The couple, pre-accident.
In one of the weirdest stories ever, this woman from New York, Angelika Graswald, pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide yesterday after her future husband drowned on the Hudson River in 2015. You may or may not remember a story The Inertia ran in 2016 about the woman who was accused of trying to sabotage her husband’s kayak after he’d been drinking, possibly hoping to collect on a $250,000 life insurance plan.
On an early spring evening in April of 2015, Graswald and 46-year-old Vincent Viafore pushed off into the Hudson River in kayaks near Cornwall, New York. The couple, from nearby Poughkeepsie, was paddling back from Bannerman’s Island in the middle of the river, a common paddling destination, but not necessarily an easy one if conditions aren’t ideal. The water was reportedly messy with waves and wind. Around 7:30 p.m., the 35-year-old Graswald made a 911 call that her fiancé, Viafore, was in distress, having capsized his kayak. He wasn’t wearing a lifejacket.
When authorities arrived, Graswald was swimming and in distress herself and Viafore was nowhere to be found. Search efforts yielded nothing. In May of that year, a body was found near the Cornwall Yacht Club. It was later identified as Viafore’s. What initially looked like an open-and-shut tragedy turned into a murder mystery when police became suspicious of Graswald’s “matter of fact,” story with little show of emotion. “Initially, we believed her to be a survivor of a tragic accident,” said New York State Police Maj. Patrick Regan at a news conference following the accident. “Some inconsistencies in the accounts that she gave of those last minutes led investigators to be suspicious.”
After heavy police questioning, investigators say Graswald admitted to tampering with Viafore’s kayak, removing the drain plug so it would fill up with water. “Yes … I wanted him dead, and now he’s gone,” she said on a video that was played nationally on the CBS show 48 Hours, a television news magazine that profiles criminal cases.
It is certainly a bizarre case: Graswald admitted she removed the drain plug in his boat and knew a locking device in his paddle was missing. Without a lifejacket, Viafore had little protection if things went wrong. Facing second-degree murder and manslaughter charges, her plea will get her out of jail, with time served, by December, her defense team said.
“While no outcome can compensate for the loss of a beloved son, brother and uncle, this disposition will hopefully bring a measure of closure to the Viafore family,” Orange County District Attorney David M. Hoovler said. “… By pleading guilty, the defendant has acknowledged that Vincent Viafore’s death was not simply a tragic accident, but the result of this defendant’s criminal conduct.”
