Chapter 23

Statements of Facts

After Bobby T got more documents out of the evidence box in the police department basement, he agreed to meet me one summer night in 2005 at the Blue Colony Diner.

This diner, located at Exit 10 off Interstate 84 at the base of Church Hill Road in Newtown, Connecticut was always a cop hotspot. On any given night you could see multiple local or state cops eating dinner. I think the owner fed them for free.

I, too, used this diner many times as a private investigator to take witness statements and conduct interviews in a public setting. The waitress who worked their for 30 years appeared just as we slid into a booth at the rear of the main seating area. As I ordered my diner staple, grilled cheese on rye, Bobby T pulled out a file folder.

A friend’s statement

“Here’s the statement Hope Lambert gave us back in 1987,” Bobby T said as he handed me a few pages across the booth. Hope Lambert’s husband Alex was a friend of Willis Brown. After Regina married Willis, she became friends with Hope, who was also a flight attendant.

I took the original one-page document and made a note of Hope’s date of birth, home address, and that she was thirty-seven years old at the time. Hope told police that Regina told her Willis was going to kill her and the children and that it would be much worse than what went on in the woodchipper murder. I jotted down quotes from Hope’s statement on a piece of paper so it wasn’t as obvious as writing in a reporter’s notebook.

“She also told me that the media reports of the Eastern pilot killing his wife were not as sensational as those of him [Willis] killing her. He [Willis] also told her [Regina] that he was also going to kill the children and dispose of their bodies so that they would never be found. He said that he would dismember her and that there would not be a trace of evidence,” according to Hope’s statement.

I’d read previous press reports quoting Hope as saying Regina told her she was in fear for her life, but reading Hope’s statement was the first time I hear about Willis’s threats to kill her in the same or worse manner as the woodchipper case.

In her statement, Hope said Regina was planning to send the children to Texas and that she didn’t want them to return to Connecticut until it was “safe.” Hope said that Regina would “never just up and leave her children” and that if she “disappeared it would not be of her doing.” The statement was not dated.

Between bites of my gooey cheese sandwich, Bobby T handed me another letter. This one was from Dwight Fontenot, Regina’s older brother, dated April 23, 1987. Dwight traveled to Connecticut from Texas approximately two weeks after his sister disappeared. He went to the Ethan Allen Inn in neighboring Danbury to meet with his brother-in-law Willis Brown. Fontenot brought along a local attorney to witness the conversation.

A brother’s statement

Dwight asked Willis “about the argument in front of the house” the week before Regina vanished. There was no public record of what Willis told his brother-in-law about the argument, but I imagine Regina talked to her older brother about it. There were several arguments between the couple the month before Regina vanished.

One argument involved Willis Brown’s twenty-one-page “letter” dated February 14, 1986, complaining about his marriage to Regina, his obsession over the paternity of his children, and his claims that his wife was a drug addict.

When Willis showed up at the house to deliver a late child support check around the same time, he had a confrontation with Regina in the driveway in front of a neighbor. Regina was upset with him, but instead of arguing, Willis just laughed. It was on this day that Willis Brown learned from his son that the two older children were traveling to Texas on March 21. The boy asked his father if he was coming too.

Willis then learned from the babysitter Sharon Ryan that a few days after the first two children were sent to Regina’s parents, she and the baby were traveling to join them in Texas on March 26. Willis now knew that his children and the babysitter would be in Texas, leaving Regina alone at the house for the first time since their separation several months before.

Days before Regina vanished, they argued a second time in the kitchen over mortgage refinancing paperwork. Willis claimed he needed more cash to keep his moped business on Block Island solvent. The bank included both their names on the application, despite Willis being the sole owner. He wanted Regina to sign the papers, and she refused.

Regina told Willis she would not sign the paperwork until he did various things for her. Willis told her, “Regina, I’m not going to be bribed by you.” He left the house, taking the paperwork with him. The loan was never processed. Apparently, Regina had put a lis pendens—Latin for “suit pending”—on the house during the restraining order hearing in Sept. 1986, and her signature was required if any real estate transactions were to transpire.

The last day Regina was seen alive

During his meeting with Willis, Dwight Fontenot asked him about March 26, the day she was last seen alive. In response, Willis said that on April 3 before 8 a.m. on his way to the dentist, “he noticed the breezeway was dirty” and said the dog had no water, that the dog had turned the “tray upside down” meaning he had flipped his water bowl over. Dwight didn’t ask him about the dog.

A neighbor told Dwight that someone fed the dog during the week after Regina disappeared. Willis also told Dwight that he made no observation about the state of the house, such as the dirty dishes left everywhere that the neighbors noticed, when he was there. He also said he didn’t go downstairs on April 3.

I find these statements curious. Willis wanted it to be known that he was not in the basement after Regina disappeared. Willis told police during his first interview that when he was in the house on April 3, he found the place a mess, so despite what he told Dwight, he had made a previous observation about the state of the house.

When state police searched the house eight weeks after Regina vanished, they found some debris in the basement coal stove, like someone had burned something, a photograph perhaps?

The Sciannas didn’t live at 16 Whippoorwill Hill Road very long, a little over a year. They moved out several months after Regina Brown disappeared. I found their new address on Bridge End Farm Road in Newtown.

A stroke of luck

As with most of my important interviews, I liked to show up unannounced, in person, and catch them off guard. I find people are more likely to talk to me and less likely to blow me off than when I try to call or email first. I knocked on the front door. Salvatore Scianna opened it slowly.

“I’m writing an article for Connecticut Magazine, and I have a few questions about your former neighbor Regina Brown,” I said. He invited me in. The house was completely empty. I was standing in the foyer when his wife, Linda, appeared.

“You just caught us,” she said. “We are moving out in about an hour.” I can’t believe my luck. I quickly started throwing questions at them.

“I called the police and they told me, ‘we do not respond to barking dogs,’’’ Salvatore said. His statement lines up with the police logbook. He confirmed he called in the complaint.

“The barking was excruciating that night. That’s why I called the police. It was out of the ordinary because the dog never barked,” he said.

He told me, when the cops wouldn’t respond, he went over to the house and hollered at the dog to shut up.

“Then I went home,” he said. “I was so exhausted I fell asleep. I don’t remember if he stopped barking or not.”

Linda remembered that first her husband called the Brown residence and there was no answer, so that’s why he went over there after he called the police.

“The dog was tied up on the porch,” Linda said. The only porch at the Brown residence was an enclosed breezeway between the main house and the detached garage. It looked like it could have been added years after the house was built.

Checking up on the dog

Linda told me that after Regina disappeared, she and another neighbor, Linda Van Horn, went through the house a week later since Van Horn had a key. She told me Van Horn’s daughter took care of the dog when Regina traveled, confirming what Van Horn herself had told me.

“There were breakfast dishes on the table, wet washcloths on the counter. It looked like someone left in a hurry,” she told me. “What I knew of her, she wouldn’t leave the house like that.” Linda told me that Regina was neat. She told me she remembered seeing a container of milk that was left out on the kitchen counter and toys everywhere.

When she went to the house Linda Van Horn told police that she was worried she would find a dead dog after a week. By the time they went into Regina’s house on April 3, the dog was untied, and had left a mess of dog poop in the garage. Which begs the question: who untied the dog between March 27 and April 3? Or the bigger question: who tied up the dog in the first place?

Linda Scianna gave me a brief history of their time on Whippoorwill Hill Road. They had only been living there about a year when Regina Brown disappeared. She recalled how cute the Brown children were. She remembered the girls’ names but not the oldest son’s.

“I never knew them to have any problems,” she said. “Willis didn’t seem violent.” But as we talked some more Linda blurted out, “Willis had issues.”

“Willis came over once and asked me where I got my work pants, that he liked them and wanted to get a pair like that,” Salvatore told me. “I thought that was odd—a Black man asking me for advice on clothes.”

A disturbed crime scene

“I felt bad, something bad happened to her,” Linda said. “No mother leaves their children behind like that. They leave their husbands, but not their children.” At some point during our interview, the Scianna’s teenage daughter arrived and quietly listened to the conversation. At times when Linda described the “shrilling bark” of the dog, she looked at her daughter, who nodded her head in agreement.

“The cops were mad at us for disturbing the crime scene,” she recalled. “But we didn’t know it was a crime scene.” Linda said that the Newtown police only interviewed her once in 1987. She remembered when news broke that Regina Brown was missing, the media showed up outside her house.

She didn’t want to go on camera because she was pregnant. Salvatore told me he thought Willis rented a charter plane, put concrete on her body, and dumped it in the ocean on his way to Block Island.

“The fishes got her,” he said. Does he mean “sleeping with the fishes” from that famous scene in The Godfather when they asked what happened to Luca Brasi? It’s intriguing that Regina’s next-door neighbor came up with one of the early police theories about how her body might have been disposed of considering Willis was a pilot. Neither Linda nor her husband ever testified in the Brown divorce case, either about what they did, heard, or saw on the night of the barking dog.

The woodchipper murder resurfaced

“Where are you moving to?” I ask Linda.

“Southbury.” Linda explained to me they moved to this Newtown neighborhood across town after leaving Whippoorwill hill Road fifteen years ago.

“You know they found the fingernail right across the river,” Linda said as she pointed from the foyer through the house toward the kitchen window that looked out over the Housatonic River.

Here I was asking questions to try to find out what happened to Regina Brown, and all her friend wanted to talk about was their proximity to the woodchipper murder crime scene.

No matter who you talked to, the woodchipper murder sucked up all the air in the room. No wonder most people don’t remember the disappearance of a Black woman named Regina Brown fours months after the woodchipper murder.

Chapter 21

The Night of the Barking Dog

Combing through court transcripts, police reports, and news clippings, as well as with my handwritten notes from numerous interviews I have conjured up what Regina Brown’s last day may have looked like.

March 26, 1987

The morning fog gave way to a warm afternoon drizzle. Regina Brown buckles her youngest into the child-restraint seat in the back of the family car. Sharon Ryan, the young, newly hired, live-in babysitter, would drive the trio to LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York.

Regina looked over her left shoulder from the front passenger seat to check on the baby as they left. She was sending Sharon and her baby to Texas to join her two older children.

Five days earlier Regina flew with her four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter to Ames, Texas. The children were going to live with their grandparents, at least temporarily, in the same house where Regina grew up in the small town.

As they prepared to leave Newtown, it was an unusually warm spring day—62 degrees—really too warm for Regina to wear the puffy white down coat with a large fur-lined hood. She may have zipped it up around her small frame or tossed it in the back of the Honda. She kept her figure slim and her manicured nails pretty, with bright red polish. As an American Airlines flight attendant part of the job is to be attractive to passengers flying at 30,000 feet.

The car was parked at the bottom of the sloping driveway, which rises to a cul-de-sac at 18 Whippoorwill Hill Road. The 3,000-square-foot house with four bedrooms stands on one acre surrounded by stunning 180-degree panoramic views of the rural countryside that stretched for more than thirty miles.

The vast, open fields crisscrossed with centuries-old stonewalls hinted at the town’s agrarian past. The S-shaped road, dotted with nearly two dozen sprawling ranches and other contemporary houses built in the late 1960s, was quiet enough that children could play and ride bikes unattended.

Sharon drove the older model Accord out of the subdivision, taking a right-hand turn onto U.S. Route 6. As they headed down the steep hill, the Taunton Tavern restaurant appeared on the right, decorated with a nautical mess of buoys, bumpers, and fishing nets. The former tugboat captain who owned the place might have thought they added charm and seaworthiness to the aging structure, but it looked like it was being held together by the miles of rope wrapped around its exterior.

Within five minutes, Danbury appeared on the horizon. After several more traffic lights on the busy highway, they arrive at the Pathmark supermarket, taking a right-hand turn into the large parking lot.

Rushing to LaGuardia Airport

A mother in a hurry and hungry, Regina ran inside and bought a half-gallon of Sealtest milk, a half-gallon of Tropicana orange juice, and a plastic container of chili. She wrote a check for $26.78 from her personal bank account and returned to the car with twenty dollars in cash.

Next stop, directly across four lanes of rushing traffic, was McDonald’s, where Regina purchased a Happy Meal. This would be the last meal she provided for her child. Sharon remembered filling the car with eight dollars of gasoline at the Mobil station at Exit 8 before heading westbound on Interstate 84.

She also remember she used Regina’s key ring, loaded with multiple keys, to drive the car. On the hour-plus drive to New York City, between bites of chili and sips of orange juice, Regina chatted about upcoming home improvements and how she planned to earn extra money working more flights. The day before she bought new curtains. She told Sharon she needed a break from the kids.

