Helle Crafts: Winter of the Woodchipper

Richard Crafts Is Still Alive
(“The Disappearance of Helle Crafts,” Forensic Files)

Note: This post has been updated with information from 2020

Before launching into this week’s recap, I’d like to let readers know that the name of this blog is changing from True Crime Truant to Forensic Files Now. A redesign is coming in a few months, too, but the true-crime content will remain the same.

But enough about the future — let’s fly back to 1996, the year Forensic Files broadcast the premier episode of its first season, when the show used literal titles instead of puns (“A Case of the Flue,” “Naughty or Nyce,” etc).

“The Disappearance of Helle Crafts” tells of a crime 30 years old, but you can bet that the killer will always be part of popular culture.

Mystery inmate. Richard Crafts was an airline pilot, a part-time police officer, a former Marine pilot, and a father of three. But ever since 1986, he’s pretty much been “the guy in Connecticut who put his wife in the woodchipper.”

Let’s get two pieces of bad news out of the way up front.

First, the Connecticut Bureau of Prisons doesn’t provide recent photos of inmates, so we have to use our imagination regarding his age progression.

Second, and far worse, Crafts has already become eligible for release.

Danish transplant. I’ll get to the specifics about his escaping razor wire on two feet, but first here’s a recap of the episode along with additional information drawn from internet research:

Helle Lorck Nielson originally came from Denmark and met her future husband in Miami, in 1969, when she was training as a flight attendant for Pan Am and he was training as a pilot for Eastern Airlines.

They married in 1975 in and eventually moved to a $250,000 house on a two-acre lot in Danbury, Connecticut.

Beating the odds. In 1984, doctors discovered that Richard had colon cancer and gave him only a 2 percent chance of survival, according to a Newtown Bee story, although the Hartford Courant described it as stomach cancer.

Either way, he survived.

But Richard, who associates described as nice although a bit introverted, didn’t appreciate that Helle had cared for him during his surgery and chemotherapy.

The ingratitude turned out to be the least of his shortcomings as a husband and father.

And although he reportedly made $120,000 a year — a nice bundle in 1986 — he didn’t like the idea of paying alimony and child support and dividing up the family possessions. He allegedly tried to thwart a breakup by telling Helle his cancer had returned, but she discovered he was lying.

Flight attendant palooza. A divorce became imminent in the fall of 1986, after a private investigator named Keith Mayo confirmed what Helle, age 39, had been suspecting, that her husband was having an affair.

The other woman was an Eastern Airlines flight attendant from Middletown, New Jersey, named Nancy Dodd.

The Crafts’ marriage had been in bad shape for a while, with Richard disappearing for long stretches. Helle found receipts from Christmas gifts her husband had bought for another woman.

Richard would later nonchalantly admit to state police that he actually had a second girlfriend, yet another Eastern flight attendant, and that his job as a pilot presented a lot of nice opportunities to cheat.

Plaintive request? According to Helle’s divorce lawyer, Dianne Andersen, who appeared on the Forensic Files episode, Richard physically abused Helle at times.

When Helle filed for divorce, she told Andersen that if she disappeared, Richard did it.

Andersen remarked that it was “an unusual comment” (but not if you watch Forensic Files often enough).

Richard Crafts had at one time done some piloting for a secret CIA mission, and Helle feared he could track her down anywhere if she tried to flee, the Hartford Courant reported on September 14, 1989.

Missing maiden. But Helle’s life ended right in the Crafts’ home. Her friend Gertrude Horvath dropped her off there on November 18,  1986, after  a trip to Frankfurt, Germany, for her job.

The family’s live-in nanny, Dawn Marie Thomas, 19, was out of the house.

When Helle didn’t show up for work the next day, her friends turned to Keith Mayo, who started an investigation on his own.

Call in Henry Lee. The nanny told Mayo that Richard had ripped up some bedroom carpet that had a mysterious dark stain on it.

A large freezer was missing from the house. And then there was the $279 receipt for the rental of a diesel-powered woodchipper.

A snowplow driver named Joe Hine reported seeing a man with a woodchipper on a bridge over the Housatonic River shortly after Helle went missing.

That sighting jumpstarted police interest in the case — to such an extent that investigators called in forensics expert Dr. Henry Lee.

Waterside lab. The investigative team found a pile of wood chips with a letter addressed to Helle Crafts on the river bank. They discovered blond hair, bone fragments, and a woman’s painted fingernail. In the water, they found parts of a chainsaw with the serial number scratched off.

Police set up a tent near the murder scene to collect and study the evidence, and motorists started heading to the site to slow down and take a look, according to the Newtown Bee.

“The horrifying accounts of the murder stunned and shocked the community, known more for its quality of life than for gruesome deaths,” the Newtown Bee recounted. (Tragically, Newtown would go on to make headlines after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.)

“She ran off.” Meanwhile, Richard Crafts insisted he didn’t know where his wife was. He had previously said that she went to Copenhagen to stay with her mother, Elsebeth Nielsen, because she was ill. He told other parties that Helle had jetted off to the Canary Islands with a friend.

Richard’s defense lawyer would later contend that, because Helle was a world traveler who spoke four languages, she could have happily gallivanted off anywhere, the Hartford Courant reported on September 14, 1989.

Remnants of a woman. But investigators weren’t buying it. They deciphered the obscured serial number on the chainsaw, and it matched the number Richard Crafts had filled out on a warranty form.

They eventually found a total of 2,660 light-colored hairs on the chainsaw and in the chip pile. Dental records confirmed that a tooth at the scene came from Helle.

The authorities concluded that Richard Crafts bludgeoned the slender 5-foot-6-inch-tall Helle to death with a police flashlight in their bedroom, froze her body, then disposed of it with the chainsaw and rented woodchipper.

