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Hi crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashlee Flowers.
And I'm Brit. And the story I have for you today is a rare example of a murder case going to trial without a body ever being found.
When a mother of five disappeared from her Connecticut mansion in May 2019, the search for her made national headlines.
And once police see surveillance footage of her husband dumping garbage bags into city trash cans — footage a lot of you have probably seen yourselves — a murder conspiracy involving at least two other people starts to unravel.
And our reporter Taylor was actually boots on the ground during all of it, as it was happening.
she has spent years with this case compiling every single thing there is to know about it.
So even if you think you've heard it all, you probably haven't until today.
And listen closely, because there is still work to be done.
We may know who's responsible, but the biggest question still remains, Where is Jennifer Farber -Dulos?
on the morning of Friday, May 24th 2019 Lauren Almeida is as busy as she always was as the full time nanny for the five children in the Delos family.
Her day starts early with texts coming in from her boss Jennifer Farber Delos about the kids.
They've got two sets of preteen twins and an eight year old girl to look after.
So like, managing their calendars was not for the week.
So the mom, Jennifer, had handled school drop -off that morning, but Lauren had an extra to do to juggle today.
She was gonna have to pick up four of the five kids from school like mid -day and drive them an hour away into Manhattan for an orthodontist appointment.
Now, one of the older girls, lucked out, doesn't have an appointment, so she's just gonna take the bus to a friend's house after school.
So around 11 a .m., Lauren heads over to Jennifer's, and this place is like a seven -bedroom house that Jennifer's mom had recently bought for her and the kids - I'm sorry, seven bedrooms?
Yeah, and seven and a half bathrooms, like we're talking a bit of a mega mansion, but where they live in Connecticut, like this isn't uncommon. New Canaan is in one of the wealthiest counties in the entire country.
And a lot of these families had like very big money, including Jennifer's.
We're talking prep school, trust fund, Wall Street kind of money.
So when Lauren gets to the house, she's kind of surprised to see Jennifer's Range Rover parked in the garage, since Jennifer had told her that she'd be taking that SUV to New York today for an appointment of her own.
But Jennifer's Chevy Suburban was gone, so Lauren figures she must have had a change of plans or maybe plans went out the window because when she gets inside the house there are things left behind that make it seem like Jennifer must have maybe left in like a rush.
Like first, Jennifer's expensive purse is there on the floor between the mud room and the kitchen.
The mug of tea that Jennifer makes every morning was sitting on the counter alongside the granola bar that she normally eats for breakfast, like unopened, and a 12 pack of paper towel rolls that Lauren stocked in the pantry, like the night before, is almost completely gone.
Like 10 of them have been used, which at first, she kind of figures, oh, the kids must have spilled something, whatever, kids will be kids.
But alarm bells, because what soccer field's high schooler of kool -aid do you have to spill to use 10 rolls of paper towels?
Again, I don't know.
It's early, kids be kids.
She's got a zillion other things on her mind, so she just starts straightening up the house, and then she goes to pick up the kids from school.
Now she had texted Jennifer at some point asking if one of the girls could use an iPad for the long car ride.
Now she doesn't hear back, which doesn't really concern her, right?
Jennifer's probably at that appointment or whatever, and then she's gonna meet them actually at the orthodontist appointment, so fine.
Lauren texts her a few more times anyway with like a play -by -play for when she does see her phone.
She lets her know their ETA to Jennifer's mom's house where they plan to head first. She lets her know she got there, asked if Jennifer is still gonna meet them at the orthodontist. At this point, it is like hours that have passed, it's 4 p .m. now.
And Jennifer hasn't responded to any of the texts.
Like whatever appointment she had, she should be done with, right?
She should be able to like check her phone in all this time.
Right. But again, Lauren just keeps like chugging along.
She goes to the kid's orthodontist. And while there, she tries to finally just call Jennifer.
But it goes straight to voicemail.
And that is when Lauren starts to panic.
Texts are one thing, but Jennifer always answers her phone.
So while the kids are in with the orthodontist, she starts calling anyone she can think of who might have heard from Jennifer today.
But she's even more concerned to learn that no one has heard from her at all.
And that's when she gets an idea.
Not something she would normally do, but this is starting to feel like not a normal situation.
Lauren checks the iPad that they brought because it's logged into Jennifer's Google and Apple ID so she can actually see Jennifer's Google calendar, see where her appointments were that day.
And so, once the kids are done at the orthodontist, she takes them back to their grandma's and then she hops in a cab and heads to the address of Jennifer's last appointment.
But the receptionist there tells her that Jennifer never showed up.
So, Lauren calls one of Jennifer's best friends, probably half unsure what to do, half pretty sure she does but like it doesn't feel real.
But with the friends encouragement, that they call police in New Canaan to report her missing at around 7 p .m. They tell the dispatcher, Jennifer is missing.
And by the way, dispatcher, this is worst -case scenario because Jennifer is in the middle of a very contentious divorce with her children's father, Fotis, who, BTW, just recently bought a gun.
And like, point taken, police arrive at Jennifer's New Canaan home pretty much immediately.
They check all around.
I mean, no one is there.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of disturbance inside the house.
So they head through the garage, which at first glance is all organized clean as well.
But one officer takes a really close look at Jennifer's Range Rover, the one that she was supposed to take to New York, but is still sitting in the garage.
And there on the bumper are tiny specks of red blood spatter.
So police immediately call for backup.
And as they continue to search the garage for more evidence of what happened in it, they find more blood stains on the floor, other parts of the car.
And again, we're talking like tiny drops, and it becomes clear to the officers that someone did a very serious cleaning job on this garage, like a 10 rolls of paper towel cleaning job.
Yeah, I don't know what they used.
But police start searching, not just the garage, but like the neighborhood, the surrounding areas.
and they pretty quickly find Jennifer's black Chevy Suburban abandoned at a place called Waveney Park, which is like 10 minutes from her house.
According to Rich Cohen's book, Murder in the Dollhouse, the car is backed up against a tree.
Gearshift is stuck in reverse, doors are locked.
And when they look in the windows, they don't see any sign of Jennifer in the vehicle, but they do see, quote, the cleanup of a bloodlike substance.
