Jury begins deliberating Richard Dabate’s fate in Fitbit murder trial

After five weeks of testimony, and more than six years since the alleged crimes, a jury is deliberating in the “Fitbit murder” trial to determine the fate of Richard Dabate.

The jury began their deliberations about 2:30 p.m. Monday in Rockville Superior Court after each side made their impassioned closing arguments.

The defense claimed a botched investigation and several sources of reasonable doubt, from unreliable 2015 technology to a house cleaner’s claims that she may have seen a large, green figure rush by a window she was dusting.

The state painted Dabate as a man feeling the weight of his lover’s impending unplanned pregnancy and a crumbling image of suburban bliss. Prosecutors allege that he hatched a plan to kill his wife and stage a home invasion, crafting a story of a masked intruder to pin the crime on.

Connie Dabate, Richard Dabate’s wife and the mother of his two young sons, was found shot to death in their Ellington home just two days before Christmas in 2015. Over the past five weeks, jurors heard from more than 130 witnesses and considered over 600 pieces of evidence as the state built its case against him.

During an hour-long closing argument, and then a rebuttal, State’s Attorney Matthew C. Gedansky told the jury that Dabate’s seemingly a perfect life — large homes, vacations and his family-man image paired with a doting wife — wasn’t his reality.

“It was all an illusion, it was a lie,” the prosecutor told the 12 jurors and three alternates.

With his lover Sara Ganzer just two months away from giving birth to their daughter — a secret neither he nor his wife’s family knew about — Gedansky said Dabate’s carefully curated life was “coming to an end in a crash, a loud crash. And he couldn’t stop it.”

Gedansky said he was scared of being exiled by his community, of becoming a “black sheep” in the family. His solution was to bring his marriage to an end with two bullets fired by an intruder the state says never existed.

Dabate’s defense attorney, Trent LaLima, argued that killing his wife would have only hastened the ostracism prosecutors say he was afraid to face.

Dabate has stuck fervently to his story that he came home that morning after realizing he’d left his laptop at home. When he got home, he told the jury that he heard a noise upstairs. He assumed it was their cats but went to investigate, anyway.

When he went upstairs, he says he was met by a masked man much larger than him who was wearing a hunting-style suit and had a voice like Vin Diesel. The man robbed him, then chased his wife into the basement where he shot her before zip tying him to a metal folding chair, stabbing him in the legs, setting a pile of papers on fire and fleeing on foot.

His defense repeatedly reminded the jury on Monday that though some of Dabate’s statements and timelines have changed over the years — discrepancies LaLima attributed to trauma and time — his account of the intruder has never waivered.

LaLima told the jury that the state failed to prove his client’s innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and asked them to consider six sources of reasonable doubt: his consistency in his claims of an intruder; his seemingly normal behavior the morning of the murder, like looking up a no-spoiler review for the new Star Wars film; six locations where unknown DNA was found in the home; a lack of witness testimony that Dabate walked to the edge of his own backyard that morning to plant his wallet; and testimony from a house cleaner who said they may have seen a large, dark green figure move past the window.

Gedanksy, on the other hand, walked the jury through the timeline of Dabate’s argument compared to forensic evidence from the day of the crimes, including cellphone GPS points that put Dabate in the house all morning and Fitbit data that showed Connie Dabate moving around, leisurely, after the time her husband said she was killed.

He asked the jury to considered how no one in the neighborhood saw the large camouflage wearing intruder as he fled. The state called dozens of neighbors who testified they they did not.

He questioned why nothing was stolen from the house during the home invasion other than Dabate’s wallet, which was in the yard. Nothing was taken. He continued to poke holes in Dabate’s differing statements over the years and mismatching timelines.

LaLima countered by urging the jury to consider whether they would remember small details of a traumatic day, like the one his client says he experienced. To prove his point, he asked jurors to consider whether they remembered what certain witnesses wore when they took the stand in the trial.

He also brought into question the accuracy of technology the state relied on to build at least parts of their case, saying that Fitbits and cellphones are not designed with exact accuracy for court testimony in mind but rather “to convince you to buy the next Fitbit, Fitbit 2.0, at Dick’s Sporting Goods.” He asked the jury whether their smart phone causes them to miss a text, or if their GPS tells them they’re a street away from where they actually are. Then he asked them to consider the reliability of such devices back in 2015.

LaLima leaned one of the defense’s four witnesses’ testimony — an account from a house cleaner that she thought she may have seen a large green figure pass by the window, but it may have been a deer or reflection. He argued that, if like Dabate said, the intruder was wearing a mask, she wouldn’t have seen a face but said that he’d “never seen a green deer.”

Gedansky addressed the weight of that witnesses testimony in his rebuttal, pointing out evidence that the window the cleaner was dusting at the time had a UV filter on it that may have distorted her view.

Gedansky closed the trial by telling the jury that Dabate had given them the pieces of a puzzle that they are now asked with using their “common sense” and “life experience” to put together.