Troconis jury to deliberate with Albany Avenue trip at forefront of Farber Dulos’ disappearance
The criminal trial for Michelle Troconis is expected to come to an end this week after the jury heard 25 days of evidence from the prosecution and 2½ days of evidence from the defense in the long-awaited proceedings.
The state rested its case on Wednesday after calling dozens of witnesses and introducing more than 150 exhibits of evidence as it built its case against Troconis. The 49-year-old woman is charged with conspiring with her former boyfriend Fotis Dulos to kill his estranged wife, Jennifer Farber Dulos, on May 24, 2019, and cover up the crimes.
The state’s witnesses ranged from Farber Dulos’ 88-year-old mother to the nanny to the five children Farber Dulos shared with Dulos to DNA experts, forensic analysts and an FBI agent.
A trip Troconis and Dulos took to downtown Hartford on the day Farber Dulos disappeared was at the center of much of the evidence jurors saw throughout the proceedings.
When Farber Dulos went missing, investigators zeroed in on trash bins along Albany Avenue and combed through their contents after Dulos was seen on city surveillance cameras putting garbage bags into those bins.
In the 2½ days that the defense spent presenting their case, the topic of the trip to Albany Avenue was mostly avoided. Testimony from lay witnesses instead focused heavily on May 23, 2019, the day before Farber Dulos went missing when Dulos and Troconis hosted a dinner party at their Farmington home on Jefferson Crossing with both reportedly appearing happy and hopeful.
The next morning, investigators allege Dulos laid in wait for Farber Dulos to come home from dropping their children off at school, killed her in her New Canaan garage and disposed of evidence in trash bins along Albany Avenue.
Troconis’s defense attorney Jon Schoenhorn has repeated what Troconis said in her interviews with investigators about that trip to Albany Avenue: She did not know what Dulos was doing.
Troconis told investigators she just thought they were going to Starbucks. She said she was on her phone, not paying much attention. When she asked Dulos what they were doing, he told her not to worry as they stopped at multiple city trash bins along the street.
The Hartford Courant drove that route and found that the Starbucks at Bishop’s Corner in West Hartford was about a 12-minute drive from their home at 4 Jefferson Crossing, heading past the West Hartford Reservoir. To end up on Albany Avenue along the route that Dulos was seen driving, the couple would have traveled about 36 minutes after passing that Starbucks, going into Hartford and looping back around.
With the stops captured on city surveillance cameras, it would have taken about 40 minutes.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit for Troconis, Dulos’ black Ford F-150 Raptor was spotted entering Albany Avenue about 7:31 p.m. that evening, headed east with Troconis in the passenger seat.
A minute later, he turned his Raptor onto Milford Street, where the truck disappeared from view of city cameras for about seven minutes. The Raptor then turns back onto Albany Avenue, heading east until it stops at the intersection of Albany Street and Garden Street, where Dulos gets out, takes a black trash bag from the bed of the pickup truck and puts it in a trash bin.
At 7:41 p.m., he puts another bag into a trash bin at Albany Street and Garden Street. Then he pulled a U-turn and headed west, then arriving at Starbucks.
The couple was seen on surveillance camera footage ordering food and frappes at the Bishop’s Corner Starbucks at about 7:59 p.m., according to the warrant affidavit.
Investigators combed through the trash bins Dulos stopped at and found evidence linked to Farber Dulos, including a blood-soaked bra and a Vineyard Vines shirt that the jury saw in an emotional moment in the courtroom.
Farber Dulos’ loved ones wiped away tears as the now-brown-stained clothes were held up. Farber Dulos’ body has never been found. She was declared legally dead in October 2023.
Forensic experts also testified that there were traces of blood, or a blood-like substance, on other items found in those trash bins like zip ties and garbage bags. They also found things like a sponge, a box cutter, pieces of tape and a mop handle. Inside a city storm drain, they found two altered Connecticut license plates linked to Dulos.
Troconis is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of conspiracy to tamper with physical evidence, two counts of tampering with evidence and hindering the prosecution.
Troconis jury sees surveillance videos from Hartford, altered license plates pulled from storm drain
In arguing against a motion of acquittal filed by the defense last week, prosecutor Sean McGuiness said the state provided ample evidence for the jury to reasonably conclude that Troconis knew where Dulos was the morning his wife vanished and what he was doing on Albany Avenue.