And it's at this moment, when this becomes a full -blown missing -person search. And when police question Lauren, she tells them that, if something bad happened to Jennifer, there is only one person it could be, her husband of 14 years, soon -to -be ex -husband, Fotis.
And they learn that she and Fotis were years deep into a divorce, with no end in sight, and it was, I mean, clearly messy, to put it lightly.
I mean, so much so that, in Jennifer's divorce filing from two years prior, which would have been in 2017, she described Fotis' behavior as irrational, unsafe, bullying, threatening, and controlling.
She also claimed in those same documents that he'd verbally and physically attacked her to the point that she filed for an emergency order for full custody.
But that got denied by the courts.
Now, right before she filed for divorce, she fled their home with their kids, telling Fotis that she was visiting her dad's grave, which was in upstate New York.
But instead, she actually took them to a hotel in New York City and hired bodyguards.
Now Fotis lashed back by accusing her of kidnapping their kids, and they had been at each other's throats ever since in court appearances that were racking up millions of dollars in legal bills for them both.
But it wasn't always that way.
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Jennifer and Fotis both attended Brown University, but they didn't really hit it off until years later when they randomly bumped into each other at an airport in Aspen, Colorado.
Though Fotis was married when they reconnected, he assured Jennifer that he was in the process of getting a divorce, and in 2004, about a month after that marriage was officially over, he and Jennifer were married.
And they had a few seemingly happy years growing their family.
They had four kids in four years through IVF, then a baby girl, and they were each growing their careers.
Fotis was running a construction and home flipping business, fully funded to the tune of millions by Jennifer's dad, by the way.
And Jennifer was a writer.
She'd once been a budding playwright in New York, but at this stage of her life, she wrote for the new site, Patch, and blogged about being a stay -at -home mom.
And when they first started out, Fotis was constantly moving the family in and out of whatever home he was flipping, which ended up putting Fotis in control and ended up putting Jennifer on edge.
And that tension extended outside of the walls of their home.
According to Cohen's reporting, Fotis and Jennifer's dad came to blows when Jennifer's dad threatened to cut him off financially.
So they argued back and forth for a bit and eventually Fotis threw a chair at him.
Now it missed and I don't know how that got resolved, but her dad continued to finance Fotis' business dealings, and the business, and probably Jennifer's dad's wealth, funded trips to Greece, where he was from, to water ski, like this dude was obsessed with water skiing.
He also had the oldest twins on this grueling schedule of practicing and traveling for water skiing competitions, whether they wanted to or not.
By 2011, Fotis finished building them a nearly $4 million mansion in Farmington, which is another wealthy suburb in Connecticut.
That too was financed by Jennifer's parents.
And even then, like from the outside, Jennifer seemed happy.
But their nanny Lauren tells police that the facade had started to crack.
Like Fotis was never home, he's always abroad, and then when Jennifer's father, her like lifelong protector died in early 2017, Jennifer was just like lost in her grief.
Then follow that by her finding out that Fotis was cheating, and this wasn't just a fling.
On a trip to Miami to waterski, of course, with the kids, Fotis introduced Lauren to a woman that he called a friend, Michelle Traconis.
Now, she's a fellow waterskier from Venezuela who lived in Miami with her own preteen daughter, and her daughter was like a pre -Olympic skier.
Lauren tells detectives that she didn't say anything at the time, but she noticed that in that like, quote -unquote, first meeting, the kids already seemed to know Michelle.
And Jennifer must have felt it too because she told Lauren about her suspicions.
So she ends up leaving the trip early and confronted Fotis about the affair via text.
And then things quickly went downhill from there, like Fotis became more and more controlling.
Wait, did he deny the affair when Jennifer confronted him about it?
No, not at all. Like, he was pretty much like, yeah, no, this is Michelle and actually, would you mind moving out so Michelle and her daughter can move on?
I know. And he's like, you know, you can still come and go as you want.
Like everything will be fine.
No. Same. Jennifer's like not having it.
And that is around the time that she left with the kids.
And Michelle and her daughter like fully moved into the Farmington house, not long after.
So just to be clear, are they all sharing a house?
No, no, no, so this is what I'm saying.
So Jennifer, she doesn't go back to live in the Farmington house.
She leaves, her mom buys her that other house for data, she files for divorce.
But the kids were spending a fair amount of time in the Farmington house with Fotis, Michelle and Michelle's daughter.
Like instant blended family here.
Fotis and Michelle clearly did not care about what was best for the kids.
But we know that Fotis did care about money.
He's gotten very accustomed to his lavish lifestyle, but now that he and Jennifer were divorcing, his mother -in -law wanted that couple a million back that they had loaned him to start the business.
And it turns out Fotis was another couple of million in debt.
So his feet are to the financial fire, and it seems like he was using the kids almost like a pawn at this point.
A divorce battle turns into a custody battle that just gets uglier and uglier until Jennifer disappears.
And with that comes the possibility of sole custody of the kids, which could mean access to the children's trust fund set up by Jennifer's parents, $2 million per kid.
That is $10 million that would take care of his debt, keep his lifestyle up, at least for a little bit.
So police hear all of this.
And at the same time, they've been searching high and low for Jennifer, along with Jennifer's loved ones.
I mean, even K -9s have been sent out to track Jennifer's scent.
they're doing aerial searches of the woods and ponds nearby.
Police are handing out flyers.
They know finding her will help tell them what happened.
But there is little doubt in anyone's mind about who is behind it.
Police are as suspicious of FOTUS as everyone else is.
Now Lauren is in pretty constant contact with police and she tells them the next day that FOTUS has been texting her since late Friday night and is like dead set on seeing the children, which she says she's not gonna let happen until they find Jennifer.
And they're being taken care of under close watch at their grandmother's apartment.
So the day after Jennifer disappears, police meet briefly with Fotis.
And weirdly, though they don't know why, he's sporting a new haircut.
The dude's got a fully shaved head.
And this guy's not one to usually rock a buzz cut.
Are they talking to Michelle Chu at this time?
Not yet, but they have only got eyes for Fotis at this point.
But this would be the only time that Fotis ever meets with police.
He has his divorce attorney with him.
So even this meeting, this one that he does have, is short -lived.
They don't get anything from him like he's not talking.
In this meeting though, investigators do ask to see his phone and he hands it over, which would turn out to be a mistake for him.
