Before she disappeared in the spring of last year, Jennifer Farber seemed to have everything she wanted. She had a handsome Greek American husband, Fotis Dulos, whom she married in a big affair at the Metropolitan Club in 2004. She had five young children, all with Greek names, in a nod to Dulos’s country of ancestry. She lived in spectacular comfort in mansions in Connecticut, with enough help that she could’ve continued the writing career she began in the 1990s, and Dulos could do what he wanted, though Farber didn’t always know where he was going and with whom. Money was never an issue: Farber came from a wealthy New York City family, and Dulos was a luxury real estate developer in the 2010s in the tristate area, not exactly a difficult market.

Farber had long coveted this type of all-encompassing domestic lifestyle, even if the surroundings were a bit different than her adolescent dreams. “The New York Times wedding pages held a hypnotic sway over me since I discovered them at age 11,” she wrote in an essay published in Personals, a collection edited by Thomas Beller, in 1998. “Entering the structured, ambitious black-and-white world at the back of the Sunday paper, I was window-shopping for a life.” Farber imagined the day when she’d “live on Park Avenue in the 60s in a ‘perfect eight’ with a fireplace and service entrance, and supervise our New York calendars,” she wrote. As always in New York, the good life came with great real estate. With the right apartment and the right husband, she’d be just like the other women in the paper: “correctly poised super girls, well educated, accomplished, thoroughbred.”

Like many women whose lives are outwardly perfect, though, Farber’s marriage had secrets. Dulos, 51, was an Adonis, a beautiful creature, with extraordinarily fine, delicate features, saucer-size brown eyes, and a fastidious appearance. He hardly resembled Mr. Rochester, but, according to a longtime friend of Farber’s, beneath the veneer, he had a similar personality—a rigid man, moody and gloomy at times, and quick to inform Farber, 50, of her shortcomings. He seemed far from the man he pretended to be, and the series of actions he took in the year since Farber’s disappearance could not have proved that more.

But another secret was that Farber, for all her analysis of the Times’s wedding pages, was deeply ambivalent about the pursuit of a socially appropriate life. This was partially her ironic Generation X attitude, of course; almost everything one wanted, in her demographic cohort, had to also be not wanted. But with Farber, her true needs and desires were even more complicated.

In that same essay, Farber also wrote about her love of the dollhouses on display at the Museum of the City of New York. When she peered into them, she felt transported to 1920s New York society, imagining the dazzling parties she could have attended back then. “I am the kind of person who looks at other people’s lives and wonders if I could have what they have,” she wrote. “The question of whether or not I want it usually comes second.” Farber continued, “And later I would try on a series of men, figuring out how their lives looked on me, sometimes having to alter my contours to force this appealing new entity to fit like a trace over my own self.”

In the press coverage of Farber’s disappearance, she is described merely as a suburban mom, her larger identity as a woman elided. But after I graduated from college in 1995, about five years after she had, we crossed paths, though just barely. I worked in magazines, and my coworker Dany Levy had pulled off a New York real estate miracle. She’d found us apartments in an exquisite Greenwich Village brownstone whose owner was defaulting on his loans. Levy and her friends took the ground and garden floors, shrouded by trees, and turned me on to the parlor floor, with its 12-foot ceilings, original marble fireplaces, and claw-foot tub. When my roommate and I toured the place with our parents (though employed, we did not make enough money to rent an apartment without guarantors), my father was so tickled, he climbed into the tub and had me snap a picture with my camera. His daughter, a real estate savant. In Manhattan, there was no higher praise.

Back then, I knew a brunette writer with bangs, looking vaguely like Stephanie Seymour, who lived around the corner at One Fifth Avenue, an Art Deco co-op on the edge of Washington Square Park that I coveted (like those dollhouses Farber loved, it was built in the ’20s, during the literary and political revival of Greenwich Village). Once, I was part of a group of people who trooped over to her building, walking under the forest-green awning to the two-story Gothic lobby, to pick her up for a party in Tribeca. “When we first met in the fall of 1990, my impression of Jennifer was as gentle and soft-spoken, thoughtful and quick to warm up in conversation,” says Carrie Luft, one of her closest friends. “I remember in particular a black velvet (maybe velour?) long-sleeved baby-doll dress she wore, with black tights and tall boots, sometimes a bright scarf. She was stunning. You really couldn’t have looked better in the early ’90s.” Farber was also an object of desire of an editor I dated briefly—he was a little bit older but very cool, we thought, with a line into the best reservations at restaurants in town. I remember him walking by my brownstone’s window with Farber one snowy day and thinking, Huh, I guess that is really a thing.

But this was an era of lots of dates, none of them particularly serious. Life for young women in the literary scene was made up of decadent book parties and late nights at sophisticated bars, the tables laden with martinis. Did we engage in male author worship, like the youngsters who hang on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s every witticism today? Of course we did, from time to time. But this wasn’t the misogynistic Beat scene with Joyce Johnson publishing here and there. In the ’90s, women were ever more subjects than objects. At the same time, female authors had a hard time getting published if they weren’t writing chick lit, and most of what a woman wrote was called chick lit even if it wasn’t. I remember carrying a copy of The Invisible Circus, Jennifer Egan’s first novel, to work one day, prompting a male editor to ask me, “Is that the kind of writer you take seriously?”

Among this crowd, you defined yourself by who you read, and Farber was into American classics, like Edith Wharton and John Cheever. She was connected to Open City, a journal started by Robert Bingham, a novelist and heir to a Southern newspaper fortune who died of a heroin overdose in 1999; Daniel Pinchbeck, a writer who has more recently become something of a New Age guru; and author Thomas Beller, Farber’s longtime boyfriend. “She knew her shit, and I say that as a serious reader and sort of a snob myself,” says another boyfriend. She was out and about, and well-liked. “Jennifer was a vibrant presence on the New York literary scene in the late 1990s,” says Elizabeth Sheinkman, a literary agent and friend. “She was observant and often wryly funny about human behavior and social interactions, and she was always generous and supportive towards other writers in her midst.”

Like most writers before part of the job was gathering readers as an Instagram-friendly lifestyle brand, Farber didn’t have refined tastes in art or food or interiors. She put an elliptical machine in her apartment for workouts with little concern for its impact on her decor and focused on other interests. “Jennifer really dug music, especially Brit pop of the time like Oasis and Blur,” says the ex-boyfriend. “Plus, she could be really witty. We were talking once about movies we’d seen, and this was her one-line review of the Clive Owen film Croupier: ‘I sleepier.’ ” Nor did she separate high culture from low: “Jennifer was a Princess Diana and Prince Charles fan—she was embroiled and caught up in that,” says Dan Rybicky, a friend from the 1990s.

Though she was generous, picking up the tab at dinner at times, the only way you would’ve truly keyed into her family’s wealth would be to note she traveled by cab or black town car. The subway was for the US Open, where her dad’s company had a box. Among those she didn’t know, she could be aloof, even haughty at times, toggling between nervous girlish energy and a hailstorm of clever ripostes. “Emotionally, Jennifer could be awkward,” explains the ex-boyfriend. “She had a hard time connecting.” Luft says, “I think a lot about Hesse’s line from Demian: ‘I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so difficult?’ Jennifer and I had discussed Hesse somewhat recently, and Thomas Mann—how do you empathize with, and not envy, the Hans Hansens of the world, when you’re more of a Tonio Kröger?”

Farber found her voice in an MFA program at NYU. She was particularly turned on by Stanislavski-inspired writing exercises, sometimes following the steps in An Actor Prepares. “It was as though a veil had been lifted, for Jennifer and for some of the rest of us,” says Luft. “The self-censoring mind got out of the way. It really clicked for Jennifer. She could perceive what was her honest writing and what wasn’t. She found her own rhythm and voice; her people came to life.”

Between 1994 and 1999, Farber finished four full-length plays. “For more than a decade she wrote regularly, with passion and focus,” says Luft. The two friends, and others, cofounded a theater troupe, Playwrights Collective, which put on picnic readings in Tompkins Square Park and at a café on Avenue A, salons in living rooms, and, at real theaters, Farber’s surreal comedies mixed with memoir elements. One of her plays, The Red Door, is about a young woman on the eve of her wedding who is visited by men she’s dated, had fantasies about, or wanted to date; her father keeps popping in, telling her it’s time to get married. It was a way of addressing her own longings, anxieties, and confusions about whether she was ready to be in a committed relationship, and with whom. “At core, almost all Jennifer’s work explores the need to be loved and known as one’s true self,” adds Luft.