Money problems

Regina had recently complained to her divorce attorney that her estranged husband Willis Brown was three weeks late with the court-ordered weekly child support of $170. The day before she picked up a check for $1,000, payable to her, from the American Airlines Employee Federal Credit Union. It appeared this was another credit union loan like the one for $2,000 in December, which she needed to help make ends meet.

And on the day Sharon flew to Texas, Regina wrote Sharon’s paycheck for $350, but postdated it for April 1 and asked her not to cash it until she could deposit her own paycheck, which she would pick up when they arrived at LaGuardia Airport. Sharon recalled that before leaving for the airport, she overheard Regina on a telephone call telling someone to let themselves in to her house to feed the dog.

A new puppy

I imagined that Sport, a spaniel-mix puppy, was a gift to herself and her children to mark a future of happiness. In reality, Regina may have wanted a dog not only to lick her children’s faces in joy, and tussle on the front lawn, but also to warn her if anyone knocked at the door or appeared in the house unannounced.

Sport may have some Brittany in her; soft white and orange hairs appeared in her coat. She was approximately nine months old. Regina told the judge during an early divorce hearing that the puppy was in need of some shots, but she couldn’t afford them.

She said she struggled to pay for expenses for her children, as their father did not support them despite earning an annual salary of $150,000 as a pilot and substantial extra income through his moped rental business on Block Island. There was plenty of money. Willis just wasn’t in the mood to share it. Regina put the needs of her children before those of the puppy.

As they arrived in Queens, it was dark, an hour past sunset. When they pulled up to the terminal, Regina jumped into the driver’s seat and told Sharon to wait inside with her baby while she parked the car, picked up her paycheck, and made a telephone call.

A flurry of phone calls

Sharon has only been employed by the Browns for four months, just after the restraining order was issued barring Willis from his home. Willis hired Sharon after meeting her on Block Island the previous summer, knowing that with her there he would have eyes and ears in the home.

When Sharon saw Regina return to the terminal, she later told police, Regina appeared nervous and upset. A little while later, Sharon said Regina left them again to make another phone call.

According to phone records obtained by police, at 7:08 p.m. Regina called Liberty, Texas, and charged the call to her home phone. It was the last time she spoke with her family and possibly her other two children.

Within the hour, Regina Brown kissed her youngest daughter goodbye before she boarded the plane with the babysitter. This was the last time anyone saw Regina, though she had told friends and family that she planned to fix up the home, to get things in order, and to join her children in Texas in the coming days.

Before they boarded, Regina told Sharon she would call them at her mother’s house to make sure they safely arrived in Texas. They were on standby for a flight which left around eight in the evening and would take almost three and half hours to fly from New York City to Houston, and then another hour’s drive out to Ames.

They would not arrive at Regina’s parents any sooner than half past midnight Eastern Time. According to those who knew her, Regina would have stayed awake to make this call, to check up on her children, because she was that kind of mother.

A return to Newtown

Evidence points to Regina returning to Newtown that evening. Maybe she kept busy decorating the basement bedroom in her home, hanging the new curtains she bought the day before.

Or maybe she did try to call Texas, but the circuit was busy, as it had been earlier in the evening when she tried to reach her mother from LaGuardia Airport. Whatever the reason, Regina never did reach her mother.

No one knows how long Sport was barking, but sometime around two thirty in the morning, Regina’s next-door neighbor called police to complain of the constant, loud shrill barking keeping them all awake. The new moon wouldn’t rise until four fifty-nine on the morning March 27, 1987. It was unusually dark the night of the barking dog.

Chapter 20

The Logbook

Back at work in Manhattan after the Good Friday holiday and my drive around Newtown with Bobby T in 2005, I reached out to his former boss, retired Newtown Police Chief Michael DeJoseph. I wanted to mine the retired chief’s memories about the case he never closed. He happened to work in New York City for the Department of Justice in the Inspector General’s office.

“My feeling is that she is in Block Island Sound,” DeJoseph said as we sat in the upper level of a crowded Starbucks near Madison Square Garden. “I can’t prove it; it’s just my feeling.”

But then he offered up another scenario. He told me they never searched the septic system at the Brown’s Newtown home on Whippoorwill Hill Road.

“This guy (Willis) is very smart, he’s an electrical engineer. He would know how to do this,” DeJoseph said. “How long was that dog barking the night she disappeared? Long enough to open the tank and put a body in.”

“What barking dog?” I asked. I had never heard this story before. “How do you know?”

“It’s in the logbook,” DeJoseph said. “Nobody went to the house that night.”

The police logbook, where the dispatcher notes all phone calls from the swamp of humanity, was my go-to place to look for crime stories. I didn’t recall reading about any barking dog in any of the news articles Bobby T gave me.

“If you could do anything different in this case, what would it be?” I asked before I left to return to my office across midtown. DeJoseph sat silently for a haunted moment in front of me. I saw his eyes moisten behind his tinted Perry Ellis glasses.

“I’ll have to think about it,” DeJoseph says. “But that dog, that night, if someone had gone...”

Searching for the logbooks

Armed with news of a barking dog, I emailed Bobby T several times, pressing him for information. He told me what I was looking for is either in a logbook as a phone call in the early morning hours of March 27, 1987, or as a written police report about the call.

According to Bobby T, the older logbooks were either removed during a cleaning spree or after a flood in the basement of the police department, which is why he can’t find them.

“They were either thrown out or sent to the library,” he told me one night on the phone.

A visit to the library

I started my search at the library in the research section of the C.H. Booth Library on Main Street. I chatted with the research librarian and learned she moved to the area in September 1986, just as I began to cover the Newtown crime wave for The Bee and weeks before the woodchipper murder exploded on the front page.

“Does the library have any old police logbooks I could look at?” I asked. She told me the library doesn’t have any police logbooks in its collection.

Instead, she directed me to the Newtown vertical file—a fancy name for alphabetized file folders containing papers or smaller booklets that have not been assigned a number in the library system.

All I found was one folder marked “crime” and a handful of lists of articles, some handwritten, some from a database printout. There are also a few articles on the woodchipper murder trial from the New Haven Register, the Hartford Courant, and a list of coverage found in The New York Times.

“Are there any other files in the crime section?” I asked.

“No, just the Crafts case. It was kind of notorious, you know,” she said.

“Really?” I said, not hiding my sarcasm. “Why are there no Newtown Bee articles in the file?”

The librarian handed me a printout of an email from a former Bee staffer, written in 1999 explaining that the newspaper had no digitized, indexed, record of its own coverage.

The email stated, “We ran stories on July 31, 1998, July 28, 1997, and November 22, 1996, which are recaps. There is no old morgue anymore. Curt (the former managing editor), lost it somehow, so we only have the morgue that started in 1995.”

What is it about Newtown and its relationship to historical papers and important evidence? Cops lost track of logbooks, the local newspaper editor lost the old morgue, and the public works department buried Regina’s car, a critical piece of evidence.

Before I left the library empty-handed, I asked one more question.

“Have you ever heard of Regina Brown?”

“No, who was that?”

“The other missing flight attendant.”

Burning logbooks in Newtown

I continued looking for the logbooks. I called the town historian who told me that there was some discussion about saving them, but many were damaged by a flood and not salvageable. I called Bob Berkins, who worked in the Newtown police records department for years.

Berkins told me that Newtown had all the logbooks from 1971, when the department was created, to 1990 when they changed to a more modern dispatcher set-up.

“I recommended that the logbooks be sent to the library. They told me they had no room for them,” he told me over the phone. “The logbooks stayed in the stockroom at the department for several years and finally were sent to the landfill to be burned per Chief Kehoe.”

“How very sad,” I said. I let out a deep sigh. It was 2005. I estimated this logbook burning took place in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

When I spoke to Bobby T to commiserate about the loss of the logbooks, he agreed with Berkins’s assessment that they are gone forever. He said some are still floating around the department but most likely not the one I’m looking for.

A needle in a haystack

“I am going down into the vault tomorrow night to get the evidence box,” Bobby T told me over the phone a few days later. “I’ll try and get your questions answered.” He did talk to the dispatcher on duty that night to see if she could remember anything about the barking dog complaint from 18 years earlier but nothing concrete came to mind.

Two days later I got an email from Bobby T, part of which read, “Believe it or not we have a copy of the logbook page in the file: Dated March 27, 1987 2:41 a.m. MR. Siena (sic) complains that Mr. Brown is not home and dog is barking. (Logged in D.W. book.) NO COP SENT BY LINDA COAD.”

A confirmation that the dog was barking, that a neighbor—the husband not the wife as Bobby T had originally thought and why he capitalized MR. in the email—called in a complaint, and that the Newtown police did not respond or send an officer over to the Brown residence. I had a name. I was on my way to find the person who heard the barking dog the night of Regina Brown’s disappearance.

Chapter 19

A Drive Around Newtown

I arrived at the Newtown police station for a visit with Bobby T on Good Friday. I had the day off from my PR job in Manhattan. It was also March 25, 2005, and the next day would be the eighteenth anniversary of Regina Brown’s disappearance.

We walked down the hall toward the detective bureau to have a little chit chat with two younger detectives he was hoping might take an interest in the case. An hour later, Bobby T and I hopped into an unmarked sedan for a drive around Newtown.

“A cold case homicide is easier to investigate than a missing person cold case,” Bobby T told me as we turned left out of the parking lot and head up Main Street toward the flagpole. I nodded in agreement. In a homicide, there is usually a body, proof of death.

Here, all we had was mostly circumstantial evidence to go on. We talked about how the case lacked what made for a good true-crime TV show—a body and physical evidence tying the suspect to the murder scene. In Regina’s case, there was no body and no murder scene.

“Even Crafts had three-quarters of an ounce of human remains as physical evidence,” I said.

18 Whippoorwill Hill Road

We drove past the flagpole, past the north end of the Main Street historic district where another smaller flagpole marks the sailors and soldiers’ monument across the street from the old stone library. We continue down the state highway for another few miles in silence before Bobby T takes a right-hand turn. The first stop on our Newtown driving tour was 18 Whippoorwill Hill Road, the last known address of Regina Brown.

The entrance to Whippoorwill Hill Road hasn’t changed much in two decades. A former rambling teahouse stands at the corner. In the 1920s, these homes were transformed into eateries with Japanese gardens and served traditional tea rituals, making them a popular destination for motorists from cities like Bridgeport to come and spend the day.

Once on Whippoorwill Hill Road, the distant past recedes, replaced by aging raised ranches along the winding road. When Regina and Willis lived there, you could see clear across the open fields behind their home to the hills hiding the Housatonic River beyond. The same river that starred in the woodchipper murder case. By 2005, houses dotted the pastures instead of dairy cows.

Bobby T slowed down the car as we approached the cul-de-sac high above the wooded lot. The Browns’ former house is well below street level, like it’s lurking in a hole, hiding from view. There isn’t any traffic on this dead-end road. Bobby T turned off the engine. We can’t hear each other thoughts in the silence, but the stillness vibrates with thoughts about Regina’s disappearance and the lost opportunities of the past.

The mailbox looks like it’s been there for decades. I imagined Regina arguing with Willis next to it and the neighbors looking out their windows at the spectacle in the days before Regina disappeared. The same neighbors who called the police on the night of the barking dog.

I saw the breezeway between the house and the garage. After a few moments, Bobby T started the car and drove around the circle. I absorbed the breathtaking view of the surrounding area, tall pines, bare, broad oaks, and a multitude of maple trees still naked from winter.

Found on the streets of Manhattan

Bobby T and I were looking for Regina’s car, which had been stored by the Newtown Police since 1987, to see if there was any evidence that might have been previously overlooked. We were also looking for the car because it’s a crucial piece of evidence in an open missing person investigation.

After Regina disappeared, Newtown Police were alerted to its whereabouts after they posted its license plate numbers as part of her missing person case. It was found at 242 W. 104^th Street, two blocks from Riverside Park overlooking the Hudson River.

“We interviewed the doorman and he said the car had been there for a week,” Bobby T said. “We asked around, but nobody saw anything regarding the car.”

Newtown Police Chief Louis Marchese knew the car had to come back to Newtown. It had been removed from 104^th Street and towed to an impound lot when New York City police called them about it.

“Lou was so cheap that he didn’t want to pay to have the car towed back to Connecticut,” Bobby T told me as we drove to the highway department.

“But I remember the car was towed to the state police forensic lab in Meriden for processing,” I told Bobby T.

