Brooke Crews Testifies in William Hoehn Murder Trial

She says he knew she wasn't pregnant and told her to "produce a baby"

FARGO, N.D. — With just a few days left in William Hoehn’s trial, his former girlfriend Brooke Crews takes the stand.

She is serving a life sentence for 22-year-old Savanna Greywind’s murder and Hoehn is charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Crews will never be out of prison on parole and she is not getting any deal from the Cass County State’s Attorney’s office for testifying.

She says the only reason she’s even coming forward now is to start doing the right thing.

In order to keep Hoehn from leaving her, Crews did something in December 2016 she says she still doesn’t know how to explain: pretend she was pregnant.

“Anything else other than a pregnancy test that you sent to him,” said Ryan Younggren, Cass County Asst. State’s Attorney.

“Ultimately I think I sent him a picture of a sonogram picture as well,” Crews said.

“Any heartbeats?” Younggren said.

“Oh, yes. Yes,” Crews said.

She found the heartbeats online, but the pregnancy test and sonogram pictures were both souvenirs Crews kept from previous children she gave birth to.

To make it more real, Crews started to keep a detailed log of her pregnancy. She even went so far as to pick up a birth certificate application, birth kit and had a blank notecard with “baby Hoehn’s feet” written on it.

“You wanted this pregnancy very much?” Younggren said.

“Yes,” Crews said.

“And you said that did convince him to come back?” Younggren said.

“Yes it did,” Crews said.

The baby was meant to be a new beginning for the couple, and the idea of a just a pregnancy did jumpstart it.
Crews says things got much better between the two, until they started making hospital preparations on August 6th, 2017.

“He laughed and said ‘Haha, they’re just going to laugh at you and tell you that you’re not pregnant,'” Crews said.

Crews says it forced her to come out of her delusion. Since Hoehn had already told coworkers they were expecting a child, he told her she “needed to produce a baby.”

Because of previous conversations Crews had with Hoehn about his sexual fantasies, which involved kidnapping, raping and killing a woman, she assumed it meant she should go to great lengths.

“I took that to mean that I better have a baby and it didn’t matter how I got it.”

Hoehn came up to Crews one day and asked her if she’d seen the “Greywind girl who was really pregnant,” which then sparked an idea.

On August 19th, 2017, Crews asked Greywind to model a dress for her.

She says the two got into an argument about Crews’ cat but Greywind fell and hit her head on the bathroom sink.
Crews then got a knife and started cutting Greywind’s baby out.

When Hoehn walked in, Crews wanted his help.

“He was like ‘what the f***? Is she alive? He put the rope around her neck and he pulled it tight and he said ‘if she wasn’t dead before, she is now,'” Crews said.

Crews says they cleaned the bathroom at least five times and stuck Greywind in the bathroom closet after wrapping her in garbage bags.

She stayed in there while police searched the apartment twice on August 19th.

The two moved her into a dresser in their bedroom on August 20th.

Police did a walk through the same day while Crews says Greywind’s baby was hidden under the bed covers next to Hoehn.

“I can’t undo what I’ve done. But I can do everything in my power to own up what I did and to help the Greywind family have closure in any possible way that they can,” Crews said.

Crews says she and Hoehn never made an explicit agreement to murder Greywind. Hoehn’s trial will continue Wednesday afternoon.