As authorities carry out a feverish search for missing Connecticut mom Jennifer Dulos, court records released Monday show that investigators have recovered clothes and sponges stained with her blood from trash cans in Hartford and based on cellphone tracking placed her estranged husband near the cans the night she disappeared.
The new details were released in arrest warrant affidavits for Dulos’ husband, Fotis Dulos, and his girlfriend, Michelle Troconis, who were formally charged in court Monday with tampering with or fabricating physical evidence and hindering prosecution, The Hartford Courant reports.
The duo was held on $500,000 bond, and prosecutors told a judge they plan to file additional charged in the case. Troconis is reportedly out on bail, while Dulos is not. The newspaper reports that both have declined to cooperate in the investigation.
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Dulos, who has five children with Fotis Dulos and has been enmeshed in a bitter divorce proceeding for two years, has been missing since May 24.
According to the warrants, police went to the mom’s home after she failed to show up to multiple doctor’s appointment in New York and concerned friends contacted police in New Canaan around 7 p.m. on May 24.
Arriving officers found no one home but were able to gain access after friends encouraged a nanny to let police inside. During the search, officers found stains on the garage floor and on a vehicle in the garage, and evidence that someone had tried to clean up the crime scene, the warrants say.
The also located a Chevy Suburban registered to Jennifer Dulos about three miles from her home, but no sign of her in or near the vehicle, the documents say.
Based on what was recovered from the crime scene, “investigators came to the consensus that a serious physical assault had occurred at the scene and Jennifer Dulos was the suspected victim,” the affidavit says.
The next day, officers briefly interviewed Fotis Dulos, who met investigators with his attorney at his side and declined to assist in the investigation, but handed his iPhone X to a detective who seized the cellphone, believing it contained evidence of a crime, the affidavit says.
Search warrants for the phone place the estranged husband in north Hartford on the night of May 24, the affidavit states.
Investigators coupled the cellphone data with footage from surveillance cameras monitored by the Hartford Police Department that show a man who looks like Dulos and a passenger who resembles Troconis driving in a pickup truck that makes more than 30 stops along a four-mile stretch of Albany Avenue discarding trash bags that appear to be stained with blood, the affidavit says. The license plate on the truck appears to match one owned by Fotis Dulos and a sticker matching one on his truck appears in the surveillance footage as well, the affidavit says.
The footage shows the bags being thrown into various trash receptacles and in once instance something being pushed through a storm grate, the affidavit states.
Investigators responding to the storm grate recovered an envelope that contained two Connecticut license plates that were registered to a SUV owned by Fotis Dulos, the affidavit says.
Investigators searched for the trash bags and recovered bags that are consistent with those seen on surveillance cameras, the affidavit says. Inside they recovered clothing that appeared to contain blood, kitchen items including a bloody sponge, and other pieces of evidence that are not detailed.
A crime lab determined the blood from items recovered from the trash was that of Jennifer Dulos, the affidavit said.
Read it at The Hartford Courant
