Bart & Krista Halderson | What Happened Inside the House (Part 3)

By the Summer of 2021, Bart and Krista Halderson were living the quintessential Midwestern life. They owned a beautiful home in Windsor, Wisconsin, and a rustic family cabin up north in White Lake, where they loved spending time together. They were also preparing to cross the finish line of parenting. Their oldest son Mitchell was a successful tech professional, engaged and in the process of buying a house. Their youngest son Chandler was days away from moving to Florida to work for SpaceX. But on July 7th, 2021, the dream shattered. Chandler went to the police station to report his parents missing. Bart and Krista had gone up north to the family cabin for the Fourth of July weekend with an unknown couple. They never came back.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow.

• 0:15Derrick Levasseur?

  And I'm Derrick Levasseur.

• 0:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  So today, we are diving into the next part of the Bart and Krista Halderson case.

• 0:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 0:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  AKA dumbest criminal ever Chandler Halderson, but.

• 0:26Derrick Levasseur?

  That's a title that a lot of people are going for, but he's up there. And I will say that video, I have watched that video of him going to get surveillance or do some surveillance on the surveillance around his house. I have watched that video, no word of a lie, probably 30 times. It's still as funny as it was the first time I watched it. Just his reactions in those moments where he's realizing he's completely screwed. I know this isn't a funny situation, but as I always say, you got to find levity in the moments where you can, otherwise it'll just eat you alive. And that video just compartmentalizing it is just absolutely hilarious.

• 1:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then this is the same day, of course, that he gets picked up by the police.

• 1:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes.

• 1:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Driven to the police station.

• 1:09Derrick Levasseur?

  And you got the interrogation footage.

• 1:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Goes through his interrogation, right?

• 1:12Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then, and then after that, on the evening of July 8th, 2021, Chandler Halderson was placed under arrest and taken into custody. Now, at this point, they cannot arrest him for murder, et cetera. They don't know enough, but he was being arrested for providing false information regarding a missing persons investigation, right? They have Bart's torso on Chris's farm, right? They have that. And so they know, obviously, they know, like dude's lying about everything.

• 1:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  But the investigation hasn't, they haven't even identified Bart's torso yet, right? Because it's going to take some time. So they want to arrest Chandler, so they have him. Because they know as well as you and I do. I mean, after I went to the, around the neighborhood and found out about all the surveillance they had, I probably would have been gone at that point. Like, I would not have been home when the police showed up to bring me into the police station. So they know as well as you and I do, that if they let him go at this point, he may not be around anymore.

• 2:14Derrick Levasseur?

  Especially after that line of questioning.

• 2:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 2:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Absolutely.

• 2:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  So as Chandler's being walked towards booking, he told Detective Henrickson that he wanted to go back up and tell him everything. And Henrickson informed Chandler, well, you asked for a lawyer. And since you asked for a lawyer, I'm unable to speak to you regarding your missing parents at this point without the lawyer present. So while the booking paperwork was being completed, Chandler asked Detective Henrickson, what was different, right? What's different from the previous day when you guys were at my house and you talked to me? And, and today, when you talked to me and now I'm being arrested? And Chandler was told that the police had found something. And Detective Henrickson said, at this point Chandler's eyes got very wide.

• 3:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he made a comment along the lines of, you don't know the whole story. Which, I mean, yes, you do Chandler, but it doesn't really matter. Your father's torso was found in, in a forest. So what, what kind of whole story is really going to add any context to that? That doesn't make you look like a monster? And then during the booking questionnaire, Detective Henrickson asked Chandler if he was feeling like he might want to self harm. And Chandler's response to this question was that he didn't feel bad about what he did, right? So during the booking questionnaire, the questions are going to be asked, they have to ask, do you feel like you might try to hurt yourself?

• 3:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  And Chandler's response to that, instead of saying yes or no, was, I don't feel bad about what I did. Which I think basically means like, no, why would I hurt myself? I don't feel bad about what I did.

• 3:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, admission of guilt after invoking his right to an attorney. So this is a little bit of a slippery slope here, right? Where Detective rightfully says, I can't ask any more questions. But in, in response to a question that, like you just said, he's supposed to ask, he basically confesses in an indirect way, like, I don't feel guilty about what happened. So it's something you got to put in there, but I can already see a defense attorney salivating over this and.

• 4:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, good thing they had plenty of other evidence.

• 4:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Of course, of course. But the, this right here is the first, from the way you're describing it to us, the first time where he's acknowledging that he's responsible for what happened to his parents. So it's, it's significant.

• 4:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I mean, throughout the whole trial, I'm honestly sitting here like, what is, what is, what are we doing here? Basically, like, how did we get to the point where the trial happened? Because what could Chandler's defense possibly be? Like, he can't possibly be saying, I didn't do this. In fact, pretty much that was his defense. But anyways, let's focus on the timeline between July 1st and July 8th of 2021. And we're actually going to converge several different timelines in an effort to piece together what actually happened throughout those days and what actually happened to Bart and Krista Halderson. Because as you know, Chandler claims he doesn't know because he didn't do anything. So he's never going to fill in those gaps for us. All right.

• 5:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  So July 1st. No. So July 1st, 2021, this is a Thursday, okay? Chandler was up early on this Thursday texting his girlfriend Kat, asking her how she had slept. Now Kat told Chandler, I slept good. And then she asked, what about you? At 7:26 a.m., Chandler responded, quote, I hardly slept, end quote. Kat told Chandler, I'm sorry, you know, why did you not sleep well? And Chandler replied, quote, I D K. I don't know, for anyone who doesn't know.

• 5:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, is that what it means?

• 5:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  I D K, yeah.

• 5:46Derrick Levasseur?

  I got it.

• 5:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Stuff hasn't really been going well for me lately, so I'm trying to plan for the next thing to [BLEEP] me over, end quote. Now, of course, Chandler could have been talking about his fake job at American Family Insurance, not sending him a paycheck, right? He's saying, things aren't going well. Maybe my job, my fake job's not sending me a paycheck. He could have been talking about the battle he'd been having with Madison Technical College for over a year to get a simple copy of his transcripts. He could have even been talking about his fake injury, which had left him in a neck brace with all sorts of alleged permanent damage to his legs and his nerves and his, his brain. Or he could have been talking about a text he had received from his father two days earlier on June 29th, a text that said, I talked to Omar Jobe.

• 6:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  A text that Bart meant to communicate that he'd figured out all the people that he and Chandler had been communicating with over the past few months from American Family Insurance and Madison College were never employed at those places. Now, I personally think Bart sent that text because he wanted Chandler to know he'd figured out that all of those people were in fact Chandler.

• 6:51Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree with you.

• 6:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, there's no evidence that Chandler even knew who Omar Jobe was, since he wasn't actually a student at the college. However, just as Bart had perused the staff list on the college website, Chandler could have done the same after receiving his father's text. He could have typed in Omar Jobe, Madison Area Technical College, and figured out within a few seconds that Omar Jobe was actually employed at M A T C. In fact, he was the enrollment coordinator. So it is fair to assume that by June 29th, Chandler knew the gig was up and he was running out of time. Oddly enough, after Bart and Krista Halderson disappeared, and after Chandler was arrested, when police went through the Halderson home, searching for evidence,

• 7:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  they found a printed out email on Bart Halderson's desk. Now, it seemed Bart did this with a lot of emails. And this is a very boomer thing to do, by the way, because my mom does the same thing.

• 7:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Shots fired.

• 7:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's like, I know that all the emails are there in my inbox, but this one's important and I need to remember it. So she'll print the email out and then she'll make notes, like with a pen, on the email and keep it on her desk. So instead of storing it in the inbox, she just prints it and keeps it on the desk. And Bart seemed to do this with emails he felt were important, that he had to follow up on. Now, this email that Bart printed had been sent by Bart in August of 2022 to Krista. And it basically let her know where they were with everything, you know? Hey, Chandler had talked to someone at M A T C named Daniel Spieth. He summarized to Krista what they had learned from Daniel so far. He typed Daniel Spieth's phone number into the email and also stated, quote,

• 8:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  he sounds just like Chaz on the phone, end quote. Ugh. So in August of 2020, Bart obviously talked to Daniel Spieth, quote unquote, who was probably Chandler.

• 8:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 8:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he's saying to his wife, this guy, Daniel, sounds just like our son Chandler on the phone. Now. Daniel's number was the same number as a burner phone the police would find in a desk drawer in Chandler Halderson's bedroom. So as you mentioned last week, and we talked about this, there were likely in-person conversations between Chandler and his father Bart after that June 29th text about Omar Jobe. There were also probably conversations about the situation between Bart and his wife Krista Halderson. And I have no doubt that both Bart and Krista, at some point, sat Chandler down and asked him to explain himself, right? We would assume something like that happened.

• 9:31Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, this didn't just all happen because of a couple texts or emails. There was a deeper conversation where at some point Chandler realized the jig was up. Parents knew what was going on.

• 9:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I was really focused on that because they don't talk a lot about it in the trial.

• 9:46Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, I mean, you really can't.

• 9:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Because they can't, right?

• 9:48Derrick Levasseur?

  The only people who could tell you that are dead.

• 9:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  But I looked at things and I saw that on June 30th at 7:22 a.m., so the day after the Omar Jobe text, Krista texted Chandler, quote, "Thanks for waving. You made my day." End quote. And Chandler wrote back, "No problem." And then Krista texted again, quote, "I love you lots." End quote. So this would have been sent right around the time that Krista was leaving for work in the morning. She's probably referring to Chandler waving to her through the window as she left, which she was happy about.

• 10:19Derrick Levasseur?

  Let's dive into that a little. Let's unpack it. Like, this is, this would be potentially after maybe a heated discussion, maybe a conversation because...

• 10:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or at least Bart telling Krista, "I found this out. Something's going on. He hasn't been honest with us, right?"

• 10:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, the reason I say, and I could be looking too deep into this, like, it's not a big deal for your child to wave to you goodbye when you're leaving. To me, it's more of an acknowledgement, like, we're okay.

• 10:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Unless that's not a common thing for Chandler to do.

• 10:44Derrick Levasseur?

  It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be. But, but could it be a waving of like, "Hey, I know things are rough right now. Love you." Like waving goodbye, like, "Hey," an acknowledgement that I'm not ignoring you. And her, for her to bring that up and say, "Hey, thanks for waving. You know, love you lots." I could be completely wrong on this, but it's almost like, hey, that's their, their way of being like, "I know things are bad right now. I know we're, you know, having some issues and we had a, a difficult conversation, but thank you for waving and I love you a lot."

• 11:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think that this was Chandler trying to be on his best behavior and cozy up to the parent whom he knew had the softest of soft spots for him, right? He was, he was a mama's boy. She still called him my baby, even though he's a grown ass man. He knew, all right, if I'm dealing with Bart and Krista, Bart is not going to give me any leeway. I need to get my mother on my side. And I need to pretend to be the most sweet, doting son and do the things, I'm sorry, manipulative in a way of like, "Oh, I'm going to wave to her and, and I'm going to say goodbye to her." And, I mean, it made her so happy, obviously. She was like, "It made my day." So he's doing things he wouldn't ordinarily

• 11:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  do. And she's like, "Oh, it's so sweet. My little baby." Like, I have to have his side when, when it comes down to a discussion with him and his father and myself. That's what I think he was doing.

• 12:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Possible. I mean, unfortunately, we'll never know. There was, there's so many things where we're trying to read between the lines because we don't know the exact chain of events. Obviously, you're breaking it down force as much as you can. But to get inside the head of Chandler, it's tough. I mean, we talked about psychopath versus sociopath last week. And if that's what we're dealing with here, which we both believe that we are, it's hard to rationalize the irrational. I will say one more thing. I don't know why I'm thinking about this now, but I don't think I talked to you about this yet. Last night, which would have been Sunday night, I was perusing our Patreon. I was in the discussion boards, as I often am. And last week, we had talked about the whole soda thing and trying to get into Chandler's head.

• 12:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, we did talk about it on our Patreon Live. Yeah.

• 12:47Derrick Levasseur?

  We did, we did. And, and I will say, there was a comment from someone in the, in the discussion board for this particular case. And I thought it was interesting and I wanted to get your opinion on it. They believe, and I think they could be right, where we talk about the soda and the fact that like, how are you thinking about soda after this whole thing? But is it possible that he asked her to get soda on the way home because he was trying to buy more time?

• 13:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  So we had just talked about this Friday on our, on our Patreon Live. And I said, yes, the prosecution has used the, can you stop and get soda text, saying Chandler was trying to buy more time. And that could be true.

• 13:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think that was true. But also, Krista stops, I think he just was a horrible person. I think he also, it was like, it was a double kind of motive, like, but also, I'll have soda, right? So, because how much time is stopping and buying soda really buying? She stopped at, at the gas station or like the convenience store, which was right next to her work. She could walk to that place. She would walk there and get a sandwich every day for lunch. So at the most, to walk in and buy some soda, check out, and then get back in the car, you're buying five, eight minutes? Not a ton of time bought, okay?

• 14:02Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, fair.

• 14:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  I also think he just wanted soda.

• 14:04Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, he also, maybe he has to drive a little bit out of the way. You're right. I mean, maybe 10, 15 minutes max.

• 14:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, she didn't have to drive out of the way because the place was right next to her work.

• 14:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Fair.

• 14:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, no. So, I mean, probably maybe.

• 14:15Derrick Levasseur?

  I just know it's a good point. I was like, you know, I thought there was more, just some strategy to this. And maybe that's what it was, where a combination of being parched and also needing as much time as possible to clean up.

• 14:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  I guess when you're in the situation, even a couple minutes of extra time is, is time bought. But still, it wouldn't buy all that much time. If he wanted to buy time, he may have given her a more in-depth kind of request that would have her driving out of her way.

• 14:41Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. And I, and I don't want to get too far ahead because you may give us, you may shed light on this, but there's also a possibility that he was done cleaning up, but he was also trying to, if he had already made the decision to kill Krista, he was trying to set up an environment where she would come in, her guard would be down, it would allow him to get to jump on her as well. But I got a lot of opinions on that as well without knowing the details. So we'll, we'll keep it going. But shout out to the Patreon chat for the, the suggestions, because some of them are good. Some of them are really good.

• 15:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, so now we're still on June 30th, right? So Krista leaves for work. "Thank you so much for waving. It made my day." Chandler's like, "No problem." She's like, "I love you lots." Right? This is Krista saying, I think, "Things aren't ideal, but I still love you."

• 15:23Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree.

• 15:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  And this is Chandler, like, "I better make sure I'm on mommy's good side because daddy's really mad at me." So at 5:19 p.m., after returning home from work, Krista texted Chandler again, quote, "Come see us when you're done." End quote. And I believe this text was Krista summoning Chandler downstairs to the conversation he would have with both of his parents about what had been going on. He was most likely in his room at this point, hiding from his father and playing video games because we know he ain't going to school and we know he doesn't have a job. And then when Krista got home from work, Bart was probably like, "Your son's been hiding from me all day. Can you please get him to get his ass down here because we have to talk about this?" And so then Krista and

• 16:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  Bart decided it was time to have the intervention, have the conversation, get to the bottom of everything. Now, obviously, I don't know how this conversation went or what Chandler said to his parents. But would you agree that her texting him at 5:19 p.m. after she get home, she gets home from work, "When you have a second, when you're done, come down and see us." This is the conversation that's going to happen, right?

• 16:28Derrick Levasseur?

  I think Bart was waiting for Krista to get home and him knowing that he has a better, you know, Krista has a better relationship. She makes the text and, but even this tells me like, the relationship between them was, was odd because you're texting him to come downstairs? I mean, this house was big. It wasn't that big.

• 16:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, I, I can't, I can't even judge her for that. My son's 14. He plays video games in his room. And, and sometimes I'd be like, "I'm ordering a pizza." And he'll be like, "Okay." And he's playing video games.

• 16:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, but ordering a pizza, Stephanie.

• 16:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  Then the pizza gets there and I text him and I'm like, "The food's here." You know, like, "Come down."

• 16:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. Ordering a pizza. Like, very, like, something that's trivial, right? But this is a big, this is a big conversation you're about to have. "Hey, when you get a second, come downstairs." Again, listen.

• 17:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  But she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to put pressure on him. She doesn't want to stress him out. Yes, no, I guess she babied him. She doesn't want to stress him out. She doesn't want him to, you know, come down.

• 17:19Derrick Levasseur?

  To not come downstairs to lock his door?

• 17:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, because apparently, like, he would retreat to his room. He was very, like, private about his room. He didn't like people going in there. It was kind of his, like, private space that he would have to be requested to leave and join the rest of the family in the house.

• 17:35Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay. Yeah, but I do agree with you. And there might've even been some hints prior to that, which would explain the waving and "I love you lots." Like, maybe there was some tension within the house that wasn't directly being addressed. But everyone under that roof knew this was coming to a head. And this is, this is the text where, hey, let's finally confront this.

• 17:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, you know, they were sitting in the kitchen, at the kitchen table, waiting for it to come down with all the proof in front of them, right?

• 18:00Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm sure Bart was already indirectly, if he hadn't said it right out, like, his mannerisms, his behavior was like, "I'm pissed off." You know?

• 18:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. You know, Chandler walked in there and Bart was like, he's got the whole board up with all the evidence tacked to it. He's got the times, he's got the dates, he's got everything. So now, like I said, I don't know how the conversation went, what Chandler said to his parents, what they said to him. But it appears that he bought himself some time again. And the reason I believe that is because we have Bart entering into his Outlook calendar on July 1st at 3:00 p.m., CHAZ, M A T C, as in, a meeting with Chad, Chandler, at M A T C on July 1st at 3:00 p.m. Additionally, the next day, July 1st, Krista was texting Chandler in a normal and loving way. At 1:38 p.m., Krista said, quote, "Hope things are going well, thinking about you." End quote. And Chandler wrote

• 18:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  back, quote, "Going well, thanks." End quote. Because Krista's at work, Bart and Chandler are at home. So I think this was Krista asking if things were going well with Bart. Like, is everything okay with you boys? Like, everything's...

• 19:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Clearly, there was a lot more of a heated discussion between those two.

• 19:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm. Like, is everything going well because you have this meeting coming up at M A T C today? Are you ready for that kind of thing?

• 19:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 19:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I believe that Chandler continued to deny everything during this conversation with his parents on June 30th. I think he said, "Listen..." This is a huge misunderstanding. I don't even know what this Omar Job guy is talking about. He must be new. There must be something going on here. Listen, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go to the college tomorrow and on July 1st, and I'm going to prove that I am right and this guy's wrong and we're gonna figure everything out. There has to be some mistake. We just need to figure out why this mistake happened and how to fix it. So not realizing that being murdered was a possible outcome, Bart agreed and was like, "Okay, yeah, let's go. Let's go Chandler. Let's go to M A T C on July 1st."

• 20:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, what does he have to lose? If anything, he's gonna prove his point.

• 20:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly. What's the worst that could happen, right?

• 20:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Either- Or maybe, maybe Bart says like, "Oh, you're, that's not what happened? Well, let's go to the school." And Chandler's like, "Sure, let's do it. I'm on your side." And he's like, "Perfect, let's do it. I'm gonna put the final nail in your coffin right here by bringing you to the school and I want you to lie to my face in front of them."

• 20:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  I honestly think it was Chandler that suggested it because there was no official meeting with M A T C and I feel like Bart would have like made sure to call and make sure that someone at the college was ready to talk to them. So I think Chandler was like, "We're gonna go in, we're gonna talk to them."

• 20:37Derrick Levasseur?

  Or Bart pulled that, "Let's just show up."

• 20:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, like you said though, what's the worst that could happen? Either Chandler's right and there is some mistake and everything he had been saying was true, which at that point, that's, that's great, you know, for everybody. Or, or Chandler would be backed into a corner, faced with all of his lies and unable to continue lying to get himself out of trouble. Either way, all would be known and all would be resolved by 3:00 PM on July 1st. And genuinely, I think Bart knew that Chandler was foolish.

• 21:06Derrick Levasseur?

  Of course he did. Of course he did.

• 21:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think he was, he was calling his bluff.

• 21:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Didn't wanna believe it, but he knew he was right.

• 21:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  But Bart's also not thinking like, "Oh, Chandler's buying himself another day, right? He doesn't, he doesn't understand that while Bart's calling Chandler's bluff, Chandler's just buying another day to plan how he would resolve this situation without ever having to admit that he's a pathological liar, a loser and a leech." Bart doesn't realize. He's like, "Okay Chandler, let's go to the school." And then finally, you won't be able to get, to wriggle out of this anymore. And Chandler's like, "I'm going to kill my parents. We're never going to that school."

• 21:45Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, you think at that point, he had already made that decision.

• 21:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Absolutely.

• 21:49Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I think, uh, I mean, we'll never know.

• 21:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  He knew they were never gonna go to that school.

• 21:53Derrick Levasseur?

  No, they, they weren't gonna go to the school. Maybe that is the point where he made the decision. Or again, like he often did, even in that interrogation, he's just telling another lie to buy him a little bit more time. And then shortly after this conversation where he's now challenged his dad and said, "Let's go to the school tomorrow." He's sitting up in his room, realizing there's no way that this gets played out and I win. So the only option here is to kill them both.

• 22:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think that's, yeah, he was like, "Well, let's go to the school."

• 22:19Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 22:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then he's thinking, and then he's thinking, "Okay, now what do I do next?"

• 22:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then he was like, "There is no move."

• 22:25Derrick Levasseur?

  There is no move. I'm out of moves.

• 22:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, he could have just like, I don't know.

• 22:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Told the truth?

• 22:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Been faced with the truth and been like, "Yeah, I suck. I suck as a human."

• 22:34Derrick Levasseur?

  That would be a normal person's reaction though, right? Like, we're dealing with a psychopath. So this is someone who's a pathological liar.

• 22:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think a sociopath, like I said, but yeah, because a psychopath, like I said, there's, you're kind of born that way.

• 22:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Maybe he's a psych- I don't know, man.

• 22:49Derrick Levasseur?

  I think he is a psychopath.

• 22:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, because there's no reason in his childhood for him to-

• 22:53Derrick Levasseur?

  He didn't have a social environment that would create this. He had good, loving parents and I think they enabled some of the behavior, but I think even though it wasn't detected, he's, this is probably something that's been with him since birth.

• 23:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Which is why I think when he was like waving at his mom, see, a psychopath wouldn't do that unless there was a personal motive of gain for them. Cause they don't have like attachments to people. They don't care about people.

• 23:13Derrick Levasseur?

  I hear you, but there's no like template for these guys, right? They're all a little unique, a little different. That's why we're constantly learning by covering these cases. It's not to-

• 23:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think sociopaths are a little unique and different and can form attachments to like specific people, but they say psychopaths don't have any actual care for anyone. It doesn't matter. So, yeah.

• 23:32Derrick Levasseur?

  There's a, there's a world to say that he didn't have any attachment even to her. He just used her more.

• 23:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Obviously he didn't. Killed her.

• 23:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So he was, the only time he showed or displayed any emotion was for some motive that he had, something that he needed or wanted.

• 23:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, which is like, "Oh, let me just make my mom think that I love her."

• 23:50Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 23:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  So she's nice when we have this conversation, when she gets home tonight. Yeah. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 24:00Derrick Levasseur?

  This episode is brought to you by the Ladder app. And let me take a guess. You have a folder saved with all your Instagram workouts and it's right on your phone and you fully intend to use it, but let's be honest, you never do.

• 24:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And then it's sat there untouched next to a recipe for a high protein pancakes I also never made.

• 24:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, that, that's the problem, right? Random workouts are easy to save, but they don't give you an actual plan. That's what makes the Ladder app different. It gives you expert strength training, real progressive programming and a plan designed by certified coaches. Shout out to my coach, Brian.

• 24:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  Coach Brian.

• 24:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Coach Brian. And we were, we were saying before we started recording, Brian's a good looking dude. So he's not, he's not hard to look at either.

• 24:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  That actually matters though. Not that he's good looking, but that, that there's, there's strength training that has real progressive programming. That, that's what matters because otherwise you're just walking into the gym like, "I guess I'm here now. Uh, what do I do?"

• 24:52Derrick Levasseur?

  I always wondered why I wasn't making progress. And with the Ladder app, each week builds on the last through structured training blocks. So you're not just moving around, you're actually training with intention and you're moving forward.

• 25:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  Which sounds much better than my usual approach of vibes and confusion.

• 25:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's not a plan.

• 25:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  It is not, but it is honest. So the favorite thing for me about the Ladder app is that it's like having a personal trainer in your headphones. It actually is. You have a personal trainer in your headphones. So the in-ear coaching walks you through every set with form cues, reminders and motivation. I like that because the second I have to think too much, suddenly I'm checking a text, refilling my water, wandering away and the workout has spiritually ended.

• 25:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Exactly. Ladder removes that friction and it works for different strength training as well. So you have Pilates, bodybuilding, dumbbell only at home, hybrid strength, glute focus programs. That's me, right? Kettlebells. And so whether you train at home or at the gym, there is a plan designed for you.

• 25:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I like that attracts your progress too. So the app remembers your weights, uh, reps, sets. You can actually see yourself getting stronger over time. Plus there's a real community behind it with a group chat where your coach can answer questions and members can keep each other motivated. So it's structured coaching, progress tracking and motivation without having to schedule a personal trainer or let's be honest, pay personal trainer prices.

• 26:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Which ain't cheap.

• 26:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  Remove the guesswork with Ladder and get a real coach in your ear telling you exactly what to do for every workout. No thinking, everything planned for you. If you have an iPhone, head to ladder.fit/crimeweekly and take a quick quiz to find out your perfect ladder plan. Use our link and get a free seven day trial with no credit card and $10 off your first month if you join.

• 26:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, so here we are. It's the morning of July 1st, the day of the M A T C meeting and Krista Halderson has left for work. It's just Chandler and his father at home. Well, she hasn't left for work yet, right? When, when Chandler's texting his girlfriend Kat early on the morning of July 1st, telling her he didn't sleep well because things haven't been going great for him. I believe he was talking about his parents finally unwinding his web of lies and him believing there's no other way out of it than to kill them both. This is when-

• 27:04Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree with you.

• 27:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  Ugh, I gotta figure out how to-

• 27:06Derrick Levasseur?

  He's a victim.

• 27:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  I gotta figure out how to make this work.

• 27:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Closing in on him because everyone's starting to untangle his web of lies.

• 27:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  So three minutes after Chandler sent that message to Kat, his mother Krista in her Volvo left for work at 7:30 AM. And at 7:50 AM, Chandler texted Kat again, quote, "I just had a great future planned and it's falling apart," end quote, right?

• 27:30Derrick Levasseur?

  I think there's truth in that statement as well.

• 27:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, Kat thinks he's, he, she's like, "What do you mean? You know, you're like, your future's not falling apart. You're moving to Florida. You got this great job at SpaceX." You know, it's going to be okay. Like we have, we have everything going for us still.

• 27:45Derrick Levasseur?

  He knows that's not true.

• 27:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly. And Chandler responded, quote, "Will you leave me even if it doesn't work? Worded bad, but you understand," end quote. And Kat told Chandler, "Yeah, I'm not gonna leave you." She said, quote, "Florida would be so dope and nice, but I'm not dating you for money. I love you tons," end quote. I could, I can't imagine why she was dating him, honestly. He just, he sounds like he sucked in every way possible.

• 28:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I'll refrain from saying anything. I mean, we did see Kat's interview and you guys in the comments had a lot of, uh, opinions on that, on that interview. I'm, I'll leave them in the comments if you wanna go watch last week's episode.

• 28:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  But like, was the sex good? I, like, is that what, cause sometimes, I've been thinking about this a lot. Cause I hear her in the interview. She's like, "Yeah, he's weird. He wears long sleeve shirts and he loves his socks and he's always falling all over the place." And like, "Yeah, he doesn't really know how to express emotion and he seems like he has no emotion." And he's constantly like, now he's got all these health issues. It's like, "What were you with him for? He seems like he sucked, but like, was the sex good? Cause sometimes-

• 28:52Derrick Levasseur?

  I don't think it was.

• 28:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  I, I can't imagine that it was, but-

• 28:55Derrick Levasseur?

  I don't think it was. I don't think it was. I think I'm gonna try to be kind here because Kat didn't do anything wrong as far as the actual crime. What I will say is that-

• 29:08Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm gonna try to be really respectful. I say this Chandler was immature and maybe acted more like a 12 year old than his actual age. And in that interview, I saw a lot of immaturity with with Kat as well. So maybe they were more alike in that sense where they kind of found some commonalities. But I don't think the relationship was that was that deep. We'll just put it that way. I think it was more surface level. Yeah, maybe some sex in there. But I feel like overall, you know, she had some some growing up to do as well. And maybe now in hindsight, she would acknowledge that as well after seeing she has to after watching that interview, if she watched it now have some points where she said, Yeah, it didn't it didn't come off great.

• 29:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, I think this happens with a lot of of girls and young women where it's like, oh, he needs so much like he needs constant reassuring and he needs constant taking it's like, I can fix him kind of thing like, maybe he has so much potential and he's so smart and he has all these opportunities. If I could just teach him to be a man, he would be a great man, you know?

• 30:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Even if that's true, and then I'll get off this horse to think about the context of what she was there for and her kind of flippant behavior toward it, where it's like joking and all this stuff. I found it extremely disrespectful. I'll just say that outright. You know, they're looking for two missing adults at that point.

• 30:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  And you'll see her testifying during the trial and you'll see a very different

• 30:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, Kat. Okay, good.

• 30:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  I can't just I just look in the way and they're like, what's this weird thing about Chandler? And she's like, No, this is just how he is, you know? And like, it seems like all he did and all he wanted to do was play video games and be weird and feel sorry for himself and be a victim. And I just can't imagine.

• 30:46Derrick Levasseur?

  That must have been a boring, boring relationship.

• 30:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  What was your benefit in being in this relationship? So

• 30:52Derrick Levasseur?

  To each their own, man, I don't know.

