Ep. 119 | The Murder of Helle Crafts

Danish-born Pan Am flight attendant Helle Crafts had told friends and her divorce attorney that if she ever went missing, they shouldn't assume it was an accident. Weeks later, in November 1986, she vanished from her Newtown, Connecticut home after confronting her husband, airline pilot Richard Crafts, about his infidelity. Investigators eventually traced the case to a rented industrial woodchipper and a chest freezer, piecing together — through blood evidence, hair, bone fragments, and a single dental crown — that Richard had killed Helle and disposed of her body through the chipper into the Housatonic River. The case became the first murder conviction in Connecticut history secured without a body, and it later inspired the woodchipper scene in the film Fargo.

SOURCES:

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