Nanette Krentel murder featured Sunday night

Sunday night, the Bayou Justice broadcast revisits the 2017 murder of Nanette Krentel in St. Tammany Parish, discussing live comments and theories from viewers and longtime supporters of this newspaper column.

Nanette’s house on Philip Smith Road in rural Lacombe, Louisiana, burned to the ground on July 14, 2017. Inside, investigators found the charred remains of Harley, Nanette’s chihuahua, along with the bodies of Baby Kitty and Smokey, Nanette’s beloved kittens. From the evidence collected, investigators believed all three pets died of smoke inhalation. Still, someone had doused at least one of the three with gasoline before the fire started.

Investigators also found Nanette’s body in those ashes. However, they believe the 49-year-old beauty died not from smoke inhalation or from being burned. Six years after her death, investigators still cannot agree whether Nanette Krentel committed suicide or someone else shot her in the head with a small-caliber handgun.

Initially, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office treated her death as a suicide, discontinuing the crime scene investigation after finding two handguns near the body. Five days later, ballistic tests proved neither gun killed Nanette, and police again cordoned off the crime scene with barricades and yellow tape, looking for another weapon. They found more than 30 in the ruins, but none definitively matched the gun that killed Nanette.

The following September, St. Tammany Coroner Charles Preston said he found no smoke or burn debris in Nanette Krentel’s respiratory system and declared her death a homicide. The fire, he said, reached Nanette after she had stopped breathing.

That same afternoon, Sheriff Randy Smith issued a news release saying his agency could not support the coroner’s conclusions. Later, reacting to an outraged public during a press conference, the sheriff recanted his earlier statement, insisting his officers never stopped investigating the case as a homicide.

“We are diligently working on this case, and our detectives will continue to work until we have all the answers,” Sheriff Smith said.

On November 8, 2019, The Huffington Post published an interview with an unnamed investigator with Smith’s office. “We don’t understand the coroner’s ruling,” the source said. “This is all for naught. We know what happened. There’s no mystery. This [death] is a suicide.”

A member of her close-knit senior class at Archbishop Chapelle High School in Metairie, Lori Rando, told “People Magazine Investigates” that Nanette, her best friend, exhibited signs of depression after her husband admitted to having an affair.

“The last few months of her life, Nanette started pulling away,” Rando said. “There was less and less contact between her and her friends and family.”

Expanding on the suicide theory, let’s recount Nanette Krentel’s last day and consider what happened if she did kill herself.

According to a Walgreens parking lot security camera and Nanette’s credit card and cell phone location services, Nanette’s Mercedes SUV went through the drive-through at a McDonald’s on Northshore Boulevard in Slidell the morning of the fire. She bought a $7 breakfast and had Harley in the front seat beside her. Family members said the long-haired chihuahua went everywhere with Nanette and could be easily identified even in the grainy video.

Despite multiple requests from Nanette’s family, police refuse to make the surveillance video public.

At 9:11 a.m., a security camera on Phillip Smith Road picked up the Mercedes returning to the Krentel home.

Nanette’s phone records listed an outgoing call to K-Mart at 10:03 a.m. Workers there said a woman claiming to be Nanette phoned about a prescription refill.

These clues tell us Nanette decided to have a hardy breakfast and order new medication mere hours before killing herself.

In the early afternoon, according to a lady who did not know Nanette or her husband, Nanette accidentally called her number. Nanette’s cell phone records confirmed the call at around 1:30 p.m.

At 2:30 p.m., Nanette’s neighbor called 911 to report the Krentel house fire.

Given this information, if Nanette decided to kill herself after getting off the phone with K-Mart, she had roughly three hours to start fires in at least two rooms after dousing the house, security camera equipment, and her pets with gasoline.

Next, she entered the master bedroom with three handguns. Eventually, she decided which one to use and put a bullet into her right temple. The lead never exited her skull. The gun she used fell into a hidden location, making the other two handguns easier for police to find.

She stopped breathing long before the fires reached her bedroom, so she must have somehow diluted her accelerant to make it burn slower than regular gasoline. However, these slow-burning fires would also have to accelerate after she died, as the flames had engulfed and destroyed the home before Nanette’s fire chief husband arrived at 3:00 p.m.

Maybe it is just me, but the sheriff’s office’s suicide theory doesn’t seem plausible given these facts. Perhaps, she loved her cheating husband enough to off herself. Then, it is conceivable that she didn’t want to leave her house for the other woman, but why pour gasoline on the security cameras, and why would a reputed animal lover not put her pets outside before starting the blaze?

In Sunday night’s live YouTube broadcast, we will consider other possibilities, focusing foremost on who had a motive to murder Nanette Krentel.