When I was in school, I took a drama class. My favorite improv game was “Death in a Minute…” where the audience shouts out absurd things, and the actors have one minute to improv their death; for example, “death by Choco Taco!” This case includes death and a woodchipper – which sounds like something out of the movie Fargo, but for Helle Nielsen, was all too real.
Helle Nielsen was an only child, born on July 7, 1947 in Denmark. She grew up in a small village and enjoyed school. She spoke French and English, and understood German, Norwegian, and Swedish. She attended college in England, and later moved to France where she worked as an au pair until taking a job as an airline attendant with Capital Airways. She loved to travel. When she learned Pan American Airlines was looking for flight attendants, she applied and got the job. She was sent to Miami Florida for training, and it was in Miami that she met Richard Crafts.
Richard was born on December 20, 1937 in New York City. He was not a great student and after some time in college, he decided the military was the way to go. He joined the marines, where he learned to fly. After he left the military he worked as a pilot.
Helle and Richard started a relationship, despite the fact that he was already engaged. Helle became pregnant in 1975, and the couple married in 1979 and settled in Newtown, Connecticut. In the 1980’s Newtown was a very quiet place, rural, with plenty of lakes and streams. The couple had three children, and both parents continued to work, Helle as a flight attendant, Richard as a pilot, in addition to taking on a job as an auxiliary policeman.
The couple had no money problems, in fact their combined income placed them within the top 5% of wage earners in America. As an auxiliary policeman, Richard earned no wage, and often responded to police calls without authorization. He secured a job in nearby Southbury, where he was paid seven dollars an hour, and even paid for expensive training seminars which taught him police procedure.
Richard controlled all the money in the relationship, which allowed him to purchase whatever he wished without Helle’s knowledge. He collected guns, and even invested a great deal of money in landscaping equipment, which seemed to go unused.
They hired an au pair, Dawn Thomas, to help with the children, as both Helle and Richard traveled a lot for work. They were well liked in the community; some went so far as to say they were the perfect family. But appearances can be deceiving.
It was not uncommon for Helle to appear in public with bruises on her face. One of her friends later reported to police that Helle was being abused by her husband. Richard would disappear for days at a time, never saying where he was going. By 1985, Helle learned that Richard was engaged in multiple affairs. That September, she met with divorce attorney, Diane Anderson, who encouraged her to hire a private investigator. She hired Oliver Mayo, and as much as it pained her, he did his job, and caught photos of Richard kissing another flight attendant outside her home in New Jersey.
The Disappearance
On November 18, 1986, Helle returned to Newtown after a long flight from Frankfurt, West Germany. She got a ride from another flight attendant, and when she arrived at home, she knew Richard and the kids were home. She was excited, especially with Thanksgiving coming up.
A massive, uncharacteristic, snowstorm rolled in. The snow was wet and heavy, causing power outages throughout Newtown. When Richard woke the next morning, power had still not been restored to their area.
Richard woke Dawn and the children up. He asked her to hurry and take them to his sister’s house in Westport, where they still had power. When she asked him where Mrs. Crafts was, he told her she had gotten out of bed, dressed, took her flight bags, and left the house an hour earlier.
At his sister, Karen’s house, he told her he would return later that day, after returning home to check on the electricity. Once the power was restored, he picked up the children and returned home.
Two days later, on November 20, Helle had not shown up for work. A colleague called Richard, who told her she had just called him from Europe. Helle, he said, had gone to Denmark to see her sick mother for a few days. He informed her that she had taken her flight luggage and parked her car in the Pan American Airlines employee car park. He gave this same story to the nanny and the children.
After an additional three days, Helle’s car remained untouched. Items that had been in her car after her last trip to Germany remained in the back seat. Her friends knew it was uncharacteristic of her to leave without saying anything to them; something was wrong. By the 29th, Lena Johannsson, a friend, obtained Helle’s mothers phone number in Denmark. Upon calling, however, they were informed that her mother was not ill, and she had not seen Helle. In fact, she didn’t expect to see her until the following April.
It didn’t help that Richard kept feeding them different stories, even once admitting that he did not know her whereabouts. Concerning them even more was the fact that Helle had told them about Richard’s volatile temper, even saying, “If something happens to me, don’t think it was an accident.” On December 1, they moved forward and filed a missing persons report.
The Investigation
Helle’s friends relayed to police their concerns about Richard. They told them about Helle’s fears, that if anything happened, it wouldn’t be an accident. They believed this extended to her disappearance. Detectives brought in Richard, who maintained his story, that she had gotten up early, dressed, took her flight bags, and left.
