Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (15 page)

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genuine remorse. But all the drama about the death penalty had

nothing to do with remorse. That was self-centered: ‘What’s the best

thing for me, poor pitiful me; I’ll just take the death penalty.’ ’’

Q

Richard Crafts believed he could never be held responsible for his

wife’s murder if he was able to ensure that no trace of her would ever

be found— and he very nearly succeeded.

In one of the most notorious, and literal, acts of erasure ever

conceived, the forty-eight-year-old airline pilot killed his flight atten-dant wife one snowy night in Newtown, Connecticut, in 1986, then

attempted to obliterate all trace of her by putting her body through a

wood chipper.

At the time she disappeared, thirty-nine-year-old Helle, a Danish

immigrant who spoke or understood six languages, was growing

increasingly afraid of her husband. A few months earlier, she had

begun making preparations to leave him, hiring a private investigator

to find out if he was once again cheating on her, and a divorce lawyer.

‘‘If anything happens to me,’’ she told several friends, as well as

her divorce attorney, ‘‘don’t assume it was an accident.’’

Crafts had physically abused his wife and had affairs with numer-ous women throughout their eleven-year marriage. A month before

she went missing, the private investigator showed Helle pictures of

Crafts with a woman, a fellow flight attendant, he had been seeing

on the side for at least a decade. (He also resumed an affair with an

ex-girlfriend around the time of his wife’s disappearance.)

Like so many eraser killers, Richard Crafts was well practiced at

keeping secrets. He lied to Helle about his flight schedule to make

time to see his girlfriends. He had the couple’s phone bills sent to a

secret post office box to hide evidence of his calls to paramours. He

even lied about his medical situation.

Two years earlier he had been diagnosed with colon cancer and

had surgery and chemotherapy. When Helle filed for divorce, Crafts

told his wife he was dying and had chosen to abandon treatment.

She found out by calling his doctor, however, that his treatment was

complete and that his health was stable.

Even with his parents and siblings, Crafts was extremely guarded,

refusing to answer any questions about his personal life. Friends

characterized him as aloof, and Helle described him to her divorce

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attorney as ‘‘cold’’ and ‘‘detached.’’ At home he spent much of his

time alone in the basement, drank heavily, and showed little interest

in their three children. He felt absolutely entitled to what he described

to police as his ‘‘extracurricular activities’’ with other women.

‘‘I’m away from home [many] nights every month and you run

out of books to read,’’ he said, as casually as one might describe an

evening of channel surfing.

He also harbored a sadistic streak. During and after serving in the

Marines, he flew flights for Air America, the CIA-run airline then

involved in a clandestine operation in Vietnam and Laos. He bragged

of leaving the hatch open and performing hotshot maneuvers when

he was assigned to ferry prisoners, watching his terrified passengers

scream for their lives as they rolled around the open plane. He also

described how the pilots amused themselves by throwing monkeys

attached to little parachutes out of their planes.

Helle had long believed she was unable to bear children. When

she got pregnant, Crafts was enraged. He beat her and forced her

to get an abortion. When she got pregnant again, he left her. Helle

scheduled an abortion, but suddenly Crafts changed his mind, saying

he wanted the child after all. They married a few days later, but soon

Crafts was back to expressing his reluctance, questioning whether the

child was actually his. He was no happier with her subsequent two

pregnancies, not even coming to the hospital when she gave birth to

their daughter, Kristina.

He once punched his wife in front of guests at a dinner party. At

other times, friends saw her with black eyes and other injuries. Crafts

was exceedingly tightfisted with money and made Helle foot most of

the household expenses, even though she made about a third of what

he did. He did splurge on a few things he enjoyed: expensive tools and

machinery, such as a $20,000 backhoe, and a weapons collection that

included fifty guns. A cop wannabe, he spent his spare time working

as a $7-an-hour auxiliary officer for a neighboring town. He outfitted

his personal auto, a Ford Crown Victoria, the same model as most

police cars, with a siren and flashing red light on the dashboard. He

even crafted his own ammunition.

