Jurors hear claim intruder killed wife in Fitbit trial
VERNON — More than six years after he first recounted the story to police, jurors on Thursday heard Richard Dabate describe walking in on a masked intruder at his Ellington home in December 2015 in an encounter that he said ended with the killing of his wife.
Prosecutors, armed with data from Connie Dabate’s Fitbit fitness tracker that they say shows her walking around the couple’s home after the alleged attack, argue that Richard Dabate’s version of the story was concocted to cover up his involvement in his wife’s slaying.
The murder trial entered its third day on Thursday, following years of delay caused by the pandemic and the death of Dabate’s former defense attorney, Hubert J. Santos.
So far in the trial, prosecutors have not brought up the FitBit evidence that stirred national attention around the murder case. Instead on Thursday, they focused on Dabate’s interactions with detectives at a Hartford hospital in the hours after he was found tied to a chair in his home. This included playing the first part of a roughly five-hour recorded statement he gave to police in which he recounted the alleged attack.
According to testimony from officers and a nurse at the hospital, Dabate appeared “calm” and “cooperative” as he told police how, after leaving for work around 8:30 that morning, he pulled over after realizing he left his laptop at home and then saw an alert from his home’s security system on his cellphone.
In the recording, Dabate told the officers that he was at first unconcerned about the alert because his security system frequently sent out false alarms. But after returning home to get his laptop, Dabate said he walked upstairs and found a man dressed in dark green camouflage and a mask standing with a knife in the couple’s walk-in closet “looking around trying to find something.”
“He said something about my kids, I can’t remember what but it was threatening,” Dabate told the officers on the recording.
After agreeing to the intruder’s demand to turn over his wallet and credit card PIN numbers, Dabate said he heard his wife come home, at which point he said he yelled at her to “get out of the house.”
Instead, Dabate said, he heard his wife run into the basement where the couple kept a locked gun. The intruder then ran into the basement following his wife, Dabate said, and he attempted to chase after him but fell at one point.
When he got to the basement, Dabate said he saw the intruder holding the couple’s gun inches away from his wife before hearing “the loudest bang” and watching his wife fall to the floor.
Afterward, Dabate told police that the intruder got him in some type of headlock and then restrained him to a chair so he couldn’t move. Dabate said the man then started “randomly poking” him with either a box cutter or razor blade, before burning him with a blowtorch that was stored in the basement.
The intruder then appeared to try to set fire to some clothes in the basement, Dabate said, before he was able to use a free hand to burn the intruder’s mask, prompting him to flee.
Dabate said he then crawled upstairs and attempted to activate the panic button on his home’s alarm system before calling 911. Fire crews arriving at the scene found blood drops leading from the basement door to the kitchen area, where Dabate was found on the floor tied to a metal folding chair, according to an arrest warrant.
State police detectives Jeffery Payette and Brett Langevin, who spoke to Dabate at the hospital, testified on Thursday that Dabate was “cordial” and gave lengthy responses to their questions, while also allowing police to test his clothes for gunshot residue and take samples of his DNA.
After recording Dabate’s statement about the alleged attack, Langevin said Thursday he asked him whether there was anything else the officers should know. At that point, Langevin said, Dabate began telling the officers about an “agreement” he had with his wife to get another woman pregnant and co-parent the child.
Police allege that Dabate later changed the story to say the pregnancy was unplanned, and messages between him and the other woman were later uncovered in which Dabate said he was planning to divorce his wife.
Dabate was arrested in 2017 and charged with murder, tampering with evidence and giving a false statement, in part due to data obtained from his wife’s Fitbit device.