The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Woodchipper killer to walk free
NEWTOWN — They still point to the Silver Bridge and say that’s where he did it.
The Newtown airline pilot convicted of killing his Danish-born wife and running her frozen body through a woodchipper three decades ago drew as much national attention as the missing New Canaan mother whose estranged husband and alleged killer died this week of apparent suicide.
But as the Jennifer
Dulos story wanes, the 1986 case of Helle Crafts is coming back in the headlines.
The reason: Husband and murderer Richard Crafts, now 82, has completed his 50-year prison sentence early because of good behavior and will walk free as soon as June.
“It’s obviously going to traumatize some people,” said Gary Fillon, who lives in the Lake Zoar section of Newtown — a neighborhood that was rocked in 1986,
when Richard Crafts was charged with his wife’s dismemberment. “We really don’t think about it all the time, but everybody knows this is where it happened.”
The Newtown woodchipper murder became notorious not only because its brutality belied the bucolic spirit of Newtown. It was the first time in modern Connecticut history that a man was convicted of murder without a body being found — also a possibility in the Dulos case.
The state confirmed that Crafts, a former Marine who flew CIA missions in Southeast Asia before becoming a commercial pilot, was moved from a Bridgeport halfway house to a “transitional housing program for veterans” — the last step to freedom.
“Crafts had been incarcerated since 1987 and was sentenced under an old law allowing … for
offenders to earn a significant amount of time off their court-imposed sentence,” said Karen Martucci, director of external affairs for the state Department of Corrections. “He was assessed as low risk to the community upon approval for release and will reach the end of his sentence this summer.”
The Newtown police department said it had not been informed.
“It’s the second-biggest story we have ever had in Newtown, and we haven’t heard anything about it or seen anything posted about it,” police Capt. Christopher Vanghele said.
It was not clear where Crafts plans to live when he is released from his program. His probation officer could not be reached Friday.
The Crafts conviction precedent without the victim’s body was frequently cited by observers following the missing person case of Jennifer Dulos, and the murder and kidnapping case against her estranged
husband, Fotis Dulos, who died Thursday.
Crafts was accused of being barbaric and shrewd.
He used a chainsaw to dismember his wife’s bludgeoned body and then fed frozen parts into the woodchipper, discharging her remains into the Housatonic River at Silver Bridge, according to investigators.
While Crafts claimed his wife had flown back to Denmark, police found her fragments on the shore of the Housatonic River where a witness had seen a man running a woodchipper during a snowstorm.
What the police found wasn’t much — a fingernail and a fingertip among strands of blonde hair and bone fragments.
It was enough to issue a death certificate for Helle Crafts, a 39-year-old flight attendant who had told her husband she wanted a divorce because of his infidelity.
To help make the prosecution’s case during the murder trial, a forensic expert put a dead frozen pig through a woodchipper to show jurors what shredded bone look like.
Crafts’ 1989 conviction was a big win for crime science, considering it was the era before DNA identification.
“It put forensic science on the front page,” Newtown police Lt. Aaron Bahamonde said.
Crafts, who maintained his innocence during his trial and was criticized by the judge at his 1990 sentencing for his lack of remorse, is due to be released no later than Aug. 1.
The corrections department said Crafts “has remained in compliance with his release conditions.”
While in prison, “he only received two disciplinary infractions,” the DOC said.
“In line with our classification system, his risk level was reduced with appropriate programming and compliance with rules and regulations,” the DOC’s Martucci said.