After seeing the incriminating photos of her husband, Helle

instructed her attorney on October 14, 1986, to begin divorce pro-ceedings. She tried to keep things civil between them. They made an

agreement that he could keep living in the house until the divorce

went through as long as he didn’t see his girlfriend (a deal that he

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promptly broke, she discovered). Helle arranged to have the divorce

papers served on November 14 while the children were at school.

Crafts told her he would accept service, but instead slipped out the

back door when the sheriff arrived.

He had already put into motion a very different plan for his wife.

Q

The day before he was supposed to accept service of the divorce

papers, Crafts went out and bought a large-capacity freezer, which

he picked up the day before she disappeared. He paid cash, refusing

to give his name even for the receipt. He also bought a shovel and

heat-resistant gloves. On November 18, 1986, the last day she was

seen alive, he rented a large wood chipper— powerful enough to chip

logs a foot thick.

That evening, Helle returned from working a flight from Frank-furt. A huge snowstorm hit that night, knocking power out for hours.

At six the next morning, Crafts ushered their three children and

live-in nanny out of the house, telling them he was going to take

them to his sister’s house to wait out the power outage. He claimed

his wife had already left and would meet them there, which would

have meant she had driven by herself before dawn in a blinding

snowstorm, but Helle never arrived.

In the days that followed, Crafts gave a number of different

explanations for his wife’s whereabouts. He told some friends she

had gone to visit her sick mother in Denmark (who wasn’t sick at

all and hadn’t seen or heard from her daughter), even claiming she

had phoned him from there after November 19. He later claimed, at

various times, that she went off to visit a friend in Florida, went to

Club Med in the Canary Islands, and ran off with a lover.

Authorities believe he killed his wife the night of the storm and

placed her body, wrapped in plastic like a side of meat, in the

brand-new freezer until she was frozen solid. He then transported

her corpse to a secluded piece of property he owned nearby, carved

it up into manageable pieces with a chainsaw, and fed the remains

through the wood chipper.

It was an almost foolproof scheme, uncovered only by exemplary

forensic work, lucky breaks, and the ceaseless tree-rattling of the

private eye who feared that Helle’s sudden disappearance could mean

only one thing and urged authorities to look at her husband.

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The lucky break came from a snowplow operator, Joey Hine, who

happened to come across Crafts and his U-Haul-pulled wood chipper

on deserted River Road along the banks of the Housatonic in the

early morning hours a few days after Helle disappeared. Apparently,

Crafts pulled over there to try to clear out any bits of human remains

inside the wood chipper by running branches and vegetation through

it before he returned it, and to dump the detritus into the river.

A second stroke of luck occurred when the plowman led detectives

to the location and a small pile of debris from the chipper was still

there, more than a month after Helle went missing. They found

remnants of shredded plastic and paper intermingled with the wood

chips. On one of the scraps, apparently a piece of mail that had been

in Helle’s pocket when she died, they could make out the missing

woman’s name and address.

It was a stunning and almost unbelievably fortuitous discovery.

Police searched the surrounding area extensively, even lowering the

river to drag its bottom. They simultaneously tracked down the

actual machine and truck Crafts had rented. All told, they recovered

fragments of a finger, toe, bits of skull and other bone chips, and two

dental crowns—about three-quarters of an ounce of Helle Crafts.

Hair, bone, and tissue were also found in the U-Haul. A chainsaw

was pulled from the river, human tissue and hair still attached to

both the blade and the tool’s housing.

During a search of the Crafts home, they found that carpeting

had been pulled up and removed from the master bedroom, where

the nanny had noticed a dark stain, and from several other rooms.

Bloodstains were found on the mattress and on towels in the home.

When police searched the home, the mattress was lying flat on the

floor, the box spring missing. On November 19, the day Helle failed

to show up at her sister-in-law’s, Crafts purchased a new comforter

and pillows. A few days later he purchased new carpeting.

‘‘It’s difficult to imagine a more sadistic and surreptitious disposal

of remains,’’ Walter Flanagan, the state’s attorney, said. ‘‘Whoever

did this would have to have nerves of steel, ice in their veins . . . [and

be] totally free of emotion. Most of us couldn’t even do that to a rat.’’

