Doomed to Fail - Ep 219: A wild way to dispose of a body - The Murder of Helle Crafts

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

We've said it before, and we'll say it again - divorce is an option. It's not great, people will be sad, kids will be traumatized, but it's WORSE to be the child of a murderer and not have a mom. Today, Farz tells us about how Helle Crafts's husband, Eastern Airlines pilot Richard Crafts, thought that the best way to keep sleeping with floight attendents would be to get rid of his wife, and her body. We won't spoil it here, but it's gross (not goopy though!).  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. We are back, Taylor, and you are migrating from the caffeinated to the decaf dikech. I see. I am. I did pour a decaf diac Coke into my McDonald's Cup. I mean, it's not that late there. You probably still muster another non.

on decaf for like 20 more minutes? Yeah, it's 5.45. I can do it pretty late. I'm not like my husband has to stop drinking caffeine at like 1 p.m. I'm still, I can still go pretty far. And like, you know what? I love an after dinner coffee if I have gas over. I love

coffee after dinner. But like you know, that doesn't happen all the time. It's a nice end cap to a good meal. And I think, I think because of our previous work history together, we were so full of coffee

for so long that we're desensitized, I would say. I was like the only thing that you could do to break up the day is get up and get a cup of coffee. It is true. Hello, everyone. Welcome to doomed to fail. We bring you history's most notorious disasters and epic

failures twice a week. And today, Fars has a story that he had to watch Forensic Files for, which I'm excited about because Forensic Files is super fun. It is awesome. It is awesome. It is very well made, very well done. And I, what I'm going to be discussing here today, actually was the inspiration for

another very, very watchable thing. It was an inspiration for a very famous movie, not completely an inspiration for, but like a part of that movie, which we'll get into, was from the real true story that I'm getting into here. The movie I'm thinking about won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and one of the stars won best actress at the 1997 Academy Awards. Can you have any, do you have any guesses here?

Give me something else, anything else. American Film Institute ranked it as the 93rd best movie ever made. William H. Macy. Oh, okay. Is it the one about, nope, I don't know. Bargo. I'm going on Fargo.

What were you going to go with? I, like, all I could think in my head was Titanic, and I know that you're not doing Titanic, but I was like, that's all you can think of. I would have said, The lady. What's her name, Francis? Yes, Frances McDormant.

She's the one that won the Best Actress Award. There we go. There you go. I also have enjoyed the Fargo TV show. Have you watched it? I haven't watched any of it. Some of them are better than others. like one season i like didn't really like but like the first season has a scene in it that i think is one of the most insane scenes i ever seen in television i screamed and like just it was

like nothing i've ever seen in my life what was it if you know you know i'm not gonna tell you all right which can you tell me what episode at least it's at the end of which which one which episode oh no at the end of the season oh then season okay season one yeah okay all right um Well, I'm going to be talking about a woman named Hela Crafts, which was the inspiration for probably the grossest scene in that movie. Do you know which one? I don't remember. Okay.

All good. We're going to get into it. And the second I say the words, you're like, oh, shit, I get it. I know what you're talking about. Her name actually is Hela. Like, in the Forensic Falls, they did call her that. It's H-E-L-L-E. She's Danish.

That's, yeah. Not like from California. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it wasn't like a hippie. Her middle name is in Venus. Like, it's a real name. So, Hela was born in 1947, and she lived until 1986, spoiler alert, which makes her 39 years old at the time of her death. Just to give you all some sense of timelines here.

Like I said, she was actually born Helen Nielsen in Denmark, and she had a career as a flight attendant, which is also how she met her wayward terrible husband, a guy named Richard Graff. who was a pilot with Eastern Airlines they would marry in 1975 and settle in a town that would later become known for even worse violence

than what we're about to discuss Newtown, Connecticut and have three kids together. So there were several years of seemingly blissful marriage before Hella started suspecting that Richard was sneaking around

with another woman. Another flight attendant? Yes, actually. I literally wrote down that flight attendants were his niche, but that's like three paragraphs from now. So I'm going to say this sentence again later. I don't want to be a dick, but they're like readily available. Yeah.

