Why a News Anchor Kept Her Mother's Murder a Secret

A former Miss America pageant contestant and current broadcast anchor was absent from her morning news seat but reappeared on social media with stunning news of her own: her mother had been murdered.

“There is something I've been wanting to tell you, but up until now, couldn't,” Heidi Voight, a morning NBC Connecticut Today news anchor, posted to Facebook Monday. “I have been carrying this painful secret: My mother's death was not natural, nor peaceful. My mother was murdered, violently, in the place she should have felt safest – her own home.”

Claudia M. Voight, 73, was strangled in her home in Windham, Vt., in a February crime that was “not random,” Vermont State Police said in a press release earlier this week.

Her death “​​initially was reported to be the result of an apparent medical event and did not appear suspicious,” police said. However, an autopsy days later “indicated the death was suspicious.” By April the medical examiner had determined that Claudia had been killed by a “neck compression” that was not immediately noticeable, according to police.

“For the last 161 days, the world around us has moved on,” Heidi said in the post. “But my family and I have been living February 21st on repeat.” Saying her mother had been “stolen from her family,” she added, “She should still be here.”

Vermont State Police called the murder investigation “sensitive,” saying they had feared “jeopardizing the case” by telling the public they were investigating the woman’s death as a potential homicide. 

“There is an emotional purgatory that comes when you must silence what you want to scream from the rooftops,” Heidi said in the post. “How could we write her obituary or plan her service until the world understood the true magnitude of this senseless loss? But our silence was necessary to protect the early stages of the intense criminal investigation.”

No arrests have been made, but police said that they had not identified any larger threat to the community.

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Born on the Connecticut shoreline city of Milford, the award-winning news anchor and reporter was crowned Miss Connecticut in 2006 and went on to compete in the Miss America pageant the following year, according to her NBC bio and IMBd page.

“This has broken me and changed me,” Heidi said. “But I am my mother's daughter, and I will come back stronger. I will fight for her.”

She recalled that her identical twin daughters “now ask me almost every day, ‘Why did Grandma go to Heaven?’”

But she cannot give them a straight answer, she said. “I still don't have the words yet to begin to explain to such innocent minds that such evil exists in this world,” she said, adding: “It wrenches my broken heart to know that someday they will have to learn the truth of how they were robbed of so many years with their ‘Grandma CC.’”

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