Just found the rest of the article installments - well done IMO and so glad these were found!
Murder in Fairfield County – Air Mail
Excerpts from Part 1 article:
I never wanted Jennifer out of the way.
—Fotis Dulos
The moves made by Fotis Dulos on May 24, 2019, would have seemed nonsensical to any observer other than an omniscient narrator, the Devil, or God.
He woke at 4:20 A.M., about an hour before sunrise. He had spent the night apart from his paramour, a 44-year-old Venezuelan publicist and ski bum named Michelle Troconis, who was back in the master suite of Dulos’s 14,000-square-foot mansion, at 4 Jefferson Crossing in Farmington, Connecticut. He was behind the wheel of a red Toyota Tacoma pickup truck by 5:35, the early-morning sun turning everything into its shadow. At 6:36—scattered clouds above the highway now, fair-weather cumulus—the red pickup was recorded as it sped past the Fairfield rest stop on the Merritt Parkway.
It was not even his truck. He’d “borrowed” the Tacoma—without permission—from an employee. Fotis, 51, did not look remotely like a pickup-truck sort of guy. He was small and finely made, with large dark eyes and handsome features. In life, as at the movies, be suspicious of any character better-looking than is strictly necessary. A builder and developer, Fotis owned the Fore Group, which built the sort of high-end marble-soaked McMansions that devour forests and destroy marriages.
In life, as at the movies, be suspicious of any character better-looking than is strictly necessary.
It was after seven A.M. when the Tacoma reached New Canaan, a town on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. About an hour from Grand Central on the Metro North—35 miles as the crow flies—New Canaan is one of the wealthiest towns in America, and one of the safest. Before that morning, there had hardly been a murder in New Canaan in decades. The streets were filled with school buses when Fotis arrived, the station wagons filled with nannies, the Range Rovers and Saabs filled with moms who, on their way to work or not, keep track of their children and BMW-driving husbands via cell phone and G.P.S. When seen again at 7:40 A.M., the red Toyota pickup was parked on Lapham Road, on a turnaround beside Waveny Park—300 acres of trails, this was once the estate of Lewis Henry Lapham, a founder of Texaco—and the driver was apparently gone.
Fotis, having vanished from the matrix, reappeared several minutes later, only now riding a bike—the detectives believe it was him, anyway—a fancy French racer with curved handlebars.
Dark Pants, Hooded Sweatshirt, Pedaling Fast
He was going northwest on Weed Street, past lawns and houses, mailboxes, parked cars, and dogs, the wind in the trees whispering the same sentence again and again: You don’t have to do this. Fotis was wearing dark pants and a hooded sweatshirt that hid his face. He pedaled fast. It was a 20-minute ride—about 3.5 miles—from Waveny Park, where he’d left the truck, to 71 Welles Lane, the New Canaan mansion where Jennifer Farber Dulos, Fotis’s estranged but not yet ex-wife, lived with the couple’s five children.
Meanwhile, a 2017 Chevy Suburban, a huge S.U.V., was ghosting along Welles Lane, heading for the big house at the end of the cul-de-sac. This passing car—it was Jennifer Dulos, returning to 71 Welles Lane after having dropped her kids off at the New Canaan Country Day School—was captured by a private security camera, which tells you a lot about New Canaan, a place of constant activity, the comings and goings of repairmen, landscapers, pool guys, delivery trucks, much surveillance but not much crime, where just about everything that happens is seen by someone or something.
Jennifer likely parked the Chevy beside the Range Rover in the center bay of the three-car garage. It was shortly after 8:05 A.M. The garage door would have closed. For the next 130 minutes, the 9,800-square-foot house—six bedrooms, seven baths, and two half-baths—was quiet. These were the crucial moments when whatever did happen was happening. If the security cameras could see through wood and plaster, we’d know everything.
In New Canaan, just about everything that happens is seen by someone or something.
The garage door would have opened at around 10:25 A.M. A minute later, the Chevy Suburban was on the move. Shortly after that, it was parked near the red pickup truck on Lapham Road beside Waveny Park. The Tacoma then left New Canaan. At 11:20, it was seen on the northbound side on the Merritt Parkway, going back the way it came. An object was visible in the bed of the truck: the dandified rim of an elite racing bike. The truck was seen on Route 8 just across the Naugatuck River from the River Rock Tavern in Derby, Connecticut, then seen on I-84 in Waterbury, Connecticut, at noon, before it finally arrived at its point of departure, 80 Mountain Spring Road in Farmington, a house that Fotis’s company owned and that he’d been using.
The house in New Canaan where Jennifer Dulos lived, and from which she disappeared.
Fotis Dulos had been gone just under seven hours, had driven around 140 miles, likely biked 3.5 more, and probably believed that, in that time, he’d solved all his problems.
How could he know that nearly every step along the way had been captured on some sort of surveillance—cameras posted on highways and at rest stops, on private front and back porches, and mounted on school buses, which, between six A.M. and four P.M., canvass nearly every inch of the state? In the weeks that followed, it was the job of New Canaan police and state detectives to first find and then assemble each piece of this puzzle into a coherent picture. The detectives were in fact trying to pull off the most difficult feat in police work, a trick that’s been attempted in the U.S., according to one source, just 526 times since the early 19th century: prove a murder in the absence of a body.
One of the Richest Counties in the U.S. …
Fairfield County is one of the oldest parts of the United States. The British sought to destroy its farms and burn its villages in the Revolutionary War, then again during the War of 1812. In several Connecticut towns, a local will show you the musket shell or cannonball that’s been lodged in the tavern wall since the age of candlelight. Contractors at work on a house in Ridgefield recently unearthed four skeletons, soldiers killed at the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777.
Fairfield is also one of the richest counties in the United States. As of 2010, it was the nation’s sixth-wealthiest county, which does not do it justice. Fairfield County supplies bedrooms and retreats to some of the richest people in the world, with a special interest in financiers. Ray Dalio (net worth: $18.7 billion). Steve Cohen (net worth: $13.7 billion). Andreas Halvorsen (net worth: $3.7 billion). The Connecticut Gold Coast consists of just the swankiest of these swanky towns: Westport, Weston, Greenwich, Darien, and New Canaan, which may be the most affluent of them all. These towns stand for a certain American social context—old money, horses, and blueblood snobbery—which is why a certain kind of movie had always been set there. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Stepford Wives, The Swimmer, and The Ice Storm. It’s where the heroes and villains of Showtime’s Billions machinate and scheme. New Canaan was supposedly a setting for Gentleman’s Agreement, in which Gregory Peck posed as a Jew to unmask the “gentleman’s agreement” that kept real-estate brokers from selling property to Jews.
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There’s something mesmerizing about rich and super-rich people who go off the rails, with Fotis Dulos being a prime example. They fascinate because they make you realize that no amount of money or square footage can fix what’s wrong with some people.[BBM]
Crime, when it does come to the Gold Coast towns, which is not often, tends to be of the domestic variety, ugly and strange but focused on the family.[BBM]
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There are emotions, the world as it seems, and then there are facts, the world as it is. Here are some facts. Fotis re-united with Jennifer in the spring of 2004. He finalized his divorce in July and married Jennifer in August. He started a home-building business that same year, perhaps as soon as he had access to the Farber fortune. Over the next decade, he would support that business with millions of dollars borrowed from the Farbers. What happened in that time—the kids, successes, and failures—was probably meant to bind the family and erase the debt—Fotis later said he was never expected to repay—but ended up destroying every life in its vicinity instead. [BBM]