• 30:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  So Kat tells Chandler, No, I am not with you for money. I love you. It's okay. Chandler replied, quote, I love you tons too. By the way, I'm not giving up. I'm just worried. End quote. Okay. So by 8am that morning, Kat's on her way to work. She and Chandler were sending messages back and forth here and there at 102pm Kat texted Chandler that her mom had given the okay for them to hang out all weekend. And she told him to quote, convince his parents hard, end quote. And Chandler wrote back a minute later, quote, I overheard that they might go to the cabin with their friends, but I DK, I don't know, end quote. Now, according to Kat, Chandler had been on lock for several weeks and his parents were not letting him see her all that much. And so they had planned to spend

• 31:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  the entire weekend that 4th of July weekend together. And so she wanted him to convince his parents to allow it because remember, he's been punished for two weeks, even though he made that up. Now Chandler was telling Kat that he overheard Bart and Krista discussing how they might be going to the cabin all weekend with friends. But according to Kat's testimony, she had been under the impression for a week or so that Bart and Krista were going to the cabin even before this. And that was because she and Chandler had been kept apart for so long, and she was getting frustrated by it.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  A message from you. To be honest, it's getting to the point where I want to text your mom directly. What was this about on June 30, 318 in the afternoon?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  About him being grounded and not being able to see me or hang out.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Were you wanting to see him?

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  And what did he tell you about whether he could see you or not?

• 32:31Speaker 03

  He couldn't because I wasn't allowed over.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  And what does he say?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  This weekend will be great.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  That weekend was the 4th of July weekend coming up, right?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  And then on June 30, you send this message next. What does that say?

• 32:50Speaker 03

  We're not going to the cabin, right?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  So in the realm of messages where the cabin, the first time the jury's seen that, how did this come up? Or what was going on where you sent this message?

• 32:59Speaker 03

  I was under the impression that Mr. And Mrs. Halderson were going up to the cabin for the 4th of July weekend.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Was that conversations or like over the phone or in person you'd had with Chandler? Or was that?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Over the phone.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Okay. And you ask, we're not going to the cabin. Are we? What does Chandler say?

• 33:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 33:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  So Derek, this is what makes me wonder if there was more premeditation involved in this than we think. Like, it was more than just him waking up on July 1 and being like, shit, that I'm supposed to go to the college today with my dad. He's gonna find out. Because by June 30, which by the testimony, we kind of think that at least a few days before June 30, Kat's under the impression that Bart and Krista are going to the cabin. But we know they were never going to the cabin. So leading up to June 30, at least for a few days, Chandler had been telling Kat that there was a possibility his parents were going to the cabin.

• 33:51Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I think the the actual plan or the the decision to kill his parents may have been confirmed in his brain within the, you know, leading up to the conversations that he was having with his parents, knowing that there was really no way out. But I do think there had been ideations of killing his parents way before that.

• 34:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 34:15Derrick Levasseur?

  That this was something that he may have been thinking about for months, maybe years.

• 34:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, like, it was a logical thing to him. Like, well, if there's nothing else I can do, then I can do this.

• 34:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I think I think that there was, there was something there prior to the final decision that yep, I'm finally doing it. I think he had thought about it probably on on multiple occasions.

• 34:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. So at some point on June 30, or in the few days before Chandler had told Kat that his parents were going to the cabin, and it was Kat's belief that they, she and Chandler would have unobstructed access to each other all weekend, and they would pretty much be spending the whole weekend together to make up for lost time because they hadn't been allowed to see each other that much in the previous two weeks. Now, at 210pm, about an hour after this text exchange, Chandler received a text message from his father Bart. I'm ready whenever you are. Okay. Now, it's believed that this was Bart letting Chandler know he was ready for this event at 3pm in his calendar labeled CHAZ M A T C. I think that Bart believed the meeting would be in person at the M A T C campus. And he was

• 35:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  trying to get Chandler ready to leave the house. So Chandler wasn't messing around, not coming out of his room. And so they get in the car and drive there. Now, the campus, I looked it up, it's about a 15 minute drive from the Halderson home. And this was a meeting that Bart had been waiting for for almost two years. He probably wanted to make sure that Chandler didn't pull anything to delay or make them late. I don't know, like falling down the stairs again. So he's trying to give Chandler enough time to fall down the stairs and, you know, slip around in his socks. So that even if that happens, he can still pull him up and be like, All right, don't worry, we have enough time, we can get there. Now, from that point, Bart Halderson never sent another text and all activity on his phone ceased from 3pm on. And the reason they say from 3pm on is basically because

• 36:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  the the kind of data capture happens on the hour every hour. So it would kind of show everything that happened after 3pm and nothing happened after 3pm. But they pretty much think that text from Bart was one of the last things he ever did on his phone at 210. So then, at 319pm, this is when Chandler texted his mother. And he said, Dad's phone died, right? And he said, you know, text me if you need anything. And then he asked her to stop and get some soda on the way home from work. Now, here's why I say that the soda stop did not take up much time, because Krista gets out of work at around 5 and she got home from work at 513pm. The neighborhood security cameras captured her

• 36:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  car driving in and her getting home. And two minutes before that Chandler made a list in the notes app of his iPhone. Weekend chores, H2O2, lemon, door handles, move your shit upstairs, get a job, clean the floor. Now, no one besides Chandler could possibly know exactly what happened that day inside the Halderson home. But based on evidence and forensics, we can try to piece it together, which is what we're doing. So the police and prosecution believe that at some point after Bart sent his final text, he found himself in the basement of the house. Now, the Halderson basement was divided down the middle into two distinct spaces, the more finished south side, and then the unfinished

• 37:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  like utility area on the north side.

• 37:37Derrick Levasseur?

  This is in the basement, not the house itself.

• 37:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  In the basement. So

• 37:41Derrick Levasseur?

  So you got like a partially finished basement?

• 37:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. So when the police gathered evidence in the home and went down into the basement, they went down the basement stairs, they noted that to their right, when they go down the stairs, was a small like standalone freezer. So when I say a small standalone freezer, I mainly a chest, not a stand up freezer or refrigerator freezer combo. Yeah. There's also a stand up freezer also that's kind of like a larger one. But then there's this chest, this smaller chest. And there were a lot of things that stood out to them about this freezer. First of all, it had not been there when the police had visited Chandler at home on the night of July 7, after he'd reported his parents missing. Secondly, it

• 38:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  was unplugged and open and placed directly in front of a large shelf that contained some laundry detergent, some Dawn Power Wash, which is like a dish spray, and some carpet cleaner. Now, the crime scene team felt that it was a weird place to put a freezer in the middle of the floor, in in the way of the storage shelf behind it. And even though the freezer was open and unplugged, they noticed there was some fluid in the bottom of it. And it was very clean inside, but there was like a little water at the bottom. And the drain plug on the inside and the drain plug on the outside were not in place. You know, so this is where you would pull the plug to let any water.

• 39:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, the water come out. Yep.

• 39:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, like I said, there's also another freezer, this one bigger, flush with the wall, plugged in. When they opened that, it was full of food, working fine. So the team processing the scene realized that they had not been made aware of two freezers in the basement. So they contacted the lead detectives who'd been at the Halderson home on July 7th, and they were informed that the smaller freezer had not been there that day. So then swabs were taken from the bottom drain of the freezer and tested positive for human blood. Additionally, an empty bottle of hydrogen peroxide was also collected from the shelving unit behind that small freezer. And during the trial, it's funny, because remember, I'm like, why are we having a trial? Chandler's defense team has nothing to say. Whenever they'd cross-examine, their cross-examination would last like three minutes, and it was

• 39:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  embarrassing. So during the trial, Chandler's defense attorney asked the detective, like, why did you choose to take that bottle of hydrogen peroxide of all things? And the detective was like, well, first of all, the hydrogen peroxide was out of place. Like, there were some cleaning supplies there, but there was, there was like several bottles of one thing. There was like five bottles of Dawn Power Wash and several, you know, containers of laundry pods. And all of these bottles and containers were full, or mostly full. So to see an empty bottle of hydrogen peroxide on the shelf, which wouldn't really be considered a cleaning product, it's more like a medicine product you'd see with first aid stuff.

• 40:26Derrick Levasseur?

  Although I will say I use hydrogen peroxide on my carpets, but that's a side story.

• 40:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's interesting. He's like, well, basically, he's like, it just stood out to me. It was empty. I didn't really think it belonged with cleaning products. And he's like, and also, hey, I've been doing this long enough to know that people use hydrogen peroxide to clean up blood, right?

• 40:44Derrick Levasseur?

  That it gets out urine stains, blood stains, absolute hydrogen peroxide and ammonia. Little tip for you guys.

• 40:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  And this isn't like a big, like industrial sized bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It's like a normal one you would get with the Band-Aids and stuff.

• 40:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  And what was in Chandler's notes app? What was the first?

• 41:02Derrick Levasseur?

  Clean the floor.

• 41:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, no, what was the first item in his notes app?

• 41:05Derrick Levasseur?

  What was it? Get a job?

• 41:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  H2O2 lemon.

• 41:08Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  What's H2O2?

• 41:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Peroxide.

• 41:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Hydrogen peroxide, right? So obviously, this is something that, you know, the police are putting together. Hydrogen peroxide used to clean blood. It's an empty bottle. I'm gonna take it. And they found plenty of blood in the basement. They sprayed luminol on both sides of the basement and both sides lit up. The luminol lit up visible footwear impressions stamped into the blood on the floor, and the floor showed blood tracking, pooling, and dripping patterns. This led to the belief that Chandler had killed both of his parents in the basement. He had dismembered them in the basement, and he had attempted to clean up afterwards. Because not only do you see him walking through the blood, but

• 41:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  you see swiping patterns. We've talked about this before. Looks like he's trying to clean it up. Now, because luminol reacts to both blood and other things, like cleaning agents, yeah. They did another test that was performed to confirm that there was human blood on the floor, and then they DNA tested that blood, and that blood belonged to both Bart and Krista Halderson.

• 42:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, we see it all the time. We've seen it on television shows, too. Sometimes they'll actually put bleach or something down to create the, the reaction that you would see with luminol, because it gives you a really strong reaction. But it seems like this, they, they followed it step by step, exactly what you're supposed to do. It's not enough just to get the positive luminol test. You then have to confirm that that luminol test, A, is not a cleaning agent, or not just a cleaning agent, but also to have it come back to the DNA of the people that are currently missing. That's what we would like to call the smoking gun. That's, that's a slam dunk.

• 42:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, the police have to be very careful with this, especially in their initial reports. You'll always see them say, we saw a blood-like substance. We saw a blood-like substance, because they can't call it blood until it's been tested forensically for blood.

• 42:54Derrick Levasseur?

  And then also, they can take it a step further. Maybe they did here, maybe they didn't. But you bring in experts in that field, and you say, hey, not only was this confirmed to be blood from our victims, but also the amount of blood that was observed under the luminol testing, it would be too much for someone to survive without getting medical attention.

• 43:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 43:14Derrick Levasseur?

  We saw that with Jennifer Dulles.

• 43:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  We saw that also with Brandy, Brandy Hall, remember, in her truck?

• 43:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, Dulles was a big one, where they had all the blood inside the, the house as well, where it's like, listen, unless she received medical attention immediately, she would not have survived these injuries.

• 43:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, I mean, at this point, Derek, they've got Bart Halderson's torso, so I think that they didn't, they probably didn't need to take that step, but.

• 43:36Derrick Levasseur?

  But everything you're saying there makes total sense, where somehow, we may never know, he convinced Bart to come down to the basement and probably did the same with Krista. Hey, listen, dad fell down the stairs, something happened. You know, it wouldn't be hard to get him to go down there.

• 43:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, here's the thing. It's very interesting. I like listening to the detectives that processed the scene as far as like CSI goes, because they're looking at everything, and I love it, because the, one of the detectives was like, okay, I also saw a defect, like an indent on the concrete basement floor. And he was like, this indent was significant to me, because even though the basement floor has a lot of other defects and indents, this specific one stood out. It looked clean. It looked new, and it still had a chalky and dusty feel inside of it, and it didn't have like embedded dirt or grime like the others, right? So then, bullet fragments were also recovered, and a spent cartridge shell was found underneath a blue workbench on the south side of the basement. So obviously,

• 44:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  law enforcement collected the ballistic evidence and found that not only was the cartridge consistent with being shot from an SKS-type rifle, but it had the same head stamp as the bullet that Chandler had given his brother Mitchell as a get well gift.

• 44:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, you said that last episode, that, and that, that's how that bullet becomes significant, right? They're able to make a match. And then, the indentation you're referring to, obviously, we're not talking about something the size of a basketball. Visually, it's probably more the size of a quarter. And that would more than likely be an indentation from a bullet bouncing off the concrete.

• 45:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, exactly. So that's why the detective's like, okay, it looks to me like a bullet hit here, right? And now we're finding all these other things. Now, going further, there was a little crawl space area. Remember I said there's the rack with the laundry detergent, and then the hydrogen peroxide, the empty bottle was there? Now, behind where that open freezer had been found, and behind that rack with the cleaning products on, they found a sort of hidden, like crawl space behind some insulation. And so there's like a little crawl space, and then there's like insulation and some boards propped up. And so the police went in there, and they found a few black triangular pieces that ended up being mouthpieces that were used for vapes, like smoking devices. So that's nothing really

• 45:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  incriminating. It's like Chandler's vaping, he doesn't want his parents to find out, so he's kind of hiding them in the basement. But at that point, the police were like, okay, clearly, someone intentionally hid these back here, and maybe they could have hidden other things back here.

• 46:06Derrick Levasseur?

  By the way, you could take those mouthpieces and DNA test them, but I mean, we'll see. We'll see what happens here.

• 46:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then they tore the insulation out, and then they revealed the rest of this crawl space, and they also revealed three magazines containing bullets.

• 46:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Wow, yeah. It's great investigative work.

• 46:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  So the theory was that Chandler had gotten his father down into the basement somehow, at which point he shot him from behind at least twice and possibly three times. So bullet fragments had been extracted from Bart's torso and bone, because remember, Bart's torso's found, they found certain entry wounds, but they, they couldn't, because it's only the torso, and it's decomposed, and it's all cut up. So the, the forensic person testifying was like, definitely shot twice, definitely the entry wound is to the back, which means he was shot from behind. He could have potentially been shot three times, because there was some small bullet fragments in his bone, but we can't tell for sure. All the entry

• 47:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  wounds located in Bart's back. So obviously, a sneak attack of some point.

• 47:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, all premeditated at that point, not premeditated for weeks, but whatever amount of time that he had planned it, maybe he had already thought about this scenario, all planned out. And I go back to the whole vape cartridges, right? The mouthpieces. Maybe they did this, maybe they didn't, but you know that Chandler likes to use the vape. You could test that and show that he would have a, he would have an understanding of that crawl space, and that's something that he used for, for hiding other things that he didn't want people to find.

• 47:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, and the police knew, hey, the freezer's here now, but it wasn't here on the 7th. So clearly, somebody put this freezer somewhere. Chandler's kind of using this basement as his little hidey hole. So.

• 47:46Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, I love the reference there, the hidey hole.

• 47:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  The hidey hole, you like that BTK?

• 47:50Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, shout out BTK, you.

• 47:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Shout out BTK. Chandler and BTK would have gotten along well. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but we have more to talk about, lots more when we get back.

• 48:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  This episode is brought to you by Helix, and I know I've said this before, but I love Helix, okay? And upgrading my sleep has genuinely been one of the best things I've done for my daily energy, and I'd say mental, like mindset, too.

• 48:14Derrick Levasseur?

  Sleep is one of those things where people underestimate it and the impact it can have until they're not getting enough of it.

• 48:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Switching to a Helix mattress really did change the game for me. Before Helix, I was tossing and turning, constantly waking up overheated, which I hate, trying to get uncomfortable, basically performing a full athletic event in my sleep, not getting into that deep sleep cycle I need to get into to actually rest my brain, and then I'd wake up exhausted, which feels deeply unfair, actually, after doing all that work overnight.

• 48:45Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, you should not need to recover after sleeping.

