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You forget we're all mammals.
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Everything that happens to human beings,
whether it's road rage, walking down the street,
everything that happens to human beings
is about territory and pecking order.
We're mammals.
And that applies to murder at the Met.
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The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City
is one of the most prestigious
cultural institutions in the world.
In the early 1980s,
it was a beacon of elegance,
standing tall in a city overrun by crime and chaos
but on one terrible summer night,
that crime and chaos found its way inside the Met.
For insideedition.com, I'm Sal Bono
and this is "New York Gritty."
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In the 1980s, New York was on its knees.
Economically, the city was about to go bankrupt.
Culturally, the violence was at its height.
It's incomprehensible to most people
to juxtapose what it was like then
and what it is now.
I mean, it was just really a feral city
and it came to a point where children
were literally sleeping in their bathtubs
so that stray bullets from drug dealing gangs
wouldn't be hitting children as they slept.
Despite all the depressing things
that were existing in New York City at that time,
there were certain places that were considered
almost like diplomatic enclaves
where nobody would be harmed, nobody would be hurt
and that people could see only pretty things,
only, like, beautiful things.
The Metropolitan Opera was home
to some of those beautiful things.
The Manhattan home
of great voices and big diamonds.
Founded in 1883, the Met has always attracted
top talent from all over the world.
Backstage are many of the famous singers
who have sung in well-known operas.
Anybody that had any pretension
to cultural appreciation
would wanna go to the Met.
You look beautiful.
There was that movie, "Moonstruck."
Nicolas Cage wanted to go to the Met
and he was a working class guy
and he had enough knowledge to that
this was something that was so beautiful.
Meet me at the Met.
All right. All right.
Where's the Met.
The Met was one of the main institutions
that kept the city going.
If the Met fell into disrepute,
if it became a seamy place where rich people didn't go
and therefore went out of business,
there is not a lot of reason to stay in New York.
But one night in July 1980,
the Met became the site of a terrible crime.
The Met is
a maze.
Very spooky.
It is "Phantom at the Opera" time.
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On the evening of July 23rd, 1980,
Helen Hagnes, a superbly talented 30 year old violist
was preforming in the orchestra
of 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.
At 9:30 p.m., intermission,
she left the orchestra pit to stretch her legs.
She was not slated to perform
in 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.
Not wanting his wife to travel home at night
with her expensive instrument,
Helen's husband, Janis Mintiks,
would pick her up after each performance.
On that terrible night, Janis, was waiting outside the Met
but Helen never came out to meet him.
The next day, her body was found
inside one of the building's air shafts,
nude and bound with rope.
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I went, opened my door and picked up the paper
and there was the headline.
That's how I found out.
I literally fell on the floor
and I just, I collapsed for about 10 minutes
and then I got up and I said,
"What am I gonna do?"
Judith Olson was an up-and-coming pianist
when she met Helen.
She says they became close friends,
bonding over their small town roots
and their awe of a big city with endless possibilities.
Helen and I met at Julliard.
I don't remember exactly the first time
or place that I saw her
but I do remember what I saw
because Helen was very unusual looking,
especially, especially for Julliard
and I, especially for New York.
She had this incredible white blond hair.
She was beautiful and she was pretty tall
and so she sort of stood out
in any situation.
I traveled quite a bit with her performing
and we went (laughs)
to places that we wouldn't have expected to go.
Judith says after Helen got married in 1976
they saw less of each other but remained friends
and occasionally performed together.
The last time I saw her,
I believe I just ran into her on the street, on 72nd Street,
we just said a passing and we spoke for a couple minutes.
It wasn't anything special so,
of course, we had no idea that that was our goodbye.
With Helen's death classified as a homicide,
the search for her killer was officially on.
They had to canvas anyone
who might've been outside at the time.
No one ever thought they'd figure out who did it.
The cops were pretty sure it was an inside job,
somebody inside.
With no witnesses or obvious suspects,
the media dubbed the killer, The Phantom of the Opera.
Although the city logged more than 2,000 murders is 1980,
Mintiks' seemed to have bigger implications than others.
This is where Helen Hagnes
played her violin on Wednesday night.
As a young television reporter,
Meredith Vieira interviewed Helen's colleagues
after her death for WCBS.
She's a very fine violinist,
a very nice girl.
She's outgoing, charming, helpful.
Michael Rammels says he doesn't want to believe
someone he works with is responsible
for something like this.
'Cause you can't function under the assumption
that someone's lurking in the shadows after you somewhere.
I just, I don't think about it that way.
In an effort to calm the public's fear,
the Met offered tours of the building to reporters.
One of the least used parts
of the building is the sixth floor.
People rarely come up here.
It opens out onto the roof
and the air shaft where Hagnes' body was dumped.
This place is so remote, police say,
the murderer would've had to know of it beforehand.
Evidence led cops to a stagehand at the Met,
21 year old, Craig Crimmins.
Investigators say they found his hand print
on the roof of the building
and the rope used to bind Helen
was tied in a distinctive knot.
They found a, I believe it was a clove hitch knot,
and that's used by stagehands.
The fact that were moved towards a suspect by that way,
is something like almost out of an old-fashioned
detective's playbook.
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After questioning Crimmins,
police were able to piece together
what they believe happened to Helen Hagnes Mintiks
the night she died.
And in the elevator during the intermission,
he made some kind of a pass and she slapped him
and that was the trigger.
He pulled out a hammer and he was enraged
and it wasn't so much the slap.
It was the, "You don't think I'm good enough for you,"
I believe.
He becomes enraged and in a drunker stupor,
he takes her up to the roof of this edifice
in the back of this 10-story structure
behind the patrons' gaze
and he proceeds to try to undress her.
He tried to rape her but he can't
because of his inebriation, presumably,
leaves her there.
When he walks away, he hears her making a sound
as like a wounded animal,
'cause she was beaten up by this guy
and the end, he actually kicks her
and he pushes her basically down this shaft
where she was found like dangling
in the shaft hours later.
She had subdural hematoma, bleeding in the brain,
and the suggestion was is that she died
while she was kicked off this roof,
she was still alive and she died
a slow and painful and no miss death.
Craig Crimmins went on trial
for killing Helen Hagnes Mintiks in 1981.
The Phantom of the Opera had been unmasked
to the relief of many.
I was afraid for myself
because pretty much everybody that knew me knew her.
So I thought, well, if somebody was looking for her,
if somebody had targeted her and sneaked into the Met,
maybe I'm next.
It was intense grief.
I mean, I cried day and night.
But I was also afraid for myself.
Craig Crimmins was convicted of felony murder
and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison
where he remains to this day.
With Crimmins locked away
and New York City having cleaned itself up
from its crime-ridden past,
the murder at the Met has become a distant memory
but Helen's friend says the "Phantom of the Opera"
will always mean something different for her
than for anyone else.
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I would rather have it called "Phantom of the Opera"
than a title that really describes what happened.
I would rather hear that than by best friend, Helen,
was tied up, tortured,
but if I just hear "Phantom of the Opera,"
it sounds just like a story.
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