@xtrain, thanks for finding this article:
Excerpt below:
Family Life Becomes a Prison
Their youngest child was born in the fall of 2010. As anyone who has kids can tell you, sleep, or lack of it, can be more powerful than love. Nights when a baby won’t stop crying, added burdens on attention and money, will, if anything, put even more pressure on an already troubled marriage. Jennifer hinted at this in an essay published on Patch on April 26, 2012, confessing that life was harder with her husband than without. “It was not like this when my husband Fotis was not here,” she wrote of a long night in which three of them—husband, wife, baby—shared a bed. “We had more room. I and she (and he, somewhere afar) slept better. But if Fotis is to come back (he leaves again today) next Tuesday, then we do have to get this dealt with. Which may mean her crying, but it’s just so heart wrenching. Then again, who can subsist on no sleep?”
At such times, family life will become a prison for a man like Fotis, a vain man, a man a little too concerned with his hair and clothes and the trimness of his body, one determined to look and feel as he did when he was young. For such a man, a relationship is less about loving than being loved, admired, showered in a certain kind of light, looked at a certain kind of way. Once you have kids—Fotis had five!—that sort of attention, which had powered the marriage, shifts from husband to children, where it glows like a lost paradise. “The best part of my night now, hands down, is when I give our baby … a bath and then her bottle, in my arms,” Jennifer wrote in March 2012. “She falls asleep, safe, up against my chest. I love it. It’s my peace and solace and quiet reward.”
What will a man like Fotis do in such a situation?
He will wander. He will look for what he has lost somewhere else, with someone else. And he will lie about it, then come to resent the person who makes him lie. None of this can be said for certain—in any work of nonfiction, the unknowable stands behind each sentence—but it can be inferred from the behavior of the participants. You deduce it the way an astronomer, seeing a characteristic wobble of a small planet, knows there must be a big planet tugging from just beyond the line of sight.
The girlfriend: Michelle Troconis arrives at Stamford’s superior court in July. She has been charged with conspiracy to commit murder and has pleaded not guilty.
Fotis began to disappear for days, then weeks at a time. Now and then, when Jennifer challenged him, he’d fly into a rage.
A Threat to Leave
Some of these tantrums were just loud; others were loud and scary. One day, in June 2017, the nanny later told police, she had found Jennifer crying in the driveway. Jennifer said Fotis had tried to run her over with the car. To save herself, she’d had to jump out of the way. Later that summer, Fotis chased Jennifer through the house. She made it to her bedroom and got the door locked just in time. He stood there, pounding the door and screaming, but quieted down when he saw the nanny and one of the children watching. Jennifer did not call the police, said the nanny, because she was scared of what Fotis might do. He’d threatened to take the kids to Greece and never return.
On another occasion, when Jennifer did call the cops, Fotis explained his behavior by calling Jennifer a “bad mother” and saying that she “belongs in an asylum.”
In March 2017, Jennifer realized her husband was more than just running around and cheating on her. He’d gotten involved in a serious affair. The woman had actually done some work for the Fore Group. Think of the nerve! The person destroying the last remnants of the marriage had been inside Jennifer’s own house!
And who was this woman?
Jennifer realized that Fotis had gotten involved in a serious affair. The woman had actually done some work for the Fore Group. The person destroying the last remnants of the marriage had been inside Jennifer’s own house!
She was a good-time girl! A ski bum from South America! Her name was Michelle Troconis, but friends called her Michi. She had long dark hair and a wicked smile. She was in her early 40s when she met Fotis, with a teenage daughter from a liaison that preceded her failed marriage. She’d gotten a degree in psychology at the Central University of Venezuela in 1998, then worked in event planning and public relations at hotels around the world. The Ghantoot Racing & Polo Club, in Abu Dhabi. Cerro Castor, a resort on Mount Krund, in Tierra del Fuego. She had been the host of Snow Time, an ESPN show shot at ski resorts in South America. She had lived in Caracas, the United Arab Emirates, Miami.
She was a type—the jet-setter, the aging ingénue, the woman who always seems to find the best-looking, most unstable man in the room. It was Michelle Troconis’s arrival on the scene that set in motion the events that would lead to the disappearance of Jennifer Dulos. [BBM]
