A juror in the trial connected to Jennifer Farber Dulos’ disappearance and murder was thrown off the panel Friday after an anonymous note revealed they had compared the case to the psychological thriller Gone Girl.
The dismissal marks the second time a juror in Michelle Troconis’ Connecticut trial has been removed from the high-profile case. Earlier this week, an alternate juror was booted after he admitted shouting “We love you” to a prosecutor during a brief run-in at the court elevators with another juror and a court marshal.
The Gone Girl note prompted Judge Kevin Randolph to pause the sixth day of trial for Troconis, a 45-year-old who has pleaded not guilty to allegations she conspired with Farber Dulos’ now-deceased estranged husband, Fotis Dulos, to murder the mom-of-five in May 2019 and cover up the crime. After a 45-minute recess, Randolph told the court he dismissed Juror 186 and that all other jurors said they could continue to be fair and impartial in the case.
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“One of the jurors discussed something about the case and it was all over social media. Said it was like Gone Girl,” the note written by another juror said, referring to the adapted film starring Ben Affleck about a woman who fakes her disappearance to frame her husband.
“A brief mention. Several other jurors said, ‘Don’t discuss this,’” the note added.
Farber Dulos, 50, was last seen on May 24, 2019, after dropping her five children off at school. While her abandoned car was later found on a New Canaan road, her body has never been recovered. (Before trial, a judge declared her dead.)
At the time of the murder, Troconis was the live-in girlfriend of Fotis Dulos, who was in the midst of a bitter divorce with Farber Dulos and a custody battle over their five children.
Prosecutors say Dulos, a luxury home builder, was “lying in wait” near his estranged wife’s home, where investigators found signs of a “serious physical assault” and zip ties believed to “secure and incapacitate” Farber Dulos. Surveillance footage shows Dulos and Troconis stopping at several locations around Hartford hours later, prosecutors say. In one video, prosecutors say, Dulos disposes of trash bags as Troconis sits in the car.
Troconis has long insisted she is innocent—despite initially withholding information about her ex’s whereabouts on the day of the murder. She told police she did not know her boyfriend was doing anything criminal when she watched him throw away the garbage bags and did not suspect any wrongdoing when she helped him write a timeline about what they did when Farber Dulos went missing. Fotis Dulos, who was also facing charges in connection with the crime, died in a New York City hospital after attempting suicide at his home in January 2020.
The juror’s Gone Girl comment is not the first time the case has been compared to the Gillian Flynn novel. A Lifetime movie on the Dulos case is titled Gone Mom, and in 2019, Dulos’ former attorney alleged Farber Dulos faked her disappearance.
“It absolutely sickens me that a work of fiction written by me would be used by Fotis Dulos’s lawyer as a defense and as a hypothetical, sensationalized motive behind Jennifer’s very real and very tragic disappearance,” Flynn told WTNH in response to the theory.
