Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the morning of Friday, July 2, 2021, Krista Halderson didn’t show up for work.
That wasn’t like her. Krista worked in customer service at an auto body shop, and she did not just fail to turn up without a word. Her coworker and close friend, Daniel Kroninger, texted her. He called. Nothing.
That afternoon, he and his girlfriend drove out to the Halderson home in the village of Windsor, just outside Madison.
Nobody answered the door. Through a window, Kroninger noticed a coffee table tipped on its side near the fireplace. Then he walked over to the garage and looked in.
Both cars were there.
“I was like, ‘what?'” he later told CBS News’ “48 Hours.” “Why are both cars here?”
As he started around the back of the house, the side door opened. Out came the Haldersons’ younger son, Chandler, 23, wrapped in a towel. He said he had just gotten out of the shower.
His parents, he said, had to go up north that morning. There was an emergency at the family cabin.
The cabin story
Bart and Krista Halderson had two sons. Mitchell, 24, worked in tech and was engaged. Chandler still lived at home. As far as anyone knew, he was studying for an IT degree at Madison College, had an internship at American Family Insurance, and had just landed a job at SpaceX.
Bart, a managing director at an accounting firm, loved woodworking. Krista loved art projects.
Over the July Fourth weekend, Kroninger kept checking in with Chandler. The answers kept coming.
The cabin in Langlade County had bad cell service, Chandler said. You had to wait for the clouds to clear before a message went through. Then he said he had talked to his parents, and they would be back on Monday.
They did not come back on Monday. Krista missed work again on Tuesday. On Wednesday, July 7, she missed a doctor’s appointment she had been determined to keep.
Kroninger pushed Chandler to go to the police. That morning, Chandler walked into a Dane County Sheriff’s Office precinct and reported his parents missing.
“A couple he didn’t know”
The story Chandler told the detectives had grown. His parents had not driven themselves, he said. Another couple, people he didn’t know, had picked them up and taken them to the cabin.
Nobody else had heard anything about the trip. Bart and Krista hadn’t mentioned it to their coworkers, or to their older son. Chandler also told family friends his parents had taken a large amount of cash and alcohol along, and might have gone to a casino. Bart’s brother Brett, a former police officer, said that made no sense. Bart didn’t go to casinos.
The Dane County detectives called their colleagues in Langlade County, three hours north. Deputies went to the cabin, and the next day they met Mitchell there and searched it with him. It was dark inside. The canoe was still in the shed. Nobody had been there in a long time.
Door to door
While his brother was searching the cabin on July 8, Chandler was busy on his own street in Windsor.
Bart’s brother had told him to ask around for home security video, anything that might show who had come and gone. So that morning Chandler went door to door.
Several of the neighbors had Ring doorbells, and the cameras recorded him on their front steps. He asked whether they had security video, and whether their cameras could see the road or his house.
One neighbor, Jay Gilbertson, asked him about the other couple. If his parents were missing, were they missing too? Chandler said it was possible the couple had just carried on with their trip. Then how would his parents get home? Gilbertson didn’t get an answer that made sense, and Chandler moved on to the next house.
A reporter from NBC15 in Madison came out to the street that day and saw him doing it. Chandler agreed to an interview, as long as he wasn’t filmed. He wanted to see whether he could catch a glimpse of his parents leaving the house, he told the reporter.
Then he reached the Bennett house.
Kelly Bennett had heard about the missing couple the day before. Her family’s camera system looked straight at the Halderson driveway, and her husband had already volunteered the footage to the sheriff’s office.
When Chandler came to their door that morning, Bennett’s sister told him the family had already given everything to the investigators.
The camera had been recording all week.
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