She Stares at Her Victim’s Son in Court, Thinks She Can Face Him — Until He Speaks

I want to end with the lesson my mom taught me. Leave everything the same or better than you found it. Michelle Traonus, you did the opposite. You should be punished. >> She stares at her victim’s son in court, certain nothing, he says, can shake her. Michelle Traconis believed she could walk away from this.

 From the moment investigators first questioned her to the day her trial ended, she maintained she had no idea what really happened or that the woman at the center of this case was dead. For a while, she never had to answer for it. But then prosecutors started laying out the evidence piece by piece, and everything changed.

 This is the chilling case of a Connecticut woman who helped mastermind one of the state’s most shocking crimes. And every detail you’re about to see has been verified through court testimony, police reports, and evidence entered at trial. Because what began on a Friday morning in New Kanan, Connecticut, would challenge everything you think you know about marriage, motive, and what a camera sees when two people tell two different stories.

 Friday, May 24th, 2019 didn’t happen in isolation. Two years earlier, Jennifer Dulos had filed for divorce from her husband, Fotus, after 13 years of marriage. While Fotus ran a luxury homebuilding business, Jennifer came for money of her own. Her late father had built a Wall Street brokerage firm, and court records would later show that Fotus owed Jennifer<unk>’s mother more than a million dollars.

 But money wasn’t what kept dragging them back into court. The divorce turned into one of the most bitter custody battles Connecticut court had seen. More than 400 filings piled up over the next 2 years. Jennifer warned the judge that Fotus had threatened to take their five children and disappear. She said she feared what he might do if she sought full custody.

 She even asked for a restraining order, but the request was denied. Connecticut law required proof of physical abuse, and Jennifer could not produce any evidence that the court found acceptable. At one point, Fotus’ own attorneys asked the court to order a psychological evaluation of Jennifer’s mother, Gloria Farber, questioning her mental health in the same filings that were supposed to be about the children.

 Farber’s attorneys called it an attempt to publicly shame her. They said it showed, in their words, his capacity for cruelty. Michelle was not a new presence in the children’s lives by then. She had known the family since 2017 when a nanny first introduced her to Fotus at a water ski club in Miami. The children even had a nickname for her.

 Jennifer eventually learned about the relationship and confronted Fotus directly. The family’s nanny later testified that the confrontation frightened Jennifer badly enough that her weight and her sleep both suffered in the months that followed. In 2018, a judge suspended Fotus’ visitation rights entirely. The reason he had let the children spend time with his girlfriend, Michelle Traonus, against a direct court order, and he had asked two of his sons to lie about it to a court-appointed psychologist.

 For a while, Jennifer had sole physical custody. Footus fought his way back to supervised visits 7 hours every other weekend. He was still barred from letting the children near Michelle. Less than 2 months after that order, Jennifer Dulos vanished. Friday, May 24th, 2019. Jennifer Doulo dropped her five children off at school in New Cananan the way she did most mornings.

Surveillance cameras near her home caught someone in a dark hoodie riding a bicycle toward her house that morning. Investigators later said the bike matched one photo Dulos had owned since childhood. Another camera caught someone driving O Jennifer’s car away from the house at 10:25 a.m. What those cameras captured, nobody watching them live that morning understood yet.

 The family’s nanny, Lauren Almeida, arrived at the house around 11:30 that morning. Jennifer was supposed to be there. She was not. On the counter, Almeida found a granola bar and a cup of tea, both untouched. In the pantry, 10 rolls of paper towels were missing from a 12-pack opened only the day before. She called Jennifer’s phone. No answer.

 She called again. Still nothing. By evening, friends could not reach Jennifer either. She had missed calls. She also missed a scheduled appointment. For a mother who tracked her children’s schedules down to the minute, missing all of it at once was not like her. Friends reported her missing that night.

 Police went to her rented home on Wells Lane. What officers found made this look like something far darker than a missing person’s case. Could be up there, but >> there’s something back here, too. >> Splatter. >> Whatever they hit went down this side of the vehicle. It’s up here, too. It’s like a pattern here. >> Clue, >> right? Not for usually if you hit a deer and it blowing your car.