Q

Crafts was indeed a cool customer, so cool that two weeks after his

wife disappeared he took and passed a lie detector test; at the time that

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he took the test, the lieutenant in charge of the investigation for the

Newtown police considered it to have cleared him. (The Connecticut

State Police, who ended up taking over the investigation, were much

more convinced of Crafts’s guilt.) However, many people, especially

psychopaths, are able to pass polygraphs because the test does not

really measure lies. It measures the fear of getting caught in a lie, the

physical signs of psychological stress.

A person without conscience, who feels no guilt about lying, who

feels supremely self-confident and immune from the consequences

of his behavior, who experiences no sense of fear whatsoever, may

very well pass a lie detector test. It’s amazing to me how many eraser

killers resist taking a polygraph, which could allay the suspicions of

police if they pass it. Even if they fail, the results cannot be used

against them in court.

Above and beyond any psychological predisposition, Crafts had no

fear of getting caught because he believed he had made it impossible

for his wife ever to be found.

However, Crafts had failed to completely obliterate his wife’s

corpse. The tissue and bone matched Helle’s blood type, as did the

bloodstains on the couple’s mattress. The more than two thousand

hairs found were blond and treated, like Helle’s. Forensic odontolo-gists matched the crowns to Helle’s dental X rays. The serial number

on the chainsaw pulled from the river was filed down in an attempt

to make it untraceable. But the state crime lab, under the direction

of the renowned forensic scientist Henry Lee, was able to restore it.

It matched a number on a warranty found among Richard Crafts’s

records.

While in jail awaiting trial, Crafts talked his brother-in-law, David

Rodgers, into getting rid of some potential evidence—including

clothing and other personal items belonging to Helle that Crafts had

burned in backyard barrels, presumably while wearing the fireproof

gloves. Rodgers also paid two strangers to say they had seen Helle at

a drug-filled party after the date she disappeared. By the time of trial,

however, Rodgers no longer supported his brother-in-law, and the

two ‘‘eyewitnesses’’ never appeared.

Surprising most courtroom observers, Crafts testified on his own

behalf. He admitted his wife was serious, at last, about divorcing

him. ‘‘My continuous playing around was a sore point,’’ he remarked

dryly. But he insisted he never hurt her.

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‘‘I never raised a finger in anger at Helle in my life,’’ Crafts said.

He claimed that their last night together was unremarkable: he made

dinner for her when she returned from her flight, and they watched

TV. He said he assumed when she left the next morning that she was

going to his sister’s, but she didn’t actually say where she was going.

Everything else, according to the defendant, was a coincidence or

misunderstanding. When he said Helle called him a day or so after

she disappeared, he meant a different Helle, one of his wife’s friends

(but she hadn’t called either, the woman testified in rebuttal). Yes,

he rented a wood chipper, but merely to clear brush on his property.

True, he bought a new freezer, but only to store the frozen food his

wife bought in bulk. (Crafts also had his brother-in-law dispose of

the freezer while he was in jail.) He said the stain his nanny noticed

on the rug was kerosene he spilled while refilling a portable heater

during the blackout (a claim Dr. Lee refuted in experiments with

various types of kerosene, showing that none left a dark stain behind).

Crafts claimed that he believed his wife was still alive.

‘‘I certainly hope she is,’’ he told the jury. ‘‘I hope she’s coming

home soon.’’

Q

The trial of Richard Crafts was the first murder prosecution

in Connecticut history without a body. Despite overwhelming evi-dence against him, the case ended in mistrial after seventeen days

of deliberation—a state record—after a lone holdout refused to

continue deliberating with the rest of the panel.

The holdout, forty-seven-year-old Warren Maskell, so infuriated

his fellow jurors that they asked if he could be prosecuted for miscon-duct. They claimed he violated the judge’s instructions, discussing

the case with his wife and reading newspaper coverage; repeatedly

forgot testimony; and behaved irrationally. An Army veteran who

told jurors he had killed in Vietnam, Maskell strongly identified with

the defendant. He was not convinced that Helle was dead, a belief

based at least in part on the erroneous idea that Helle’s mother had

smiled at her son-in-law from the witness stand.

Crafts had dodged the bullet, at least temporarily. While in jail

awaiting retrial, he vowed, like Ewing Scott, that he’d rather die

in custody than admit that he had anything to do with his wife’s

disappearance.

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