“I drove the car from New York City to Newtown and then we had it towed to Meriden,” Bobby T said. This was unfortunate, and a surprising lapse for an experienced detective, but he was ordered to do it. From my experience, none of them ever stood up to the police chief or questioned any order he issued.

Bobby T knew he might have contaminated a potential crime scene or disturbed evidence by driving Regina’s car back to Newtown, but really what choice did he have?

“Do you remember if you had to push the driver’s seat forward or backwards when you went to drive it?” I asked. Bobby T’s height is somewhere between the petite Regina and tall Willis. I was trying to see if someone other than Regina had driven the car to New York City.

“I don’t remember,” Bobby T said. But he did remember there was only one key in the ignition. I had written an article about the car’s discovery in 1987. I reported there was no sign a violent crime being committed in the car.

“I do remember Willis wanted his car back after the divorce hearing,” Bobby T said. He added that Judge Moraghan told Willis ‘when your wife returns, you can have your car back.’”

Last known storage place

The Newtown Highway Department is housed in a big industrial-sized building complex off South Main Street. When we arrived and saw no one around we realized it was a holiday, and the building was closed. We were unable to ask anyone where to find Regina Brown’s car.

“The last time I saw the car, it was rusted all over and left outside behind the highway garage,” Bobby T said. “And that was maybe five years ago.”

“The last time I saw the car was in 1987 sitting in the front parking lot of the Newtown police station. It sat there for years,” I said. “I remember peering into the back seat when I parked next to it. Sad seeing those child restraint seats in the backseat.”

We drove around the back of the highway department building.

“It was over here near this pile of sand,” he said. All I saw was an empty, sandy parking lot. We headed back to the police station and called it a day. Bobby T followed up with the town. He told me because the car was falling apart, the highway department workers buried it on the property a few years ago.

I always supported the Newtown detectives. I felt they were unfairly treated when removed from the woodchipper case because of the behavior of their police chief. But it is hard to defend the string of bad choices that led to the loss of this crucial piece of evidence. Somewhere along the line, throughout the years, someone, or many persons, let the safekeeping of Regina’s car slip through the cracks, and along with it any possible clues.

Start with Part I

PART II

“Dogs bark to say that there is something strange happening and to be alert. If the dog is more fearful, it will alternate barking with growling. If fear gains the upper hand, the growling will stop, replaced by loud barking, until either the threatening situation goes away, or reinforcements arrive.”

—Desmond Morris, Illustrated Dogwatching

Chapter 18

A Chance Meeting

A familiar thrill ran through my body as I walked into the Newtown, Connecticut Police Department in 2004. I felt like the cub reporter I was more than two decades ago, surrounded by cops and ready to sniff out a story like a newshound. I was there this time to introduce my husband’s co-worker Neil to Detective Sergeant Robert Tvardzik.

Neil wanted to report a gun stolen from his car while it was parked at work. I haven’t seen “Bobby T” in years, not since my days as a crime reporter for The Newtown Bee covering the town’s most infamous crime—at the time—the woodchipper murder.

As Bobby T emerged into the lobby from behind the locked, metal door, he gave me the same warm smile from beneath his bushy, brown mustache that I remember so well. He hasn’t changed much. Maybe a little heavier, hairline receding, but his thoughtful demeanor is still intact.

“Hey, Lisa, long time no see,” he said, his arms around me in a big bear hug. It was good to see him. I’d written a lot about his cases over the years. After I made introductions, Bobby T held the door open for Neil. They disappeared into a small interview room off the lobby.

The first book

On this late summer day, I noticed a glass display case touting the department’s citizens’ police academy. Bathed in blue light from the nearby soda machine, the case glowed like a portal to my past. The archival photos, the shiny handcuffs, and the department’s oval uniform patch—embroidered with the town’s iconic flagpole, historic red inn, and white churches all clustered on Main Street.

Off to the side, on the lowest shelf, in a dusty corner, a dog-eared paperback copy of The Woodchipper Murder by Arthur Herzog caught my attention. That’s odd. Why would they display that book?

I stared at the cover and knew I could recite every detail in that book from memory. I had lived it for years as a journalist. Do people have such short memories that they would put such a book on display? It doesn’t shine a favorable light on the Newtown police. Perhaps they never read it.

When the two emerged from the lobby interview room, the detective handed Neil his business card. I said goodbye to Bobby T, thinking I might never see him again. But fate had different plans.

Several days later, over Labor Day weekend, Neil killed himself with the gun he reported stolen. State police found Bobby T’s business card at the crime scene. It took me a couple of weeks to call Bobby T to apologize. I felt bad for bringing him into this tragic affair.

“What the hell did you get me involved with?” he said, half joking, over the phone. Any time someone’s business card is found at a death scene, especially a detective’s, it’s bound to raise questions.

“Let’s do lunch,” I suggested, to make up for the extra paperwork Bobby T had to fill out.

A part of true crime popular culture

We met the following week, sometime in mid-October, a local Italian restaurant in Sandy Hook. Although the circumstances that brought us together couldn’t have been grimmer, we soon found ourselves chatting about old times, especially the woodchipper murder case. We recalled how the media circus, with dozens of domestic and international journalists, descended on Newtown during the arrest in 1986.

The woodchipper murder spawned awful jokes like “Divorce Connecticut Style” and endless discussion about human remains and the limits of DNA and forensic testing at the time. Bobby T and I chat about how the state convicted Crafts despite weak evidence. How the body parts were never identified as Helle Crafts.

The woodchipper murder case inspired the Herzog book and multiple profiles on true-crime television, including season one, episode one of Forensic Files. It spawned copycat killers and gave celebrity criminologist Henry Lee his breakout case, which launched his celebrity as a forensic expert, eventually leading him to join O.J. Simpson’s defense dream team. It even gave the Coen Brothers the idea for a scene in the movie Fargo a decade later.

Over the years, as the myth of this case spread throughout pop culture, my notoriety as a leading expert turned me into a talking head making numerous guest appearances on TV to talk about the woodchipper murder, including on: A&E Crime Stories; Investigation Discovery Murders & Mansions; and BBC Science of Crime.

The second book

“Whatever happened to that book you were going to write about the Crafts case?” Bobby T said.

“Well, I got busy. It didn’t work out the way I wanted it to,” I told Bobby T. I didn’t tell him that I gave up on the project because I needed to find a real, good paying job, not as a private detective or a writer, but because I was short on cash after a disastrous first marriage.

My cheeks flushed when he called me out on that unfinished book. I hate when detectives know you better than you know yourself. Or at least what you’re willing to admit to yourself.

“You know what I really want to know?” Bobby T said. “Whatever happened to Regina Brown. You should write a book about that.”

“Regina Brown? That’s a name I haven’t heard in years.” I said

After being jolted by the mention of her name, I dropped my grilled cheese sandwich on the ceramic plate. I sat in silence thinking about her mysterious disappearance on March 26, 1987, just four months after the woodchipper murder.

At the time I was not as familiar with her case since it fell off my radar in the 1980s.

A third book

Bobby T told me all the work he’d done on this case over the years, how he tried to get new officers interested in the case, to no avail. I listened intensely, transfixed by his quest. As he approached retirement, he explained, he was worried that the case—and Regina Brown—would be forgotten. His haunted demeanor affected me deeply.

Every detective has that one case that never goes away. It’s usually the case that has no arrest, no justice, no closure for the family. I took a deep breath to stop myself from crying.

“I’ll write a book about her case,” I blurted out. The aging detective scowled at me.

“You are going off to work in the big city now,” he reminded me. “You’ll never finish it.”

I frowned back. It was true. I had just landed a high-paying, public relations job in Manhattan after leaving a low-paying, daily newspaper reporter job.

“I promise you that I’ll get this story told,” I said. What I didn’t know is that a simple promise over lunch would turn into a decades-long obsession that took me from Connecticut to Rhode Island to Texas in search of the truth of what happened to Regina Brown. Telling her story was a promise I had to keep.

Chapter 17

The Conviction

The wooden pews at the Norwalk Superior Court for the second woodchipper murder trial are just as uncomfortable as the ones in New London the year before. I was sitting in the back row taking notes on pre-trial motions in the fall of 1989. My plan was to cover the case for a proposed book I was going to write with the defense’s PI team, who had recently hired me as a private detective.

Days before the trial began in earnest, Richard Crafts’ lawyers put me on their witness list, based on my anonymous tip article about the chainsaw discovery under the Silver Bridge. Witnesses are sequestered from hearing testimony and I was barred from sitting in courtroom. I objected.

The judge scheduled a hearing to hear arguments about my first amendment freedom of the press rights to cover the story despite being a witness in a limited scope about one of my previous stories.

My attorney, who had successfully removed the gag order to the press before the first trial, argued with the judge to let me stay in the courtroom. Unfortunately, he said I didn’t prove I was a member of the working press. The judge wasn’t wrong.

The next day an article about me appeared in the News-Times at the top of the local section. The coverage professionally embarrassed me because I didn’t have a book contract and wasn’t working “on assignment” for any media outlet.

What exactly was I? A freelancer working on spec? Could I be a private detective and a journalist at the same time? I was a witness for the defense in the infamous woodchipper murder case. I had held up the trial proceedings for a day for my first amendment rights hearing. The nightmare of every objective journalist was playing out in real time for me. I had become the story.

Testifying on the witness stand

I ran my hands down my gray pin-striped skirt suit to smooth out the wrinkles on my way to the witness stand. I raised my right hand, placed my left hand on the bible, and thought what a hypocrite I was to swear on the Bible. I remember the day, November 8, 1989, because the Berlin Wall had begun to crack and would fall the next morning.

State’s Attorney Walter Flanagan, who used to feed me “off the record” information on this very case, marched up to me on the witness stand.

“Did you write this article on January 9, 1987?” Flanagan asked holding up a copy of news clipping. I hid a smirk building inside me that he had to read my entire body of work on this case to find one tidbit.

“Yes.”

“In it you claim that the state police said they found the chainsaw under the silver bridge based on an anonymous tip,” he continued.

“That’s correct.”

Flanagan pulled out another of my newspaper articles.

“Did you write that the state police made a dive in July, a routine exploratory dive just like at the Silver bridge in January.”

I was confused. I didn’t write that the Silver bridge discovery was based on a routine exploratory dive.

“I don’t recall writing that,” I told him. This dive story was six months after the Silver bridge dive when the state police dove off the Shepaug Dam on Lake Lillinonah looking for Richard Crafts’ freezer, where they speculated that he hid his wife’s torso.

“Read this,” he said as thrusted a copy of my newspaper clipping toward me.

I scanned the article and saw that the state’s attorney had highlighted the quote.

“If this is in the story, it’s because that is what the state police told me,” I said.

A college degree

The state’s attorney claimed I contradicted myself in the freezer dive story. Actually, it was the police who contradicted themselves. It is interesting to note, that the freezer dive and state police comments in July 1987 came after the defense discovery motion in May asking for that anonymous source’s name.

I believe their comments at the July dive were given to me and other journalists to erase their admission of an anonymous source, and cover their tracks for the upcoming second trial.

Before Flanagan let me go, he had to tarnish my press creds.

“Where did you graduate from college?”

“The University of Bridgeport.”

“You don’t have a journalism degree, do you?” Flanagan said. “Your college transcript says political science.” Another hidden smirk, he had to pay for my transcripts.

I was forced to tell my story of a young woman in the spring of 1985, who had a double major in journalism and political science, but failed to finish one last independent study in magazine writing and only graduated with one major with honors. Despite that, I started at The Newtown Bee as the paper’s police reporter in October.

At the time, it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t have a journalism degree, I had taken the entire curriculum of courses, and I had a job as a bona fide newspaper journalist. I had training in writing, reporting, copy editing, ethics, and libel law.

I had already done six ceiling-breaking internships with the state’s second oldest daily newspaper. I was the inaugural intern at the state capitol bureau. I covered Presidential visits, the legislature, and the time Adam Walsh came to Hartford to push for missing children laws. College was behind me and my professional life was about to take off.

However, four years later I was slightly embarrassed by the state’s attorney. He also pointed out I had been hired as a private investigator working for a former member of the Crafts’ defense team. A lack of objectivity for a witness. perhaps. I left the stand a little deflated, but I know what I was told by the state police around their discovery of the chainsaw under the silver bridge.

I still have the notebook pages from that day and it says, “anonymous tip” in quotes from Sgt. Daniel Lewis as a second source to confirm the first mention of the tip at the Silver bridge the day before from the public information officer Lt. Edward Daley. This was not something I made up. Why would I?

