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State Police Searching Septic Tank For Bones At Home Where Jennifer And Fotis Dulos Once Lived
The Connecticut home is located a little more than a mile away from where Fotis Dulos died by suicide.
Police drained a septic tank at a Connecticut home where Jennifer Dulos and Fotis Dulos once lived together in a continued effort to find Jennifer’s still-missing body.
Connecticut State Police spent about eight hours intensely searching an Avon home and its surrounding wooded property on Thursday, the Stamford Advocate reported. In addition to police investigators, cadaver dogs and a septic company assisted in the search of the area.
The property’s septic tank was emptied and its sludge is expected to be examined for bone fragments and other evidence, an unnamed source told the Hartford Courant. It’s not clear what evidence, if any, was found on the property.
Jennifer and Fotis rented the home for a few months in 2010 and while the home has been vacant since 2017, its current owner hired Fotis in 2018 to repair water damage, according to the Stamford Advocate.
Jennifer vanished last May amid a heated divorce and custody battle for the couple's five children. Fotis died on Jan. 30 after an apparent suicide attempt in his garage while facing murder and kidnapping charges in Jennifer’s presumed death.
Although Jennifer's body has never been found, an arrest warrant issued by investigators alleged that Fotis was “lying in wait” for Jennifer the day she vanished and that “the crime and clean-up are believed to have occurred” shortly after. Dulos’ former girlfriend Michelle Troconis and his former civil lawyer Kent Douglas Mawhinney have been eyed as alleged co-conspirators in the case. Both been charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the case.
The site of Thursday’s search is located just miles from two Farmington properties which Fotis owned. He took his life in one of these properties — located just over a mile away from the Avon home, the Hartford Courant reports.
Fotis’ homes have been central to the search for Jennifer. While search warrants never specifically mentioned the Avon home, investigators believe he made several stops between his two properties on the day that Jennifer vanished. On that day, Fotis allegedly enlisted Troconis to help clean up blood in an employee’s pickup truck while at one of his properties.
There is also a 90-minute window that afternoon where Fotis’ Jeep is unaccounted for; it was spotted on surveillance video leaving one of Fotis’ properties at 2:24 p.m. and it doesn’t return until 3:55 p.m., according to the warrant.
David Ford, who owns the Avon property, told the Stamford Advocate that police “left no stone unturned” during Thursday's search.
“I brought them in every room and showed them every nook and cranny,” Ford said. “I told them that ‘if you want to knock down a wall, go ahead.’”
Mawhinney, who is jailed on a $2 million bond, is expected to appear in court next on July 9.
Troconis is expected to appear in court on Aug. 6. She is currently on house arrest and recently put out a statement alleging ignorance.
“Whether or not Fotis Dulos was capable of doing the things the police and prosecutors accused him of doing, I do not know. But based on what I have learned in the last year, I think it was a mistake to have trusted him," Troconis said.
Charges against Fotis have been dropped following his death.
