Late on the night of November 18, 1986, a fierce wind mixed with a blizzard swept through connecticut in the United States. Located at the Krafts home at 5 Newtown New District Road, the live-in nanny Mary. Thomas was awakened by a loud noise coming from Helen's bedroom, the hostess upstairs.
She hurried up, ready to find out, but the noise suddenly stopped, "I was probably hallucinating," and Mary lay down on the bed again, having a night's nightmare in the howling wind.
Early the next morning, Mary was woken up by her host, Richard Clofts, who said that Helen had driven alone to her sister-in-law Karen's house and urged her to rush to the rendezvous with her 3 children.
Mary reluctantly took the children on the road, grumbling as she drove, "Who would visit someone else's house in the early morning on a snowy day?" ”
Curiously, Mary didn't see Helen at Karen's house.
Three days later, on November 22, Mary was cleaning the couple's master bedroom when she found a grapefruit-sized black-red stain on the carpet, but she was in a hurry to go out and did not have time to clean the carpet.
When Mary returned again, she was surprised to find that the carpet in the master bedroom and the children's bedroom had disappeared. Richard, the man, smiled and told her that he had nothing to do at home for a few days off, so he came to clean up the whole house.
Mary jerked her head up at Richard's face, and somehow she noticed that Richard seemed to be smiling unnaturally. The loud noise of the night before suddenly hit her chest, and an ominous breath spread from the soles of her feet along the nerves to her whole body, and Mary's hands trembled involuntarily.
At this time, the doorbell of the house was ringing, and Helen's colleague and close friend Anna rushed into the door, and she angrily shouted at Richard: "Is there something wrong with Helen?" ”
Anna would talk to Helen on the phone every day, but for a whole day on the 19th, Anna did not contact Hai Lun. She asked Richard anxiously, and the answer was that Helen had been out of town.
But the following week, Helen neither went to work at the airline nor asked the company for leave, and Anna could no longer sit still and ran straight to confront Richard in person.
Richard laughed: "Anna, you probably watched "Miami Storm" (a crime investigation program that was popular in the United States at the time), Helen just went out to breathe, you know, she likes to travel alone." 」 ”
Richard left the house after perfunctory Anna, apparently not wanting to be pestered by her anymore.
Anna turned her head to look at Mary, her face as earth-colored as she was: "He's lying, really. In the face of the repeated inquiries of Helen's friends, Richard had given the answers of going back to Denmark to see his sick mother and going to Paris to see female friends, etc., and this time, he gave Anna another explanation, which could not help but make people suspicious.
Mary, who was already suspicious of the sudden disappearance of the hostess, told Anna what she had seen and heard in the past few days, and Anna did not hesitate to rush into the new town police station.
Experienced police officers immediately locked richard in the suspect in Helen's disappearance.
Richard, a pilot at Eastern Airlines, has been married to Helen, who is a flight attendant for 11 years, and has three children, a man and a woman. Despite Richard's repeated claims that he and Helen were happily married, Helen filed divorce proceedings in court and mysteriously disappeared as the trial was about to begin. Friends suddenly recalled that Helen had worriedly mentioned to them that if she disappeared one day, she must have been killed by Richard.
Richard had been married twice before he knew Helen, and after the marriage and the peach blossoms continued, Helen argued with him about this, and got a fist that rained on her body. As Richard's domestic violence escalates, Helen resolves to file for divorce.
The police preliminarily judged that Richard had a good motive for committing the crime. However, in the face of interrogation, Richard behaved unusually calmly, and the police could not find the slightest flaw.
As long as the police officers in the United States encounter a difficult case, they will sacrifice the killer - lie detector. To the surprise of the police, Richard went through three lie detector tests around December 1986, but all three times the results showed that he had no problems, and Richard arrogantly provoked them: "You prove it." ”
The police scratched their heads, and they rushed into Richard's house to look for physical evidence, but they rummaged inside and out, and they didn't find Helen's body.
According to the common practice in the Judicial Circles of the United States at that time, the discovery of the corpse was the necessary evidence to prove that the murder occurred. Although Helen has been missing for a long time, she cannot be sure that she was killed without finding the body. The police had a reason to slack off, and they even deluded themselves into thinking that Helen's friends were fine: "You must have watched too much criminal investigation TV." ”
Despite numerous setbacks, Helen's friends were reluctant to give up, and they went to the Connecticut State Police Department's Major Crimes Unit, when the famous Chinese detective Li Changyu was serving as the chief forensic expert of the Connecticut State Police Court, and on December 17, the case was officially handed over to him.
