▶ 8 unlikely people to have ties to Dulos case.
The investigation into the disappearance of Jennifer Dulos involved a predictable array of law enforcement figures, suspects and lawyers — as well as some surprise characters who emerged with twists and turns in the case.
Here are a few of them who have popped up in the past year since the 50-yearold New Canaan mother of five vanished on May 24, 2019 and her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos, and two others were charged in her death and disappearance.
Anna Curry, Fotis Dulos’ “best friend”
Anna Curry, a North Carolina woman who was described in Fotis Dulos’ bond documents as his “best friend,” was thrust into the spotlight when she was seen at his Farmington home on Jan. 28 — the day of his apparent suicide attempt.
Curry had been staying with Fotis Dulos, whom she met when they worked together in New York nearly 20 years ago. Curry paid $147,000 in cash — and promised to pay an additional $272,000 — to help post the $6 million bond when Fotis Dulos was charged with murder in early January.
A source close to Dulos said Curry remained by his side at a New York hospital until he died on Jan. 30.
Attorneys for Dulos said his apparent suicide stemmed from the emergency hearing that was called for that day when a judge could have revoked the bond and sent him back to jail. The hearing was called when Palmetto Surety Corp., which posted the bond, was concerned about the collateral real estate properties Dulos had put up from his struggling business, Fore Group.
Despite Dulos’ death, Curry is still responsible for the remaining payments. Palmetto has declined to say whether she has been making them.
In a note left in his car, Fotis Dulos apologized to Curry.
“Above all, Anna Curry I am sorry for letting you down and not continuing the fight,” he wrote.
‘Bondsman to the stars’ Ira Judelson
While Fotis Dulos felt he was likely going back to jail on Jan. 28, his attorneys say their client was not aware they had secured Ira Judelson to post his new bond.
Judelson, however, never got the chance to pay the bond as Fotis Dulos died two days later. It would not have been the first highprofile case in which he was involved.
When former head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique StraussKahn was charged with raping a hotel worker in New York, Judelson posted $6 million in bail, believed to be one of the largest cash bail amounts in New York history, as the New York Post reported.
And when MMA fighter Conor McGregor was arrested on charges of assault and criminal mischief, he turned to Judelson to bail him out.
He’s also bailed out football player Lawrence Taylor, rappers Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Ja Rule and DMX, and comedian Katt Williams, among many others.
Gillian Flynn, author of “Gone Girl”
After Jennifer Dulos disappeared on May 24, 2019, and as speculation built about her whereabouts, suspicion grew of her estranged husband.
But Fotis Dulos’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, a character in his own right, opined that the 50-year-old New Canaan mother might have authored her own disappearance, likening the case to the novel “Gone Girl,” about a woman who fakes her own death to frame her husband while she goes into hiding.
Pattis told the New York Post that Jennifer Dulos once wrote a similar 500page manuscript.
“This is a person who has a pretty florid imagination and motives to use it to hurt Mr. Dulos,” he said.
However, Flynn, who wrote the 2012 book that was turned into a movie, issued a statement blasting Pattis’ theory.
“This situation is so incredibly painful, I can’t imagine what her children, her family, and all those close to her are going through. I am deeply sorry for Jennifer and her loved ones,” Flynn wrote in a statement.
“I’ve seen in recent coverage that Jennifer’s husband and his defense attorney have put forward a socalled ‘Gone Girl theory’ to explain Jennifer’s disappearance. It absolutely sickens me that a work of fiction written by me would be used by Fotis Dulos’ lawyer as a defense, and as a hypothetical, sensationalized motive behind Jennifer’s very real and very tragic disappearance.”
“Fudge,” who may have traded crack for evidence linked to the case
A knife found in a Hartford trash bin in the days after the disappearance was traded for $5 worth of crack cocaine, a man who was released from prison told the Hartford Courant.
The man, who was charged with misdemeanor failure to appear and trespassing, claimed he found a blood-soaked pillow in a trash can on Albany Avenue near Garden Street sometime on Memorial Day weekend after Jennifer Dulos disappeared, the Courant reported.
The man said beneath the pillow he found what he described as a fishing knife that he traded to a guy he only knows as “Fudge” for crack cocaine, according to the report.
According to arrest warrants, surveillance video captured Fotis Dulos on the night of the disappearance in the same area of Albany Avenue dumping bags of trash that were later found to contain his wife’s blood and clothing.
However, a police source said that without finding the knife, there is no way to know if it was connected with Jennifer Dulos’ disappearance.
According to arrest warrants in January when Fotis Dulos was charged with murder, police said the nanny for the Dulos children reported that camping pillows were missing from Jennifer Dulos’ garage.
