FROM A DREAM TO A NIGHTMARE
Happy life of promise and privilege devolved into acrimony — or worse
NEW CANAAN — Theirs was a marriage made of dreams.
The 36-year-old bride saw in his smile the promise of a provider who would give her the commitment she always craved.
The just-divorced groom saw in her eyes the promise of a wife who would put aside her writing career for a homemaker’s life.
In less than a decade, the two Ivy League graduates had used the advantages of privilege to arrive at the good life, raising their children in a 15,000-square-foot mansion built by the company he started with her father’s money.
At the time, the couple’s trip to the tip of South America was just that — an exotic date in a foreign place. She had no indication that it was more than a vacation.
Jennifer Dulos was at the height of her life as a married mother of five — in jarring juxtaposition to the bloodspattered scene detectives found at her home two weeks ago, in what has become one of the nation’s most widely followed crime stories.
She treasured putting to bed her youngest child, Cleopatra, before going out at night with her husband, Fotis Dulos — the man now accused along with his lover, Michelle Troconis, of dumping his wife’s bloody
clothes at Hartford garbage sites the night she was reported missing.
“The best part of my night now, hands down, is when I give our baby, Clea-Noelle a bath and then her bottle, in my arms,” the missing mother wrote in a 2012 blog post. “It’s my passion, my joy, my connection.”
Jennifer Dulos’ delight with married life may surprise those who only know from media reports about the acrimony of her divorce battle that has dominated the headlines since her May 24 disappearance.
Accounts of her happy life, culled from her blog posts as a busy mom of two sets of twins and a toddler, can only heighten the intrigue of the multidimensional story, now entering its third week of national coverage.
While there are immediate questions about the criminal case against the husband and Troconis, about the welfare of the five children protected by an armed guard in their 85year-old grandmother’s Park Avenue apartment, and about the search for Jennifer Dulos that seems to take police to a new location each day, there are also deeper questions.
How can love can be so thoroughly undone in just a few months, and in the process turn the American dream inside out?
Sex and money always seem to suggest an answer.
Fotis Dulos — the 51-yearold Turkish-born luxury homebuilder in jail on charges of hindering prosecution and tampering with evidence — has seen his business spiral into nearbankruptcy since 2017, when his wife found out he was having an affair with Troconis, a skiing marketer from Argentina, and filed for divorce.
Expect more drama Tuesday when Dulos and his 44-year-old lover are due next in court in what has become the most high-profile Connecticut crime story of its kind in 30 years.
In 1986, a commercial pilot from Newtown was accused of putting his wife’s body in a wood chipper after she confronted him about cheating on her. The Newtown wife, whose body was never found, had told friends “If anything happens to me, don’t assume it was an accident.”
In the same way, domestic violence advocates are calling today’s story of Jennifer Dulos a cautionary tale about the dangers of ignoring signs of escalating violence.
Jennifer Dulos has said in divorce filings that she feared her husband would try to hurt her in retaliation for seeking full custody of their children, claiming that he once tried run her over with his SUV.
How Jennifer met Fotis
When she got the email
from him in January of 2004, he was still married, and she had returned from writing stints out west to her native New York City, where her father, Hilliard Farber, had founded a thriving brokerage firm.
Fotis Dulos’ divorce from the woman he married in Greece four years earlier would not be finalized until that summer. And as soon as it was, he married Jennifer.
But it didn’t happen quite as fast as that sounds. She met him her first week as an undergraduate at Brown University in 1990, where he was one year ahead of her, pursuing a degree in applied mathematics.
“We had a special chemistry together,” she wrote in a 2012 blog about her husband, who was raised in Greece and worked in a family business after graduating with a Master of Business Administration from New York University — the same school where Jennifer earned a master’s degree in writing. “We were careful to be careful with each other until lightning finally struck.”
They set out immediately in pursuit of the American dream in Connecticut. He started a luxury homebuilding business with financing help from her father, and she had back-to-back twins in 2006 and 2008, and a fifth child in 2010.
She was so happy about being a mother of five kids under six years old that she started blogging about it.
“Fotis likes to sleep in each other’s arms. He says that people who love each other do this,” she wrote in a blog post from those days. “Sometimes I do this. Sometimes I curl into a tight ball and escape life.”
The life she embraced as a housewife included taking kids to horse riding lessons, and watching “Dancing With the Stars” with her husband. Her blog is a chronicle of the mundane and the merry, including a Christmas Eve when her husband dressed up as Santa Claus.
Nothing made her happier than being home.
“I love normal,” she blogged in 2012.
Happy no more
Five years later, Jennifer Dulos would be fighting the battle of her life to get away from that home, and keep the father of her children as far away from them as possible.
She found out in 2016 that her husband was having an affair with a younger woman from Argentina, who promptly moved into the family mansion with her daughter when Jennifer Dulos moved the kids to a rented home in New Canaan.
Adding to family tensions, was the 2017 death of Jennifer Dulos’ father, her husband’s main source of business financing. When Jennifer Dulos filed for divorce, her mother sued Fotis Dulos for $2 million for loans she claimed he
failed to repay.
Fotis Dulos, who claims to be near bankruptcy with liabilities of $7.6 million against assets of $400,000, has made accusations of his own, calling his wife an unfit mother and characterizing the loans from his late father-in-law as gifts.
The two years of divorce court recriminations are nothing compared to the two weeks of investigations that began over Memorial Day weekend, with the vicious assault that police believe Jennifer Dulos suffered in her New Canaan home.
The multiple blood stains on the garage floor, the patterns of nearby blood spatter and “evidence of attempts to clean the crime scene” led police to conclude “a serious physical assault occurred at the scene, and Jennifer Dulos was the suspected victim.”
“I think it is tragic,” Greenwich resident Michelle Voigt told Hearst Connecticut Media as she walked in the New Canaan park where police were searching.
Jennifer Dulos’ New Canaan landlord agreed.
“She was a very nice woman, very kid-centric,” said Arnold Karp. “What happened to her?”
Still missing
While everyone asked that question, police were reviewing security camera footage of Fotis Dulos and Michelle Troconis dumping bags containing Jennifer Dulos’ blood-stained clothes at garbage sites in Hartford.
Reporters called out to the husband and his lover after they were arraigned on June 1, asking the husband, “Is there anything you want to say to your children?” and asking the lover, “Are you going to do the right thing?”
Troconis, who was released on $500,000 bail, was seen with her attorney having a discussion with law enforcement this week.
Fotis Dulos, who remains in jail awaiting $500,000 bail, has refused to cooperate with police, except to turn over his cellphone — which led detectives to the security cameras.
Police have used dogs, drones and helicopters to search woods, garbage dumps and homes owned by the husband.
The intensity of the investigation and the saturation of the news coverage has taken a toll on some in New Canaan, who would prefer to be spared the attention.
“The reality is it is a news story, but we want normalcy,” one resident told Hearst Connecticut Media.
Meanwhile the children remain in their grandmother’s Manhattan apartment, according to a court-appointed guardian.
“I can represent to the court they are safe,” Michael Meehan told a judge last week.