Jack Anthony Holland clutched a fidget toy in his hand and focused on memories of his ex-girlfriend from two decades earlier as he testified in her murder trial.
He was sitting just feet from her husband, the man charged with killing her and framing Holland for stalking and murder.
Holland traveled from his home eight hours away in Utah to testify in Broomfield, Colorado, at the trial of Daniel Krug. Krug, 44, was charged with first-degree murder, stalking and criminal impersonation in the December 2023 death of his wife, Kristil. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole on April 18.
That criminal impersonation was of a totally unaware Holland, 43, a TexasRoadhouse server who had dated Kristil more than 20 years earlier in a teenage romance.
He had been at his home and buying a sweatshirt at Kohl’s one state over on the day of the murder and policequickly ruled him out as a suspect thanks to the receipt and the distance proven.
Wearing a suit and tie, Holland nervously told the jury how shocked he was when police arrived at his door on December 14, 2023, the day Kristil was found fatally bludgeoned and stabbed in the heart in the garage of her family home.
When he was finished on the stand, Holland glared pointedly at Krug as he walked past the defense table on his way out of the courtroom.
‘I looked right at him, and he just stared straight,’ Holland said of the defendant. ‘I stared at him for about two to three seconds, and I just wanted him to look at me. I just wanted him to look into my eyes, but he wouldn’t.
Utah man Jack Anthony Holland, 43, was shocked to discover that his ex-girlfriend, Kristil - his 'first love' and 'first everything' - had been murdered in Colorado after she was harassed for months by a stalker claiming to be him. Her husband was behind it all
Holland, left, pictured with Kristil, right, in 1999, when the two were dating. They met while working at JCPenney. Kristil encouraged Holland to not only get his GED but‘pushed me in a lot of things... and it really helped,’ he tells the Daily Mail
‘I was upset… he was framing me for murder,’ Holland tells the Daily Mail. ‘I wanted him to look at me and be a man.’
Krug continued to just stare straight ahead – as he did for most of the trial. Within days, hewould trade his jacket and tie for a mustard prison uniform after jurors found him guilty on all charges.
They returned the verdict on April 17, the day Holland turned 43 - the same age Kristilwas at the time of her murder.
Holland believes both Kristil and his late mother may have had a heavenly hand in ensuring his alibi.
It’s very unusual, he says, for him to take a spur-of-the-moment shopping trip – particularly when he’d worked until a few hours before midnight the previous evening.
Typically, he'd just lounge around, especially on a weekday off - but on that day, he awoke and felt inexplicably propelled to buy a new Adidas hoodie.
He said he feels his 'mom's presence a lot,' and theorizes that this may have been her doing from beyond the grave. Then again, now knowing Kristil was killed several hours earlier, he wonders whether 'maybe she did come and say, "Hey, go to the store. Go buy this."'
For whatever reason, he said, ‘I got up immediately… about 11 o’clock.
‘I put my shoes on. I didn’t even take a shower. I just put deodorant on, and I just went straight to the store.
‘I don’t ever go to the store. I hate going to the store… and I just went.’
‘It was just a crazy thing,’ Holland said.
He returned home from Kohl’s in the early afternoon with the new hoodie and the receipt, kicking off his shoes and relaxing in bed to watch television.
Then he heard banging on the door and saw police. Confused, he let them in and asked if he was under arrest.
‘They’re like, “We don’t know yet,’” said Holland, who was racking his brain for a reason they’d be there ‘because I didn’t do anything wrong – like, 100 percent, I couldn’t figure out anything I did.’
They asked him if he knew a Kristil Krug, and he told them that she was an ex-girlfriend.
‘As soon as that came up,’ he said, he began to panic about a Facebook message he’d sent to her drunkenly years earlier.
He can’t remember what he wrote, but Kristil blocked him afterwards – so he ‘thought maybe I was getting in trouble for that.’
But he gave the officers the go-ahead to search his room, and they made a phone call after recovering evidence – including the Kohl’s receipt.
Then, they simply told Holland he wasn’t under arrest and that a detective would be in touch, and they left.
