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[Music] hi hi awful weather out there you want want to go inside the diner no uh I don't want anyone to see
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me like this you're not going to like these it's what you thought on a dark rainy day in the fall
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of 1986 hel crafts learn from a private investigator that her husband was having an
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affair is that your husband yes that's Richard shortly after this meeting helic
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crafts disappeared this is the story of how forensic science solved the puzzle [Music]
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[Music] I first met hellocrafts in uh the fall of 1986 uh she came in to see me and was
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discussing the possibility of a divorce from her husband she was very concerned about what was happening at that time
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she was also concerned um about um potential violence shall we say by all accounts 39-year-old hel crafts was a
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caring mother of three young children in an unhappy marriage she strongly suspected the affair she uh felt she
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knew who the individual was but she really wanted some confirmation so we talked about hiring a det itive to prove
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that in fact yes he was involved with another woman at that time it was a typical scenario of husband is never
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home constantly lying about his whereabouts and she had had enough when hel crafts hired detective Keith Mayo
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she provided an important lead a longdistance number she saw on the phone bills but didn't recognize I met with
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her uh several days after uh we had caught uh Richard with his girlfriend and there were many photos of
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uh affection between the two of them her uh kissing him and holding his hand and
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rubbing his back those types of photos Rich she just broke down she cried for at least 5 or 10
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minutes just sobbing Hela and Richard crafts had been married for 12 years they both work for the airlines Hela as
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a flight attendant for PanAm Richard a pilot for Eastern Airlines he was also a part-time policeman I would describe him
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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
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and friends say Richard sometimes hit Hela dearest mother here I am again in London I have said to Richard I want to
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be divorced I no longer trust in Richard hugs Hela after Hela filed for divorce she
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confided in friends on her flight crew I want to tell you something I told my lawyer if anything ever happens to me
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don't think it was an accident was an accident and that's an unusual comment
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to get from a client on November 18th 1986 Hela returned from a European flight assignment and was dropped off at
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home by her best friend it was the last time anyone saw her a few days later Hela missed her
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next flight assignment she didn't call in so friends called the crafts home Richard said she went to Denmark to
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visit her sick mother later he told a different story that Hela was on vacation with a friend all which proved
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not to be true and when this all came together one started talking to the next to the next there was a collective sense
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of panic in short time the friends were basically telling me that she had disappeared and
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uh that uh she was not the type of individual who would do this she had three small children so I called Keith
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Mayo I immediately told Diane that I thought we should go over to the New Town Police Department to report her
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missing and they just turned a deaf ear on us so Mayo launched his own investigation in this home video the
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crafts live in nanny talks about some mysterious dark stain she noticed on the carpet shortly after Hela disappeared in
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the inside the bedroom door was a spot a black spot yeah how big would you say it
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was that how about that big yeah did it look like a stain it looked like it was stay
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but it hadn't been there before the fact that there was new carpet in the bed
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master bedroom and Richard ripped up the carpet and wouldn't give the nanny an
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explanation as to why also suspicious a large freezer missing from the garage and credit card receipt showed that
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Richard had rented a commercial wood chipper right after Hela disappeared had something happened to
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Hela inside the house and was her husband involved police asked Richard crafts to
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take a lie detector test did you kill your wife no do you know your wife's whereabouts no
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did you have anyone kill your wife no showed very little reaction at all there was nothing that either my partner saw
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or I saw that indicated that he was lying with helicraft still missing and no leads Connecticut State Police called
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in their secret weapon forensic expert Dr Henry [Music] Lee Dr Henry Lee is the director of the
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Connecticut State Police forensics laboratory and one of the world most respected forensic experts he
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accompanied police as they searched the Craft's home we star exam some piece of
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physical evidence and uh found some uh uh tiny clue on the mattress doly discovered five tiny stains so small
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they could barely be seen could they hold the key to The Disappearance of hellocrafts an orthotolidine Solution on
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the mattress fibers turned blue it was blood a species test proved it was human blood but was it helis an antigen test
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revealed type O positive the same type as hel crafts and microscopic analysis revealed it was circulation blood and
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not menstrual if a circulation blood now which means a blood vessel has to be injured to create such a pattern Dr Lee
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studied the angle and intensity of the blood's impact he concluded the blood
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hit the mattress at an angle of 10° meaning it came from an individual leaning over the bed or
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kneeling the blood was moving through the air at medium velocity consistent with an injury caused by a blunt object
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and there was a 6in blood smear on the side of the mattress the bathroom towels had been
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washed recently but Dr Lee tested them with an orthotolidine solution the blue areas
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proved the towels had been soaked with blood the next issue of course a human body cannot just vanish in the
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air a body has to be someplace but there was no body no weapon and no Witnesses police needed
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more to go on so they looked for any unusual events that might somehow be connected to hel Craft's disappearance
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it led to an important break it snowed the week of hela's disappearance a snowplow driver reported seeing a wood
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chipper on a bridge about 3:30 in the morning a man briefly appeared wearing an orange Poncho he saw the same wood
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chipper again on River Road about an hour later I said well take this man to the location to the exact location where
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he saw the wood chipper it was here where the honic river runs into Lake Zoar police searched the riverbank all
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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
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mail addressed to miss hel L crafts they were just laying there you know and I thought
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good Lord you know we didn't I didn't even think too much about the how the
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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
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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
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spent days sifting through the dirt and debris along the riverbank in addition to the letter and blonde hair they also
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discovered a few blue fibers a gray piece of metal what looked to be some Tiny Bone fragments and another piece of
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evidence which just appeared the sun had melted the snow away from this wall and uh right against the wall
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laying right on top of the leaves a painted fingernail divers explored the bottom of
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the river and found pieces of a chainsaw even more unusual the serial number had
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been scratched off everything was taken to the state police forensic laboratory in Meridan Connecticut because any
