Rich Cohen: Murder in the Dollhouse

The disappearance in 2019 of Jennifer Dulos is one of the most chilling stories I’ve ever read about. When the mother of five vanished from her wealthy Connecticut suburb, her estranged husband became the prime suspect. But when Fotis Dulos ended his own life, the mystery deepened. Author Rich Cohen has the inside story in his book, Murder in the Dollhouse. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
And there's nothing worse than living in fear twenty four
hours day, fear that's inside your own house.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:48):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. The disappearance in twenty nineteen
of Jennifer Dulos is one of the most chilling stories

(01:09):
I've ever read about. When the mother of five vanished
from her wealthy Connecticut suburb, her estranged husband became the
prime suspect, but when Photus Dulos ended his own life,
the mystery deepened. Author Rich Cohen has the inside story
in his book Murder in the dollhouse. So when you

(01:31):
bring up this subject to some of your friends who
know about the story, maybe bits and pieces of it,
what do you say that just says, this is the theme,
this is really what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well, I feel like Ryan lived. Everybody knows a story
because I live very close to where it happened, and
it was like a horror story happening in real life.
Started as a missing person story, turned into a search
for a body, and we all knew about this story,
but we didn't know about Jennifer Doulo as a person.
And when I got to know about her, in turns

(02:03):
out we have a lot of friends in common. It's
that her life is so much like every one of
our lives, and she seems like such a familiar person,
Like I felt like she couldn't be my sister. It
felt like I understood her very very well. I tell
people that sort of you just know, sort of the
tabloid version of the story. But to really understand the
enormity of this crime that her husband committed killing her,

(02:26):
you have to really know what she was like as
a person. And that's kind of what I tried to
do in the book. You know, and then there's a
lot of things in the book that I think are
genuinely news that shocked me. It was one of those
rare nonfiction reporting things some a nonfiction writer and journalists
were actually usually you kind of know what happened before
you start reporting, that's just the truth. In this case,

(02:47):
I found things out that shocked me and made the
whole things seem different to me several times. So it's
it's hard to sum up for that reason because it's
a big story.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, and part of what you go into the book,
which I think is great, is, you know, on the
s I think you can look at Jennifer Doulos as
someone who came from, you know, wealth, someone who didn't
have to work necessarily, but also wanted a family, was
trying to make good decisions about who she was having
a family with. Boy, I tell my girls, please be

(03:16):
careful about who you have children with. You know, Mary,
let alone have children with, because you're stuck with that person,
not just for eighteen years. She you know, was the
is it the niece of Liz Claiborne. Yeah, and came from,
you know, a wealthy family and seemed privileged. But at
the same time, you know, this is this is a
person who liked the rest of us. We're just trying

(03:38):
to make good decisions and make her dreams come true.
And then as we go through this, you know what,
we can learn a lot more about Jennifer, which is
what I'm going to appreciate the most, I think.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
I mean, I agree with you in that de kids
tell you are when you got married, she was a
little bit older. But when you get married, usually make
a decision, like if you look at it, you get married,
like my mom was nineteen when she married my father.
There's not a decision you would have made the same
way to age nineteen. Your decisions are not supposed to
hold up. You do stupid things when you're in your twenties,
and yet you make, if you get married, the most

(04:07):
important decision of your life, and it's got a weather time,
and you feel that like a large element of it
is luck, you know, I mean, you try to be smart.
And that's the thing with Jennifer too. You don't really
know who you're marrying until he's married them, at which
point it's too late. And she married, she got married
when she was older. You said she had really two dreams.

(04:28):
One was a writer's dream to be a playwright, and
the other was, you know, it's called murder in the
Dollhouse because she was obsessed with dolls dollhouses when she
was a little girl, and she tried to build that
in the real world in Connecticut. And at some point
she felt like she couldn't have both, and for a
bunch of reasons, she gave up a writing dream and
went all in and sort of almost picked this husband,

(04:48):
like you cast a part in a play. Like he
looked right, he had the right credentials, he went to
the right schools. They've both gone to Brown. He was
very good looking. She said she wanted to look great
with the person she danced with at her wedding. Well
she did. They were both great looking people. But at
the end the guy was I believe a psychopath. And

(05:09):
there's really no way to prepare for that. And we
talk about the missing White Girl's syndrome, whatever they call it,
and I understand that. But one of the fallacies in
all this is that somehow it's always good to have money. Yeah,
and we tend to think people that have money have
good lives, and tend to think that if we make
enough money will be safe and for me, part of

(05:30):
this story is no amount of money can protect you,
and in fact, in this case, having money made it
worse because some of you are in the divorce court
where you could afford lawyers for over a year and
you can fight over every little thing. So a situation
where we had no money, it would have just settled
it because nobody would have cared to be employed by

(05:51):
you for a year ended up being dragged out at
this moment of high tension that lasted for over a year.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that does seem like the big theme
here as money is a danger versus money as some
of an attribute. Can we talk about Jennifer Dulos before
she was Jennifer Dulos and kind of the world that
she came from.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Yes, well, her parents had this ideal marriage, and you know,
we all kind of turn our parents if our parents
have a good marriage. We turned their courtship into a
family fairy tale. And one of the things she problems
she had, I think is shed leave this fairy tale
of true love about her parents. And they had a
great marriage, but it is a fairy tale, and when
you're a kid, you're supposed to sort of give it

(06:31):
up and realize people are people. She always believed in it,
always was after it herself. Her aunt was Liz Blademore.
Her father was also hugely successful, and he was the
first Jewish head the bond apartment at GP Morgan Bank
in the seventies. Okay, this was a very like old money,
waspy culture, and to fit into that culture, he had

(06:53):
to kind of remake himself, and he believed in this
ideal of kind of the perfect marriage. Was this old money,
losty guy. I mean like certain kind of clothes, certain
kind of fabrics, certain kind of drinks, certain kind of gin,
certain clubs. And I believe he did that for professional reasons.
I know because my father did the same thing, which
she had to do if you were Jewish or Catholic

(07:15):
or anything in America in the early nineteen sixties, going
into business if you're anything but a lost So I
think she and he had a name for the ideal,
which was Bank, and she's sort of Jennifer believed in this.
This was the ideal person was this very waspy figure
sheet they called Bank. And she sought this person out

(07:36):
and of course that's again another fantasy. That person doesn't
really exist, but in a weird way. We take the
things our parents say seriously, and sometimes it's like your
parents forgot to tell you, Oh, that was a joke.
So she grew very wealthy in Brooklyn Heights or I
don't know if you know Brooklyn Heights, but it's certain,
in my opinion, the best neighborhood in New York. It's
like you're right across the river with an unbelievable view

(07:58):
of Flora Manhattan. Every time you see a movie shot
of Manhattan, it's taken from the Promenadgue on Brooklyn Heights.
She went to this great private school called Saint Anne's
and if you read the alumni, it's children of celebrities.
Just the top. It's like sixty thousand dollars a year. Now.
She was walking distance from the school, but her father
was very, very very protective of her to the extent

(08:21):
that he didn't even want her like riding in the subway,
which is some part of growing up in New York.
So he had for her car and driver who would
take her everywhere. She never had a wait in the
rain for a taxian, and could also kind of supply
intelligence for her father about where she was, and a
lot of people think the tragedy of what happened to
her is that she was over protected. She was so

(08:42):
protected from bad people and the bad things that when
one finally showed up in her life, she was basically defensive.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Was she an only child or did she have siblings
that were treated the same way?

Speaker 2 (08:53):
She has an older sister who was treated the same way,
but her older sister I don't really talk a lot
about in the book intentionally or had certain mental health
issues and sort of was a different case. So in
a way, she was treated a bit like a princess
and like an only child. And people talked about this constantly.
As a matter of fact, when I called their old

(09:13):
friends and talked to them, they would say, when they
heard that Jennifer had died, they knew that Hillard, her
father was dead, because as long as he was alive,
she would be protected. And there's a lot of truth
in that. And once that protection was gone, she was
basically on her own in the world and was sort
of overmatched in this relationship.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Did her father Hillard police the men you know that
were coming into her life, like, would he give a
thumbs up approval up until she meets her husband.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
I don't think he really policed her in that way
because her relationships weren't serious, so when they became serious,
that was a different story. But I think very much
he also had this fantasy for her. She went to Brown,
she first met photos Duelis at Brown, wasn't interested in
him then, but was friendly with him. And then she

(10:00):
went to the NYU playwriting program and with a bunch
of other students who many of whom went on and
became very successful in Hollywood, created shows and showrunners and everything.
She started this playwriting group and they started putting on
their own plays. And her father really gave a lot
of money and bankrolled this thing and would buy all
the tickets to the plays. But I think he always

(10:22):
saw it as a bit of a like a hobby,
like something she did on the side till her real
life began. And a big moment for her, which you
know if you read the book, and was one of
the things that shocked me is she wrote this play.
She was like me. That's why identified with her, and
that she worked from her own life and her own
experience as a writer. There's a famous quote, Philip Roth

(10:44):
us to quote it all the time when a writer
is born into a family that family was finished, because
you have to be merciless with about your own family
if you're going to be good. And she wrote a
play kind of gently mocking her family and her world
she came from. And it was handed off to this guy,
Eduardo Macatto, who I knew because I later worked on

(11:06):
a TV show with him, and he's like a very
fierce kind of artist. And he took her play and
saw though it was a gentle kind of satire, underneath
it was a portrait of this very hollow way of life,
and he pulled that out and made it a very
dark comedy and it was a big hit. Playwriting group
was called the Playwrights Collected. With the biggest hit they had,

(11:26):
they extended the run. It was reviewed in The Villain
Voice and the New York Server, all over the variet
It was reviewed all over the place, and her family
came and saw it, and her father basically said, in
a very coarse language, you've made your family look terrible.
And at that point, it was like she reached that
point that everybody who writes about their only own family

(11:48):
come to, which is she had to chew, you know,
if she was going to go with her art or
if she was going to sort of be the daughter.
And it's like she a little bit like she chickened
out right at that point and she quit play. She
pulled the play, she canceled the run, she canceled the
playwriting group. She never wrote another play that we know of. Again,

(12:08):
she kind of went out west. She converted to Christianity
from Judaism.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
How was that? Did that go over okay with Hillarn?

Speaker 2 (12:16):
She never told her family, and that was like a
legitimate beef that her that Photus had, because that's another story.
But she never told her family. But she was somebody
not really comfortable in her identity. And I understand it
because you know, now everything's about identity. Everybody wants to
their own identity. When we were growing up, the whole
thing was your identity is American, and you don't want

(12:39):
anything that pulls you out of that. And if you're
a writer, you want everybody to like what you write,
and you don't want to have a name that makes
people think of you as this or that. You want
to be the big thing. So to her, it was
important that she was Christian, that she didn't have a
name like Farber. She changed her name, and later one
of the people said one of the happiest moments apt

(13:00):
she got married was changing her name from Farvard Todulos.
And then she met Fotus on that trip. So in
a weird way for me looking at it, because I
felt like we're on parallel tracks. I was in New
York in the nineties with the same friends, at the
same parties, trying to do a version of the same thing,
and we both got to a point where we moved
to Connecticut and had many kids very quickly. But when

(13:22):
she got to the point where she had to choose,
she kind of like chose to leave her writing life
and her friends behind. And there's something very sad about it.
Only later and you look back and say, that was
a real turning. That could have gone this way, that
could have gone that. So it's like sort of the
sadness of the person who doesn't quite become the person
they had the potential of being. And that's really the

(13:45):
tragedy of her, because we can be talking about her
right now, is like she was Norah Ephron. I mean,
I think she had that kind of talent and I
would like to think that at the end of her life.
After she left her husband. She was starting to write
again and that might still have happened, but he took
that away from her too.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
So she goes to Brown and she meets Potus and
how are they meeting? And by the way, I did
not know a name like Doula's would be. It's a
Greek name, right, I mean, is that something in Connecticut?

Speaker 2 (14:16):
Then well that's the joke. The joke is she wants
to bank and she winds up with another ethnic group
like Judius, and she winds up with somebody who's actually
a Greek national and who speaks with an accent and
is you know, Greek Orthodox. It's a different thing. It's
not what she had dreamed of. But it's interesting because
she wasn't interested in when she met him. He was
very handsome. He had been sort of a superstar athlete

(14:39):
growing up. He'd been on the Greek national water ski team.
But in Brown there are a lot of very rich expacts,
like you know, sons of Greek shipping airs kind of people.
He wasn't that. He was a middle class kid who
had to work to get into Brown and was very
status conscious and very class conscious in a way that
I think most Americans, whatever we say about America, we
just aren't okay. So very much was trying to get

(15:02):
out of the position he was in socially because of
his class. And you always saw her. She was beautiful
and she was away to a higher world. That's how
I think he saw her to him. To her at
age twenty one, he was very good looking, very nice,
and very boring, and she was uninterested in him for

(15:23):
all those reasons. When she met him again and he's
like thirty five, she wants to have kids. Her first
career blew up. Told me, the guy that seemed uninteresting
at twenty one now is very interesting in age thirty five,
when everybody's gotten married, there's fewer options. She's running out
of time. I believe she lowered her defenses because he

(15:45):
checked so many boxes that made him seem safe. The
main one is he went to Brown and they knew
the same people, so she thought she knew him when
she didn't. And the other one was that he then
went to the Columbia Business School, he worked in a
big company. He just fit the role, you know. And
the person who knew from everybody I've spoken to, even

(16:06):
since his books come out, is right from the beginning,
Hillar and Farmer knew the guy with trouble. They got
in a huge fight that basically turned physical very early
in the marriage, with bot Is actually throwing a chair
at his father in law and threatening to take Jennifer
and disappear. And they never that's something they always was threatening,
and so he sort of pledged himself to sort of

(16:27):
protect her. But I think that it is interesting the
choices you make when you feel like you're running against time,
which I think she felt like. And if you look,
she went from no kids to five kids in seven years,
and that's very tough, no matter how much money you have,
that's tough.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
Do you think he was driving for that number of
kids or do you think it was her.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
I honestly don't know if he even cared if he
had kids. I mean, from everything I say, I hate
to say that Becauntry loved his kids whatever. I don't
want to but very much was about the boys more
than girls. He felt like a deal had kind of
been made, which is he gave Jennifer what she wanted,
which was kids, a big family, a husband that looked good,

(17:10):
and she gave him what he wanted, which was the
money to start a home building business, which was his
house building group where they built these giant McMansions all
over suburbs of Hartford in Connecticut, And that business, which
looked very successful on paper, was actually entirely bankrolled by
Hillard Farber. So I call him like the the tempkin

(17:30):
son in law because it's like you go in the
front door and your back outside. I mean, that's my
sort of feeling about the guy. So I feel like
it was part of the deal. And I feel like
once she had the kids and was busy with the kids,
he felt one that he didn't get the attention that
he wanted from her, and her attention was now on
the kids. Also, he felt like he'd done his part
and now he can do what he wanted, which was travel,

(17:53):
have affairs, do whatever he wanted. And throughout the whole
this story researching, it comes across about him as a
tremendous amount of self pity. He always feels sorry for
himself that he's not getting we should have and he
deserves more.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
You know, I talked to I've mentioned this on my
show before. I've talked to Catherine Ramslin. You know, he's
a very famous forensic psychologist who spent a lot of
time with BTK with Dennis Raider, who she says, is
you know has psychopathy, psychopathy which you mentioned with with us,
and she said, you know you use that hair checklist.
There's no real scan you can do, and you know

(18:30):
there's all of these markers like grandiose sense of self
and a facade, and you know you had gotten into
trouble maybe when you were a kid, and you know
this whole thing, And she said, I actually talked to
Robert Hare, who created this checklist, and she said, you
have to add whining to that, because the self pity
is real with everybody. Ted Bundy, Dennis Raider would whine

(18:53):
about like being interrupted or his plan going awry, as
if you know, his cab didn't come on or something.
It sounds like you saw that with photos also.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
Always having temper tantrums and always doing things to let
Jennifer know that he was in charge and it was
his show. And basically, I feel like one way to
look at the story is she said yes to every
single thing he ever wanted until her father died and
he had an affair with this woman, Michelle Jaconiz. He
wanted to bring that relationship into the open and actually

(19:25):
set up a situation where they would all basically live
together and glend Jennifer's kids with his daughter, and he
said to Jennifer, you know, you'll stay in this house too.
This is a house that Jennifer's mother's paying for. Okay,
you'll stay in this house too, and you can even
have your own room. That's what my mom told me
when we moved from Libertyville, Illinois to Glencoe when I

(19:46):
was five years old, you know. And so basically she
said yes to him until she said no to that,
and he just couldn't handle her saying no to him,
and that sent off the chain of events that led
to her death. And as far as the hair of
the checklist you're talking about, it's really interesting because when

(20:06):
I step back and say, what is this real? What's
the big picture of all these different attributes we can
look at. To me, like a definition of evil is
somebody who doesn't see other people as real. They see
them as objects in one way or another. It's almost
like the non player video game character. You know that
that's not really a real person. And I feel like

(20:28):
the sense I got from him is this the guy
who only saw himself as real, and he saw other
people as objects. And when he met Jennifer in the
Aspen airport, he saw her as an object. He could
use the tool to get what he wanted, which was money,
started his business climb and class and at the end
she was still an object. But now she was an
object standing in the way of what he wanted, which

(20:50):
was this life with this other woman, and so he
removed her. And the way I say that very coldly
because this isn't a case where a strange couple gets
it's in a fight and there's a shoving match and
she stumbles and hits her head and dies. Okay, this
is a cold blooded, carefully plotted murder where he planned

(21:11):
it for prommonly months and did it in such a
cold fashion that it was reading about him and reading
what he did. One is when I write, I try
to empathize with the person I'm writing about, so I
can understand their decision making. It's the only way you
can understand what someone else is doing is try to
understand how they feel. I could not put myself in
this guy's head. It was like this caused me to

(21:32):
raise a big question with all the psychiatrists I talk to,
which is, are people who do what he did the
same as everybody else, just at the edge of the spectrum,
or are they different? And I came to the conclusion
that they're different. And I also learned from these psychiatrists
that five percent of the population can be characterized as
psychopaths and in a certain kind of life, with a

(21:53):
certain kind of way. Maybe you never even know it.
They just seem a little old.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
They're running companies. Many of them are running companies. They
make very cold decisions, which is what you need when
somebody runs a company to be efficient.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
And maybe there's some evolutionary advantage to having these people
at certain prices moments, like you know, war something I
don't know, but in your day to day life, it's
not what you want in a partner, you know.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
I've talked to people, and I was doing a story
about a woman I believe definitely had psychopathy, and I said,
what's the difference. He's a researcher in psychopathy. I said,
what's the difference between a male and a female? And
he said, a male psychopath will stab you, a female
psychopath will ruin your credit, and they'll take your identity
and steal everything from you, but they might not kill you.
And then of course there are the special people who

(22:39):
will do both. But you know, I ask back to
kind of what you were saying about duelists, and you're
feeling like he, you know, he feels like he's the
only real person and everybody else's like a chess piece.
Katherine Ramslin has this great scene in one of her
books when she's talking to Dennis Raider in prison, and
she said, I need you to think and come up
with some way to explain to me the way your

(23:02):
identity works and the way other people with psychopathy it works.
And he came back with this paper cube, and on
each side was written some role in his life. So
he was like a you know, church deacon. I think
he wrote that on one side he was a civil servant,
on another side father, you know, blah blah, and then
serial killer. And so he puts the cube down and
he starts flicking it and he says, I'm not grounded

(23:22):
in any of these I will just change who I
am based on the situation. And that's the way that
we are. There's nothing real, it's a facade, and you're
grafting on to other people's personalities depending on what they're
asking for. But she said he was just flicking this thing. See.
Now I can go to church and act fine, but
now tonight I want to go stalk to someone and
kill them. And I found that fascinating. I mean, we're

(23:43):
mostly grounded, you know. For me, I'm grounded in my
family more than anything else. But when you're not grounded
in anything, you know, of course you're going to see
people as objects.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
You know. Well, it's interesting. Is made me think. There's
a book called Great Planes by Anne Fraser. That's one
of the books that made me want to be a
nonfiction writer instead of a fiction writer way back when.
And I'm just rereading it this summer. And he's talking
about somebody who committed a murder in Montana, like in
the nineteen seventies. And the guy said he killed somebody
because he wanted to know what it felt like. And

(24:14):
somebody says, well, what did it feel like? And he says,
it felt like nothing, And it just gives you the shiver. Man,
That's what I feel like with Botus after he killed Jennifer.
He gave this interview on Local NBC in Connecticut. He
has no emotion whatsoever, and his only thing at the
end when they ask him how he feels is he

(24:34):
feels he's being treated very unfairly by the state. Okay,
And the interviewer says, so, are you saying that you
got the work of this situation. You're the biggest victim,
and he said yes, And it didn't even occur to
him that for his own good he should pretend to
care what happened to his wife because he couldn't know

(24:54):
that a normal person would care what happened to his wife.
But he can't, isn't He can't even pretend because he
doesn't know what in It feels like nothing. So this
situation where deal with somebody who doesn't follow the normal rules,
doesn't see people as real, is playing a game of chess.
You're just completely unprepared for it, because by definition, you're

(25:15):
just reading your humanity into them to see what they
would do, and that's just not going to work. And
one of the things is they've never found Jennifer's body. Okay,
So Potus Dulos, though he was so smart and did
all this stuff to hide his crime, he was actually underestimated.
The police That's another thing with psychopaths. They think they're
the smartest people in the world. He underestimated the police,

(25:36):
and he didn't understand the technology and the fact that
he was basically on camera all day that whole day,
except for two times he's off camera for like an
hour in the morning in New king Connecticut and in
the afternoon where he got rid of the evidence in Farmington, Connecticut.
So the police say he must have got rid of
her body in one of those two times when he
was off camera. So I was talking recently in one

(25:57):
of the detectives and I said, I always assumed he
or did whatever he did in Nu Canaan, because how
do you put somebody, your wife's body in a car
and drive her fifty miles down public highway with cars
all around you would that's too scary. He could do it,
He's like he could do it. Yeah, he had no fear,
and he had no doubt that if he got pulled over,

(26:18):
he would just talk his way out of it.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, she got drunk, she's passed out. Yeah, isn't that
amazing that people feel like that? I mean, I can't
even imagine somebody thinking like that. That's why the psychologist
I talked to said they fouled their own nest. Eventually,
they can't help it. They tripped themselves up because they
don't have their own identity. And you can only put
to I have a friend who says it, and maybe
this is a famous quote she stole this from. But

(26:40):
a man can only hold his breath for a year.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Uh huh. You know.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
I tell my kids that get to know someone for
at least a year, at least a year to get
to know who they really are, because you can only
pretend you're not who you are for about a year.
Let's go back and you know, is it twenty seventeen
when this whole like wacko proposal Jennifer, you can stay
in the house, but Michael friend's going to move into Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
I'm very bad with remembering years, but yes, that sounds right.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
I think that's when they initiated the divorce, and that's
what I want to get to. So this is this
pivotal moment for Jennifer, who finally found that wine that
didn't need to be crossed?

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Right?

Speaker 1 (27:17):
Does she fairly quickly after that say screw you, I'm
getting a divorce and then hire the attorney.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
Well, I think first of all, she had this fantasy
of marriage, which is I call the dollhouse fantasy. And
she at first didn't want to give up on the marriage,
you know, that was like giving up on her dream.
And so there was a couple's therapy and all that,
and finally when this happened, she was living in the house.
She stayed in the house, she had everything sort of
on hold, and she but she was saying no to him,

(27:44):
and he started to ratchet up the pressure. I think
he thought that get to scare her. Basically, she'd always
just said yes, but now she's saying no, so she's
got he's got to move her to yes. To do that,
it's going to require some pressure. One thing he did
is he let his kids drive his car. Scare the
crap out.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
Oh my gosh, they're all under seven, right.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yes. He started doing more and more things like this,
and finally she took him aside and showed him that
he had purchased a gun. Showed her the gun, which
she took I think rightly as a threat. Okay, right
after she saw the gun, she started making plans to leave.
But she knew that she had to do it, like
secretly and very carefully, because if you found out she

(28:27):
was going to leave, because with her, she would take
the money and everything else. He wanted still to have
the access to the money from her family. She hired
something which I lived in Connecticut all these years, I
didn't know this existed. They're moving companies that have unmarked
vehicles for situations like this, so they could show up
and help you pack, and if the husband or the

(28:48):
wife or whatever stumbles upon the scene, it doesn't look
like a moving company. So he waited to a day.
The day that she knew, he'd be gone all day
at the waterski pond. I believe I think it was
Father's Day with this kid. She had this company with
the unmarked cars, packed up everything. She had told him
she was going to go stay with her mother in

(29:10):
Pound Ridge, New York, and then visit her father's grave
the next day. Father had died not that long before.
And she got with her nanny and two cars and
all the kids and she left. And as soon as
she left, he started looking around and saw that everything
was gone, and he started to freak down. He called
the police, and we tried to get the police to
stop her and arrest her for taking his kids. And

(29:31):
that was the beginning, and she went to New Canaan,
where she'd sort of secretly rented a house, and the
next morning she went to a lawyer filed for divorce
and also filed for a restraining order, which she got.
Get it like an emergency basis. And it's interesting you
mentioned the timing is so important because just to go
back for a second, when he met her, there were

(29:53):
red flags that she either missed or willingly drove right
through because she wanted to get where she wanted to get,
which is she met him in the airport in Aspen.
He called her. They went on three days before she
did an internet search and realized he was already married. Okay,
so she confronted him and he sort of said, yeah,

(30:14):
but it's ending because I want to have kids, but
she's not. She doesn't okay. So, by the way, this
is the psychopath thing because one thing that told you
made me think of this because the holding breath for
a year, because he was really very good at figuring
out what the other person needs and becoming that thing,
whatever it was. And he knew right away that she
wanted to have kids and felt that she had to

(30:35):
do it quickly if she wanted to have a bunch
of kids. Yep. So she took what should have been
a disqualifying fact he was already married and turned it
into oh, here's somebody who really wants to kids right now.
He turned it into something that made him more rather
than less appealing. But she said, I will not date
you while you are married. So from that call he
was divorced within four months, and within four months of

(30:57):
that they were married, and within a month to that
they're in Connecticut. She's pregnant, you know. So it was
the speed, and at the end it was the same
way which he was done holding his breath. He would
stopped pretending to be what she wanted. She had the
kids and he now wanted this other life. And she
got out of there and did everything right. Because a
lot of people would say, well, she has all this money,

(31:19):
couldn't she blah blah blah blah blah blah. No, he answers.
You know, I mean, there's nothing you can look at
and say she shouldn't she shouldn't have continued with him
when she thought out she was married. But at the end,
she did everything right. As soon as she saw that
he had gotten a gun. She made plans to leave.
She left in the right way, very carefully. She got
the kids enrolled in school in a new place. I mean,

(31:39):
she was incredibly efficient. She got him in a good house,
she got him in a new life. And then she
got a lawyer and started fighting this case. And that
case went through four hundred filings. Another thing is he
was obsessed with winning, right, he never could lose. And
he said to her during the during this whole thing,
if you come at me once, I'm going to come
back at you one hundred times carter. Early on, a

(32:01):
judge said and to them, basically, we're going to separate
these people, which is what you have to do in
these high concert situations. And you can see your kids,
but Michelle, the paramore can't be there, and you can't
mix them up with your with her kid. Okay, you
can maybe do that after the divorce. That's what the
divorce will be about. But until the divorce is final,

(32:22):
you're frozen in this state. So if you were a
normal person in him and you want to get into
another life, you think get through the divorce as quickly
as possible. Instead, he kept violating that order over and
over and over again and kept getting caught. And it
got to the point where he was having his kids
live for him. He was saying all this crazy stuff

(32:42):
for his kids to tell her, and they'd go to
the judge. And so you got almost four hundred of
these filings and you never even got to sort of
the starting slot of the divorce.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Four hundred filings. That's incredible. Yeah, and I know that
this turns into like the divorce of the century for Connecticut.
When you were talking about him doing all of this stuff,
I was thinking, that's the risk taking. I mean, you know,
it's not jumping off of buildings, but having your kids lie,
saying things where you know you're going to get caught.
You know, these are all things that just don't occur
to people sometimes, you know, when your sole focus is

(33:16):
to ruin the other person who you think is ruining you.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Right, And to me, one of the big moments, because
I was looking at the court documents, is he has
a lawyer. Keith fires a lawyer because lawyer isn't aggressive enough.
He decides to represent himself, okay, and he puts Jennifer
on the stand under OAH and cross examined her rutally okay,
which it's amazing to me that it's even allowed to happen. Okay,

(33:42):
And he is trying to beat her into a confession.
But what's her to confess? You realize as you're listening
to him, he wants her to confess that he is
the better parent. Ultimately, then he calls himself to the
stand and he does something I've only ever seen once before,
and it was the Winny Allen movie Bananas, which is
he cross examines himself, which if you're a writer writing this,

(34:04):
you want to see what he thinks of himself, because
he basically gives it soliloquy of his own sorry state
and all the things that happened to him and Helen
fergus Is from the stand, but it became another playing field.
And this was a guy who I would say he
was a chauvinist. Okay, So he was a misogynist and
he didn't like women to have any control. He felt

(34:24):
that they should not be in control. And he winds
up in a situation where he's trying to win. He's
in court and he's going up against who his wife is,
mother in law, and the judge all women and he's losing,
and it's so emasculating. It's like it's intolerable. You can
just see this scheme building up. It's intolerable. He also

(34:45):
had a weird thing about Jewish people where he thought
Jewish people were like he wouldn't he would let his
son see a psychiatrist, but it couldn't be a Jewish psychiatrist.
He said this stuff publicly and on the record because
he believed that June would necessarily side with other Jews.
So now he's in a situation where it's not only women,
but it's a bunch of Jewish women, and to him,

(35:06):
it's just like topsy turbudum. And to me, one of
the craziest realizations I had is one of the things
you can't figure out is Okay, he killed her, he
inside to kill her, but why didn't do it when
he did it? Like what was the trigger? And there
were a lot of possible triggers. But the court had
hired a psychiatrist to write sort of a report on

(35:27):
the whole marriage, and the psychiatrist missed the field, so
we don't know what it says. The part of it
leap the psychiatrist seemed to come down on his side
and to say human being mistreated and Jennifer was addicted
to the conflict and would never give in because this
was her way of keeping Photus in her life. Was
the divorce. So he gets this report. The question is

(35:48):
why the guy said that. I think because Photus is
a charming psychopath was able to calm this guy. But whatever.
But it seems to me that weirdly that was the trigger,
because it's like, here was an official saying, you're right,
you are being mistreated. She does deserve to die. He
needed that little bit of outside affirmation to sort of

(36:08):
be the green light to set his plan in action.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
So they hadn't even gotten into the divorce. They were
still battling it. Right, did they have a prenup or
where did he get this money from if she's cut
him off because it comes from her inheritance and from
her mother.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Well, there was no free up and she had definitely
more expensive lawyers than him. And there wasn't just the lawyers,
like for example, there was a guardian ad litem, which
is like basically some of the court of points succeeded
the interest of the kids. That person had to be
has to be paid by the couple, as in all cases,
they said they would split that s faate. He never paid.

(36:45):
She paid for him, and then he said, you can't
trust the guardian because how can you trust anybody that
she pays for? So it was like a crazy Joseph
Heller asked catch twenty two kind of thing. He had
a lot of money in his houses, and it turns
out later that most of these houses and property were
secured by loans and property given to him by Hillard Farber.

(37:07):
But for time it was enough for him to bankroll
this thing. And one of the theories for his motive
in the end is his mother in law obviously stopped
giving him money and then sued him to get back
the money they had went and he had lost that case,
and he didn't even own his own house. And at
the end the thought it's one possible motive is his

(37:27):
kids had trust funds, and Jennifer controlled the trust funds.
But if he became the sole remaining parent because they
were not divorced, he would control the trust funds and
that would be the money that would get him out
of his jam. So one reason possibly take Jennifer off
the board was to get control of the kids and
get control of the money. So money was a constant
thing in this like it always is. But I think

(37:49):
he thought he had enough to get through the divorce
and then he'd maybe be able to get to some
of the money that first kids.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Friends of the couple, where did they fall on all
of this? Everybody say with Jennifer, you.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
Know a group of guys who went to Brown Photus
chipped in and paid his bail the first time he
was arrested, and they did it like in a sporting
betting way, which is half of them believed he couldn't
have done this, which is like a lot of people
think there's no way he would have done this, and
then half thought maybe he could have done this. So
the bail in the end, they decided would be paid

(38:22):
by the people who lost that bet when they figured
out if he did it or not. So that's about
the extent of Photus. His friends. Mostly they lay low.
They wouldn't talk to me, or they talked to me
off the record, because nobody wanted to be associated with
this person after the crime, because it's like being associated
with Ted Bundy or something, not putting them at the
Ted Bundy level, but being we don't want to be
associated with him. Jennifer's friends, they were very critical, obviously

(38:45):
a photus, and a lot of the people from earlier
in life she cut off. She stopped talking to them
for many years. But the few people that she did
talk to were all deeply suspicious of Potus from the
very beginning. And it's the kind of thing where when
they got married and very fancy wedding on the Upper
East Side of New York, people are sitting around saying,
other than the fact that he's really great looking, why

(39:05):
is Jennifer marrying this guy. It's a kind of wedding
you go to and you can't figure it out. And
the reason was because she wanted them kids very quickly.
But one of her friends said to me, you know,
she was complaining to him and telling it. She's telling
everybody how dangerous he was, you know, how he could
kill her. And he sort of said, well, then you
need to like end the divorce because you need to
get away from him, because like, if he's really that dangerous,

(39:27):
stop engaging with them completely. But there was no way
to get to the next part of her life except
through some kind of contact, and that was kind of
the terrible position she was in.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
So take me to the moment when people realize that
she has gone gone and not coming back. And I'm
sure there's a debate of did she just want to
take off because she's scared of him? I mean that's
a valid explanation. She's kind of going into hiding, leaving
her kids behind. What are the circumstances, where are we
in time when that happens.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Well, her good friends immediately went happened. They've known about photos,
they knew him. Several of them said, sinking, feeling my stomach.
It's voted, vote has killed him. So then I think
the police probably thought that too, because in a case
like this, it's almost always been a noble divorce, it's
almost always thought the defense. When he got a defense
lawyer later, they wanted to give this idea, Well, maybe

(40:18):
she ran away, you know, because that bad psych report
which I mentioned was going to hurt her case, and
she ran away and baked her own death in some
way or something to pray him. Her lawyer said this
in court, and he likened it to the book Gone Girl,
and he called it the Gone Girl defense. The question

(40:40):
for the police was they needed It's very hard to
prove a murder without a body, and the reason for
that is it's obvious, which is, what if you convict somebody?
What if you execute somebody and the dead person turns
out actually to be a lot And it sounds crazy,
but it has happened seven times in American history that
somebody has been convicted for murder and the person turned

(41:01):
up alive later. So you know that if they bring
a a conviction of a person when there's nobody, it's
got to be a very, very very strong case. The
police needed a little bit of luck and they got
it because again Fotus thought he was smarter than everybody
and made a series of super interesting mistakes early in
the police investigation. So one thing he did was, first

(41:22):
of all, the police call him the Knight that she
disappears that night, and he has no interest in what happened,
or he doesn't care, which is like he should pretend
he's interested in but it's chilling. He doesn't know, he
doesn't care about what happened, or the mist would happen
because he knows what happened. The police asked him to
come by the police station the next day to help them.
He's not a suspect. At this point, they want his

(41:44):
help finding Jennifer. He shows up like three hours late,
which seems crazy. He shows up wisely with the lawyer,
not wisely with the wrong kind of lawyer. He shows
up with a divorce lawyer when he needs is a
criminal lawyer. Okay. The lawyer somehow had its phone, maybe
left in the car, hands Photus his phone in front
of the cops. The cop says, is that your phone?

(42:06):
Photos says yes. The cop says, can I see it?
Photos hands on the phone. The guy opens the phone
and says, what's your security code? Otis tells him, by
the way, the code is zero zero zero zero. And
the lawyer says, hey, you can't look at his phone.
You needn't warrant. And the cop says, I'm not looking
at it. I'm putting in an airplane mode to lock it
down until we get a warrant. Okay. Photus on the

(42:28):
day of the murderer, that left that phone in his
house in Farmington, knowing the police will look at the phone,
sneething was in Farmington and that would give him an alibi.
He also had a friend who reesed call that phone,
and that phone answered by his paramore is mistress Michelle Traconis.
So looked like he had a phone call on that
phone in Farmington. He killed Jennifer. He went back to Farmington.

(42:49):
He just put all this evidence in bags, put the
bags in his own car, then drive back to his
own house where he grabs his phone. Okay, which is
almost like a jo of like Americans can't be without
their phone. He takes his phone, He puts his phone
in his pocket. He goes down to a very rough
neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, not where he lives, and throws

(43:11):
this garbage out in dumpsters down there. When the police
look at the phone, yes, he's in a Farmington all day,
but hey, why at the end of the day it
is seen down in this bad neighborhood in Hartford. So
they call the state police and say, do you have
any cameras down there? And Photus I think thinks there
will be no cameras because it's a bad area and
the police don't care about it. In fact, it's just

(43:32):
covered in cameras because they're trying to break a crime.
Leave down there. You get the footage, and the footage
shows Potus and the shell and photus his car driving
slowly down the road, throwing out garbage in various dumpsters,
including a FedEx package which they shove in the storm drain,
and then the police go the next week and get that,

(43:53):
and that is the evidence that you then see prosecutors
hold up in court when Michel Terconas is on trial.
So that was very stupid. Took up his phone, and
it was very stupid to show up without the right
kind of lawyer, and it was very stupid to be late.
It was very stupid to give them the security boat.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
All those things foul their own nest. It can't help it.
What is the working theory about what actually happened? He
strangled her, dismembered her, put her, I mean, where would
she be?

Speaker 2 (44:21):
Well, I always thought it's just horrible to talk about. Okay,
they found in the evidence zip tize bloody zip tized,
so as the comps said, you don't really have to
zip tize somebody that's dead. So the thought is he
zip tied her when she was alive, So who knows
what he did to her? And he did not shoot her.
They never found it, but there was footage from that
scene in Hertford told me about where somebody pulls a

(44:43):
knife out of the garbage, which they then traded. Okay,
so they never found the knife, but there it is
on camera, so he thought did he stabbed her? Another
thing he messed up at is he did not realize
the amount of blood in a person's body. She basically
bled out in the garage. He then I had to
take all these paper towels and Jennifer stuff to clean
it up and put it in halfne bags. And the

(45:05):
question is I always thought that he hid her body
close to the house. Some people from that I've spoken
to from New Canaan police and stuff suggests another person
might have come from Greece and helped him dispose of
her body, taking the body off his hands, in which
case the peace will never find it because they're only
looking along the area where he's on camera. You get
out a mile into the woods. It would have to

(45:27):
just be dumb luck that they would find her body.
Talking to the police again more recently in the course
of my book tour, and maybe think maybe she is
buried somewhere up near where they lived in Farmington, because
he's steal icy enough. They've taken her up there and
they lived right next to them was this big forested
area many acres beside a reservoir where they used to

(45:48):
ride bikes and stuff. So she might be buried in there.
And the thought is that she might have been dismembered
and buried in various places in there. It's just a
question of what you believe, like the importance of finding
the body, which is the police I've spoken to actually
said maybe it's better not to find the body at
this point, like to let people keel rather than bringing
this all up to the present tense, because finding the

(46:09):
body will allow them to answer questions about what happened,
but it will raise probably more questions than it answers.
But other people that expoming to believe that the crime
until the body is found, the crime is in some
sense still happening. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
I was thinking about what you were saying about somebody
from Greece or anybody else coming in and taking care
of the body. And I was thinking about a case
that I had read about with geofencing. Had you dig
into that at all? No, So, you know how photos
was an idiot and they could track them different places
and stuff. But with geofencing, and I don't think you

(46:45):
can retroactively do it. But what they could do is
draw an area around their house, Jennifer's house, and at
a certain time, they can you know, they can go
back and look at these times and find out what
cell phones were there at the time. Yeah, wouldn't work
on somebody who's smart enough to turn off their phones
and then go commit a crime. But if you're at
a party and you didn't a fight with some guy
and you stab them and then you take off, they

(47:07):
would interview everybody at the party because they would have
all of their sop phones at that one particular location.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
So I think that would be really interesting and a
good application of that is there an accomplice who shows
up that there's just so off the radar. At least
you'd be able to see if there was some contact.
But let's just me fantasizing about some solution here.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
You know. I kept thinking about remember this case that
this woman Sean for Lady was murdered in Rock Creek Parkway.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
I lived in Modesto for four months reporting on that case.
That's where she was from, Meso, California.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
Yeah, okay, so they were looking for her body in
Rock Creek Parkway and several years later and they never
found it. Several years later, somebody found it like ten
see the way from where they'd been looking, which just
shows you if she was buried myland of the Woods.
And that's something like geofensing like you're talking about. For me,
there was a hugely enlightening thing that happened in my
town in Richfield, Connecticut, which is somebody was a couple

(47:56):
of years ago expanding their basement and they discovered a corpse,
a body, so they called the police, stay freaked out.
The police came and said, we think this is old.
We have to call him like somebody else, and they
called him the state, and the state started digging and
they discovered basically nine bodies a mass grave, and it
turned out that they were British soldiers from a mass

(48:17):
grave from the Revolutionary War in the Battle of Ridgefield.
And these were people buried right at basement level, right
under main Street, in the middle of town, like not
in some far away place, and unless somebody happened to
dig there, they just sat there for whatever two hundred
and fifteen years. We forget because everywhere we go is stores,
roads and everything. But the world is still a very,

(48:39):
very very big and we're very very very small.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Tell me, I mean, I am very curious about Michelle
in general. Why don't we get to kind of the
end of the story and where we are when photos
does what he does and then here's Michelle, his girlfriend,
just like left hanging out to draw. Here is the
only one left out of this whole freaking mess.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
So killing himself turns out to be incredibly cowardly because
there's a whole mechanism estate that needs someone to be punished,
and her only play, the only move she has, is
to sort of turn against Photus and testify against him.
But he takes that away from her. So everybody this
guid's dealt with. He screwed. Everybody can de with. Every

(49:18):
woman dealt with he wrecked her life. Okay, So whatever
you think of Michelle, he wrecked her life and meeting
him was the worst thing that ever happened here. And
we don't know the extent of her involvement. We know
that she seeming was very involved with disposing of evidence
and giving an alibi and helping him in all these ways.
If I were her and I were her lawyer, I
would say, present yourself as the second victim because you say, Okay,

(49:40):
she's the paramour, But Jennifer was the paramour. Remember I
told you that Jennifer started dating him. He was already married,
you know, and she should say, listen, if we ended
up together ten years down the line, this could be me.
The case in court was so strong against her that
it just seemed like the jury could do nothing except
find her guilty. So I think that he left her

(50:01):
to take the full weight of the case against him,
and she did take it. And this was a guy
who went around ruining people's lives. He ruined Jennifer's life
first and foremost. He ruined Michelle's life, and she cooperated
in her own room. Let's say anybody did do his kids,
I mean, left his kids with the worst imaginable legacy.
What is there for them? And their mother killed by

(50:21):
their father, their father kills themselves, so they never really
even know what happened. So when Michelle went to prison,
I was being sentenced. I went to court, and the
kids got up and spoke, and their whole thing was,
we want to know what happened, like we want to
know what actually happened, because everything is speculation. There were
only two people actually there and they're both dead, you know,
and so he took that away from his kids too.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
What does she say, is she saying anything at all?

Speaker 2 (50:46):
She's saying she's innocent, that her only prime is she
fell in love with the wrong person, you know what.
I think that she probably doesn't know where Jennifer's buried,
or she would have already given that up because that's
her only way out. I think that's why. I think
that maybe he had help and handed it off, and
maybe at the end even he didn't know where she
was theared.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
So this is a plea deal, or she goes to trial.
It sounds like she.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
Went to trial, she was convicted.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
That does not seem smart.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah, she sends to fourteen years, and she's already served
a bunch of times fourteen years, you know, and then
there's already the time she's served. So she put it
all together, it's like twenty years.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
She'll go up for parole, right, and she'll have to
admit culpability essentially, right, I mean, doesn't she have to
admit remorse?

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Well, I was talking about this because she's in the
middle of an online campaign and I know this because
I'm a target of it. And I don't know who
it's being run by. But she's innocent that everyone's lying
about her, that the prosecution told a lie that you know,
and they have to explain away all the very creating
information against her. And the problem with that is when
she does come up for parole, it doesn't look like

(51:48):
that all that will be against her. I think, like
she never admitted it, she never accepted responsibility, you know.
And again here's somebody else who's painting the whole story.
Is she's the victim.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
So the moral of this, if there is a moral,
and I don't know if there is a moral, but
we go back to the title of your book, which
is Murder in the Dollhouse. Does this take you back
to Jennifer, who on the outside has this beautiful, large family,
this really you know, good looking husband who seems to
be doing well in business, and supportive family and you
know all of that and it's a facade. Clearly. Is

(52:21):
that sort of what the message was to the people
in Connecticut, you know, about their own society.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
Perhaps I mean for me personally, because I consider myself
when the people in Connecticut, you want to take something,
you can make something positive out of Connecticut is a
very beautiful place, very beautiful beautiful house is. It's just
a gorgeous place. And these houses and you think you
understand what's going on and lessons you never really know
what's going on in someone else's house, and you never

(52:47):
really know what's going on in somebody else's life. And
you should have sympathy for other people, okay, because you
don't really know what's going on. And the story is,
help people as much as you can because they really
need it.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
My kid and I will drive around in wealthier areas,
and you know, she went on all the cars and
the large houses and kind of how how blessed these
people are. And I'm saying, you don't know who owns
that house, who knows how people are leveraged around here?
And if you're relying on appearances, oftentimes those appearances are
not real and they'll fail. And you know, you come

(53:19):
back to that. So I feel so awful for Jennifer
and for her family. What do you know, just sort
of as a final thing, what's happening with the kids
who ended up raising them? I mean what they were
all under.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Ten kids are basically being raised by the nanny. Mostly
the nanny and the grandmother. They're doing I mean, considering
the situation, they're doing very well good And one lucky thing,
if you call anything lucky, is they have each other.

Speaker 3 (53:43):
So I knew that when my own when my mother died,
I felt like nobody in the world going through except
my brother and my sister, and you'd like cling to
them at that moment, and they have that.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
So that is something you just hope in the best.
And this is their life. I don't have to say,
except you know, the money thing. It's like sometimes money
is more trouble than it's worth. And you know, you
can only be in one room aute time anyway, you know.
And it's interesting because when I was going through the case,
Fotus had a lot of complaints about the divorce system
and how he's being treated unfairly, and some of his

(54:17):
complaints ring kind of true because some of her behavior
seems like a little crazy, that's how he was putting it,
like her intense nervousness seems crazy until you know that
he killed her, and then all her warnings were correct,
and everybody who told her she was acting kind of crazy,
we're wrong. And basically you realize that what's missing from

(54:39):
all these legal documents is her fear, which is the
whole thing, you know. And when I'm talking about people
that are rich, we're talking about this happened before the divorce.
For the last five three four years of her life.
This woman, with all this money and all this talent
and looks and physical gifts, was terrified. And there's nothing

(55:00):
worse than living in fear. Twenty four hours to be
fear that's inside your own house.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.

(55:38):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen
Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and

(55:59):
Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more.
And if you know of a historical crime that could
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