Good for everyone else though.
Because when they do a data dump on the phone, they're able to map out Fotis's whereabouts on the day that Jennifer disappeared.
And this is where things start getting weird. The data shows that on the day Jennifer vanished, Photis was in Farmington until about 7 p .m. His phone is moving around the Farmington house, which is like only something you can say about a $4 million mansion, right?
Like moving around the house.
It's like locking, it's unlocking.
He answers a call from a friend in Greece.
The phone never leaves the house, which is, like, all fine and good since police think that Jennifer went missing from her house in New Canaan.
But it's always a good reminder to give people about phone data.
It shows that your phone was there.
Not you. Right. But after 7, he goes somewhere unusual.
Into downtown Hartford, Connecticut, which is, like, 25 minutes away from his house to potentially the sketchiest street in the city, Albany Avenue.
This is an area of high crime that police know really, really well.
What was he doing there?
That's what detectives are wondering, but again, FOTUS isn't talking.
So what they do is they check their command center that monitors surveillance cameras all around Hartford, and they task one lucky analyst to come through all of the video from that day.
Now it's important to know, FOTUS has like an entire fleet of vehicles, and he is known to borrow his employees' cars whenever he feels like it.
But primarily, he drives his black Ford Raptor, which is this F -150 pickup truck.
So this analyst uses software that can pull out footage of specific vehicles from all the footage that they had.
And he's able to isolate footage of Fotis's Ford Raptor with a man who looks a lot like Fotis behind the wheel.
And he's turning on to Albany Avenue at around 7 31 p .m. And in the bed of his truck he has got several big black trash bags.
So he turns onto a side street which unfortunately doesn't have cameras.
He's out of view for about seven minutes, and when he turns back onto Albany Avenue, the surveillance footage shows that almost all of those trash bags, poof, they're just gone.
There's only a few bags left and some other things in the bed of his truck that are hard to make out on video, so police assume that he dumped some of the bags while he was out of camera's view.
And it becomes clear that he's dumping whatever it is he's got back there when he starts doing it on camera, like no question about it anymore.
Surveillance footage shows that Fotis stops, gets out, puts something in a trash can.
2 minutes later, he pulls over again on this busy road with people all around and puts something else in another trash can.
The actual number of stops he makes is hotly debated because, again, they're not all caught on camera.
But in another video, there is footage of him stopping in front of a restaurant to take what looks like, almost like a floor mat out of a car, specifically a WeatherTech mat that, by the way, there are WeatherTech mats missing from Jennifer's Suburban, but he takes what looks like this WeatherTech mat out, drags them over to the side of the restaurant, and then he drives a little further down the road, and guess what they spot on one of those cameras?
Dude's not alone. During one of their stops, the passenger -side door opens, and a woman who looks a lot like Michelle, leans out, like touches the ground.
It's not clear why, and while she's doing whatever she's doing, Fotis comes over right next to her and slides something down a storm drain.
So investigators see on even more surveillance footage that after making their trash runs, Fotis and Michelle go to a Starbucks nearby and they get food, and they get frappuccinos.
Yeah, you know, totally your usual Friday night errands, dump in evidence, get flaps.
The yuge. Over the next couple of days, investigators start swarming the local trash processing plants with cadaver dogs.
And they also bring in a sewer crew to pump out all the water in the storm drain, looking for whatever it was that FOTUS was throwing away.
And through this all, FOTUS still isn't talking.
Michele still hasn't been questioned yet, either by the way.
And she's just going about her weekend.
She's getting her hair done.
She's going water skiing.
Of course. On the same pond, by the way, as the cops were literally searching for Jennifer's body in that same week.
What? Yeah. But she's not going to be living her best life like that for long.
Because all the searching that investigators are doing is starting to tell a story.
A story that doesn't make Fotis or Michelle look very good.
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Please get their first win when they pull up a FedEx envelope from that drain.
That's what they find in there.
And inside are two Connecticut license plates.
At first they look just like regular plates, whatever.
But detectives realize that someone is tampered with them.
There's tape added to some of the numbers or letters or whatever to change its appearance, like for example, a D was changed to a B.
And when they figure out what the original plate was and they run it, they get a match. They are expired plates registered to Fotis.
How long had he been planning all of this?
Makes you wonder, right?
I mean, like here's the thing.
My dad kept old plates for like, I don't know what reason.
He liked to hang in garages.
He literally did. Like, I get that.
But did he have this laying around, Like it's an interesting tidbit nonetheless.
Did he use it because it was something already there or was this something?
I know, because this divorce, remember, it's been going on for years.
Now they find that but what they find next is the real clincher.
Police find what was in some of those trash bags.
And I think everyone watching this case unfold on the news at the time was terrified that Jennifer or more likely parts of Jennifer would be in those bags.
But when they open them, What they find are two ponchos, sponges, and lots and lots of paper towels.
Just like the ones missing from Jennifer's pantry.
And all of it is covered in blood.
There's also a box cutter, zip ties, gloves, a piece of a mop.
Like pretty much a clean up kit.
And they also find Jennifer's clothes in these bags, a bra and a long sleeve Vineyard Vine shirt.
and eerily, the shirt had a slogan on it that says, every day should feel this good.
These clothes were also drenched in blood.
And when I say drenched, I mean drenched in blood.
I mean, police have to be thinking the worst at this point.
They do, like any hope of finding Jennifer alive is pretty much out the window, especially when DNA testing comes back and confirms that all of that blood was Jennifer's.
And it's her DNA on pretty much everything that they find in the bag, including the zip ties, a sponge, the gloves, and one poncho.
But guess who's DNA is on one of the garbage bags?
Votuses and Michels.
And that's enough for investigators.
I mean, not enough for murder charges yet, but enough to get them both on hindering prosecution and tampering with evidence in connection with Jennifer's disappearance.
So just eight days out from her going missing, they hit both of them with the lesser charges.
Investigators are confident that Fotis killed Jennifer by this point, but they need proof.
Physical evidence would do.
I mean, that would be great, right?
But a confession could be even better, and they're hoping that they can get Michelle to flip.
So, they haven't even talked to her yet.
Still, like, why is beyond me, but now is their time.
And to everyone's surprise, Michelle is willing to talk.
Did she get an attorney?
Yes, so after her arrest, she hires a defense attorney.
this guy Andrew Bowman, and the both of them sit down for her first interview with detectives, and they sit down for hours that night.
But flipping is not what she does.
It is full Tammy Wynette stand by your man, and she provides Fotis with what she seems to think is a rock solid alibi.
According to Michelle, Fotis was at the Farmington House with her all morning just like his phone data would suggest. She said they took a shower together and had sex. Then she left the house while he stayed back, but don't worry, she can fully account for her time, too, because she said she went to this stop and shop, she can prove it, because she took a selfie with this robot thing that drives around looking for people who might be stealing or whatever, and then she saved the receipt for that trip as well.
Oh good. She stopped by a friend's place, who she says can vouch for her, and then she, of course, went water skiing.
Naturally. From her account, there is no way Fotis was anywhere near Jennifer or when Jennifer vanished.
Jennifer's house in New Canaan is more than an hour's drive from the house in Farmington.
And Michelle conveniently saw Fotis in Farmington like every few hours that morning.
She says her and Fotis have lunch together.
Then at 3 .30, she goes to a property that Fotis is renovating on Mountain Spring Road.
And this Mountain Spring Road, this is less than five minutes from their Farmington house.
So she says she's going there to clean at 3 .30.
Fotis meets up with her later and then they go on their ride for fraps.
The end, normal day.
And her story seems solid, almost too solid?
Like, rehearsed? And that's because it is.
You see, police have been doing methodical searches of each of the properties owned by Fotis' company, and guess what they found at the Farmington house?
Some handwritten notes and photocopies of those notes in the trash, and then stuffed into a briefcase.
And what is written on those pages is stranger than anything I could get away with writing in fiction." The notes they find are different versions of a timeline, like hour by hour, sometimes down to the minute of what Fotis and Michelle were allegedly doing the day Jennifer disappeared.
And there's a timeline of phone calls that they both made and received that day.
They are detailed and they hit every part of what Michelle told police that they both did.
And I assume like a little trip to dump evidence isn't on that whole timeline schedule thing.
Oh, that's definitely not like, that's where the written timeline actually ends and the phone data, security footage, like diverge from the story.
According to these notes, they never went to Albany Avenue, they went straight to Starbucks.
And listen, investigators go on to dub these the alibi scripts.
In their eyes, these timelines were Fotis and Michelle's attempt to get their story straight to account for Fotis's whereabouts and to back everything up with receipts and selfies with stupid robots or whatever and call logs.
Like do they think they pre -planned the Alibi and were working on like the best version or they wrote this after to make sure that they had their stories like all lined up?
They think they pre -planned it and then went and like acted it out, but like who makes photocopies?
I mean you need multiple copies of the script if everyone's gonna learn their lines.
That's the thing I couldn't wrap my head around.
And then to keep them!
I know. And just to have them there.
But per Michelle, she said, that's not why any of it was made.
Like these aren't scripts, we didn't photocopy, so everyone had some, this is all a misunderstanding.
Okay. So listen, they bring her in again on June 6th, they question her about these timelines, about the alibi scripts, whatever you wanna call them.
And she says, yes, she and Fotis wrote them, but they did it based on his attorney's advice.
I guess he told them that they needed to be able to give full accounts of their days, like on the day Jennifer disappeared, May 24th, and then the next day.
So why leave out that ride on Albany Avenue?
I know. So she says that to her, it was just a ride to Starbucks.
Like she's like, I didn't leave anything out.
Like I said, we went to Starbucks.
Which is what we did.
But she's like, I didn't even notice that Fotis was making all these stops.
She's like, I was on my phone, and I wasn't paying attention.
And then I only really looked up when the time I opened the door and leaned out and touched the sidewalk which she says was to wipe gum off of her finger.
So she just didn't notice the multiple times he pulled over in this pretty sketchy area, hauled full trash bags out of the bed of his truck.
And he went down like a little alley at some point in time.
That is her story. But Albany Avenue is not the kind of street that you don't notice you're on.
Right. and the crazy part to me is like, it's not even on your way to the Starbucks that they went to.
And I have to tell you this story really quick.
So our reporter, Taylor, she covered this case.
I told you at the top, a ton, like as it was happening.
She actually drove the route herself, and she wrote a front page story in the Hartford Current that this wasn't just a quick detour to dump these bags, this was at least a 36 -minute trip passing the Starbucks that they eventually went to driving to another town and then looping back around to the Starbucks.
And Michelle's attorney at the time was not happy about this headline.
He actually like stormed up to Taylor in the morning that the story ran, told her it was BS.
So it definitely hit a nerve with him.
And I feel like she was doing the right thing.
Yeah, and like listen, I don't even know what you're mad about, like maps be maps.
Like, you can't argue with that.
Anyway, Michelle does tell police, at one point, that she asked FOTUS, why are we here?
So like at some point she had to have looked up and been like, uh.
But she says, Photus was like, oh, don't worry about it.
And she was like, oh, okay.
And listen like preliminarily, when they look at her phone data, it seems to line up with her story.
Because like while Photus' phone is somewhere in the house, like there are parts where like her phone is in the house too but like different parts of the house.
Giant house. Right.
But here's where things start to kind of fall apart.
It's hard to stick to the script when you don't have the script in front of you, That's not a script, whatever.
And when they talk to her a second time around, she suddenly can't remember if she actually saw Fotis at the Farmington house after 8 a .m. on the day Jennifer disappeared.
She now doesn't think they had sex or had lunch together, which were big parts of the story.
I would say those are the kind of big diversions from what she originally said.
I know, and her excuse is she tells police, oh, it's a big house, It's not like she's in his face all the time.
But as far as I know, he was there.
That's what I mean.
Like, I knew he was there, but I didn't necessarily see him.
And police aren't buying it.
They're done listening to a story that they know isn't true.
And they are ready to play hardball.
During the second interview, they tell Michelle verbatim that she is the most hated woman in America.
And even though they don't know this for sure, they tell her that Jennifer is dead and that Fotis killed her.
Detectives also tell her that Fotis had been trying to get back with Jennifer, like this part's a lie we know that's not true, but they're, I think, trying to get under her skin.
And I think it works.
These interviews are recorded and you can see that she's distraught.
