Surveillance footage showed Krista eventually entering the home, never to be seen alive again. “K I can,” she wrote, with a smiley face. Then the defendant texted his mother that dad’s phone died. The prosecutor asserted that Chandler shot Bart in the back with a high-powered rifle. It was the last time he used his phone, Brown said. “I’m ready whenever you are,” about 50 minutes before the murder. “There’s no way out of this one,” the prosecutor said.īart Halderson texted his son at 2:10 p.m. “That’ll be it then,” Bart Halderson said in this account, his last recorded words alive, from about a day and a half before the murders.īrown said the man’s calendar showed he planned on meeting school officials with defendant Halderson at 3 p.m. Believing the college was wrongfully withholding his son’s transcript, the older man pretended to be Chaz in a phone call with a college customer service representative, and he learned that the school officials his son communicated with were actually made up. The state showed jurors pictures of Halderson wearing a neck brace, but surveillance footage from allegedly after the murders showed him without the brace, lugging around bags of ice at gas stations, which Brown said were used to ice his father’s dead body.Īccording to Brown, Bart Halderson finally figured out the truth, at least about the school. He allegedly claimed to have a brain bleed, a hematoma, spinal damage, having had to get his head drilled open, being unable to use his legs, being unable to drive, getting nerve damage, being unable to fly on an airplane, and needing a colostomy bag. “He’s going to be an astronaut,” Brown said.Īs an escape hatch out of this, Halderson faked getting a serious concussion from a fall downstairs, the prosecutor said. In this account, he lied to his girlfriend about renting an apartment and buying a car to head down to Titusville, Florida, where the company has its launch facilities. The situation with the insurance company came to a head: Halderson allegedly claimed he got a job at SpaceX. According to the prosecutor, Halderson did go to college but had flunked out after a semester. Madison police and the state’s Department of Natural Resources did not have scuba diving teams, Brown said. “But the way a parent looks at their child as maybe telling the truth is not the way that you as jurors have to look at this,” he said. Brown suggested that Halderson’s parents gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then he allegedly said that the company had to pay him so much money that the bank thought the deposit was fake.ĭefendant Halderson went as far as to stage emails between him and a fictitious HR person who used a generic email address, which he forwarded to his father, Brown said. Then he allegedly claimed to have given the wrong direct deposit information. The defendant gave different stories, first claiming the insurance company withheld his paychecks because they mistakenly had him as an hourly worker instead of salary work, the prosecutor said. Taking everything at face value, defendant Halderson was an unemployed slacker who mooched off of his parents, played video games when he was supposed to be working remote for the insurance company, and resorted to increasingly desperate tales to keep the lies going.Īccording to Brown, Halderson claimed to work at the business for a year, but his father, who was an accountant, kept quizzing him on why he was not paying rent. Brown also says investigators found a piece of a human skull inside the fireplace. The photo shows the Halderson family fireplace, where the glass was broken.
Then he reported them missing, telling a story about them going hours up north to their cabin, the prosecutor said.īrown tells jurors Halderson planned to dismember his parents and burn their remains. “Chaz” shot his dad in the back, murdered his mother Krista Halderson, 53, when she returned home, and discarded their dismembered body parts throughout southern Wisconsin, Brown said.
This all fell apart after the defendant’s father Bart Halderson, 50, found out he was not even going to school, the prosecutor said.
It turned out to be an elaborate web of lies, the state said.
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He told family he was a college student about to graduate, he worked at an insurance company, he helped police as a scuba driver for a rescue team, and he just got hired to work for SpaceX, prosecutor William Brown told jurors on Tuesday. In early 2021, Wisconsin man Chandler “Chaz” Michael Halderson, 23, appeared to be a pretty impressive guy, according to opening statements in his murder trial.