Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At about 8 in the morning on Friday, May 24, 2019, Jennifer Dulos dropped her five children off at school in New Canaan, Connecticut.
She was 50. She drove her black Chevrolet Suburban back to the house she was renting on Welles Hill Road, and at 8:05 a neighbor’s security camera recorded her pulling in.
It is the last image anyone has of her alive.
Jennifer had two doctor’s appointments in New York City that day, at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. She never made either one. When the children’s nanny arrived at the house later that morning, Jennifer wasn’t there.
By about 7 p.m., two of her friends had called the police.
A divorce that never ended
For two years, Jennifer had been trying to get away from her husband.
She filed for divorce from Fotis Dulos in 2017 and moved into the New Canaan rental with their five children. In 2018 she won sole physical custody. The fight that followed was bitter and expensive. Her mother, Gloria Farber, sued Fotis for about $1.7 million in unpaid loans.
Fotis, a home builder, lived about an hour north in Farmington. His girlfriend, Michelle Troconis, lived there with him.
Blood in the garage
Officers went to Jennifer’s house that evening. A police body camera was recording at 8:14 p.m. as they searched her garage.
What they found there turned a missing-person call into something much darker. There were blood stains on the garage floor and on Jennifer’s other car, and more blood in the kitchen. Investigators would later say there had been an attempt to clean it up.
A little over an hour later, detectives found the Suburban, the car she had driven home that morning. It was abandoned on a road near Waveny Park, a few miles from the house, with blood inside it.
Jennifer was nowhere.
“Gone Girl”
Fotis said he had nothing to do with it.
Asked in a television interview with Dateline whether he believed Jennifer was still alive, he said yes. He said he did.
His lawyer, Norm Pattis, went further. In June 2019 he told reporters that Jennifer, a writer, had once written a 500-page manuscript with a plot that resembled “Gone Girl,” the novel about a wife who stages her own disappearance to destroy her husband. He suggested she might have done something like it. Later he floated a “revenge suicide” theory.
He admitted he had never read the manuscript. Jennifer’s family called the claims “false and irresponsible.” A lawyer for her mother called them “a classic act of desperation to slander the victim.”
By then, detectives had been following something else for weeks.
The phone that went to Hartford
On the morning Jennifer vanished, Fotis had left his phone at home in Farmington, even though he normally carried it everywhere.
That evening, it was moving again. Location data put Fotis, and Michelle Troconis, in Hartford, Connecticut’s capital, a short drive from Farmington.
Hartford had more than 1,000 city surveillance cameras running in 2019. Investigators went to the city’s camera command center and started pulling footage along the route the phone had taken, down Albany Avenue.
Around 7 p.m., a black pickup truck pulls to the curb on Albany Avenue. A man in a cap and a white shirt climbs out of the driver’s side with a black garbage bag in his hand and walks it over to a public trash can.
He gets back in. The truck drives on. A few blocks later it stops again, and he does the same thing. Then again. In total, he stopped at trash can after trash can along the road.
In the passenger seat sat a woman. Investigators identified her as Michelle Troconis. At one stop she can be seen leaning out of the passenger side toward the curb. She later told police she had been getting rid of a piece of chewing gum.
Near one of the stops, the camera also showed the man drop something into a storm drain.
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