Murder at the Met: read on to discover the tragic story of the Met violinist murdered in a concert interval...
Murder at the Met... an otherwise normal concert
For Helen Hagnes Mintiks, the evening of 23 July 1980 should have been just another booking in the diary of a busy freelance violinist. Hagnes, aged 30, had been hired to play in the orchestra for the Berlin Ballet’s 11-day residency at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan, and Wednesday 23 July was day eight of the sequence. Hagnes took her chair as usual for the first half of the 8pm performance, where Stravinsky’s Firebird and the Pas de deux from Minkus’s Don Quixote were the works featured.
After the interval, a violinist was not in her chair...
At the interval, Hagnes left the orchestra pit along with her fellow musicians, but when the players reconvened around 9.30pm for Ture Rangström’s Miss Julie, she was not among them. Hagnes’s violin lay unattended on her chair, and by the time the curtain calls for Miss Julie ended, she was still missing. Had she fallen ill, a fellow violinist wondered?
Outside the Met building, Hagnes’s husband Janis Mintiks, a sculptor, waited patiently in his truck to pick Helen up, as he did after every performance. But his wife did not appear, and a perplexed Mintiks returned to the couple’s West 75th Street apartment without her.
The missing violinist... 'a sweet and talented girl'
Neither Janis nor Helen were native New Yorkers. Janis was an Austrian immigrant, and Helen grew up on the family poultry farm in Canada. She started playing violin aged eight, appearing as a soloist for the Seattle Symphony while still a teenager. Leaving Canada to study at the Juilliard School, New York, she subsequently became a pupil of the great Ukrainian violinist Nathan Milstein. ‘A sweet girl, trusting, gentle,’ her Juilliard violin teacher remembered. ‘A talented girl, with all sorts of enthusiasm.’
Murder at the Met... the police make a gruesome discovery...
Anxiety about Hagnes’s disappearance quickly mounted. At 11.15pm, police were notified, and a search of the Met’s maze of offices, corridors, dressing rooms, stairwells and elevators was initiated.
Nine hours later, at 8.30 on Thursday morning, a gruesome discovery was made: her body was at the bottom of a ventilation shaft, bound, gagged and naked. Hagnes had, it seemed, been thrown from a sixth-floor roof at the rear of the building. How had she got there, detectives wondered, and who was her attacker?
An investigation is launched
A murder investigation was launched, one of the biggest Manhattan had seen in recent memory. A team of 50 detectives interviewed over 500 Met employees and musicians, but leads were slow in coming. One witness had, it seemed, spotted Hagnes in a backstage elevator with a ‘plainly dressed, dark-haired white man’, towards the end of the concert’s interval. Another witness heard scuffling in the elevator when the doors had shut.
Suspicion gradually centred on a Met stagehand named Craig Crimmins, who resembled a pencil sketch a police artist had made from witness statements. A partial fingerprint had also been found on the sixth-floor rooftop, and Crimmins matched it. At 7pm on Friday 29 August, five weeks after Hagnes’s body was discovered, the 21 year-old was arrested outside his Bronx apartment and indicted for her murder.
Murder at the Met... what was the motive?
Why did he do it? Those close to Crimmins initially found it impossible to believe that he did, describing him as ‘a quiet, gentle, unobtrusive and well-liked young man’. But a different picture emerged during the course of the police investigation. Crimmins had, it transpired, drunk ‘about two dozen bottles of beer’
on the day of the murder. He was ‘stumbling, rocking back and forth and bumping into scenery and lamps’, a fellow stagehand recollected.
Encountering Hagnes, and possibly offering to take her to a Berlin Ballet star she wished to visit, he instead rode the elevator to a basement area beneath stage level. There, no doubt inflamed by alcohol, he attempted to rape Hagnes. When this failed (Hagnes fought back), Crimmins marched the violinist up a rear staircase to sixth-floor level, at some point binding her with a rope. Hagnes was still alive when Crimmins kicked her into the ventilation shaft, and she died of impact injuries sustained during the fall.
Murder at the Met... a term of 20 years to life
While claiming not to remember details of the evening due to intoxication, Crimmins eventually confessed to Hagnes’s murder. He was given a prison term of 20 years to life, and is still serving his sentence to this day.
At a parole hearing in 2002, Crimmins expressed regret over the crime, and gave a chilling insight into the rage-fuelled state of mind which caused his actions. ‘She slapped me in the face and kneed me in the groin,’ he claimed of his victim. ‘And I don’t know, something snapped in my brain’.