But it still doesn't quite get her to crack.
So investigators have to keep digging.
And when police find more surveillance videos This time from a major highway in Connecticut and cameras near Jennifer's house in New Canaan.
They're finally able to map out where FOTUS really was that morning.
And it wasn't at the Farmington House with Michelle.
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So remember how I mentioned that Fotis was known to just like borrow his employees' cars?
Well it turns out that's exactly what he did the morning Jennifer disappeared.
He took a red Tacoma pickup truck that belonged to his project manager, this guy Pavel Gumieni.
It was parked at the Farmington house because that's where Fotis ran his business out of, like one wing of the house, so he was able to take it right from there that morning.
And when police zero in on that truck using surveillance footage from the rest stop on the highway they watch a man who looks like Fotis, but again, this is where I wanna point out, but with a shaved head.
And I couldn't figure out what the shaved head was about but when you look at his project manager, his project manager has a shaved head.
So he is, so he shaved his head to look more like the project manager?
Who would normally be driving that car, maybe?
I don't know, so, so they see him, they see, it looks like Fotis, again just with a shaved head, driving 70 miles toward New Canaan.
Then, security footage from a local school bus shows that same truck in New Canaan at 7 .57 a .m. parked at a nearby spot, which should sound familiar, Waveney Park, where Jennifer's Suburban was found missing its WeatherTech mats.
Now, we don't know how long the Tacoma had been parked there by that time that the school bus caught that footage, but what investigators find next indicates that it was probably parked there before 7 .30, because an analyst watching the surveillance video also spots something else.
There's a wheel of a bicycle poking out of the bed of the Tacoma.
And it all comes together for police when a security video from one of Jennifer's neighbors shows a man in a hooded sweatshirt riding a bike from the direction of Waveney Park right into Jennifer's neighborhood that morning at around 7 .30am.
Then, that same camera shows Jennifer getting home from dropping the kids at school, pulling her Suburban into the garage, where police now believe Votis was lying in wait for her.
Nothing actually gets captured on cameras for a while after that, because this is when police believe that Votis was killing Jennifer and scrubbing the garage clean.
And then the next thing we see is at 10 .25 a .m. That's when Jennifer's Suburban drives out of their neighborhood and toward Wavony Park, presumably with Jennifer's body inside.
And can cameras pick up who's driving the vehicle?
No no, it's not clear enough who was driving the Suburban that time, and there aren't any cameras in the park.
But police believe that Fotis moves Jennifer's body from her Suburban into the Tacoma that he was driving, abandons the Suburban, and then drives back onto that property that he was renovating in Farmington to meet Michelle, who, remember, was like conveniently at the property to clean that day.
And this is when more neighborhood security cameras come into play.
Fotis and Michelle, mostly Michelle are captured on a neighbor's camera going back and forth between their house and the property that they're cleaning and then another property that Fotis is working on nearby.
Police questioned Michelle about these trips and she tells them that she went to the property to clean it because Fotis' company had scheduled a last minute showing, they're just trying to sell this house, So she got there, went back to go get a broom, and then drove back.
And then when she returned, she had everything she needed, including sponges, paper towels, black trash bags, a lot of the same things that they found in the evidence dump on Albany Avenue.
But weird girl that you're super helpful this one specific day, because a project manager for FOTUS' company told police that he didn't remember Michelle ever cleaning a single one of their properties before ever.
Like first time for everything.
And cleaning apparently put her in the mood, because she also tells police that she and Fotis did something sexual up against the Tacoma in the driveway?
Now, to this day, no one knows where and when Fotis apparently got rid of Jennifer's body.
There is a chance that Fotis got rid of it or handed it off to someone in New Canaan or somewhere in between New Canaan and Farmington.
I mean, they've got some surveillance footage of him leaving Jennifer's house, heading back to Farmington, arriving at the house that he was renovating.
But there are, like, gaps in the footage where he could have pulled off somewhere that police don't know about.
The thing I keep coming back to is there is also a chance that her body was still inside the Tacoma in that moment that Fotis and Michelle were up against the truck, which is like, twisted and sick to think about.
So police search all of Fotis's work properties, including this property that they're renovating on Mountain Spring Road.
And they even search the woods around it, peering down into a septic tank that they find on the property.
They don't find anything of note except for they do make note of a black porch that is parked in this like super crowded garage at one of the houses.
And they make note of this one because they see that the seats of this car are missing.
And those seats become a key piece of evidence that helps investigators because those seats aren't actually missing.
They're just not in the Porsche.
Those seats are now in Pavel's Tacoma that Fotis was driving the day Jennifer disappeared.
And police find this out days later when they pull Pavel over and he tells them what went down.
He says that Fotis took the Tacoma without him asking on the day that Jennifer disappeared.
He had it until the afternoon when Pavel met Fotis at the Mountain Spring property.
Fotis didn't even want to give it back, even offered to let him use his Raptor for the weekend.
But Pavel's like, dude, just give me my truck back, what are you doing?
And Fotis finally agrees, but Michelle has the keys.
So they call her to bring them back and Pavel does take the truck.
But then for the next few days, Fotis is like blowing him up, calling and calling, telling Pavel that he needs to get new seats in the Tacoma.
Fotis says he'll buy them for him or give him the seats from his Porsche.
But Pavel is like, dude, no, I'm okay.
It's a work truck. Why would I be getting new seats?
But Fotis pushes, and while doing so, he tells Pavel not to text about the seats using the word seats to like, we should speak in a code and call it hardware.
Okay, this is all bizarre.
Is Pavel living under a rock?
Does he know this man's wife is missing and Fotis is like the prime suspect?
So it has to become suspicious to him because I don't know what he was thinking at first, but eventually Fotis changes his tune and he basically says, okay, listen, I saw Jennifer that week, like the week before she disappeared, so police might find one of her hairs in the truck and that wouldn't be good for me.
But by the way, Pavel, you better not say anything because he's quick to remind him, like you aren't a US citizen.
Like this dude's from Poland, and if you get entangled in a missing -persons case, it could be really bad for you." So Pavel gets freaked out.
He does switch the seats in his Tacoma for the Porsche seats, like Votus tells him to.
But here's the kicker, he doesn't get rid of the Tacoma seats.
