Defense lawyers sound off on Dulos case
State prosecutors have a strong case with plenty of circumstantial evidence against murder suspect Fotis Dulos, even though his wife’s body has not been found, according to veteran defense attorneys.
Attorney John R. Williams, a former law partner of Fotis Dulos’ defense attorney Norm Pattis, said the amount of surveillance evidence detailed in the arrest warrant is “absolutely staggering.”
Williams cited the dozens of pages of data describing what police allegedly found at Jennifer Dulos’ New Canaan home after her disappearance last May, including blood stains and splatters as well as her blood mixed with Dulos’ DNA on a faucet. Detectives used cellphone records and surveillance footage to track Dulos from his Farmington home to her home. Cellphone evidence and surveillance footage also showed him driving to Hartford the day his estranged wife disappeared and dumping trash bags filled with items stained with her blood, according to the warrant.
Dulos faces charges of capital murder, murder and kidnapping. His exgirlfriend, Michelle Troconis, who according to police was with Dulos when the trash bags were dumped, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Kent Douglas Mawhinney, Fotis Dulos’ former lawyer and friend, also is charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
“The corroboration is simply mind-boggling,” Williams said. “It’s an incredible amount of police hours; there’s a vast amount of surveillance evidence. This is the most dramatic evidence of the power of mass surveillance technology. The minute-by-minute tracking is absolutely staggering.”
Williams believes that “nowhere in the world has surveillance technology been deployed so brilliantly.”
Jennifer Dulos remains missing
Williams said the fact Jennifer Dulos’ body has
not been found is “not a big issue. It’s unusual to have a murder conviction without a body, but it’s not unprecedented.”
Williams alluded to “the woodchipper murder” in which Richard Crafts was convicted of killing his wife, Helle Crafts, by repeatedly bludgeoning her in the head, then feeding her remains through a woodchipper he had rented. Tiny fragments of human tissue were found next to a lake in Newtown. Crafts was convicted in November 1989 and sentenced to serve 50 years in prison.
Closer to where the alleged Dulos crime occurred, attorneys who spend much of their time at the Stamford courthouse agree the 33-page arrest affidavits charging Dulos and Troconis with murder are very strong.
Stamford criminal defense attorney Lindy Urso, who is taking Stamford murder defendant Jhonel Telemin, 25, to trial in February or March, said he did not see obtaining a murder conviction in a case with no body as a problem.
“Is there anybody on the planet who thinks that Jennifer is still alive?” he asked. While the state will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she is dead, Urso said the prosecution is not required to prove that point beyond all doubt.
Urso, who has a special interest in the case after representing one of Dulos’ construction company employees during the investigation, said the state could have arrested him on a murder charge with the evidence they uncovered within two weeks of his wife’s disappearance.
But there was no rush as there is no statute of limitations for murder, Urso said.
Stamford’s Senior Public Defender Howard Ehring struck the most cautious tone of the Stamford attorneys.
Remembering the “Missing Masseuse” case from 1988, Ehring said proving a no-body murder can be extremely difficult.
In that case, masseuse Carla Almeida disappeared after showing up at Tevfik Sivri’s Trumbull home in April 1988. Judging from the amount of blood found in Sivri’s home, police and Henry Lee, then director of the State Police Forensic Laboratory, were able to convince a jury that Almeida was murdered. The jury found Sivri guilty of murder.
Yet the state Supreme Court reversed the conviction, finding that without a body the state could not prove that Siviri intended to kill Almeida, a necessary element in establishing a murder had occurred.
Almedia’s body was later found with a gunshot wound to the head and Sivri was convicted of murder.
“It is always more effective for the state when they have the body,” said Ehring.
Defense attorney Glenn Conway of New Haven cited another Connecticut case in which there was a conviction without a body: Lawrence Smith was found guilty of murder for killing and dismembering a Meriden drug dealer with a chainsaw. Police believed the remains of Juan Disla were thrown into the Quinnipiac River. Smith was sentenced to 80 years in prison in 2006.