Kristil Krug, 43, was found fatally bludgeoned and stabbed in the heart in the garage of her home in Broomfield, Colorado, on Dec. 14, 2023. She'd spent the final months of her life in fear of a stalker and was carrying a firearm at the time she was attacked
Kristil's husband and father of her two daughters and son, Daniel Krug, 44, was sentenced to life in prison after a Colorado jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, stalking and criminal impersonation
They didn’t tell him that Kristil had been brutally murdered hours earlier – and Holland’s presence in Utah, an eight-hour drive from the Colorado crime scene, had quickly ruled him out as a suspect… along with the receipt for that hoodie.
It would be weeks until Holland found out that the woman he calls his 'first love... my first everything,' had been murdered at the home she shared with her husband and their three children in Broomfield, about 30 minutes north of Denver.
That heartbreaking news was followed by a tragic twist: For months before Kristil’s murder, she’d been stalked by someone pretending to be Holland.
The stalker threatened Kristil and her husband, sending surveillance photos indicating the family was being constantly watched. The messages were frightening, vile and vulgar.
Kristil believed them to have been from Holland, and she’d even gone to the police before her death.
The mother of three first called the police on October 31, 2023, and then met with a Broomfield detective a few days later in early November. She provided them with spreadsheets of all the stalking evidence and her history with Holland, including the Facebook interaction that had him so worried.
She told the detective at the time that her husband was aware of past messages and attempts to reconnect from Holland.
Kristil gave police Holland’s contact information and asked them to intervene so she could feel ‘a little bit of safety, so I know where he is and what car he’s driving.’
But nobody from the Broomfield Police Department ever called Holland as the harassment campaign escalated. The stalker even created a fake profile on a hookup site inviting strangers to text genitalia pictures to Kristil’s phone.
Anxious and paranoid, Kristil bought a gun and purse for concealing it, vigilant at all times and completely changing her schedule in fear of the stalker.
Police, family and others questioned at the murder trial earlier in April all told the court that, for most of that time, Kristil believed Holland was her stalker. But, they added, as time went on, she began to also suspect her husband.
Holland, pictured with family, was surprised and confused when police turned up at his door on the day of Kristil's murder. He was quickly ruled out as a suspect given that he'd been eight hours away in Utah and had proof he'd bought a sweatshirt at Kohl's earlier that day
Krug killed her before she could unmask him herself, the Broomfield jury heard last week. Though detectives were able to quickly tie the stalker's communications to him, not Holland.
As a key witness during the trial, Holland was sheltered from much of the proceedings. He is both learning and coming to terms with many details of Krug's devious plan all at once.
All of it, he says, has been ‘like a movie.’
At times, so was Holland and Kristil's teenage romance.
The pair met while working at JCPenney in the Denver metro area, when Kristil was 18 and Holland was 17. Kristil’s brother and best friend, Lars Grimsrud Jr., was also an employee.
‘I told her brother… “Hey, I like your sister,”’ Holland tells the Daily Mail. ‘And he said, “Good luck… all my friends like my sister, and none of them get her.”
‘And I was like, “Well, okay, challenge on. Let’s do this.” And I started talking to her more at work.’
Holland invited the siblings to an outdoor rave, where he and Kristil paired off at one point.
‘I don’t want to be cheesy, but it was kind of magical,’ said Holland. ‘The music was just playing, and we were dancing, and then we sat down and kissed.’
The two of them were very different from each other: Holland liked to party and had dropped out of high school promising his mother he’d quickly get his GED, and Kristil was at the beginning of a successful academic and professional career in biochemical engineering – her father said she had an ‘intellectual and scientific brilliance.’
‘We got each other really well,’ Holland said, calling Kristil ‘the smartest person’ and ‘best person I know.
‘We were connected.’
Kristil's father, pictured at the podium, spoke at a post-sentencing press conference. 'Our hearts are broken,' Lars Grimsrud Sr. said. 'As we grieve this sad loss of a vibrant and... talented soul... we remember her for the joy that she brought into our lives and the beauty that she shared with us'
Kristil's relatives hugged each other outside the courthouse in Broomfield, Colorado, after the jury found Krug guilty on all charges
She successfully encouraged him to get his GED and ‘pushed me in a lot of things... and it really helped,’ he said.
