Jennifer Dulos dreamed of the perfect life – and then everything fell apart: A new look into her life before she vanished
Jennifer Farber Dulos was more than a headline. She was a writer, a daughter, a mother of five, and a woman who believed in a dream of the perfect life.
It became a nightmare — Jennifer now missing and presumed dead, her husband Fotis Dulos, suspected of her murder and dead by suicide, and his new partner, Michelle Troconis, in jail for her role in the murder.
Rich Cohen, a journalist who covered the case for Air Mail, knows the details all too well. But he wanted to know more about Jennifer, and the life she lived before she vanished.
This week, Cohen released a new book on the case, Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story, in which he turns the lens away from the bloody crime scene and the gory details, and back to Jennifer.
As a young girl, Jennifer spent hours playing with a dollhouse she had begged her parents for. It was the perfect house with a perfect little doll family inside – an exact replica of the life she wanted when she grew up.
In what she described in one of her writings as “window shopping for a life,” Jennifer wrote about her hunt for a husband, three kids, and the perfect life in New York.
From living a playwright’s New York City dream in the 1990s to the affluent town of New Canaan, Connecticut, Jennifer was seemingly living the life she had wanted for so long.
But when she disappeared on May 24, 2019 after dropping off her five children at school, media coverage quickly framed her as a missing suburban mom, and then turned the focus on her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos and his socialite girlfriend, Michelle Troconis.
As a longtime resident of Fairfield County, Cohen ran in the same social circles as Jennifer, and felt a connection to her simply through their similar lives.
“I hesitated when I was asked to cover the case – it was too close, too painful,” he said. “We’re the same age, both writers, and we both made this big move from Manhattan to Connecticut for the suburban dream.”
But like so many others who followed the case, Cohen became fixated on it.
Police believe Fotis was lying in wait for her when she returned home from dropping their children off at school and later disposed of her body with help from Troconis. He was charged with her murder, but died by suicide before going to trial leaving Troconis to take the fall.
In 2024, Troconis was sentenced to 14 years in prison for her role in the murder following an eight-week trial that transfixed the public, where prosecutors repeated the gory details and held up the stiff bloody Vineyard Vines shirt found in a trash bin after Dulos and Troconis were seen on video dumping trash bags in various places around Hartford.
Even after Troconis was sentenced, Cohen knew there was more he could write, especially after noticing a change in the true crime world.
