Former fire chief Steve Krentel says his life will never be the same after his wife Nanette’s 2017 murder, which remains unsolved.
On July 14 of that year, Nanette, 49, was found dead in their house with a gunshot wound to the head — and the family home had been set on fire.
“I just try my best to live with it and pray every day that it gets resolved,” Steve, 50, tells PEOPLE. “I want an answer.”
Answers about who would want to harm the preschool teacher, an animal lover, remain elusive. The mysterious case is featured on the premiere episode of the new season of People Magazine Investigates, airing Monday at 10 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery. (An exclusive clip from the episode is shown below.)
As police began to investigate, suspicion quickly focused on Steve, then the fire chief for St. Tammany’s District 12, who admitted cheating on his wife of 22 years with a colleague.
But investigators say Steve “has been ruled out as a suspect at this time,” and police confirmed that at the time of Nanette’s death, Steve was at the fire station about 17 miles away. He also asked for and passed a polygraph test.
Nanette’s family says she was considering ending her marriage, but Steve maintains the couple had worked through it. More than a year after Nanette’s death, Steve resigned from the fire department after an internal review found he’d had improper relationships with two female employees and allegedly took air-conditioning units from ambulances.
• For more on this story, see “Somebody’s Watching,” the first episode in the new season of People Magazine Investigates, premiering Monday, Nov. 5, at 10 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery.
The fire — which investigators determined had been set after Nanette was killed — was so fierce that it ravaged a video surveillance recorder that may have provided a picture of her killer. It also obliterated any chance of discovering if the fire-damaged gun found near her body was the same weapon used to kill Nanette.
Even surveillance footage from a local McDonald’s that seemed to show Nanette’s car and a woman who looked like her picking up food on the morning of her death provided few clues.
RELATED VIDEO: Preview of Monday’s People Magazine Investigates Season 3 Premiere, “Somebody’s Watching”
Steve believes that whoever killed Nanette may have been lying in wait for her return home from the fast-food restaurant.
“I think maybe they were in there when she got there,” he says. “All she was doing was just running up the street and coming right back. I think she was gone for a total of 30 minutes.”
The couple had an alarm system but it was usually only turned on at night when they were in bed. Nanette most likely wouldn’t have turned it on while she was at home during the day, Steve says.
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“I have suspected every single person in my life or people we knew on a peripheral of our life, and I have to trust that the police by investigating them and eliminating them, that they know their job,” Steve says. “So it’s down to the individual that did it is probably going to be somebody that I am not thinking of.”
RELATED: Inside the Mysterious Murder and Burning of a Small-Town Fire Chief’s Wife
Still, he believes the culprit was someone the couple knew.
“I have a feeling it’s got to be somebody that we know either directly or indirectly,” he says.
Anyone with information about Nanette Krentel’s death is urged to contact Crime Stoppers at 504-822-1111 or detective Daniel Buckner in the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office at 985-726-7835.
People Magazine Investigates: Somebody’s Watching airs Monday (10 p.m. ET) on Investigation Discovery.