 You take it to the car wash and get it cleaned. Especially your Land Rover. >> Yeah, it is sold me. Especially the fact that we’ve got a mess of the other side. >> There was blood on the garage floor. There was blood on a Range Rover parked inside. Something happened in that garage. That was for sure. Her own SUV turned up abandoned in a park about 3 miles from the house.

 The battery had died, so the police needed to have it towed for processing. There was no sign of Jennifer inside. In fact, to this day, her body has never been found. Keep that in mind. Investigators pulled photo doulos’s cell phone data within hours of the missing person’s report. That data pointed them 70 mi northeast to a 4-m stretch of Albany Avenue in Hartford.

New Kanan police did not know Hartford well, so they walked into the Hartford Police Department and asked for help. 20 minutes turned into 12 hours of footage pulled from cameras strategically placed across the city. What those 12 hours revealed changed the entire case. A man matching Photo Duelus’ description driving a pickup truck borrowed from a former employee of his own construction company.

 Over and over, the truck slowed down. A man stepped out. A bag went into a trash can. The truck pulled forward. It happened again and again. More than 30 stops along that same street. In at least one clip, a second person can be seen in the passenger seat reaching toward the sidewalk. Police later identified her as Michelle Traonus. Detectives searched those Hartford trash cans days later.

 Inside, they found clothing sized for a woman. They found zip ties. They found a kitchen sponge, a mop handle, work gloves, and a set of altered license plates sealed inside a mailing envelope dropped into a storm drain a few blocks away. Lab tests confirmed what investigators already suspected. The blood on those items matched Jennifer Dulos.

 Think about that for a moment. A mother of five had vanished less than a day earlier, and the evidence tied to her disappearance was already sitting in public trash bins, waiting for anyone willing to look hard enough. There was more. Investigators also learned from one of Fotus Dulos’s employees that Fotus had ordered him to swap out the seats in his Suburban.

 When investigators tracked down the original seats and sent them for testing, lab technicians found what appeared to be blood. It matched Jennifer Dulles’s DNA. Keep that in mind. It would become one more piece of evidence the defense would spend the entire trial trying to explain away.

 While detectives built their case on paper, other officers searched for something no warrant could produce on its own. Jennifer herself. They searched Waven Park in New Cananan where her SUV was found. They searched a mulch dump nearby. They searched a reservoir half a mile from Fotus’ own home in Farmington. They searched a pond in Haven where Fotus had once taken the children to water ski, a pond Jennifer herself had described in divorce filings as a place he pushed them too hard.

Investigators went further than public parks and ponds. At Fotus’ own Farmington property, they brought in ground penetrating radar and an excavator, tearing into his own backyard while news cameras watched from the road. They searched a family property in Poundidge, New York that belonged to Jennifer’s side of the family, too.

 None of those searches turned up a body. Photo Dulos and Michelle Traonus were arrested on June 1st, 2019, one week after Jennifer vanished. >> Where is she? Where is she? >> Charges against you, >> Michelle. Where is Jennifer? Jennifer, >> do you know where Jennifer is with her disappearance? >> Are you Are you innocent? Both were charged with evidence tampering and hindering prosecution.

 A judge set bond ordered a GPS monitor for Fotus and had both surrendered their passports. He was barred from any contact with his own five children. Days later, Fotus violated the terms of his release. His GPS tracker showed he had crossed into New York while driving on a country road, something he would explain away as an accident.

 On the other hand, his attorney came up with a theory for her disappearance, one he would later float to reporters gathered outside the courthouse. He painted a narrative of Jennifer staging her own disappearance and then carrying out a revenge su just to make Fotus look guilty and cost him his custody of the children in the process.

 Fotus made his own case to the cameras. While he acknowledged that it was almost always the spouse that was guilty in these kinds of cases, he insisted he was innocent. But then investigators kept working and that claim was not backed up by a single piece of physical evidence they had. In the weeks that followed, Fotus avoided cameras entirely, except when he chose not to.