Figure | Li Changyu
After reading the lie detector report of the Xinzhen police, Li Changyu's first reaction was that as a husband whose wife had been missing for a long time, Richard seemed to be too calm.
The principle of the lie detector used at that time was very simple, people often lied with rapid heartbeat, blushing and sweating, which triggered changes in blood pressure, breathing, heart rate and skin voltage, and these physiological changes were not easily controlled by consciousness. Therefore, the police believe that the lie detector is quite reliable.
But in fact, the credibility of this lie detector test result is not high. Even innocent people are nervous to the point of sweating in the face of serious police interrogation, while many professionally trained agents can easily fool lie detectors.
As the best forensic expert in the United States, Li Changyu has always held such a view on the conclusion of lie detection: "Passing the lie detector does not mean that it is not involved in the case; not passing the lie detector test does not mean that it is involved in the case." All in all, he didn't believe in polygraphs, only real scientific evidence.
After some investigation, Li Changyu was surprised to find that Richard was actually an agent of the CIA before, and later volunteered as a part-time police officer, and the lie detector was like a child's toy in his eyes.
Li Changyu already knew that he was facing a calm and calm opponent, who had a wealth of anti-reconnaissance experience.
The key physical evidence that can confirm Richard's crime is the missing Helen's body, in order to avoid hitting the grass and snake, Li Changyu took advantage of Richard's christmas with his family to spend Christmas in Florida, leading 12 serious crime team detectives to search Richard's home.
The scene of Richard's house made Li Changyu take a breath of cold air. Previous police searches have destroyed the scene, and this time the interior is a mess, the corridor and the master bedroom have been repainted blue, and most of the rubber mats under the master bedroom carpet and carpet have disappeared. Detectives used magnifying glasses and ultraviolet light sources to search the corners of the house and found no blood or other evidence that he was killed.
Something has definitely happened to this house! This is what Li Changyu deduced from his intuition based on years of experience in handling cases.
On December 27, Li Changyu, who had returned to Richard's house in vain, this time brought his helpers, Helen's friends, who needed to know the original furniture of the house.
Through memories, Helen's friends helped Li Changyu restore the position of Helen's big bed. After moving the bed back to its original place, Li Changyu, based on the habit of American women who like to sleep near the bathroom, and reminiscent of the "black and red stains" that Nanny Mary had seen earlier, and deduced that the blood stains may have come from the bottom of the bed on Helen's side.
Although the carpet had long since disappeared, Li Changyu found with subtle observation that next to the stain site, there were several small reddish-brown blood spots that were almost invisible to the naked eye.
When Li Changyu goes out to handle cases, he will carry three tools with him - a large number of luminol and other chemical reagents, a magnifying glass and a multi-wavelength light portable lamp source. Luminol reagents can detect suspicious blood stains under appropriate fluorescence irradiation after the addition of distilled water.
In the room, Li Changyu used the three tools to find several reactions to suspected blood. In addition, bathroom cleaning cloths and washed towels also have a positive blood reaction.
Based on the distribution of these blood stains, Li Changyu deduced that Helen may have been changing the sheets when she was killed, the murderer attacked her from behind, Helen fell to her knees or fell to the foot of the bed after being injured, and her blood splashed directly on the surface of the mattress.
In order to confirm the conjecture, Li Changyu cut a mattress of 6×6 square inches, and found a large number of tiny reddish-brown blood stains on it under a high-powered microscope, and these blood spots were consistent with Helen's blood type, all of which were O blood.
By now, it is almost certain that Richard killed Helen, but Lee faces the same dilemma as the Police in Newtown: Where did Helen's body go?
When reasoning about the case, Li Changyu seemed to see his former colleague Richard hiding in the shadows and smiling at himself: "Dr.Li (Dr. Li), you still admit defeat." ”
In order to find clues, Li Changyu used the most advanced infrared high-altitude photography equipment to search a radius of hundreds of miles, but unfortunately he found nothing but a cow.
Just as the case entered the labyrinth, an angry snowplow driver approached Li Changyu and provided an important clue.
The snowplow driver saw an industrial wood crusher parked on the bridge at four o'clock in the morning on a snowy night, and he kindly said to the driver: "The wind and snow are so big, go home early." Who knew that the other party not only did not appreciate it, but also put up his middle finger at him very impolitely.
Coincidentally, the snowplow driver saw Richard's picture in the newspaper and immediately recognized him as the person who humiliated him that day.