He tells police that he kept them just in case they wanted them, and of course they want them.
So he works out a deal with detectives.
he gets immunity in exchange for his cooperation.
Immunity for what? Well, I mean, technically he tampered with evidence.
Like even if he didn't fully know it was evidence.
So maybe that, some people have speculated maybe he was helping Fotis at Jennifer's house at the time of the murder or like somewhere in New Canaan after.
I mean, remember, there were two bloody ponchos, which could have meant that Fotis had an accomplice for the actual murder, or maybe he just doubled up on ponchos to avoid, I don't know.
But if they put Votis at the house based on video footage of him riding the bike, wouldn't they know if someone else was there or not?
Not necessarily. So like, even though they've got like footage right at the Tacoma and all of that, there are blind spots in the neighborhood where someone could come in and not get caught on camera.
So there's no proof that there was anyone else involved.
It's just - There's no proof that there wasn't.
And I don't know how far they dug into Pavel because the deal that he made with them for immunity, it kind of like halts any investigation into him.
But to be clear, immunity deals aren't usually on the table when murder charges are involved.
So like - Wait, so did they ever do a data dump on Pavel's phone?
Well, no, they did.
So, and this is why, like, again, I think there's like this theory of did he help or whatever, like it actually, his phone put him in New Canaan, but he was at a legitimate construction site in that town that he was working, for FOTUS, but it never puts him at Jennifer's house.
So anyways, he does his deal with them, he gives them the seats, and they light up when they're sprayed with luminol and then the black light goes over to test for the presence of blood.
So then they send the Tacoma seats off for official DNA testing, right?
Like this is a good indicator, but we've gotta prove that it is blood, and it is hers.
But that's not all they learned from Pavel.
he also tells them about a conversation he heard a few months back, like before Jennifer disappeared, when Fotis was talking about putting down their family dog.
I guess, Michelle chimed into this conversation, calling Jennifer a bitch and said that she should be buried in the backyard next to the dog.
So, clearly, Michelle, tons of bad blood there, right?
It's not even like we can just say Fotis didn't like Jennifer.
Michelle is clearly feeding into that too.
The thing is though, they've searched the yards, Jennifer is not there.
So where is Jennifer?
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While they're waiting for the DNA results from the seeds, Fotis and Michelle are both out on bond.
There's still no body, and so there's still no murder charge.
And Fotis is gearing up for a fight.
Remember, he has brought in his divorce attorney already, but he's got this other guy as well, his longtime friend, sometimes business attorney, Kent Moynihan.
This dude's on speed dial for him.
But he also at this point decides to hire a criminal attorney, and he doesn't just hire anybody.
He hires Norm Patiss, whose client list includes Alex Jones.
You know the guy that claimed that Sandy Hook was a hoax, so like not a great guy.
Yeah, you are the company you keep.
And as if this case wasn't enough of a media spectacle already, Norm takes it to another level.
And he tries dragging our girl, Gillian Flynn, into this hot mess.
Rude. Right, I know you have, but I don't know if all the crime junkies have read Gone Girl or seen the movie.
Both, obviously. You know the one where Rosamund Pike plays a woman who leaves her husband and in doing so methodically frames him for her murder.
Well, that is what Norm said happened here.
He claims that he read a manuscript that Jennifer wrote with a similar plot and says that Jennifer gone -girled herself to try and ruin Fotis's life.
No one is buying that.
Her family and friends know that she would never leave her kids, and police are very clear that they are looking for a body, not a diabolical wife.
The only diabolical people we have here are Fotis and Michelle.
Where do people find these attorneys?
Like, I get it, like everyone needs a good defense, right?
But in my book, there's like a line, right, You have this guy throwing out these wild scenarios that victim blame this woman who's already dead.
I know, and then you have his lawyer, Fotis' original lawyer, who's like, I guess in my mind when they create the Alibi scripts, at some point - We're already off the rails there.
Well, yeah, and if they're like, oh, my lawyer told me to write it, like didn't you?
Are you saying it? I agree.
And we can also lump Fotis' lawyer friend Kent in all of this, too.
Because get this. So they find that Kent had helped start a gun club in this nearby town years earlier.
He left the club, but interestingly rejoined it a couple of months before Jennifer vanished.
Now here's the really interesting part.
In early June, two members of that same gun club remember that they saw something weird and they decided to call police.
They say that they were walking through a wooded area of the club just a few days before Jennifer vanished when they saw this large pit in the ground, a six foot pit that looked a lot like a grape.
Someone had tried to hide it.
There are like two grates over it, branches, leaves like trying to camouflage it.
But when they look inside, like they moved at all, nothing was there, just like a tarp and two bags of lime.
So knowing that he has this connection to the gun club, this weird thing happened at the gun club, but he also has a connection to FOTUS.
the police start looking into Kent a little more closely.
Okay, did they go look at this hole?
Well, they did. It seemed like someone had tried to cover it up even more after news broke about this discovery.
Like it had conveniently been filled back in by the time the state police went to check it out.
And then when they tested the area, there was no evidence that there were ever human remains buried there, but their investigation into Kent certainly didn't stop.
Because as it turns out, Kent was also in the middle of a very contentious divorce.
He had actually been charged with raping his wife, a charge that has since been dropped.
But his wife had a protective order against him.
Though police learn that Kent was still trying to contact her through FOTUS.
And since Norm is bringing up plots from works of fiction, maybe there is another one that we should talk about.
I feel like we talked about this before, like a little Strangers on a Train situation.
police begin to connect the dots.
Both of these men had very tumultuous relationships with their ex -wives or soon to be ex -wives or current wives, whatever, and reasons to want those wives gone.
Police records show that investigators begin to suspect that Kent may have also been involved in Jennifer's disappearance.
And is there any specific evidence tying him to her disappearance or just like this weird hole at his gun club and his connection to Fodesz?
So his name is also mentioned in the alibi script.
According to Fotis and Michelle's timelines, Fotis and Kent met at the Farmington House that morning, which again would place Fotis in Farmington, not New Canaan.
And when police first asked Kent about this, he said that he never knew of any meeting.
But then when they asked him a second time, he said they did have a meeting scheduled there that morning, but Fotis never showed up.