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investigation involves so many specialty area that's why we start calling in
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forign 16 by now the story was Front Page News around the world Richard crafts was a
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suspect but he maintained his innocence saying he didn't kill his wife he didn't
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know her whereabouts and that he had passed a lie detector test but the forensics might tell a different
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story when Dr Lee convened the first meeting of his forensic team he knew they faced a difficult task they need
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either that piece of paper from me that says somebody's dead or occasionally a huge pile of
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evidence to convince them to identify the individual become a scientific challenge they began by examining every
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Notch of the chainsaw and found some human hair tissue and the minute piece of fiber in eyes it was barely visible
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with the naked eye on The Cutting Edge of the chain the fiber was a bluish green cotton the same color as hela's
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favorite cotton night shirt and it matched other blue fibers found at the river but since the serial number was
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scratched away it was impossible to tell who owned the chainsaw or was it by using particular
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chemical solution that will eat away the upper layers of the metal that have been
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altered by the water or by some physical attempts to alter the serial number it worked the serial number on the
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chainsaw 5 9 2 1 6 1 6 it matched the warranty card sent in by Richard B crafts next forensic experts wanted to
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find out whose hair was on the chainsaw and at the river every one of the 2,660 hairs was examined under a
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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
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find some no hair to compare basically we use her hairbrush there was a characteristics that that is
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somewhat unusual for head hair and that's a ridge that was present in the head hairs they concluded that the hairs
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found on the chainsaw and at the river were microscopically similar to the hair from hela's hairbrush next they turned
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their attention to the fingernail with the bright red nail polish a chemist compared it to a bottle of hela's
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fingernail polish found in her home analyzing the various organic compounds these graphs show that the Polish on the
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fingernail found at the river is the same as polish taken from the bottle found on hel's nightstand good forensic
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work determined that the fingernail polish and the hair were both similar to hela's but they couldn't prove she was
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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
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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
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suspected that the bones found that the river had gone through the wood chipper crafts had rented so Dr Lee got the same
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machine and ran a test this is actual footage a pig was put through the chip chipper since their skin and bones are
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similar to humans Dr Lee noticed that the chipper produced a unique signature type of cut one that matched The Cutting
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pattern on the debris found at the river what I was presented with were these very very tiny uh literally millimeter
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size fragments of um bone and in amongst some of these fragments it was possible
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to uh see that some of the fragments uh indeed came from a human under a spectrograph Dr Harper noticed tiny
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grooves in the bones the grooves told a story they were formed by blood vessels inside the top of the skull something
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only humans have they also identified skull fragments from the side of the head and these were the most important
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from a forensic point of view so if the fracture is beveling outwards another the force came from the inside we know
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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
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it happened but we certainly knew she was dead afterwards okay so now we know a human
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being is dead the next question is who Dr Harper froze some of the bone fragments with
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liquid nitrogen then ground them to a fine powder tests revealed the bones came from an
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individual with type O positive blood hel Craft's blood type finally Dr Lee turned his attention to the gray piece
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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
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form of identification they needed more so Dr Lee asked Dr karazulas himself to go to the river where he searched for 5
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days then a break i' been at the crime scene for maybe eight hours I slipped
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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
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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
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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
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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
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mouth finally the forensic team had an actual match and they say hel Craft's
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teeth are in this pile and they were knocked out of her head violently and we have a human head
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going through violent injury in the same pile so we said that means hel craft is
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Dead period based on the forensic evidence Richard crafts was arrested and charged
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in the murder of his wife what happened to hel crafts based on the forensic evidence a reasonable
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scenario can be pieced together hey thanks for the ride on November 18th hel crafts returned from
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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
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expected home until midnight before going to bed Hela changed into her favorite blue night shirt looked through
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her mail stuffed it into her pocket to believe and began Chang I don't believe
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you you know I can't take this anymore why don't you just get out no you get
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out you get out leave me alone then it happened quickly using a police flashlight the first blow
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knocked her to the ground the second produced the blood splatter hitting the mattress at a 10° angle while falling
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her head grazed the side of the mattress leaving the blood smear he wrapped the body in the bed B
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covers carried her through the house into the garage and placed the body into a [Music]
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freezer Richard tried to clean up the blood with some towels which were later washed but traces of blood remained on
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the towels later discovered by Dr Lee Marie Thomas the nanny arrived home around 2:00 a.m. and went right to
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bed at Daybreak crafts took the children and the nanny to his sister's house
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saying their mother had left earlier Marie hurry up he then rented the largest commercial wood chipper he
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could find and a U-Haul truck using his credit card by Night Time hel's body was
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completely Frozen crafts transported The Remains along with a chainsaw and some wood to the
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river the snowplow driver spotted the wood chipper on a bridge around 3:30 in the morning and again near the river an
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hour later using his chainsaw crafts dismembered hela's frozen body and put the pieces through the chipper along
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with some wood since the body was frozen It produced little if any blood splatter
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most of the debris blew into the river only a few pieces fell short landing on the bank the male hel placed in her
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night shirt pocket pass through the chipper virtually untouched before leaving crafts took
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apart the chainsaw scratched the serial number off and threw the pieces into the
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river how close was the brutal murder of hel crabs to the Perfect Crime boy damn
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close damn close if that person truly believes they're not going to be caught
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and there's no fear or threat to them they could get by a polygraph test the
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key solving this case so called teamwork assemble a good tee and work together amazing you the human body
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writes so much of its history in itself [Music] oh [Music] a [Music]