dad. There were two bullet holes in his back. In his back, ugh. Nearby in the woods, there was a rusted out old water tank, the kind of junk it's not that unusual to find on an old working farm. Hidden inside it were pruning shears, scissors, and broken saw blades. Elsewhere in the woods, police found a bloody tarp. Blood on the tarp and cutting tools would later be matched to both Bart and Krista Haltersson.

Chandler's interview at the police station had so far just been him recounting his story to detectives, but the tone quickly changed when they learned what their colleagues had found out at the farm. One officer got in Chandler's face, pressuring him again and again to tell the truth. Tell the truth. It's not a bad idea when you're interviewing a young dork like Chandler. They'll often just crack like an egg. But he just said, okay, yeah, okay, lawyer. And that was that for Chandler-Halderson, talking to the police. He was arrested right away, initially on a charge of providing false information about a missing person. After that, the dominoes kept falling. Andrew Smith, Chandler's. And there's army buddy from Escape from Tarkov called police right after he heard Chandler had been arrested to tell them about the rifle he'd given him.

He'd later explain to a prosecutor why he came forward so fast. To put it blankly, sir, I served in the army and I'm not going to get fucked for something I didn't do. He knew the SKS rifle he'd given to Chandler could be traced back to him. The rifle itself would take a little longer to show up. Chandler had hidden it behind some boards and a shed on the farm. Investigators talked to the Halterson's neighbors in Windsor. One said that on the night of July 1st, there was a strong smell of wood smoke all over the neighborhood. The smell soon changed.

The neighbor described it like barbecuing a large pork. Oh, boy. There was a pond behind the Halterson House, and the neighbor on the other side of it was, I think it's fair to say, a scosh security conscious. He had 13 security cameras around his home. Dude, what are you hiding in there? That's so important. This guy's got like 15 of the Pulp Fiction briefcases stacked up in his mom. god dang at the very least i mean come on at the very least one of the cameras pointed across

the pond at the halterson house and early on the morning of july second it caught the glow of light from the fireplace there visible through a window this remember was on a warm summer night later the light flared up really brightly and then suddenly went out investigators would later find scorching around the fireplace and the glass screen in the front of it was broken They think Chandler tried to burn his parents' remains in the fireplace, unaware that the fat in a human body can be flammable. The fire flared up almost out of control, the heat intense enough to shatter the screen, and Chandler had cut his foot on the broken glass in his panicky attempt to put out the blaze. Unlike fat, bone doesn't burn easily. Forensic technicians found bone fragments in the fireplace, including pieces from at least one human skull.

Chandler had tried to burn his parents severed heads in his fireplace. Jesus Murphy. I can't even imagine. I just can't even imagine. But watch that security footage. You can find it online. Of the firelight in the window, it is one of the creepiest things I have ever seen in a murder case. It gave me chills all over.

It's, yeah. Just because you know what's going on. You can see the light just flare up really bright and then wink out. And you know exactly why. and it is just chilling. In his own parents' fireplace. It's just in their own fireplace. It's awful.

I can't even imagine. In the basement, which had a sparklingly clean floor, investigators found a shell casing. And despite Chandler's hard work with the Swiffer Wetjet, luminal and a black light revealed plenty of blood evidence. At least one of Chandler's parents was likely killed down there, probably both of them, given the lack of blood evidence anywhere else in the house, and they'd probably been at least partially dismembered.

down there, too. When his first disposal method failed, and I really do think that Chandler was dumb enough to believe he could get rid of two entire human bodies in a living room fireplace, he turned to the woods. Police had found a piece of Bart, but what about Krista? Investigators interviewed Chandler's girlfriend, Kat. You can watch a video of that first interview where she completely dismisses the possibility that Chandler could have hurt his parents.

I mean, of course she would. This was the guy she loved. someone she thought she knew better than anyone. And maybe I'm over-analizing, but I do think you can see a little doubt there. Like she's trying to reassure herself that what she's saying is true. Yeah, at one point they asked her, you know, do you think he could have had anything to do with it? And Kat says, no, no way. I mean, he has SpaceX.

It was really sad. Just like his parents and everybody else in his life, Kat had bought every word in his big bag of bullshit. She was completely cooperative with the police and gave them. her phone when they asked to make a copy of it. Remember when Kat had thought Chandler was cheating on her and made him keep the location service turned on on Snapchat? Well, it turns out, around 9 a.m. on July 3rd, Kat checked her phone and saw that Chandler was 25 miles away

at a swimming hole he liked on the Wisconsin River. He told Kat he was going to be at home. She took a screenshot of the location image and saved it. She had no idea anything was wrong with Chandler's parents at that point, but she did wonder if he was up there with another. girl. And by the way, one of the more memorable pictures from this case was taken at this same swimming hole a year earlier. It's Chandler in real short denim cutoffs holding a big knife and like trying to give the camera his blue steel. He's got like one foot up against a tree way higher than

