The Disappearance of Helle Craft

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Hi.

Awful weather out there.

You wanna wanna go inside the diner?

No.

I don't want anyone to see me like this.

You're not gonna like these.

On a dark, rainy day in the fall of 1986,

Hella Crafts learned from a private investigator that her husband was having an affair.

Is that your husband?

Yes.

That's Richard.

Shortly after this meeting, Hella Crafts disappeared.

This is the story of how forensic science solved the puzzle.

I first met Hella Crafts in the fall of 1986.

She came in to see me and was discussing the possibility of a divorce from her husband.

She was very concerned about what was happening at that time.

She was also concerned about

potential violence, shall we say.

By all accounts, 39-year-old Hella Crafts was a caring mother of three young children in an unhappy marriage.

She strongly suspected the affair.

She felt she knew who the individual was, but she really wanted some confirmation.

So we talked about hiring a detective to prove that, in fact, yes, he was involved with another woman at that time.

It was a typical scenario of husband is never home, constantly lying about his whereabouts.

And

she had had enough.

When Hella Crafts hired Detective Keith Mayo, she provided an important lead, a long-distance number she saw on the phone bills but didn't recognize.

I met with her

several days after

we had caught Richard with his girlfriend.

And there were many photos of affection between the two of them.

Her kissing him and holding his hand and rubbing his back, those types of photos.

She just broke down.

She cried for at least five or ten minutes, just sobbing.

Hella and Richard Crafts had been married for 12 years.

They both worked for the airlines, Hella as a flight attendant for Pan Am, Richard a pilot for Eastern Airlines.

He was also a part-time policeman.

I would describe describe him as

he was very cold.

You know, when he looked at you, he had a very cold stare.

Their relationship was not a close one, and friends say Richard sometimes hit Hella.

Dearest mother, here I am again in London.

I have said to Richard, I want to be divorced.

I no longer trust in Richard.

Hugs.

Hella.

After Hella filed for divorce, she confided in friends on her flight flight crew.

I want to tell you something I told my lawyer.

If anything ever happens to me, don't think it was an accident.

It wasn't an accident, and that's an unusual comment to get from a client.

On November 18th, 1986, Hella returned from a European flight assignment and was dropped off at home by her best friend.

It was the last time anyone saw her.

A few days later, Hella missed her next flight assignment.

She didn't call in.

So friends called the craft's home.

Richard said she went to Denmark to visit her sick mother.

Later, he told a different story, that Hella was on vacation with a friend.

The friends were basically telling me that she had disappeared and

that she was not the type of individual who would do this.

She had three small children.

So I called Keith Mayo.

I immediately told Diane that I thought we should go over to the Newtown Police Department to report her missing.

And they just turned a deaf ear on us.

So Mayo launched his own investigation.

In this home video, The Crafts Live-In Nanny talks about some mysterious dark stain she noticed on the carpet shortly after Hella disappeared.

In the inside of the bedroom door, there was a spot, a black spot.

Yeah.

How big would you say it was?

Half a square.

How about that big?

Yeah.

Did it look like a stain?

It looked like it was stained, but it hadn't been there before.

The fact that there was new carpet in the master bedroom and Richard ripped up the carpet and wouldn't give the nanny an explanation as to why.

Also suspicious.

A large freezer missing from the garage.

And credit card receipts showed that Richard had rented a commercial wood chipper right after Hella disappeared.

Had something happened to Hella inside the house, and was her husband involved?

Police asked Richard Krafts to take a lie detector test.

Did you kill your wife?

No.

Do you know your wife's whereabouts?

No.

Did you have anyone kill your wife?

No.

Showed very little reaction at all.

There was nothing that either of my partner saw or I saw that indicated that he was lying.

With Hella Crafts still missing and no leads, Connecticut State Police called in their secret weapon, forensic expert, Dr.

Henry Lee.

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Dr.

Henry Lee is the director of the Connecticut State Police Forensics Laboratory and one of the world's most respected forensic experts.

He accompanied police as they searched the craft's home.

On the mattress, Dr.

Lee discovered five tiny stains, so small they could barely be seen.

Could they hold the key to the disappearance of Hella Crafts?

An orthotolidine solution on the mattress fibers turned blue.

It was blood.

