Police had receipts.
They had suspicious purchases.
They had blood.
But they still needed to know where the wood chipper had gone.
Then came Joseph Hine.
Hine worked for the town of Southbury and drove a snowplow during winter weather.
Around the period when Richard had possession of the rented machine, Hine remembered seeing something that had seemed strange even before anyone knew Helle was missing.
A truck.
A wood chipper.
One man.
And weather in which almost nobody had any logical reason to be chipping wood.
The exact timeline matters.
The first dramatic social-media version often compresses everything into one night:
Helle disappears.
Snowplow driver sees Richard grinding something beside the river.
Police arrive.
Case solved.
The real sequence was slower.
Helle was last seen on November 18.
Richard obtained the chipper on November 20.
Witnesses saw a rental truck towing a chipper that evening and into the early hours of November 21.
At approximately 6:30 p.m. on November 20, a lone individual was observed operating a wood chipper near a steel bridge.
Then between roughly 3 and 4 a.m., the machine was seen again in the same general area.
Around 4 a.m., Richard himself was encountered with the truck and wood chipper in a Southbury school parking lot.
A coworker asked what he was doing.
Richard gave a simple explanation.
Storm cleanup.
He said he had been dealing with branches knocked down by the November 18 storm.
That answer might have made sense.
Except investigators later found evidence that there had been no need for the wood chipper for that kind of storm cleanup.
No relevant fallen limbs.
No municipal task requiring him to be operating the machine there in the middle of the night.
Joseph Hine eventually led investigators toward the river area.
Lake Zoar forms part of the Housatonic River system.
The shoreline in winter was hardly an obvious place to search for evidence from a missing-person case.
And detectives faced a brutal practical problem.
If prosecutors were right, the machine had done exactly what it was designed to do.
A wood chipper takes solid material and turns it into scattered fragments.
Rain.
Snow.
River current.
Wind.
Vehicle movement.
Time.
All of them could disperse evidence.
The state would later have to persuade a jury that a person had died without presenting a conventional body.
That meant investigators had to treat almost nothing as potentially important.
They searched the wood-chip debris.
The riverbank.
The water.
The area beneath and around the bridge.
The first discoveries seemed insignificant.
An envelope.
Except it carried Helle Crafts' name.
Pieces of blue fabric.
Tiny fragments.
Hair.
Material that could easily be dismissed as garbage if no one knew what they were looking for.
Then the search became much more disturbing.
Among the wood chips investigators began finding biological material.
Small pieces of tissue.
Bone fragments.
A human fingernail.
Dental material.
Hair.
A crown from a tooth.
The recovered remains were so small that no ordinary observer looking at the riverbank would have thought a body had ever been there.
That was exactly the prosecution's problem.
Richard's alleged disposal method had almost worked.
Almost.
One newspaper account later described police recovering only tiny fractions of a human body.
The quantity did not matter nearly as much as identity.
Investigators needed to prove two separate things.
First:
These fragments were human.
Second:
They belonged to Helle.
Without that second step, Richard's lawyers could argue that police had found unidentified biological debris unrelated to his missing wife.
Forensic dentistry became critical.
Dr. Constantine Karazulas compared dental X-rays.
The recovered crown and tooth material had characteristics that could be compared with Helle's existing dental records.
In court, Karazulas testified that he was certain the specimen belonged to Helle Crafts.
It became one of the strongest bridges between the fragments on the riverbank and the woman who had vanished from Newtown.
Hair recovered in the debris was also consistent with Helle.
The blond strands resembled material from her hairbrush.
The fingernail fragment carried polish consistent with a bottle associated with Helle.
Blood type evidence also aligned.
This was years before modern DNA profiling could simply produce the kind of probability jurors now expect from forensic television.
Investigators had to build identity through layers.
Dental structure.
Blood type.
Hair characteristics.
Nail polish.
Clothing fibers.
Personal material.
Location.
Timing.
Machine rental records.
No single clue carried the entire case.
Together, they began forming something much harder to explain innocently.
Then police searched the water.
They recovered a chain saw.
Its identifying serial information had been damaged.
Someone appeared to have tried to prevent the tool from being traced.
But investigators were able to work backward through the physical and sales evidence.
The chain saw was connected to Richard Crafts.
On it investigators recovered biological material.
Blood.
Hair.
Tissue.
Fibers.
Some of those materials were consistent with the fragments from the riverside and with Helle.
The machine in the river.
The wood chipper on the bridge.
The freezer.
The missing carpet.
The blood by the bed.
The fragments.
The dental crown.
The conflicting stories.
Investigators now believed they could reconstruct what happened.
The prosecution's theory was horrifying but methodical.
Helle had been killed inside her home.
Her body was stored in a freezer.
Once sufficiently frozen, it could be divided using the chain saw.
The frozen pieces could then be fed into the rented industrial wood chipper.
The river would carry away what remained.
The weather would help.
The storm would reduce witnesses.
The water would destroy evidence.
No body would remain.
And without a body, perhaps no murder could ever be proved.
It was an attempt not simply to hide a victim.
It was an attempt to erase the physical fact that a murder had ever taken place.
But a wood chipper does not make matter vanish.
It scatters it.
And investigators were about to turn that difference into an entire homicide case.