The Wood Chipper

A True Crime Story

By: Anthony Crafts

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In the dead of a Connecticut winter, Helle Crafts vanished without a trace.

She was a devoted mother, a respected flight attendant, and a woman quietly preparing to leave a troubled marriage. Her disappearance would ignite one of the most haunting criminal investigations in American history—one that ended in a conviction without a body, without a witness, and without a clear cause of death.

Her husband, Richard Crafts—a stoic airline pilot and part-time cop—was accused of committing the unthinkable: killing his wife, dismembering her, and disposing of her remains using a wood chipper during a snowstorm.

What followed was a trial that shocked the nation. Forensic science was pushed to its limits. Tiny fragments of bone, hair, and tooth were held up as proof of murder. But was it enough?

The Wood Chipper is a deeply human exploration of doubt, disappearance, and the thin line between justice and assumption. More than a story of murder, it is a study in ambiguity—and a haunting meditation on the absence that remains when truth cannot be fully known.

How do you convict a man of murder when the victim is never found?