The Stamford Superior Courthouse is a massive glass-and-brick building—all atriums and soundproof hearing rooms—in the center of that bleak booming town. The surrounding streets are dominated by low-slung apartment developments, highway interchanges, fast-food joints, and government buildings that hum with traffic. The fact that the court is sleek, ultra-modern, and seems toothachingly new belies the nature of the scenes unfolding inside. Take, for example, the trial of Michelle Troconis, the last day of which most of the people lined up for the metal-detector machines have come to witness as participants, reporters, or gawking aficionados. This is real old-time biblical shit, as ancient as David and Bathsheba.
Michelle Troconis, the 49-year-old Venezuelan socialite who was convicted on Friday for conspiracy to commit murder, is tall, willowy, and as beautiful as a newscaster. Her trouble started when she met Fotis Dulos at the Greater Miami Ski Club in Doral, a center of the water-ski world a few dozen miles from South Beach. She fell for the married man, a builder of luxury Connecticut homes who was estranged from his wife, the brilliantly rich, fabulously connected Jennifer Farber Dulos.
Troconis, driven mad by the endless divorce proceedings—she described her two years in Connecticut as torture—and by her hatred for Jennifer, whom she called a bitch and said should be buried beside the children’s ailing dog, Beckham, was charged with participating in the murder of Jennifer Dulos, which took place in the house at 69 Welles Lane in New Canaan on May 24, 2019. The murder was violent enough to splatter the three-car garage with blood.
According to the prosecution, married man meets woman, falls in love with woman, conspires with woman to kill wife, but is sloppy. He leaves blood, DNA, physical evidence, and even his own image—the state’s case relied on surveillance and security cameras—nearly everywhere. In the end, facing life as a small, pretty person in a maximum-security prison, Fotis opted for a sucker’s acquittal, closing the garage door of his Farmington McMansion, getting in his car, starting the engine, and going to sleep forever, leaving Troconis to face the music.
This is real old-time biblical shit, as ancient as David and Bathsheba.
The trial lasted 28 days, the equivalent of a poker game that’s gone all night and into the next morning. The mood was electric. The elevators and common rooms buzzed. People spoke of the principals as if they were characters in a play: Michelle was the femme fatale, the plotter, the temptress and deceiver who would finally get what she deserved. Jennifer was the martyr and saint, a stand-in for all those women trapped in a bad marriage, a common state of play in central coastal Connecticut. That’s why people identified with her so strongly. That’s why people came and cameras rolled. And that’s what Jon Schoenhorn, Michelle Troconis’s defense attorney, was up against.
The jury, which had started with nine members and four alternates, had been whittled down to six—three men and three women who would sit in judgment on the lives and actions of these wayward 1-percenters. They’d seen blood evidence, DNA evidence, surveillance. They’d heard from experts, friends, cops. They’d seen Jennifer’s blood-soaked Intissimi bra—blood that dark looks like coffee—and her bloody Vineyard Vines T-shirt (extra small). They’d seen the bloody zip ties, bloody paper towels, and bloody sponges found in dumpsters on Albany Avenue in Hartford, over 50 miles from the crime scene.
Michelle was identified on video riding shotgun as Fotis made the dump run. She told police she thought they’d merely been going to Starbucks. “I went as the stupid girlfriend [trying] to help him out. He said, ‘Come, let’s go to Starbucks,’ and I did.” She said she ordered a chocolate croissant when they finally got to a Starbucks, but they were sold out. “Why is she so good on details that don’t matter,” asked the prosecutor, “and so bad on details that incriminate her?”
The state closed its case dramatically—poetically—with Jennifer’s 88-year-old mother. Gloria Farber lost her husband, Hilliard, in 2017 and lost her daughter, Jennifer, in 2019 and was now left, at the end of her life, to raise the five orphaned grandchildren in her apartment on Fifth Avenue. In court, Gloria wore a charcoal blazer with red and white checks, a gray scarf, a silk scarf, a gold watch, and a wedding ring. Her shoulder-length hair—black with a touch of white—was done in the same style as Jennifer’s. She used a cane and moved slowly but was absolutely alert on the stand, intelligent, and stunningly alive. Her eyes sparkled beneath hooded lids. She smiled when she probably wanted to curse.
Her presence—she offered little evidence—was meant to make a point: Jennifer was a real person, and had real parents, and came from a real family, and that family was a kind of nation, and that nation had been destroyed, leaving only the grandchildren. The five Dulos kids, all under 18, two sets of twins and the youngest, Clea-Noelle, were in court for the closing arguments.
What were those kids supposed to make of this spectacle? What lesson could be gleaned? Their father killed their mother, and Michelle Troconis is sitting right there. According to the state, the case boiled down to a single phrase: a mother’s worst nightmare. If true, what is it for a grandmother, a woman who lived long enough to see everything dissolve? Born in New Jersey, a doctorate from Columbia, a career in childhood education, a figure in New York society, a woman of wealth and taste—looking at her grandchildren, the jurors and prosecutors, at Troconis, Gloria must, at least for a moment, have felt that she’d lived too long.
