The snow plow driver saw him first, just before dawn on November 19th, 1986. A man stood alone on the steel bridge over the Housatonic River, feeding a wood chipper in the middle of a blizzard. The power was out across Newtown, Connecticut. No one else was on the roads.
It was so strange that Joseph Hine never forgot it. When the man noticed the plow approaching, he simply motioned for Hine to go around. Toward dawn, he was still working. Three days earlier, Helle Crafts had returned home from a long flight from Frankfurt, Germany.
She was a 39-year-old flight attendant for Pan American Airlines, married to a pilot named Richard Crafts. They lived in a quiet, wooded corner of Newtown, a bedroom community for commuters who worked in New York City. They had three children and a live-in nanny, Dawn Marie Thomas. To the neighbors, they were the perfect family.
Helle was warm and devoted to her kids, and Richard was active in the community, working part-time as an auxiliary policeman. But the marriage was not what it appeared to be. Richard had carried on extramarital affairs for more than twenty years. Just three months before her disappearance, Helle had hired a divorce lawyer.
At the lawyer’s urging, she hired a private investigator named Keith Mayo to follow Richard. Mayo produced photographs of Richard with another woman. Devastated, Helle decided to serve Richard with divorce papers. But Richard refused to be served.
He made appointments and never showed up. He did not want the divorce. On the night of November 18th, a massive snowstorm descended on Newtown. Helle arrived home after midnight, excited to be back for Thanksgiving.
Her flight attendant colleague dropped her off and watched her run inside when she saw the lights on. Then the power went out across the area. The next morning, Richard woke the nanny and told her that Helle had gotten dressed, taken her flight bags, and left the house an hour earlier. He sent the nanny and the children to his sister’s house in Westport, where the power was still on.
That was the last time anyone saw Helle Crafts. She simply vanished. Two days passed. When Helle failed to show up for work, her friends and colleagues started calling.
Richard told them Helle had called from Europe, that her mother in Denmark was sick, and that she had gone to visit her. He told the same story to the nanny and to the children. He said Helle had left her Toyota Tercel in the Pan Am employee parking lot, as she always did before a flight. A pair of boots she had worn home from Germany were still in the back.
But Helle’s car stayed untouched for days. Her friends grew worried. It was uncharacteristic of her to disappear. They filed a missing persons report.
In a town as quiet as Newtown, the disappearance of a mother of three was startling. Helle’s friends told police something that haunted them: she had said that if anything ever happened to her, they should not assume it was an accident. One friend called Denmark and spoke to Helle’s mother. The mother was not sick.
She had not spoken to her daughter in weeks. Richard’s story about Denmark raised more suspicion. Still, when police questioned him, he stuck to his account. He agreed to take a lie detector test, administered by two state police polygraph examiners.
He passed. The examiners told investigators they were fairly certain he did not know where his wife was. Richard admitted he had made up the story about Helle visiting her sick mother, saying he had not wanted to air his dirty laundry about his marriage. With Richard cleared for the moment, police broadened the investigation.
Dr. Henry Lee, the chief criminalist for the state of Connecticut, was brought in. A task force was formed. They collected financial records, credit card data, phone records.
There was no activity from Helle. No calls, no charges, no sign of her anywhere. Then the nanny, Dawn Marie Thomas, came forward with something she had seen. She told investigators that before Helle disappeared, she had noticed dark stains on the carpet in the master bedroom.
Richard had later removed that carpet. When asked about it, Richard said a kerosene heater had spilled during the blackout and he had taken the carpet to the dump. He said he had cut it into two-foot strips to make it easier to remove. The private investigator, Keith Mayo, went to the landfill and spent an entire day searching.
He found the carpet. The forensic laboratory analyzed it, but found no blood or trace evidence linking it to Helle. Despite the setback, Mayo kept pushing. He insisted Richard had killed his wife.
Police turned their attention to Richard’s financial records. Just after the storm, he had charged new bedding to a department store, a comforter and pillows. Then came the most telling purchase of all. Richard Crafts had rented a commercial wood chipper during the storm on November 18th, 19th, and 20th.
That was enough to convince a judge to sign a search warrant. On Christmas Day, while Richard was in Florida with the children, investigators moved in on the Crafts home. They wanted to keep it low-key, not embarrass the kids or the neighbors. The house was in disarray.
Carpets had been torn up. Furniture was askew. Things had been burned in the fireplace. They found a king-size mattress propped against the wall.
When they examined it, they found blood spatters near the end, in the same spot where the nanny had noticed the dark stain. The blood was female. But it was not Helle’s blood type; Helle had type O. This was not type O.
Still, police had no murder weapon, no crime scene, no witnesses, and no body. Dr. Lee considered every possibility: Helle had run away, been kidnapped, suffered an accident, or been murdered. If she had been murdered, where was the body?
They searched the house, the refrigerator, even the septic tank. Nothing. Then the snow plow driver came forward. Joseph Hine had seen Richard Crafts on the bridge, operating the wood chipper, pointed toward Lake Zoar below.
That changed everything. Investigators rushed to the lake. They set up tents, brought in the major crime squad, and sifted through piles of wood chips along the shoreline. It was freezing, miserable work that took days and nights.
Dr. Lee and his team found 56 tiny bone chips. They found 2,660 hairs. They found a tooth with distinctive dental work.
They found a dental crown, a fragment of a toenail, and part of a finger. Less than three ounces of human material in total. But it was enough to prove Helle Crafts had been murdered. The bone chips showed the marks of a commercial wood chipper.
The hairs were bleached and dyed, matching samples from Helle’s own hairbrush. The hair had been traumatically stressed, consistent with having gone through the machine. Near the bridge, they found shredded mail, correspondence from Helle’s mother. They found fabric from a blue-green nightgown, the one the nanny said was Helle’s favorite.
A fragment of toenail was painted with pink polish that matched a bottle found in the house. Then divers recovered a chainsaw from the bottom of Lake Zoar. Human tissue was lodged in the grease inside the motor. The serial number had been filed off, but investigators restored it and traced it to a store in Newtown.
There was a receipt in a shoebox. The chainsaw had been purchased with Richard Crafts’ Visa card for $499. The serial number matched. Richard Crafts was now the prime suspect.
On January 13th, 1987, state police surrounded the Crafts home at midnight. They asked Richard to come out. He refused. For half an hour, police waited, knowing his three young children were inside.
Eventually, he came out. The children were unharmed. Richard Crafts was taken into custody and processed overnight. The next morning, he was arraigned in Danbury Superior Court.
The media descended on Newtown from all over the world, from Denmark to New York City. The trial was set for New London. The prosecution had an enormous amount of evidence: DNA testing, blood grouping, hair comparison, fiber analysis, tool mark analysis, handwriting analysis. Dr.
Lee testified for days about the reconstruction of the case. The first trial lasted four and a half months, with hundreds of witnesses and thousands of pieces of evidence. Then the jury deliberated for 17 days, the longest in state history. One juror refused to deliberate further, voting for acquittal and saying he would not return to the jury room unless carried in.
The judge declared a mistrial. A second trial was ordered in Norwalk, away from the media glare of Newtown. Prosecuting attorney Walter Flannigan reconstructed the crime for the jury. He theorized that when Helle returned home, she and Richard argued over the pending divorce.
Richard struck her in the head with a blunt object, probably a hammer. He wrapped her body in the carpet, which soaked up the blood. When he realized he could not clean it, he rolled up the carpet and dumped it. Then he put her body in a freezer in the backyard.
Once frozen, he cut it into sections. On the morning of November 19th, he drove the nanny and children to his sister’s house. He spent the day loading the body into a wheelbarrow with the wood chipper. That night, he drove to the bridge and fed her remains into the machine, scattering them over Lake Zoar.
The courtroom listened in shocked silence. Richard Crafts remained calm, showing no emotion at all. After less than three days of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree. He showed no reaction.
On November 20th, 1989, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison. At the time, Connecticut had no allowance for parole. Richard Crafts remains in the Somers Correctional Institution. For the residents of Newtown and the investigators who worked the case, the memory never faded.
Dr. Lee, who worked on almost 8,000 major cases, always remembered this one. What everyone remembered, he said, was how anyone could murder his wife and put her through a wood chipper. It was unbelievable.
A beautiful small New England town, a snowstorm, and a family destroyed by murder.