He's like, oh, I came, I waited for like an hour, I gave up.
and he said he didn't talk to FOTUS.
But oops, his phone is broken, he fell down the stairs the day after Jennifer vanished and broke it and also hit his head, so my memory's kind of fuzzy.
I can't be certain.
What a series of unfortunate events.
Yeah, so broken phone and amnesia or not, police are able to pull his cell records and see that he did talk to FOTUS on May 24th, after all, while FOTUS was on Albany Avenue dumping evidence.
So please interview Michelle again with this new information and she changes her story again.
At this point, she's done protecting Fotis because they're not even dating anymore.
So she is ready to tell what seems to be closer to the truth.
Remember, she said that she wasn't sure if she saw Fotis at the Farmington house that morning his wife vanished, or at least that was her second version of events.
Well, now she says she never saw him there.
She's sure of it. And remember how his phone was in Farmington all morning and answered that call from his friend in Greece.
Well, Michelle admits that was actually her.
She answered the call, which by the way was planned in advance.
And she says this time that she wasn't alone.
Kent was at the Farmington house and he directed her to answer the call.
And she says that when she was cleaning the Mountain Spring house, Fotis handed her a paper towel with these big brown stains on them and she put them into the garbage bag.
she said that she thought that Fotis just like spilled coffee or something.
I'm sorry, coffee, blood, huge difference.
I know but I think this is her way of explaining why her DNA is probably on the trash bag with blood evidence in it.
And police actually figure out that dumping those trash bags wasn't the only way the couple was getting rid of evidence.
Security cameras are the unsung hero in this case because even more surveillance video captures Fotis driving Pavel's red Tacoma again five days after Jennifer vanishes, this time to a car wash.
And it turns out replacing the seats wasn't enough for Fotis.
He wanted to deep clean this vehicle too.
So he dropped the truck off at a car wash, paid cash to get full detailing, and he has to leave it there for a while.
But Michelle followed him there and picked him up.
So that's how she knows about this.
She's telling them about this now.
Police think this was another attempt by Fotis to destroy evidence with Michelle's help.
Right. So on September 4th, Fotis gets hit with more hindering and tampering charges, so does Michelle and she turns herself in the next day.
And while Michelle is starting to cooperate, Fotis definitely is not.
He again gets out on bail and starts doing interviews.
On one TV hit, he wishes Jennifer and her family happy holidays, like he is fully keeping up this facade that he thinks she's still alive out there trying to frame him.
Well wait, where are the kids during all this?
Jennifer's mom has full custody by this point.
And they at least have Lauren, she stays on as their nanny so they've got some semblance of stability still.
But like, dude, I don't even know this.
We've done cases like this before where it's like, I don't know how your world isn't just so rocked.
Like upside down. Upside down, right.
So I don't know what they're thinking about the investigation, or their dad, or what their grandparents are telling them.
But the investigation is moving on, and after months, police finally feel that it's time to upgrade the charges.
On January 7, 2020, Fotis gets charged with murder, felony murder, and kidnapping in Jennifer's disappearance, and Michelle and Kent are charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
And it's in their arrest warrants that police lay out exactly what they think happened to Jennifer.
Police say that Fotis woke up early on May 24th.
He went and grabbed Povel's Tacoma with his childhood racing bike in the bed and drove to New Canaan.
He parked at the Waveney Park, rode his bike to Jennifer's, somehow got into her garage, and then laid in wait.
Jennifer came home from dropping off the children at school, opened the garage, drove in, closed the garage door, and then based on the blood spatter, it seems like Jennifer might've been like just about to walk into her door, her back turned, when Fotis attacked from behind they think.
Now it's still unclear exactly how Jennifer died because her body is still missing.
But it seems like Fotis struck Jennifer, caused her to fall and become incapacitated.
The ME was confident that she suffered non -survivable wounds based on the amount of blood that they found and all of the evidence that was dumped.
And I don't know when she died, like that's not clear.
But Fotis spent hours cleaning up that garage.
He even went into the house, took her paper towels and left behind one spot of Jennifer's blood, mixed with a trace of his own DNA on her kitchen faucet and then another tiny DNA sample on her doorknob.
Then police believe that he zip tied her by her ankles and wrists and then put her and his bike into her suburban, drove back to the park, where he either transferred her body to the Tacoma or did something else with it, maybe gave it to someone else to dispose of, and then drove back to Farmington.
again. Michelle, police say, knew about it all along and helped establish an alibi, helped get rid of evidence.
Kent, they alleged, did the same as part of a scheme for the two men to help each other get rid of their wives.
Now, despite a $6 million price tag on his bail, Votis makes bond, bankrolled by another woman who has moved in with him.
This friend named Anna Curry, who forks over a large sum of cash.
Anna, girl. I know I could do an entire series on like wags of killers.
It is truly unbelievable to me but like, I don't know their arrangement.
Again, like a friend.
Whatever it is, it doesn't last long.
You see there was an issue with the bond.
So Fotis was scheduled for a bail hearing on January 30th and he was expected to be going to jail for the long haul after this.
Well, the morning that Fotis is supposed to appear in court, media have like swarmed his Farmington house, hoping to catch sight of him.
They're like waiting, they're waiting, he's not coming out.
So when court marshals realize that VOTUS wasn't on his way to court, where he's supposed to be, they make their way over to his house.
Remember, this is like an enormous place, it has this long driveway, so most of his cars aren't even visible from the road.
But when investigators get closer, They see that there in the garage is Fotis' raptor, and inside is Fotis, barely clinging to life.
First responders pull him out, they start CPR.
A scene that is captured on video by news helicopters, he's eventually airlifted to a hospital in the Bronx and put on life support until his children can come a few days later and say goodbye.
And later, the very day that they came to see him, Fotis is pronounced dead.
He had poisoned himself with carbon dioxide.
Inside the home, they found a suicide note that says he couldn't serve another day for something he didn't do, and he also writes that Michelle and Kent are innocent.
Now, this doesn't stop anything else that's moving forward. Michelle and Kent are still facing trials.
There is no easy out for them.
With delays from the pandemic and endless pretrial motions from their defense attorneys, their cases take years to get to a courtroom.
So from 2020 to 2023, they're both out on bond.
Sometimes with ankle monitors, like maybe sometimes not, Michelle is just like living her life in Miami, gets permission from the court to travel as she pleases.