Yeah, is where it is. So she would try to address this with Richard that she thought that he was sleeping around, but apparently he had a super violent temper. and so they didn't get right far. I can't imagine what it's like. It's like I have an issue I want to discuss my spouse and it's like they're just going to blow up you. Like I assume you just like go inside yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. So the next part here is like I went to a little bit of like Connecticut law for a minute. But my general assumption based on the other part that I'm going to get into here is that she was basically trying to put together evidence for infidelity in anticipation of a divorce. I looked at the divorce law in Connecticut in the 1980s and it was a no-fault state even in the 1980s but if you proved fault like with infidelity then the distribution of assets and the alimony component was dramatically skewed towards the cheated upon spouse

so that's why I think that she was probably just in a evidence gathering mode so she hired this guy a private investigator named Keith Mayo to follow her husband around and document what he was doing and he caught photos of him being affectionate with another woman who was also a flight attendant and here's where my bit comes in i guess flight attendants were his niche i told you would come back i wrote it i'm gonna say it oh there we go um because apparently they're plentiful so there's that available sorry available that's what you said they're plentiful and available And we don't know for sure anything that happens beyond this, beyond what happens on the night of number 18th of 1986 at 7 p.m.

Because that's the night she got home from working a flight from Germany back to the United States. She was driven home by a friend. And a few days later, she missed her next flight assignment without calling in and just basically no-showed. So people kind of freaked out a little bit about this. It's a tough job, I imagine. Just like the time you have to be away, you know. And if they're both doing it, then like, yeah, I doubt they saw each other very much, you know. For the next month or so, Richard would come up with excuses depending on who he was talking to about Hella's whereabouts.

So if he was talking to her family, he'd tell them she was off to the Canary Islands with friends. If she was talking to her friends, he told them that she was off to Denmark visiting family. So he was like- And they do have kids, you said? They have kids. Yeah, three kids. Okay. So it sounds like Hela's private investigator was kind of the only person. with any investigatory background

who actually gave a shit about what happened to her. I mean, her friends and family cared, but nobody else really did. He basically launched his own investigation by interviewing the crafts live in nanny. So they had to live in nanny for their three kids.

And the nanny told her, told this guy, Mayo, that she noticed bloodstains on the master bedroom carpet shortly after Hela had disappeared. By December 1, this investigator, this Keith Mayo guy,

he reported her missing the Newtown police and the police actually did go so far as to hook up the husband to a lie detector and none of his responsive came up as deceptive so they were like well you're good but again if you're psychopath right I don't think that

the lie detector has technically count anymore right you can't use it as like actual evidence in the trial but it can rile someone up in an investigation it can it can give you enough juice to know that you should run harder or less hard at someone but it's like when is it not the husband like literally when it's like a stranger yeah yeah her friend dropped her off the house and then nobody heard from it and the only other person is either that or her like seven-year-old killed her like right do you remember that uh Shannon Watts's friend

Nicole who was like the fucking best who was like absolutely not the immovable objects yeah she was like no and she like figured it out yeah so the local police after this uh lie detector test weren't really doing anything so keith went to the state police and they actually did take him semi seriously the state police also had a secret weapon available to them this one forensic investigator named dr henry lee and this guy henry lee would be become like kind of a celebrity investigator. He would go on to work on cases like the John Bonnet Ramsey

Disappearance, O.J. Simpson. It's like I must have heard of him. Yeah, he's one of those guys. Like, if you watch forensic files, I think he comes up. I think he's like a regular on that. I think he is too. Um, he did the, he did a bunch of the 9-11 forensics. He did, um, the D.C. sniper case. He did the,

um, forensics on Kaylee Anthony's body when they found it. Oh, shit. Yeah. He's, he's like a legit dude. So five, five days. after she was last heard or sorry five weeks after she was last heard from at this point keith mayo had already gone to the state police richard ended up taking his three kids with him to for a vacation and during that time the state police just went and searched his property in the house um they found some tiny tiny discolarations on the couple's mattress i saw the pictures

through forensic files and they basically like were undetectable like you would never notice them under any circumstance but there's i have children there's There's scenes everywhere. Yeah. You know, like there's, yeah. But in this case, they did notice it, and Dr. Lee asked for that part to be removed and sent to his lab. They also noticed that a large part of the master bedroom's carpet had been removed. That's suspicious.

