On a cold February night in the Colorado mountains, assailants kidnapped two men from their Fremont County homes, bound their wrists with zip ties, forced them into a vehicle at gunpoint and drove up an isolated canyon road.
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Some 10 miles in, the attackers pulled over and forced the men, Rodolfo “Rudy” Santillan-Reyes, 36, and Ryan Roth, 25, out of the vehicle. They shot Santillan-Reyes three times and Roth once, then kicked the men off a ravine, sending them tumbling down the steep slope.
Santillan-Reyes fell all the way to the bottom, surviving just long enough to drag himself under a bush. It was an attempt, investigators thought, to hide from the shooters — people he knew.
One of the killers in those 2022 slayings was no stranger to the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office. He was a confidential informant who was only out of jail because of a deal he had struck four months earlier with Detective Stephen Krueger and Jeff Lindsey, then a senior prosecutor in the 11th Judicial District Attorney’s Office and now the elected DA.
The confidential informant, Anthony Fogle, now 49, was in frequent contact with Krueger, exchanging 146 texts during the three months before the slayings on Phantom Canyon Road. He spoke with the detective on the phone hours before the double homicide, and he met with the FBI and the detective days after the deaths.
But those facts remained hidden for years, only fully coming to light in recent months — a delay that prompted a Fremont County District Court judge to sanction the district attorney’s office and remove it from one suspect’s case in July.
Fogle and two women, Suzzette Salyer, now 44, and Toni Gurule, 45, , were charged in 2024 with first-degree murder in the killings, and Fogle agreed to testify against the women in exchange for his guilty plea and a sentence capped at 25 years.
His status as a confidential informant — a person who secretly provides information to police — should have been promptly and fully disclosed to defense attorneys under Colorado’s discovery rules, which require prosecutors to share evidence with defense attorneys, Judge Lauren Swan found.
It wasn’t.
The detective said he forgot about the confidential informant paperwork, falsely claimed he wasn’t in contact with Fogle around the time of the homicides, and dodged a question about Fogle acting as a confidential informant while on the stand during Salyer’s jury trial.
In Gurule’s case, prosecutors fought her efforts to obtain information about the deal, and the district attorney’s office failed to promptly turn over the confidential informant agreement even after Swan ordered them to do so. Lindsey testified in July that he couldn’t remember the specifics of the plea deal that allowed Fogle to walk free before the killings, when he otherwise would have been facing decades in prison.
The judge on July 13 sanctioned the district attorney’s office for failing to share information about the arrangement with Gurule’s defense team, finding that Gurule was entitled to know about the DA’s “favorable” treatment of Fogle. The judge reduced the first-degree murder charges against Gurule to second-degree murder to punish prosecutors for what she said was a wider pattern of discovery violations in the long-troubled DA’s office, including at least 23 discovery violations under Lindsey’s leadership.
The judge removed Lindsey and the entire DA’s office from Gurule’s case on the grounds that Lindsey had a personal interest in the outcome that made it unlikely the woman would receive a fair trial unless a special prosecutor took over the case.
“I am finding that Mr. Lindsey has a personal interest in this case, given that he is an elected official that is impacted by any publicity this case receives, especially given that he was the very district attorney that four months prior to the homicide in this case, offered one of the co-defendants an extraordinary plea deal,” she said, going on to note that case law requires a situation to be extreme before a judge can appoint a special prosecutor.
“The court is unsure of how much more extreme it gets when the prosecution continues to refuse — or fails to provide — exculpatory information to the defense, is not forthcoming with the court, not to mention, allowed a detective to testify under oath to things directly contradicted by records in possession of the district attorney’s office,” she said during the July hearing.
Gurule’s defense attorney, Joshua Tolini, called the discovery violations “an intentional cover-up” in a court filing Monday and renewed his request that all charges against his client be dropped.
“In my opinion, Jeff Lindsey has blood on his hands,” he said.
Lindsey denied wrongdoing in an interview with The Denver Post and said he has hired an outside auditor to review his office’s discovery practices so they can be improved.
“There is no attempt to hide anything,” he said. “There never was.”
Confidential informant
A year before the kidnapping and murders of Santillan-Reyes and Roth, Fogle was speeding down Highway 50 at 99 mph on a Tuesday afternoon.
