Review: Herzog, The Woodchipper Murder
Sep. 15th, 2019 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny
The Woodchipper Murder by Arthur Herzog IIIMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The first episode of Forensic Files is about the gruesome murder of Helle Crafts (and, yes, Fargo is based on it, too), so I knew exactly what this book was about when I saw it. It's not like Herzog is hiding his light under a bushel, here. It is perfectly competent true crime, without being much more than that, and Herzog for some reason published his book before Richard Crafts' second trial (the first one having ended in a hung jury because one juror seems to have been a spectacularly stupid man). The second trial resulted in the first murder conviction in Connecticut without an actual body. (They found bits of Helle Crafts: a tooth, a fingernail, some fragments of bone.)
Crafts will be eligible for parole in 2021, which was unimaginably far away in 1989, when The Woodchipper Murder was published. He will be 84.
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