​Savanna’s convicted murderer tells her story

FARGO – Brooke Lynn Crews, a one-time aspiring fiction writer, feminist, a student of psychology, spun an intricate web of lies that even she began to believe. When the truth snapped her from the daily journaling of her faked pregnancy, it was too late for her to change. She decided to steal another’s child.

She stole the child, Crews said in court, because she couldn’t stand the thought of losing her former boyfriend and co-conspirator, William Henry Hoehn, currently facing conspiracy to murder charges. With no disregard for the mother’s life – or any mother – she spent days planning after Hoehn mentioned Greywind’s pregnancy and then lured her upstairs to her apartment under the guise of a sewing project.

To quote Robert Burns, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” At times, the incidents leading up to and after Greywind’s murder and kidnapping of her unborn child appear sophisticated and cunning, but it was a dark and twisted kind of luck for Hoehn and Crews that kept them from behind bars nearly a week before their final arrests.

Minutes after murdering Greywind and showering off the blood with Hoehn’s help, Crews sat on the front stoop with Joe, Greywind’s father, and had a chat. When police came she allowed them to search the apartment. Officers did not find body or baby, but baby Haisley Jo was wrapped in a blanket lying beside Hoehn on the bed while he drank a beer, Crews said.

“I was high, and they weren’t there really all that long, Crews said. “I don’t think at that point they were looking for our baby, they were looking for Ms. Greywind.”

Greywind, who was 22 at the time, was already dead, wrapped in blankets and plastic, and was hidden inside the bathroom closet, she said.

Forensic analysts also found no blood in the bathroom, nor the couple’s DNA on a rope that was found across Greywind’s neck. Crews claimed that under Hoehn’s direction she cleaned the bathroom in places with a toothbrush, taking special care to clean under the doors and along toilet edges. She disinfected the bathroom with Fabuloso All Purpose Cleaner at least five times, she said.

At the witching hour, two days after Greywind’s murder, both Hoehn and Crews moved Greywind who had been moved into a hollowed-out dresser with the drawer faces nailed shut, and carried her down the stairs into Crews’s Jeep Cherokee, Crews said. A feat seemingly impossible with lookouts the Greywind family had kept posted for days after the murder. The last time she saw Greywind was when Hoehn drove away toward the Red River.

The couple’s dark luck would run out when Hoehn backed up into a car at Walmart, prompting a police search and serving a warrant on him for an unpaid fine. Hoehn also told coworkers and friends about Crews’s pregnancy, and continued the ruse after kidnapping Haisley Jo, whom they named Phoenix, by telling many that he was a new father.

“It wasn’t something that we discussed,” Crews said in court. “To go out and tell people that our baby had been born. I had been having this – quote – pregnancy and I’m sure he told a lot of people that I was pregnant.”

The relationship
Crews met Hoehn in 2012, she said, in a bus when she was attending psychology classes at MSUM. The relationship didn’t start until a year later however, and they started living together in 2014.

“It was either very good or very bad,” Crews said of their relationship. “Violence, very ugly.”

She said Hoehn was physically and verbally violent, frequently hit her, she said. Police were called more than a few times during their relationship, prompting a restraining order in 2017. When Hoehn left her in 2016 and ran to a former fiancé, Tanith McCloud, Crews tried to get him back by tricking him.

“Will had left the home and that left me in a very difficult spot,” Crews said. “I was isolated and I wasn’t working. He was the breadwinner, if you will, and so outside of him and my two youngest children, he was all I knew.”

Crews is the mother of seven children, giving birth to her first at the age of 14. She had a medical procedure done in more than ten years ago to keep her from getting pregnant.

Hoehn, a father of two children, was never steadily employed. He switched jobs every four to six months usually citing complaints against his superiors. Both Hoehn and Crews smoked marijuana, Hoehn also enjoyed drinking.

“I told him that I was pregnant in an effort to get him back,” Crews said. “I wanted him to come home.”

“Did it work?” Ryan Younggren, the assistant state’s attorney said.

“Yes it did. I sent him an email I do believe with a positive pregnant test, a picture.”

The sonogram came from her pregnancy with her youngest child, so did the pregnancy test. She found a baby’s heartbeat online and presented it as proof to Hoehn that she was pregnant, she said.

“I kept up the ruse for so long I had myself convinced that I was, until the beginning of August of 2017,” Crews said. “You’re asking me to explain something that I am still not able to explain.”

Just like the years before, Crews continued journaling, keeping track of faked appetite changes, leg swelling, weight growth, even later contractions. She never filled in a page she prepared on information for “Baby Hoehn,” or the official document for applying for a North Dakota birth certificate.

As in Monday’s testimony of Hoehn’s former fiancé Tanith McCloud, who said Hoehn was sexually deviant, enjoyed choking during sex, Crews said Hoehn used ropes to choke her, to bind her wrists and feet during sex.

“The bondage happened regularly, three times a month,” Crews said.

The couple kept ropes around the house for such purposes, and Hoehn initially had fantasies of asking other women to join in.

“I would interact with him in these conversations, the discussions regarding other women became more and more frequent and the ages got less and less, I mean, younger and younger,” Crews said. “So it got to the point that that’s going a bit too far.”

