What her phone was doing at 9:40
Between 9:40 and 9:46 that morning, Connie’s iPhone was busy on Facebook.
Records showed that it shared a video to her Facebook page at 9:42 a.m. and sent a Facebook message at 9:46 a.m., using the house’s own internet connection.
By Richard’s account, his wife had been lying dead in the basement for more than half an hour by then.
The email he sent “from the road”
Then investigators looked at Richard’s own story about the drive.
He said he had pulled over on the side of the road and emailed his boss from his phone, then turned around and drove home. But the records showed he logged into his work email at 9:01 a.m. from the IP address of the house itself. At 9:04, the email to his supervisor about the alarm went out, and it came from his laptop, not his phone.
He had been at home, on the laptop he claimed to have forgotten, writing the excuse for coming home.
The alarm system did not back him up either. And Connie’s phone held one more thing: a note she had written the year before, titled “Why I Want a Divorce.”
Five days after Connie died, investigators said, Richard called about her $475,000 life insurance policy.
The arrest
On April 14, 2017, almost 16 months after the killing, Connecticut State Police pulled Richard Dabate’s car over.
Troopers took him from the car. About 20 minutes later, a camera inside a cruiser recorded him in the back seat, staring ahead.
He was charged with murder, tampering with evidence, and making a false statement. He posted $1 million bond and went home. At his first hearing, his lawyer said Richard was innocent and looked forward to being vindicated at trial.
The arrest warrant ran to about 50 pages. Newspapers around the world called it “the Fitbit murder.”
Five years to a verdict
The case took years to reach a jury. A jury was picked in early 2020, then the pandemic shut the courts down, and that panel was eventually dismissed. A new jury was seated in 2022, and the trial finally opened in Rockville Superior Court that spring.
Richard took the stand himself. He told jurors the same story: a large masked man in camouflage, with a voice like the actor Vin Diesel, had shot his wife and tied him up. He denied having anything to do with her death.
His lawyers went after the tracker. Fitbits were never designed for courtroom precision, they argued, and the device’s clock could have drifted. They pointed to unidentified DNA in the house, including on the gun, and to a house cleaner who said she might have seen a dark green figure pass a window.
A Columbia University researcher who had studied the Fitbit One’s accuracy testified for the prosecution. He said it was unlikely the clock was wrong, because the device synced automatically.
Prosecutor Matthew Gedansky told the jury that Richard had planned to kill his wife and stage a home invasion because his double life was falling apart, with a baby on the way by another woman.
On May 10, 2022, after a five-week trial and less than two days of deliberations, the jury found Richard Dabate guilty on all three counts: murder, tampering with evidence, and making a false statement. Court marshals put him in handcuffs and led him out of the courtroom.
65 years
On August 18, 2022, Judge Corinne Klatt sentenced him to 65 years in prison: 60 years for murder and five for tampering with evidence.
“The nature of the offense was brutal,” the judge said. “It was calculated.”
Richard still says he is innocent. He appealed, arguing among other things that the Fitbit evidence should never have been allowed. In March 2025, the Connecticut Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction, and with it, the use of the data from Connie’s tracker.
Shortly before she died, Connie had made an appointment with a therapist. “Rick is a mess,” her mother remembered her saying.
She went to her exercise class that morning, came home, and posted a video to Facebook. The little tracker on her waistband kept counting every step she took in her own house, right up until 10:05 a.m.
It was the one witness her husband never thought to account for.