‘We were together every day… and I know it was only a little under two years, but it seemed a lot longer.’
As Kristil dedicated herself to scientific studies, Holland said he was falling into a pattern of drug abuse.
'It was changing my personality, and I was lying to her about it,' he told the Daily Mail.
They broke up around 2000.
'We hugged, and I've never cried so hard,' he said. 'It was so hard for me. I was so in love with her, and it was so hard to break up. All the breakups I've had since then have never been like that.'
A little bit later, he said, Kristil repeatedly called him, but 'I always had my sister answer the phone and tell her I wasn't home because I just couldn't go through that again.
'And so I kind of regret not answering the phone, because if we got back together, maybe we would have stayed together, and this wouldn't happen, and I would have been a different person and I would have gone different directions... what if I went to college, and what if I was smarter, and what if I would have stayed with her, and she wouldn't have been with him and this wouldn't happen and we would have been together.
'I just think about that stuff all the time,' he said.
Holland moved to Idaho, and then Utah, to escape the party and drug scene he'd become entrenched in in Colorado. Occasionally, over the years that followed, he would reach out to Kristil.
Holland specifically remembers one communication he had with her around 2004, which he testified about in court.
'She was like, "My boyfriend will get mad because he's studying for a test, and I don't want to upset him or make him mad... he's not going to like that I'm talking to one of my ex-boyfriends,"' Holland recalled for the Daily Mail.
'And I was like, "OK," and we stopped talking.'
Holland says he's never loved any other woman like Kristil, and his mind is plagued with 'what ifs.' He wonders whether 'if we got back together, maybe we would have stayed together... and she wouldn't have been with him and this wouldn't happen'
Holland said he reached out again around 2015 or '16, adding that they became friends on Facebook, 'and I tried my hardest to be chill, and then I just got really drunk and got stupid, and then she blocked me.'
He can't remember what he said while inebriated but believes it was along the lines of sharing his feelings, apologizing for lying back in the day and admitting to having made a big mistake.
‘It was hard to get her off my mind,' he tells Daily Mail. 'She was always on my mind… I honestly never loved anybody else the same as I loved her.’
After that blocking, however, he said he'd given up on communication - which was why the mention of Kristil's name compounded his shock at police's December 2023 arrival.
A mutual friend told him weeks later that Kristil had been killed - the officers hadn't mentioned it.
When detectives from Colorado traveled to his home in the weeks after, he was horrified to learn her husband had not only been arrested, but he'd been setting Holland up to take the fall.
They looked into Holland's GPS data and drove three hours north to Pocatello, Idaho, to interview his sister and view family photographs that would give Holland alibis for times the faux stalker had seemed physically present in Colorado.
That includes Halloween 2023, when Kristil first contacted police after receiving an image of her husband from the stalker and a threat to his safety - both of which were sent by Krug himself, a Colorado court found last week.
'I just was shocked, I just couldn't believe it,' Holland said of learning about his framing. 'Feeling like, "Oh my gosh, this is like a movie." I was scared... I was terrified.
'I was scared that maybe I would falsely get accused, that maybe he was smart enough to get DNA from me or something.'
Holland still can't believe that, from the time Kristil first contacted police in October until her death in December, nobody told him he was under suspicion.
‘They should have let me know,' he said. 'They should have come and had an officer come to my house and been like, “Hey, we have a warrant out for your arrest.”
‘And they should have brought me to the station, and they should have talked to me person to person or on the phone… and let me clear my name.
'I would have shown them everything, because I didn’t do anything wrong – and they didn’t do that.'
Up until the case closed, Holland was anxiously awaiting the verdict from his Utah home. The court heard closing arguments exactly one week after Holland's testimony, and they found Krug guilty a little more than 24 hours later.
'I was so relieved, and I was so happy. I was like, "We got [him],"' said Holland.
'If you're going to frame somebody, you've got to do a little bit better job than he did.'