My relationship with the state’s attorney had soured a year earlier after my investigative story about how Richard Crafts didn’t have the woodchipper when the state said he did to match other witness testimony during Storm Carl on the night Helle Crafts disappeared. He never did fix the timeline discrepancy about the woodchipper during the second trial, either. The jury didn’t seem to care.

A guilty verdict

A month after the unsuccessful Block Island search for Regina Brown’s body and two weeks after my trial testimony, a jury took only four days to convict Richard Crafts of first-degree murder on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. They all wanted to go home.

In January 1990, Crafts was sentenced to fifty years in prison without parole. Inexplicably, this zealous pursuit of a conviction in the “no-body” woodchipper murder of a white woman did not translate to a more robust investigation for Regina Brown, a Black woman’s disappearance. I, like all the others who were transfixed by the woodchipper murder, moved on.

Regina’s case went cold for more than a decade.

Chapter 16

The Search

Newtown detectives were busy and distracted as they prepared for their testimony in the second woodchipper murder trial which started on September 6, 1989, more than a year after the first one ended in a mistrial. Another change of venue was requested and this time the trial would be held in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Meanwhile, Newtown detectives Harry Noroian and Robert Tvardzik were drafting a search warrant for Block Island based on the discovered map turned over by Margaret Brown’s son six months earlier and the recent revelation of the trailer rental by Willis, which he hid from police.

What the search warrant reveals

The search warrant mentioned that Willis was “concerned” about the publicity surrounding his missing wife and how it might be detrimental to himself, when he was interviewed at the Newtown police station one week after Regina vanished on March 26, 1987. He compared the potential publicity to the woodchipper murder. It also revealed that Willis’s first visit to police on April 3 to give a statement happened one day before the first of several parking tickets appeared on Regina’s abandoned car in Manhattan.

This information led police to surmise that April 4 was the earliest date her car could have been in Manhattan. I can attest to this thinking because every city driver knows that the NYPD traffic unit descends upon illegally parked cars within minutes, not days, to ticket them.

The last time this car was seen was on March 26 at LaGuardia Airport by the babysitter. This meant the car was missing for at least a week after Regina’s disappearance and before that first parking ticket. Who had custody of the car during this time? It was not at her house in Newtown.

Police confirmed that Regina returned home from LaGuardia on March 26 because they found the receipt from the supermarket where she bought chili, orange juice, and milk on her way to the airport. By the time the babysitter returned home to Newtown from Texas on April 8, the chili and milk were still in the refrigerator, spoiled.

The search warrant also mentions that Willis Brown agreed to take a polygraph test after his divorce and child custody hearing in late 1987, but by June 1988 had decided against it because it “would do him no good” and suggested it didn’t do Richard Crafts any good either (he passed his polygraph but was still convicted of first degree murder). At the same time he told police he would not consent to any more interviews.

Detective Noroian told me years later he remembered that final interview. “Yea, Willis didn’t like me at all,” Harry said. “And he was just like his father. A clone of Senior, with those big hands.”

According to the search warrant, Newtown police believed Willis brought Regina’s body to Block Island in the days following her disappearance to dispose of it. They were looking for “body parts, or body in whole, skeleton remains, blood, saliva, hair, body secretions, fingerprints, palm prints” and firearms and/or bullets, or blunt instruments that may have been used in the commission of a crime. The search warrant was signed by a judge and a trip to block Island was planned. The last time Newtown police used a police K-9 to search for Regina’s body was in Newtown in 1987.

Cadaver Dogs on Block Island

On September 27, 1989, Newtown detectives, along with Block Island police and a body dog from the Massachusetts State Police, began a three-day search of the Gobern property where Willis Brown, his father and stepmother spent the summer of 1987 after Regina’s disappearance.

During a break in the search, Newtown Police Chief Michael DeJoseph addressed the media, who had descended on the small island. DeJoseph had been promoted to police chief nearly two years earlier.

“I think Mr. Brown knows more about the disappearance of his wife than he’s letting on,” DeJoseph told the TV news crews.

The search covered thirty-seven acres across three undeveloped plots of land off Beacon Hill Road. At this point, according to news reports police said, “Willis Brown is their only suspect” and the German Shepherd Dog Syros, “sniffed and probed at several areas, prompting searchers to dig several holes that yielded no evidence.” Chief DeJoseph said he believed Regina Brown “is the victim of foul play.”

Block Island Police Chief Richard Lemoi told reporters the search included an old foundation and a cistern, as well as “an abandoned root cellar located in a sunken area” which he described as a “bowl.”

News outlets from Connecticut and Rhode Island were held behind yellow crime scene tape watching the search. At one point, “a helicopter transporting a camera operator and a reporter swooped to within 900 feet of the site, scaring the police dog.”

Day two of the search

By Thursday, Sept. 28, 1989, the island was swarming with press and television crews waiting for the dog to find something. Police started their search without the dog for about one hour, because he had been spooked by the helicopter from a Connecticut television station. According to the dog’s handler, as long as a buried torso is intact, even after two and half years, the dog would locate it.

But why would police believe that only the torso would be on the island? Most criminals, or anyone who watches a lot of TV crime shows, knows teeth and fingerprints were used for identification of the deceased, especially before the days of DNA identification. Looking back at the woodchipper murder case, only the victim’s head and limbs were sent through the woodchipper, the torso was never found.

Detective Noroian, onsite during the Block Island search, told me years later, “we found a head in Rhode Island many years after the search and thought that Regina might have been decapitated.” It reminded me of the picture Bobby T shared with me of a human skull, minus the lower jaw, resting on a corrugated metal warehouse roof. Body parts can turn up in the strangest places.

The search focused on two areas about 500 to 600 yards from the house trailer that Willis Brown rented. They could only pursue this so far, however, because the judge who signed the search warrant did not allow them to search inside the trailer.

Day three of the search

Investigators searched another area about 100 yards north of another abandoned square foundation. Chief Lemoi confirmed the foundations had been on the property for decades. They searched a third area as well as a cistern before they called off the search.

Once again, there was no sign of Regina Brown’s body. In early October, the search warrant affidavit was filed in court, which released the map to the public.

Chief Lemoi seemed fond of the spotlight and liked talking about the case with reporters. Though the case was not in his jurisdiction, he eagerly told reporters the map had too few words to identify the author’s handwriting with scientific certainty, according to the FBI.

This information could only have been shared by Newtown detectives to Lemoi, maybe hoping someone might recognize the handwriting since the map was published in local newspapers.

A trip to Albany for clues

After the search, Harry told the press he and Bobby T drove to Albany to question Willis Brown Sr. about the map. Harry said Willis Brown Sr. told him he didn’t draw the map and that the handwriting on it was not his deceased wife’s.

He also claimed he didn’t know how the map got into his house, adding that his wife had mental problems, too.

By late October, police are out of leads. What seemed a promising break in the search for justice for Regina Brown had come up empty.

Chapter 15

The Map

The woodchipper murder trial was the first criminal case in Connecticut history to have gavel-to-gavel TV cameras in the courtroom with a press pool cameraman stationed inside to record the historic trial. When court was over each day I’d scurry back to my hotel room to watch the clips on the six o’clock news. Sometimes I could see myself executing journalism writing furiously in my reporter’s notebook in the first or second row of seats, which were reserved for the press.

Connecticut State Police Criminologist Henry Lee launched his celebrity status as a top forensic scientist when he captivated the jury for five days with discussions of bone fragments, tissue samples, hair strands, tooth pieces, and nail polish comparisons as they related to the remains of a white woman found on the shores of Lake Zoar.

He never called them Helle Crafts remains, but only that they were “consistent” with a white woman, with her dental x-rays, with her nail polish. One day I was walking in front of him down the hallway after court, and I heard him say to someone over my shoulder, “I would never say that is Helle Crafts.”

A mistrial after months of testimony

By July 1988, after nearly four months, hundreds of exhibits, dozens of witnesses, and days-long summations the jury reported they were deadlocked. The judge instructed them to go back and see if they could come to a consensus. A first-degree murder charge needed a unanimous decision.

On July 17, after seventeen days of deliberations, the judge declared a mistrial. One juror, Warren Maskell, claimed he was bullied by jurors to change his mind, left the courthouse, and refused to deliberate anymore. An hour after the mistrial, State’s Attorney Walter Flanagan was visibly upset and joined journalists out on the front steps of the New London courthouse, a beer in his hand.

“Maskell’s a coward,” Flanagan said. He defamed the lone juror who held out not to convict Richard Crafts. Maskell later won a sizable settlement in a defamation suit against the state’s attorney.

After the mistrial, the press went home, Richard Crafts went back to jail, state prosecutors had to decide if they wanted a retrial, and Regina Brown had been missing for more than a year with no progress in the investigation.

A mysterious map is discovered

Eight months after the woodchipper murder mistrial, in March 1989, Randy Locke, Margaret Brown’s son from a previous marriage, called Newtown police with a shocking revelation.

Margaret Brown, the late wife of Willis N. Brown, Sr. and Willis N. Brown, Jr.’s stepmother, committed suicide in Albany, New York a year earlier on March 21, 1988.

According to Albany police reports, “Mr. Locke...while going through his deceased mother’s personnel papers, found a piece of paper which appeared to be a map.” The next day Newtown Detective Harry Noroian drove to Albany and retrieved the hand drawn map, which had the words “Block Island Trailer” written on the top and, below, a square with the word “Trailer” in the center.

There is also a long line that looks like the letter L and next to that “Regina, O God” and below that a straight line and the word “Ocean.” Under Regina’s name is a small rectangular box that could possibly be a grave.

Murder hearsay discovered

Locke suggested the police talk to his aunt in New Hampshire because his mother often went to see her after she came back from Block Island. Locke told Det. Noroian that his mother and Willis Brown Sr. worked for Willis Jr. at his Block Island moped business in the summer of 1987, just weeks after Regina Brown disappeared.

Locke also told the detective his mother had changed when she returned and that something seemed to be bothering her, but she did not tell him what it was.

After the map’s discovery, Det. Noroian visited Margaret’s sister, Beverly Cullen in New Hampshire. She told the detective that when her sister Margaret came home after that summer, she told her, “You don’t know what’s going on there, strange things have happened there. Willis Brown Jr. murdered his wife.”

A battle for custody

By June 1989, three months after the map discovery, Willis moved to Texas. After he lost custody of his children in his divorce, he decided he would sue Regina’s parents for custody. It felt to all working on the case that Willis most likely wanted to gain custody to eliminate his $2,250 per month court-ordered child support payments.

In his custody suit, Willis claimed Regina’s mother could no longer care for the children because her health had declined after the death of her husband the previous summer. Willis wanted immediate custody, but the judge ruled against him.

The judge did grant Willis extra visitation rights with his children, but only if he surrendered his pilot’s license during visits and kept them in Harris County, Texas where they lived. Regina’s mother no doubt asked for this stipulation because of Willis’s earlier kidnapping of his children from Texas three months after Regina’s disappearance.

During the latest custody hearing, Regina’s mother testified, “If he’s killed my daughter there’s no telling what he’d do to me or to the children.” She also told a local reporter that the two older children no longer ask where their mother is, but the younger one does. “I just tell them that I don’t know where her mother is, but I think she’s in heaven with Jesus,” their grandmother said. “While I know in my heart, she is dead, you can’t help hoping she’ll come through that door.”

After the hearing, Det. Noroian told the Houston Chronicle, “We have no way of knowing for sure what has happened to Regina, but she was a very professional woman. Her children came first, then her job. It’s difficult to understand why she’d wake up one morning and leave. Foul play is a possibility.”

What the detective isn’t telling the reporter is that foul play has been ramping up ever since the map discovery. The biggest break in the disappearance of Regina Brown is just around the corner.

A landlord called police alarmed

A few months later, on July 9, 1989, the Sunday Journal Magazine published an exhaustive ten-page feature on the disappearance of Regina Brown by Providence Journal reporter Tracy Breton. The article detailed the tragic marriage of the Browns and the floundering investigation, but not the map discovery.

A Block Island property owner, Maryann Matthews, contacted Newtown Detective Robert Tvardzik after she read the article. She told him that she owned a mobile house trailer on the property of David Gobern, her father, and that she had leased it to Willis Brown Jr. for the 1987 and 1988 summer seasons.

Willis Brown never told Newtown investigators that he lived on Block Island in the days and months after his wife disappeared. He told them he lived in Queens in an apartment, and when he was on Block Island, he lived at his business, The Moped Man, on Water Street.

