Jennifer Farber Dulos

Jennifer Farber Dulos was born on September 27, 1968, and grew up in New York City in an affluent family. A Brown University graduate and aspiring writer, she married Greek-born luxury home builder Fotis Dulos, and the couple had five children together. By 2017 the marriage had collapsed, and Jennifer filed for divorce, initiating a bitter, drawn-out custody battle. In court filings she expressed fear of her husband, writing that she was afraid of what he might do and that he had threatened to take the children. She moved with the children into a rented home on Welles Lane in New Canaan, Connecticut, a quiet, wealthy suburb where she believed they would be safe.

On the morning of May 24, 2019, Jennifer dropped her five children at the New Canaan Country School and was never seen again. When she missed several appointments and could not be reached for roughly ten hours, she was reported missing shortly before 7 p.m. Officers who searched her home found what appeared to be bloodstains on the garage floor and on a vehicle parked inside. Investigators later concluded that Jennifer had suffered a serious physical assault in the garage. DNA testing showed the blood was hers, and surveillance video captured Fotis Dulos discarding garbage bags along Albany Avenue in Hartford that evening; the bags held clothing in her size, zip ties, and sponges stained with her blood.

Fotis Dulos and his girlfriend, Michelle Troconis, were arrested on June 1, 2019, on charges of tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution. On January 7, 2020, prosecutors escalated the case, charging Fotis with murder, felony murder, and kidnapping. Troconis was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and Fotis's former attorney, Kent Mawhinney, was also arrested on a conspiracy charge. Police theorized that Fotis lay in wait at the home, attacked Jennifer as she returned, and disposed of her body, which despite extensive searches was never recovered.

The case never reached a full murder trial. On January 28, 2020, facing new charges and released on bond, Fotis Dulos attempted suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning at his Farmington home; he died on January 30, 2020. Prosecutors formally dropped the charges against him after his death. Michelle Troconis went to trial in 2024 and, on March 1, 2024, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and multiple counts of evidence tampering and hindering prosecution; that May she was sentenced to more than fourteen years in prison. Kent Mawhinney, the third defendant, later resolved his case with a comparatively short sentence. A probate judge declared Jennifer legally dead in October 2023, formally acknowledging what investigators had long concluded. Throughout the proceedings, authorities maintained that the physical evidence, the blood in the garage, the discarded bloodied clothing, and the surveillance footage of Fotis along the trash route in Hartford, pointed clearly to a planned attack, even though her body was never recovered. For her five children and her mother, who cared for them after the disappearance, the years of court hearings brought a measure of accountability without the closure of a recovered body. Her remains have never been found, and the location of Jennifer Dulos's body remains the case's central unanswered question.