MURDER IN THE DOLLHOUSE: The Jennifer Dulos Story, by Rich Cohen
On May 24, 2019, Jennifer Dulos dropped her children off at school in New Canaan, Conn., then drove home in her Chevy Suburban. She was supposed to swap out the Suburban for the Range Rover so that she could drive herself to a doctor’s appointment in New York City, only she never made it.
In the wake of Jennifer Dulos’s disappearance, suspicion fell on her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos, a builder of luxury homes, who was spotted on surveillance footage disposing of bloody trash — along with his girlfriend, described as “an international party girl.” Fotis, presumably to avoid criminal justice, poisoned himself with carbon monoxide from his S.U.V. (His girlfriend is currently incarcerated.)
It was all a terrible and senseless tragedy, no question, and five children are now parentless in its wake, but what made it news on such a massive scale? Replace New Canaan with Hartford, the Chevy Suburban with a Nissan Versa, and the wealthy wife with a single mother struggling to keep her kids afloat and ask whether Connecticut would have mounted its most expensive-ever criminal investigation on her behalf. Ask whether her final hours would have played out everywhere from The New York Times to Vanity Fair to “Dateline NBC” to a Lifetime docudrama tastefully titled “Gone Mom.”
I know, I know: I’m being a true-crime buzzkill. But it is to Rich Cohen’s credit that, in his never-boring “Murder in the Dollhouse,” he pauses over “the media’s obsession with dead white women” and declares outright that the Dulos murder was “about money — it’s always about money.”
He proves his point over the course of his book, though you do have to get past some initial grandiosity: “The more I learned, the more I felt as if I knew Jennifer, as if her world and mine were contiguous,” he writes. “I felt like I was seeing the story of my own generation in a convex mirror — distorted but recognizable.”
Maybe we can skip the mirror part and follow the cash because therein lies the tale, and Cohen, a prolific journalist and author of 14 books, is awfully good at telling it. With great skill he sketches the origin story of Jennifer Farber, who was the niece of Liz Claiborne and the beloved second daughter of a wealthy financier. Growing up in Brooklyn Heights, she was a child of privilege, eschewing the subway and bus in favor of a black town car. She never held a paying job, but she did like to write, and she enrolled for a time in N.Y.U.’s graduate dramatic writing program.
As Cohen tells it, she really just wanted a family of her own. She had spent a good part of her youth peopling a Victorian dollhouse, and the décor of her first adult apartment had included an empty baby crib. Still unattached at 35, she began to panic.
Enter Fotis Dulos, a handsome Greek water skier, former Brown classmate and Columbia-accredited financial analyst. He was also married, but that obstacle was soon surmounted.
Burning to have children, Jennifer headed straight for in vitro fertilization. Two sets of twins followed, then a fifth child, apparently unplanned. The money bleed had just begun — because kids in suburban Connecticut require babysitters and nannies and, when they get older, boat rentals, horseback lessons, lacrosse and ice hockey equipment. When such families travel, they require first-class seats, five-star hotels.
The financial solution offered by Jennifer’s dad was to float his son-in-law millions of dollars in cash and guaranteed bank loans to launch a luxury real estate business. But then her dad died, the business floundered and her husband’s eye wandered, landing at last on a snow skier with a child of her own.
By 2017, Jennifer and Fotis had separated, but this did nothing to ameliorate their financial woes, because they placed their marriage at the mercy of Stamford, Conn., which, as Cohen writes, happens to boast “the most punishing, money-friendly divorce court in America.”
Plunged into this zero-sum dystopia, the Duloses soon ditched their attorneys for expensive “scorched-earth lawyers,” who justified their retainers with a sea of filings — more than 400 in all.
Twenty-three months later, their divorce hadn’t even left the starting line, but Fotis, chafing at court orders he saw as punitive and staggering under millions of dollars’ worth of debt, had reached his breaking point.
We might write off his ensuing act of homicide as the work of a psychopath — Cohen certainly does — but Fotis had no prior history of physical violence, and Cohen’s own reporting suggests that, if the Duloses had somehow managed to sidestep a divorce industry that monetizes revenge, they might have lived to tell their own tale.
At least, it’s pretty to think so. In the end, a lot of people got rich off Jennifer and Fotis — and nothing got fixed. Her body has still not been found.
MURDER IN THE DOLLHOUSE: The Jennifer Dulos Story | By Rich Cohen | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 352 pp. | $29
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