A sheriff’s deputy in Fremont County, southwest of Colorado Springs, pulled a U-turn to chase him down, and as the deputy drove to catch up with him, a witness saw Fogle toss a black bag and a gun out his window before he pulled over in Penrose, according to an affidavit. Deputies found small bags of methamphetamine and heroin inside the black bag. Fogle was carrying more than $764 in cash.
The man had a lengthy and violent criminal history dating back decades, including multiple convictions for assault, robbery, burglary, menacing, manufacturing drugs and tampering with evidence. He’d been released from prison four months before and was on parole. He was not allowed to possess the Taurus .357 Magnum revolver he tossed out the car’s window.
Fogle was charged with six felonies, including one that carried up to 32 years in prison. He spent several months in jail before Krueger and Lindsey crafted a deal in which Lindsey dropped all charges except a single count of careless driving — a traffic offense that carries up to 90 days in jail. The prosecutors had a discussion at the bench with the judge before Fogle pleaded guilty in October 2021; that discussion was not included in a transcript of the hearing.
Krueger testified in May that he and Lindsey offered Fogle that plea deal because Fogle provided information that led to a large drug bust of a suspect named “Jason Baumgartner,” according to a transcript of the hearing. That appears to be Jason Bumgarner, who was arrested in September 2021 after sheriff’s deputies found 50 pounds of marijuana, three pounds of methamphetamine, 30 guns and four stolen cars in his home.
“In a nutshell, yes (Fogle) was a CI for a short time,” Krueger wrote in a recent email to prosecutors. “Jeff and I got him a deal and out of jail.”
After Fogle’s release in October 2021, Krueger texted with the man and sought information from him about criminal activity in Fremont County, court testimony revealed. Krueger did not sign Fogle, who was still on parole, as an official confidential informant for the sheriff’s office right away. Parolees are not allowed to work as confidential informants except with special permission from the Colorado Department of Corrections. Tolini, Gurule’s attorney, alleged in court that Krueger knew about that policy and delayed the official paperwork because of the rule.
Tolini pointed to a text exchange in which Fogle offered to set someone up to be arrested with guns and drugs in exchange for cash, and Krueger responded that such a deal “may have to wait till after parole,” according to court testimony.
Fogle did sign the confidential informant paperwork in January 2022, but Krueger canceled the official arrangement after 10 days when Fogle became a suspect in a different case, according to court testimony. The detective continued to stay in touch with Fogle, who remained on parole until April 2022, according to the Department of Corrections.
“Of course, I’m going to try and keep in contact with the suspect, right?” Krueger testified in May. “Why wouldn’t I want to know where he’s at, who he’s with, what he’s driving, where he’s staying?”
It was that January 2022 paperwork — signed weeks before the double homicide — that Krueger testified he “forgot… existed” when Fogle and his co-defendants were later charged with the killings. Krueger falsely told prosecutors that he hadn’t had any contact with Fogle around the time of the double homicide — a claim disproven by text messages that prosecutors had in their possession.
Three days after the homicides, on Feb. 11, 2022, Krueger texted Fogle to ask about the killings, testimony revealed.
“What’s the word on the street with the Phantom Canyon (expletive)?” the detective asked in the message.
At the May hearing, Krueger said that Fogle was not a confidential informant because, although he routinely provided tips, the detective never received information that he could use to make an arrest after Fogle was released.
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“I tried to cultivate a confidential informant out of him,” he testified, according to a transcript. “…Confidential informants are useful. He was useless. He said he was going to — we talked, but he never provided anything. So to call him a confidential informant is false. I wanted him to be. Did he? No. He never provided anything credible.”
“It was superficial,” the detective continued a moment later. “He pulled the wool over my eyes. I wish I never would have got him out of jail.”
Krueger was placed on administrative leave on June 11 for a pending internal affairs investigation, Sheriff Allen Cooper confirmed Friday. The sheriff declined to detail the nature of the investigation, but Swan, the judge who listened to the detective’s testimony in May, later noted that she had “concerns about the credibility of Detective Krueger.”
A man who answered a phone number listed for Krueger last week hung up without commenting.
‘Two-faced’ prosecution
Swan in July also noted a “lack of full candor” from prosecutors in the Gurule case.
She chastised the prosecution for “concerning acts,” including failing to turn over Fogle’s confidential informant agreement during the regular course of discovery and failing to promptly turn it over even after she specifically ordered them to do so in January.
She noted prosecutors made representations in court that “were not wholly truthful,” and called prosecutors “two-faced” for failing to follow court orders while also seeking to punish others for failing to follow court orders.