Very suspicious. There's no reason to do that. If you ever go into a house with carpet removed, you know someone died there. Especially if this is like a square in the middle of a room. It was more like a, so a square in the middle of the room would be less suspect than this, because this looked more. more like you were carving a liquid trail out. Like, I saw a picture. It's in the shape of a body like that, like, you cut out like the splatter from the brain matter going out of the side.

I spilled a bunch of wine in a human-shaped form and I had to clean it out. So the forensics on the mattress showed that it was human type O positive blood, which was the same as Hela. And one interesting thing that I never knew about was that Dr. Lee determined that that blood that was on the mattress was circulation blood versus menstrual blood, I guess. Huh. Do you know that was a, they could tell? Menstrual blood's probably different because it's like, it's not like blood, like, I don't know if you want to know this, but like, if I like cut myself, that blood is different than my period

blood. blood is like very thick because it's like the lining of my uterus coming out. I guess. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. It's almost just different matter. So, okay, fine, fine. This is me being ignorant.

Never mind. I mean, it's gross. Well, what it told them was that, like, a blood vessel only leaks blood if it's damage. So, like, it told them more than you would get from just menstrual blood. Right. So they also ran checks on his credit card and found that he had recently purchased a freezer, a chainsaw, and that he had also rented a little, little drum roll, a wood chipper. Oh, no. That is the connection.

Fargo. This is the inspiration for when that one crazy German guy fed Steve Bouchemey's corpse were Woodchipper. I love Steve Boucherby. Have you seen Tucker and Dale versus evil? No. Oh, God, it's all good. There's a woodchipper part in there too.

Oh, there you go. This inspired a lot of art. Oh, I just feel like it's going to be so goopy. Tell me about it. Tell me more. It is. It's actually less goofy than you think. I'll tell you why that is. Yeah. Okay, yeah. So as please start interviewing people, they came across a guy named Joseph Hine.

The night that Hela had returned home from a Germany flight, a snowstorm had hit Newtown really hard, and Joseph Hine was employed by the city of South Ferry, which is only about eight miles north of Newtown. Are they flying out of New York airports? I don't know. I don't go that deep. I assume,

right? Like, why would you fly? I mean, can you do an international flight out of Connecticut? It seems like a... Probably not. Continue. So that night, this guy Joseph was using a snowplow to clear the roads when he drove by a lake named Lake Zora and noticed a U-Haul truck with a wood chipper in the back right on the shore of Lake Zora. He led investigators to the part of the shoreline he saw the truck at and the investigators there found the crown of a tooth, three ounces of miscellaneous U.S. human tissue, thousands of strands of blonde hair, a bunch of dried blood, a painted fingernail.

Like the nail, like the nail, like the actual male, but with like finger, or paint on it. Yeah. And even more telling than this, and a little weird was that they also found mail addressed to hella. Yeah. Like, like not shredded? Not shredded. it apparently like whatever happened this was fine this mail was like fine because nothing i read

or watch indicated that they pieced this thing together it was like it was just sitting there a piece of mail that had her name on it all again this is eight miles from their house it's a little weird to like have this here so they also searched the water near the site and they found the chainsaw in the water which had strands of blonde hair lodged between its teeth It's gnarly, isn't it? Yeah. Well, that sounds goopy. It's actually not.

I'm going to tell you why it's not. Okay. I'm going to keep saying that it's not goofy. Okay, okay. I really want to know because I'm just like picturing goop. I know. I know. It seems goofy, but it's...