A species test proved it was human blood.

But was it Hellas?

An antigen test revealed type O positive, the same type as Hella Crafts.

And microscopic analysis revealed it was circulation blood and not menstrual.

You have a circulation blood now, which means a blood vessel has to be

injured to create such a pattern.

Dr.

Lee studied the angle and intensity of the blood's impact.

He concluded the blood hit the mattress at an angle of 10 degrees, meaning it came from an individual leaning over the bed or kneeling.

The blood was moving through the air at medium velocity, consistent with an injury caused by a blunt object, and there was a six-inch blood smear on the side of the mattress.

The bathroom towels had been washed recently, but Dr.

Lee tested them with an orthotolidine solution.

The blue areas proved the towels had been soaked with blood.

The next issue, of course, a human body cannot just vanish in the air.

A body has to be someplace.

But there was no body, no weapon, and no witnesses.

Police needed more to go on.

So they looked for any unusual events that might somehow be connected to Hella Craft's disappearance.

It led to an important break.

It snowed the week of Hella's disappearance.

A snowplow driver reported seeing a wood chipper on a bridge about 3.30 in the morning.

A man briefly appeared, wearing an orange poncho.

He saw the same woodchipper again on River Road about an hour later.

I said, well, take this man to the location, to the exact location where he saw the woodchipper.

It was here, where the Housatonic River runs into Lake Zoar.

Police searched the riverbank.

All they found were a few mounds of woodchips.

But when they took a closer look, they found a piece of an envelope.

It was mail, addressed to Miss Hella L.

Crafts.

They were just laying there, and we started finding a lot of hair.

That was when I remarked to my boss, you know, I said, you know,

if he did what I think he did, it's time for me to retire.

Police spent days sifting through the dirt and debris along the riverbank.

In addition to the letter and blonde hair, they also discovered a few blue fibers, a gray piece of metal, what looked to be some tiny bone fragments, and another piece of evidence which just appeared.

The sun had melted the snow away from this wall,

and

right against the wall, laying right on top of the leaves, a painted fingernail.

Divers explored the bottom of the river and found pieces of a chainsaw.

Even more unusual, the serial number had been scratched off.

Everything was taken to the state police forensic laboratory in Meriden, Connecticut.

Because any investigation involves so many specialty areas, that's why we start calling Forensic King.

By now, the story was front-page news around the world.

Richard Krafts was a suspect, but he maintained his innocence, saying he didn't kill his wife, he didn't know her whereabouts, and that he had passed a lie detector test.

But the forensics might tell a different story.

When Dr.

Lee convened the first meeting of his forensic team, he knew they faced a difficult task.

To identify the individual became a scientific challenge.

They began by examining every notch of the chainsaw and found some some human hair, tissue, and a minute piece of fiber.

In size, it was barely visible with the naked eye on the cutting edge of the chain.

The fiber was a bluish-green cotton, the same color as Hella's favorite cotton nightshirt.

And it matched other blue fibers found at the river.

But since the serial number was scratched away, It was impossible to tell who owned the chainsaw or was it.

By using a particular chemical solution, that will eat away the upper layers of the metal that have been altered by the water or by some physical attempts to alter the serial number.

It worked.

The serial number on the chainsaw matched the warranty card sent in by Richard B.

Crafts.

Next, forensic experts wanted to find out whose hair was on the chainsaw and at the river.

Every one of the 2,660 hairs was examined under a microscope.

A lot of the hairs had been cut, but not cut with a scissors.

Did it belong to Hella Crafts?

So we have to find some known hair to compare.

Basically, we use her hairbrush.

There was a characteristic that is somewhat unusual for head hair, and that's a ridge that was present in the head hairs.

They concluded that the hairs found on the chainsaw and at the river were microscopically similar to the hair from Hella's hairbrush.

Next, they turned their attention to the fingernail with the bright red nail polish.

A chemist compared it to a bottle of Hella's fingernail polish found in her home, analyzing the various organic compounds.

These graphs show that the polish on the fingernail found at the river is the the same as polish taken from the bottle found on Hella's nightstand.

Good forensic work determined that the fingernail polish and the hair were both similar to Hella's, but they couldn't prove she was dead.

I received a phone call from Dr.