you'd think. Like his knee is almost at nipple height and obviously thinks he looks like an ultimate badass. The reality is closer to what you'd get if you Google twink crocodile Dundee cosplay, but there you go what a goob when police went to search the overgrown land around the swimming hole they made a discovery just as shocking as the torso at the farm one complete adult female leg severed mid-thigh and just one foot from the other leg both hidden in bushes along with the fragments of bone in the fireplace this was all they'd ever find of christa halterson it's really hard to comprehend just how dumb chanels was about all this, which is good. I mean, we like it when criminals are dumb. It means they get caught easy, and Chandler was arrested just 36 hours after he'd reported his parents missing. We had another Wisconsin case similar to this recently, if you recall, like half the state is deep, dark woods where a body could stay hidden for years or decades, and instead Chandler goes to a farm where the people know him well and his favorite swimming hole without turning off the location

on his phone. And he left his bloody tarp and cutting tools right there, beside their remains. You're in Wisconsin and you can't find a lake to chuck all that stuff in. Just dip shit. But, you know, it's, I think the reason I bring that up is because it's so emblematic of who this person is. He is just lazy to his core. Just lazy to the core. I mean, that's the reason for everything in this is just absolute self-absorption and laziness, phoning it in in every area of his life, just unreal. Before Bart or Krista's remains were found, and thus before anyone but their killer knew they'd been cut to pieces, Chandler's Google history showed searches like, Wisconsin dismembered body found, and dead body found Wisconsin.

Remember the text his mom had supposedly sent Chandler from the cabin on July 4th, saying she and Bart were going to watch the parade up in White Lake? Well, cell phone data showed Krista's phone had been in Windsor, in or near the Halterson home when that text was made. The phone had been turned on just long enough to send the message, then turned to. off again. And to put the cherry on this Sunday of incompetence, White Lake had actually held their parade on July 3rd that year, which I imagine would be something you could easily Google. Lazy. Police would find both Bart and Krista's phones in the Halderson's garage, wrapped in foil and hidden inside a shoe. Bart had a health app running on his. It stopped recording

data right after 2 p.m. when he and Chandler were supposed to leave to see the college administrators. That was probably when he was killed. Investigators think Chandler killed Krista right after she came home from work later that day. Just think of how icy cold this was. He was planning to kill his mother, but he also wanted some soda. So he'd asked her to pick some up on her way home. Unbelievable. Unbelievable, knowing that he was going to murder her when she got there, but he still wanted that Coke.

Unreal. You can watch video of Chandler's trial. online, which is fascinating to watch because of the witness testimony, and to see Chandler just apparently bored out of his tiny mind. But there wasn't any real doubt about the outcome. Chandler lied as easily as breathing, but he was also terrible at it, just like he was terrible at trying to cover up his crimes. He might as well have gotten a t-shirt printed that said, I killed my parents. Ask me how. Why had he killed his parents? Obviously his whole dumbass web of lies was about to fall apart and for a narcissist like Chandler maybe avoiding that

confrontation was reason enough to kill him he is precisely that pathetic like for a narcissist ego death is death right so to lose face to have everybody find out he'd lied about getting a job at SpaceX and lied about this and lied about that it's unthinkable they can't absorb that kind of an of an ego shock so they would rather kill it's just absolutely crazy as it happens Bill and Krista had life insurance policies that combined to around a million dollars which could give a guy an awful lot of free time

to play escape from Tarkov but we don't know if Chandler was aware of those policies or whether money was a motivator at all the jury convicted Chandler after a couple hours of deliberation and after that all the insurance money went to his older brother Chandler was sentenced to life in prison

with no possibility of parole thank God We're not psychologists, so obviously we can't diagnose Chandler-Halderson, but I think it's fair to say he's at least within walking distance of psychopathy. I mean, when you consider how the story ended, all his stupid, grandiose lies seem like something you'd pull when you don't consider other people real, when you think of everybody else as NPCs in your story, who would never question you, of course. And then there's the killings themselves. This guy not only murdered his parents, he had no qualms. about cutting them up with saws and gardening tools. He cut off his mom and dad's heads and tried to burn them in the fireplace, and apparently it didn't bother him at all. A person who can kill that easily, just to get out of an embarrassing conversation, is almost certain to hurt someone

else. And we should all be glad this loser is going to be behind bars forever. So Chandler's joined the long list of adult kids who killed their parents because they didn't feel like explaining themselves. We've covered several of them before. Seth Gonzalez, Christopher Porco, Chris Pritchard. Then there's Bart Whitaker, Sidney Powell, Jennifer Pan. And that's just the list I came up with off the top of my head. This stuff happens a fair amount. Sometimes these killers do end up confessing. Bart Whitaker, who actually hired two friends to murder his family for him, so he wouldn't have to admit he'd flunked out of college, eventually did an interview about it. He and his dad, the sole survivor of the awful massacre, still have a close relationship. His dad forgave him. Family, man. It's wild

stuff. I wonder if Chandler will ever admit to what he did. Something tells me he won't. I think lying is in his blood. Yeah, makes me glad my husband and I opted for cats instead of kids. But it's a chilling thought when you watch the documentaries about these cases. There's always a picture of the parents like holding their brand new baby so happy and proud and you think they're holding their future killer. Try to sleep tonight with that image in your head. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few

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