Forensicwx
Final Roll Call 4153. STLCO 10-42 10/13 @ 1519
Interesting developments in this case....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/n...d-in-hudson-river-kayaking-accident.html?_r=0
For days, the New York State Police scoured the sandy shorelines of the Hudson River, looking for a man whose fiancée said had slipped under the frigid surface when his kayak capsized during a weekend excursion.
The family and friends of Vincent Viafore, 46, a tall, muscular man who loved all things on the water, walked alongside the authorities as they searched for his body.
His fiancée, Angelika Graswald, 35, put her hands on her face and sobbed during a television interview, her grief visible in reddened eyes after she said she watched her fiancé disappear into choppy waters on April 19. People she spoke to said she sounded upset and lost for words.
But friends said she sometimes behaved as if a huge weight had fallen off her. She posted a torrent of photos to Facebook, one of them four days after Mr. Viafore’s disappearance showing her kayaking on stormy waters. (She answered a commenter who wrote, “You did everything you could,” with an image of a rainbow.) Another showed her doing yoga beside a river.
On Thursday, Orange County prosecutors charged Ms. Graswald with murder, saying she intentionally killed her fiancé and then told misleading stories as Mr. Viafore’s loved ones fretted.
“Initially, we believed her to be a survivor of a tragic accident,” Maj. Patrick Regan, a State Police commander, said at a news conference. But, he added, “Some inconsistencies in the accounts that she gave of those last minutes led investigators to be suspicious.”
Major Regan said the authorities believed the murder happened on the river, but he declined to answer questions about what evidence they may have. Mr. Viafore’s body has not been found. “She made statements that implicated herself in this crime, enough to certainly have reasonable cause to have made the arrest,” he said.
In an interview with News 12 Westchester on Thursday, she said she was wrongfully accused.
Ms. Graswald called 911 around 7:40 p.m. on April 19 as the couple were kayaking back to the western shore from Bannerman’s Island in the Hudson, several miles north of West Point, the authorities said. The wind had picked up. She said Mr. Viafore, who was not wearing a life vest, had disappeared into the 46-degree waters. She was wearing one, though she still had to be rescued.
The authorities recovered two kayaks, but not Mr. Viafore’s body.
.....
“I saw him struggling a little bit,” she said in a soft, halting cadence. “He was trying to figure out how to paddle the waves. And then I just saw him flip, right in front of me.”
Despite his muscular build, Ms. Graswald said she was powerless to keep him from drowning.
“He kept, like, watching me, and I kept watching him,” she said. She remembered calling out: “Just hold on, just hold on!
“He said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it,’ ” Ms. Graswald continued. “I was like, ‘Pff, what are you talking about, you’re going to make it, of course.”
She offered few hints of a troubled conscience. About a week after the episode, she called her father-in-law from a previous marriage, Richard Graswald, with whom she rarely spoke, to wish him a happy birthday.
“I asked her about the accident, and she says, ‘You know, it’s a tragic thing, what can I say about it?’ ” Mr. Graswald said. “She was upset, of course. I didn’t prod into it.”
Ms. Graswald, a native of Latvia, kept her married name despite divorcing Mr. Graswald’s son in 2009. But online and with Mr. Viafore, she used a different last name, Lipska, said Kimberly Popovich, a longtime friend of Mr. Viafore.
Ms. Popovich said she was not sure that Mr. Viafore had known of her prior marriage. She said he was taken by her, in part because she was 11 years younger......
But since his disappearance, Ms. Popovich said she recalled clues that something was off about her. Mr. Viafore, who held a well-paying job as a project manager, had been supporting her since she quit her job as a bartender. And she said the story of a reckless kayaking trip was out of character for Mr. Viafore.
“Even though he had that side of him that was kind of an adrenaline person, he always took precautions about himself,” Ms. Popovich said. “When this story came out that he was on the Hudson at 7:30 at night in those choppy waters, 30 degrees, it just didn’t jibe with me.”
Her brashness may have led to a break in the case. On Wednesday, the authorities said, Ms. Graswald went to Bannerman’s Island, known formally as Pollepel Island, to lay flowers in honor of Mr. Viafore. Investigators were there as part of their search efforts, and it was while they were speaking there that the most glaring contradictions emerged.
The Orange County district attorney, David M. Hoovler, would not say whether there was a life insurance policy, a will or estate, that was set to go to Ms. Graswald after Mr. Viafore’s death. Of her possible motives, Mr. Hoovler said, “Not going to speak of it.”
Ms. Popovich said, “You want to believe that people are good, but you have that feeling in your gut that something is probably just not right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/n...d-in-hudson-river-kayaking-accident.html?_r=0