By David A. F. Sweet
“There are no boring psychopaths,” writes Glencoe native Rich Cohen in his latest work of non-fiction, Murder in the Dollhouse. “They hum with electricity…decisions that seem inexplicable in the abstract – marrying a man one month after his divorce, following him to Connecticut – make sense in the presence of that electric glow.”
“It turned into Anna Karenina — the court documents, her e-mails between her and her estranged husband,” said author Rich Cohen about his research into the Jennifer Dulos murder.
Published May 20 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Cohen’s true-crime book examines the life of Jennifer Dulos. A graduate of Brown University who ended up living in New Canaan with her five children, there’s plenty of drama once she meets her husband — Fotis Dulos, a fellow Brown alumnus from Greece. A relationship rife with fights, adultery, kidnapping threats and, finally, her 2019 murder – amid one of the nastiest divorces in Connecticut had history – are detailed. Last seen dropping her kids off at New Canaan Country Day School, Jennifer’s body has never been found – a fact that still haunts Cohen.
“There were buried bodies from the Revolutionary War found here in Ridgefield a few years ago when homeowners extended their basement,” Cohen said. “When someone is putting up a new house, they might find Jennifer’s body. It might happen 300 years from now.”
Cohen covered the murder trial for the weekly newsletter Air Mail, founded in 2018 by Graydon Carter – who headed Vanity Fair for a quarter century — and former New York Times reporter Alessandra Stanley. He discovered that Jennifer, who perished at 56, had been a promising writer – an author of plays that received positive reviews from The Village Voice and the New York Observer who also crafted a blog.
“When I got into all the material around it with the arrest warrants and started meeting the people, I identified with her so intensely. It’s like she lived a mirror version of my life – coming out of college and becoming a writer,” said Cohen, a prolific author who has penned books about two memorable Chicago sports champions, the 1985 Bears and the 2016 Cubs. “We were at some of the same big, raging parties in New York, though I don’t remember meeting her.
“I wrote about 10 stories for Air Mail about the case. You think you’re done. But you keep thinking about and dreaming about these people. Dreaming about her.”
Convinced he would be writing the next In Cold Blood – a book he devoured during a college road trip, from which he took away the importance of the victim in such a story – he was surprised when Murder in the Dollhouse became more like a Leo Tolstoy novel.
“It turned into Anna Karenina — the court documents, her e-mails between her and her estranged husband,” Cohen explained. “Really intense information about a person’s life.”
The day of the murder, Cohen points out Fotis left his phone at his house so it couldn’t track him. But his biggest mistake was taking it with him as he drove far away to Hartford to dispose of blood-stained towels and more, which the police discovered.
As both a child and an adult, Jennifer Dulos was obsessed with dollhouses.
During his trial for murder, Fotis got so desperate that one of his lawyers, Norm Pattis – known for defending anybody, including a father sent to prison for 70 years for dropping his baby off a bridge – introduced the novel Gone Girl defense. Based on the best-selling book, it claimed Jennifer faked her own death. Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn even issued a statement saying she was sickened that the lawyer would use a work of fiction as a defense.
Cohen noted Fotis represented the biggest challenge he faced in putting together the book.
“I had trouble understanding him. I can’t imagine doing what he did in any scenario,” Cohen said. “It was a challenge to think, ‘Are people who kill in cold blood on the same spectrum as everyone else, and just went onto an extreme on the spectrum, or are they different?’ I started to feel they were different.
“You put a normal person under that pressure of a divorce, they’ll have a midlife crisis, start doing drugs – but a psychopath? To them it’s almost like other people are characters in video games – they can’t feel them at all. She became an obstacle in his way, and he moved her.”
A memorial to Jennifer sprang up near Fotis’ house after he was charged with murder – he was captured on camera ripping the display apart. Later, when the day his bond was revoked because properties he put up were in foreclosure, he killed himself in his garage via carbon monoxide poisoning. He left a suicide note, casting blame on many but not himself. His paramour Michelle Troconis, who was seen with him when he disposed of bloody towels, was found guilty on six counts of conspiracy to commit murder; two of the Dulos kids tore into her during her sentencing. She is serving a 14-year prison term.
In putting together the book — a sensational read, buoyed by muscular reporting and sterling writing — Cohen wanted to bring Jennifer alive as a person.
“One of my goals was to bring her to the center of her whole story, not to let her be defined by her death,” said Cohen. The only photo in the entire book is a small one of part of her face on the cover because “a photo’s a moment in time – the image becomes drained of meaning. A book should make her bigger, not smaller.”
Among his other works, Cohen wrote Pee Wees about a season in the life of a hockey parent following his 12-year-old son.
And what about the title, Murder in the Dollhouse? Jennifer was obsessed with dolls and houses as child – and even as an adult.
“She attempted to create the perfect home like the one she wanted in the dollhouse,” Cohen said. “The brutality of the world came into this perfect vision.”
Rich Cohen will speak about Murder in the Dollhouse June 10 at The Book Stall in Winnetka.
Unsung Gems columnist David A. F. Sweet can be reached at dafsweet@aol.com