Det. Noroian confirmed with Block Island police that Willis Brown rented a three-bedroom house trailer and took up residence there for the 1987 summer season. Willis was caught in another big lie.

Matthews told police that during the negotiations in 1987 Brown insisted on occupancy of the trailer on April 1, 1987—just four days after Regina’s disappearance—contrary to her desired start date around Memorial Day.

She believed that Willis may have even been on the property before the first of the month, he was that urgent to get there. Matthews also confirmed that Margaret and Willis Brown Sr. lived on the property with Willis Brown Jr. during the summer of 1987.

Chapter 14

The Suicide

On the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of Helle Crafts—November 18, 1987— and the jury selection in the so-called Woodchipper Murder trial of her husband Richard Crafts, the Regina Brown case makes the news after months of silence.

I grab my camera again and head to a wooded area between Whippoorwill Hill Road and Interstate 84 in Northwest Connecticut. There I find two Connecticut State Troopers from the Emergency Services Unit with their German Shepherd Dogs “York” and “Lady” searching a 100-acre parcel for clues.

Lt. Detective Michael DeJoseph, now Acting Police Chief told me, “It is a routine investigative technique. We were hoping to turn up something tangible, however, we did not.”

He told me the detectives and others have been working on the case as a “top priority” since Regina disappeared on March 26.

While I’m not in court to cover the Brown’s divorce hearing, I decide to note at the end of my story that the grandparents of Regina’s children are contesting custody from Willis Brown. Judge Howard Moraghan was very busy with the ongoing Brown divorce hearing and taking breaks to hear pre-trial motions in the woodchipper murder case in Danbury Superior Court.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be the last newspaper article about Regina Brown I would write as a staff crime reporter.

A change in venue

In January 1988, Judge Moraghan declared a change of venue to New London, Connecticut was needed in the woodchipper murder case due to extensive pre-trial publicity. He reported that all the potential jurors, and the 12 selected for the trial, from the Danbury area knew quite a lot about the case from media reports.

Jury selection began in March in New London. the new venue It was expected that many jurors would come from the working-class area where factory workers from submarine maker Electric Boat lived in nearby Groton. Not exactly the upper middle-class jury from northern Fairfield County Crafts’s attorney had already selected, many of whom worked in Manhattan or in high paying careers as doctors, lawyers, or airline pilots. Richard Crafts’s peers.

By now my status at The Newtown Bee had shifted from staff reporter to freelance contributor. I left The Bee to pursue higher education, and I convinced my editor to keep me on as a stringer for the Crafts trial which we guessed would run a few weeks. When it was over, I’d figure out the next phase of my life. My editor, Curtiss, decided not to have me cover the jury selection since they were paying me by the week, and it just wasn’t that important for The Bee’s readers since they were not local residents in the jury pool.

A suicide in Albany

During the Crafts jury voir dire, on March 21, 1988, an article in an Albany, New York, newspaper detailed a suspicious death of Willis Brown’s stepmother. The headline “Albany woman found shot dead in apartment” was followed by the next day’s headline, “Police believe woman’s death suicide.”

One article refers to the death of Marguerite L. Brown as, “A 54-year-old city woman found shot to death in March in her home in an Albany senior citizens apartment building probably took her own life, Albany Police said Wednesday.”

Willis’s stepmother, Margaret Brown, was found shot to death in her home almost exactly one year to the day of the disappearance of Regina Brown. Margaret was married to Willis’s dad, Willis N. Brown Sr.

According to one article, “Neighbors told police they heard two shots fired sometime between 6:30 and 7 p.m., but police could only confirm she had been shot once, in the chest.” The Albany County coroner said she had been shot at close range by a Ruger .357-magnum handgun. Police had not yet determined if her death was a result of a homicide or a suicide.

One article said her body was found on the bedroom floor and there appeared to be “no evidence of a struggle.” However, Willis Brown Sr. was arrested by police on two counts of illegal weapons possession. He was held and released from the Albany County Jail.

Albany Detective John Pariseau called Newtown police to ask them to notify Willis Brown Jr. that his stepmother had been found dead, and his father was in jail on pending weapons possession charges. Newtown detective Harry Noroian was tasked with going to Willis’s house in Newtown to tell him.

While on the phone, Harry asked the Albany detective if, as part of Newtown’s ongoing investigation, he would ask Willis senior when he last saw Regina Brown. Later that night, Pariseau got back to Harry to let him know that “senior” said it had been four years since he’d seen his daughter-in-law.

The second article states, “...suspicion that Marguerite L. Brown had committed suicide was based on the results of State Police laboratory tests showing she had gunpowder residue on one of her hands.” Initially, police investigated her husband in her death while awaiting gunshot residue results on his hands, but felt, “...the test results on the woman’s hands strongly suggested the death was self-inflicted.”

Another attempted interview

Three months after the death of Margaret Brown, and new suspicion in the case, Detective Noroian wore a wire to try another attempt at interviewing Willis Brown, Jr. outside his house on Whippoorwill Hill Road.

When the topic of his stepmother’s death came up, Willis complained loudly about a newspaper article, written by News-Times reporter Patrick O’Neill, that explored how his stepmother’s apparent suicide could be a homicide.

“They officially ruled it a suicide,” Willis told Harry.

O’Neill suggests in his article that perhaps Margaret Brown did not kill herself but was also a victim of foul play, just like Regina Brown. Detective Noroian told Willis he was still investigating Regina’s disappearance.

“I wish you luck,” Wills said. “I’m done. Good day.” With that, Willis walked away basically telling police he would no longer agree to interviews.

I hope you have been enjoying the weekly serialization of my book The Night of the Barking Dog here on Substack. The story about what ever happened to Regina Brown in Newtown, Connecticut is something I’ve been reporting on for nearly 40 years.

And the story isn’t done being told. I want to share an article that appeared in The Hartford Courant today.

When you are so connected to something you are always trying to find yet another piece of evidence, or some answer to a question, or some nuance that might make a difference. Or you discover something that changes the narrative.

In the end, a judge in Texas may be the last of a long list of reasons justice failed Regina Brown. Newtown Police were developing an arrest warrant during the pandemic.

The article reveals that when investigators tried to get a search warrant from a Texas judge–Willis Brown, the estranged husband and prime suspect in Regina’s murder lived in Texas–he refused to sign it.

And with that the active investigation faded away. But there is still more of this story to tell. Stay tuned.

Chapter 13

A Busy Newshound

It was late July 1987 when I grabbed my camera and reporter’s notebook and headed out to watch the state police make another dive in the murky waters around Lake Zoar in Newtown, Connecticut

I stood atop the 140-foot tall Shepaug Dam at the northern end of the lake when I snapped a photo of Sgt. Daniel Lewis as he emerged from the water in full scuba gear waving to signal a successful dive. I’m surrounded by a handful of print and radio reporters and a lone TV cameraman.

“Recertification [of the divers and diving equipment] is the biggest reason we are here. Looking for the freezer is purely speculative,” Sgt. Lewis told the gaggle of media. The State’s Attorney had released information that he speculated that Richard Crafts had frozen his wife’s body after killing her with a blunt object to the head. Crafts, he said, had frozen her body for maybe three days before cutting it up with a chainsaw and putting the limbs and head through a commercial woodchipper spewing the pieces into Lake Zoar.

I called the Sgt. Lewis the next day to finalize my quotes.

“We have no reason to believe that the freezer missing from the Crafts residence is in the lake. But I will tell you that Helle Crafts’s toro is missing.” The sergeant made a point of telling me they were acting on a hunch that the freezer may be in the lake near the dam like when he and other divers searched beneath the Silver Bridge in Newtown in January and found the chain saw believed to have been used in the crime. I recalled that Sgt. Lewis told me in January they acted on an anonymous tip, a fact I did not recall while I wrote this story some seven months later.

I grabbed a fresh copy of the July 24, 1987, edition of The Bee from the front of the newsroom nestled near the antiques greeting customers at the front door. I raised all 64 pages in four sections to my face and deeply breathed in the aroma of legacy, local journalism. I loved the smell of fresh ink hot off the presses. It reminded me of the purple mimeograph sheets I inhaled in elementary school with its nose-wrinkling tart scent.

I scanned the front page looking for my photos and story about the state police dive at the Shepaug Dam. Instead, the lead story above the fold with its blaring headline, “Police Chief Announces Plans to Retire” slapped me across my face.

The police chief retires

While I was engaged in pack journalism hobnobbing with state police divers at the dam, Newtown Police Chief Louis Marchese went behind my back to break a big story. It didn’t surprise me that he selected the male publisher of The Bee, a longtime ally, to announce that he is going to retire after 16 years as the department’s only chief. Who was I but a young female cub reporter who walked into his office almost weekly for the last two years. His snub made me feel like I was not to be trusted with keeping such an exclusive story a secret.

I immediately scrambled to call all my sources for a follow-up story that would be a week old by the time The Bee published again. All the daily papers had multiple installments by the time my story ran. While I waited for my first source to pick up the phone, I let out a heavy sigh. I’m always playing catch up with The News-Times, but at least our hometown paper got this big scoop.

Everyone I interviewed including the first selectman and the police commission chairman were surprised at Marchese’s announcement. It also fueled rumors that his departure was tied to the department’s removal from the Crafts case investigation a seven months earlier.

I called the police commission chairman who told me they would discuss it at their next meeting in August. Another commissioner I called told me, “Finding a person to fill his position will be the largest challenge the police commission has ever had.” That was an understatement as the ad they ran in the area newspaper only said, “Chief of Police, Town of Newtown, Applications/resumes accepted in the Office of First Selectman.” The ad ran for only one week.

The Brown divorce trial

In August 1987, Willis Brown ceased to deny Regina’s children were his when the latest round of court-ordered DNA paternity tests proved, yet again, that he was their father. He dropped his adultery claim, filed a no-contest divorce, and sought custody of the three children. So did Regina’s parents Emile and Ernestine Fontenot in Texas. A judge ordered psychiatric evaluations for all the litigants to determine if any would be a danger to the children.

During Willis’s examination a doctor gave him four tests with 1,526 questions. Willis scored high on the paranoia scale and exhibited “over-controlled hostility,” meaning Willis could appear calm even while experiencing a rage. It was the doctor’s opinion that Willis didn’t think the children were his and he was making a considerable issue of it. In Connecticut, a divorce could be held with only side present. Willis’ wife, Regina Brown, had been missing for four months. Police considered him the prime suspect.

Days before the start of the Willis Brown vs. Regina Brown divorce hearing in Danbury Superior court on September 28, 1987, my editor Curtiss Clark approached me as I stood by the wooden rack that held competitors’ newspapers in The Bee newsroom. He looked over my shoulder as I’m reading about the pending Brown divorce case in The News-Times.

“What are your thoughts about covering this divorce case,” Curt asked me.

“I’m not sure we’ve ever covered anything like this before,” I said not turning my head to look at him while still reading the article.

“We typically don’t cover private family matters,” he said.

“I am really busy with the Crafts coverage,” I said and paused. “And it is a private family matter.”

“I agree, you’re very busy and we don’t cover divorce hearings,” he said and walked away. In a way, I was relieved that I wouldn’t be burdened with extra days in court to cover this. The Crafts case was becoming all consuming. I was covering all pre-trial motions, the jury selection which will take weeks, and all my other normal beats from local police to real estate to obituaries.

A gag order in the woodchipper murder case

Even though the judge issued a gag order on all attorneys and Richard Crafts from speaking with the media, there was plenty to write about. The judge was trying to curb the massive amount of prejudicial pre-trial publicity in the case that might taint a jury pool.

“Counsel will not try the case in the press,” the judge told the lawyers during a pre-trial hearing at Danbury Superior Court. I was still trying to collect all the articles I’ wrote on the woodchipper murder case for a defense motion asking for a change of venue due to pre-trial publicity.

All media in the area were subpoenaed for circulation numbers, numbers of clips, and reach of their coverage areas. Working at a weekly paper paid off in this instance, as I had fewer clips than my daily newshounds to round up for court subpoena.

Chapter 12

A Kidnapping in Texas

About six weeks after Regina Brown disappeared, Richard Crafts’s defense team–hired to defend him in the woodchipper murder trial–filed a motion of discovery for the Regina Brown missing person file from police The attorneys claimed Regina Brown’s disappearance pointed to a possible signature crime. Two flight attendants missing in four months from Newtown, Connecticut.

When I reached Danbury State’s Attorney Walter Flanaghan by phone, in May 1987, he told me he does not want the case file released because it’s an open investigation. He claimed there is no proof that Regina Brown was dead.

