Family rejects ‘Gone Girl’ suggestion
Lawyer reportedly linked disappearance to book Farber Dulos wrote in 2002
The friends and family of Jennifer Farber Dulos, the missing New Canaan mother of five, issued a statement Monday criticizing her estranged husband’s attorney for trying to link an unpublished manuscript she wrote in 2002 to her disappearance a month ago.
“Trying to tie Jennifer’s absence to a book she wrote more than 17 years ago makes no sense. Evidence shows that Jennifer was the victim of a violent attack in her New Canaan home,” Carrie Luft said in a two-paragraph statement released Monday.
The statement came as Norm Pattis, the attorney for Farber Dulos’ husband Fotis Dulos, filed a motion late Monday in Superior Court seeking to make public a custody study done as part of the Dulos’ ongoing divorce case. Pattis said he believes it will help him mount a defense for Dulos who, along with his girlfriend, Michelle Troconis, have pleaded not guilty to evidence tampering and hindering prosecution charges related to Farber Dulos’ disappearance.
Judge Donna Heller ordered
the study, which was done by Dr. Stephen P. Herman and is currently confidential, during proceedings in the couple’s contentious divorce case. Heller has used the study to help her determine custody arrangements for the couple’s five children who are between the ages of 8 and 13. In March, Heller ordered that Dulos be given more access to his children, including on weekends at his Farmington home.
Pattis drew the ire of Farber Dulos’ family by suggesting that a 500-page manuscript Farber Dulos wrote in 2002 was similar to the novel “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn. “Gone Girl,” published in 2012, is about a woman involved in a troubled marriage disappearing on the couple’s wedding anniversary. The woman fakes her own death to frame her husband while she goes into hiding. Pattis said that in the past, Farber Dulos disappeared and lived under an assumed name and said she has the means to do it again.
“Trying to tie Jennifer’s absence to a book she wrote more than 17 years ago makes no sense. Evidence shows that Jennifer was the victim of a violent attack in her New Canaan home,” Carrie Luft said in a two-paragraph statement released Monday.
“As of today, she has been missing for a month. This is not fiction or a movie. This is real life, as experienced every single day by Jennifer’s five young children, her family, and her friends. We are heartbroken. Jennifer is not here to protect her children, and these false and irresponsible allegations hurt the children now and into the future,” Luft said. Luft has been the spokesperson for the family of Farber Dulos since she went missing on May 24.
Pattis didn’t reveal details of the manuscript, but Luft said she has seen it and said Pattis is deliberately mischaracterizing it. She said it was written several years before Farber Dulos began dating Fotis Dulos.
“I read Jennifer’s novel in installments as she was completing the manuscript. She finished the draft around 2002,” Luft said. “Her book has nothing to do with ‘Gone Girl.’ Jennifer’s novel is not a mystery. It’s a character-driven story that follows a young woman through relationships and self-discovery over a period of years. Like all of Jennifer’s writing, it expresses a deep longing for human connection and the need to be accepted as one’s true self.”
In a statement issued late Monday, Pattis didn’t back off the possibility that Farber Dulos disappeared.
“Fotis Dulos is presumed innocent. He should not be effectively imprisoned on conditions of release and kept from those he loves — including his children,” Pattis said. “We are continuing our investigation of Ms. Dulos’ disappearance, and believe it to be entirely consistent with the evidence to conclude that she was not a victim of foul play at the hands of third parties. Efforts to distance Ms. Dulos from a Gone Girl-type scenario are wellmeaning, to be sure. But the fact remains that Ms. Dulos remains accountably “Gone,” and had the imagination, means and motive to disappear.”
Pattis and West Hartford attorney Rich Rochlin are now representing Dulos in the divorce case. Pattis said they filed a motion Monday to get visitation with, and ultimately custody of, the children for Dulos.
In his motion to unseal the custody study, Pattis argues that information in the study is “necessary to his defense” because it will establish “Fotis Dulos had no motive to cause her disappearance,” that she had motive to cast suspicion on him and to rebut claims that he was violent or menacing toward her.
Farber Dulos, 50, went missing May 24 after dropping her kids off at school that morning. Police said she missed two appointments in New York City that day and was eventually reported missing by friends around 7 p.m. Her black 2017 Chevy Suburban was found on a road near Waveny Park about 4 miles from her New Canaan home.
She and her estranged husband have been embroiled in a bitter two-year divorce and custody battle, a contentious case full of back-and-forth accusations of ignoring court orders, threatening each other in front of the children and allegations of threats to hurt the children or each other. The couple’s five children have been staying in their grandmother Gloria Farber’s New York City apartment since May 24.
The grandmother sought temporary custody of the children in probate court. The filings in that case have not been made public.
State police detectives have spent three weeks combing through 30-35 tons of trash a day looking for evidence of her disappearance. In addition to the trash plant search, state police have continued to systematically search properties owned by The Fore Group, Dulos’ luxury home building company, and other places that he frequented like a lake in Avon where he took the children water skiing.
As many as 25 to 30 investigators across a half-dozen agencies are working the case on a daily basis, and New Canaan police have received more than 800 tips and 80 surveillance camera submissions to date, New Canaan police have said.
The criminal charges against Dulos and Troconis, court records say, stem from video surveillance footage that shows a man and woman resembling Dulos and Troconis discarding trash in bins along Albany Avenue in Hartford on May 24, the day Farber Dulos went missing. Police have said DNA from blood found on towels, clothes and sponges retrieved from the Albany Avenue bins matches Farber Dulos.
Sources familiar with the investigation said the video obtained from Hartford police shows the man dumping at least two garbage bags into the trash bins.
State police recovered one of the bags before it was picked up and taken to the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority’s trash-to-energy plant in Hartford’s South Meadows. Since garbage pickup was delayed by one day because of Memorial Day, most of the trash from the Albany Avenue area had not been incinerated.
Dulos and Troconis have pleaded not guilty to the charges and are free after each posted $500,000 bail. Troconis is scheduled to appear in court July 18 and Dulos’ next court date is Aug. 2. Both hearings will be held in Superior Court in Stamford.