In the early days of the investigation into the disappearance of Jennifer Dulos in 2019, Michelle Troconis was adamant that she didn’t know what happened to the mother of five, whose husband was her lover as the Duloses fought through a contentious divorce.
“I can spend a month with you guys,” she told investigators in her second interview with detectives, less than a week after the first, the Stamford Advocate reported. “I can do whatever you want, but I didn’t do it.”
Prosecutors played the video of that June 6, 2019, interview on Friday as the 11th day of Troconis’s trial in connection with Jennifer Dulos’s disappearance and presumed murder got under way.
Dulos’s husband, Fotis Dulos, committed suicide after he was charged with his wife’s murder, leaving Troconis to face prosecutors alone.
Detectives repeatedly pressured Troconis, telling her they “know you know” where Jennifer Dulos is — and in the first interview, telling her she was “probably one of the most hated women in America right now.”
“We just want you to come clean and tell us everything you know,” former Connecticut State Police Detective John Kimball, who was on the stand Thursday and Friday for the videos, says in the interview.
Troconis told police that in the days after Jennifer Dulos’s disappearance, she told her lover she was “fed up.”
“After this is finished and she appears I’m leaving,” she told police she said to him. “I’m going to Colorado.”
She told the detectives her two years in Connecticut were “two years of torture” that were “like a nightmare.” Dulos, she said, begged her to stay.
Kimball asked Troconis what she thinks happened to Jennifer Dulos.
“I think think that she’s still somewhere, I hope, hiding,” she told the detectives, sharing a story she said Fotis Dulos once told her that his wife had a rift with her parents when she was younger and disappeared temporarily.
Kimball pointed out Dulos’s five young children and reminded Troconis of her own 12-year-old daughter.
“Would you ever leave and go hide and not tell your 12-year-old daughter where you were?” he asked.
It would “never even cross my mind,” Troconis acknowledged.
Through much of the interview, investigators hammered at the timeline of when Troconis saw Dulos on the morning of May 24, the day Jennifer Dulos disappeared. In the initial interview, she said she saw Fotis Dulos that morning at the house they shared in Farmington, although she said she had slept with her daughter that night because of storms in the area.
In the second interview, she admitted that she likely hadn’t seen him that morning — the morning prosecutors say he was at his wife’s house in New Canaan killing her — but had instead seen him in the afternoon.
The investigators also pressed her about Fotis Dulos’s trip into Hartford to dump items in the trash — items that turned out to be articles of bloody clothing and other evidence in the case. Troconis accompanied Dulos on that trip but insisted she didn’t know what her lover was throwing away.
“No one is going to believe you didn’t know,” Connecticut State Police Detective Corey Clabby told her.
Troconis said the garbage dumping wasn’t unusual, but the locations Dulos chose were. She said she asked Dulos why they were dumping garbage in Hartford, and he just told her to relax.
Troconis, 49, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, tampering with evidence, and hindering prosecution.