Gloria stood up to the examination and cross. Her strength was an example—maybe that was the lesson. Don’t buckle. Keep going. Survive. It was a display of class that highlighted the difference between Jennifer’s world and the world on display during the defense, the chaotic clown show of central Connecticut. Jennifer came from New York City, Saint Ann’s, Brown. Michelle’s case showed where Jennifer ended up. It was a world of quickie car washes, spec houses, and hair salons on Route 44—the quotidian life of Hartford County.
Michelle was identified on video riding shotgun as Fotis made the dump run.
The defense’s job was to re-cast Michelle: from paramour to victim, just another person who’d fallen victim to Fotis’s charm. They painted her as a naïf, a poor fool, who, having lost her heart to this olive-skinned Adonis who carved up the course in Doral—she had admired Fotis through a curtain of spray—followed him to Connecticut, where she found herself the third party in a contentious Fairfield County divorce. Never entirely comfortable speaking English, she was confused by the protracted custody battle and terrified by the police investigation that followed Jennifer’s disappearance—that was the defense’s contention. She had believed Fotis because she had loved him—that’s our default position with people we care about. If her story changed in the course of the interrogations, it’s because she was stressed, sleep-deprived, scared. Had Michelle believed Fotis capable of murder, she never would have gotten involved with him in the first place.
The prosecution had an even tougher task. First they had to prove that Jennifer was actually dead. Fotis’s lawyer, Norm Pattis, had floated the so-called Gone Girl Defense. Maybe it was like that Ben Affleck movie. Maybe Jennifer, realizing she might lose custody of the kids, lit out, leaving Fotis to look like a killer. What if we put Fotis in jail and, in 10 or 20 years, Jennifer walks into a police station? Though stupid, it made a point: it’s nearly impossible to prove a murder without a body, which is why few such cases make it to trial. Whatever mistakes Fotis made that day, and he made many, he did do one thing right: Jennifer has never been found.
Then, once the jury was convinced of the murder, the state still had to prove Troconis conspired before and after the fact. The state made that case with lab work, witnesses and video. Michelle had created an alibi for Fotis, helped destroy evidence, and, in the course of three police interrogations, changed her story to fit whatever new facts were revealed.
Michelle, in shawl and slacks, her long rust-colored hair swept back, reading glasses on her head, face frozen in an expression that my grandmother would have called Farbissina punim, listened carefully to the closing arguments. Now and then, she reached out to touch one of her sisters, who sat in the first row. Tall and slender, these beautiful sisters had entered the court side by side, like ninjas, shoes going clickety-clack, as if ready to do battle. Their father, Dr. Carlos Troconis, a cardiologist in Miami, white-haired, balding, and dressed like a British banker, sat next to them, the patriarch trying to contain a situation that already had spun out of control. Like Gloria, there must’ve been moments when he felt he had lived too long.
Michelle turned to the jury when Schoenhorn began his close. They looked into her eyes, as if trying to read her inner nature. She stared back, blank. The room had become muggy. The seats were filled with women from New Canaan, blonde and symmetrical, rows of colored sweaters. They traded glances, whispered during breaks. A picture of the Dulos children was shown on-screen. They are young in the picture, smiling, gathered around a smiling Fotis. They are not so young in the court, and they do not smile. Everything is a clock. The time between this moment and that moment does not exist for Jennifer.
The defense’s job was to re-cast Michelle: from paramour to victim, just another person who’d fallen victim to Fotis’s charm.
According to Schoenhorn, the state had failed to connect Michelle to the crime and should in fact view her as a casualty, second only to Jennifer. The man she fell in love with, the man smiling in the picture, did not exist—she was deceived. The case is entirely circumstantial, he explained, based on coincidence, on “supposition on supposition on supposition.”
The judge called for a short recess before the prosecution got its last 30 minutes. I followed the crowd into the hall, which was suddenly jammed with lawyers, cops, spectators, family members. It was the intimacy, the multiplicity of fates, the ant-farm quality of life on the fourth floor in Stamford, that resonated.
At 11:54 a.m., the two oldest Dulos children were amid the crush, discussing the case with a gray-haired man as the cop who interrogated Michelle Troconis looked on, while, just down the hall, behind a door marked reserved, Michelle Troconis sat with her phone in her lap, eyes big, dark, and wild. I have seen that look on the faces of friends who have realized they are screwed.
A few days later, Troconis stood as decisions on each of the six counts were read. Here’s how that would have sounded to her: Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty. Michelle put her face in her right hand, sat down, and dropped her head to the table. Her shoulders rose and fell. One of her attorneys rubbed her back. She wore a beautiful white sweater—you could almost feel the weave. Long hair spreading across the table and falling to her knees, Michelle was bent like a comma when the marshals arrived with the cuffs to lead her away. The sentence, which will be issued on May 31, could keep her in prison for up to 50 years: 2074. When nearly all those in the courtroom will be dead and gone.
Rich Cohen is an Editor at Large at Air Mail