Eric Preimesberger, 29, was a father of two, a motorcycle salesman, and a fixture of Reno’s scooter racing scene — the kind of guy who, according to his own mother, could land in a country where he didn’t speak the language and walk away with ten new friends by dinner. On April 24, 2010, his wife, Kristi, later said, he grabbed a backpack and walked out on foot after an argument, leaving behind his car and — more tellingly — the beloved yellow-and-black Honda Ruckus scooter he rode with his club, the Battle Born Scooter Crew. He told her, she said, that she’d never see him again.
That was Kristi’s story. But she never actually reported it to police herself.
A Mother Who Wouldn’t Let It Go
Eric’s mother, Kay Wilson, never believed it. The scooter detail alone didn’t sit right with her — Eric didn’t go anywhere without it. She asked Kristi, repeatedly, to file a missing persons report. Kristi refused. So weeks after her son went silent, with nothing to go on but her own certainty that something was wrong, Kay filed the report herself, on May 17, 2010, from her home in New Mexico.
That report set off a chain of events. Reno police reclassified Eric’s case from a routine missing-adult report to a “suspicious endangered missing adult” case, moving it into the department’s Robbery/Homicide division — a signal that investigators already suspected something was seriously wrong.
Meanwhile, Kristi relocated from Reno to Eugene, Oregon, just eight days after her husband’s disappearance, moving in with her brother, Timothy Wayne Morgan, 25 — a man known locally as a spiritual healer who performed “sound healings,” a vibrational sound therapy, and who had built a small but devoted following in the Eugene wellness community.
Kristi told investigators she’d packed a portable storage unit — a POD — with the family’s belongings about eight days after Eric was killed, and had it shipped from Reno to a storage facility in west Eugene. She specifically told police she’d packed Eric’s things into it, including, notably, his scooter. When investigators eventually tracked the unit down, they brought in cadaver-sniffing dogs — three separately trained dogs, run across two separate passes. All three alerted to the presence of human decomposition on the unit’s exterior. Police obtained a search warrant. When they opened it, they found nothing but furniture, household items, and Eric’s scooter. No remains.
For Eric’s family, it was a strange, painful moment: no body meant, however faintly, that hope wasn’t yet gone. It would take months to understand why the dogs had alerted on a unit that never held a body — that story, the box that traveled with Eric’s remains, is a different container entirely.
A Break, By Accident
The case sat largely unresolved for months. Then, on August 10, 2010, Timothy Morgan was arrested in Roseville, Minnesota — nowhere near Nevada or Oregon — on an unrelated felony drug possession charge. Kristi was arrested alongside him, facing charges of marijuana possession and child endangerment; Eric and Kristi’s two young children had been with the pair throughout.
Once Minnesota authorities ran the siblings’ names, the connection to Nevada’s open murder investigation surfaced. Reno detectives flew out to interview them. Reporting at the time indicates it was Kristi’s own mother who first tipped off Reno police to the siblings’ location, after Kristi called home following questioning by Minnesota police.
On August 13, 2010, Kay Wilson received the call confirming her worst fears: Timothy Morgan had confessed to killing Eric.
What Really Happened
According to Kristi’s own trial testimony, given May 1, 2012, the fatal encounter unfolded over two days in April 2010. She said she’d called Timothy in the early hours of April 21 to ask him to fly in and help the family with their move to Oregon; he flew to Reno and rented an SUV.
That day held two separate arguments. In the first, Eric began gathering his things upstairs, appearing ready to leave. In the second, the confrontation turned physical — Eric shoved Kristi, and Timothy, who had been in the house, intervened. Eric and Timothy grappled; Timothy injured his hand in the struggle. The physical altercation between the two men seemed to subside. Timothy went to the kitchen sink to wash his hand. Eric sat down on the couch.
Kristi testified that she turned around and saw her brother strike Eric in the head with a baseball bat.
In a panic, Timothy and Kristi dragged Eric’s body from the living room into the laundry room, and left him there for hours. When Timothy went back to check on him, Eric was lying in a pool of his own blood, and was, in Timothy’s own word from his police confession, “stiff.” Kristi ran upstairs first — not to Eric, but to her children’s bedroom doors, to keep them from coming downstairs and seeing what she’d just witnessed. She said she didn’t call 911, despite, by her own account, having raised the idea to no response. Instead, she began cleaning. Timothy retrieved a tent from the garage to cover Eric’s body, and the two of them loaded him into the back of the rented SUV.
Note: Timothy’s own confession to police describes striking Eric twice, both blows to the back of the head — a detail that differs slightly from Kristi’s testimony of a single blow. Where our sources genuinely conflict on a specific physical detail like this, we’re flagging it rather than picking one version to state as settled fact.
