​Savage fantasies

FARGO – Years before Savanna Lafontaine Greywind was murdered, her unborn child ripped crudely from her womb, William Henry Hoehn, accused accomplice, had savage fantasies.

Hoehn choked his former girlfriend for pleasure, Tanith McCloud, formerly of Grand Forks, now living in Moorhead, said in court. She met Hoehn while working for a marketing company in Grand Forks taking drive through McDonalds orders along the West Coast.

“Once in a while he would try and strangle me,” McCloud, 33, said. She has Native ancestry and considered herself Gewind’s cousin.

[Editor’s note: HPR decided not to include the remainder of McCloud’s quote.]

“I was uncomfortable about it.”

After McCloud broke off the engagement, Hoehn soon after turned to the co-conspirator in Greywind’s murderer, Brooke Lynn Crews, who had a medical procedure to ensure she could not get pregnant. Their sexual relationship, according to Assistant State’s Attorney Ryan Younggren, was rocky, and included choking. Hoehn was also convicted of domestic violence and child abuse.

As a former fiancé, Hoehn was once open minded, always looking for a quick way to make money, once joining the oil field workforce in Texas, McCloud said, but he could also be extremely racist, and prone to angry fits after he drank.

Hoehn, 33, has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kidnap Greywind’s baby, Haisley Jo, whom he and his former live-in girlfriend Crews named Phoenix, and he’s also pleaded guilty to lying to police. After more than a year in county jail, Hoehn is currently in the second week of a trial on charges he conspired to murder Greywind.

Never once during recorded telephone conversations revealed during trial has Hoehn expressed concern for Greywind, the baby he kidnapped, or Greywind’s surviving family. In a recorded telephone conversation with McCloud, Hoehn claimed he was being treated unfairly, about how police begged him for cooperation, but didn’t release the truth to the media.

He regretted talking to police. He called a former cellmate a “jailhouse b*tch” for ratting on him. He bad mouthed the Greywind family, and slept with a led pipe next to his pillow the days before his final arrest, he told McCloud.

He painted a picture that he was, and is, a victim.

“I should’ve had ya’ll put the cuffs on me and stopped talking right now,” he told police he believed were listening in during a September 11, 2017 conversation with McCloud.

Hoehn also joked about dead bodies, conspiracy theories, the penal system, and about his nickname “Billy” that sounded like “Billy-mom” on the jailhouse recording. Believing he was entitled to a fair bail, he made jabs at the court system for setting his bail too high, at $2 million.

“If they drop that charge… I would be out of here,” Hoehn told McCloud, making reference to the conspiracy to murder charge. The prosecution, led by Younggren, Tanya Martinez, and Leah Viste, contend that Hoehn was involved in Greywind’s murder, and that the couple planned months in advance.

Although DNA evidence is lacking due to the amount of time Greywind was floating in the Red River, the prosecution released electronic records of his ZTE cell phone. Forensic investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered evidence that Hoehn was actively searching for topics on abdominal pregnancy before Greywind’s murder.

On Crews’s Samsung cell phone and on laptops, forensic investigators also found searches made on topics such as midwifery, to how to deliver a baby unassisted, to Moses baskets, Amazon purchases of baby products, and “How long does it take to pass out from not breathing?” Google searches.

Other online searches Crews made included: “If a woman dies pregnant, when does the baby die?” “Anatomy of a human torso,” and “If a pregnant woman holds her breath, does the baby keep breathing?”

Dr. Victor Forloff drove from St. Paul, Minnesota early Monday morning to testify that Greywind died from exsanguination, or from a loss of blood. He added that ligature marks found around Greywind’s neck where consistent with choking. Either injury could have been the cause of death, but because neither bone nor inner tissue were damaged in Greywind’s neck, he believed that she died from blood loss.

“I was concerned about possibility of strangulation,” Forloff, formerly from Siberia, said. During his years at the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s office he has performed more than 4,000 autopsies.

“I believe, and I tried to document the ligature direction in this case… in my opinion this is a horizontal position of the ligature that could be related to possible asphyxiation due to strangulation.”

Both Forloff and a forensic pathologist hired by the defense, Dr. Brad Randall, found no injuries to Greywind’s head.

“I look everywhere in this case, and I think I look very carefully,” Forloff said. “I think there is no head injuries in this case. Basically, I was able to find injury related trauma to her body, I was able to observe strangulation, sharps injuries to her abdomen, and contusions to left arm and back.”

In hanging victims, the ligature mark would start at the neck and move upwards.

Randall agreed with most of Forloff’s assessment, but believed strangulation was not performed in an attempt to kill Greywind.

“I think there are other explanations on why the rope was present,” Randall said.

Thick rope, looped over and knotted, was used as a type of garrote around Greywind’s neck.

“If you’re going to use strangulation to death then that’s a possibility, but in this case I think there are other reasons the rope was round the neck.”

Greywind was killed without any form of anesthesia, and her death could have taken anywhere from 10 minutes to nearly an hour, Randall said.

“I can tell you, if someone tried to cut my abdomen, I would be screaming,” Forloff said. “That’s painful, yes.”

Forloff called Greywind’s crude fetal abduction an “out-of-hospital Caesarian” procedure. Her baby was taken, but everything else including her uterus and placenta remained behind, although in modest forms of decomposition at the time of his autopsy on August 27, 2017. The umbilical chord was not clamped at two places and cut in the middle, which showed the killer did not care about the victim’s well being.

Timing of events and the choking aspect are arguments made by the prosecution to prove premeditation from both Crews and Hoehn. Inside a baking cabinet drawer police found twine used for what was apparently practice for tying knots. A long white cloth, resembling a bathrobe belt, was also discovered with multiple knots.

No blood was found inside the Hoehn’s bathroom, the room in which the prosecution says Greywind was murdered, according to North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation Supervisory Special Agent Mike Ness. The prosecution asked him about “Dexter the crime scene out,” a term that stems from the popular television show “Dexter,” about a man who murders people and cleans up to cover his tracks.

Two Cass Clay ice cream buckets were photographed in Hoehn’s and Crews’s bathroom. One bucket sat in the sink, filled with a cleaning solution and a rag on the day Crews was arrested. Police found baby Haisley Jo wrapped in a blanket on the couple’s bed.

During police interviews after their arrests, both Crews and Hoehn lied repeatedly to police. Former cellmate, Bryan Grob, testified on Monday that Hoehn and Crews carried Greywind out in a hollowed-out dresser.

Still unknown:
- So far evidence revealed in court has not shown how Crews, a convincing liar on police video footage, eventually caved in and changed her plea to guilty.

- What was Hoehn’s actual involvement in the murder?

- Exactly how was Savanna Greywind, 22 at the time of her death, a Native woman from the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe, an expecting mother weighing more than 150 pounds, with dozens of concerned family members around the apartment building, physically moved without being seen from Apartment 5, 2825 Ninth Street North to end up wrapped in black garbage bags and duct tape and dumped into the Red River?