The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Prosecutor says leaks in Dulos case created ‘very dangerous situation’
STAMFORD — Prosecutor Richard Colangelo and defense attorney Norm Pattis have not agreed on too many things when it comes to the Jennifer Dulos case.
But Colangelo acknowledged during an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media, days before the oneyear anniversary of the New Canaan mother’s May 24, 2019, disappearance that there were law enforcement leaks that damaged the integrity of the investigation.
In particular, Colangelo pointed to the arrest of Fotis Dulos on murder and kidnapping charges in January, when the media reported the news before state police had even arrived at his Farmington home.
“When we went to arrest Mr. Dulos, the news had it before the state police went out to serve the warrant,” Colangelo said. “That created a very dangerous situation for the officers involved and that’s really what I was upset about.”
While fighting a court-imposed gag order in the case while representing Fotis Dulos, Pattis repeatedly vilified law enforcement for leaking information. When Fotis Dulos died
in January from an apparent suicide after he was notified of an emergency bond hearing where a judge could have sent him back to jail, Pattis said his client had been “tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.”
“Now he has been executed,” Pattis said in a statement. “We remain committed to demonstrating he did not murder Jennifer.”
Colangelo, who was appointed chief state’s attorney on the same day Fotis Dulos died, said the leaks were regrettable.
“There were leaks,” he said. “It was very disappointing to me. To some extent yes, attorney Pattis was correct, the court of public opinion did try Mr. Dulos. Unfortunately, we couldn’t try him because he took his life.”
If he hadn’t, Colangelo said, a jury would have found him guilty of killing his estranged wife.
“I’ve looked at the evidence,” he said. “I wouldn’t have brought the case if I didn’t think I could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Pattis said he can no longer discuss the case at the request of Fotis Dulos’ estate.
Colangelo, the former state’s attorney for the Stamford-Norwalk Judicial Branch, says he will remain on the case to prosecute Fotis Dulos’ former girlfriend, Michelle Troconis, and lawyer Kent Mawhinney. They have each been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, while Troconis is also facing tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution charges.
Colangelo declined to speak about the details of the investigation because the case is still pending, but pointed out one long-standing misconception about surveillance footage of Fotis Dulos and Troconis in Hartford the night of the disappearance. Video showed Fotis Dulos throwing out garbage bags and stuffing a license plate into a storm drain along Albany Avenue, arrest warrants state. The bags were later determined to contain Jennifer Dulos’ blood and clothing, while the expired license plates were registered to Fotis Dulos, according to arrest warrants.
Colangelo said the original arrest warrants when Fotis Dulos and Troconis were arrested last June on tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution charges wrongly stated that the footage showed them stopping more than 30 times.
Pattis had complained that the footage didn’t show 30 stops. Colangelo agreed — and said state police have since clarified in court documents that there were only six stops.
“People are still talking about the 30 stops and where are the 30 stops and on the video I don’t see the 30 stops,” Colangelo said. “If people were reading everything they were given, they would realize that was a mistake by the state police and it’s been corrected.”
“One of the issues with this case was that all the search warrants were sealed,” Colangelo said. “When they became unsealed and they became public information, people grabbed them and started running with them.”
The sheer number of places where police searched for evidence also fed public speculation.
Waveny Park was the first glimpse many people had of the case last May. It was a few days after Memorial Day weekend and the search for Jennifer Dulos was intensifying with local, state and federal authorities scouring the 300-acre park with dogs, some specifically trained to locate her phone, while police helicopters and drones flew overhead. The scene played out for days as the town became the focus of national attention, but nothing significant was ever found there.
Fotis Dulos’ luxury home-building company, Fore Group, owned or developed several properties throughout the state that were also searched in the days and weeks following the disappearance.
New Canaan police also requested the public to turn over relevant security camera footage — a textbook best practice in law enforcement, according to John DeCarlo, a former Branford police chief who is now an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven.
“The citizens in the community have to be highly engaged,” he said. “We can’t solve crimes in a vacuum. We need the community.”
According to arrest warrants, a neighbor’s security camera captured an image of Jennifer Dulos returning to her Welles Lane home, where police believe Fotis Dulos was “lying in wait” on the morning of the disappearance. Another New Canaan resident’s security video showed a man police believe was Fotis Dulos riding a vintage French bicycle from Waveny Park in the direction of Welles Lane that morning, according to arrest warrants.
Investigators spent weeks combing through garbage at a Hartford dump after learning of the surveillance footage depicting Fotis Dulos and Troconis throwing out trash. An Avon water skiing pond frequented by Fotis Dulos and his children was also searched.
Some of the early searches didn’t turn up anything, Colangelo said. Others “led us to the next stop and the next bit of information.”
While prosecutors are prohibited from commenting on pending cases, the intense public interest meant it was “hard to give the investigative process or the thought process in this type of case” as more and more information became public, Colangelo said.
In her first public comments since her arrest, Troconis said in a prepared statement released by her lawyer last week that “it was a mistake to have trusted” Fotis Dulos, but that she does not know where Jennifer Dulos is or what happened to her.
Colangelo declined to comment on Troconis’ statement. He said he hasn’t had substantive discussions with lawyers involved in the cases against Troconis and Mawhinney yet because most courthouses statewide have been closed because of the COVID-19 crisis and he hasn’t finished turning over discovery evidence.
Though the prosecutions are on hold, he said, the investigation continues.
“Not a day goes by that we’re not looking at the evidence and trying to find Jennifer,” Colangelo said. “It is our hope and our goal to find her. There’s always hope. If you don’t have hope, what do you have?”