Fiancee Charged With Murder of Missing Kayaker

Her tale of tragedy didn't add up, cops say
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted May 1, 2015 3:48 AM CDT
Fiancee Charged With Murder of Missing Kayaker
Graswald told police her fiance vanished near this stretch of river.   (recordonline.com)

A murder mystery on the Hudson: Police in Orange County, NY, have charged a woman with the murder of the fiance she says vanished beneath the surface of the river when both their kayaks capsized April 19. A state police commander says Angelika Graswald, 35, initially seemed like a grieving victim of tragedy, but "some inconsistencies in the accounts that she gave of those last minutes led investigators to be suspicious," and she "made statements that implicated herself in this crime, enough to certainly have reasonable cause to have made the arrest," even though 11 days of searching have failed to turn up the body of 46-year-old Vincent Viafore, the New York Times reports.

Graswald, who said during a 911 call that Viafore wasn't wearing a life jacket when he fell into the frigid river, tells News 12 Westchester that she is being wrongly accused. But a friend of Viafore's tells the Times that something seemed off about her behavior after the incident and the way she had described it. Viafore, a strong and experienced swimmer, "always took precautions about himself," the friend says. "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." Police say they believe Viafore was murdered on the river, though they haven't commented on how, and they've asked people near the Hudson anywhere south of Albany to look out for his body, CBS New York reports. (Another group of kayakers recently saw a beautiful day turn deadly.)

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