 When a television crew staked out his Farmington property, hoping for an interview, he called the police on them himself, then told the responding officer he did not want them to come back. By now, the case had national attention. Nearly 500 tips had already come in from across the country, and reporters were camped outside a private multi-million dollar neighborhood that had never seen anything like this before.

 Family and friends of Jennifer’s pushed back publicly on comparisons to other famous missing wife cases, insisting this was not a mystery. They said they already knew who was responsible. Draconus had her own version of events. In a recorded police interview around this time, she denied any wrongdoing. Investigators found something harder to explain away than a denial.

 The arrest warrant revealed that Fotus and Draconis had written out what detectives called alibi scripts, written accounts of where they claimed to have been that morning for them to memorize. But no matter how they pressed her for the truth, she insisted that neither she nor Fotus had anything to do with Jennifer’s disappearance. >> We know you have information and we need to know that.

 We do not want to go through, listen, we don’t want to go through the script because we found the script and if we start to review the script to rehearse the story that we found documentation of it, our instructions from the state’s attorney will walk out that door. And when we walk out that door, that will be it. This is coming from the state attorney.

So, please tell I don’t want to hear the script. I want to hear what happened to Jennifer and I want to hear who’s involved in her murder. >> I don’t know. You’re asking me something that I don’t know. >> But can I say something? Don’t get upset to me. >> I’m not upset. I just want you to understand. >> Okay. You’ll have you’ll have a chance.

You found a piece of paper that mirrors your statement to us. We don’t want to talk about that. I slept with her. Her alarm mine are set up at I think hers is at 6:35. Mine’s for sure 6:40. >> And we woke up. She takes showers. I go to my room. I also do the same thing. >> He was there when we woke up. >> He was there at the house.

>> He was in the house. >> Okay. So, what if I were to tell you that I have evidence that he was not in the house at that time? You see what I’m saying? Do you understand what I’m saying? I don’t want to be over dramatic. I don’t want to This is not this is not any kind of threat.

 I just want you to understand you have a daughter who’s 12 years old. You have a mother home your mom. >> Okay. All right. You understand that? You don’t want to go to prison. She went further and tried to convince detectives of the idea that Jennifer actually just went into hiding. And I’ve seen in the newspaper that she got >> they’re asking you for your only your knowledge.

 Not what you read in the newspaper. Not what you think the >> And I think that she’s still somewhere hiding. You guys said that you find blood. So obviously she’s not hiding her food. What photos have told me that in the past before they were married I don’t know when how many years she fought with her parents and she disappeared and she moved to Austin and she got an inherit of an aunt of $3 million and she lived there like for 3 years in Aspen and she changed her name to Jennifer Bay.

>> A friend and former lawyer of Fotus’ Kent Mhenny turned up in both of those alibi accounts. Investigators interviewed him twice. Years later, he would be charged in the same conspiracy. It would take another round of questioning for Traconis to finally tell the truth, or at least the parts of it that didn’t incriminate her.

 This time, she admitted to detectives that she hadn’t been fully honest with them the other times they brought her in. >> You ready to admit that you weren’t 100% truthful with us trying to pursue? >> That should be an easy That should be an easy answer. >> Yes. and she finally gave them some key pieces of information they would need to crack the case.

>> At some point, I’m coming out and he gave me the paper towel and I threw it in that in that gar towel. >> Yes. Yes. >> What was he using paper towel? >> He said that he spilled I think it was coffee >> in in one of the cars. He that’s what he told me. I’m not sure if that’s true or not. I thought paper towel was dirty.

>> What color was paper towel? What color was the dirt paper towel? >> Brown. >> Brown. >> Having a real hard time believing that you don’t know what’s going on here. >> He walked and he grabbed me. He gave me a piece of paper or the toilet the paper towel and I put it inside where I had the bag of cleaning that what I was cleaning the house.

>> Okay. Did Did you see spilled coffee? >> No, I didn’t see that. >> Did you see a coffee cup? >> No, because I didn’t look inside the car. >> Did the paper towel smell like coffee? >> No, I didn’t smell it. >> Always still. You’re holding that coffee sticks. >> But I hold the paper towel, but I didn’t smell it. I didn’t see that.

