Fate is a casting director. Some it casts as heroes, some as villains, some as buffoons. Michelle Troconis, who is currently on trial in Stamford, Connecticut, for conspiracy to commit murder, left her home in Venezuela for the U.S.A. intent on becoming a socialite and entrepreneur, a jet-setting expat.
Instead she finds herself cast as the other woman, the paramour. Possibly she is an idiot, blind to the obvious. Possibly she is Lady Macbeth, who assisted when her boyfriend, Fotis Dulos, a Greek-American, Ivy League–educated pretty boy, did away with his wife, Jennifer, who, on the morning of Friday, May 24, 2019, dropped her five kids off at the New Canaan Country School and vanished.
More than three years have gone by, and the police still haven’t found Jennifer’s body. What they do have is a trail of physical evidence, a suicide note written by Dulos as the police closed in (on January 30, 2020, he shut his garage door, started his car, and drifted off), and Michelle Troconis, left to face the music alone.
Evidence of the apparent killing of Jennifer Dulos was shown to the jury in the first days of Troconis’s trial. The existence of the items had been reported, this being one of the most covered criminal cases of the era—Jennifer Dulos, née Farber, was the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family and the niece of Liz Claiborne—but seeing them in three dimensions was a shock.
There was the blood-covered Vineyard Vines T-shirt Jennifer was reportedly wearing on the day of her disappearance, pulled from a trash bin in Hartford. Considering the circumstances, the slogan on the shirt is pure Kafka: Every day should feel this good. That shirt, extra small and suggesting the pleasures of the preppy good life, made the murder graphically real. The violence and rage of it, how the abyss seemed to open in the middle of a blue suburban morning—she dropped her kids at school and took the S.U.V. home, where her estranged and angry husband was, to quote the police, “lying in wait.”
There was a stained poncho, work gloves, and bloody zip ties. “There’s little reason to zip tie a dead person, so it is reasonable [to conclude] she was alive when she was bound by the ties and [that] they were used to prevent her escape,” read the police report.
When a prosecutor held up Jennifer’s blood-soaked Intimissimi bra, a gasp went up from the gallery, where Jennifer’s friend Carrie Luft was sitting. “Witnessing Jennifer’s blood-soaked clothing, knowing that was the shirt, the bra, she wore on the last day of her life, made us imagine, again, what she must have endured on May 24, 2019,” Luft said in a statement. “She died a tragic death, and her loss is felt beyond what words can express.”
Possibly she is an idiot. Possibly she is Lady Macbeth.
Jennifer’s elderly mother, the 88-year-old Gloria Farber, who took custody of the five orphaned Dulos children a few days after Jennifer’s disappearance, attended the first day of the trial—she came to bear witness, in the biblical sense—but has rarely been seen since. It was probably too much, finding herself across the aisle from the Troconis family.
Michelle’s sisters, long-haired and beautiful, have been there every day, as have her parents, whose clothing and manner speak of South American money, Venezuela’s upper classes, who are either tightly protected—it’s a world of closed rooms and gun-toting guards—or have relocated to Florida, a move the Troconis family made years ago.
Michelle’s mother, Marisela, is a mental-health counselor; her father, Carlos, is a pediatric cardiologist. He wore elegant suits with pinstripes to court, beautiful Gatsby-like shirts and ties, and soft leather shoes with buckles. Now and then, when a mean detail emerged—Michelle claiming she and Fotis had sex and showered together the morning of the murder; Michelle and Fotis reportedly having sex against the door of the red pickup truck probably used to transport Jennifer’s body—Carlos Troconis put his hand to his face and pushed back his thin white hair.
His gaze alternated between the witness stand, where cop after cop condemned his oldest child, and his phone, where he followed the testimony on live stream. He was like a Cubs fan who, though seated behind the dugout, still tunes in to the radio broadcast. He listened through a white earpiece, grimacing.
After all those years, college and medical school, marriage and daughters and the move to the United States, it has ended up here, in this antiseptic courtroom—Room 4A— in Stamford, where it’s nothing but gray skies and housing developments out the window. And the trees are bare, and the branches rattle when the wind blows, and Michelle is on trial for conspiracy to commit murder.
The prosecution showed the jury footage of Michelle and Fotis in a black F-150. Fotis, a contractor who built massive homes, the sort outfitted with backyard pizza ovens, was all about trucks, jeeps, and S.U.V.’s. The jury watched the F-150 make stops, Fotis getting out to toss garbage bags in dumpsters on Albany Avenue in Hartford, a seedy area suspiciously far from Farmington, where Fotis and Michelle lived in the McMansion that had once been Jennifer’s home. Michelle had moved in shortly after Jennifer gathered her kids and nanny and clothes and even toothpaste and lit out for New Canaan one rainy night.
Michelle sits in the passenger seat of the F-150 in the video, talking on the phone as Fotis dumps the garbage. She opens her door in one shot, leans out, and wipes her hand on the pavement. You can almost feel the grainy concrete. The police say this showed Michelle disposing of evidence, the act of an accomplice. Michelle says she was in fact wiping gum off her finger.