• 48:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly. And that's what I love about Helix. They have over 20 customizable options, including built-in cooling features, so you can find a mattress that actually works for the way you sleep, whether you're a side sleeper, back sleeper, hot sleeper, restless sleeper, all of the above, whatever your sleep personality is, Helix has options.

• 49:05Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, and we both have the Midnight Luxe, and we absolutely love it. We've had them for years. It lives up to the hype, the Luxe part, definitely. It feels as good as it did the day we bought it.

• 49:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  And by the way, we didn't pick it. The sleep quiz picked it for us, and the sleep quiz does not miss, okay? I love that Helix makes the whole process easy. It ships free to your door in a convenient box. Setup is simple, and they give you a 120-night sleep trial, a limited lifetime warranty, and the happy with Helix guarantee.

• 49:33Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, and that's a big thing, because buying a mattress, it's a, it's a big decision. So you want to make sure that you know it works before committing to it.

• 49:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Helix is also the most awarded mattress brand, tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired.

• 49:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, so if your current mattress is giving, we need to talk, this is a good time to upgrade.

• 49:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly, because Helix is running their Labor Day early access sales from August 1st through August 13th. Yep, right now is the absolute best time to upgrade. Go to helixsleep.com/crimeweekly for 20% off. That's helixsleep.com/crimeweekly for 20% off. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout, so they know we sent you.

• 50:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right, so Chandler lures Bart down to the basement somehow. Now, I've thought about this a lot. Did Chandler go down in the basement and hide with the gun? I think this is probably what happened. He hid with the gun and then he was like, Dad, I fell down the stairs. You know, or I hurt myself. Yeah. And Bart's like, this freaking kid again? Cause this happened recently, a few weeks ago. Remember Bart's at his desk typing and then he hears like Chandler fell down the stairs, but he's like, it didn't sound that bad, so I didn't get up. And then Chandler's like, help me, I've fallen and I can't get up. And that's when Bart goes to investigate. So Chandler already knows, I'm gonna pretend to fall down the stairs again. Maybe he went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then he was like, Dad, help me. Bart comes down. Chandler's kind of hiding in that space by the, where the freezer is.

• 50:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he steps out and when Bart walks downstairs, he shoots him in the back.

• 51:02Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, simple explanation, usually the right one. Whatever it was, I don't think they walked down the stairs together. I agree with you. I think he yelled up to his dad for whatever reason. And when dad comes down the stairs, he positioned himself Chandler at an angle where-

• 51:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Already ready with the gun.

• 51:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Right, where he knows from being down there multiple times that when Bart comes down the stairs, Chandler's gonna have a position from behind where you can shoot him.

• 51:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm. And it's believed that by the time Chandler texted his mother at 3:19 saying, Dad's phone's dead, it was in fact, the truth that Bart Halderson was already dead. And then Chandler needed to conceal his body temporarily because when Krista arrived home from work, he somehow got her down in the basement too, because there's not blood really found on the main level of the house.

• 51:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, no, he wanted it, he wanted it deliberately to be done in the basement.

• 51:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  In one spot.

• 51:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Can I ask a question? When you talked about that indentation on the concrete, were you referring to the concrete wall or the floor?

• 51:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  The floor.

• 51:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay. So that also gives you an indication that even if Bart, or it could have been Krista, whenever they were shot standing, they were also shot while horizontal as well.

• 52:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, standing up, yeah.

• 52:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Cause SKS rifle, you can see the SKS rifle is something that's extremely powerful and more than likely would create a through and through wound, meaning that it would go through multiple people. And so that's probably what happened here.

• 52:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  So then Krista gets home. It's likely Chandler somehow got her down into the basement too. I think he was probably down there when she got home and he was like, hurry, Dad collapsed. He's having a heart attack, something like that, which would make Krista rush down the stairs. And then, you know, Chandler did something to Krista. Now-

• 52:41Derrick Levasseur?

  He could have used Bart as a decoy. Bart could have been laying right there as she comes down the stairs.

• 52:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 52:46Derrick Levasseur?

  And she goes, oh my God, Bart. And then she's looking over him, he shoots her from behind. Wouldn't be hard, that would be the trap right there.

• 52:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  The thing is Krista's exact cause of death has never been determined and I'll explain why later, but-

• 52:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Can take a guess why.

• 53:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  They do know that five bullets were missing from one of those magazines. Bart was shot at the most, they believe, three times, even though there's really no way for them to know that for sure, I will say, because a lot of Bart's body parts were never recovered, right? So Chandler could have shot and like maybe missed.

• 53:19Derrick Levasseur?

  Flinched, yeah. Anticipated the shot, which will cause the rifle to drop down in the front. That happens a lot by inexperienced shooters.

• 53:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, maybe shot him in the leg or the butt or whatever.

• 53:28Derrick Levasseur?

  That does happen more than you think.

• 53:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  So we don't, we don't know, but at this point, you know, both of his parents are dead.

• 53:36Derrick Levasseur?

  I, I think more than likely he shoots them while they're standing, they go down and then he finishes them off to make sure they're dead. Probably a shot to the head or to the chest. Or to the back.

• 53:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  Maybe not the head and I'll explain why later, but-

• 53:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, but we don't have Bart's head, right?

• 53:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  We don't have Bart's head technically.

• 53:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, I'll let you get there. I might be jumping ahead.

• 53:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  So at this point, it's likely that Chandler left his parents' bodies in the basement and then went to the garage where he began gathering some tools to begin dismembering them. Now, in the garage, police found a couple lengths of rope, uh, black and orange. Now remember, there was a black rope wrapped around Bart Halderson's torso when they found it.

• 54:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Right.

• 54:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  So that black rope in the garage had been cut. And so they would match it to the rope that was found tied around Bart Halderson's torso, proving the rope tied around Bart Halderson came from the Halderson family garage.

• 54:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep, and they would be able to compare threads and all that stuff to confirm it's the exact same black rope.

• 54:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  They did, yep. So a handle from a bow saw was collected with a small piece of the broken saw blade still attached and this would match to the broken saw blade found on the property of Cruss, the, the farm.

• 54:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep, okay.

• 54:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  So leaning against a wall of the garage, they collected a wooden handled axe that had blood staining on the area with a handle and axe came together as well as on the axe head itself. And obviously all this blood is matching to Bart and Krista Halderson. Now, there was also a waste bin and a recycling bin found in the garage. And there was blood found on the handle of the garbage can as well as inside the garbage can. We are gonna talk about that later. It'll probably be the next and final episode, but I have theories about that. So the garage also contained a rack of Rubbermaid storage bins. And this is very organized, everything's like labeled, it's nice, but underneath the rack with the Rubbermaid storage bins, there's a whole bunch of shoes located underneath that rack.

• 55:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then there's a rubber mat with like more shoes on it that's kind of tucked underneath the rack. And then when that rubber mat was pulled out, the police retrieved a pair of black floral shoes that had been hidden underneath the rack. And they saw that there was what appeared to be foil sticking out of the right shoe. And so they're like, what is this foil? So they grabbed the foil in a procedural police way, obviously, I'm kind of boiling it down. They did everything properly, yes.

• 55:53Derrick Levasseur?

  Make sure you do everything, not gloves, all that good stuff.

• 55:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  They showed every single step of it during the trial, I'm not gonna bore you with it. So they opened the foil and then they were like, oh, there's something in this foil that's wrapped in a piece of paper towel. So they opened up the paper towel and inside, wrapped in paper towel, wrapped in foil, shoved in that shoe, was Krista Halderson's cellphone, Bart Halderson's cellphone and their driver's licenses, so.

• 56:17Derrick Levasseur?

  So he tried to create like a Faraday cage with the foil essentially.

• 56:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly, that's so interesting. Now this stood out to me because I'm like, this is weird. And then it made me think about something else the police had found, which they mentioned during their trial testimony, but it was never really like specified. But while the police were going through the house, they found that every single Alexa device in the Halderson home was unplugged. And I think that Chandler thought if he wrapped the phones in foil, it would make like a Faraday cage and they wouldn't be able to be tracked. But listen, he's an idiot because the phones were turned off anyways, so they wouldn't have been able to be tracked until, or unless he turned them back on, which he did with his mother's cellphone on July 4th. And do you know what happened when his mother's cellphone came back on on July 4th?

• 57:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was pinging off towers at the Halderson home. So there's no, there's no like, I don't know why he thought that wrapping them in foil while they were off would stop them from being tracked.

• 57:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Listen, if they were, what do I always say?

• 57:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, if they were smart, they wouldn't get caught.

• 57:18Derrick Levasseur?

  We talked about Kohlberger earlier this week. If they were smart, we wouldn't catch them.

• 57:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  So I mean, that with the foil thing in combination with the unplugged Alexas, it makes me feel like Chandler was hella paranoid in like a conspiracy theorist sort of way.

• 57:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, the Alexa thing, not to give him any credit, is a smart thing because depending on how you have them set up, they are listening constantly.

• 57:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, they are, yes.

• 57:39Derrick Levasseur?

  So, so there would be recordings there that potentially if he hadn't unplugged them, that the law enforcement could go back to Amazon. I don't know how long the recordings work for all that stuff, but potentially capture the murder on audio at least.

• 57:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, but this is why it's kind of funny to me, because Chandler's over here, like making sure his smart devices can't hear him, but then at the same time, he seemed to completely forget about every neighbor outside the house that had a Ring doorbell camera.

• 58:06Derrick Levasseur?

  No, no, he's an idiot. And then also on top of that, if you're trying to create the illusion that your parents left under their own free will, the one place you wouldn't expect to find their belongings would be at the house.

• 58:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, why'd he keep them there?

• 58:18Derrick Levasseur?

  So why wasn't that dumped in some river somewhere, you know?

• 58:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think he wanted to make sure that if he needed to like reassure people that they were alive, he could turn them on, but-

• 58:27Derrick Levasseur?

  I get it, but at that point, you're an idiot.

• 58:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  But at the point that the police are coming on July 7th, you should make sure those phones are nowhere in the house and he didn't do that.

• 58:34Derrick Levasseur?

  It should be up at the campground somehow. I mean, I know how you'd get up there, but it should be closer to that area and it should, they should never be found.

• 58:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, exactly. So, but they're still there when he gets arrested on July 8th.

• 58:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that was a misstep.

• 58:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, in that same area of shoes, they also found a pair of size 10 and a half sneakers with what looked like twigs and grass embedded into the soles and reddish brown stains in the tread, the toe area and the tongue. These are Chandler shoes. So a roll of yellow duct tape was also collected and the cut piece of that roll of tape was matched to several pieces of yellow duct tape found at the location of Bart's body. There had been yellow duct tape on the tarp found in a black garbage can and a loose piece of duct tape found in the garbage can. And those matched the cut made on the roll of tape found in the Halderson garage. This is something that they did, it's called a fracture match, which I didn't know the technical term of it before, but it's really cool.

• 59:26Derrick Levasseur?

  Especially with duct tape, by the way. Duct tape's awesome because not only can they match the glue, but they can also match, when you pull out a piece of duct tape, you can see the, the fibers, the threads in it.

• 59:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly, that's what they did, yeah.

• 59:36Derrick Levasseur?

  And they can take that and match it up under a microscope and they can say to you, yeah, this piece was actually cut from the last piece here. So it's, it's incredible. Duct tape, duct tape's a good one for evidence collection as far as comparables.

• 59:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was so cool to see how they did that. So they were able-

• 59:52Derrick Levasseur?

  They do it with bullet striations too.

• 59:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yep, they were able to determine that all the duct tape they found where Bart Halderson's torso was found came from that duct tape, a single piece of duct tape from that roll at the Halderson home.

• 1:00:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Color, adhesive, threads, the, the, the pattern of thread, every company does it differently, Gorilla versus 3M, they all have their own proprietary thread pattern. And so it's, it's really easy to match it up if you know what you're doing. I couldn't do it, but the, the, the smart people could.

• 1:00:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  So that was very cool. I liked learning about that. So then at 6:30 PM on this same day, right? This is, we're still on July 1st, which is the day that, that he killed his parents. Chandler sent his girlfriend Kat a text message and it said, quote, "Baby, I need you," end quote. So I would assume by 6:30 Chandler's done with the, the majority of the killing and dismembering at least as much as he can. Now, between 7:49 and 7:54 PM Chandler was in the shower cleaning off. And we know this because he and Kat were in the shower together in separate homes, but they were on FaceTime.

• 1:00:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  They were doing a FaceTime call while they were showering and Kat took screenshots. So she was able to show the police, here's the screenshot I took of Chandler in the shower between this time and this time, and it's all time stamped. So we gotta, we gotta give the Gen Z respect for being chronically online and taking screenshots of everything because Kat took screenshots of everything.

• 1:01:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Were they, were they having phone sex?

• 1:01:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, they were just talking to each other while they

• 1:01:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Shower?

• 1:01:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  In the shower. Yeah.

• 1:01:25Derrick Levasseur?

  So why is she screenshotting it?

• 1:01:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Cause I don't know. She thinks he's cute or something. I don't know.

• 1:01:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 1:01:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was just, you can see, I'll, I'll have Shannon put up the pictures of him in the shower.

• 1:01:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Good. I'll take your word for it. They can put it up online for, for you guys.

• 1:01:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. He's just sitting there looking, looking all creepy at the, at the phone.

• 1:01:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. I'll take your word for it, but yeah, we'll throw it in the episode for you.

• 1:01:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  So that night Chandler told Kat that he thought his parents were out doing grocery shopping before they left for the cabin the next morning. And then he told her he was going to bed, but Chandler did not go to bed. At 8:16 PM, the neighbor's surveillance camera captured Krista's Volvo leaving the Halderson home. And by 8:22 PM Chandler was at the QuickTrip in Windsor where he purchased two large 10 pound bags of ice. And then Chandler was home by 8:29 PM. And then between 8:30 and 9:00 PM, remember the Halderson's neighbor, Stephen Gribber, reported beginning to smell something pungent burning. Now it's believed at this point Chandler had brought some of the body parts up from the basement into

• 1:02:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  the family room where he began burning them in the fireplace. Now this part of the, the investigation and the forensics, it's horrible, but it really interested me. It really interested me. And I, I want everyone to know, things can be absolutely disgusting and horrible, but still I learned so much from this. So I, I'm kind of looking forward to introducing this to you. Derek, you probably know some of this because you have a better investigating background than I do, obviously, but I learned a lot. So.

• 1:02:55Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm still learning all the time though. That's part of the reason I love covering these cases is another tool in the toolbox. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

• 1:03:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  I found this testimony stimulating and it was very technical.

• 1:03:05Derrick Levasseur?

  I love learning from other detectives who sometimes use innovative approaches or even use approaches I'm familiar with in a better way.

• 1:03:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was just very, very interesting. Like they did a great investigation, I will say. Basis covered, beginning till end.

• 1:03:18Derrick Levasseur?

  And that's a big compliment coming from you.

• 1:03:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  I know. I know.

• 1:03:21Derrick Levasseur?

  That's, that's high praise.

• 1:03:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  When a police body does a good job, I'm going to say you did a good job because this is not easy work.

• 1:03:27Derrick Levasseur?

  You don't throw those compliments out lightly. So that's, this is, this is high praise for you guys. If you're, if you're anybody from the team who worked on this case is listening.

• 1:03:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  Good job, guys.

• 1:03:35Derrick Levasseur?

  Good job. Stephanie approved. Boom.

