Helle Crafts

Case background and investigation

Helle Lorck Nielsen Crafts was a 39-year-old Danish-born flight attendant for Pan American World Airways who lived with her husband and three young children in Newtown, Connecticut. Her husband, Richard Crafts, was a pilot for Eastern Air Lines and a former Green Beret. By 1986 the marriage was failing: Helle had learned of her husband's infidelity, hired a private investigator, and told friends she intended to divorce him. She reportedly confided to friends and co-workers that if anything happened to her, it would not be an accident, a chilling remark that would later take on grim significance. The private investigator she hired had documented Richard's affair with another flight attendant, and Helle had begun preparing to end the marriage and protect her children.

On the evening of November 18, 1986, colleagues dropped Helle off at the family home after she returned from a flight from Frankfurt, West Germany. She was never seen alive again. In the hours and days that followed, Richard offered shifting and evasive explanations for her absence, telling relatives and friends variously that she had gone to visit her mother in Denmark or was traveling. Investigators would later conclude that he struck Helle in the head at least twice, stored her body in a freezer until it was frozen solid, then used a chainsaw to dismember the frozen remains.

Richard rented a large industrial woodchipper and, on a snowy night, was seen by a local snowplow driver, Joseph Hine, operating it near the shore of Lake Zoar along the Housatonic River. He fed his wife's frozen, dismembered body through the machine, scattering the fragments. But the disposal was not complete. Searchers later recovered more than 2,600 hairs, bone fragments, teeth, a fingernail, and other tissue near the river and on the rented equipment. Crucially, a tooth crown was matched to Helle's dental records, and blood consistent with hers was found on a mattress at the home. Richard's credit-card records also revealed telling purchases, including a freezer that was never found in the house, new bedding, and the woodchipper rental.

On the strength of that forensic evidence, the Connecticut medical examiner issued a death certificate on January 13, 1987, and Richard Crafts was arrested. The case made legal history as Connecticut's first murder conviction obtained without a recovered body. His first trial, in 1988, ended in a mistrial after a juror walked out during deliberations. A second trial in Norwalk ended on November 21, 1989, with a guilty verdict, and Crafts was sentenced to 50 years in prison. He served roughly 32 years before being released in early 2020 for good behavior under an older sentencing law, first to a halfway house and then to a shelter, drawing renewed public attention to one of the most notorious murders in Connecticut history.