Lawyer: Fotis Dulos Is Dead

Accused wife-killer Fotis Dulos died at a Bronx, N.Y. hospital Thursday, his lawyer said.

Fotis Dulos booking photo on Jan. 7, 2020. Courtesy of the Connecticut State Police

The 52-year-old succumbed to injuries sustained Tuesday in a suicide attempt by carbon monoxide poisoning, according to Norm Pattis.

“Fotis Dulos was declared dead tonight at 5:32,” Pattis said in a televised interview outside Jacobi Medical Center.

“It’s been a truly horrific day for the family, filled with difficult decisions, medical tests and meeting the requirements to determine death,” Pattis said.

He referred to Fotis Dulos’s family from his native Greece, not the five children of Fotis and Jennifer Dulos, now orphans, who had lost their mother May 24.

As of 6:30 p.m., police had not confirmed Fotis Dulos’s death.

If true, it comes about eight months after what investigators have described as the violent murder of Jennifer Dulos in her New Canaan home, and three weeks after police charged Fotis Dulos in the capital crime. 

His girlfriend at the time of the murder, Michelle Troconis, and friend and attorney, Kent Mawhinney, have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

It’s unclear whether Fotis Dulos left a note. Police have not confirmed finding one.

Pattis maintained his client’s innocence, saying Fotis Dulos’s family “is adamant that his name be cleared” and that he would seek to “proceed on as if he were alive, to vindicate him because we think he is wrongfully accused.”

Jennifer Dulos. Photo courtesy of the New Canaan Police Department

The accusations against Fotis Dulos stem from evidence and testimony that police began citing within days of what authorities came to establish as the murder date—the Friday headed into Memorial Day weekend last year—and three subsequent arrests that encompass seven felony charges outlined in sworn affidavits signed by Superior Court judges. The evidence includes video surveillance showing Fotis Dulos traveling to New Canaan on the morning of the murder, pedaling a bike from Waveny toward Jennifer Dulos’s home—the site of a violent assault—then driving back upstate with the corpse of his estranged and fearful wife and, the following day, steering through Hartford in a pickup truck and dumping items in trash receptacles and storm drains that investigators would  . He was charged twice with tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution, including for instructing one of his employees to destroy the back seats of the pickup truck he drove back to Farmington from New Canaan (he didn’t).

Fotis Dulos faced mounting financial difficulties—for example, one of the homes he agreed to mortgage as payment to the bail bond company that paid his $6 million bond was heavily encumbered—in addition to the extensive circumstantial evidence gathered by local, state and federal authorities.

Michelle C. Troconis. (Tyler Sizemore/Hearst Connecticut Media/pool photo)

Even so, Pattis said that Fotis Dulos’s legal team already filed a motion seeking to substitute the estate of Fotis Dulos for the man himself as a defendant in the criminal case “to force the state to show its hand in a trial filled with evidence [that] we think amounts no more than innuendo and unsupported suspicion.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what the state will do with the murder case. 

The remains of Jennifer Dulos have not been found. 

Farmington Police just before noon Tuesday received a call to check on Fotis Dulos because he couldn’t be found for a scheduled court appearance. He was found in his car and transported first to UConn Health, then Jacobi.

Connecticut State Police said in a press release Thursday that detectives from the agency’s Western District Major Crime Squad on Wednesday executed a search warrant Fotis Dulos’s Farmington home “as it relates to the ongoing murder investigation of Jennifer Farber Dulos.” The Farmington Police Department is investigating the attempted suicide, the press release said.