APPLETON, Wis. (Court TV) — Testimony at a preliminary hearing revealed new details about handwritten notes found inside of a binder written by a woman accused of stabbing her boyfriend to death.
Samantha Krebs is charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the stabbing death of her boyfriend. (Outagamie County Sheriff)
After Thursday’s hearing, a judge found enough evidence for Samantha Krebs to stand trial on charges of first-degree intentional homicide for the stabbing death of her boyfriend, identified in court documents as J.J.C.
On July 18, 2024, J.J.C. was found bleeding from a stab wound by two friends, John and Christie, who came to the property to see him and Krebs. When police arrived at the scene, Krebs was gone. John and Christie told police that Krebs told them to say that the victim had stabbed himself. Christie later told police that Krebs told her, “I can’t go back to prison, I can’t go back to prison.”
When she was initially questioned, Krebs told police she had left the apartment at approximately 7 p.m., more than two hours before J.J.C. was stabbed, and didn’t know what was going on. At Thursday’s preliminary hearing, Appleton Police Sgt. Chad Riddle testified that Krebs’ story quickly changed when she was taken into custody. “Ms. Krebs … made the statement that she just watched her fiancé kill himself, and now she was being arrested,” Riddle said.
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Appleton Police Sgt. Chad Riddle testified at Samantha Krebs’ preliminary hearing on Oct. 31, 2024. (WLUK)
Riddle said they were able to track Krebs using surveillance video after she left the apartment with J.J.C. She went to another apartment complex, where she met up with another man. “What I felt was noteworthy,” Riddle said, “was there didn’t seem to be, from the view of the camera, that there was any indication of any type of emotion, that anything had happened. It just seemed like it was just a normal conversation.”
Krebs stayed at the second apartment complex with the man for several days. When police searched that property, they found a green binder containing six looseleaf handwritten pages that appeared to have been written by Krebs.
Riddle described the pages as “almost like a play-by-play of what had occurred” inside the apartment. The notes said that J.J.C. had wanted to meet his uncle to get drugs, and when the author (allegedly Krebs) tried to intervene, J.J.C. went into “what was described as a manic state.” When the author went to then leave the apartment, J.J.C. made a comment that “he would stab himself and make it look like she did it if she left.”
According to the notes, J.J.C. went into the kitchen, grabbed one of their “new Temu knives,” and threw the sheath into the living room. The author then said, “Everything happened so quickly.” The author suggested that J.J.C. may not have realized the knife was sharp since their “old knives were dull.”
Riddle said that two of J.J.C’s former coworkers called him in the week following his death to report that his “fiancée” had threatened to stab and kill him multiple times.
Krebs was arraigned on Nov. 5 and is due back in court in January for a status conference in her case.