Farber’s feelings about men seem to have been tangled up, or one could say tightly knotted, with the way she defined herself. She often had a boyfriend, no matter how much she felt let down by relationships. “My contented self proved much less vibrant than my previous, covetous self,” she explained. Farber craved stability but sometimes held herself at a remove, unable to truly connect without feeling like a fraud. She was often attracted to preppies (prep culture was cool back then), like a boyfriend she describes wearing “black tasseled loafers, khakis, and rumpled Brooks Brothers shirts. He always looked as if he had just gotten out of bed.” She tried to mold herself into the character she imagined another boyfriend, even more conservative, would want her to be: “I was a master at acting, at feeding him lines he wanted to hear: ‘How’d you do on the back nine?’ ‘How’s your Jansen Fund doing?’ ‘You look great in that shirt, we’ll buy you another one.’ I elaborately celebrated his petty victories: a filed prospectus, making good time on the LIE, the arrival of his American Express gold card.”

She didn’t need to get married like some sort of modern Lily Bart—Farber’s trust was quite vast—but she wanted to, in the same way that all of us wanted to back then; we were the first generation of women to expect to get married, have kids, and also work, even though not as many of us ended up with careers post-kids as the two-parent working families of today. “I want home, family, fresh-cut flowers,” she wrote. About a year before 9/11, Farber moved out of Manhattan. The scene was on its way out anyway, after it was sold to Americans on HBO’s Sex and the City. Now everyone wanted the young female writer’s lifestyle of dates, parties, and belly flopping on Pratesi sheets while pecking at a laptop. On TV, the martinis and stiff scotches women drank back then had been replaced by more telegenic pink cosmopolitans, and our black knee-high leather boots remade as Manolo stilettos in primary colors. Seeking a quieter life, Farber drove cross-country with her Cavalier King Charles spaniel.

In 2003, a year after her dog had passed away, and without a serious boyfriend, Farber was at the airport in Aspen when she ran into Fotis Dulos, whom she knew as one of the Euros populating Brown back in the day. Born middle-class in Istanbul as part of the Greek minority in that city—who prefer to call the place Constantinople, the name of the city during Byzantium—Dulos moved to Athens when he was seven. In a piece of personal writing, he once said, “By the time I was in my late teens and approaching the end of my high school years, I knew I wanted to get exposed to societies and cultures beyond my own country. Greece which is demographically a very homogenous country had become my home, but I felt an overwhelming need to be immersed in an environment with more cultural diversity.” Dulos was not as well-heeled as the rest of Brown’s Euro crowd, which included a family member of long-deposed Greek royalty and other high rollers, but he developed a taste for (or, one could say, a fixation on) the finer things in life. He and Farber had chemistry when they met her first week of Brown but didn’t see each other much after that.

Now Dulos had an MBA from Columbia University and a job as a manager at the technology consulting firm Capgemini; in the U.S., he said, “I met people from every corner of the globe, and it excited me beyond belief.” He was gregarious, clever, athletic—and considered himself quite the catch. “Everything with him had to be the best: the best ski equipment, the Porsche,” says the friend of Farber’s. He was early to the 2010s wellness trend of wealthy guys treating not only their cars but their bodies as well-tuned machines. Farber, who was a competitive squash player in high school and a runner, found him very attractive. “Serendipity cast its spell,” she wrote, with “this young man I’d always liked—we had a special chemistry together, always, something special and precious and we were careful to be careful with one another until lightning finally struck.”

Perhaps from Farber’s perspective, it didn’t hurt that the media was also in the middle of a “fertility panic” after economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett published a book about the wisdom of women marrying in their early 20s and then starting a long career only after their children were teenagers, which, Hewlett argued, was a feminist move and economic boon. Now society was fixated on the question of when women should have children, not the Sex and the City-era question of whether life was better if they did not have them at all. What was a woman if she wasn’t a mother? You could end up Carrie Bradshaw, which wasn’t the worst fate, but also didn’t seem particularly satisfying. Farber wasn’t on a desperate hunt for a husband, but she was aware that she was in her thirties and her childbearing years were coming to a close. And Dulos, then in the middle of a separation from his first wife, an attorney, was interested in a committed relationship. Not only that: He wanted a big family, and he wanted it soon. The couple moved to central Connecticut, more than two hours from Manhattan, where Dulos began his home-building business, the Fore Group. Instead of taking ordinary loans, he borrowed millions from Farber’s father at a low interest rate. Farber’s parents wanted to support them. Hilliard Farber was an immensely successful banker, and Farber’s mother, Gloria, is prominent in educational philanthropy. (Gloria’s brother founded Liz Claiborne with his wife, a company eventually worth a billion dollars.) Her dad in particular was the kind of old-school patriarch who took pride in helping Dulos and Farber succeed. Dulos seemed committed to his work. “I love creating structures that complement their surroundings, enhancing them,” Dulos wrote. “Mostly though, I love working with others and bringing their vision to life, giving them a place to call home. Home for me is being with my loved ones.”

