The blood on her Range Rover was the first clue that Jennifer Dulos’s disappearance last May would turn into something sinister.
The weeks that followed brought more revelations from the police, adding to a mystery that gripped the public.
Her blood was also discovered on the seat of a car her estranged husband had borrowed on the day she vanished. Nearly two dozen items with her DNA were found in garbage cans some 75 miles from her suburban Connecticut home. Then there was her ongoing acrimonious divorce case, in which Ms. Dulos, a mother of five, had said she worried she was in danger.
Yet even as each new detail made it more likely that Ms. Dulos had met a violent end, investigators could not find one key piece of evidence: her body.
Still, last week, nearly eight months after Ms. Dulos went missing, prosecutors accused her estranged husband, Fotis, of murdering her.
In the warrant charging Mr. Dulos, 52, with murder and kidnapping, officials detailed their meticulous investigation. They drew on blood-spatter analysis and DNA evidence to conclude that Ms. Dulos was fatally attacked. Then, using phone records, surveillance footage and interviews, they built their case for Mr. Dulos’s alleged involvement, piecing together his every move.
The laborious process followed a script that prosecutors often have to execute in murder cases where the most crucial piece of evidence — the victim’s body — cannot be found.
“At the end, your puzzle is going to be missing pieces,” said Tad DiBiase, a former federal prosecutor who wrote a book on homicide cases involving bodies that have not been recovered. “So you need to have enough of the other pieces that you can still see the entire puzzle.”
Murder charges brought without a body are relatively rare. These cases require a voluminous cache of circumstantial evidence both to establish the involvement of the accused and to show that the victim was definitively killed.
But the extra burden might actually make convictions more likely.
Mr. DiBiase has tracked just 526 such cases that have gone to trial in the United States since the early 19th century. Of them, 86 percent resulted in a conviction, he said.
Nationally, the conviction rate for all murder cases is 70 percent, according to the
federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“Only the very best no-body murder cases go to trial,” Mr. DiBiase said.
The Connecticut State Police declined to comment on the Dulos investigation, citing a gag order issued in the case. The state prosecutor in charge of the case did not respond to requests for comment.
One law enforcement official familiar with the case said investigators had gathered far more evidence than they have so far disclosed.
The charges brought against Mr. Dulos and two others accused of conspiracy to commit murder, Michelle C. Troconis, 45, Mr. Dulos’s girlfriend, and Kent D. Mawhinney, 54, a friend, were based on more than what was disclosed in the warrants, the official said...
Jennifer Dulos: How the Police Made a ‘No-Body’ Murder Case