Conway said it’s clear that prosecutors in the Dulos case will try to convince a jury his wife is dead because of evidence found in her home. “They can show she was bleeding profusely,” Conway said, based on his reading of the warrant.
Conway noted the warrant also includes a finding by the state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. James R. Gill, who determined she sustained injuries that would have been “non-survivable” without medical aid.
“You’ve got to make some kind of a showing to convince jurors she’s dead,” Conway said. “They now have the medical examiner’s finding. I think that was the missing link to getting the arrest warrant.”
Conway added, “I think circumstantially it’s a very strong case against Dulos. The evidence is circumstantial but that can be as strong as a direct evidence case.”
Conway also termed it “a compelling case. If she did not fall victim to foul play, how do you explain her disappearance? All the evidence shows she loved her kids and would not abandon them.” (Jennifer and Fotis Dulos had five children.)
Defense attorney Hugh Keefe, who said he had scanned the Dulos warrant, remarked, “It reads like a John Grisham novel. It’s 33 pages of a story.”
But Keefe added, “It sounds like a strong case to me. The lack of a body doesn’t seem to matter much in Connecticut.”
Evidence
Keefe pointed to a portion of the warrant that listed dozens of items recovered from the trash bags dumped in Hartford. These included a sponge, a mop handle, a bra and gloves with a DNA match to Jennifer Dulos and pieces of the garbage bags and a garden glove with a DNA match to Fotis Dulos.
“You’ve got a whole page of items thrown out of that pick-up truck,” Keefe said. “They have him in a video throwing it out.”
Defense attorney William Dow III agreed that “it sounds like a substantial circumstantial evidence case.” But Dow disagreed with the other attorneys when he said, “What plagues this case is the obvious: there’s no body. To what extent that factor plays into this is what this case revolves around.”
Asked how he would defend Dulos, Dow said, “Your approach is dictated by your client’s wishes. He’s obviously saying there is no compromise; make them prove it. The lawyer’s role is to say to the state: ‘Prove it. We’re ready’” (to go on to a trial).
New Canaan attorney Matthew Maddox, who has represented more than 3,000 clients in every criminal category during his 28 years in practice, called the affidavit “gripping and compelling.”
He said that while reading about the evidence the state has against Dulos, he couldn’t help imagining Jennifer Dulos’ last moments and “abject horror” she must have experienced.
“As a defense attorney, the chief medical examiner’s opinion is a blockbuster,” Maddox said. “That opinion, based on blood spatter and other evidence to back up his conclusion that she lost too much blood to have survived, is the absolute star witness of the case,” he said.
Representing someone in Dulos’ shoes “would give me tremendous pause,” Maddox said.
He offered Pattis a piece of advice: “Please keep your client off television,” he said.
Urso said that if he were working the case, he would spend most of his time trying to get Fotis Dulos’ cellphone, which led police to the trash cans in Hartford that contained traces of his wife’s blood and DNA, thrown out, along with the DNA evidence.
Stamford criminal defense attorney Bruce Koffsky, who serves on federal death panels in New York and Connecticut and is representing about a dozen murder defendants, said there is a lot about the case that would trouble him were he representing Dulos. He said it remains to be seen what the state can do with its case.
“They have not found the body, which makes this a circumstantial case, and they certainly have a lot of circumstantial evidence. But whether the state will be able to tie it into a bow and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is something that we shall see,” Koffsky said. “I know both the prosecutor and the defense attorney, and they are impassioned advocates for their sides.”
The state has presented a murder case that appears to have required tremendous planning, Koffsky said. “This does not appear to be a simple crime of passion and then panic,” he said.
The trial
Conway, the New Haven attorney, said he would worry about the jurors. “Ordinary people look at this case and tend to go with their gut feelings and intuition. As a defense attorney, I would see a danger in this. It would be my biggest concern.”
Conway added, “You’ve got to devise a defense and argument to get them not to go with their gut feelings and sympathy for her. You want to elicit this promise during jury selection. I think the state will put on ‘bad guy’ evidence. They’ll try to show him as a bad guy in as many ways as they can: ‘He took money, he owed money, he was in this custody fight.’ The defense should show him as a loving father. ‘Why would he do this to the mother of their children?’”
Keefe said if he were in Pattis’ place, he would insist that Dulos exercise his right to have a probable cause hearing. During such sessions, held long before the trial, the prosecutors have to show they have enough evidence to go ahead with the charges.
“You’ve got nothing to lose by doing so,” Keefe said. “It’s a great vehicle to get evidence earlier. And you can judge the credibility of witnesses. It’s a golden opportunity to size them up in crossexamination.”
When Conway was asked whether he, too, would ask for a probable cause hearing, he said: “Absolutely! You can challenge the state’s key witnesses on the stand. You can eyeball their demeanor. You get to see the cards the state has, their evidence. And that is gold.”
Williams said the biggest question faced by Pattis and Dulos is whether during the trial itself Dulos will testify on his own behalf or exercise his right not to testify. Williams noted defendants usually don’t testify because they might not hold up well during cross-examination. “But in a case like this, when there’s so much (publicity) out there, it might be one of those times where Norm recommends he testify.”
“This will be one of the hardest questions Norm and his client have to make,” Williams said. “At this point it’s too early for Norm to make a recommendation. But I’d tell him (Dulos) he should start thinking about it. It could be the most significant decision he makes in his life.”
What about the role of the two charged with conspiring to murder Jennifer Dulos? “You should always be worried about co-defendants,” Keefe said. “What’s interesting to me is the role of the lawyer (Mawhinney). How dumb do you have to be to get involved with your client? The first thing they teach you in law school is: keep a distance between yourself and the client.”
Referring to Mawhinney and Troconis, Williams said, “I’m surprised both of them submitted to multiple police interviews. I can’t imagine why a lawyer would make statements to police; maybe he felt under pressure. And it sounds like she didn’t do a good job; she kept contradicting herself. Will the state want to use her (as a witness against Dulos)? I’d think Norm would be able to cross-examine the hell out of her because of her inconsistent statements to police. And Norm is a great crossexaminer.”
If he were steering the ship, Koffsky said he would have made sure to have kept Dulos at a lower profile than he’s displayed.
Conway said if he were Troconis’ attorney, “I’d tell her to cooperate . ... She has to take seriously her liability. This is the rest of her life at stake.”
Conway said he would advise both Troconis and Mawhinney to try to work out plea deals with the state.
Williams said his first thought about the state’s case against Dulos is outrage over the unusually high bond set by Judge John Blawie Tuesday in his Stamford courtroom: $6 million. Dulos was able to return to his home Thursday by putting up more than $400,000 in cash. His bond on the earlier charges last June of hindering prosecution and tampering with evidence was $500,000.
“This business of an increase in the bail bond strikes me as legally outrageous,” Williams said. “The bond on tampering was a murder bond; it was set with the full expectation he’d be charged with murder. Anything but a nominal increase now is punishment without trial, without a conviction. It’s based on a presumption of guilt. What’s the legal justification for that kind of an increase in the bond?”
Overall, Dow said, “It’s a fascinating case. You have the People magazine parts of it: he had a girlfriend, they were living together, he moved out on his wife, they had all this animosity. It’s a full bouquet of fascinating issues, rumors, gossip, mystery, criminal law problems and conundrums.”
“This is a case that is going to go to trial,” Conway said. “I’d be stunned if there was a plea deal. If the state made a (plea) offer to him, it’d be 35-40 years in prison. Given his age (52), it’s a life sentence.”
Conway added, “I have confidence in Norm’s ability to bring the best possible defense. I look forward to it.”