Nannies for the Dulos children
Early in the investigation, police received key information from the family’s nanny, Lauren Almeida, that led authorities to believe the New Canaan mother was the victim of foul play.
But nearly nine years before Jennifer Dulos was reported missing, the family endured tragedy when her mother-in-law was killed in a freak accident involving their former nanny.
Kleopatra Dulos — the 77-year-old mother of Fotis Dulos — died in 2010 after being run over by a Land Rover driven by the former nanny when they were living in Avon.
An investigation by the Avon Police Department determined Kleopatra Dulos’ death was not a “criminal event” and no arrests were made.
As the nanny moved the vehicle, Kleopatria Dulos asked her to turn on the vehicle’s headlights. The nanny looked down to turn on the lights, and then pulled forward, assuming Kleopatra Dulos had moved away from the vehicle, the report said.
However, the nanny told police, she must have fallen down next to it and out of sight. When the nanny drove forward, she stopped when one of the children screamed from the back seat, the police report said.
When police arrived, they found Kleopatra Dulos alert and conscious, in extreme pain, with tire marks across her lower back and clothing. She later died at Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford.
Michelle Troconis’ mother, Marisela Arreaza
Michelle Troconis, the ex-girlfriend of Fotis Dulos charged with conspiracy to commit murder, tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution in the case, has had a large contingent of family members at each of her court appearances.
Among them is her mother, Marisela Arreaza, who even attended at least one of Troconis’ interviewed with investigators. Arreaza was with her daughter when she met for several hours with the state’s attorney and state police investigators at her lawyer’s Westport office last June.
Arreaza faced her own trouble with the law in Florida in 2016 when she and another woman were indicted on federal Medicaid fraud charges.
Arreaza was accused of paying at least one person to become a Medicaid patient in her behavioral health practice, D&D Psych.
Arreaza closed the practice after being indicted and turned the office into a space for her "legal team" working on her defense, court papers said. Arreaza, who lives in Miami Beach, Fla., and the co-defendant agreed in 2017 to plead guilty to offering health care kickbacks.
The case was dismissed in December 2018 after Arreaza and the co-defendant were approved for a pretrial diversion program.
The wife of former Dulos lawyer Kent Mawhinney
Kent Mawhinney, a lawyer who represented Fotis Dulos in the $2.5 million lawsuits filed by his mother-in-law and was eventually charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the case, first came to the attention of the public through allegations made by his own estranged wife in connection with their divorce.
Mawhinney was accused in 2019 of spousal rape and violating a protective order involving his estranged wife, who told police she believes he “wanted her dead,” according to a police report.
Fotis Dulos allegedly reached out as an intermediary for Mawhinney, but the lawyer’s wife suspected a darker plot was afoot, according to the woman’s statement to police.
The woman told police she went with a friend to Max’s Oyster Bar in West Hartford on May 19, 2019, planning to have Fotis Dulos coordinate a FaceTime meeting with her and Mawhinney, according to the woman’s sworn affidavit for a restraining order against her husband.
At the restaurant, Fotis Dulos showed her a letter Mawhinney had written bemoaning the difficulties in the marriage and invited the woman and her friend to his Farmington home, but they declined, according to the affidavit.
Mawhinney’s wife said she told Fotis Dulos she would not meet Mawhinney unless both of their lawyers were present. Fotis Dulos then paid the bill and left the bar abruptly, according to the affidavit.
The woman told police “that she was in fear for her safety,” an arrest warrant for Mawhinney said, and “she felt she was being ‘baited’ and was uncomfortable with the fact that Dulos kept inviting her back to his residence.”
Mawhinney has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which are still pending in court.
Wakeboard Federation
One strange twist in the case came after police searched for evidence at a water skiing pond in Avon where Fotis Dulos and his children trained.
In divorce documents, Jennifer Dulos described her husband’s affinity for water skiing as an “obsession.” She said he insisted their children train to be world-class water skiers, and had them on a strict regimen that she believed was “dangerous and excessive” and would sometimes last all day.
“The children have told me that they do not want to water ski at this level,” Jennifer Dulos said in the divorce documents. “They are physically and emotionally exhausted and have begged me to do something about it. We are all terrified to disobey my husband.”
But Nancy Mastrocosta, secretary general of the Hellenic Waterski and Wakeboard Federation in Athens, Greece, released a statement disputing those allegations, saying the children enjoyed water skiing and that Fotis Dulos was a caring father.
“Fotis Dulos is not the person portrayed in the media; far from it,” Mastrocosta said in the statement. “We witnessed Fotis for many years as a calm, balanced, respectful, kind person.”