GET AWAY WITH MURDER?
On November 19, 1986, Helle Crafts, a Pan Am flight attendant from Connecticut, disappeared. Her husband was suspected shortly after she vanished: Richard Crafts told authorities that he hadn’t left the house on November 19, but credit card records showed that he’d purchased new bedding. Shortly before his wife disappeared, he also had bought a large freezer and rented a wood chipper.
When a witness recalled seeing a wood chipper near the Housatonic River, police searched the Crafts home. Blood found on the mattress matched Helle’s. A letter addressed to Helle was found near the Housatonic, and divers recovered a chain saw and cutting bar, which still had human hair and tissue in its jaws. Based on this, a more thorough evidence search was begun.
Here’s what they found:
2660 hairs.
One fingernail.
One toenail.
One tooth cap.
Five droplets of blood.
(A fingernail in a U-Haul rented by Crafts chemically matched nail polish in Helle’s bathroom, too, but it was thrown out of court because of the lack of a search warrant.)
From this evidence, in 1989, Crafts was found guilty of his wife’s murder and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison.
This case made Dr. Henry Lee famous. Leave it to him, a forensic hero, to secure a murder conviction… even without a body.