By David D’Arcy

There is a moral to this story, besides the obvious one, that murder is a horrible crime whether the body is found or not. If there are wealthy women with weaknesses to exploit, predators will find them.

Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story by Rich Cohen.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $29

There’s an old joke. Why is divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth every penny.

Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story scrutinizes a bitter and costly divorce that was argued in Connecticut Superior Court in Stamford. It was a battle between a builder with a taste for everything expensive (except divorce), and his wife, a rich banker’s daughter.

The price proved to be too much for Jennifer Dulos. She disappeared on May 24, 2019. “Was disappeared” might be the better term. It was presumed to be murder and the death became a tabloid saga – a murder, with everything except a body. The traces of Jennifer’s blood that police found were so abundant that it was assumed she had to have died, and died violently.

The case had lurid elements before and after Jennifer vanished: a privileged Jewish daughter of a prominent financier in New Canaan, Connecticut, a Greek husband who built McMansions on her family’s money and lived with her in a nearby not-so-tony town, and a divorce adjudicated in the Tiffany’s of marital jurisdictions.

Rich Cohen’s book is a true crime tale with twenty-two pages of footnotes – the narrative offers plenty of policing details glaring enough for movie trailers. (For those drawn to melodrama, there is already a Lifetime version of the story.) The true-crime tale is also a chronicle of life thrashing around the boundaries of class and cash, in and close to one of America’s richest towns.

The bare bones of the story — Jennifer Dulos (nee Farber) was Jewish, rich, and beautiful. She was a talented writer, raised to be blithely dependent, Jennifer Farber wandered to Colorado and Los Angeles, converted to Christianity, and took a new name (Jennifer Bey). She then returned to Connecticut, where she married and had five children with Fotis Dulos, a handsome Greek man: cash poor but toxically overloaded with ambition. It wasn’t all greed for Fotis. He craved status, respect, and attention. He wanted his children to be water-skiing champions; he worked them day and night at it. His building business and his family were bankrolled by Jennifer’s father, Hilliard Farber, a successful investor who built a fortune, despite being burned by big banking’s Protestant establishment.

After his fifth child with Jennifer, Fotis found a Venezuelan girlfriend, the chic Michelle Troconis. It wasn’t a secret. His marriage, still subsidized by Jennifer’s father, fell apart, and the feuding husband and wife started a costly battle. Cohen says “divorce is Fairfield County’s great industry.” Both sides hemorrhaged money on lawyers, and then Jennifer disappeared. Cohen’s book mutates from a study of a privileged existence to a chilling portrait of a murderer.

After police linked Jennifer’s blood and surveillance camera evidence to Fotis and Michelle, the pair were arrested. Michelle flipped and testified. The haughty Fotis tried representing himself, a self-defeating move that still gave him a chance to examine and clash with his wife in court. He was more successful in January 2020 when he attempted to kill himself in his car via carbon monoxide poisoning.  Doctors kept him alive for a few days before he died. Michelle, who spoke of wanting to kill Jennifer herself, is in prison after her lawyers requested that her punishment be probation. Jennifer’s body has never been found.

For the impulsive heiress, the cash price of a divorce in Stamford would have been affordable. Her gregarious father, Hilliard Farber, was famously generous, even with his son-in-law. As Cohen tells it, “ If the books didn’t balance and the loan officers began to call, Fotis could reach out to Hilliard, who would make the crooked straight….In addition to buying a husband for Jennifer, Hilliard paid to make that husband appear successful. Fotis was a Potemkin son-in-law. He looked solid from a distance, but walk through the front door and you’d find yourself in an open field.”

Cohen notes that “Jennifer Farber met Fotis Dulos when she was vulnerable, when she feared her window on motherhood was closing. Fotis’s talent was to recognize Jennifer’s problem, and turn himself into the solution.” The sperm provider as a heel.

The arrogant and angry Fotis assumed that he was smarter than he was, which made for an odd gambit that offers this book’s few moments of humor. Cops suspected that, to throw off investigators, Fotis shaved his head like a man on his construction crew. He then took that man’s truck to a rough, drug-addled neighborhood in Hartford, cruising up and down streets where no one would be on the watch for bags of “trash” that he might leave there. He didn’t account for modern policing – the neighborhood was filled with surveillance cameras that recorded plenty of incriminating evidence. Police work being hit or miss, the slow movement of cops on checking piles of trash where Fotis may have disposed of human remains could explain why Jennifer’s body was lost.

Jennifer Dulos. Photo: Wikimedia

Cohen, a veteran of magazine and book-length journalism, is skilled at mapping out human ecosystems. Jennifer went to St. Anne’s school in Brooklyn Heights, a free-form conveyor belt to the Ivy League. She then went to Brown, where she first met Fotis, whom she found “too short” at the time. Height mattered less when he reappeared and she thought she needed him.

The author also found lawyers who blame psychological pressures, and the media frenzy, for why Fotis and other divorcing men commit brutal crimes. To believe that, you would have to ignore the abuse eyewitnesses said Fotis had piled on Jennifer. Still, the divorce culture fed and fed off plenty of high-priced careers. Part of that culture, Cohen shows us, involves finding counseling for children who are the inevitable victims of over-lit public fights between their parents. For a psychologist or psychiatrist, getting a rich troubled child as a patient is “an annuity,” one lawyer tells the author.

There is a moral to this story, besides the obvious one, that murder is a horrible crime whether the body is found or not. If there are wealthy women with weaknesses to exploit, predators like Fotis Dulos will find them.

Will this gruesome tale make New Canaan and its surrounding circles of wealth any less desirable? Rising real estate prices suggest otherwise, and divorce also isn’t getting any cheaper.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.