Chief of Detectives James Sullivan, speaking at the news conference to announce the arrest of Craig Crimmins, said detectives questioned more than 1,000 people.
On the evening of July 23, 1980, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, a superbly talented thirty-year-old violinist, was performing in the orchestra at the Metropolitan Opera House, in Lincoln Center, on Manhattan’s West Side. The Big Apple was a long way from Aldergrove, British Columbia, a tiny suburb of Vancouver where she was born and raised.
Mintiks had been a child prodigy. She earned an undergraduate and a master’s degree from the Juilliard School of Music and went on to study in London, Switzerland, and Italy. Along the way, she was mentored by some of the world’s most renowned violin virtuosos. Now she was playing at the Met, not only the undisputed crown jewel in the city’s cultural firmament, but also the apogee of Western civilization’s grandest musical venues. It was a dream come true.
Mintiks played flawlessly during the first two performances by the Berlin Ballet, The Firebird and the sublime pas de deux from Don Quixote. At the 9:30 P.M. intermission, she left the orchestra pit to stretch her legs. She made a brief stop in the women’s locker room, located beneath the stage, and then was seen boarding a backstage elevator in search of the star, Valery Panov, a Soviet defector and principal male dancer for the troupe.
Mintiks was not slated to perform for the third ballet, Five Tangos, but when she failed to return for the finale, her colleagues played without her, for even in opera, “the show must go on.”
It was only after the final curtain fell that her bandmates became concerned about her whereabouts, as did her husband, Janis, who came after the show to pick her up. Police officers from the nearby Twentieth Precinct were called to the scene and began a painstaking search of every nook and cranny in the ten-floor theater. Eleven hours passed before they found her naked, battered body splayed on a ledge thirty feet below the roof in one of the opera house’s six ventilation shafts.
Ropes and strands of torn clothing had been used to tie her hands behind her back and bind her ankles. A gag of napkins was stuffed in her mouth. The medical examiner determined that her death had been caused by multiple fractures of her skull, ribs, and lower extremities. The autopsy also revealed heavy bleeding in her brain, an indication she was alive when she was hurled to her death.
The medical examiner determined that her death had been caused by multiple fractures of her skull, ribs, and lower extremities.
Among evidence that the police recovered was a palm print on a pipe on the sixth floor and the rope used to secure the victim’s hands. They noted it had a clove hitch knot, commonly used by stagehands. Detectives were also able to draw a composite sketch of the suspect based on a description that Laura Cutler, an American dancer in the troupe, provided of a man she saw in the elevator with Mintiks before she went missing.
The crime seemed like something plucked from the pages of an Agatha Christie mystery. The media’s unrestrained fascination fell somewhere between the sheer brutality of what had occurred and the ethereal qualities imbued by both the victim and the storied venue.