Lee asking me if I would come and take a look at these little pieces of

what he thought to be bone and wanted me to see if I could identify them in any way.

Dr.

Lee suspected that the bones found that the river had gone through the wood chipper crafts had rented.

So Dr.

Lee got the same machine and ran a test.

The chipper produced a unique signature type of cut, one that matched the cutting pattern on the debris found at the river.

Under a spectrograph, Dr.

Harper noticed tiny grooves in the bones.

The grooves told a story.

They were formed by blood vessels inside the top of the skull.

Something only humans have.

They also identified skull fragments from the side of the head.

And these were the most important from a forensic point of view.

So if the fracture is beveling outwards, we know the force came from the inside.

We know it was a whole lot of force.

So we don't know if that's what killed her.

We don't know if she was dead before it happened.

But we certainly certainly knew she was dead afterwards.

So now we know a human being is dead.

The next question is: who?

Dr.

Harper froze some of the bone fragments with liquid nitrogen, then ground them to a fine powder.

Tests revealed the bones came from an individual with type O positive blood, Hella Kraft's blood type.

Finally, Dr.

Lee turned his attention to the gray piece of metal metal believed to be a crown to a tooth.

But there was no human remains on that crown, so that couldn't be used as a form of identification.

They needed more.

So Dr.

Lee asked Dr.

Karazoulus himself to go to the river where he searched for five days.

Then, a break.

I'd been at the crime scene for maybe eight hours.

I slipped and fell into the brook.

And I had a pail and I was picking evidence up.

And I cleaned my hand off in this pail that I was collecting evidence in.

When I came into the tent, I put all the contents of the pail down, I washed my hand, and I looked down and there was the tooth.

But was it Hella Crafts?

And I was able to match all the years of different x-rays from 1986 back to 1982.

So I had no doubt in my mind that the tooth I found came from Heli Craft's mouth.

Finally, the forensic team had an actual match.

That means Helicraft is dead.

Period.

Based on the forensic evidence, Richard Crafts was arrested and charged in the murder of his wife.

What happened to Hella Crafts?

Based on the forensic evidence, a reasonable scenario can be pieced together.

Thanks for the ride.

On November 18th, Hella Kratz returned from her flight to Germany around 7 p.m.

She put the children to bed around 8.

The nanny had the night off and wasn't expected home until midnight.

Before going to bed, Ella changed into her favorite blue nightshirt, looked through her mail,

stuffed it into her pocket,

and began changing shirts.

I won't believe you.

You know, I can't take this anymore.

Why don't you just get out?

No.

You get out.

Leave me alone.

Then it happened quickly.

Using a police flashlight, the first blow knocked her to the ground.

The second produced the blood splatter, hitting the mattress at a 10-degree angle.

While falling, her head grazed the side of the mattress, leaving the blood smear.

He wrapped the body in the bed covers,

carried her through the house into the garage,

and placed the body into a freezer.

Richard tried to clean up the blood with some towels which were later washed, but traces of blood remained on the towels, later discovered by Dr.

Lee.

Marie Thomas, the nanny, arrived home around 2 a.m.

and went right to bed.

At daybreak, Krafts took the children and the nanny to his sister's house, saying their mother had left earlier.

He then rented the largest commercial wood chipper he could find and a U-Haul truck using his credit card.

By nighttime, Hella's body was completely frozen.

Krafts transported the remains, along with a chainsaw and some wood, to the river.

The snowplow driver spotted the wood chipper on a bridge around 3.30 in the morning and again near the river an hour later.

Using his chainsaw, Crafts dismembered Hella's frozen body and put the pieces through the chipper along with some wood.

Since the body was frozen, it produced little if any blood splatter.

Most of the debris blew into the river.

Only a few pieces fell short, landing on the bank.

The mail Hella placed in her nightshirt pocket passed through the chipper virtually untouched.

Before leaving, Krafts took apart the chainsaw, scratched the serial number off, and threw the pieces into the river.

How close was the brutal murder of Hella Krafts to the perfect crime?

Boy.

Damn close.

Damn close.

If that person truly believes they're not going to be caught and there's no fear or threat to them, they could get by a polygraph test.

The key solving this case, so-called teamwork.

Assemble like a team and work together.

Amazing.

Yeah, that the human body writes so much of its history in itself.