THE ANCHOR MUST HAVE BEEN MADE IN CHINA

Body of commercial fisherman's missing wife washes ashore tied to an anchor and shot in the head weeks after he told police she'd fallen overboard

By Jennifer Smith

Daily Mail
July 6, 2017

The body of a fisherman's missing wife was found washed ashore, tied to an anchor and shot in the head weeks after he told police she'd fallen overboard during a boating trip.

Karen Leclair washed up on the New York shoreline of Lake Erie on Wednesday, three weeks after her husband Christopher reported her missing.

An anchor had been found to her torso with nylon fishing rope and she had been shot in the head.

The 51-year-old's husband was charged with her murder on June 11 hours after telling police she had fallen overboard as they sailed Lake Erie.

He claimed she was feeling unwell and had been sitting on a bucket on the deck of his commercial boat when she vanished.

Surveillance footage captured the couple boarding the boat on June 10 together and taking it out on the water. Only Christopher disembarked, however, and he was seen on the same cameras returning the next day which is when he made the phone call.

It was later claimed that he spent the night with his mistress who said he'd told her she could move in to his home soon after returning from the first boat outing.

Authorities charged Christopher, 48, with murder within hours of him calling them to report his wife missing.

In police interviews, he allegedly confessed to police that he'd been having an affair with another woman for the past eight months and admitted they'd been intimate on June 9, one day before his wife was last seen.

His lover was interviewed and claimed that on June 10, after going out to see with his wife, he returned to her home and discussed her moving to his house in Albion in the near future.

'We were just looking for the truth, and we were trying to find answers. We were doing everything we possibly could to find and locate Karen Leclair.

'So when we sit her husband down and we start asking questions and answers to those questions really don’t make sense, and we go back and look at surveillance videos from the marina and we see that, according to the videos, she disappeared on Saturday and he doesn’t report that until Sunday, that’s a red flag to our investigators.

'At that point the theme of the investigation started to take a change,' Lt. Wayne Klinen, crime section supervisor for state police Troop E in Lawrence Park Township, told Go Erie.

The pair had been married for 26 years when Mrs. Leclair disappeared.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here is another case in which one of those ever present surveillance cameras helped police solve a case.