>> But even still, you didn’t smell coffee. >> No. >> You know how coffee is? When you smell it, it sticks. This is Pavll’s truck. >> Mhm. >> Did you ever hear of something called luminol? >> Mhm. >> Luminol is something we use to look at evidence. >> Mhm. >> To see if blood was somewhere. >> Mhm. >> When it hits the blood, it illuminates.

>> Mhm. >> What’s all that? >> That’s blood. >> And where do you think that belongs to? Who do you think that belongs to? >> Training frames. know stuff that you’re not telling us. >> No, I don’t. >> That’s the man you’re protecting cuz that’s the sick >> him. I’m not protecting him. I I said and I really don’t want to see him ever again.

>> Draconis thought she could take some of the heat off of herself by throwing FOTUS under the bus. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. She was about to find that out. Weeks after her interrogation, Traonus asked a judge for an order keeping Fotus and his legal team away from her.

 The judge granted it. The two codefendants who had once lived under the same roof were no longer speaking to each other except through their lawyers. On January 7th, 2020, prosecutors charged Fotus Dulos with murder, felony murder, and kidnapping. But he wouldn’t even get to stand trial. Just a few days later, he died by an apparent suic.

 Just days after those charges were filed, that left one person to answer for what happened in that garage and for the hours that followed it. Michelle Traonus. Investigators eventually charged Mahini 2 with conspiracy to commit murder. He pleaded not guilty. Traonus’ trial began in January 2024, nearly 5 years after Jennifer Dulos disappeared.

 It ran 7 weeks. Her mother, Marisella Ariaza, sat beside her through much of it. Trachonus’ family had one answer for every piece of evidence prosecutors raised. An innocent explanation. The jury would hear all of it before deciding whether they believed it. The state built its case around three things.

 The blood in the garage, the truck in Hartford, and the woman riding in the passenger seat. Lauren Almeida, the nanny who had first introduced Traconis to the family, testified about watching Jennifer’s fear grow across those two years. >> You just describe for the jury what you saw. >> So, after I pulled into the garage, they saw me pull in and they both went inside.

 And so, um, I had some of the kids in the car. I don’t remember where we were coming back from, but we walked in through the garage to the mud room to the kitchen and um I just kind of like focused on the kids getting them to where they needed to be. And it was later on that Jennifer told me >> what focus was saying. >> So I was in one of the kids’ rooms and we were just doing a puzzle together where all of a sudden like we started to hear screaming and Jennifer ran through the bedroom door.

 I don’t believe that she knew that we were in there, but she ran through the door. Vot was yelling. I’m not sure what he was yelling. And she closed the door behind her and pushed her body up against the door and he was trying to get in. And I mean, her face was just she was terrified. And she saw that myself and her daughter were there.

 And to be honest, I kind of froze cuz I didn’t know what to do. And then when he pushed the door more, he saw that his daughter and myself were in there. And his demeanor totally changed. He went from yelling to like, “Jennifer, I just want to talk.” like very softspoken. It was so weird. And so eventually he walked away cuz myself and her daughter were there.

 She told me she needed to get out of the house and so she left me with the kids and she just got in the car and I think she just went down the street to really just like kind of catch her breath. >> The truck’s owner took the stand too. Pavle Gumi, who worked construction for FOTUS at the time, told the jury he had lent Fotus that pickup truck himself with no idea what it would end up carrying that night.

>> Do you recall whether or not this is the first time you’d operated it since Friday? >> I don’t recall it. >> Approximately what time did you arrive at work >> around 8:00 in the morning? >> And just to be clear, when we say work, you’re not driving directly to a project site.

 You’re going to the office of Fort Jefferson crossing. Is that correct? >> Yes. When you arrived at Fort Jefferson crossing at 8 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, May 28th, where did you go? >> I went into the kitchen for Jefferson crossing. >> Why did you go into the kitchen? >> To ask us what veo I’m taking and giving the heat to my home. >> And was this your routine every Monday? Yes.