• 1:03:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  I am very, very happy with you and I learned a lot. Okay. So there's the family room. That's where the fireplace is, right? On the table in the family room, police found a measuring tape and they say Chandler used the measuring tape to go downstairs and measure body parts from his parents to make sure the ones he was bringing upstairs would fit inside of the residential fireplace. And then if they didn't, he would then cut to make sure that they would. Okay. But let's be honest, this plan, because he's an idiot, it was never going to work because a residential fireplace can't get hot enough to destroy human remains. Right?

• 1:04:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. It's not a cremation oven.

• 1:04:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  It can't. It just can't. So to reduce a human body completely to ash, a commercial crematorium must maintain temperatures between 1400 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit for multiple hours under direct pressure. But obviously home fireplaces are not only going to lack the thermal capacity, but also the oxygen airflow to sustain those temperatures. So they found a fan on the family room table as well. And they say this was a fan Chandler used to try and add oxygen and airflow to the fireplace. And to be fair, the fireplace did get very hot, very, very hot, hotter than it should have, which is why some of the paint and like the plaster and stuff around the fireplace had bubbled and distorted.

• 1:04:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now on the surveillance video, remember from the neighbor across the street that showed the fireplace flickering in the family room all night? We can also see that at one point around 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM, the light in the family room got very bright. Then the kitchen light went on and off, and then the bright light in the family room suddenly went out. So the police and the prosecution believed that the fire in the fireplace had gotten out of control due to the rendering of human fat. So Chandler went to the kitchen, got water and threw it into the fireplace, which then caused the glass on the fireplace front to crack. That's how the glass cracked. That's how the glass cracked.

• 1:05:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Makes sense.

• 1:05:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  So on the remaining glass, investigators noted a cloudy, greasy residue. And this same residue coated the inner perimeter of the metal frame. And the residue was the thickest along the back and sidewalls of the firebox, which is the inside of the fireplace. And it was concentrated heavily around the lower third of the chamber. So instead of being covered in normal gray ash, the bricks were coated in this like amber colored greasy film. And this was a film of biolipids, fats from the human body that are highly flammable. Um, and they're highly flammable because of their molecular structure, but I found out human fat doesn't typically burn well on its own because it becomes liquid at very

• 1:06:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  high temperatures. However, when it melts and saturates a porous combustible material like clothing or wood logs, it triggers what forensic scientists call the wick effect. So the combustible materials act exactly like the cloth wick of a candle. And then the human fat is like the, uh, the accelerant, the, the oil, so to speak.

• 1:06:39Derrick Levasseur?

  First off, I had never heard of this before the wick effect. So that's interesting and new to me, but I would equate it to something similar to a meat that you would cook where you're cooking it on the stove and you start to have, you know, you get done cooking and you look up and there's grease covering the back, the, the hood, the range hood, the backsplash, all of it, because a lot of that's rendering off into the air and then settling in close proximity. That's the best equivalent I can give.

• 1:07:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or if you're making like short ribs and then it's all covered in foil, because I love making short ribs and you pull it out and some of the liquid like kind of slashes out onto the, the oven. It like goes, it's very, you know.

• 1:07:16Derrick Levasseur?

  What does it do again? Yeah. But if you guys didn't see on video.

• 1:07:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  It makes like hissing sounds and smoke.

• 1:07:20Derrick Levasseur?

  It's the hand gestures that got me.

• 1:07:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. It makes hissing sounds and smoke.

• 1:07:23Derrick Levasseur?

  The hand gestures and the neck. Actually Shannon needs to slow that down and just, yes, yes, that's it right there.

• 1:07:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  So then I started thinking about like, you really can't just set a human on fire by like throwing fire at them. Right? Like you need something. And that's why with the witch trials, they would keep the person clothed and put like all the kindling and stuff underneath them because in combination with all those things, the human body will be set aflame. Whereas if it was just like a naked body and nothing else, it, it really, I mean, they would burn, but it wouldn't be like this whole, oh, I'm combusting up and my whole body and bones are dissolving. It wouldn't happen like that. So at this point Chandler realized, hey, the fireplace is probably not going to be the solution I needed to be to make my parents' bodies vanish. And then he tried to make the fireplace

• 1:08:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  look normal again before reporting his parents missing. He stacked clean, unburnt logs of real wood onto the grate. And then he put fresh newspaper around the grate and around the wood, but the police took the newspaper out and it was dated June 23rd, 2021. So it was like newer newspaper and obviously it's July. So the fireplace hasn't been used in a long time. So how the hell did paper from June 23rd get in there?

• 1:08:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Another minor detail, but really, really good investigative work. Because there would be detectives that we've talked about in past episodes that would miss that little detail.

• 1:08:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Which it's like with all the other stuff, you probably don't need it, but it just adds more.

• 1:08:51Derrick Levasseur?

  Everything matters because you don't know what's going to be admissible and what's going to get thrown out. So every little detail that just shows what actually happened is, is important. You can never assume that it's, oh, you know what? We got enough. We don't need anymore.

• 1:09:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. I just, I, I thought it was fair. And it gets better. Okay. So he, he came up, Chandler came up with a story when the cops got there. He's playing with the dog. He broke the glass, but nobody really believed him. Okay. Uh, and based on the wound on his foot, which wasn't really like, oh, you got this from slashing your foot open on broken glass. Based on everything, the police were like, we don't really believe this. And what Chandler didn't realize is his efforts to clean up this fireplace were not only half assed, but really messy. And he didn't understand how the fireplace worked, so to speak. So we're going to talk about that, but let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 1:09:48Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:10:02Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. And I feel like the brain and body fuel is exactly what I need most days because between work, recording and life in general, I don't have time for snacks that make me feel like I need a nap immediately afterwards.

• 1:10:13Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:10:52Derrick Levasseur?

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• 1:11:16Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:12:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right, we're back. So what Chandler did was he completely failed to understand how his own home's heating infrastructure worked. And I can't even say that he's dumb for this because I didn't even know this. Once again, I love learning this stuff. So he looked at the fireplace, as in just like, oh, it's the inside of the fireplace. It's a surface level trash can. But he was oblivious to the fact that gravity and architectural design were systematically collecting evidence as he was burning his parents. So in older or traditional brick and mortar homes with a central fireplace, there is a small cast iron trap door built directly into the floor of the firebox. And that's usually located

• 1:12:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  right under where the logs sit. It's called an ash dump door. So instead of shoveling hot ash out into the living room, the homeowner would simply have to push the ash through the the ash dump door. And then the ash falls down a hollow brick chimney, vertical chute that empties into a sealed concrete or brick vault located at the absolute bottom of the chimney stack. And in the case of the Halderson home, that was housed within the basement walls. And that vault that's at the bottom of the chute is called the ash pit or the ash trap. So when Chandler overloaded the family fireplace with the human remains of his parents, the extreme heat and frantic stoking caused fragments of bone, teeth, and

• 1:13:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  liquefied biolipids to fall directly through the grate and slip through the cracks of the floor's ash dump door. And then Chandler aggressively swept the top hearth. He scrubbed the frame and the glass and threw down these fresh unburnt logs to make the living room and the the family room look normal for when deputies arrived on July 7. But he didn't realize the ash chute extended completely into the subterranean foundation. So he thought he had successfully hidden or destroyed the evidence by wiping down the visible fireplace box. So when arson investigators in the state crime lab processed the main floor fireplace, they immediately recognized that a substantial portion of the ash was missing from the surface

• 1:14:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  grate. And so they followed the path of gravity. Normally, an ash pit has a small metal door in the basement, and then you would shovel the debris out every few years. But in many modern homes with finished or partially finished basements, like the Halderson home, that access door would get covered up by drywall, insulation, or framing during home renovations. So that was the case with the Halderson home. It had like a drywall put up in front of that that ash door where you would normally clean it out. So I don't honestly know how people in that situation would clean out the ash trap, but they probably don't even know that they have to because they don't use their fireplace enough because it was for the old days when you would use it as your main heating for the house. But anyways,

• 1:14:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  to reach the bottom of the ash trap, the true bottom, forensic teams had to physically tear away the wall paneling and framing in the basement to expose the structural masonry of the chimney column. And once they breached the brick cleanout access point at the base of the chute, they unlocked a time capsule of the crime. They shoveled the ash that was in there, which was a lot, into buckets. And then they poured those buckets into flat containers and they systematically began sifting through all of the ash, eventually revealing a total of 230 bone fragments. Now, 106 of those fragments were positively identified as human bone fragments. We had 53 skull bones. So when you say Bart's skull was never found.

• 1:15:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Technically.

• 1:15:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Technically was, but in fragments. And so they couldn't tell.

• 1:15:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Wouldn't be able to determine if he was shot in the head with those fragments.

• 1:15:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  But I will say there was no bullets found in the ash trap. But I don't know if they would have melted.

• 1:15:52Derrick Levasseur?

  That would make sense, though, because it would be a through and through.

• 1:15:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, yeah. Even though there was a bullet fragment found in Bart's bone of his torso. So.

• 1:16:00Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. So it depends, right? Like, it depends on where it hit with the skull, depending on the angle. Again, there's no rhyme or reason to it. You could have an entry and exit wound on one particular part of the body. And then just based on the trajectory, it may hit a rib, it may hit a second rib. And because of it being slowed down by the skin and the muscle tissue around it, that could be enough to have it lodge inside the body opposed to going right through.

• 1:16:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes. Well, what we need to take from this is Chandler cut off his parents' heads and tried to burn them in the fireplace.

• 1:16:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Clearly. Yep. Maybe he thought that that was the key to identifying the body.

• 1:16:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  53 skull bones. I think he wanted to burn all the body parts.

• 1:16:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Couldn't fit it.

• 1:16:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  But couldn't fit it. And then the fireplace burned too hot, got out of control, started like melting things. And that's when he put it out.

• 1:16:47Derrick Levasseur?

  And the process was probably taken too long.

• 1:16:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  They also found 18 hand bones. They found 24 dental fragments, eight vertebrae bones, and three fragments from long bones, like the legs, the arms. Okay, so he tried to burn a lot of body parts in here.

• 1:17:02Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree with you that the original plan was probably to burn it all. But I also think that he was focusing on identifiable, in his mind, identifiable body parts, like the head, the fingers, the toes, like places where you could go back and run tests to confirm the identification of said body. Maybe he thought the torso alone would not be enough.

• 1:17:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, how? It's got blood. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:25Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm just saying, I'm trying to get in the mind of this guy. It doesn't make sense, but maybe that was his thought process. Like, oh, you know, a torso alone, as long as they don't have something to compare it to, it could be just classified as a John Doe or a Jane Doe.

• 1:17:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:17:41Derrick Levasseur?

  I get it. I get it.

• 1:17:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  And it's not even like he tried to hide the torso all that well, right? He put like some leaves and sticks on top, but he didn't bury it.

• 1:17:49Derrick Levasseur?

  No, that's what makes me think that, oh, the torso alone won't be enough for them to identify who it belongs to.

• 1:17:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. He's not smart. So.

• 1:17:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, we've established that.

• 1:17:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  I also want to say that it's pretty obvious and likely that all 230 bone fragments were in fact human bones. But for the purposes of the trial, they couldn't be identified that way because to legally certify a bone fragment as human in a court of law, an anthropologist has to identify certain diagnostic landmarks, like specific structural features unique to the human anatomy, like distinct curvature of a human skull plate, the specific thickness of a human femur, etc. So for more than half of the bones recovered from the ash trap, they were burned so severely that they lost these outer surface details. And, you know, when human bone is subjected to intense prolonged flame contact, it undergoes a process called

• 1:18:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  calcination, which means the fire burns away all the moisture and organic collagen inside the bone. And so it causes the structural matrix of the bone to shrink, warp, and become incredibly fragile. But the prosecution did give some context to the jury. They were like, listen, we can't tell you for sure, based on like legality, that all of these bones were Bart and Krista's. But we can tell you for sure that no animal remains or barbecue scraps were ever placed into that fireplace, meaning that the unidentified bone fragments were simply the pulverized, completely charred remains of the exact same human remains found right alongside them. So.

• 1:19:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. Reasonable deduction here. I think most jury members, under these circumstances, are going to deduce or come to the conclusion that, hey, we got these 200 plus bones, more than 100 plus of those bones are confirmed to be human, more than likely, the remaining bone fragments are human as well.

• 1:19:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  And they were confirmed to be Bart and Krista's because I believe it was like a dental apparatus that had belonged to Bart was found. So, you know, they were able to say.

• 1:19:46Derrick Levasseur?

  Some type of crown or bridge.

• 1:19:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Chandler didn't just burn other people here. If you needed any more context, these bones did belong to his parents, right?

• 1:19:55Derrick Levasseur?

  And they didn't cook in this fireplace. They didn't cook meats and things like that. That's also important to rule out because that could be used as some defense. The fact that they were able to positively identify some of the fragments as belonging directly to Bart and Krista, that's the nail in the coffin.

• 1:20:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  So that brings us to Chandler's realization that the fireplace is not going to be his saving grace for making all the remains of his parents disappear. Now Chandler told the police during his interview on July 8, that on this Friday night, when he's burning his parents in the fireplace, he said his girlfriend Kat slept over. So that night, he's burning the remains overnight, right? From Thursday night into Friday morning. And he said that Friday night Kat slept over, and before she arrived, he spent the day playing video games, even though he knew he should have been cleaning and doing his chores. However, a neighbor's security cameras captured some vehicle activity that morning.

• 1:20:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  So at 7:02 a.m., a neighborhood surveillance camera captured Bart Halderson's Subaru leave the Halderson home. And at 7:21 a.m., Chandler drove that same vehicle into the parking lot of Fleet Farm. So this is a general store. They specialize in hardware, outdoor materials, farm stuff. He's seen on the store's surveillance camera, walking in, wearing the same sneakers he had on when he murdered his parents, because their blood was found on the sneakers. And he then purchased a six by eight silver black heavy duty polytarp, which would later be matched to the tarp that was covered in his parents' blood and found hidden on the farm where he tried to conceal his father's dismembered torso. At 7:31 a.m., the Subaru returned to the Halderson's home.

• 1:21:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  What we do not see on the neighbors' security cameras is any vehicle containing a mystery couple arriving at the Halderson home. We don't see Bart and Krista walking out with suitcases, boxes of alcohol, and bags of casino money, ready for a fun weekend at their cabin. We do not see that ever. So, once again, Chandler's all worried about phones and wrapping them in foil and Alexa devices, but then he tells the police, "Yeah, the people came and picked up my parents", not realizing that all of his neighbors have security cameras.

• 1:22:04Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. That video that we played, I talked about it earlier, just you could tell he really, he just forgot about that aspect of this, of this whole thing.

• 1:22:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  He really did. He definitely did. But don't worry, the phone's wrapped in foil.

• 1:22:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I mean, he really just totally tunnel vision on whatever he was doing, forgot about the idea that neighbors may have cameras. Yeah, it wasn't well thought out.

• 1:22:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, at around 8:00 a.m. that morning, this is Friday morning, Chandler's girlfriend Kat left for work. She began texting Chandler about her preparations to stay the night with him. And she's really excited about this because they hadn't had any real time together in weeks. At 9:23 a.m., Kat texted Chandler and told him that when she left for work that day later, she had to stop at two different Targets for groceries, and then she had to stop at her mom's house. So Chandler said, "Okay." And then at 9:30 a.m., he texted, quote, "Don't rush, I have tons of chores they are having me do," end quote. Of course, he doesn't want her to rush. She doesn't get out of work till 5:00, but he's like, "Don't, don't rush. Once you do get out of work, I need as much time as I can get." So Kat then asked Chandler what he wanted for dinner that night.

• 1:23:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  She was like, "I can make chili, we can make hamburgers, whatever you're in the mood for." The two go back and forth about what they should have for dinner that night, and then, and then Chandler said something that surprised Kat and kind of pissed her off. He said, quote, "We could do dinner tonight, and you come over in the morning again and stay till Sunday night," end quote. He followed that up with another message that said, quote, "Like dinner plus sex," end quote. So he's telling her, like, "You can come over, we can have dinner, we can have sex."

• 1:23:36Derrick Levasseur?

  You can feed me, and you can have me.

• 1:23:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Then you gotta go home.

• 1:23:39Derrick Levasseur?

  Then you gotta leave.

• 1:23:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  Then you gotta go home.

• 1:23:41Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's not gonna sit well with most, most people.

• 1:23:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, no. Kat was a bit annoyed by this.

• 1:23:45Derrick Levasseur?

  Understandably.

• 1:23:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. She was like, um, this is not the plan that we've been, your parents are out of town. We haven't been allowed to see each other for weeks, and now you're telling me that the one night we could finally spend the night together? Oh, I can have sex with you, but I can't lay next to you as you sleep? This is messed up. She's like, "Why? What's the point?" She said, "Why would I come over, have dinner, hang out, and not stay if I'm just gonna come back tomorrow morning? Like, this is ridiculous." And Chandler said, "It's because I need to get some chores done." So, okay, Kat's pissed, but she's not, she's not really telling him she's pissed, but you can tell she is.

• 1:24:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, she's annoyed.

• 1:24:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, and she's, she's real, she's hurt, is what she is. She's hurt. So, at noon, Chandler texted Kat again, and he told her that he also needed ice, and, quote, "Now hydrogen peroxide, because I stepped on glass," end quote. At 12:15 p.m., Chandler texted, quote, "But for real, if your mom has an extra bottle, that would be great, and a Swifter wet jet," end quote. Kat wrote back telling Chandler, quote, "We have both," end quote, meaning they have hydrogen peroxide.

• 1:24:50Derrick Levasseur?

  They have peroxide and they have the...

• 1:24:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  They have a wet jet, yeah. He, he calls it a Swifter in the text.

• 1:24:54Derrick Levasseur?

  That's the brand.

• 1:24:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's Swiffer, it's Swiffer.

• 1:24:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, Jesus, yeah. I thought it was Swifter too, I was like, yeah.

• 1:25:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's not.

• 1:25:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Clearly, I don't use one a lot, but we have one, we do have one.

• 1:25:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's Swiffer, it's Swiffer, it's not Swifter.

• 1:25:07Derrick Levasseur?

  We have the, um, the one that begins with a B.

• 1:25:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, unless that's a Mandela effect, and it is Swifter. I think it's Swiffer, though, but anyways. This is also the day that Krista Halderson's coworker and friend, Daniel Croninger, stopped by, worried about why Krista had missed work without telling anyone. So his car is seen arriving at 4:45 p.m. and leaving at 4:51 p.m. But remember, Daniel said when he saw Chandler that day, Chandler was just getting out of the shower and his foot was bandaged. He had just showered, because all day he'd been trying to find a way to hide the remainder of his parents' bodies somewhere in the house, so that Kat wouldn't notice anything was out of place or weird. And that's why he doesn't want her to spend the night, right? So, the night before, we know Chandler had purchased 20 pounds of ice. And so the prosecution believes that Chandler used the ice and the freezer in the basement

• 1:25:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  to temporarily preserve and hide the remains to prevent any smell that would occur from rapid decomposition.

• 1:26:00Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:26:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  And this is the kind of decomposition that you would expect to happen during extremely hot July temperatures, right? Because, you see, the Halderson home did not have central air conditioning. And in fact, a surprise visit from an HVAC tech named Zach Reed during the period of time in which Bart and Krista were missing became highly memorable during the trial, because prior to their murders, Bart and Krista had contacted a local HVAC company to get an estimate for installing a new air conditioning system. It had been a very hot summer, and the consultation had been scheduled for July 6th, 2021. So this was another kind of way the prosecution was like, Bart and Krista didn't go to no cabin, because if they had, why would they plan to have an HVAC guy come and talk to

• 1:26:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  them about an AC unit when they were gone? So, while Zach Reed was at the house, he never got inside, because Chandler pulled up after Zach was there and kind of waiting for someone to come, and Chandler was like, "Hey, my parents are away for the weekend." But Zach Reed noticed while he was looking around the house that the basement windows had been completely obscured by some sort of covering. And when the police went in the home later, they found that all the windows in the basement had been covered by blankets and towels, and we know why. Chandler doesn't...

• 1:27:13Derrick Levasseur?

  We do.

• 1:27:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, Chandler doesn't want to see anybody, you know, anybody to see him dismembering his parents' bodies. Also, he's trying to keep it as cool in there as he possibly can, right?

• 1:27:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, insulate as much as possible to keep out the heat, yep.

• 1:27:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  And while we understand that the basement would probably have been slightly cooler than the rest of the house, it's still a very hot July.

• 1:27:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Not gonna be good for flush.

• 1:27:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Nope, temps are in the high 80s, the 90s. Chandler could not very well leave the remaining parts of his parents' bodies sitting on the basement floor, because they would start to smell, his girlfriend might notice that smell, and later reported to questioning detectives when Chandler reports his parents missing. So Chandler got a bunch of ice, he puts the ice in the freezer, then hid the remains inside the freezer, knowing Kat was coming over, and then he took a shower, so that when she arrived, he would be fresh and not sweaty and bloody from that task. Now, at around 5:00 p.m., Kat left work and stopped at her apartment, so she could grab some clothes, and then throw them into the washer when she got to her mother's house. And so Kat and Chandler are talking a little bit more, and you can tell that Kat's miffed,

• 1:28:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  because he was like, "Well, I mean, were you even ready to spend the night?" And she's like, "Yeah, dude, I've, I've packed clothes and stuff, because I thought I was spending the night, but don't worry, I'll just leave them in the car, whatever. I'll just leave my bag in the car, whatever. It is what it is, it's fine." It's not fine, when she says it's fine. It's not fine.

• 1:28:37Derrick Levasseur?

  No.

• 1:28:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, he's absolutely ignorant to the fact that he's hurt her feelings, by the way.

• 1:28:43Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, he's a little preoccupied.

• 1:28:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  He is, but I also think, once again, like, he doesn't have the social understanding. He's like, "What's the big deal? If you come over and we hang out together all night, we're just gonna sleep. What do you even want to be here for when I'm sleeping? Like, why does that matter?" You know? So Chandler texted at 5:20 p.m., "Okay, I do kind of need the Swifter and peroxide and stuff," end quote. So at 5:29 p.m., Kat was at the Hillsdale Target in Madison. She did a curbside pickup order for some groceries, pork chops, oat milk, cheese. She then went to her mother's house. She threw the laundry in that she had taken from her apartment, she grabbed the Swiffer, she grabbed the peroxide that Chandler had reminded her several times that day he needed. And then at 6:04 p.m., she received a text from Chandler reminding her that he also needed ice, so he needs more ice.

• 1:29:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  Apparently, the 20 pounds he had gotten the night before was not enough. And during the trial, they're asking her, they're like, "Did you know he got 20 pounds of ice the night before?" And she's like, "No." And, and they were like, "Why would Chandler need ice? Did, did they not have an ice machine in the house?"

• 1:29:43Derrick Levasseur?

  Or at least an ice cube tray?

• 1:29:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, an ice cube tray, something. She's like, "He really likes his drinks cold."

• 1:29:49Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 1:29:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  The Haldersons really like cold drinks.

• 1:29:53Derrick Levasseur?

  And also, why can't he go out and get it? I don't know. There's a lot here that in hindsight...

• 1:29:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, because he can't drive. He can't drive because of his injury, remember?

• 1:30:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, that's right, the injuries.

• 1:30:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  She's gotta wait on him hand and foot, she's gotta take care of poor little baby boy Chandler.

• 1:30:06Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I'm gonna give Kat a little grace on this, where it's like, if somebody not in these circumstances says, "Hey, on your way over, can you grab a bag of ice?"

• 1:30:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'd be like, "Bitch, what are you doing? You don't have a job."

• 1:30:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, he's injured.

• 1:30:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, he's injured.

• 1:30:17Derrick Levasseur?

  He's injured. So I could see, as the good girlfriend being like, "Yeah, you can't really leave the house, you like your drinks cold, they probably don't have an ice machine."

• 1:30:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  They have like a normal freezer where they have ice, but she said...

• 1:30:28Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, like an ice cube tray, but it's not gonna be frozen as fast as the bags of ice would be.

• 1:30:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  He likes his drinks cold, understand? And she's waiting on him hand and foot, okay? Because he's injured, and she's worried about him.

• 1:30:41Derrick Levasseur?

  He's injured, man, gotta go easy on him.

• 1:30:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Chandler never deserved Kat, okay? That's, that's a fact. At 6:37 p.m., Kat's now at a different Target. And here she grabs watermelon and pickled jalapenos for the burgers they decided to make that night. And this is very important, because she does curbside pickup at both Targets. And what happens, Derek, when you do curbside pickup? Or let's say you order something from DoorDash or something? What's on the bag when you get the bag?

• 1:31:05Derrick Levasseur?

  I, I don't do it too often, I'm definitely just calling myself out here. Isn't it your name or whatever?

• 1:31:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  Your name. Your name is on the bag.

• 1:31:13Derrick Levasseur?

  I knew that.

• 1:31:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  And usually, the day and the time and your name, right? There's like maybe a receipt stapled to the bag, and then your, your name's written on the bag, because they put all the bags on a shelf, so that when you arrive for the, the door, the port, the pickup at the curbside, you say, "I'm here," and then they're like, "Okay, Kat's here." They find the bag that says Kat, they grab it, they bring it out to you.

• 1:31:31Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, I thought they just scanned a ticket number or whatever, but okay, cool.

• 1:31:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  They grab the bag that says Kat, right? So later, they're going to find in the garbage cans that are at the end of the, the driveway at the property of Cress, at the farm, where Bart Halderson's torso is found, they're gonna find a bunch of bloody rags inside of a plastic bag, inside of a Target bag.

• 1:31:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Oof.

• 1:31:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  And whose name is on it?

• 1:31:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Our girl Kat.

• 1:31:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Our girl Kat, from her July 1st... Curbside pickup and they're gonna ask Kat, "Did you ever bring that bag to Chris's place?" She's like, "No, the last time I saw it, "It was at Chandler's house." So this is another thing that places something that was at the Halderson home at the farm.

• 1:32:14Derrick Levasseur?

  And this is something that's important because I know it didn't work out that way. You've shown us, you have already shown us a quick clip of Kat, who's clearly a witness. But during the investigation, I have no doubt in my mind, there was a part of the investigation that involved looking into Kat and whether she had assisted after the fact. That's still accessory to a crime. So clearly they were able to rule that out. But when you find a bag that Kat brought over, you do have to ask the question or you're not doing your job. When she came over, did Chandler disclose what he had done? And then enlist her help to clean up the area? So I'm sure that was a consideration initially.

• 1:32:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  So it was because they found-

• 1:32:53Derrick Levasseur?

  As it should be.

• 1:32:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, because they found out she had spent the night there.

• 1:32:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. They wouldn't be doing their job if it wasn't considered.

• 1:32:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  We see at 7:01 PM Kat's Subaru pulls into the driveway of the Halderson's home. So Bart had a Subaru and then Kat had a Subaru, different models, different colors. So she pulls in at 7:01 and you can see her get out of the car. She goes inside and then she returns to the car a few minutes later with Chandler. They grab some of the bags of groceries out of the car. They go back inside. I have to give her credit. At least she was like, "I just picked up groceries for this dude. Like, he better get his ass outside, neck brace or no neck brace, and help me carry these things in." So Kat later told the police that inside the house, it smelled smoky. And so she asked Chandler, she's like, "What the heck? Why's it smell like that in here?" And he was like, "Well, I was playing with the dogs. The fireplace broke and then this allowed the smoky smell of the fireplace to invade the home."

• 1:33:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Kat also remembered that Chandler had told her that because he'd hurt his foot, there was going to be blood and glass all over, but she didn't see any of that. In fact, when police checked the fireplace, there was blood on the inside. On the outside, there was blood on the floor, around the fireplace, on the hearth. It was all over. Now Kat did end up sleeping over Friday night. So I have a sneaking suspicion, because I am a girl, that she made Chandler feel bad. That he'd set her up. Yeah, he'd set her up with all these expectations about being together the whole weekend and then had changed the plans to last minute. But I think they made a deal, which I'm going to talk about in a second. That Chandler said, "Okay, if you sleep over tonight, here's what needs to happen tomorrow." I'll talk about that in a second. So Kat said that when she slept over,

• 1:34:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  they would usually sleep in Chandler's bedroom upstairs. But this night, they slept in the living room. And she said they slept in like this makeshift fort that Chandler had created by pushing all of the couches together and then putting sheets over the couches and then putting like blankets and pillows inside this little like walled off area that the couches being pushed together had made. Now Kat said they had never done this before when she had slept over. But Chandler wanted to be closer to the dogs because there were fireworks going off all weekend and the dogs would get scared of the fireworks. The prosecution put forth their own theory of why Chandler wanted him and Kat to sleep that way that night. They said that Chandler did this couch fort thing to basically trap Kat in.

• 1:35:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  She was used to walking around the Halderson house at will. She knew where almost everything was and a lot of the drinks and refrigerated snacks in the house were kept downstairs in the basement. So soda and drinks in that main stand up refrigerator and then ice cream and popsicles and such in the smaller free standing freezer. So let's say Kat woke up in the middle of the night, she wanted to grab a drink or a snack. She'd go downstairs in the basement. Why wouldn't she? She'd normally do this anytime, but Chandler didn't want that. And Chandler wanted to be able to know if she moved, which is why he didn't want her to spend the night at all. Not because he didn't want to see her, because he was like, "I don't want to be asleep and have her get up and find something I don't want her to find because then I'll have to kill her too." And Kat's very lucky to have gotten out of the situation alive, I believe.

• 1:35:54Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, she really, because I have no doubt in my mind, he would have killed her just as easily.

• 1:35:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Absolutely, 100%. So honestly, if she hadn't been as trusting of him and if she'd questioned him more, I think that she was, was very likely to be in danger. So the prosecution was like, "Listen, if Kat and Chandler had been sleeping in his bed, she could have just gotten up and slipped out. He wouldn't have noticed." So he made this like network of couches pushed together so that the sleeping area would be smaller and more confined and Kat would have needed to clumsily crawl out of this couch fort, over blankets, over couch cushions, over the arms and the backs of the couches. And Chandler would have felt her move.

• 1:36:32Derrick Levasseur?

  And would have signaled them.

• 1:36:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, she probably would have like bumped into him, jostled him, like accidentally kicked him when she's trying to get out. So he wanted to know if she woke up in the middle of the night so that she wouldn't discover anything.