Detectives interviewed Dawn Thomas, who held nothing back, telling them about the morning of November 19, when she and the kids were rushed to Richard’s sisters house. She told them they left around 6:30am, and Richard didn’t linger; he quickly rushed off and didn’t return until 7pm that evening. Later that evening when she inquired again about Helle’s whereabouts, Richard told her he didn’t know. It wasn’t until the next morning, when she asked once again, that she was given the story about Helle going to visit her mother in Denmark.
Dawn began to notice things, like pieces of carpet had been cut out and were missing from the master bedroom. Richard had an explanation though – he had spilled kerosine, and it needed to be replaced.
Newtown police asked Richard if he would submit to a lie detector test. He agreed, and passed, with no deception being recorded. However, during this time, he did admit to lying about the story he gave regarding Helle visiting her mother. He told police that he and Helle were having difficulties and he didn’t want to “air his dirty laundry.”
While lie detector tests are not admissible in court, usually the concern is around those who fail. Richard passed, but some detectives, and even Oliver Mayo, believed he was somehow involved.
On December 11, Richard was again questioned. He had an answer for everything.
Q: “Did you know that your wife hired a private investigator?”
A: “No.”
Q: “Why would your wife tell her friends she was afraid for herself regarding serving you divorce paper, and tell them to check on her if something happened?”
A: “I cannot imagine her saying this, it is completely out of character for her to say this.”
Q: “What’s the story with your bedroom rug? Apparently you removed it, or cut some pieces out of it. Can you explain this to me?”
A: “All the rugs in the house are being removed and replaced.”
Q: “What was spilled on the rug in your bedroom?”
A: “Kerosene.”
Q: “Did you cut pieces out of the rug?”
A: “Yes. Two feet at a time. It’s easier to remove it that way.”
Q: “What did you do with the rug you took out of the bedroom?”
A: “Dumped bedroom rug in the Newtown landfill one week ago. It was blue in color.”
Mayo, convinced Richard had done something with Helle, felt he needed to do something. He recruited a few helpers and they took a trip to the landfill. Days of searching through garbage paid off though, when they located a piece of rug, nearly identical to the on that had been cut out. Unfortunately, no blood evidence was found.
Police pulled Richard’s bank and credit card statements where they found several odd purchases made around the time of Helle’s disappearance. A freezer, that was not found in the home, bed sheets, a comforter, and a woodchipper. There was also a receipt for a chainsaw, that was later recovered in Lake Zoar, covered in hair and blood, which matched Helle’s DNA.
Joseph Hine, a local man who worked for the town of Southbury, and happened to drive a snowplow, reported that on the night of November 18, while he was plowing the roads, he noticed a rental truck, with a woodchipper attached, parked close to the shore of Lake Zoar. He didn’t think much of it, until the search of the Crafts’ house made news.
Hine was able to lead detectives to the location, where they found several small pieces of metal, human tissue, a fingernail with pink nail polish, bone chips, human hair, the crown of a tooth, and type O blood. Helle had type O.
Had Helle been killed, her remains fed through a woodchipper?
Woodchipper and Arrest
With the help of a forensic dentist, the tooth crown was positively matched to Helle’s dental records. Though they did not have a “body,” they could conclude that Helle was dead, likely hit in the head and stored in the missing freezer until she was frozen solid. Her body was then cut into pieces with the chainsaw, then fed through the woodchipper, which projected her remains into the rental truck.
The Connecticut State Medical Examiner’s Office issued a death certificate on January 13, 1987 and Richard was immediately arrested.
State medical examiner obtained a pig carcass that was fed through a woodchipper. Inspecting the pig’s bone chips afterward showed similar results as the ones found by the lake.
Richard Crafts’ trial began in May 1988 in New London, and ended in July with a hung jury, when a single juror voted in favor of acquittal before walking out of deliberations and refusing to return. A second trial in November 1989, this time in Norwalk, resulted in a guilty verdict.
Richard Crafts was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Interestingly, he never served the whole sentence. Connecticut once had “good time” legislation which allowed a considerable amount of time to be shaved off an inmate’s sentence for good behavior. After serving just 32 years, Richard was released in January 2020 to Isaiah House, a halfway house in Bridgeport, and then to a shelter for homeless veterans.
The case of Helle Crafts was the first Connecticut murder case that was tried without a body. You can read more on this case in, “The Woodchipper Murder” by Arthur Herzog.
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