“Fotis was so smart that he was stupid,” an investigator told me. “He dumped all that stuff on Albany Avenue because he figured no one would look there, and, if they did, they’d just say, ‘Oh, someone got stabbed in a gang thing.’ But, because there’s been such violence, the place is plastered with cameras. Albany Avenue was actually the dumbest place to hide evidence.”
There were also items pulled from the trash or captured on video, including a knife and a pillow a homeless man found on Albany Avenue and traded for crack. “The homeless man took the knife and put the pillow back into the garbage bag,” the Hartford Courant reported on January 8, 2020. “He said the knife had blood on it that he wiped off. He said he sold it to a guy named Fudge for $10 worth of crack cocaine. Fudge said he sold the knife for food. It’s never been found.”
“Fotis was so smart that he was stupid.”
The jury was shown six hours of footage from Michelle’s interrogations. (She was arrested at a hotel in Avon, Connecticut, in her pajamas, in front of her 12-year-old daughter, Nicole, at 11:30 p.m., June 1, 2019.) In the end, it was not physical evidence that undid Michelle so much as her own words, which were filled with contradictions, take-backs, and re-dos, with moments of confidence that gave way to pleading confusion.
Watching Michelle as if in split screen—here and now in court, there and then at the police station—was to experience time’s relentless march. Jennifer, still the object of a panicked search on screen one, is already a tragic memory in screen two. A million years have passed. Fotis is dead. The older children are already thinking about college. When you kill someone, you don’t only take away what they have but what they will never get to see.
Michelle looks more than a little like Jennifer. It’s disturbing. It’s as if women were as interchangeable to Fotis as auto parts. The New York Post has claimed he had a type: long-haired, almond-eyed, lanky. A friend of Jennifer’s characterized Michelle to me as a kind of Bizarro Jennifer: Jennifer in a world turned upside down.
Michelle’s dress was uncharacteristically dour in court, even schoolmarmish, a far remove from her Instagram pages, in which she is seen in bathing suits on beaches, in ski pants on slopes, in slinky dresses beside a grinning Fotis Dulos. Her days in court, by comparison, have been a phantasmagoria of earth tones, beige sweaters, sensible shoes.
Her auburn hair, which has been allowed to gray, if only slightly, is punctuated by tortoiseshell reading glasses seemingly meant to re-cast the socialite party girl as a studious person who has been misunderstood. Positioned between her lawyers, she sits at a laptop. One day, it was opened to a story about cops charged with fabricating evidence in an unrelated case, a fact noticed, as perhaps had been intended, by at least one reporter.
Troconis was a young-looking 44 when she met Fotis at a water-ski club in Miami, Florida. She is now an old-looking 49. The last two years, some spent in jail, some tagged with a G.P.S. ankle monitor, have aged her terribly. This trial is a monumental risk. It weighs on her—you can feel it. If convicted, she may spend as many as 20 years in prison. She did a good job of masking the strain—she’s like a person staring into a stiff wind—until she didn’t. On the trial’s 10th day, she cried at the defense table. This was the first sign of weakness in Michelle, of fear and humanity.
But just why was she crying?
Was it because the reality of Jennifer’s fate—the screaming void, the black on black of nothing and nowhere forever—finally pierced her shell, and she understood and wept? Was it because seeing herself in this awful earlier moment—she cried as footage of her interrogation played—she was overwhelmed by self-pity, by what had been done to her? Or was it because, in watching herself change her story, remake her alibi and lie, she suddenly realized, as a bluffer looking into the eyes of a card sharp realizes, that she’s fucked?
This trial is a monumental risk. If convicted, she may spend as many as 20 years in prison.
If Michelle knows where Jennifer’s body is, she can trade that information for leniency. But it seems almost certain that she does not, or she would have made that deal already. If Fotis was still around, she could rat him out in exchange for freedom. But Fotis is gone.
Another co-conspirator remains, Kent Mawhinney, Fotis’s shady lawyer who helped corroborate the alibis. Mawhinney stayed in jail when the others got out, probably because he did not have bail money. When he did finally post bail, he asked to have his ankle monitor removed so he could put on ice skates to referee youth hockey—the request was denied, but it proves you never really know who is officiating your kid’s game. Mawhinney has seemingly reached his own deal with the state and will apparently not testify.
Michelle Troconis has become an object of hatred for many in Connecticut, especially women in the midst of divorce. (Fairfield County is the Kingdom of Divorce.) Paramour, home-wrecker, evil woman. It’s as if they blame her not only for what she did but for what she represents: the prison and humiliation of a bad marriage.
For her lawyer, Jon Schoenhorn, who will get a chance to put on his case in the next few weeks, task one is to change that perception, to convince the jury that Michelle, far from being a conspirator, was a victim, just like Jennifer. Fotis had in fact been married when he first hooked up with Jennifer, in 2004, meaning Jennifer had herself once been the paramour.
No one made this case more powerfully than John Kimball, the detective seen grilling Michelle in the interrogation video in court. “Fotis lies to everybody, and the reason he lies to everybody is because he only cares about one person in the world—and that’s himself,” Kimball told Michelle. “He didn’t care about his first wife, didn’t care about his second wife, and doesn’t care about you.”
At that point, Michelle, who was crying in the video and in the court—because time is a braid, a weave, a single piece of rope—said, “I’ll do whatever you want, but I didn’t do it.”
Rich Cohen is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL