What was in the bags
Over the following days, investigators traced the bags and recovered them from the city’s trash.
Inside were clothing in Jennifer’s size and bloodstained cleaning items: sponges, ponchos and cut zip ties. The blood was Jennifer’s.
Fotis’s DNA was found inside a glove from one of the bags, and his fingerprints were later matched to a garbage bag and tape from the Hartford bins. Prosecutors said one bag carried DNA from Jennifer, Fotis and Michelle Troconis.
When investigators pulled the storm drain, they found two license plates. Someone had altered them with blue tape. Once the tape was ignored, the plates traced back to an old Chevrolet Suburban once registered to Fotis.
None of that looked like a woman who had run off to punish her husband.
The red pickup
The pieces from the morning came together too.
That morning, Fotis had taken an old red Toyota Tacoma belonging to one of his employees from a job site in Farmington. At 7:57 a.m., a passing school bus camera caught the Tacoma near Waveny Park in New Canaan, about 100 feet from where the Suburban would later be found. Video also showed a figure on a bicycle heading toward Jennifer’s house. Prosecutors said it was Fotis.
At 10:25 a.m., the neighbor’s camera recorded the Suburban leaving Jennifer’s house. Police believe Fotis was driving it with Jennifer’s body and the cleanup supplies inside. Just after 11 a.m., surveillance showed the red pickup leaving New Canaan.
Five days later, Fotis took the Tacoma for a $250 wash and detail. He then pushed the employee to replace the truck’s seats, offering him a spare set and telling him to throw the old ones away. The employee kept them and handed them to police. A stain on the passenger seat matched Jennifer’s DNA.
Investigators also found a mixture of Fotis’s DNA and Jennifer’s blood on the faucet in her kitchen.
Arrested
On June 1, 2019, one week after Jennifer disappeared, Fotis Dulos and Michelle Troconis were arrested at a hotel in Avon on charges of tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution.
Michelle Troconis sat down with detectives three times. In the first interviews she backed Fotis’s account of the day: she said the two of them had been in Farmington, had lunch and cleaned one of his properties. She said she had no idea what was in the bags in Hartford and thought they came from a house Fotis was selling.
“I have no idea what happened to Jennifer,” she told police. “I have no idea where Jennifer is.”
In August 2019, police searching Fotis’s home and business found two pages of handwritten notes. They laid out, almost hour by hour, what Fotis and Michelle had supposedly done on May 24 and 25. Police called them alibi scripts. They named alibi witnesses who turned out to be false, and they left out the drive through Hartford entirely. Troconis admitted helping write them, and said they had been written at the direction of Fotis’s lawyer at the time.
Charged with murder
On January 7, 2020, Fotis Dulos was arrested again, this time for murder and kidnapping. Michelle Troconis and Kent Mawhinney, a lawyer and friend of Fotis’s, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Fotis posted his $6 million bond the next day.
Three weeks later, on January 28, 2020, he missed an emergency court hearing. Police went to his house in Farmington and found him unresponsive in a car in his garage. He had poisoned himself with carbon monoxide. He was taken to a hospital in the Bronx and died there on January 30. His lawyer said he left a note proclaiming his innocence.
He never stood trial.
The trial
Jennifer’s body has never been found. In October 2023, a probate judge declared her legally dead.
Michelle Troconis went on trial in Stamford in January 2024. For six weeks, jurors watched the morning’s camera footage, the red Tacoma, the bicycle, the car wash, her own interviews, and the Hartford videos of the truck stopping at bin after bin while she sat in the passenger seat.
Her lawyers said the case rested on speculation and that she never knew what Fotis had done. Prosecutors said she helped him plan the murder, destroy the evidence and build his alibi.
On March 1, 2024, after a little more than two days of deliberations, the jury found her guilty on every count, including conspiracy to commit murder, tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution.
On May 31, 2024, Judge Kevin Randolph sentenced her to 20 years in prison, suspended after 14 and a half years, followed by five years of probation. She is appealing.
Kent Mawhinney never went to trial on the conspiracy charge. In June 2025, prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to convict him of it, and he entered an Alford plea to a misdemeanor charge of interfering with police. He was sentenced to the 11 months he had already served.
Jennifer’s five children are in the care of her mother, Gloria Farber.
Her husband’s lawyer once suggested she had written herself a “Gone Girl” ending. The cameras on Albany Avenue had recorded a different one, one garbage bag at a time.
