Investigator: Case could happen anywhere
CANAAN — Police here aren’t called to investigate serious crimes too often.
The town had one homicide in 20 years — an openand-shut murder-suicide — and its police department doesn’t even have a rank of detective.
So when a 50-year-old mother of five reported missing on a Friday evening at the start of Memorial Day weekend in 2019 quickly ballooned into a national story, the town and its police department were suddenly in uncharted territory.
For New Canaan Police Officer Thomas Patten, a 20-year veteran of the department, the Jennifer Dulos case was his first homicide investigation.
“This by far has been the largest investigation I have been a part of,” Patten said. “This evolved into someNEW
thing on day one that I had never investigated before. New Canaan has never had a crime like this.”
“Nobody wants to think that a situation like this could happen in their town,” he said. “The sad truth is that it does.”
In exclusive interviews with CT Insider, Patten and State Police Detective John Kimball, the lead investigators in the case, have provided new insight into the disappearance, their theories of what happened and say they have a new lead that could soon lead them to Jennifer Dulos’ remains.
“At one point, I think we had every single unit working on the case,” Kimball said.
When recalling key points in the investigation, Kimball goes back to that Friday night in May 2019. After friends reported Jennifer Dulos missing around 7 p.m. May 24, 2019, New Canaan police officers went to her Welles Lane home and no one appeared to be there, Kimball said.
The police officers started to look around and found what appeared to be blood on the front of a vehicle inside the garage, Kimball said.
At first, police asked family and friends if Jennifer Dulos had recently struck a deer. When they were told she had not been involved in any accident, the missing persons report took a sudden turn.
“If (the officer) hadn’t seen that, we may not be sitting here today talking about this,” said Kimball, a member of the State Police Western District Major Crimes Unit. “She may have gone ‘missing’ and that would have been it.”
The case has since prompted one of the most extensive missing persons investigations in the state’s history, and continues to this day.
Kimball has seen his share of serious crimes, but the Dulos case, which has spanned at least two states and four Connecticut counties, is by far his agency’s biggest investigation, he said.
The investigation has cost state and local police hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime and other expenses.
“This taxed us to a large extent, but we are committed to finding Jennifer,” Kimball said.
Jennifer Dulos was last seen on a neighbor’s security camera returning home after dropping off her children at school around 8 a.m. May 24, 2019.
Police believe her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos, was “lying in wait” and attacked her in the garage, according to his arrest warrant. Police said Jennifer Dulos was the victim of a “serious physical assault” and the state’s medical examiner determined she would not have survived without immediate medical attention, according to the arrest warrant.
Fotis Dulos died in January from an apparent suicide as he faced murder and other charges in the case.
His ex-girlfriend has been charged with conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes in the case. His former attorney, Kent Mawhinney, has also been charged with conspiracy to commit murder. They have each pleaded not guilty.
Around the time Jennifer Dulos was reported missing, police said Fotis Dulos and Troconis were seen on surveillance video making three stops on a busy Hartford street, according to their arrest warrants. During each of those stops, police said, Fotis Dulos was seen dumping bags that were later determined to contain his wife’s blood and clothing, the warrants said.
But, according to Kimball, there were even more bags that police were not able to recover.
One video showed the bed of the truck contained several bags as it turned onto Milford Avenue, Kimball said. When the truck turned back onto Albany Avenue a few blocks away, the number of bags was down to two or three, Kimball said.
There is no video of what happened to the bulk of the bags — and they were never found, Kimball said.
Kimball said one of the bags that was recovered contained clothing that were Jennifer Dulos’ size, including an extra-small Vineyard Vines shirt and a bra. Both contained what appeared to be blood stains with her DNA, Kimball said. And both had been cut up the middle, much like medical personnel cut off the clothing of a wounded patient, Kimball described.
Among the items recovered from the trash were two plastic rain ponchos, one with the hood cut off, and four 3-foot long zip ties that had been cut, arrest warrants said. Police believe the items had been used to subdue Jennifer Dulos while she was gravely injured, according to arrest warrants. Two of the zip ties were covered in blood and Jennifer Dulos’ DNA and were likely cut after she had died, since “there is little reason to incapacitate a deceased person,” the arrest warrants state.
The items were a key find in the case, Kimball said, but investigators would like to make an even bigger discovery: Jennifer Dulos’ remains.
While Kimball said they have a new lead that could point them in the right direction, there are a few key gaps in the timeline investigators established for the day of the disappearance that may contain the missing link.
“We obviously haven’t found Jennifer yet so we don't know definitively what happened. We have points of data that we can place Fotis at and that we can place Jennifer at, and then we have gaps,” Kimball said.
“Obviously, Jennifer or Jennifer's body was taken and put elsewhere,” he said. “And we have, like I said, data points of Fotis Dulos’ activities on that day. Whether or not Jennifer’s with him during some or all of those data points, we don’t know. But we’re working toward that every day.”