Kent, at one point tried to remove his own ankle monitor, and then he petitioned the court to have it removed, saying that like it's not fair, cause he wants to go ice skating and he can't fit ice skates over his ankle bracelet.
Like dude. Priorities?
No. You're charged with plotting a murder.
For real. Maybe don't worry about going ice skating right now.
Jury selection for Michelle's trial started in October of 2023.
It was hard to find an unbiased jury like i said at the top.
Like this was making national headlines.
But they do and that same month, a judge legally declares Jennifer dead.
Even before Michelle's trial began, it was clear what her defense was going to argue.
And I bet you can't even guess it because it's not the Gone Girl thing.
They say that Michelle didn't understand English.
Wait, what? Yeah, well to be fair, English is not Michelle's first language.
She was raised in South America.
Her first language is Spanish.
But we know Michelle speaks English.
All of her police interviews are in English.
Yeah, you've never brought that up before.
Exhibit A. I'm not saying you were lyin', I'm just sayin' that the information that I'm comin' forward at, You didn't really know what you were saying, you did not.
So when he was walking around the property where you guys were, did you really see what he was doing or no?
I saw him fixing the ribbons.
They were, like, big ribbons that he covers, so people don't step...
Because when they do the open houses, people park in the grass, and he gets upset.
Did you see him for a handful of hours, or just a few minutes?
No, because I wasn't there three hours.
I was just there for a period of time.
I went inside to clean, and I actually was upset because I'm like, I don't want to clean this house, but I always get upset.
I get crumby, doing something that I don't want to do.
And I went up, I saw the — But still, her attorney is adamant that Michelle never should have been interviewed in English.
He says the case should be thrown out, and Michelle is — she eventually gets, like, locked into this defense.
Like, she actually uses an interpreter throughout the trial and only speaks in Spanish in court, even when speaking to her family.
When the trial starts in January of 2024, prosecutors planned to prove that Michelle not only knew she was helping get rid of evidence on Albany Avenue, but that she plotted with FOTUS to kill Jennifer.
The trial lasts months until March 1st, when a jury finally finds Michelle guilty on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder and charges of hindering a prosecution, tampering with evidence, and conspiring to tamper with evidence.
She gets sentenced to 14 and a half years in prison and that is where she is now, appealing her conviction.
Michelle has filed a habeas petition to get released, arguing that her rights were violated and that her conviction should be overturned.
And we reached out to her attorney for comment and he gave us a brief explanation on what that petition means generally.
Basically, Michelle is arguing that she was led astray by her first lawyer when he gave her bad advice to sit down with police for multiple interviews.
And by the way, at some point, Michelle was arrested again during her trial for contempt of court, and so she's also awaiting a trial on that separate charge.
Now, all these years later, Kent, that dude is still waiting to face a jury.
So he's out on bond, but just has been consistently listed as on the trial list without a start date scheduled.
which I was like, I couldn't understand.
I've never seen before, so our reporter, Taylor, has heard from insiders at the courthouse that Kent likely won't go to trial and that maybe a plea deal may be on the way.
Now, the whole time, Kent's lawyer maintains his innocence, too, says he never colluded with FOTUS or dug a human -sized grave in the gun club property or whatever.
So, we'll see if anything ever comes of that or if it's like a forever waiting game.
When our reporter, Taylor, spoke to Jennifer's friends, they described her as a wonderful mother who loved her children.
But she was much more than just a mother.
Like she was a friend, she was a daughter, she was an academic, a writer.
And her friends want to make sure that that part isn't forgotten.
You guys, Jennifer took every step she could to safely leave her husband.
With resources most people don't have. Every year in the US, more than a thousand women are killed by intimate partners and women are at the highest risk of being killed when they leave their abusers.
The statistics are so high that Jennifer isn't even the only woman named Jennifer in Connecticut to be murdered by an estranged spouse.
In 2007, Jennifer Magnano was shot dead by her husband on the front steps of her home in Terreville, Connecticut, when she was required to come back to the state for a custody hearing, despite being super afraid because she knew her husband was dangerous.
Together, those two Jennifers are the namesake of Jennifer's Law, a domestic violence legislation that extends access to protective orders to women who are victims of coercive control.
It is terrifying. And what is even scarier is that many states still don't offer protections to victims of that type of abuse.
We're gonna provide some resources in the show notes for more information on this, and how you can get involved and change that.
Because, you guys, abuse isn't just physical abuse.
It is important to note, not just like the signs of it, what to look for, not even in your own relationships, but in the relationships of people you love.
So we're gonna also provide resources to anyone who is, or maybe knows someone who finds themselves in a situation like Jennifer's.
You guys, we literally get emails from listeners every week who tell us that they finally left for good because of a story that they heard on our show.
And maybe today that's you.
Like you know the warning signs or you can feel it.
You're trying to convince yourself that's other people, it's not you.
Your partner's gonna change.
Or yes, they hurt you but they would never kill you.
Maybe it's even better in this very moment but how many times has it been better before?
And then it got bad again, and then it got even worse.
On average, it takes people seven times to leave for good but you're not guaranteed seven opportunities.
Leaving is not easy, but it is the only way you get out alive.
I don't want to have to tell your story one day.
Jennifer's kids lost both of their parents in one fell swoop.
Jennifer's children have rarely spoken publicly, but when they all gave victim impact statements at Michelle's sentencing, they looked right at her and they each begged her, a woman they once trusted, to finally tell them where their mom is.
And that's the piece of this solved case that investigators still need help with.
If you or anyone you know knows anything about the whereabouts of Jennifer Farber Dulos or any details about her disappearance, the location of her remains, please email cold .case at ct .gov.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, CrimeJunkiePodcast .com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
At least we don't let them know.
Crime Junkie is an audio Chuck production.
So what do you think Chuck?
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Hi, crime junkies. It's Britt.
One of the things I love the most about this community is how much we care about telling the right stories in the right way.
That's exactly what Dark Down East is all about.
Investigative journalist Kylie Lowe digs into cold cases and missing persons from New England, working closely with families and communities to advocate for the truth.
If you care about justice the way we do, this podcast belongs in your queue.
Listen to Dark Down East now, wherever you get your podcasts.
