ability to find the dead. In mid-January 1987, it wasnât a buried body but a body spread far and wideâa case that involved forensic scientist Henry Lee (who later became famous as a defense expert in O. J. Simpsonâs trial). The case became the inspiration for the darkly comic Coen brothersâ movie Fargo . Helle Crafts, a flight attendant, was missing after beginning divorce proceedings against her philandering husband, Richard Crafts, an airline pilot. Crafts had used his credit card to rent a wood chipper and to buy a freezer and a chain saw. A snowplow driver reported seeing a man using a wood chipper along the bank of Connecticutâs Housatonic River in the middle of the night during a snowstorm.
Lady was put to the tedious task of sniffing piles and piles of frozen wood chips hauled in from the riverbank. One pile was particularly interesting: Lady alerted. Itâs here. What she had found, although tiny, was human. Ultimately, because of Ladyâs alert, police recovered sixty tiny chips of bone. A bit of blood. Strands of blond hair. A tooth with a gold crown. And a fingernail whose color exactly matched a bottle of polish in Helle Craftsâs bathroom cabinet. It was the first time in Connecticut history that a murder conviction was secured without a body. Richard Crafts was sentenced to fifty years in prison in 1990. The earliest he can be released is August 2021, when heâll be eighty-four years old.
â¢Â  â¢Â  â¢
Another object [of this invention] is to provide a method of building construction in which the dangers attendant upon working at elevated levels will be reduced to a minimum.
âUnited States Patent Office No. 2,715,013, August 9, 1955
It was just three months after the Helle Crafts case, in late April 1987, when Andy used cadaver dogs for the purpose that the U.S. Army and the Southwest Research Institute originally envisioned: a major disaster, the worst in modern Connecticut history.
Twin sixteen-floor concrete buildings under construction in Bridgeport collapsed. LâAmbiance Plaza fell in seconds. Within hours, Andy and Lady, along with four other Connecticut state troopers and their dogs, were on the scene, facing a mountain of broken concrete slabs, twisted steel, and iron rebar. Dogs and men inched across the pitched slabs of concrete. The troopers and workers carried spray paint and flags. The German shepherds would alert, giving the general location of body after body, sometimes on open holes, sometimes at the edge of the pancaked slabs, where scent could escape.
Though it was early on, construction workers and their families were becoming aware that the scene was less a rescue operation than a recovery operation. Twenty-two workers were injured, some badly, but they were the fortunate ones: blown off the edges of the slabs by the force of the collapse as the floors pancaked down. The dogs alerted time after time after time, inhaling concrete dust. Then the cold spring rain started, tamping down the dust and making footing even more treacherous, intensifying the cold glare of the floodlights on the massive rubble pile.
The dogs helped find all twenty-eight victims. Italian-American, African-American, Irish-American workers, their bodies so broken that Andy said he had never seen so much damage on human bodies, beforeor since. And Andy has seen almost everything that humans, or nature, can do. âIt still haunts me,â he said.
LâAmbiance Plaza still angers him. Quick, cheapâand dangerous. It still angers me. In a minor twist of fate, Andy and I realized nearly a quarter century later, when we met face-to-face, that we had probably passed each other on that site. Andy was managing the dog searches for days, until the last body was removed. I was there only one night as a newspaper reporter for the Hartford Courant . All disasters, by nature, are terrible, but it was the worst disaster I had ever covered. I played
Lady was put to the tedious task of sniffing piles and piles of frozen wood chips hauled in from the riverbank. One pile was particularly interesting: Lady alerted. Itâs here. What she had found, although tiny, was human. Ultimately, because of Ladyâs alert, police recovered sixty tiny chips of bone. A bit of blood. Strands of blond hair. A tooth with a gold crown. And a fingernail whose color exactly matched a bottle of polish in Helle Craftsâs bathroom cabinet. It was the first time in Connecticut history that a murder conviction was secured without a body. Richard Crafts was sentenced to fifty years in prison in 1990. The earliest he can be released is August 2021, when heâll be eighty-four years old.
â¢Â  â¢Â  â¢
Another object [of this invention] is to provide a method of building construction in which the dangers attendant upon working at elevated levels will be reduced to a minimum.
âUnited States Patent Office No. 2,715,013, August 9, 1955
It was just three months after the Helle Crafts case, in late April 1987, when Andy used cadaver dogs for the purpose that the U.S. Army and the Southwest Research Institute originally envisioned: a major disaster, the worst in modern Connecticut history.
Twin sixteen-floor concrete buildings under construction in Bridgeport collapsed. LâAmbiance Plaza fell in seconds. Within hours, Andy and Lady, along with four other Connecticut state troopers and their dogs, were on the scene, facing a mountain of broken concrete slabs, twisted steel, and iron rebar. Dogs and men inched across the pitched slabs of concrete. The troopers and workers carried spray paint and flags. The German shepherds would alert, giving the general location of body after body, sometimes on open holes, sometimes at the edge of the pancaked slabs, where scent could escape.
Though it was early on, construction workers and their families were becoming aware that the scene was less a rescue operation than a recovery operation. Twenty-two workers were injured, some badly, but they were the fortunate ones: blown off the edges of the slabs by the force of the collapse as the floors pancaked down. The dogs alerted time after time after time, inhaling concrete dust. Then the cold spring rain started, tamping down the dust and making footing even more treacherous, intensifying the cold glare of the floodlights on the massive rubble pile.
The dogs helped find all twenty-eight victims. Italian-American, African-American, Irish-American workers, their bodies so broken that Andy said he had never seen so much damage on human bodies, beforeor since. And Andy has seen almost everything that humans, or nature, can do. âIt still haunts me,â he said.
LâAmbiance Plaza still angers him. Quick, cheapâand dangerous. It still angers me. In a minor twist of fate, Andy and I realized nearly a quarter century later, when we met face-to-face, that we had probably passed each other on that site. Andy was managing the dog searches for days, until the last body was removed. I was there only one night as a newspaper reporter for the Hartford Courant . All disasters, by nature, are terrible, but it was the worst disaster I had ever covered. I played
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