The Disappearance of Helle Crafts | S1 E1 | Forensic Files | FULL EPISODE | Forensic Files

[Music] hi hi awful weather out there you want want to go inside the diner no uh I don't want anyone to see
me like this you're not going to like these it's what you thought on a dark rainy day in the fall
of 1986 hel crafts learn from a private investigator that her husband was having an
affair is that your husband yes that's Richard shortly after this meeting helic crafts
disappeared this is the story of how forensic science solved the puzzle [Music] [Music]
I first met hellocrafts in uh the fall of 1986 uh 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 um about um
potential violence shall we say by all accounts 39-year-old hel crafts was a caring mother of three young children in
an unhappy marriage she strongly suspected the affair she uh felt she knew who the individual was but she
really wanted some confirmation so we talked about hiring a det itive 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 hel crafts hired detective Keith Mayo she provided an important lead a
longdistance number she saw on the phone bills but didn't recognize I met with her uh several days after
uh we had caught uh Richard with his girlfriend and there were many photos of uh affection between the two of them her
uh kissing him and holding his hand and rubbing his back those types of photos Rich she just broke
down she cried for at least 5 or 10 minutes just sobbing Hela and Richard crafts had been
married for 12 years they both work for the airlines Hela as a flight attendant for PanAm Richard a
pilot for Eastern Airlines he was also a part-time policeman I would describe him
as uh 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 Hela 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 Hela after Hela filed for divorce she
confided in friends on her 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 was an accident and that's an unusual comment to get from a client on November 18th
1986 Hela 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 Hela missed her next flight assignment she didn't call
in so friends called the crafts home Richard said she went to Denmark to visit her sick mother later he told a
different story that Hela was on vacation with a friend all which proved not to be true and when this all came
together one started talking to the next to the next there was a collective sense
of panic in short time the friends were basically telling me that she had disappeared and
uh that uh 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 New Town 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 Hela disappeared in
the inside the bedroom door was a spot a black spot yeah how big would you say it
was that how about that big yeah did it look like a stain it looked like it was stay
but it hadn't been there before the fact that there was new carpet in the bed 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 receipt showed that Richard had rented a commercial wood chipper right after Hela
disappeared had something happened to Hela inside the house and was her husband involved police asked Richard crafts 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 my partner saw
or I saw that indicated that he was lying with helicraft still missing and no leads Connecticut State Police called
in their secret weapon forensic expert Dr Henry [Music] Lee Dr Henry Lee is the director of the
Connecticut State Police forensics laboratory and one of the world most respected forensic experts he
accompanied police as they searched the Craft's home we star exam some piece of physical evidence and uh found some uh
uh tiny clue on the mattress doly discovered five tiny stains so small they could barely be seen could they
hold the key to The Disappearance of hellocrafts an orthotolidine Solution on the mattress fibers turned blue it was
blood a species test proved it was human blood but was it helis an antigen test revealed type O positive the same type
as hel crafts and microscopic analysis revealed it was circulation blood and not menstrual if 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° 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 6in 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 hel Craft's disappearance it led to an important break it snowed the week of hela'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 wood chipper 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 wood chipper it was here where the honic river runs into Lake
Zoar police searched the riverbank all they found were a few mounds of wood chips but when they took a closer look
they found a piece of an envelope it was mail addressed to miss hel L crafts they were just laying there you
know and I thought good Lord you know we didn't I didn't even think too much about the how the
chipper came to came into play at that point until we uh until we started finding a lot of 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 uh 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 Meridan Connecticut because any
investigation involves so many specialty area that's why we start calling in forign
16 by now the story was Front Page News around the world Richard crafts 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 they need either that piece of paper from me that says somebody's
dead or occasionally a huge pile of evidence to convince them to identify the individual become a scientific
challenge they began by examining every Notch of the chainsaw and found some human hair tissue and the minute piece
of fiber in eyes 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 hela's favorite cotton night shirt 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 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 5 9 2 1 6 1 6 it 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 no hair to compare basically we use her hairbrush there was a characteristics that 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 hela's hairbrush next they turned
their attention to the fingernail with the bright red nail polish a chemist compared it to a bottle of hela'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 same as polish taken from the bottle found on hel's nightstand good forensic
work determined that the fingernail polish and the hair were both similar to hela's but they couldn't prove she was
dead I received a phone call from uh Dr Lee uh asking me if I would come and uh take a look at uh these little pieces
of what he thought to be a bone and he wanted me to to see if I could uh 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 this is actual footage a pig was put through the chip chipper since their skin and bones are
similar to humans Dr Lee noticed that the chipper produced a unique signature type of cut one that matched The Cutting
pattern on the debris found at the river what I was presented with were these very very tiny uh literally millimeter
size fragments of um bone and in amongst some of these fragments it was possible
to uh see that some of the fragments uh indeed came from a human 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 another 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 knew she was dead afterwards okay 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 hel Craft's blood type finally Dr Lee turned his attention to the gray piece
of 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 karazulas himself to go to the river where he searched for 5
days then a break i' been at the crime scene for maybe eight hours I slipped and fell into the Brook and I had a pale
and I was picking evidence up and I cleaned my hand off in this pale that I was collecting evidence in when I came
into the tent I put all the contents of the pale 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 I imagine it was from 1986 back to
1982 so I had no doubt in my mind that the tooth I found came from hel Craft's mouth finally the forensic team had an
actual match and they say hel Craft's teeth are in this pile and they were knocked out of her
head violently and we have a human head going through violent injury in the same
pile so we said that means hel craft is Dead period based on the forensic evidence
Richard crafts was arrested and charged in the murder of his wife what happened to hel crafts based
on the forensic evidence a reasonable scenario can be pieced together hey thanks for the ride on
November 18th hel crafts returned from her flight to Germany around 700 p.m. she put the children to bed around 8 The
Nanny had the night off and was wasn't expected home until midnight before going to bed Hela changed into her
favorite blue night shirt looked through her mail stuffed it into her pocket to believe and began Chang I don't believe
you you know I can't take this anymore why don't you just get out no you get out 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° angle while falling her head grazed the side of the mattress
leaving the blood smear he wrapped the body in the bed B covers carried her through the house
into the garage and placed the body into a [Music] 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 2:00 a.m. and went right to bed at Daybreak crafts took the children
and the nanny to his sister's house saying their mother had left earlier Marie hurry up he then rented
the largest commercial wood chipper he could find and a U-Haul truck using his credit card by Night Time hel's body was
completely Frozen crafts 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 hela'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 male hel placed in her
night shirt pocket pass through the chipper virtually untouched before leaving crafts took
apart the chainsaw scratched the serial number off and threw the pieces into the
river how close was the brutal murder of hel crabs 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 a good tee and work
together amazing you the human body writes so much of its history in itself [Music]
oh [Music] a [Music]

Series premiere. A flight attendant went missing and was never seen again.

Brief Summary

Hela Crafts disappeared in 1986; forensic evidence linked her husband Richard to her murder.

Key points

The Disappearance of Hela Crafts. Hela Crafts goes missing after expressing fears about her husband. Was it an accident?
Richard Crafts Arrested. After extensive forensic evidence, Richard Crafts is arrested for the murder of his wife.
Forensic Breakthroughs. Forensic experts uncover crucial evidence linking Richard Crafts to Hela's disappearance.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I want to tell you something...

Hela confides in friends about her fears.

4:13WatchFeb 28, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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