McGuiness argued that the jury could reasonably conclude that Farber Dulos was killed by her husband in her garage and that her body was then driven from her home by Dulos and her body was “disposed of in some manner.”
He said the jury could conclude that Troconis “knew where he was going to go on May 24 and was covering for him” and that the discarding of evidence with blood linked to Farber Dulos’ DNA on Albany Avenue was “an indication that the defendant knew the purpose for which those items were being discarded.”
He also said evidence the state presented proved other factors to the jury, including that Dulos was motivated to kill Farber Dulos because of their ongoing divorce, alleging that Dulos drove his employee Pawel Gumienny’s Toyota Tacoma pickup to New Canaan to commit the crimes and that he attacked Farber Dulos with “at least two blows.”
Also, he said, the jury could reasonably conclude that Troconis helped her then-boyfriend clean or destroy evidence, including by taking the keys to the Gumienny’s Tacoma in an effort to keep the truck in Farmington and later shuttling it to an Avon car wash “knowing (Dulos)was going to try to destroy evidence.”
Judge Kevin A. Randolph, who is presiding over the case, said that “the discarding of evidence on Albany Avenue is an indication that the defendant knew the purpose for which those items were being discarded.”
Schoenhorn called the state’s case “speculation, upon speculation, upon speculation” and argued that the state did not put forth sufficient evidence to support all the counts against Troconis, specifically that there were multiple conspiracies.
Schoenhorn said that because conspiracy is a specific intent crime, the state needs to prove that there was a specific intent to kill Farber Dulos and that there was an actual agreement to do that together.
In a video seen by the jury, Troconis told investigators that before they went to Albany Avenue, Dulos had called her and told her to come to clean a property owned by his company, Fore Group, at 80 Mountain Spring Road in Farmington. That is where she allegedly took the keys to Gumienny’s Tacoma for a brief time. Not long after, they headed to Hartford.
Troconis told investigators that she was just along for the ride.
“I just know that I went as the stupid girlfriend to help him out, because he told me ‘Come and clean the house,’ and I did. He told me, ‘Come, let’s go to Starbucks,’ and I did,” she said.
Troconis’ defense team this week called two professors, a memory expert from UC Irvine, and a linguistics expert from Northwestern University who said Troconis had a medium proficiency in English and that multilingual people can have trouble understanding their non-native language, even if they appear conversationally fluent.
Troconis, who grew up in South America and is a native Spanish speaker, has been using an English interpreter during the trial.
Her three interviews with investigators in June and August 2019 were conducted in English, without an interpreter, a fact that Schoenhorn has harked back to throughout the trial.
The other professor the defense called was also connected to those three interviews. The jury saw hours worth of video recordings of the interviews, in which detectives call Troconis out for changing her story and being dishonest.
The memory expert, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, testified that a person’s memory can be contaminated by repeated questioning from a knowledgeable source, or from what she called implanted memories. Loftus also testified that factors like stress and sleep deprivation could impact a person’s memory.
Investigators in their interviews with Troconis, and later prosecutors, repeatedly pointed out inconsistencies in Troconis’ account of her and Dulos’ whereabouts on May 24, 2019.
In June 2019, she told investigators that she took a shower with Dulos early that morning at their home at 4 Jefferson Crossing and saw him in his office later that morning. By her third interview with lead detective John Kimball and others, she said she never saw him that morning.
The trip to Hartford was left out of handwritten timelines detectives found at Dulos’ home in Farmington, dubbed by investigators as the “alibi scripts.” Troconis told investigators she and Dulos wrote those at the advice of a lawyer, but investigators have alleged they used them to get their story straight. The notes were admitted as evidence and read aloud to the jury during the trial.
Dulos was charged with murder in connection to his wife’s disappearance but died at a New York City hospital in 2020 after attempting suicide in the garage at 4 Jefferson Crossing.
Kent Mawhinney, one of Dulos’ lawyers, is also charged as a co-conspirator in the alleged crimes. He did not testify in Troconis’ trial.
Mawhinney is still awaiting trial. His case is on the trial list but a start date has not been set.
The six jurors who will decide Troconis’ fate will return to Stamford Superior Court at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Attorneys for both sides will make their hour-long closing arguments, when they will tie together all the evidence that has been brought forth since her trial began on Jan. 11. Then, the case will be in the hands of the jury, who will begin deliberations.
