Movies - TV
The Real Crime That Inspired The Coen Brothers' Fargo
By ANDREW HOUSMAN
"Fargo" follows a hapless car salesman who hires inept criminals to kidnap his wife for ransom. The plan goes sideways, leading to a series of dark, humorous, and violent events.
While it is a work of fiction, the Coen brothers were inspired by real-world events, as the screenplay includes elements from several news events with the Coens' original input.
The notoriously grisly woodchipper scene is the closest to reality, but Joel and Ethan Coen stated that whatever real-life stories they referenced are purely surface value.
On November 18, 1986, flight attendant Helle Crafts disappeared one evening after arriving at her home in Newtown, Connecticut, from a long trip across West Germany.
Helle had been relentlessly fighting with her husband, Richard, ever since she hired a private investigator and discovered that he had been having an affair with another woman.
Richard had not taken her plans for divorce very lightly, and she began to warn her friends about his increasingly violent nature, so Richard became a suspect in her disappearance.
Police found a missing piece of carpet and blood on the mattress in his home. Credit card receipts show he bought a freezer, comforter, wood chipper, chainsaw, and bed sheets.
After a snowplow driver told the police that he saw a man with a woodchipper near Lake Zoar, an investigation of the site revealed a chainsaw blade along with human remains.
Despite this evidence, the lack of a physical corpse resulted in a drawn-out trial, and Richard Crafts wasn't convicted until 1989.