When you write about someone in your circle, or close to it—someone who died scandalously, mysteriously, violently—your friends will start to freak out. They will want to know what you have discovered and what you will report.
I found this to be the situation with the Jennifer Dulos murder case, which I first wrote about in Air Mail. A woman no longer young but still beautiful, a scion of a powerful New York family—her aunt was Liz Claiborne—a product of Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn and Brown University, a mother of five in the midst of one of the most contentious divorces in the history of Fairfield County, Connecticut (which is to contentious divorce what Las Vegas is to blackjack), drops her kids off at the New Canaan Country School, then vanishes.
I hesitated when Air Mail asked me to write about the case. It was too close, too painful. Jennifer and I were both writers born in 1968. We both made the move from Manhattan to Connecticut. We were both ensconced in the suburban dream of spouse and family. Same rinks, same schools, same towns, same roads, same hopes, fears, compromises, and dreams—it was too much.
But reading the arrest warrants for Jennifer’s estranged husband, the Greek-American builder Fotis Dulos, whom she met at Brown in 1986, and his auburn-haired paramour, Michelle Troconis, changed my mind.
It was less the details of the crime, the bloody evidence and haunting particulars that ensnared me—the police said Fotis had been “lying in wait” for Jennifer—than the mundanities. The products the couple used, the cars they drove, their lives as sports parents, their plans for their children. These made Jennifer seem less a mystery or a victim than someone as familiar to me as my own sister.
One line in particular, attributed to Jennifer by Fotis, brought the picture to life. Jennifer is said to have insulted him by telling their kids, “Successful people don’t live in Farmington. They live in New Canaan.” Farmington is affluent. New Canaan is rich. It’s the difference between the 1 percent and the 0.1 percent. It captured the nature of the struggle—status and fear of its loss—in a drop of rain.
Between May 24, 2019, when Jennifer disappeared, and May 31, 2024, when the other woman, Michelle Troconis, was sentenced to a 20-year hitch in prison, I wrote nine stories about the case for Air Mail. When I told Jonathan Galassi, my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that I wanted to turn these stories into a book, he suggested that I return to the subject and “go deeper.” I considered this advice nonsensical at first—I believed I had gone as deep as anyone could go—but agreed to try, and, in doing so, I realized that I had, in fact, not yet broken the surface of this terrifying story.
Being a lifelong reader of true crime, I had Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood as a model when I went in. But, as I read the court documents as well as Jennifer’s own writing, interviewed friends from every stage of her life—several of whom were also my friends—and visited the places she had lived, suffered, and escaped, In Cold Blood turned into Madame Bovary.
True crime as a genre is rightly criticized for focusing too much on the killers. The victims, many of them beautiful white women, are turned into props in the process. (There’s even a name for this: “dead-white-girl syndrome.”) But you can only really understand the magnitude and awfulness of the crime by understanding what was lost. With this in mind, I sought to return Jennifer to the heart of her own story, to turn her back into the person she’d been.
A violent crime is fascinating. You linger over it as you linger beside a car wreck. But it’s the individual human existence that can really touch us. As I got to know more about Jennifer, I decided I wanted to do something that, to me, anyway, seemed new: write a true-crime book that was less about death than about life.
People familiar with the story—and there have been dozens of newspaper articles about the case, along with podcasts, documentaries, even a Lifetime movie—ask if I had learned anything new. In fact, everything I’ve learned is new. There were many revelations that shocked me, the sort that made me stop and rethink everything, but the titillation was less important than the way they changed the context, making me reconsider things I only thought I knew.
Even familiar details—Jennifer’s bloody Vineyard Vines shirt found in a trash can in Hartford, the Instagram posts that set her mind reeling, the money Fotis had borrowed from Jennifer’s father to keep his real-estate business going—became new because the context changed. What had been shadowy background became three-dimensional. It made the panic and fear Jennifer experienced at the end of her marriage palpable and real. “I know that Fotis will be enraged,” she wrote in her divorce filing. “I know that he will try to hurt me in some way.”
This story is about the loss of a life, the tragedy of a family, and the dark side of the American Dream. It’s about the lives of other people, the seemingly blessed, which look perfect from a distance—Jennifer and Fotis lived in a 10,000-square-foot house, traveled first class, employed nannies and private coaches—but roil beneath.
Mostly it’s about people. It’s about what they will do to be happy and what, even more importantly, they will do to appear happy. It’s about the traps we build for ourselves. It dramatizes an especially brutal truth: when a bad person is determined to do you harm, no amount of money, court orders, or security systems can protect you.
But when you read Jennifer’s letters, when you sit in court and listen to her kids talk about their mom, when you talk to her friends, you realize that though the end was tragic, much of her spirit—it’s what people remember—remains. The focus of true crime is death, but the message must be life.
Rich Cohen is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL
