By early 1987, Connecticut prosecutors faced a legal problem that went far beyond Richard Crafts.
Traditionally, a murder prosecution presents something concrete.
A body.
A cause of death.
A pathologist explaining where the bullet entered.
Or how the knife struck.
Or what injury caused death.
The victim's identity is established.
The homicide mechanism is explained.
The defendant is connected.
Here, almost every familiar piece was missing.
No intact body.
No full skeleton.
No conventional autopsy.
No precise time of death.
No single recovered murder weapon that could be demonstrated to have caused Helle's death.
The state could not even say with absolute precision how she had been killed.
Yet prosecutors believed the evidence established something more important.
Helle was dead.
Richard had killed her.
And then he had deliberately destroyed her remains because he understood exactly what the absence of a body might mean for investigators.
The law did not require prosecutors to produce the body itself.
But they still had to prove death beyond a reasonable doubt.
And they had to prove Richard intentionally caused it.
That distinction would define the case.
Investigators began building Helle back from fragments.
Not physically.
Evidentially.
Start with behavior.
Would Helle voluntarily leave?
She was devoted to her children.
She was preparing for divorce and intended to seek custody.
She had not abandoned her belongings as part of a planned disappearance.
She had warned friends that if she suddenly vanished, they should be suspicious.
Richard's changing explanations about Denmark, overseas travel and the Canary Islands could not all be true.
Then move to the house.
Blood in the bedroom.
Missing carpet.
The timing immediately after Helle's return home.
Then preparation.
Freezer acquired November 17.
Wood chipper arranged before the disappearance.
The machine actually obtained November 20.
Rental truck.
Bedding.
Chain saw.
Then the river.
Witnesses seeing the machine.
Richard himself with it before dawn.
His storm-cleanup explanation contradicted by the absence of an actual need for that work.
Then physical evidence.
Helle's name on an envelope in the debris.
Human tissue.
Bone.
Hair.
Nail.
Dental crown.
Blue fabric.
The chain saw underwater.
Blood and biological material associated with it.
The state did not have one enormous piece of evidence.
It had dozens of small ones.
That became the genius of the prosecution.
Richard had allegedly reduced the body into fragments.
Investigators answered by building the case the same way.
Fragment by fragment.
Forensic scientist Henry Lee became one of the most recognizable figures associated with the investigation.
At the time, he was already an important figure in Connecticut forensic science, though he would become much more nationally famous later.
The Crafts case demonstrated the kind of forensic reconstruction that would eventually become a staple of American crime television.
Hair comparison.
Blood typing.
Material comparison.
Microscopic analysis.
Tool and machine evidence.
Dental identification.
The prosecution needed science not just to identify a killer.
It first needed science to prove the victim still existed in the evidence at all.
One question was especially strange.
Could the fragments recovered by the river actually have been produced by a wood chipper?
The state wanted more than imagination.
Investigators sought experimental comparison.
A pig carcass was eventually put through a wood chipper so researchers could examine the resulting bone fragments and compare damage patterns.
The experiment strengthened the state's contention that the tiny bone pieces recovered near the river were consistent with material that had passed through such a machine.
This part of the case later became famous because it represented forensic reasoning at its most literal.
Prosecutors did not simply tell jurors:
Imagine what a wood chipper would do.
They tried to reproduce the physical process.
Science turned an almost unbelievable theory into something testable.
But even if the machine destroyed Helle's remains, prosecutors still needed murder.
A person can die accidentally.
A person can die naturally.
Even improper disposal of a body does not automatically establish intentional killing.
Here, Richard's planning became critical.
The Supreme Court of Connecticut later emphasized evidence showing he had arranged for the freezer and wood chipper before Helle's disappearance.
The state argued that this was not a man who accidentally killed his wife during a spontaneous confrontation and then panicked.
The disposal equipment had already been set in motion.
The preparation itself allowed jurors to infer intent.
There was another piece of evidence that sounded almost like a line written for a courtroom drama.
At one point, Richard's brother-in-law told him police were conducting diving searches.
Richard responded in substance that they could keep diving because there was no body.
It was gone.
That remark later appeared in the Connecticut Supreme Court's summary of the evidence as something jurors could interpret as consciousness of guilt.
Richard maintained that he had not murdered his wife.
At points, his explanations suggested she might still be alive somewhere overseas.
That created an unusual trial dynamic.
If Helle could be alive, the state had no murder.
So prosecutors used her own life to prove her death.
The children she would not voluntarily abandon.
Her divorce plans.
Her work.
Her friendships.
Her warnings.
Her absence from every part of the future she had been planning.
And finally, physical fragments carrying her biological and dental identity.
The state medical examiner formally declared Helle dead in January 1987.
Richard was arrested.
The case moved toward trial.
It would become one of the most closely watched prosecutions in Connecticut history.
The state believed the evidence told one story.
Richard had planned to kill Helle.
He had tried to remove every trace of her.
He had nearly succeeded.
But prosecutors were now asking twelve jurors to convict a man of murder when the courtroom contained no body.
And the first jury could not do it.