Heavy instruments. On January 13, 1987, Richard was arrested for homicide and held on $750,000 bond at the Bridgeport Community Correctional Center.

Upon hearing the news of the murder, Helle’s mother was so shocked she required a doctor’s care.

Meanwhile, more damning evidence against Richard poured in. A few days before Helle disappeared, Richard had used cash to buy a deep freezer and refused to give his name to the appliance dealer, according to People magazine.

Investigators believed he used a U-Haul truck to transport the large Brush Bandit woodchipper to the river bank. After the murder, he scratched the serial number off the chainsaw, dismantled it, and threw it into the river, they concluded.

Copenhagen ploy. Richard’s lack of concern over his wife’s absence didn’t exactly help his case. Helle’s friend Jette Olesen Rompe testified that when she expressed alarm because Helle hadn’t shown up for work, Richard told her, “You’ve been watching too many movies,” the Hartford Courant reported on April 12, 1988.

Elsebeth Nielsen refuted Richard’s claim that Helle went to Copenhagen to nurse her back to health in November. Helle wasn’t scheduled to visit until April 1997, and Nielsen felt fine until she found out about the murder of her only child.

J. Daniel Sagarin, Richard’s lawyer, countered her friends’ assertions that Helle would never willingly leave her children. “People do things in divorces,” he said, the Hartford Courant reported.

Sympathetic juror. Richard Crafts’ sister and brother-in-law, Suzanne and Malcolm Bird, supported his innocence.

At the 1987 trial, Richard found one more sympathetic onlooker.

Eleven jurors voted for conviction, but a lone holdout named Warren Maskell, 47, defied the judge and walked out of deliberations. According to People magazine coverage:

Maskell had visited a nearby church every day at lunchtime, seeking divine guidance, and his belief in Crafts’s innocence was unshaken to the end. “A woman who was sick of trying to change a guy could just take off and say the hell with it,” he explained. “I think Helle Crafts might still be alive.”

At least Helle’s friends and family had the comfort of knowing that Richard was tucked away in jail the whole time; he couldn’t come up with the bail money.

Half a century. And incarcerated he would stay — a second jury found him guilty of murder on November 21, 1989.

It marked Connecticut’s first homicide conviction without a body and the first time the state had allowed  cameras in a murder trial.

A judge gave Crafts 50 years.

In 1993, Crafts appealed, contending the circumstantial evidence was insufficient and the nationwide publicity about the crime prevented a fair trial. No luck on that; the state supreme court upheld his conviction.

That same year, a judge refused Richard’s bid to extract money from Helle Crafts’ estate.

Friends loyal to the end. As far as the three children, ages ranging from 5 to 10 at the time of their mother’s murder, they stayed with some of Helle’s friends and continued to attend school in Newtown, according to the New York Times.

Two of Helle’s flight attendant colleagues launched a campaign to raise money for the kids, which back in pre-Go Fund Me days involved posting signs in stores and on bulletin boards in airports.

Another of Richard Crafts’ sisters, Karen Rodgers, of Westport, Connecticut, eventually took custody of the kids.

The state saw to it that the children received Richard’s pension fund, according to a Connecticut News-Times story.

No country club. As far as Richard’s whereabouts, he spent some of his sentence at the MacDougall Walker Correctional Institute, but later moved to the Osborn CI in Somer, Connecticut.

Life there sounded pretty stressful, so Richard, who turned 81 in December, probably hasn’t grown old like a fine Merlot.

When officials closed parts of the medium-security prison in 2016, rumors spread that they were contaminated with cancer-causing PCBs.

I originally reported that Richard Crafts would become eligible for parole in 2022. But reader Horrified wrote in with the news that Richard is actually scheduled for release in the second half of 2020.

How did this happen?

Well, it’s safe to assume his sister Karen Rodgers didn’t write any letters to the parole board to support him. She sided with the prosecution during the trial and encouraged the judge to give him the maximum sentence. She contended that the Crafts’ son Andrew was afraid of his father.

Unfortunately, Helle’s lawyer wasn’t around to fight Richard’s release. Dianne Andersen died in 2012. A News-Times piece remembered her fondly as the first woman to practice law in town and  a “barracuda” in the courtroom.

And Keith Mayo died in a car accident in 1999, according to reader Horrified.

It’s a good bet that many of Helle’s same friends who aided Richard Crafts’ conviction made a case to keep this wife-killer removed from fresh air and unable to access heavily bladed machinery for the maximum amount of time.

Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but Richard had an odd obsession with working in law enforcement — despite that the part-time gigs he snagged paid a fraction of what he made as a pilot — and “even when he was off duty [he] sometimes responded to police calls without authorization,” according to the Pan Am World DocuProject. I hoped that such biographical details would give pause to the judicial system.

But ultimately, none of that seemed to matter. According to a Jan. 31, 2020, story from the Newtown Bee, at the time of Richard Crafts’ sentencing, the laws in effect enabled a convict to serve “significantly less time” if he “exhibited good behavior while incarcerated.”

Richard Crafts was released from prison into a Bridgeport halfway house named Isaiah House, then to a shelter for homeless veterans, also in Bridgeport — and in summer 2020, he should be completely free, Fox61 reported. (Thanks much to Horrified for providing the links.)

Celluloid infamy. As for the 800-pound popular-culture gorilla in the room — whether filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen got the idea for the woodchipper in Fargo from the Crafts murder — there’s not really evidence to confirm or refute, according to Snopes.

Oh, and one more piece of bad news, but it’s really pretty small. Forensic Files hadn’t started using its theme music with the guitar chords yet when Medstar produced the episode in 1996.

But Peter Thomas’ storytelling still makes it feel like home and lends compassion to the story of Helle Crafts, a nice woman who married a heartless guy.

That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi or Amazon Prime