This Job Is Murder, And Renowned Forensic Expert Excels At It

MERIDEN, Conn. - Richard Crafts plotted the perfect crime - disposing of his murdered wife's body with a machine that turns tree branches and limbs into mulch. No body, no clues, no worries.

It seemed as if his estranged wife, Helle, a 39-year-old flight attendant, had vanished after Nov. 18, 1986.

Enter Henry C. Lee, world-renowned forensics expert.

The woman's friends told him she feared her husband was trying to kill her. A snowplow driver remembered seeing a man who looked like Crafts hauling a diesel woodchipper in a blizzard. Crafts, it developed, had rented such a machine a week earlier.

Meanwhile, divers fished a chainsaw out of the Housatonic River. Records showed Crafts purchased the saw with his credit card.

An army of 100 detectives scoured the area, finding wood chips smudged with blood and body tissue. Investigators recovered 56 tiny fragments - a dental crown, a tooth, a tip of a thumb, bone splinters and hair strands.

It amounted to less than an ounce of Helle Crafts, or one-thousandth of her body, but Lee identified her.

Human tissue on the chainsaw was the same as that found on the mulch. The dentistry matched. Fingernail polish from a nail fragment was the same as that in a bottle in the Crafts' home; hair strands from the scene were identical to those on the woman's hairbrush.

The result: Crafts was convicted of murder in 1989.

Credit Henry C. Lee.

"It's not a question of whether he can walk on water - that's an established fact. It's how far," said Carla Noziglia, director of laboratory services for the Las Vegas metro police department and former director of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors.

BOTH BASIC AND HIGH-TECH

Henry Lee, a native of China and former police captain in Taiwan, is director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory. At 53, he has investigated more than 5,000 homicides.

His tools are as basic as a magnifying glass. But he also enjoys the high-tech advantages of an electron microscope, an argon laser for detecting latent fingerprints, DNA testing, and an infrared spectrometer.

He has a staff of 34 and a budget of $2 million, a far cry from the single microscope in a converted lavatory he inherited when he took the job in 1978.

Forensic science is about painstaking work and long, erratic hours in seamy locales. It's about a warren of an office cluttered with 19 cardboard boxes of casework, a 5-inch stack of phone messages impaled on a metal spike at his desk, a mini-refrigerator stocked mostly with film for crime-scene cameras, lunches of takeout sandwiches and doughnuts.

Yet through the drudge work, when the clues are strung together like a connect-the-dots picture puzzle, Lee can say, "Gotcha."

Lee's sleuthing is primarily done in Connecticut, although he's assisted investigations in 50 states and about a dozen countries. Seventeen states recognize him as an expert witness.

He was involved in the 1980 murder case of Scarsdale diet doctor Herman Tarnower and the aftermath of the 1985 shoot-out between the Philadelphia police and the radical group MOVE.

More recently, he testified for the defense in the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, and donated his $4,000 witness fee to a task force investigating the unsolved murders of 12 Connecticut women.

Using a handkerchief to make his point, Lee said Patricia Bowman's black dress with the colored trim showed no grass stains, no blood stains, no soil stains, no rips and no sign of a fight.

"There was just lack of evidence of a struggle," he said.

The dress convinced at least one juror who voted for acquittal.

BLOOD-AND-GUTS FEELING

The youngest of 13 children, Lee fled wartime China for Taiwan with his mother. His father was killed by mainland communists.

Lee became a scientist because the blood-and-guts of gumshoe work - his first murder involved a body cut up and stored in six jars - made him queasy.

"I was too softhearted to be a policeman. So I gave that up to study forensics. I'd see a body all chopped up and I couldn't even look at meat for two or three months," he said.

Lee came to New York in 1965 with his wife, two suitcases, $50 and just a few words of English. He graduated from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 1972, working for a time as a martial arts instructor, waiter and lab technician. At New York University, he earned a master's degree in science and a doctorate in biochemistry.

In the years since, he has compiled a resume that stretches over 38 pages: professor of forensics at the University of New Haven, lecturer at Yale and at the People's University in Beijing, editor and writer for crime journals, and author of a handbook on crime scenes.

His crime-solving has taken him from Chile to China. His expertise has attracted investigators from Germany, the Soviet Union - even Scotland Yard. At times, Lee is positively Holmes-like, relying partly on intuition and partly on logic, sometimes given to Sherlock's lingo.

"It's elementary," said Lee. "Don't forget the basics. Use simple logic. You have to use deductive reasoning to try to put the puzzle together. Not just see the tree, but the forest."

Lee's 16-hour workday begins at 5:30 a.m. when he opens the office. He also has a lab at home. He's on call every day, seven days a week.

He has investigated whether a Chinese restaurant was serving dog meat or if a state lottery ticket had been altered. But mostly, his work is murder.

Blood spatters and a missing window shade helped trip up Dr. Russell Manfredi, a West Hartford cardiologist who was convicted of manslaughter in the death of his wife in 1987.

Catherine Manfredi's body was found in a wrecked car. Manfredi told police his wife had been spitting up blood and was driving herself to the hospital when the accident occurred. But Lee didn't buy his story.

He found blood on the instep of the car, which would be impossible if the door were closed. Now he knew the woman had been injured beforehand.

At the Manfredi house, Lee noticed one of the bedroom window shades was missing. That seemed an oddity in an expensive mansion.

He saw blood on the window sill and a long blood stain on the roof shingles. In Lee's mind, he saw a body dragged and then dropped to the concrete driveway.

The wife had been bludgeoned, and her husband had tried to cover it by faking an accident. A jury agreed.

Asked once by a television interviewer how he could be outsmarted, Lee replied: "Just don't commit a crime. If you don't commit a crime, then I cannot find any clue."

Elementary.