Lindsey, who was subpoenaed to testify in July about the 2021 plea deal he gave Fogle, said on the stand that the plea agreement was “not typical,” but that he couldn’t remember why he offered it.
“My best answer to that is he must have had really good information,” he told The Post. “I don’t remember all of that actually happening.”
Lindsey left the 11th Judicial District Attorney’s Office shortly after the deal with Fogle was made, and was working in a different jurisdiction when the double homicide happened in 2022 and when Fogle was charged in April 2024. Lindsey rejoined the office as the appointed district attorney in November 2024. He did not handle Fogle’s homicide case directly, he said.
“I’m the DA, so the buck stops with me,” he told The Post. “However, I was never assigned to this case. I never really worked the case. … I knew about the case and trusted the assigned prosecutors to take care of any discovery issues.”
Tolini believes that Lindsey directed his office to hide details about the confidential informant plea deal on purpose to keep the arrangement “hidden from the public,” he said.
Lindsey rejected any suggestion of a cover-up and said Tolini’s allegations in court filings were a “hyperbolic argument.” He said Tolini’s comments about the district attorney having blood on his hands were offensive and noted that a judge approved Fogle’s plea agreement.
“There is no way I could have known anything about what Mr. Fogle would do months after the plea agreement,” he said. “…Over 90% of our cases plead across the nation and within the state of Colorado. Every single one that goes south like this is traumatic. And to try to feed off that trauma, I just don’t think it is appropriate.”
Lindsey took over as district attorney after the previous elected DA, Linda Stanley, was disbarred in part because of discovery violations in the office. Lindsey has now invited the Prosecutors’ Center for Excellence, a New York nonprofit, to do a full evaluation of prosecutors’ discovery practices, he said.
The probe will include interviews with staff, a review of prosecution data and the office’s policies and procedures, the nonprofit said in a statement announcing the assessment in July. Lindsey said prosecutors have already gone through the 23 discovery violations that Swan cited in her ruling to analyze and attempt to fix the problems.
“We were called on the carpet, and we’ve responded in kind,” he said. “…We don’t shirk any of these duties in discovery. We take it seriously. If something happens, it is usually some kind of omission or mistake. It is never on purpose. We don’t hide evidence.”
The double homicide
Fogle in March pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the killings of Ryan Roth and Rodolfo “Rudy” Santillan-Reyes, the two men shot on Phantom Canyon Road.
Investigators believe that Toni Gurule and Suzzette Salyer, who were a couple, were in an ongoing dispute with the two men, who lived next door to each other and were in an intimate relationship with each other. Roth had posted derogatory songs he recorded on social media about Gurule, according to an indictment, including accusing her of selling fentanyl to people who fatally overdosed.
Roth and Santillan-Reyes told neighbors and acquaintances that if anything ever happened to them, the women would be responsible. Gurule and Salyer’s home wifi network was named “(Expletive) Rudy,” according to court records.
Fogle said the women came to him in February 2022 to act as “muscle” in their dispute, according to court records. He claimed he helped the women kidnap the two men and that he believed the plan was just to scare Roth and Santillan-Reyes. Fogle said that he reassured the men that nothing bad was going to happen to them as the trio drove the men up Phantom Canyon Road on the night of the killings.
Once the men were out of the vehicle, Fogle said that one of the men made a motion either to run or to come at Fogle, and that he shot the man. Salyer then shot the second victim, he claimed.
Salyer took her case to a jury trial; the proceedings ended in a mistrial in January. She then pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in April, according to court records, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Fogle was arrested on federal drug trafficking and gun charges in August 2022 after he sold drugs to a confidential informant working for the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI. Fogle later met the informant in a hotel room, carrying drugs and armed with a sawed-off shotgun, while FBI agents observed from the next room over.
Fogle was sentenced to just over 14 years in prison in September 2024 in the federal case.
In the double homicide, Fogle pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a prison sentence of between 16 and 25 years, to be served at the same time as his federal sentence, according to records reviewed by The Post. His sentencing is set for Sept. 10.
Gurule has pleaded not guilty and continues to fight the charges against her. Her trial, which had been scheduled for July, was pushed back to late August after Swan appointed a special prosecutor.
The judge noted that the revelations about Fogle’s work as a confidential informant also open up an avenue for Salyer to seek to overturn her conviction.
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