The defense’s motion claimed there was a potential serial killer on the loose who was targeting flight attendants in Newtown. Crafts’ attorneys wanted the file to point out the similarities between the two cases, and most importantly, that their client was incarcerated at the time of Regina’s disappearance.

Their theory–both women were targeted by the same killer. Flanagan also told me that if they released the Brown missing person case, then every similar “missing stewardess” case in Fairfield County should also be reviewed. I don’t recall there being an abundance of other cases like this at the time.

After I spoke with Crafts’s attorney Tom Farver and the state’s attorney, I called Newtown police who told me that the motion is up to a judge to decide. But they made sure to tell me that detectives had recently asked the state police to join the Brown investigation. I pressed one of the detectives as to the state police’s role, but he didn’t elaborate.

Judge Howard Moraghan, now assigned to the Crafts case in Danbury Superior Court, ultimately denied the motion to share the Regina Brown file with the Crafts defense team.

I filed my fourth story about Regina Brown early in the week for the Friday, May 15, 1987, edition of The Bee because I would be traveling to a dog show in Virginia. When I returned on Monday, I caught up with my news clippings from last week’s paper.

While searching for the story on the discovery motion, I furrowed my brow when I read the headline, “State Police Join Search for Missing Newtown Woman” written by another reporter. What Newtown cops asked the state police to do was search Regina Brown’s house, on May 7, six weeks after she vanished.

What I didn’t know at the time, and neither did the reporter who wrote this story, was that Newtown police tried to get a search warrant for the home, but the state’s attorney wouldn’t forward their request for a judge’s signature. The Newtown detectives got savvy and asked Regina’s divorce lawyer for permission to search the home without a warrant since no one was living there.

Considering all that had recently transpired in the Crafts case and Newtown’s removal from the case, it made sense to play nice with the state police and make a big deal of it in the press. Even though the house search turned up no new evidence of a crime at 18 Whippoorwill Hill Road, the lead detective pointed out Newtown was leading a team of six investigators in the case. He was unsure if the state police would continue to aid in the investigation. It all depended on new clues or other leads as they developed, he told my co-worker.

Meanwhile in Texas

By June 1987, woodchipper murder stories faded from the newspapers’ front pages, and there was no news to report on Regina Brown. But Willis Brown, her estranged husband, and prime suspect in her disappearance, had another plan up his sleeve. With his children in Texas and him paying a court-ordered weekly child support of $170 to Regina’s parents, Willis called them with an offer.

During the phone call, he asked Regina’s mother Ernestine when he could have the kids back in Connecticut. She replied, “when Regina comes back.” Willis replied, “Well, I suppose that will be a long time.”

Knowing he would not easily get custody of the children; he planned what he called a “mission” to Texas to spirit them away, liberate them. Willis bought a 1979 Cadillac. He decided on a two-door model with leather seats, so the kids wouldn’t fall out the back or get the seats dirty if they spilled milkshakes and hamburgers on them. He drove for two days, and when he arrived, he parked the Cadillac and rented a car to drive to a pre-planned supervised visit with Regina’s brother Sonny.

Willis picked up his three children, aged 5, 4, and 1, at their grandparents’ house with Sonny as the chaperone on June 24, 1987. On the drive back to the motel, Willis bought several gifts for his father and the children. Once at the motel, the children went swimming and visited with Willis. Sonny monitored the situation.

At the end of the visit, Willis waited for the right moment after loading two of his children into the car to drive them back to their grandparents’ home. When Sonny went into the bathroom, Willis grabbed the coat rack and jammed the door shut with it.

A Kidnapping of Kids

He then darted out to the car with a daughter under one arm, and the last of his luggage under the other. Sonny escaped from the bathroom, ran outside, and grabbed the oldest daughter. A tug of war ensued with Willis using her thighs as leverage as the two men fought on the hood of the car. With a mighty pull Willis yanked his daughter away from Sonny.

Sonny tried to stop him, struggling in the motel parking lot. Willis threw his daughter in the car and took off as Sonny tried to halt the kidnapping, running alongside the outside of the car as it sped away.

After Willis switched cars at the car rental place, he drove back to Connecticut not worried about his children or the fight with their uncle, but that he forgot to transfer the children’s clothes and gifts he bought out of the rental car. What angered him most was the loss of the purchase price of a pair of new cowboy boots, a gift for his father, that he left behind.

Willis’s mission came to an end in July when a Connecticut judge ordered Willis to return the children to Regina’s parents in Texas. I don’t know why he wasn’t charged with kidnapping. He violently stole his children away from those who had temporary custody of them, fought with their uncle, and drove them hundreds of miles across many state lines away.

Chapter 11

The Police Logbook

The media mobbed the Danbury Superior Courthouse for the woodchipper murder probable cause hearing on March 10, 1987. After an arrest in Connecticut, this hearing determines if there is enough evidence to proceed to trial.

Newtown flight attendant Helle Crafts’ divorce attorney Dianne Anderson told the judge that her client, fearful of what her husband, an airline pilot, might do to her, warned her on Sept. 4, 1986, that, “if anything should happen to me don’t assume it’s an accident.”

Ironically, another Newtown flight attendant Regina Brown was in the Danbury courthouse on Sept. 4, 1986, while Helle Crafts was in a nearby law office describing her fear. Regina testified about her fear of her airline pilot husband Willis Brown and his threats to kill her in her divorce hearing seeking a retraining order.

Two days into the woodchipper murder probable cause hearing on March 12, 1987, the prosecution presented evidence including a rented commercial woodchipper, a chainsaw, and a missing freezer. Anyone with access to a newspaper, radio or TV (these were pre-internet days), learned how Richard Crafts almost got away with the perfect crime. The takeaway? Don’t chop a body into little pieces, it leaves too much evidence behind.

Crafts’ defense attorney waived the rest of the probable cause hearing when he couldn’t cross-examine forensic witnesses because all they needed to submit was a written report. On the morning of March 26, 1987, I was in court watching Richard Crafts enter a not guilty plea during his bond reduction hearing. He’d been in jail on $750,000 bond since his arrest in January. His bond reduction was denied.

In the police logbook

Every Thursday morning, I swung by the Newtown police station to check for any late breaking news before my 12-noon deadline for the Friday edition of The Newtown Bee. While flipping through the police dispatchers’ logbook I found the name of Regina Brown for the first time.

I discovered that on April 2, 1987, at 3:35 p.m. Mrs. Van Horne (sic) of Whippoorwill Hill Road reported a possible missing person. Officer Peter Fearon took the call. She called back at 4:20 p.m. to tell police that the gold car belonged to Regina Brown. I jotted this down and made a note “in Newtown” near this information in my reporter’s notebook.

Without realizing it I was starting a timeline of the disappearance of Regina Brown. I added April 3, 1987, to my list of calls to the police by noting that her husband, Willis Brown, called HQ at 8:45 a.m. after receiving a phone call from AA (American Airlines, his employer) and spoke to Officer Fearon.

Apparently, American had called Willis to report Regina missing from her last two flights on March 30 and April 2. My timeline continued, at 8:47 a.m. AA called HQ to speak to Officer Fearon. According to my calculations, with only two minutes between the calls to Newtown police, someone at American Airlines only spoke to Willis for maybe one to two minutes at most about his missing wife.

But Mrs. Van Horn called back on April 4, 1987, to report that the Brown’s live-in babysitter had returned from Texas and was staying at the Brown residence. Again, I didn’t know that Regina had sent all three of her children with the babysitter to her parent’s home in Texas on March 21 and March 26. Regina Brown disappeared on March 26, 1987, the same day Richard Crafts pled not guilty.

The last entry on my timeline is April 6, 1987, at 2:30 p.m. when the New York Police Department’s 24^th precinct called and “reports towing for safekeeping” a 1980 Honda with Connecticut plates WV7504. Regina Brown’s car. I made a note of the new file number for Regina Brown’s missing person case—N-584-87.

Another missing flight attendant

Holy Shit. Another missing flight attendant married to a pilot is missing in Newtown? I made a beeline to the detective division since I’m on a tight deadline.

Police confirm all the details from the logbook including that Regina’s car was recovered in Manhattan on April 6. I learned that the Brown’s had a live-in babysitter, just like the Crafts’, and she was the last person to see Regina alive on March 26 at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York.

Police tell me her car had several parking tickets on it and a single key in the ignition. Newtown detectives located the car after they “filed a description over the computer system of her and her automobile as part of the missing person report.”

Computers were still shiny, new objects in the mid-1980s, when I’d only been out of college about a year. In school, they still taught us how to copy edit on paper with a red grease pencil, a pair of scissors, and a bucket of paste to cut out paragraphs and paste them into a new arrangement on a page. Now you know where the term “cut and paste” comes from.

Police said there was “nothing out of the ordinary” found in Regina’s car except some children’s belongings before it was sent to the state police forensic lab for testing. It took me nearly 20 years to learn the truth about Regina’s car.

I filed a story for April 10, 1987, that Regina is the “estranged wife” of Willis Brown Jr. and that the couple has three children, ages four, three, and one, and according to detectives it was “uncharacteristic” for her to “leave so suddenly and not keep in contact with her children.”

A color photograph shot in black and white of a smiling Regina given to me by police accompanied the article. She’s wearing a casual collared shirt and what looks like a single diamond or pearl on a gold chain necklace around her slender neck. Regina was a black woman, but looked like a white woman in the photograph with light skin and somewhat straight dark hair. It was my first glimpse of her pretty face in color, but a ghost in gray tones in newsprint.

A week later, Regina’s parents in Ames, Texas contact the paper to announce they are offering a $5,000 reward for any information about the whereabouts of their missing daughter who they have not heard from in almost a month.

Chapter 10

The Letter

After Richard Crafts arrest and arraignment, dueling public letters between a private investigator hired by Helle Crafts to document her husband’s infidelity, and the Newtown detectives removed from the woodchipper murder investigation by the State’s Attorney, exploded in the pages of The Newtown Bee.

The Newtown Police Commission decided at its Feb. 7, 1987 meeting to put the concerns of the letters off until after the murder trial. Looking back after two trials, an appeal, and nearly 40 years, that investigation never happened.

One week after the police commission meeting, Willis Brown circulated a letter of his own. I can’t help but wonder if all this letter writing unfolding in the press, including reporting of my own, didn’t spark an idea to resurface a domestic harassment campaign against his wife or some other motive.

When Willis was angry, he made a big deal of denying paternity of his three children. In 1986, a year before Richard Crafts’ arrest, Willis wrote an 18-page letter on Valentine’s Day to a Danbury Court social worker. In it he described his claim that he was not father of his children, that three different men had fathered them, and welcomed court ordered paternity tests (which proved he was the father by 99.99% likelihood).

This letter was originally written as part of his divorce proceedings. He also sent it to American Airlines, when his employer asked him about rumors circulating about his marriage and domestic abuse.

A year later in February 1987, Willis resurfaced the letter and sent it to Regina, her family, and again to American Airlines. In it he details his reasons for denying paternity of his three children with Regina and attacks her with rumors.

He writes she “used cocaine” and “enjoyed sex very much” and described her as “dreadfully sick in the head.” He gave no proof of these accusations in this letter; however, he did offer his own character profile of his wife of four years.

“Regina is a pathological liar with a criminal mentality who has the blessings of a pretty face, a soft voice, and an innate ability to much too easily sway people into following her flute. She is much like a Loreli sitting upon coastal rocks, sending her sweet chantings out to sea. Causing many a lonely seafarer to sail their vessels dangerously towards her rocks in quest of the imagined comforts implied by her beautifully, soothing, Siren song. So, enraptured they become that they abandon their usually keen sailors’ logic, and completely ignore the possible presence of massive and jagged rocks lying just beneath the coastal surface,” Willis wrote.

After a few counseling sessions in the summer of 1984 after his assault arrest three years earlier, Willis accused Regina, for a second time, of adultery, this time with a marriage counselor the couple was seeing.

A staged burglary?

In his Valentine’s Day letter, Willis said that he decided to “tap my own phone because I developed a distrust of him.”

A week after Willis stopped seeing the counselor, he claimed that Regina and the counselor faked a burglary in their home. He claimed Regina found out that the phone was bugged, told the marriage counselor, and together they planned a staged break-in to get the cassette tapes from the bugged telephone.

Willis wrote that after they returned from a movie, “Regina, as she must have been instructed, went immediately to the bedroom, stopped, and asked, ‘Have we been robbed?’”

Willis said he didn’t notice anything unusual in the house, but at Regina’s suggestion, he went to check his pistol’s hiding place and discovered it missing. Willis wrote, “Also missing were my camera equipment, telephone answering machine, the Radio Shack tapes I had used in the phone tap, and two of my watches that were on the dresser.”

Willis said he believed Regina and the marriage counselor planned the burglary because she had a list of Black families from her priest and a similar burglary happened to one of the families on the list a month later. The proof, Willis wrote, was that the items stolen from that home were recovered and found in Willis’s canvas bag that was stolen from his house.

Did Willis imagine they staged yet another burglary at another house to cover their tracks—like some thief was targeting the few Black Catholic families in Newtown—just to take some cassette tapes out of their home?

In a separate letter to the marriage counselor two months after the robbery, Willis wrote, “Webster describes ‘charlatan’ as one who pretends to be something he is not.” He goes on to request the counselor, “Also, would you take a polygraph to explain your activities...” during the robbery in May? Willis was obsessed with polygraph exams (Richard Crafts passed one) and used one as a threat to police that he would take one, when he was ready, after his wife disappeared. He never took one.

He further wrote, “On August 3, 1983, I came home early from work (Saturday at about 2:30 p.m.) and the ‘psychologist’ was in my home, rapidly dressing. I asked her [Regina] to leave. She told me she was pregnant again, and if I let her stay in the house until the baby was born, she would ‘gladly’ leave. I had no choice. The laws of the state seem to protect the unlawful, while the victimized honest seem to have few alternatives.”

Admitting domestic abuse

It was not the first time that Willis Brown would claim himself as a victim. Willis continued in the letter, “During the fall of 1983, it was very quiet in this house. She wasn’t talking and neither was I. She then came up with a plan/scheme, which I all too easily fell into. She started baiting me with how good the ‘psychologist’ (who was not a psychologist) had been for her and how bad I was. I couldn’t help it.”

“When she lashed out at me, I punched her—once on the arm and once on the thigh, which immediately transformed her from an adulterous wife to a battered wife who was five months pregnant, and, as was her plan, she made the most of it.” The letter goes on neatly organized into sections with subheads that all start with the letter P. It reads like one long, rambling pity party. While this letter was circulating, I was still covering Newtown’s crime beat.

This letter at some point after Regina Brown’s disappearance on March 26, 1987, made its way to the Newtown Police. Later that year, they released it to the media and its contents started to make their way into news reports.

Chapter 9

The Woodchipper Murder Arrest

Two weeks after the first story I wrote about the disappearance of Helle Crafts, and seven weeks since Storm Carl crippled the area, I drove to work on Thursday morning, January 8, 1987. It was so cold I could still see my breath in the car when I arrived in Newtown ten minutes later from my little cottage in neighboring Southbury, Connecticut.

The Bee had recently started a sister paper called The Weekly Star, not to be confused with the supermarket tabloid that blared headlines such as “Presidential Candidate Meets with Alien Leader.” With a Friday morning deadline, occasionally, a Friday afternoon story would scoop the Saturday morning Danbury News-Times if we could get it printed in The Star first.

The Star’s main distribution focused on Southbury and Woodbury across the Housatonic River, also known as Lake Zoar, created by two dams thirteen miles apart.

“Hey Lisa, get down to the silver bridge,” Bee Editor Scudder Smith yelled from his office in his trademark Brook Brothers pin-striped shirt and silk bowtie. “I just heard on the police scanner the state police dive team is searching for something.”

I often wondered why Scudder wore those bowties. Was it to create an image of the 1950s newsman? To be like bow-tie wearing Jimmy Olson, Lois Lane’s sidekick on the TV series Adventures of Superman. Or like the mostly male reporters wearing fedoras with little cards tucked into the wide ribbon identifying them as press, like the fedora-wearing Kirk Douglas as the opportunistic reporter in the 1951 movie The Big Carnival, also known as Ace in the Hole.

***

Tangent Alert: Paramount Pictures changed the name of Billy Wilder’s movie to The Big Carnival just prior to its re-release (hoping to salvage poor box office performance tied to its original title) without the director’s permission. I bring this to light because as I write this, tonight (5/21/2026) is the last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I’m utterly devastated and angry at Paramount for kicking to the curb such a talented comedian, entertainer, and late night host, and proving, once again, that the bottom line (wink, wink) is Paramount’s only motivation when killing creativity.

***

After Scudder’s command, I hopped in my car, drove down Church Hill Road, took a left at Sandy Hook center, and continued along forest-lined Glen Road to the silver bridge. This erector-set looking bridge, a short span that connects Newtown to Southbury over Lake Zoar, was a bridge I commuted over twice daily. I pulled over to the side of the road on the Southbury side, jumped out of my car, and headed to the state police dive team van.

Connecticut State Police Trooper and Public Information Officer Edward Dailey, towering at six-foot-two, knew how to talk to reporters, besides just looking down at them. Rumor had it his girlfriend worked for local Channel 8 TV News and that was why they seemed to get all the exclusives. By the time I arrived that freezing morning, the TV crews had come and gone.

I asked him what they were doing. Dailey told me that the state police had been “tipped off” about something being in the river. As we spoke, the divers lifted a big black plastic sack out of the dark lake directly under the silver bridge. The murky water poured out the sides of what looked like a body bag, but smaller than one for a human. Scribbling furiously in my notebook about the three divers awkwardly lifting this mysterious package out of the water, I was fixated on what I thought might be a real body bag.

Confirmed with two sources

The next morning, I called the State Police Public Information Office in the state capitol in Hartford. I’ve spoken to Sergeant Daniel Lewis before on many occasions, mostly for car accidents on Interstate 84, or the random Newtown resident arrested for drug possession.

Trained as a journalist to always get two sources to corroborate critical information, I followed up on Daily’s quote about a “tip” leading them to Lake Zoar. Sgt. Lewis was also a diver and had been in the bone-chilling water the day before.

“So, I understand that an anonymous caller tipped you off about finding something in the river regarding the disappearance of Helle Crafts,” I asked.

“Yea, we got an unidentified source about that,” Lewis said.

“Who called?” I asked.

“If I told you that, then they wouldn’t be anonymous would they,” Lewis said. I could tell he was smiling on the other end of the phone.

He went on to say that the news reports on Channel 8 on January 8 about the dive were false, claiming that the remains of missing Newtown woman Helle Crafts had been recovered and there was an imminent arrest.

I had no reason not to believe the state police. I had two sources who confirmed that the state police had been tipped off about something being in the river. The two public information officers corroborated each other’s story, so why should I doubt it. I put exactly what they told me in a little unnoticed news account in The Weekly Star. I didn’t even have a byline on the story.

But then again, the state police also said an arrest wasn’t imminent. Within 24 hours of my story being published, they arrested Eastern Airlines pilot Richard Crafts at his Newtown house on first degree murder charges relating to his wife Pan Am flight attendant Helle Crafts who had been missing since November 18, 1986.

One of the state cops had tipped off Danbury News-Times reporter Patrick O’Neill, who covered Newtown, about the arrest. He hid in the woods next to Crafts’s home just after midnight on January 13, 1987 to watch the drama unfold. His story appeared the next day on the front page and included the rumor that a woodchipper was used in the murder. My story about the arrest and the arraignment would come 48 hours later.

Approximately 12 hours after Crafts’ arrest, at the Danbury Superior Court, State’s Attorney Walter Flanagan held a press conference before Crafts arraignment. He took questions from reporters but would not confirm that a woodchipper was used in the commission of the crime or comment on any other evidence or murder weapons used.

He did say that “portions of remains of Helle Crafts,” such as a tooth, some hair, and bone had been recovered. Dr. Henry Lee, the state police criminologist, was also at the press conference and praised his team of forensic experts that brought this case to an arrest. I wrote this in my reporter’s notebook and headed back to Newtown to write the story.

Storm Carl

On Thursday, November 20, 1986, the obit for Timothy Dalton graced the front page of The Bee. But rather than read my lead story, I stared at the front page of the Danbury News-Times. One of their photographers traveled to Castle Hill Road where he captured the town’s most iconic image on one of its most unforgettable days in the late 20th Century.

Storm Carl had ravaged the countryside the night before, knocking out power with snow and ice. The photographer caught the white church steeple, snow-covered evergreens, and the flagpole on Main Street in a frozen, silent blue hue. The only color in the photo was the American flag—the one frequently stolen—which fluttered red, white, and blue.

High speed police pursuit ends in tragedy

I spent the following week at the Danbury Superior Court listening to testimony for my story “Survivor Testifies in Fatal Crash Suit.” The parents of six dead Newtown teenagers were suing a neighboring town’s police force for engaging the kids in a high-speed pursuit that ended in their deaths when their car crashed.

I first met Newtown’s junior detective Robert Tvardzik on the first day of the civil high-speed-pursuit trial where he described the ground littered with dead teenagers after their El Camino hit a rock ledge on the side of Hattertown Road, flipped in the air, and ejected all the passengers.

Two of the eight teens survived. One of the survivors testified that week about his headaches, inability to sleep, and nightmares he had about his friends who came to tell him they were alive. That same day in court I visited another hearing room and listened to John Saputo plead innocent to killing Timothy Dalton, as the state’s attorney read the first-degree manslaughter charges to the judge.

Just a week earlier, Dalton’s mother didn’t want to give me her only photo of her dead son. Now I was taking notes to explain to my readers why Saputo felt he was not guilty. In between my court visits, I wrote about an elderly couple who were asphyxiated by fumes from an improperly vented gasoline-powered generator they set up after they lost power in Storm Carl.

By Wednesday afternoon, however, I had to write another gruesome headline, “Husband Charged with Wife’s Murder.”

Another murder in Newtown

“A Sandy Hook man was charged with the first-degree murder of his wife after allegedly stabbing her several times with a large kitchen knife...” Part of the 9-1-1 call transcript read, “I need an ambulance because I’m dying...My wife tried to kill me, and then she killed herself...”

The caller was the dead woman’s husband, who was known to drink as much as a quart of alcohol a day and suffered from blackouts. The wife, stabbed multiple times in the abdomen, lay in her bed drenched in blood when police arrived at the house in Sandy Hook. Once again, I was writing an obit/crime story for the front page—the Thanksgiving edition.

During my journalism training, I was taught to focus on the criminal act: the assault, the manslaughter, or the murder, the grisly facts perpetrated by the alleged criminal against the victim. The old saying, “if it bleeds, it leads,” referring to placement on the front page of a newspaper, was so true.

My biggest stories were drenched in blood or smelled of death. I don’t recall any sensitivity training in college about how to tell the victim’s story on a deadline, with only a few inches of copy to fit in all the grim details. The truth was the gory side of the story had to take precedent; it drew readers in. Unfortunately, still does.

This focus isolated myself from the emotions involved in these cases by just reporting on what the cops and prosecutors told me. I may have been getting away with playing the part of a reporter, but I still shielded myself from feeling like a human being.

My emotionless crime reporting, written for the front page of the Thanksgiving edition, was nestled next to the winner of the paper’s turkey-drawing contest. First place went to a kindergarten student who executed a perfect crayon outline of her left hand, covered each finger with loopy feathers, with two dark claw feet at the base of her palm, and gave her thumb a wide eye, a pointy beak, and a tight waddle. I felt guilty writing so much death adjacent to such an innocent drawing on the front page of The Newtown Bee.

What’s really going on in Newtown

The editor once again tried to create happy news to combat the bad press in his hometown. “With all the tragic news that has been appearing lately,” the Editorial Ink Drops in the upper right-hand corner of the front page began, “we take a welcome turn to something more positive about our fine community. The Bee has instituted a Sportsman of the Year Award.”

After two weeks of shocking headlines of murder, manslaughter, and negligent deaths, what I didn’t know was that Newtown resident Helle Crafts, a white, 39-year-old Pan American Airlines flight attendant and mother of three getting a divorce, went missing in the early morning hours of Storm Carl on November 19, 1986.

Fewer than two months later, her husband, Richard Crafts, a 49-year-old Eastern Airlines pilot, was arrested for her murder. Ultimately, investigators would learn he tried to conceal the crime by disposing of her frozen, dismembered body in Lake Zoar using a rented commercial woodchipper.

I also didn’t know that Regina Brown felt vulnerable after Storm Carl. With no power for the electric heat, maybe she thought the basement coal stove might provide some warmth for her children, but she needed help to get it going. Against her better judgment, and guidelines set up in a recent restraining order barring him from the house based on his history of domestic violence against her, Regina asks her estranged husband Willis to come over to help.