Tell me more. So the problem they have with the chain saw was that the serial numbers have been like rubbed off, like scraped off, like shaved down. There's apparently this crazy method that, again, forensic file told me about, where they can reproduce what's been removed. using some sort of chemical application that'll, like, tell you what should have been there that's not there

anymore. I don't even ask you the science of this. That's what that liar who told Phil Collins that he had, like, authentic stuff from the LMO did. Oh, really? But he was like, oh, I used a special thing to see that, like, Jim Booby was carved into this knife, you know?

Like, it was really his, but, like, it definitely won't. Yeah, yeah. I didn't go super deep trying to figure this out because I assumed if I did it would take me 17 years actually sorted it out but like it sounds pretty intense um well very useful intense um so they were able to reveal through this chemical process the serial number of this chainsaw and when they finally were able to achieve the number they matched it to the freaking warranty card that richard sent in after he bought the chainsaw whoa this stupid it's kind of stupid yeah i have never mailed one of those in. I mean, now I get, I do insurance on Amazon because it's easy, but like I would never,

I've never mailed in a warranty card. I've never mailed in a rebate. I've never done a warranty court. I don't even know. What a nerd. What an absolute nerd. So given how long ago this was, it sounds like the majority of, um, matching or testing of things like human tissue and blood and nails and all that, that was done kind of surface level by matching what they found they knew was to pulling, you know, to what they actually discovered. They would, like, go and pull strands of hair from her hairbrush. They would compare the fingernail that was on the fingernail polish she used. Apparently, it wasn't until the 1990s, the very early 1990s, that DNA evidence was, like, scientifically conclusive enough to be used.

Yeah, yeah. I think the Oja trial was the first time it was used. We didn't know about it. Like, Jurassic Park, they explained DNA to us because we didn't really get it yet. Yeah. yeah and that was 94 so it was actually that it wasn't the first one that was the biggest one apparently in the very early stages of using DNA they used them for sexual assault cases it was like two i read of that happened like maybe a year before this happened so it was

it's new it was new enough to where they wouldn't have relied on it in this case essentially got it so by now police start piecing together the events of the night that she came home they knew she got home at around 7 they knew based on her routine she would have put the kids to bed by 8 the living nanny had the night off and they didn't actually expect her back until midnight

they think after she put the kids to bed she and Richard were in the master bedroom where she changed into her nightgown and for some reason put her mail in her pocket like in the nightgown pocket yeah but I mean again it's a 1980s

it's consequential doesn't matter but like it's okay i don't know it's the 1980s like maybe like you know you've been on the road for to germany and back like maybe like i don't know you're gonna read the bathroom yeah like i remember my mom like paying bills in the kitchen table you know yeah we used to have a more intimate relationship with our mail um i know you do and you're exceptional at sending it i will say yeah you literally have to ask you how to send mail because i don't know how to do it um So the assumption police have is that while her and Richard are in the bedroom, a fight breaks out about his cheating and Richard loses it and grabs a large flashlight they had and bashes her in the back of the head once, which knocks her down. Then he hits her a second time, which is the one that probably killed her up her into a comatose state.

And that's the one that left the blood splatter that's on the mattress. He then wrapped her body in sheets, carried her from the bedroom to the garage and placed her in. inside a large freezer. Wait, so he'd already, so he'd already bought the freezer. You already bought the freezer. Okay, so premeditating. Premeditated, yes, yes. So by the, I mean, how could you not?

Like, if I accidentally killed someone, what part of the recesses of my brain would be like, cool, let's go get a wood chipper? You had to have thought about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. He wasn't like, gonna make a bunch of stew and have to freeze it. Also, the other crazy

part is that he went and rented this wood chipper. Right. I didn't even for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, he just rented it for the moment. What I'm thinking is like, how did you clean it afterwards? That's what, you tell me,

because that's what I think would be goopy, the goopy thing. Like the next guy, like he's like, the next guy who has this from the Home Depot has it in his back yard and he puts like a branch in it and it comes out with another eyeball comes out flying out the other side. side of it. I didn't pay for this. A little extra.