Unless I saw him in the office. >> I’m sorry. >> Unless I saw him in the office. >> When you um got to the kitchen, who did you see? >> I saw Lewis and Michelle. >> And where were they located? >> They were standing in the kitchen. >> The defense had one main argument. Fus had no reason to want Jennifer dead because the custody case was starting to turn in his favor.

 Prosecutors laid out three separate acts of cleanup. Each one new, each one building on the last. Trachonis had helped clean a vehicle investigators believed was used in the crime. She had burnt evidence in the fireplace of Fotus’ Farmington home, and cell data showed she had handled Fotus’ phone in the hours after Jennifer died, helping build the timeline he would later use as an alibi.

 Two of her own recorded police interviews from June 2nd and June 6th, 2019 were played for the jury in full. Traonus chose not to testify in her own defense. In closing arguments, a prosecutor told the jury that there was no doubt that Trachonis had been part of the plan. Another put it simpler. She and Fotus had worked together to make it happen and it worked until they got caught.

 Are all these things just coincidences or is the defendant guilty? Now, during Guadir, we asked each of you if the state proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, would you be able to come out here and find the defendant guilty in open court? And each of you promised us that you could. We’ve done that.

 We’ve met our burden of proof in this case. Now, I want to show you I have two minutes left here. The timelines one last time. We’re going to talk about these timelines. Now, is to the left. The defendants timelines are to the right. And they have been referred to as timelines, but they were really just a script, weren’t they? And maybe some of you remember from English class in high school, every script has three acts, doesn’t it? The first act was the premeditation and killing of Jennifer Dulos.

The second act was the cover up through the destruction of evidence and the defendant’s lies. And now we’ve reached the third act. Except she doesn’t get to write it. You do. You write the third act of this script with your verdict. >> What’s the ending going to be? >> Tconis’ attorney pushed back hard. What I want to start off by pointing out is that what really happened on May 24th, 2019, because whatever was going on that day, whatever Photus Dulos’s role was in the disappearance and we’ll I’ll say the likely death of of Jennifer Dulos,

Michelle Traonus did not know. She did not know that Fotus Doulos planned to harm her. Everything suggested that things were going well and it was to the contrary. In fact, she didn’t know that Photus was capable of doing something like this. A man who was dedicated to his five children, had been in court for years trying to get custody back.

The state has made what I would suggest are unfounded and unfair assumptions and has speculated that Michelle Traonus had to know what was going on that she was because she was romantically linked with Fotus that she was somehow involved in this nefarious murderous plot. But but that’s not reality.

 That’s more like one of these cable TV movies, scripted movies. It’s not based on the facts that you heard during this trial. >> On March 1st, 2024, after 2 and 1/2 days of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict. Guilty on every count, conspiracy to commit murder, hindering prosecution, two counts of tampering with physical evidence, two counts of conspiracy to tamper with physical evidence.

 Your honor, Michelle Trapona stands before this court after being found guilty by a jury of her peers to the charge of conspiracy to commit murder of Jennifer Dulos. tampering and conspiracy to commit tampering for disposing of evidence in Harford on May 24th, 2019 and tampering and the conspiracy to commit tampering for destroying evidence in the Toyota Tacoma on May 29, 2019 at Russell Speeders in Avon.

 She was found guilty by a jury of her peers after trial as well as hindering prosecution. Before I go into the state’s remarks and recommendation, I’m going to ask the court to hear from the people who are most devastated by the defendant’s selfish, manipulative, and cruel actions, by her agreement to murder Jennifer Dulos, by her assistance in covering it up, and by her failure to accept any responsibility or show any remorse.

I’d ask the court to hear from Jennifer Dulos’s mother, sister, five children, and the friends who have kept Jennifer’s spirit alive despite the cruelty of Michelle Traonus. >> Trachis lowered her head onto the defense table. She had maintained her innocence for nearly 5 years. The jury did not believe her.

 Her sentencing was set for May 31st, 2024, 5 years, and 1 week after Jennifer Dulos vanished. 80 people filled the courtroom to hear the judge’s decision. Jennifer’s oldest son, Petro, took the stand. >> My mother was everything to me. But during the divorce, I became very bitter with everyone around me, especially mom, because she was always trying to help me.