• 1:36:43Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I was thinking about that as you were talking about Kat coming over. And on one hand, if he wanted to create the narrative that his parents had, you know, something bad had happened to them on vacation, if his girlfriend goes missing as well, there's a common denominator and it would have made him a prime suspect. So it would have been difficult for him to kill her, knowing what he was trying to accomplish. However, when we talk about the possibility that we're dealing with a psychopath here, we're not dealing with just an everyday person. And so at the end of the day, it's for selfish reasons and he's going to do what's going to benefit him the most. And if she had stumbled upon something, whether it was at the fireplace or in the basement, I think his emotional reaction to that would have been to kill her

• 1:37:28Derrick Levasseur?

  in that, in that second and then-

• 1:37:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  Absolutely.

• 1:37:30Derrick Levasseur?

  And then deal with the consequences later. And that kind of seems like the theme for this whole story so far. And we'll reconvene on this at the end when we finish the series. But I don't think there's a lot of thought put into Chandler's plans. He thinks about them briefly, he acts on them and then tries to figure out the details later. And that's indicative of this entire investigation. So to that point, when it comes to Kat, if she had just made one wrong turn or asked the wrong question, she would no longer be with us. So you are right, she is very lucky.

• 1:38:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, absolutely. All right, we're going to take our last break and we'll be right back.

• 1:38:10Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:38:25Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:39:17Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:39:32Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:40:01Stephanie Harlowe?

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• 1:40:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  So on the morning of July 3rd, which was now a Saturday, Kat left the Holderson home very early at 6:55 AM. And she said that this was because Chandler had some chores to do and he wanted to get those chores done before his parents came home or they'd be mad. But I believe Kat leaving this early on in Saturday morning was Chandler's deal that he had made with her. It's like, if you really want to sleep over, that's fine.

• 1:40:54Derrick Levasseur?

  You've got to go early.

• 1:40:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  You have to leave really, really early because I have chores to do. So if I can't do them tonight when you leave, then I have to do them tomorrow morning. So-

• 1:41:02Derrick Levasseur?

  I wonder why she never said like, "You want me to help you with them?" You know, we can, two people are better than one?

• 1:41:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think she did. And he said, "No."

• 1:41:09Derrick Levasseur?

  I would imagine. She was like, "Hey, what is it? I can help you." And he was like, "No, no, no."

• 1:41:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm. Yep. So Kat's plan for that day was to go over to her mom's house, hang out with her dogs and then have Chandler come over later because they were going to see fireworks. So at 7:32 AM, Kat texted Chandler and asked if he wanted a breakfast burrito. And I think that Kat was under the impression that Chandler was going to, you know, take like an hour or so to do chores because she'd said she'd seen some piles of grass outside the house that Chandler needed to take to the dump and then he would be over. It wasn't going to take long. She probably thought they would have breakfast together that morning. But then Chandler texted her at 7:46 AM and said, quote, "Sounds good. I'm doing shit kind of slowly. To be honest, I'm kind of sore," end quote. Now, obviously Kat felt bad. She wrote to Chandler, she could have stayed and helped him with his chores.

• 1:41:53Derrick Levasseur?

  There you go.

• 1:41:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yep. Because she knew that due to his injury, he was having a hard time with his legs and physical activity could be difficult and exhausting for him. And he was like, "I know, I know, but you don't need to do that."

• 1:42:03Derrick Levasseur?

  He's a trooper. He's got this, Stephanie.

• 1:42:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  He's like, "I'm a man and I can't have you help me even though I need it. But you can get all my groceries for me." So at 7:47 AM, the neighbor's security camera showed Bart Halderson Subaru leaving the house. And at that same time, Chandler told Kat, quote, "I'll BRB, be right back, going to dump," end quote. At 7:49 AM, Chandler wrote, quote, "Never mind, it's closed," end quote. And Kat wrote back, "Well, yeah, it is a holiday weekend." And then Chandler stopped responding to Kat's messages. And this made her suspicious. Now she kind of makes it seem this time and multiple other times that she's just worried about him because of his illness and she thinks he might have passed out. But remember, Chandler has cheated on Kat before and she knows this.

• 1:42:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  And so I think they are texting back and forth so consistently throughout the day because it's kind of what Kat needs to make sure that when they're not together, Chandler isn't with someone else.

• 1:43:02Speaker 02

  At some point, it's a series of messages from you and, and then this one comes at 8:38. What do you say there?

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  Hey, did you pass out?

• 1:43:13Speaker 02

  That's a question mark. Why would you send a message like that? Or why did you send a message like that?

• 1:43:20Speaker 03

  I was worried because of the head injury. If he's overexerting himself, he might push himself too hard and pass out.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  And you had sent him a series of messages.

• 1:43:30Speaker 02

  That he hadn't responded to, correct?

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  At some point that day, after you left, did you notice that Chandler was in a... Did you look at his Snapchat map to look at where he was?

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  And did you become worried or concerned in some way?

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  Showing it's been marked as exhibit number 532. What is that?

• 1:43:54Speaker 03

  A screenshot of Chandler by the Wisconsin River.

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  And how's he labeled? What's his name there?

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  Hubby.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  And what time is that?

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  8:58.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Why did you take this screenshot of Chandler's location?

• 1:44:07Speaker 03

  I didn't know why he was there, and so I was curious.

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Did you know where this location was?

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  And how did you know where this location was?

• 1:44:17Speaker 03

  I'd been there before with Chandler.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  Tell us about it.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  It's a little spot where we can park our car and walk down to the Wisconsin River for swimming.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  How many times do you think you've been there?

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  Two or three times.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  Is this that screenshot?

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  That's the location, right?

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:44:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, what did you do when you saw that location? Did you... You took a screenshot. Did you do anything else with that information?

• 1:44:46Speaker 03

  I asked him what he was doing there.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  What did he respond?

• 1:44:50Speaker 03

  He was going to pick up CBD, and he was passing through there.

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  Did you try to call him?

• 1:44:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  Were you able to talk to him?

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  Do you recall anything else from that conversation about what he said or why he was where he was?

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  He was picking up CBD for the pain.

• 1:45:10Speaker 03

  He didn't want to tell me that he was picking up CBD because he was scared I was going to be disappointed in him.

• 1:45:16Speaker 02

  And around that time that you took that screenshot, was that when all of these messages were being sent that we looked at in this exhibit where no one was responding to you? Were you having trouble communicating with Chandler that morning between 8:00 and 9:00, essentially?

• 1:45:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  When was the last time you were at that location, that out by the Wisconsin River with Chandler, approximately?

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  That summer with his friend, Smith.

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  Is that Andrew Smith?

• 1:45:43Speaker 03

  I don't know his first name. He always just went by Smith.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  Okay. How did... What was your understanding of how Chandler knew this Smith guy?

• 1:45:51Speaker 03

  They were video game buddies.

• 1:45:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, so first of all, we'll talk about how Kat's got Chandler on SnapMap. And for no... For people who don't use Snapchat, you can choose to share your location with your friends so that when they want to see where you are, it pops up your little avatar. I think Chandler's name on Snapchat was Chaz Dazzle or something stupid like that.

• 1:46:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:46:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  And so he's not responding to Kat for like an hour, which shows you how constantly they were in contact with. When he's not responding to her for an hour, she pulls up his location on Snapchat because she wants to see where he is. And when she sees that he's not home and he's not at the dump and he's at this random place, she's suspicious. Okay, this is a pretty isolated space. This is a place he's brought her before, but maybe he's brought other people there. And so she sends him the screenshot of him there on the SnapMap, and she's like, "What the hell are you doing here?" And he's like, "Oh, I was getting CBD, and I didn't want you to be disappointed in me because like CBD, what the hell does... Like, who cares about CBD?" You know, so he makes up an excuse. Now, Kat also mentioned Smith.

• 1:47:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  This is Andrew Smith. Andrew Smith was in the Army stationed in Germany when he met Chandler while they were playing games together online in 2018 or 2019. They played Arma 3 and Escape from Tarkov together, and they interacted through text and voice channels on a public server. And they played together so often, almost every day. They eventually became very close friends. So when Andrew Smith was done in Germany, he returned to the United States with his family, and he began living in Kansas. And at that time, Andrew said the frequency of him and Chandler playing games together increased because they were now in the same time zone. So in June of 2021, Andrew Smith, who's now in Kansas, he decided to pay a visit to Chandler in Wisconsin.

• 1:47:43Speaker 04

  So it was one of those last minute decisions I was able to make, sir. So my wife had ended up going to visit family in Ohio, and she was going to be gone for two weeks. So I went and looked at how many points I had. I was able to take off work, and I went and called off work that day so I could come up and have a weekend with driving up there and then spending two days with him, sir.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  It's a long drive up here?

• 1:48:05Speaker 04

  No shit. Yes, sir.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  It's okay. Everyone slips up. Where'd you stay when you were up here with Mr. Halderson?

• 1:48:13Speaker 04

  In their family home in the basement, sir.

• 1:48:15Speaker 02

  Did you meet his parents?

• 1:48:16Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  Okay. When you were up here, what kind of things did you do for fun? Where'd you go?

• 1:48:21Speaker 04

  So we went swimming at some river at some point, and then we went and drove around to the different department stores, department stores, and we're looking at weapons and all that. So we went to Cabela's. We went to, I think, it was... I want to say it was Bass Pro, but that doesn't sound right. I know we went to Gander Mountain, and then we went to like one or two other places, but I can't remember what they were.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Did you take that picture?

• 1:48:42Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  And what is that?

• 1:48:44Speaker 04

  The river, sir.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  That you went swimming?

• 1:48:46Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  And who took you there?

• 1:48:48Speaker 04

  Chandler and his girlfriend at the time.

• 1:48:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Andrew Smith stayed with Chandler and his family for about two days. He slept down in the basement. And during those two days, he and Chandler did normal things. They behaved like normal friends. They went to stores and looked at weapons, a passion they both shared. They went swimming in a local river, the same exact river where Chandler's SnapMap put him on the morning of July 3, 2021, when he wasn't responding to Kat's texts, and she had to check on his location. Now, more on that in a minute. But Andrew Smith was not going to be a bad house guest when he arrived. So he and Chandler had spent so much time together over the last several years, and they'd grown so close. So Andrew decided to bring Chandler something special when he visited him in June of 2021.

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  When you visited Wisconsin to see Chandler, you brought him a gift?

• 1:49:34Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  What did you bring him?

• 1:49:36Speaker 04

  I brought him a 20-inch barrel SKS. So I had purchased it on a gun broker, and I went and had it sent to my FFL. And then I went and sat in the FFL until I went and did the FFL transfer. So I purchased it initially because I really... Because I was like, "Oh, well, I like in the video game. I might like it in real life." And then I fired it. It sat in my safe, and then I never touched it again. And then it just dawned on me like, "Well, I'm going to give it to someone who might actually appreciate this weapon and take care of it and all that." So I end up giving it to Chandler as a gift.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  Okay. So while you like guns, you didn't particularly love this gun?

• 1:50:15Speaker 04

  No, sir.

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  You know what that document is?

• 1:50:17Speaker 04

  Yes, sir. It's a FFL transfer paperwork, sir.

• 1:50:20Speaker 02

  And you've been saying the phrase FFL, correct?

• 1:50:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 1:50:24Speaker 04

  That's a federal firearms license holder.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  Meaning someone who's licensed to sell firearms and fills out paperwork?

• 1:50:29Speaker 04

  And does the correct background checks and such.

• 1:50:31Speaker 02

  Got it. When you gave the gun to Chandler, did he pay you for it?

• 1:50:34Speaker 04

  No, sir.

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  It was a gift?

• 1:50:36Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  Did you document in any way transferring that gun to him?

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  How did you choose... Did you fill out paperwork like this?

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  I took his photo ID that the state issued him, and I took it right next to his serial number, annotating that this was me giving this weapon to this individual. So that way, if anything like this would occur, that it wouldn't necessarily come back to me.

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  It was important to you to document that?

• 1:50:58Speaker 04

  Most times it is, yes.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  Okay. Had Chandler asked you for this gun? Or was this just your idea?

• 1:51:03Speaker 04

  I think he had at one point asked for it as a joke, but mostly it was my idea, sir.

• 1:51:10Speaker 02

  You brought him other things that go with the gun?

• 1:51:12Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  What type of things?

• 1:51:13Speaker 04

  So I had brought him a steel canister that had contained roughly 480 rounds of 762 by 39 steel case 2A ammo.

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  And is that the ammunition that goes with that weapon?

• 1:51:23Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  Do those appear to be that canister of ammunition?

• 1:51:26Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  And are you fairly confident that's the one you brought?

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I'm the only weirdo that stencils his ammo can, so yes.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  You put those stencils on there?

• 1:51:34Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  When you say you stenciled this ammo can, what do you mean by that?

• 1:51:38Speaker 04

  So I've got plenty of different kinds of rounds in my home. So I'll go and have different cans for them, and I take a spray can. I'll buy the stencils so I can make sure I know what I'm grabbing if I need something before I go to the range. So I'm not running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to figure out what can goes to what.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  So this yellow paint that says 762 by 39, that's you that stenciled that on there?

• 1:51:56Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  How did Chandler react when you gave him the gun?

• 1:51:59Speaker 04

  Oh, he was happy.

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  What do you mean? But how do you know he was happy? Or how do you know that?

• 1:52:03Speaker 04

  Because he had a big smile on his face when I had given it to him as a gift.

• 1:52:06Speaker 02

  Were you aware whether his parents that he was living with were gun people or wanted guns in their home?

• 1:52:12Speaker 04

  As far as I knew that... Or what I was explained by Chandler was that his parents understood the reason of why firearms exist in this world. And not that they necessarily support having them, but they're helpful in situations.

• 1:52:26Speaker 02

  What did you do with... What did Chandler do with the gun? Were you able to figure out where he put it in the house?

• 1:52:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, he had initially... So if you would walk down the fly stairs in the basement, you would look left. There was like a little wood pile, and he had stuck it in the middle section there because it was... I understood that they might not be happy about having this firearm. So... But he had told me he was going to be moving soon to do a career in SpaceX in Florida. So he was just going to take it with him and move out there with it.

• 1:52:51Speaker 02

  Were there any magazines that came with the gun?

• 1:52:52Speaker 04

  Yes, sir. Three. Three.

• 1:52:54Speaker 02

  Were they loaded when you gave them to him?

• 1:52:56Speaker 04

  Not initially, sir.

• 1:52:57Speaker 02

  How did they become loaded?

• 1:52:58Speaker 04

  I think we were bullshitting with the magazine, sir. And both of those men were like... He was asking me how to load it. So I was like, "Oh, you just..." And I was showing him how to pack the magazine.

• 1:53:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  So apparently, when Andrew gave Chandler the gun, he could tell that Chandler was happy because Chandler had a big smile on his face. So apparently Chandler does know how to smile and feel happiness when he is being handed a gun.

• 1:53:21Derrick Levasseur?

  It's a nice gift to give someone. Those aren't cheap. But everything he said there is pretty much how it works. Gunbroker, when he says that, it's not an actual gun broker. It technically is, but it's gunbroker.com. It's a website that is used by a lot of people. I've used it before. But you can't just buy a gun there and then it's shipped to your house. You have to go through an FFL, which is a... Usually a gun store that has a license where they can make that transfer from whoever you purchased the gun from online to your persons. As far as the actual... Gift of the gun, I don't want to go too far off the path here, but man, the fact that he had to hide the gun but in a pile of wood. Maybe that would have been the first indication that maybe I shouldn't be giving him this gun at this time.

• 1:54:04Derrick Levasseur?

  Maybe I should be holding on to it and waiting until he goes off to SpaceX. I don't know.

