19th November, 1986. This was the last time Helle Crafts would be seen alive. A friend dropped her off at her home in Newtown, Connecticut, which she shared with her husband Richard and their children.

Prior to this, Helle had hired a private investigator to help build a case against her husband Richard Crafts. He was having affairs with other women and she wanted a divorce.

Helle, originally from Denmark, met Richard in Miami in 1996. She was training as a flight attendant for Pan Am while he was training as a pilot for Eastern Airlines. They married in 1975 and moved to a house in Danbury, Connecticut. Richard was diagnosed with cancer in 1984 (sources vary on whether this was stomach or colon cancer).

When Helle filed for divorce, Richard was not very happy. He earned good money but hated the thought of having to pay alimony and child support. He apparently tried to get the divorce called off by telling his wife that his cancer had returned, but she soon found out he was lying. Once she had filed for divorce, Helle told friends she was in fear for her life and reportedly said ‘If anything happened to her, we should not believe that it was an accident.’

Richard was having an affair with an Eastern Airlines flight attendant called Nancy Dodd. Helle found receipts for gifts her husband had bought that weren’t for her, and Richard often disappeared for long periods of time. Richard even later admitted to a second affair with another flight attendant and that a job as a pilot presented “a lot of nice opportunities to cheat.”

After landing in New York after attending a flight from Germany, Helle and her friend drove back to Helle and Richard’s home where Helle was dropped off.

After leaving her that night, friends became worried when they could not get hold of Helle. Richard had told her friends she was attending another flight, but her co-workers knew this was not true as regulations meant that she wouldn’t be allowed to fly so soon without having a proper rest period. Richard then changed his story, claiming Helle was in Denmark visiting her ill mother, again, this was found to be false. Her mother said not only was she not ill, but Helle had not made plans to go out and visit her. He then lied AGAIN and said she was visiting Florida with a friend.

Days after her disappearance, Richard bought a brand-new freezer and redecorated their bedroom. He was beginning to look suspicious.

One December 1st, two weeks after Helle was last seen, a friend and co-worker Rita Buonanno reported her missing to the police. Alarm bells rang as not only had Richard not reported his wife as missing, but he was continuing with his affairs.

Investigators quickly turned their focus to Richard and discovered that just before Helle went missing, he had hired a U-Haul and a wood chipper. Not long after this, a witness came forward. Joseph Heinz, a highway worker, told police that a day or two after Helle went missing, he had seen Richard parked at the side of a road along the Southbury shore of Lake Zoar at around 3:00 a.m., wood chipper in tow.

Police went straight to the scene, where they found scattered wood chips under layers of dead leaves. Among the wood chips, they also found a human thumb, a big toe, hair strands, bone fragments, material thought to be from underwear, a crowned tooth and a mailing label with Helle Crafts’ name on it. A forensic odontologist identified the tooth as belonging to Helle, and an anthropology expert declared that the bone fragments were human. They also found a chainsaw submerged in the Housatonic River with blonde hairs entwined and a bloodstained carpet inside the home. Based on all of this information, Helle Crafts was pronounced dead. Richard Crafts was arrested when he returned home from a ski trip.

Richard’s trial had to be moved to New London as it was impossible to find jurors in Danbury who had not heard of the case.

Prosecutors had a hard task. Not only did they have to prove that Helle was dead but that it was Richard who killed her, all without a body, something that hadn’t been done in the state of Connecticut before. Their theory was that Richard killed Helle because he didn’t want to get a divorce and have to pay child support and alimony. After killing her, he kept her in the freezer, dismembering her body with a chainsaw, then fed her body parts through the wood chipper.

During the trial, Dawn Marie Thomas, the Crafts’ housekeeper, testified that on the day of Helle’s disappearance, Richard made Dawn go home early. Dawn also said that a few days later Richard got rid of a freezer, which was in fine working condition, and a carpet with a large black stain. Richard had told Dawn he had spilt Kerosene on the carpet, but this wouldn’t have left a stain. The prosecution believed that Richard stored Helle’s body in the freezer, but they could not prove it as the freezer was never recovered, thus no DNA testing could be carried out.

Elizabeth Nielson, Helle’s mother, also took the stand. She told the court that the last time she saw her daughter was her 80th birthday in July 1986. She said, “She stayed for three days and I never saw her again.” This of course disputes Richards’ earlier claims that Helle had gone to Denmark to see her mother. Helle had also written a letter to her mother Elizabeth, stating that she had asked Richard for a divorce and that he was ‘seemingly unhappy about the idea.’

Southbury police officer Richard Wildman testified that at around 4:00 a.m. on November 21st, he saw Richard Crafts parked in a school car park near the police station with a U-Haul truck and a wood chipper. When he asked him what he was doing, he told Wildman that some branches had come down around his house during a snowstorm and he was cleaning them up.

Peter Grosbech, the manager of the rental service company that rented the wood chipper to Richard, said he remembered seeing a chainsaw in his truck. Though he couldn’t be sure it was the same one, he said it looked like the one police had recovered from the river at the crime scene.

Renowned forensic investigator Dr Henry Lee led a test to confirm if a wood chipper was used to dispose of Helle’s body. He fed a pig carcass (the closest match to a human) through a wood chipper and then examined the remains. They were incredibly similar to the remains of Helle Crafts. Investigators had also found drops of blood in the crafts bedroom and a blood smear along the base of the bed. This led investigators to believe Richard had bludgeoned Helle in the bedroom first. Dr. Henry Lee also found trace amounts of Helle’s blood throughout the house.

Richard Crafts took the stand in his own defence. He was calm as he answered questions about his wife and when asked if he had killed her with a chainsaw or wood chipper, simply said “No Sir, I did not.”

After 17 days of jury deliberation, the judge declared a mistrial. One of the 12 jurors held out, so the trial ended with a hung jury. A second trial was set for the following year.

At his second trial, Richard was found guilty of murder after only 8 hours and sentenced to 50 years in prison for murdering his wife.

Richard Crafts continues to deny that he murdered Helle Crafts and argued so in front of the Supreme Court, but they upheld his conviction.

After serving just 24 years of his sentence, Richard was released from prison in early 2020. He spent time in a halfway house in Bridgeport before moving to a homeless shelter for veterans as part of his transition from prison. He is thought to have been fully released from DOC custody in June 2020.

Sources:

https://forensicfilesnow.com/index.php/tag/richard-crafts/

https://www.criminallyintrigued.com/blog/2019/6/9/the-wood-chipper-murder

https://morbidology.com/the-wood-chipper-murder-helle-crafts/

https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/richard-crafts-who-fed-helle-crafts-into-wood-chipper-freed

https://storiesoftheunsolved.com/2018/11/14/the-murder-of-helle-crafts/

https://www.frontpagedetectives.com/p/woodchipper-connecticut-murder-crafts-case-today