True Crime Stories

In the last few months there has been a lot of talk about authorities solving cold cases with the help of genealogy websites. There is a group out there that has been able to take the DNA results of people who have entered them into genealogy sites in hopes of finding relatives and either matching them, or doing what they call “reverse” trees and comparing them to unknown DNA tests in cold cases. One just recently happened here in Indiana where I live and when they went to the man's home he readily confessed to the crime. One day I will be blogging about that case, but today it is about John Heath, who was convicted twenty-eight years after his wife disappeared, not by one of these methods, but simply by chance. If the new owners of property once owned by Heath had not been renovating AND decided to open a hatch in the floor of an old dairy barn the body of Elizabeth Heath would have likely never been found. DNA was not even tested in this case as experts claimed tha...

This is one of those cases that if you know a lot about true crime you remember hearing about. There have been television documentary shows about it for decades. Part of the notoriety that it received came from the fact that it was the first time prosecutors in the state of Connecticut obtained a conviction despite there not being a body to examine. I had a report that Richard and Helle Crafts were married in 1979 but I cannot say that is accurate because other reports state that by 1986 the couple had been married eleven years and had three children. Regardless of how long they were married, by late 1986 the marriage was in shambles. Both Richard and Helle were in the airline business. He was a pilot and she was a flight attendant for a Dutch airline. Helle was of Dutch heritage, in fact, her mother still lived in Denmark. It was said that the marriage was failing due to Richard's infidelity and that Helle had recently filed for divorce but the couple still li...