Intelligent, beautiful, talented, with a dream job and a happy marriage, Helena Greenwood’s life was considered perfect. But then, everything changed on the night of April 7, 1984.
Tragedy When Husband Was Away
If anyone asked about Helena Greenwood, her friends and colleagues would use glowing words to describe this woman like radiant, honest, intelligent, diligent, and sincere.
She was a talented female scientist. Coming to America to establish her career, Helena quickly advanced in the biotechnology field. Helena became the marketing director of a medical diagnostic technology development company in San Francisco, California.
She and her husband, architect Roger Greenwood, lived in Atherton, a quiet suburb of San Francisco.
On April 7, 1984, tragedy struck Helena when Roger was away on a business trip. In the middle of that night, a man suddenly appeared in Helena’s bedroom and threatened to kill her if she didn’t follow his demands. Unable to do anything, Helena had to grit her teeth and endure being raped by him. Afterward, the attacker left with some money he took from Helena.
Helena described her attacker as quite tall and slender. She couldn’t see his face because he wore a knit cap that covered his head, leaving only his eyes visible.
Fingerprints on the Teapot
Police determined the culprit broke in through the kitchen window. They also found critically important evidence – 3 unfamiliar fingerprints on the teapot near the windowsill.
Helena said she had made tea before going to bed, then set it on the windowsill. It seemed the culprit had picked up the teapot and set it down on a nearby table before jumping into the house.
The 3 fingerprints on the teapot did not match any in California’s criminal fingerprint database. Therefore, police could not identify the suspect. With no other leads, the rape and robbery case hit a dead end.
A year later, police arrested a man as he was attempting to sexually assault a 12-year-old girl outside an apartment building in Belmont, California. It was 42-year-old accountant David Paul Frediani.
David had no prior criminal record. When his fingerprints were entered into the criminal database, they surprisingly matched the 3 prints on the teapot at Helena’s home. David’s house was over 11km away from Helena’s.
Initially, David denied the allegations but after police said they had his fingerprints in the victim’s home, David began trembling and mumbling, “I was drunk at the time.” He then requested a lawyer and made no further statements.
When confronted with David in court, Helena could not definitively confirm he was the culprit. The judge had to postpone the trial for another date.
Soon after, Helena and her husband moved to San Diego when she took a new job at a biotech research company doing DNA diagnostics. Here she became the company’s vice president.
At that time, there were only three weeks until David’s trial date. However, Helena could not wait to testify because another tragedy had befallen her.
Sudden Death
It was the morning of August 22, 1985, after Roger Greenwood went to work, Helena ended a phone call with an acquaintance, gathering documents for work. And when the clock struck 9 am, she began heading to the office, unaware that in the dense shrubbery behind the tall fence surrounding her and her husband’s home, a killer had been waiting.
On that day, when Helena did not show up at the office as usual and did not call, her colleagues felt something was amiss because the doctor always arrived before 9 am and would call if there was an emergency.
By early afternoon, they notified her husband. Roger rushed home to check. After parking on the street, he approached the sturdy gate and pushed it open. But the door didn’t budge. Roger then went to the side to see what was obstructing it from the inside.
Roger was immediately stunned. It was Helena lying on her back right under the gate, motionless. Blood was pouring from gashes on her head and soaking her clothes. Roger knew his wife was dead.
Crime Scene Staged
The killer had staged the scene to look like a robbery, but police found it was a misdirection because the killer did not take money from Helena’s purse, and money in the house was also untouched.
The autopsy revealed Helena had been strangled. The wounds on her body showed the vice president had struggled fiercely against her attacker. There were small bloodstains under Helena’s torn fingernails.
Police suspected the culprit was David as he may have wanted to prevent the victim from testifying. Although the circumstantial evidence against David was quite weak, authorities also had no evidence to charge him. The crime scene investigation yielded no results, while the blood under the victim’s nails was too little to analyze in 1985 when DNA profiling technology was still rudimentary.
A few months later, David stood trial for the sexual assault charge. Even though Helena was dead, the three fingerprints and the culprit’s semen left at the scene were enough for the jury to believe he committed the crime. David received a 5-year sentence for rape and robbery. He had also been a suspect in several other sexual assaults but was not charged.
After serving 3 years, David was pardoned and returned to accounting. This man resumed his life but became reclusive. Over time, the file on Helena’s murder was archived along with 300 other unsolved homicides.
After Helena’s death, her husband and parents also passed away without witnessing the case being solved.
It wasn’t until 1998, 13 years after the murder, that police found a new lead.
The Haunting Crime Scene
In 1992, Laura Heilig, a female detective with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, was assigned to the unit handling unsolved murder cases. The file on the death of Vice President Helena Greenwood made a strong impression on her.
Laura vividly remembered the day she looked at the crime scene photo of a tall, slender woman lying on the ground. The victim’s face was twisted to the side, her lifeless eyes half-open. Contents from her purse including keys, coins, and lipstick were scattered around. Work documents stained with blood had been blown about by the wind. Near her head were a small yogurt cup and plastic spoon.
Laura read the information about the victim. She was around Laura’s age, a woman who had achieved what was out of reach for most girls of their generation. Laura thought about the sad reality that the victim had died a painful death in a foreign land.
But it wasn’t until 1998, 13 years after the murder, when they realized DNA analysis technology had advanced, that Laura and her colleagues began revisiting Helena Greenwood’s case.
Justice After 13 Years
The investigation team sent the bloodstained fingernail fragments from the victim to a DNA lab in Northern California.
Finally, the results showed there was blood from someone other than Helena. Next, the investigators requested testing a blood sample from suspect David Paul Frediani. The results confirmed it was this man’s blood.
With these results, police had grounds to obtain an arrest warrant for the accountant. On the early morning of December 15, 1999, as David Paul Frediani was nonchalantly approaching his car to go to work, police approached with handcuffs ready. “You are under arrest for the murder of Helena Greenwood.” The suspect’s face immediately changed. He surely did not expect to be arrested like this after 13 years.
In David’s trial, the prosecutor alleged he tried to kill Helena to prevent her from testifying. He thought the trial could not proceed if the victim was absent. In the end, the jury found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life without parole.