What followed was methodical, not panicked. Eric’s body stayed in the back of that SUV for several days while Timothy decided what to do next. He ultimately purchased a commercial freezer from a business that was going out of business, paying in a way that wouldn’t draw attention, and rented an enclosed U-Haul trailer. He loaded the freezer, with Eric’s body inside, into the trailer and drove — by his own estimate, forty-five minutes to an hour from the house — to a remote, wooded area he had already selected and prepared with a shallow grave. He backed the trailer as far into the woods as he could, removed the freezer, and buried Eric.
Timothy then drove in the opposite direction, to what he described as a random spot in the desert, and burned the physical evidence — bloody rags from cleaning the house, the bat, the shovels, the interior of the freezer — using firewood and gasoline to ensure it burned completely. The area he described for the burial lines up with the region around Frenchman’s Reservoir, just over the California border in Plumas County, roughly forty-five minutes to an hour from Reno.
A young member of Timothy’s local healing circle, identified in court records as James Wyrick, helped him move the freezer — which he testified “smelled of decay” — to the burial site. Wyrick said Timothy, described in testimony as a “spiritual advisor,” told him the freezer contained items connected to “bad entities.” Wyrick had no idea he was helping conceal a homicide. After learning of the arrests months later, he came forward to police on his own, which ultimately helped lead investigators to the exact burial location.
Detectives recovered Eric’s remains on August 19, 2010 — four months, almost to the day, after he was killed. That date became his official legal date of death, marking the moment the medical examiner’s office received his remains.
Trial and a Verdict That Didn’t Satisfy Everyone
Timothy Morgan was charged with open murder and extradited to Reno. He pleaded not guilty in October 2010 and, over the following months, offered investigators a series of shifting explanations for Eric’s death — at various points claiming a drug supplier named “El Fuego” was responsible, or that masked kidnappers had abducted Eric off the street, before ultimately settling on a claim of self-defense, framed as protecting his sister from Eric. According to the prosecution, Morgan only arrived at the self-defense framing after asking police what Nevada law required to support such a claim — while, unbeknownst to him, investigators had already located Eric’s remains. In February 2012, a judge ruled that Morgan’s full confession — inconsistencies included — would be admissible at trial, rejecting defense arguments that the shifting stories were too prejudicial to present to a jury.
That same pretrial hearing surfaced an unusual detail: Timothy’s defense team sought to introduce evidence that Kristi had legally changed her name from Kristi Morgan to Mallory Colici — a name echoing Mallory Knox, one half of the murderous couple at the center of the 1994 film Natural Born Killers. The defense argued the name change was probative of her identity and credibility. The judge was openly skeptical, reportedly comparing the argument to suggesting that someone who changes their name to Cinderella must therefore be a princess, and indicated he was inclined to exclude the evidence pending further briefing.
The trial began in late April 2012. Kristi Preimesberger was the prosecution’s key witness. On cross-examination, the defense pressed her on her credibility, securing admissions that she had told a string of specific lies to both Kay Wilson and the lead detective on the case — including a fabricated explanation for why Eric’s scooter was left behind, and a claim that she’d heard a woman’s and child’s voice on a call from Eric’s phone that she later admitted was likely an accidental “pocket dial.” The defense’s apparent strategy was to frame Kristi as a practiced, comfortable liar — meaning her account of the killing, including the self-defense framing, deserved the same skepticism as everything else she’d told police.
The defense presented no evidence of its own and did not call Morgan to testify. After deliberating for roughly ninety minutes, the jury convicted Morgan of second-degree murder with a deadly weapon.
Not everyone believed justice had been served — including Eric’s own mother. Following the verdict, Kay Wilson stated publicly that she did not believe Morgan was responsible and that she believed Kristi was truly culpable. At Morgan’s sentencing in July 2012, she asked the judge for leniency on Morgan’s behalf, describing him as a “kind and gentle soul.” Morgan was sentenced to 25 years, plus a consecutive term of 3.5 to 16 years for a deadly weapon enhancement, with parole eligibility after roughly 13.5 years. He maintained his innocence at sentencing.
The Money
A detail that never made it into contemporaneous news coverage of the trial: Eric was insured for $500,000 through Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, with Kristi listed as the primary beneficiary and Ivy as the contingent beneficiary.
The payout wasn’t simple. Because there were competing claims to the policy, Lincoln National filed a federal interpleader action, asking a judge to determine who was actually entitled to the money. On September 17, 2010 — while Eric was still officially a missing person, and over a month before Kristi filed her own claim — Kristi’s father, Wesley Morgan, filed a claim on the policy, purportedly on Ivy’s behalf. Kristi filed her own competing claim five weeks later, on October 25.
The case wasn’t settled until October 2012, months after Timothy had already been convicted and sentenced. The final agreement split the $500,000 three ways: $200,000 released to Kristi outright, $250,000 placed into a blocked trust for Ivy that can’t be accessed until she turns 18, and $50,000 held for attorneys’ fees and litigation costs, with anything remaining reverting to Kristi. No comparable trust structure appears in the record for Damion, Eric and Kristi’s younger child.
Timothy is serving a 25-year sentence. Kristi was never charged with a crime — and eventually received a substantial payout from her husband’s death.
The Loophole
Here is the detail that turned this case into more than a single family’s tragedy: despite admitting, under oath, to witnessing her husband’s murder, helping move his body, helping conceal it, and lying to investigators and to Eric’s family for months, Kristi Preimesberger was never charged with any crime connected to Eric’s death. Prosecutor Derek Dreiling later put it plainly: “There’s really no evidence that she did anything other than not help investigators afterward.”
The reason wasn’t a failed prosecution — it appears no charge was ever filed against her in the first place. The reason was a Nevada statute dating to 1911, which exempted certain family members — spouses, siblings, parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren — from being charged as an accessory after the fact to a felony. Because Kristi was Timothy’s sister, the law categorically placed her outside the reach of that charge, regardless of her actions.
In February 2013, Nevada Assemblywoman Teresa Benitez-Thompson introduced Assembly Bill 116 to close that gap, citing Eric’s case directly and by name in testimony before the Assembly Judiciary Committee. The hearing sparked genuine debate: lawmakers, public defenders, and the ACLU of Nevada raised concerns about criminalizing well-meaning family members who simply try to help a loved one in crisis, while law enforcement representatives argued the exemption had quietly protected people who went far beyond simply offering comfort or counsel. The bill ultimately passed in amended form, narrowing the exemption to spouses and domestic partners and capping sentencing for relative-accessories at the gross misdemeanor level rather than treating them the same as the underlying felony. Eric’s family calls it, informally, “Eric’s Law.”
It was a meaningful legal change — but one that came too late to hold anyone else accountable for what happened to Eric.
Where Things Stand
Kristi Preimesberger was never charged in connection with her husband’s death. As of reporting around the time of the 2012 trial, she had relocated to Southern California.
As of an August 2013 interview, more than three years after Eric’s death, Kay Wilson said the family was still fighting to get Eric’s children out of foster care — a detail that sits uneasily next to earlier 2010 reporting that the children had been placed with a family member immediately after the arrests. What happened in between isn’t something we’ve been able to fully piece together, and we’d rather say that plainly than guess.
Kay Wilson continued to publicly maintain, in the years following the trial, that the wrong person had been convicted, and has said she wishes the law could apply retroactively so that Kristi could be made to face a jury. She and the family have also worked to file an appeal on Timothy’s behalf — still believing, as she put it, that he took the fall for his sister.
This post accompanies the Crime Clueless episode “Bad Entities: The Murder of Eric Preimesberger.” Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Next up, explore these cases with similar themes:
- The Haysom Case — Another story where someone deeply embedded in the victims’ family circle played an active role in the crime and its cover-up, not just a bystander. Read about it here, or listen on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts.
- Betsy Faria — A case that turns on how a close family relationship can be used to deflect suspicion and avoid accountability, echoing the sibling loophole at the center of Eric’s story. Read about it here, or listen on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts.
- John and Shelly Markley — A disappearance that started out looking like a simple, if strange, missing-persons case — until the truth turned out to be far darker than the official story suggested. Read about it here, or listen on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or anywhere you get podcasts.
- Carol Thompson — A reminder that the person closest to a victim isn’t always who they seem to be, and that betrayal often comes from inside the family, not from a stranger.Read about it here, or listen on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts.
- Stacey Castor — A case that also explores how far family ties can stretch to shield someone from consequences, even when investigators have every reason to look closer. Read about it here, or listen on,Apple, Spotify, YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Have thoughts on this story or other cases you’d like to see highlighted? Share them with us in the comments or connect with us on social media. Together, we can ensure that stories like this one are never forgotten.
Don’t forget to follow us on social media, share your thoughts, and let us know what you’d like to hear about in future episodes. If you have any true crime stories of your own, send them our way crimeclueless@gmail.com to be featured on a future episode! And as always, remember: refuse to be clueless, careless, or caught off guard. Not today, murderers.
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