Money back. But here's why it's not goopy. So the next night, the night after Hello got home, the body was frozen solid. Oh. And so that's when he took it from the freezer. He used the chainsaw

to quarter the body. Then he drove it along with the chainsaw, the wood chipper, and some wood as like cover for the gore to the shore to the shore. this lake and so he was feeding it in and he actually tell me the name of the lake again i'm gonna look it up it's zor z o a r okay but that's why it wasn't gory is because it was like rock solid and he actually got most of it into the lake like it was only like tiny bits of her

remains that was actually discovered like on the shoreline right and then he had covered a lot of that up with the wood that he brought so he like ran her body through it most of it ended up in the The part that didn't end them in Lake, he shaved a bunch of wood into it to, like, mask it to a so extent. Got it, got it. So you can drive to Lake Zor 15 minutes from the center of Newtown County. Yep. Yep. Which is very close to Long Island, so I see why they would live there.

Yeah. And then Richard would obviously go on trial in 1988. His original trial was a mistrial. It was declared a mistrial. Like, he didn't get convicted. and he would go on trial again the year after and then he became the first person in Connecticut history to ever be found guilty of a murder

without the victim's body ever being recovered because yeah like so much of what the forensic files was talking about was like do we even know if she's dead like well sorry obviously she's dead but how do we prove she's dead because we don't have a body we have nothing Like we have strands of hair

Right Which is what he was coming on Right Right Did he fly planes after he called her? Probably Yeah I'm sure Yeah almost certainly

Interestingly enough He got 50 years in prison Which is kind of remarkable You'd assume he'd get life It's so gory I'm shocked that he got 50 years And then even more remarkable than that 30 years later in 2020

He was released for good behavior what yeah so he's out there he's out there he fend his wife's corpse chipper after chainsling her body and quartering her he's literally at the vans buying produce he's just hanging out so kids do they're probably not talking to him yeah sure yeah i can't imagine they have a good relationship so so but that was it Like that was part of the inspiration for Fargo

was this whole wood chipper situation which I remember as a kid watching I mean an older kid but like watching that and being like where do these psychopaths come up with these concepts in Hollywood and it's like oh like it was a real person he really did this and he's literally out there walking right now he's probably like a Taco Bell near you like right now

a thousand percent oh god that's terrible port hall yeah 39 years old fed to a wood chipper The forensic file went into great detail Way more than I'm providing here about like the gore that they recovered Because they actually also as a part of a test Ran the corpse of a pig through a woodchipper

Oh God, I mean I bet oh man And they compared like the The minimis amounts of bone fragment that was recovered on the shoreline with what they were cut what they pulled from the pig test and they're like this witcher makes the same kind of pattern and so that's sort of like he fed the whole thing through the wood chipper

oh and and wait wait I have a question was she naked no she was not naked which is why they found the male because what they think happened is she had this because they found these blue fibers that were again they couldn't like test this on a molecule level but they knew that she wore this like blue nightgown

before she went to bed and the nightgown had pockets and they were like she must have like got her mail put it in this nightgown because they also found strands of blue fibers everywhere and like that's what happened

like that's why the mail ended up where it was is she just like stuffed it in her pocket it's so that's weird I feel like I would I would put a really good person in there rather than her pressure with clothes on were I to do that

I see that's the thing I haven't thought about it so like I well I just thought about it right now I haven't like I haven't had a ton to think about but yeah you'd assume it's always the hair

it's always the hair it reminds you of that movie pain and gain I don't know if you ever saw that one I think it's it's awesome it's with the rock and with Mark Wahlberg it's really it's a real

it's a true yeah it's a true it's a true crime story for Miami but like I remember in the movie like that was what screwed them up the most was that they tried to decapitate the person like a woman and the hair's in the way

and hair's super strong and so they couldn't chainsaw it would just keep breaking the chainsaw like the engine couldn't overpower the hair and I know I know it's not good I'm just saying like it's it's these things you don't think about when you think about chainsawing the body

like in like in like an of a thousand days the Anne Boleyn movie that I watch she's like forever ago she obviously has her hair up when they do it and she goes she's like getting on the scaffold and she's like it'll be easy i have a little neck and everyone's crying and you're like oh god it's so creepy so eerie that's all you are about that you think it would be um i also like i also like the word woodchipper is such a cute word it's like woodchuck mixed with chipper and it's so fun and happy the fact that you like fed your wife in it it just ruins the whole