• 1:54:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't think he cared all that much. Yeah.

• 1:54:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Clearly.

• 1:54:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  To be honest, I mean, he's like, this is a 20 something year old kid, like whatever.

• 1:54:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm probably, you know, it doesn't have anything to do with what we're talking about here, but that does explain how he obtained the gun, you know, that he ultimately used in a murder.

• 1:54:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think it's interesting that Andrew Smith was like, yeah, I gave it to him and I made sure that I like documented it in this way in case something like this happened where it's like, did you think something like this could have happened?

• 1:54:36Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, yeah, that's, that's, and I will defend him here that that is the reason you document transfers of firearms because whether it's the person you give it to does something like this, or if the weapon is stolen, you, you want to make sure that you show the date and time where you were no longer in possession of that firearm. So I, he didn't say it the best, but he kind of shoots from the hip, as you can tell from that testimony. And I think that's, that was his true, genuine reaction. Like, hey, I want to make sure that if anything, this gun's used in any capacity that's illegal, I'm clear.

• 1:55:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm hmm. But I, I would like to know, you know, and obviously he would never say it in open court, but like, was there any part of you from being so close to Chandler, talking to him every day?

• 1:55:18Derrick Levasseur?

  He was a little off.

• 1:55:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  Knowing how gung ho he was about guns, specifically this type of gun and seeing how happy he was when he got it, like, was there any part of you that was like,

• 1:55:26Derrick Levasseur?

  maybe I shouldn't.

• 1:55:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, maybe this guy shouldn't have a gun.

• 1:55:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:55:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  I would like to know. Uh, so we have Andrew Smith. He's the one that provides Chandler with the SKS rifle, the murder weapon. And he testified that Chandler kept it down in the basement because his parents would not be exactly happy about having the weapon in their house.

• 1:55:43Derrick Levasseur?

  AKA, sounds to me like they didn't want guns in their house.

• 1:55:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  They did not. Yes.

• 1:55:47Derrick Levasseur?

  That's, that's, that's my takeaway from that statement is, oh, wouldn't be happy, but they understand their uses. No, they didn't want firearms in their home.

• 1:55:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  They don't want them under the roof, especially with all of that ammo, right? Cause that's, that's a lot of ammo. Now, we know that detectives found the three magazines in the basement because they found them behind the insulation hidden. And we know that eventually they found the stenciled metal ammo canister in Chandler's bedroom. And this is the one where Andrew Smith is like, yeah, nobody but me would do this. Like I did this to like organize all of my ammo because I had so much. But it would be a while before detectives would locate the rifle itself. It would be quite a while, actually. He gets arrested in July. They don't find the rifle until October. So as far as the river that Andrew and Kat talked about, it is a very important location.

• 1:56:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  This is the place that Chandler was known to go to with his friends, including his previous roommate, Alex Grabett, who we've talked about, and his previous girlfriend, Dakota Brown. In fact, Chandler had once sent Dakota some pictures of him at that location by the river where he was by and in a specific tree overlooking the swamp and river line. And there's pictures of Chandler shirtless climbing the tree. And in one picture Chandler is looking directly at the camera while holding a large knife in his hand. This area is generally known as the lower Wisconsin state riverway. It sits in a very, very rural pocket of northwestern Dane county near the village of Roxbury, Wisconsin. So on July 3rd, the same day that Kat sees on Snapchat, the Chandler's over in this location,

• 1:57:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  a woman named Jill Distefano was visiting her daughter in a place called Sock City, Wisconsin. So Jill was from St. George, Utah. She's visiting her daughter in Wisconsin. She's not familiar with the area or where everything is. She was outside playing with her granddaughter in the front yard of her daughter's house, which was two houses away from where there was some woods at the corner of highway 188 and Jensen Road, also known as Old Highway 60. So Jill's daughter lived across the street from a large open lot. And on that day between eight and nine AM, Jill saw a man parked at the end of the street facing the woods. She saw him walk away from his car and then walk back towards his car. And he looked across the street where there was that wide open lot. And Jill said that she didn't see where the man ended up going.

• 1:58:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  But when she saw him go back to his car, he didn't get into the car and drive away. And so she figured the only place he could have gone was into the woods, which she later found out those woods led to the Wisconsin River. Later she asked her daughter if there were hiking trails back there because she said she saw a guy and she figured he might've been looking for a hiking trail. And her daughter said, no, people don't really hike in this area. They're usually going to be there for fishing or swimming because the river's that way. Jill Distefano would call the police on July 14th and report this sighting once she heard about Chandler's arrest because she saw his picture. And she recognized Chandler as the man she'd seen that day. And then when Detective Shunk, who remember is one of the head detectives on the case,

• 1:58:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  when Jill said where the location was, he recognized it and he was very familiar with it since it had been part of his beat when he worked patrol for the sheriff's office. He said it was one of the most northwestern parts of the county across the river from Prairie du Sac in the town of Roxbury. So it's very remote. It's so remote that it doesn't even have a post office. It doesn't have a police station, nothing. So on July 14th, several people were assigned to search that area, including Ryan Caputo, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Conservation Warden. Once Caputo began a grid search of this area with others, he said the first indication to him and the other searchers was the smell.

• 1:59:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Next, Caputo spotted what he believed to be toes, a foot and part of a leg. And at that point, he was like, I don't want to have anything to do with this. I'm not looking any closer. He immediately called the sheriff's department and then investigators came and started processing the scene. They uncovered several severely dismembered remains scattered across two separate sites about 30 yards apart. There was a right leg cut entirely from the foot, all the way up to the hip socket. A left foot and lower part of a leg severed just above the ankle. There was an upper thigh portion, obviously toes connected to a part of the foot. So these were two female legs and DNA tested them to Krista Halderson.

• 2:00:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  And where were those remains located exactly?

• 2:00:17Speaker 02

  But she said, at 8:58 in the morning, when he was supposed to be doing chores on Saturday, July 3rd, I thought it was strange that he was in what appears to be a forest on the banks of the Wisconsin River near Prairie du Sac.

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  The police took that. They identified immediately where that location was, just based on looking at it. That's a bridge. Couldn't be hard. Out they go. The drones go up, the dogs go out, the search team starts searching very quickly. And I promise this is as far as the photos will go.

• 2:00:54Speaker 02

  They find the remains of Krista Halderson. Now, when I say Krista Halderson, I have to qualify that as well. We found her legs, one complete leg, then somewhat farther away in another bush, a foot, a thigh, but the same pattern crudely cut apart with appears to be handsaws, axes, things of that sort. No more of Krista Halderson that's identifiable to her will ever be found. She's just those two legs. At this point, the police thought, this is just a strange location. Why would Chandler be out there? He'd been out there before. And one friend even said, you know what? Last year he sent me a picture while he was out there, kind of shirtless, hanging from a tree with a machete.

• 2:01:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. Didn't have a lot of significance at the time when the police saw it, but eventually someone realized the tree looks unique. Interesting V pattern right there. The hollowness of the tree as it goes down. The way in which five of those branches branch off. And eventually one of the detectives realizes why. Something clicked. It was the exact location he ditched his mother's remains. That's about a hundred feet away.

• 2:02:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now it's once again weird because he tries to burn parts of their bodies, but then he leaves Bart's torso kind of like under some leaves. And then he leaves these legs and dismembered parts of his mother's body like on, on dry ground, right? Like kind of hidden in a bush here and there. But then all the other parts of Bart and Krista are never found. And this is because the police believe that he put them in the water. And we'll talk about that more uh, next time. And they say, listen, the Wisconsin River happens to be. I guess a very good river to dispose of things if you don't want them to ever be found because of the currents. And they said even people drown in that river and they're

• 2:02:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  not dismembered and their bodies are never found. So they believe that he got rid of a lot of the body parts in the river, but like, why not these ones? Were you interrupted? Did you not have time? Why'd you bring the torso there?

• 2:02:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  If you thought that the river would be a good place and things wouldn't be found, then why not all of the body parts? Like, that's, I don't understand that. But either way, now we have two locations where dismembered remains were found. The farm owned by Cress, the partner of Dolce, who's the mother of Chandler's girlfriend Kat, and then this area of the Wisconsin River where Chandler was known to like to go, where he'd been with people before, where he had pictures of himself hanging in the exact tree that his mother's legs would be found just 100 feet away from that tree. We have remains being burned in the home fireplace, a torso found on the farm, legs found by the river. But where are the other remains? Where was the gun? And what kind of defense could Chandler Halderson possibly raise for all this evidence pointing against him? What were his actions

• 2:03:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  like in the days after this? Because now he realizes, cutting it apart, burning it, this, this and that, it's not working. What else does Chandler do? And that's where we're going to pick up in the fourth and final installment of this series.

• 2:03:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I think at this point, well, I'm interested to see where the defense goes. I'm sure it's gonna have to do something with him being a victim in some way, shape or form, having to defend himself. But putting that aside for this episode, and I said we would reconvene at the end and talk about it. For me, my takeaway, hearing this story for the first time is, there was definitely some planning done when it came to the murders of his two parents. However, it wasn't well thought out. I do feel like Chandler is an impulsive person. And although he had maybe had thoughts of killing them in the past as one of their, the options he could explore if need be, I think the actual plan and the execution of said plan was probably in the last couple hours before actually killing Bart, when he realized, I'm in a corner, there's no other way out, my lies are up

• 2:04:42Derrick Levasseur?

  to my throat, I can't get out of this, I have to take them out. And that's indicative of the, of the actual crime itself and how many mistakes were made, simple mistakes were made, including not considering the fact that your neighbors would have cameras. Also, I didn't want to interrupt your vibe as you were talking about it, but even the magazines being found in that crawl space later, to me, that's not representative of him trying to hide those magazines after the fact. More than likely, he had four or five magazines for this SKS assault rifle. And this crawl space was probably a location where he kept multiple things he didn't want his parents to find. And he probably forgot

• 2:05:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  That they were there.

• 2:05:20Derrick Levasseur?

  That there were remaining magazines still in there, because he would only need one magazine to kill both of them. We're talking five, maybe six rounds at most, and probably a 20 to 30 round magazine. So he disposes of the gun, and you said it was found later, we'll get into that. But the magazine that was in that gun probably went with it, and the other magazines remained behind with the vape attachments, the mouthpieces, because he had so much going on, including having to navigate his girlfriend being there.

• 2:05:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  And clean up all the blood, yeah.

• 2:05:50Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes, the fireplace and all this. It was like, hey, I have to kill them, I'm going to kill them, and I'll iron out the details later. That's, that's what I take away so far in this series.

• 2:06:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. What do you think of when Andrew Smith gave him the gun and he said Chandler was really happy? Do you think Chandler was really happy because he was like, here's how I can kill my parents? Or Chandler was just really happy to get the gun?

• 2:06:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Probably really happy to just get the gun. He's, he's a gamer, he's someone who uses the SKS in that, in that game on multiple occasions. So, you know, I can see him being genuinely happy about the possession of the gun. I don't know why I'm saying this, because it sounds like I'm defending him, but I don't think in that moment, he's like, yes, finally the weapon to kill my parents. But do I think shortly after, he was thinking about what he could do with that gun, maybe including killing anyone who could get in his way or who has wronged him? Yes, that's the type of person we're dealing with. Absolutely.

• 2:06:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  So do you think that if it hadn't been his parents, that it eventually would have been someone else that he killed with that gun? Yes?

• 2:06:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Without a doubt. It's a combination of that classic story of, you know, we talk about school shooters and things like that, where they're not playing the video game, the first person shooter games, like most people are, where it's, you know, enjoyment, it's a community space where you can hang out with friends and family and have fun. They're looking at it as living vicariously through that character, trying to envision themselves being the ones killing the other people in the game. They're looking at it from a different lens than most people. And so, being in physical possession of the actual weapon, they're getting gratification from the game on a different level than most of us. So being in possession of a firearm that they're so accustomed to using in the game, now it just gives them another level. And what's the next step, once you have the gun? Actually using it?

• 2:07:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, now, yes, now you, you want to use it in some way, because that's not going to be enough to just have it. Now it's always going to be in the back of your head when you're playing the video game. I have this, I can use it in real life. Yeah.

• 2:07:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. No, I think he decided first, I'm gonna kill my parents, and then figured out the details later. And yeah, so many mistakes were made here, that there's no way this was a well thought out plan, that he had been kind of stewing up for the last couple of months. Yes, the idea of killing them, sure, but all the actual details involved with said murders, probably not until the last moment. Maybe not until that day, when he realized, if I don't do something now, I'm gonna have to go to the school with my father.

• 2:08:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 2:08:11Derrick Levasseur?

  So.

• 2:08:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  And that wasn't an option. It just wasn't. Yeah.

• 2:08:14Derrick Levasseur?

  His Bart had backed him into a corner. It was checkmate.

• 2:08:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:17Derrick Levasseur?

  And so there was no other alternative, but absolutely horrific story. And to think about these parents and to be murdered by their own son.

• 2:08:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  Completely blindsided. Like I said, I don't think, I don't think either of them were ever like, this is a possibility.

• 2:08:30Derrick Levasseur?

  No, God, no. And the only thing that we can take from it, and it's such a morbid way of looking at it, but it sounds like their deaths were quick.

• 2:08:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes.

• 2:08:39Derrick Levasseur?

  A lot of the aftermath that we're talking about that is disgusting and heinous, they were no longer with us to experience that. So to me, for their, for their loved ones, and the people that were close to them, that is something that you can take with you, that more than likely, they were already gone.

• 2:08:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but poor Mitchell, you know?

• 2:08:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, God. I mean, listen, there's so many victims in this case that are residually affected by this for the rest of their lives, but there's not a lot you can take that's good from this. That would be one thing, where they didn't suffer.

• 2:09:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:07Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm hoping that their deaths were quick.

• 2:09:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, that even maybe they didn't realize who was doing it.

• 2:09:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Exactly, exactly. No, fascinating case. I appreciate you breaking it down in the detail that you did. The investigative aspect of it is always so interesting, when you can see how detectives from different agencies throughout the country can, can conduct their, this investigation in a way that's unique to them. And it really just does highlight some good police work, which we don't often see when we're covering these cases. Usually there's mistakes made, which is why it takes longer to solve them. But here, these guys really did a good job. They dotted their i's, crossed their t's.

• 2:09:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, they were systematic about it.

• 2:09:44Derrick Levasseur?

  And it didn't hurt that Chandler's a moron. So, we appreciate you guys being here. I know this episode was long. I have been getting emails from you guys. We are currently working on a new case, potentially, that we're going to fund for Criminal Coffee. I'm wearing the shirt today. So anybody who's reached out, anybody who's purchased coffee or purchased merchandise and has been following up with, what's the next one? Trust me, Stephanie and I have been discussing it, it's in the works. We have also been donating to different organizations on your behalf. So if you want to go over to CriminalCoffeeCo.com, there's like a running banner where you can see all the organizations or foundations we've donated to on your behalf. One of the more recent ones being like Elizabeth Smart Foundation. We had an interview with her, we saw it as an opportunity to donate, we did. And so

• 2:10:29Derrick Levasseur?

  we wouldn't be able to do that without you guys. We appreciate the support. And if you want to join that fight against crime and helping people who've been affected by crime, visit CriminalCoffeeCo.com. That's gonna be my spiel. We appreciate the love and support. We will see you next week. Until then, everyone, stay safe out there.

• 2:10:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Bye.

• 2:10:47Derrick Levasseur?

  We'll see you soon.