She told him to stop. He didn’t. In fact, Crews said, his fantasies took a turn to extreme violence.

Especially after getting drunk, Hoehn would tell her plans of kidnapping a woman, killing her, or “roofie a girl” and raping her.

“It progressed into kidnapping a girl and having to kill her because he couldn’t have any witnesses, and the ages of the girl got progressively younger,” Crews said. “He usually talked about it almost every night.”

Sitting next to his lawyer, Daniel James Borgen, Hoehn shook his head.

“I put it off as him being drunk because he was always drunk. He would also talk about it whenever he saw a girl who caught his attention. It started out as a sexual fantasy but turned into a death fantasy, that’s how I feel about it.”

The murder
After an August 6, 2017 fight, the last time Hoehn hit her after telling her he knew she wasn’t pregnant, Crews said.

“The next day my delusion came tumbling down and I started doubting everything that I had been believing,” Crews said. “That was when he said to me that he had told everyone that she was pregnant, and I needed to produce a baby. Given the disturbing nature of some of our conversations previously, I took that to mean that I needed to get a baby and didn’t matter how I got it.

“I felt that he was playing mind games with me, as odd as that sounds,” Crews said. “We were going to raise the baby. The fight we had gotten into, what he had told me, this fake or false pregnancy it wasn’t explicit, but it was definitely implied.”

Crews became frantic, she said. In a letter she wrote to Hoehn on his computer on August 7, 2017, she discussed the “elephant in the room, meaning the only way to fix things was the need to have a baby from the pregnancy that never was.

“What am I going to do? I can’t believe on one hand that I’ve been lying to myself this whole time about being pregnant. I see myself on the screen and I don’t even look pregnant. My frame of mind then was I was pregnant, I felt pregnant, I looked pregnant.”

After Hoehn mentioned Greywind’s pregnant state, her thoughts turned toward the baby inside her. She had already done multiple online searches pertaining to pregnancy issues, but she began to search issues including how long does a baby live if the mother stops breathing.

“I began frantically trying to figure out where I was going to get a baby,” Crews said. “Because of our previous conversations, I knew what he wanted, I knew what he expected, and I wanted to give it to him.”

On August 17, after Hoehn went to his roofing job, Crews first smoked until she was high, then went downstairs to find Greywind and asked her for help on a sewing project.

There was no sewing project.

“We chit-chatted a little bit, I was having a hard time working up the courage, and so I confronted her about some things that had been happening in the apartment building that bothered me, angered me, primarily had to do with I had seen her throw my cat out of the building and umm… we got into a verbal altercation.

“I said, ‘Why did you do that to my cat?’ And she said, ‘What a b*tch,’ or something like that and grabbed my hair. I pushed her. She hit her head on the bathroom sink and fell, and that was when I went and got the knife.”

Greywind, she said, was unconscious when she returned with a Stanley utility knife.

“I started cutting her baby out,” Crews said. “She woke up. I leaned on her with my right arm, and I’m left-handed so I was using my left hand. I continued cutting and then I umm… reached in and took the baby out.”

Crews then cut the umbilical cord, wrapped the baby in a towel, and placed her in the bathtub.

“I was sitting next to her on the floor when Will tried to come back in the door,” Crews said. “He couldn’t get in the door all the way because her feet were blocking the door. He stuck his head through and he was like ‘What the f*ck, is she alive?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, please help me.’”

Hoehn shut the door, came back in wearing only his underwear and carrying a thick rope, fashioned into a type of garrote.

“He put the rope around her neck and pulled it tight and he said, ‘If she wasn’t dead before, she is now.’”

In shock, covered in blood, Crews said Hoehn took control of the situation. He told her to begin cleaning. Together, they wrapped Greywind up and put her in the bathroom closet.

Bloodied rags and towels went into a garbage bag.

“He washed me in the shower. He was pretty much telling me what to do and I was doing it,” Crews said.

In her state of mind at that time, killing Greywind wasn’t something Crews wanted to do, and she never told Hoehn about her plans. Her thoughts were only on taking her baby, but apparently didn’t care about the mother’s condition.

When police came to arrest her she remembered one officer reading her rights in the kitchen, while another found Haisley Jo on their bed, wrapped up tight in a checkered blanket.

The aftermath
Crews said she repeatedly tried to convince Hoehn to take Haisley Jo downstairs to the Greywinds. He refused, she said.

The couple lived in fear of reprisals from the Greywinds and of police during the days leading up to their eventual arrest. They kept the doors locked and barricaded. She rarely left the apartment feeding Haisley Jo milk formula. Every time police arrived, or when Hoehn was arrested for failure to pay a fine, she thought their ruse was up, and she got high to calm herself, she said.

She tried once more to lie her way out during interviews with Fargo Police detectives Nick Kionaas and Joshua Loos, saying she had a dead fetus inside her, but failed. The timelines she presented didn’t match. Hoehn eventually caved in as well, admitting to lying to police and to kidnapping.

Crews is serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. She is seeing a therapist and is under medication.

The prosecution is arguing that Hoehn was a conspirator in Greywind’s murder, and the defense is seemingly attempting to argue that he was simply a man in love who made mistakes.

The Greywind family has moved away from Fargo. Both Norberta and Joe Greywind testified in court last week.