Li Changyu followed the fork where the shredder had stayed, searching for its trajectory, and finally came all the way to the side of Lake Yola, and found some pieces of broken wood on the embankment, as well as a torn envelope (after collage restoration, it was confirmed that the address of Helen's home was written on it).
At this point, the entire chain of the case has been completed: Richard killed his wife Helen in the middle of the night of a snowstorm, wiped away the blood in the house, and then used a wood crusher to shred her body, and then threw the body into the lake.
After a field trip around Lake Yolla, Li Changyu shouted "bad", although it is called a lake, it is actually a branch of another river, and the water flow is very turbulent. The broken bones are thrown into the flowing lake water, either swallowed by the fish in the lake or gone with the waves, making it difficult to leave a trace.
Unwilling to concede defeat to the murderer in this way, Li Changyu found a pig weighing about the same size as Helen, and persuaded his daughter to cut off her long hair as an experimental tool and began to carry out the experiment of throwing the body by the wood crusher.
The results of the experiment gave everyone a glimmer of hope, the bones can only be thrown as far as 15 feet, except that some heavier bones will sink to the bottom of the lake and find no trace, and some lighter bones and hair will remain within one or two feet of the lake. In other words, the lake does not erase all traces of Richard's crime, and the shattered body of Helen at the bottom of the lake may be recovered.
Just when preparing to do a big job, the sudden heavy snow added great difficulty to Li Changyu's search, and the group walked hard in the snow two feet deep, working intensively for 10 to 20 hours a day, only to search for evidence in the frozen soil and the cold and bone-chilling lake.
The people responsible for searching for the soil on the shore divided the vast search area into a grid surface with a side length of 8 inches, shoveled the soil layer up after melting the snow little by little with a portable heater, placed it on the table inside the makeshift tent, filtered it with a sieve, separated the leaves and larger objects, and then cleaned it, and viewed nearby with a magnifying glass and a powerful light.
Thousands of suspicious particles are then loaded into evidence boxes made of cardboard and shipped back to the laboratory for further testing.
The state police diving unit searching in the lake is even harder, the lake is deep, cold and turbid, and can only stay at the bottom of the water for 5 to 10 minutes at most, all by hand and foot groping at the bottom of the lake.
Students from nearby schools were keen to throw books at the bottom of the lake, and the dive team fished out a large number of books, shoes, wine bottles and other messy things, but the key evidence was not seen.
When the team members salvaged a chainsaw with a worn number, they looked depressed and took it to Li Changyu to ask if they wanted to keep it. Every day, they have to salvage countless suspected murder weapons from the lake, and this broken chainsaw does not attract any interest from everyone.
But Li Changyu suddenly raised his head, staring closely at this chainsaw that looked very new, and his heart was suddenly excited, and his intuition told him that this chainsaw might have something to do with the case.
Although the chainsaw number was worn, Li Changyu restored the number in seconds , E591616 — within seconds using the chemical dominant method, which he said after the case was solved that he would never forget the number in his lifetime.
An investigation on the credit card slip from the local dealer revealed that the chainsaw was sold to Richard. Afterwards, many criminal police officers and journalists marveled at Li Changyu's intuition, and only he himself knew that this acumen came from the rich experience accumulated in thousands of cases and the strength of the team.
In addition to the chainsaw, detectives found a total of 3 ounces of human tissue, including 2,660 hairs, 69 small human bone fragments, 6 drops of human blood, and a truncated human skull in the snow by Lake Yorra. Based on the human form and voluminous evidence spelled out from the fragments, Richard was eventually sentenced to first-degree murder in March 1989 and sentenced to 99 years in prison.
During the court trial, Li Changyu told the jury that the biggest possibility was that Richard deliberately murdered his wife, of course, it was not ruled out that in the course of the fierce dispute between the husband and wife, Richard accidentally killed his wife. Throughout the process, Richard remained silent.
Although Richard was sentenced, he still refused to plead guilty, and after serving nearly 20 years in prison, he wrote a text message to Li Changyu: "Dr. Lee, you are the only person who told the truth in this trial, I agree with your analysis, but this is an accident." ”
Li Changyu did not reply to his letter, and everyone hoped that it was an accident, but reason told him that the probability was almost zero.
In the process of handling the case, Li Changyu has encountered many similar cases of wife killing, and her husbands are well-educated and wealthy, and they are quite decent in their treatment of people and things. But beneath their polite exterior lies a violent and dark soul.
The lively and beautiful Helen, just when she was about to escape the shadow of domestic violence, was premeditated and dismembered by her highly intelligent husband with extremely cruel means, no matter how cunning Richard tried, this is the truth of the whole case.
Text | Snow