Five weeks later, I cut out my first news clipping about the soon to be infamous woodchipper murder. A mere few paragraphs about the disappearance of Helle Crafts buried in the inside page of The Newtown Bee on December 26, 1986. Regina Brown wasn’t on anybody’s radar yet.

“Name?”

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.

“Age?”

“Only seventeen?”

“Survived by?”

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.

“Photo? No Photo.”

Later in the day, during my usual rounds, I picked up the crime report about the death at police headquarters, a converted farm equipment building on Main Street in Newtown, Connecticut. Armed with more details about this untimely tragedy, I called the deceased teenager’s mother to request a photo to accompany the obituary/crime story.

“Hello, Mrs. Smjekal?”

“Yes?”

“How are you?” Damn, did I just say that? Only silence on the other end of the line. I hadn’t yet learned to say, “I’m sorry for your loss, my condolences,” or other empathetic words to build rapport with a grieving member of the community. At twenty-five, a year out of college, my reporting skills were growing, but my people skills needed work.

“I’m writing... your son’s... obit.” More silence.

“I need a photo of Timothy for the article.” I didn’t like asking grieving people for things. It made me nervous asking for a photo of her dead son. I’m sure she had better things to do than talk with me. But it was my job as the obit writer and police reporter.

“I only have one copy of his school photo,” she said in a weak voice. “I don’t want to lose it. It’s all I have left of him.”

“I promise you if you bring it here to the paper, we will photograph it and give it right back to you.”

After I persuaded her to share her son’s photo, she told me her husband, the dead boy’s stepfather, died four months earlier in a plane crash that also killed a local industrialist.

“Oh no! That’s horrible,” I said. No shit, Sherlock. My chest tightened. I wanted to ease her pain as she seemed so sad, but I also wanted to know more.

“Tell me about Timothy,” I said. And for the next half hour, the sadness poured out of this newly grieving mother and still grieving widow. She perked up when she told me how proud she was of Timothy and how he was going, or should have gone, off to college next year. Later that afternoon, someone came to the newsroom with a small wallet-sized picture of Timothy.

A forbidden party

The Newtown High School football team had a good day on Saturday, November 15, 1986, its record now 7-2. One family threw a party at their Sandy Hook home that night. Most of the football team attended, including some uninvited teenagers. Around 10 p.m., a group of boys gathered at the top of the driveway, and a boy who lived there came out and asked the uninvited guests to leave.

An argument broke out between two of them, and Timothy Dalton, an uninvited guest, stepped between them to break it up. That was when John Saputo, a football player, punched him twice in the face with his fist. Timothy fell to the ground. John then picked up Timothy’s head and slammed it into the dirt road. Timothy never regained consciousness.

Timothy was brought to the hospital by friends an hour and a half later, bleeding from his mouth and ears. Doctors declared him brain-dead the next day. The hospital kept him on life support for an organ transplant. He was officially pronounced dead on Monday night at ten o’clock.

A first for a cub reporter

This was my first story about a killing, and I needed to get more information besides what I had learned from the funeral home and the police report before my Thursday deadline. I went to talk to a Newtown detective.

“Come in,” Michael DeJoseph, a 20-year veteran of the force, said, not looking up from his desk covered with stacks of typed police reports while a stuffed parrot hung from the ceiling, beckoning me to enter. We spoke for a few minutes about the football player’s arrest.

“You know how kids are, there wasn’t any drinking at the house,” he said as he leaned toward me as if he were telling me a secret in a whisper. I sat on the cold metal chair, writing quotes in my reporter’s notebook. My game with myself was working. I really felt like Lois Lane.

“But the parents weren’t aware that there was beer at the party. The beer was snuck into the party by the kids.” Now this was a quote I could use, and it wasn’t yet in the daily News-Times.

When I returned to The Bee, I called the state’s attorney to find out whether John Saputo, then 16, would be tried as an adult. He would. I also asked, “What’s the difference between murder and manslaughter?” I may have been a college graduate, but ‘Lois Lane, cub reporter’ still had a lot to learn.

I also interviewed the school principal, the police sergeant at the scene, football coaches, and others. Apparently, there was a rule that the football team was not allowed to attend parties. My first criminal death story appeared on Nov. 21, 1986, on the front page, “Fight Leads to Teen’s Death and Manslaughter Charges.” It still haunts me to this day.

A Battered Wife

Like many young, professional women in the 1980s, Regina Brown tried to have it all–a happy marriage, a loving family, and a fulfilling career. However, by 1986, Regina’s nerves and marriage were badly frayed.

In April 1984, Newtown police officers were summoned to the Brown residence at 18 Whippoorwill Hill Road for a domestic assault. Willis claimed that Regina had “baited him” again into punching and strangling her.

During this attack, Regina managed to break free from him, ran out of the house screaming, and called the police from a neighbor’s home. Regina told the responding officer that Willis had tried to strangle her twice and struck her in the face. Police noted in the arrest report that there were red marks on her face and throat. Willis Brown was arrested on third-degree assault charges.

As a first offender, Willis entered a ‘no contest’ plea and agreed to counseling. Willis did go to a court-appointed counselor but walked out before the 45-minute session ended. It is highly unlikely he ever told his employer, American Airlines, that he was seeking mental health counseling. The Federal Aviation Administration rules at the time grounded any pilot in treatment for psychological problems.

By September 1986, Regina found herself sitting in the same courtroom with Willis. He had filed for divorce based on false claims of adultery. DNA paternity tests had shown that he was the father of their three children. She was seeking a restraining order based on her fear of him, based on a history of domestic violence, and threats to kill her and the children.

During this time, I was covering criminal trials at the Danbury Superior Court, so I can imagine Regina in the sterile second-floor courtroom with bad acoustics, sitting on the witness stand, giving testimony. I imagined the judge to her right and her divorce attorney, Hugh Lavery, standing in front of her, asking questions.

I often wondered if Regina and I crossed paths down the courthouse hallways or passed each other in the parking lot. We were both frequent visitors. She was an abused wife seeking protection, and I was a journalist covering crime. The family court was closed to the press, but after she disappeared, all her testimony became available in court transcripts provided to police.

Regina’s attorney asked her to recount an incident in their Newtown home from July 1, 1986. She began to tell her story. Regina, cleaning the guest bathroom on the main floor, listened to Willis as he breezed in the front door, yelling.

“Did you know Robin kissed the children right on the lips in the supermarket?” Willis asked Regina after he returned from grocery shopping and buying the two older children some sneakers. Regina could tell he was angry. Willis felt it was dirty to kiss children on the lips, a form of sexual abuse he told her.

“Regina, we have to talk,” Willis said as she stepped out of the bathroom into the hallway to hear him better. According to Regina, Willis frightened her with his fist balled up and his arm raised in the air. She said he had done this before to scare her, as if he was going to strike her. Then Willis “raised his arms and went for my neck,” Regina testified.

“Regina, this is it; you’re dead,” Willis blurted out. As he squeezed her neck, Regina said that things “began to get blurry.” Her testimony continued, “I was trying to push him away from me. I couldn’t reach him. And things blurred to the point where I couldn’t see anything any longer. When I came to, I was lying in the bathroom. I did struggle with him. I remember struggling. And I remember hearing the children screaming and yelling.”

Willis was much larger than Regina, with long, strong arms and enormous hands. As she struggled, her world went dark. “And I was dragged to the bathroom. When I came to, I was—I had fallen on the baby’s potty chair. So, there I was, I was out, and I had come to on the baby’s potty chair,” she told the court.

As she tried to stand after her blackout, she heard Willis coming up from the basement. Then he appeared in the bathroom with a thick, dirty rope in his hands. She immediately recognized it as one he used on Block Island to tie up the mopeds. Willis came into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, and sat on the floor amidst the scattered toilet-training debris, the rope clutched in his hand. After a momentary pause, he spoke.

“I must have been in shock,” Willis told her.

“What happened? Why did you do it?” Regina asked.

“You’re going to call the police. I know you are going to call the police. I’ll lose everything I have if you call the police. I know you’re going to call the police,” Willis repeated.

“No, Willis, I won’t call the police. I will not call the police,” Regina promised.

“I might as well hang myself and kill us all,” he told his frightened wife. “Willis, everything is going to be okay. I will not call the police,” Regina repeated.

Regina told the court, “We stayed in the bathroom for a short period, [until] he was convinced that I was not going to call the police. I wasn’t going to call the police because I realized that I really felt that Willis needed some help, mentally. And he had continued to refuse and deny that he needed help. But he did state that he realized, at that point, he needed some help. He’s admitted to me. He said, ‘Regina, I know I need some help.’”

Livestock on the Lam

My first story as the police reporter for The Newtown Bee, “Flag Stolen Again,” appeared in the nine-column broadsheet. In truth, The Bee was known more for its antiques coverage and a gossip column written from the perspective of a cat than for its criminal justice exposés.

My story began, “The familiar scene of the American flag blowing in the wind on the Main Street flagpole was temporarily disturbed on November 3 when someone stole the flag.” I missed the luxury of a team of editors checking my work from story submission to the printed page, like at the Journal-Courier, a large metropolitan daily. But then again, if a stolen flag is the most significant police news of the week, there isn’t much need for all that editing or fact-checking.

The Bee, with its quaint tagline “known for local news since 1877,” had thrived through four generations of the Smith family as owners. The then editor and future publisher, R. Scudder Smith, reminded me of William Randolph Hearst and his penchant for inventing his own news, such as the popular jewelweed contest. Scudder, always the marketer, made yellow T-shirts with The Bee logo for all entrants.

My task was to list all the people who came to the office with a plucked weed, some from as far away as Philadelphia and Rhode Island. The winner was an eight-foot eleven-inch-tall weed found at a local animal hospital and brought in by a teenage boy who worked with local landscapers. A photo of him proudly displaying his wild weed made page six of the paper—just like gossip and celebrity news in The New York Post.

Newtown’s crime beat strolled slowly along in the summer of 1986. This 25-year-old reporter got to cover my first criminal pursuit, writing the headline, “One Sheep Roams Free.” This story details the police department’s inability to capture a roaming ram. According to reports, the sheep enjoyed the neighbor’s porch because there was a big window where it could stare at its reflection.

The sheep enjoyed it so much that he didn’t want to leave. I always wondered how the cops knew this. When the dog warden couldn’t lasso the sheep, and a police officer failed to hit the animal with a tranquilizer dart, the outlaw ram remained at large when my article went to press. A few days later, I hear on the police scanner that the ram returned home on his own. There would be no tidy follow-up story of the fugitive’s capture.

After the sheep, I had the opportunity to put my photojournalism skills to use when a pair of pigs got loose and invaded a neighbor’s yard. As they were chomping on a pear tree, I captured the scene of a cautious Standard Poodle hiding behind a tree, unable to defend his property.

Working at a weekly, my reporting always stood in the shadow of the daily newspaper, the Danbury News-Times. The Newtown reporter was my nemesis. I was constantly being scooped and felt powerless to change it. The reporter had long-standing sources in the local and state police, and I was a young woman afraid to speak up.

As part of my job, I met weekly with Newtown’s police chief, Louis Marchese, an old-school former state police captain. When I interviewed him about the fire at The White Birch Inn, a local drinking establishment, he called the waitresses “barmaids.” He also referred to the women secretaries in the office as “the ladies.” A gray-haired man of Italian descent in his early seventies, he had served longer in law enforcement than anyone else in the state at the time. Marchese’s loud, bellowing voice and glaring blue eyes terrified me as a young reporter.

I would sit across from him at his big wooden desk, where he held a fat, unlit cigar between wrinkled, brown lips, and asked questions. Before his response, he’d stare me down and chew on his cigar. Between questions, he often yelled to officers or “the ladies” for something he needed. What bothered me the most was his preference for calling Scudder to break a big story rather than calling me. I usually found out about the story by reading it in The Bee.

During my first year, I also wrote about the department’s first female police officer, the former dispatcher who witnessed Regina Brown breastfeeding her baby in the police department meeting room three years earlier in 1983.

Reporting on her career was like documenting the emergence of women’s rights in Newtown. Between union complaints and labor lawsuits, she successfully sued the town after being forced to take a lower-paying job in her former dispatcher role and not work the more dangerous patrol duty while pregnant.

The union contract had no provision for maternity leave, but the chief had previously allowed a male officer to work light duty after he broke his leg, all without a pay decrease. Nevertheless, the female officer persevered and won her suit. She would file new complaints with the union when the department lagged on gender equality policies.

It wasn’t easy being a professional career woman in the 1980s.