This meant that I hurt the person closest to me because I didn’t know how else to voice my pain. The defendant’s actions mean that I will never be able to tell my mom how sorry I am for not being a better son when she needed me. I will never be able to tell mom how proud of her courage I am. Most importantly, how much I love her.

 This fact haunts me every day. There are feelings and thoughts that I will never be able to express again because my mom was the key to those parts of me. I’m upset that I will never know the man I could have become if my mom was still here to guide me. She was my hero and now I often feel lost without her comforting smile and her meaningful discussions.

 I wish I could share my victories with her, but I can’t cuz she is not here anymore. I wish I knew she was in the stands watching me play. I wish I could come home and show her my grades and feel the genuine pride in me that I only got from her. I wish you could sit for hours and discuss everything there is to talk about.

I wish you could see me mature from a boy into a young man. I wish I could hug mom again, but I can’t now. Your honor, I understand that sitting over there is a mother with a child and a family who love her. My mom once had that. We once had that and she helped destroy it. That woman appeals to our sympathy under the guise of being a mother.

She has desecrated the meaning of that word for me. This statement is primarily about my loss, but I also want to highlight my mom’s exceptional nature. The number of people who have rallied around us is a testament to the devotion she inspired in those close to her. I want to end with the lesson my mom taught me.

 Leave everything the same or better than you found it. Michelle Traonus, you did the opposite. You should be punished. >> Trachonus’ own family and friends painted a different picture of her that day. Her pastor told the court she volunteered at a soup kitchen and had a heart for children with disabilities. I’ve served as the senior minister of Avon Congregational Church for over 5 years since 2019 when Michelle and her family literally knocked on the door.

The members of our church have been their sanctuary and their spiritual faith family. My years of study at Yale University with a master of divinity have been augmented by clinical pastoral education. This is a rigorous process of chapency along with personal psychological studies and backgrounds. Prior to ordination in the United Church of Christ, I served on the governing board of the Hatam Killingworth youth and family services.

 While working at Regional School District 17 and years before that in Florida, I served as a guardian at Lidum, providing my assessments to the court from interviews with families, doctors, psychologists, and children in order to recommend custody placement for the Department of Children and Families. seeking spiritual support and faithfilled fellowship.

 Even though English was not her first language, Michelle participated regularly in both worship services and activities of mission and fellowship. When her parents and sisters visited Connecticut, they too participated. I wish the world could know the Michelle I know one not defined in media bites scribal gloss and an agendadriven caricature.

>> It did not change the sentence. >> Total effective sentence 20 years execution suspended after 14 and 12 years 5 years probation. You will have an opportunity to challenge every finding that the jury made and every ruling that the court made. >> Madam clerk, you can give the defendant her notice of right to appear.

>> Prosecutors had asked for the maximum 45 years. Judge Kevin Randolph sentenced Michelle Traconis to 20 years, suspended after 14 and a half, followed by 5 years of probation. Her attorney asked the judge to release her on bond while she appealed. The judge said no. The appeal bond that the court set was not something that Miss Traonus or her family were able to uh meet.

 I’m asking for something more in line with what she had been released on bond for for the last 5 years. I would note that after your honor went on vacation, the state asked for additional conditions which included um making her move to Connecticut and remain within the bounds of Connecticut. My position, your honor, is the court obviously took that into consideration when it set that high bond that she was not a resident of Connecticut because that’s what the state had then argued.

 I’m asking that if there if she’s going to be released that the court set a $2 million bond, but with a condition that she reside in Connecticut and not leave without permission. And >> the court is going well council court is going to decline to set a an appeal box. Michelle Traonus is currently serving her sentence at a Connecticut women’s prison.

 She is the only person from this case still behind bars. Kent Mauhini, the friend and former lawyer once charged alongside her, pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of interfering with an officer. He was sentenced to time served. A probate judge declared Jennifer Dulos legally dead in 2023. No one has ever recovered her remains.