The boater thought it was a blow-up doll at first, just something odd floating in the water off the shore of Dunkirk, New York, on the Fourth of July. It wasn’t a doll. It was a body. The woman had no hair, no face left.
Marine life had worn away her features until there was nothing but a bloated head with no nose, no eyes, no mouth. She wore only a floral bikini bottom. The family that found her was shaken. The Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Department pulled her from the lake, wrapped her in a blue tarp, and brought her ashore.
The water was cold, so the body was better preserved than it otherwise would have been, but the decomposition that had set in still made identification difficult. Police estimated she had been in the water about three weeks. Dental records gave her a name: Karen LeClair, a 51-year-old local woman who had been reported missing three weeks earlier. Her husband, Christopher, a commercial fisherman, said she had gone overboard from their boat, the Doris M, while helping him attend to his nets.
He said she had been sick from engine fumes and leaning over the port side, and when he looked back, she was gone. The Coast Guard scrambled helicopters and cutters. The Pennsylvania State Police sent up aviation units. For about thirty hours, dozens of people searched the waters off the shore, but there was no sign of Karen.
By Monday night, the search was called off. She was declared dead. The people who knew her were devastated. Karen was a dedicated worker at a local auto dealership, a strong swimmer, a qualified scuba diver, a woman who loved her husband deeply.
She had been married to Christopher for about twenty-six years. Friends and co-workers described her as loving, caring, hardworking, and devoted. But the more investigators looked into Christopher, the less the story added up. He was a commercial fisherman, but his nets had been left unattended for weeks.
The Fish and Boat Commission had to pull them up because the decomposition of the fish in them was atrocious. He had financial problems, and he had a mistress named Tracy Butler. Karen had found out about the affair and moved out for a time, but she had come back and was trying to make the marriage work. When detectives brought Christopher in for an initial interview, he told them the marriage was good and his wife had fallen overboard.
When they pressed him, he said Karen had cancer. There was no evidence she had cancer. Karen’s boss had even asked her about it after Christopher mentioned it, and she said she didn’t have cancer. Then Christopher changed details about his affair.
At first he said it was just a fling. Then he said he saw the mistress every other month. Then he said the last time was a month ago. Then he corrected himself within the same breath: last Friday night.
The Coast Guard had also told investigators something unsettling. When they informed Christopher that the rescue was becoming a recovery mission, he showed very little emotion. His only question was, “How long do you think it would take for a body to float up in the waters of Lake Erie at this time of year? ”
He asked it in a matter-of-fact way.
There was zero emotion. Then the video footage surfaced. Cameras at the East Marina and along the channel to the lake showed the couple arriving at the dock on the Saturday before Karen was reported missing. They loaded ice, got on the Doris M, and took off.
Christopher returned hours later alone and docked the boat in a spot where he usually never docked it, apparently out of view of the cameras. No one else got off that boat. Two people went out, one came back. The next day, Sunday, Christopher came back around noon, got on the boat alone, and went out again.
The distress call came about an hour and a half later. He had already lied to them about the timeline. Police were now convinced that something tragic had happened to Karen, and that Christopher was not telling the full story. The investigation turned on Christopher fully.
They looked into his affair with Tracy Butler. She confirmed it had been serious and had gone on for five years, not the casual fling Christopher described. At one point, when Karen moved out, Tracy had moved into Christopher’s house. But when Karen moved back, Tracy was out again.
Tracy had given Christopher an ultimatum: leave your wife, or I leave you. Prosecutors believed Christopher wanted to keep his relationship with Tracy, and his wife was in the way. Christopher was arrested for Karen’s murder. From his jail cell, he made calls and wrote letters that investigators monitored.
He told Tracy elaborate lies and talked about their future together, clearly planning to pick up the relationship when he got out. He told his father over the phone that there was an item in the basement above a ceiling tile that needed to disappear. Police brought the father in, and the father admitted that Christopher had instructed him to remove a gun. It was found in a bag in a drawer under the bed.
By then, Karen’s body had been found on July 4th, fifty miles from where she had left the dock alive. The evidence with her body was damning. A blue rope was tied under her arms, another rope around her ankles, with ropes connecting them and an anchor attached. She had been weighted down and dumped into the lake.
The autopsy revealed two injuries to her head, fractures above both ears. It was a gunshot wound, a contact shot to the right side of her head. Gunpowder residue had been found under the skin, which only happens when the gun is pressed directly against the head when fired. She was dead before she went into the water.
The ropes came from a hammock on the Doris M, cut into pieces. The off-white rope was the same used to secure the anchors on the boat. The anchor itself was the largest of the three anchors from the Doris M. At trial, Christopher pleaded not guilty and came up with a new story.
He said he heard a bang, turned around, and saw Karen slumped over. She had shot herself. He said he tied her feet to keep her from slipping off the boat and then tossed her overboard with an anchor because he didn’t want the family to know she had killed herself. The jury didn’t buy it.
A witness testified that thirteen years earlier, Christopher had said he would murder his wife by taking her to the middle of Lake Erie, wrapping her in rope, and sinking her to the bottom. Another witness testified he said it again closer to the event. The jury found him guilty after about two hours of deliberation. Christopher LeClair was sentenced to life without parole, plus three additional years for tampering with and abusing a corpse.
He had spent years believing he could outsmart everyone, that he was in control. In the end, his arrogance was what did him in. The lake had surrendered Karen, and the evidence had told the truth.
At sentencing, someone said that the LeClair family and Karen’s friends could take solace in the fact that they had an angel looking over them, and that Karen was that angel.