experience for me kind of yeah yeah yeah wait was she 100% did when she was put it in it oh yeah because she was frozen okay so she was probably alive when she went in the freezer actually right because the only thing she hit he she he hit her twice and I think it takes a lot of force to kill someone by bludging them over the head I think so too how do you know what I wish not to not for a body but like I wish there was a way to test things in movies just like see if you could do it. Like, if I hit someone with a bottle,

like what would happen? You know? Like, obviously I think my hand would hurt. I don't think I would hurt anybody. I do not think the bottle would jitter, you know? But like...

No, you wouldn't share it. You definitely can cuss someone and give them brain damage. Yeah. And I think Mythbusters did a lot of that. Oh, yeah, yeah. Wait, is this true?

Am I thinking this? My parents knew a girl and... no someone i know knew a girl who died because someone threw a beer bottle across a bar and it broke and it sliced her throat that sounds almost does that not made up i don't even text my parents i'll put back on this um yeah let's we can add in it then this episode once we find out yes let's i find out um cool that is gross Is that's horrible. Yeah, it's pretty gnarly.

I don't know how I came up on this, but. And then again, just to reiterate, you can get divorced. Like, I don't know. I know. I think this guy's issue was, like, I think this guy's issue was he knew. She probably said something about how I have pictures of you making out with someone or something. She probably like dug it, dug it in. He was like, I'm going to lose everything.

And was like, this is better, which it obviously isn't. You traumatize your children. So there's that. Yeah. I mean, that's like. A thousand times worse than having your parents be divorced is having one of them dead and one of them in jail. Yeah, especially the way he did it. Yeah.

So yeah, that's my fun little story. My fun little tie-in to Wells Fargo. Just Fargo. Not Wells Fargo. That movie is delightful in a weird way. I love it. Sweet. Do we have any list for mail?

Cool. I did want to follow up on Nadine being in Canada and talking about how Canada, the northern part of Canada, needs to be defended. And she wanted to clarify that basically that means, like, Russia will send missiles over Canada when they finally destroy the United States. And I said, that makes sense. And how we can't send things to Russia without going over or to North Korea without going over Russia. Like, the world is round. We don't know that. No.

I'm like 99% of yours. I'm at 87. I'm into Japan. I don't know. You're playing. It didn't take 10 six days. So I feel like... We'll split the difference and call it we're 83% sure it's round.

Okay. Deal. I'm fine with that. Cool. Whatever. Sweet. Well, do you want to do our socials? Yes.

Please find us on social media, doomed to fell pod on all the socials. Doomedepelpod at gmail.com. If you have any ideas or suggestions. And then also just a reminder, we're going to do a bunch of re-releases coming up soon. I have some natural disasters and some murders to bring back. Thank you to everyone who gets our emails. And oh, my God, for us, we got three new email subscribers on Substack. So thank you.

Those folks. Oh, and you know what I really wanted to do for me? We have a map of where our downloads are on our Simplecast. It's fun to look at our map. And we have people who are all over the world. old who listened. So somebody in Essen, Germany is listening, which is super fun.

And then someone in where else, like all over, like in Florida, in Miami Gardens, in Denver, we have downloads in Portland, in Torio, Mexico, in Sao Paulo, Brazil to download

this week, Nashville, Tennessee, Memphis, Tennessee. I love it. So just thanks, everyone. Prague. For international. There's some $4 in Sydney, two in Perth, one in Auckland. So, thanks, everyone. All over the world.

All over the world. And thank you to those 3,000 new email subscribers. I said 3,000. I did. I did say 3,000. Thank you for a lot of time. Yeah, of course. Thank you, Taylor.

Again, at Dunifel Pot, all socials. Write to us at Dumfell Pot or write to us at Dumfell Pot at gmail.com. And tell your friends, we like doing this and want to keep doing this and would love to get more of your feedback. Yeah. That's how we got, Taylor. Thanks. Sweet. Shut it off there.