But in Connecticut, Dulos’s professional life was chaotic; “he was a last-minute, shooting-for-the-deadline kind of guy,” says the friend. And though Farber often wrote emails or letters, she didn’t develop many deep new relationships. Dulos’s friends became her friends; his interests became her interests, in particular waterskiing on local lakes, a hobby of his which began to border on obsession. Farber didn’t like waterskiing, once writing, “It hurts my back a bit and I feel the opposite of limber. I get all tight and muscle-y—yuck. (My New York number for years was: YUCKO-123. Brilliant I figured that out).”

Conceiving was more difficult than they imagined, and reproductive technology began dominating Farber’s life. Writing receded into the distance. She had completed a manuscript of her first novel around when she met Dulos in Aspen, but it remained in a drawer. “The book kind of was a garden, something that was alive,” says the friend. “And she knew that she wanted to go back and tend that garden. Sorry to be that hokey, but that would be the metaphor that I would use for it. So for her, it was like, ‘I don’t know when I’ll get to that, but I know that I want to. And I know that it’s there.’ ”

“In recent years we often discussed whether one needed to be actively working to consider oneself an artist, and we decided that an artist could hang in there, even being inactive for a long period, and still be creating on the inside,” says Luft. “Once a writer, always a writer. It’s a way of looking at the world, not just of putting words on a page or screen. I sometimes joked that I’m not a writer, I’m a ‘have written-er.’ Jennifer was always a writer, whether actively working on a project or not.”

Farber tried hard to fit into Dulos’s life. But after she finally gave birth in 2006, to twins, she began to change. And then she kept having babies: another set of twins in 2008, and a daughter in 2010. Outwardly, status quo prevailed: Like most upper-class suburban moms, she packed her kids’ days with activities, from art class and music to horse riding, swimming, and tennis. Dulos took command of the sport he loved: waterskiing. By the age of nine, the elder twins were top international waterskiers. Dulos’s sister Rena, an architect in Athens, has explained Dulos believed that engagement in competitive sports and a solid education were the best ways to raise children. “The constant effort to attain high goals has shaped his character, sense of fairness, and can-do approach to life,” she said of her brother.

Inwardly, though, as Farber had more babies, she shifted into the psychic space of motherhood, her former self moving into the rearview mirror. They found parenting five children stressful, particularly because when the children were small, Dulos kept moving the family into whatever home he had not yet sold while building another, to keep cash flowing. Sometimes a wing would go undecorated because the houses, many of them over 10,000 square feet, were simply too large to furnish, pack, and unpack before Dulos sold them off. They lived surrounded by cardboard boxes in a series of model mansions—luxurious homes, to be sure, with open-plan kitchens made of marble and great rooms the size of preschools. But these McMansions on steroids were almost grotesquely luxurious, the opposite of the compact elegance of a Manhattan “perfect eight.”

Farber craved a lifelong partner with intellect and depth. But tracing herself over Dulos, more and more, seemed to mean extinguishing herself. He was like the kid in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, the one who takes and takes from an apple tree until no apples are left, at which point he decides to cut down the tree, leaving only the stump. “Fotis likes to sleep in each other’s arms,” Farber wrote. “He says that people who love each other do this. I do this sometimes. Sometimes I curl into a tight ball and escape life. Sometimes (most times) I lie on my back, at peace, and drift far far away.”

As the couple began to fight more and more, Farber became intertwined with her children. The ancient Greeks had many words for love, from philia (friendship), to agape (God love or charity), eros (erotic love), and storge (the type of love between family members, like a mother and her kids). Farber’s was the last—an unconditional love tinged with the feeling of possession, and of romance. “Last night for the first time she said ‘I love you’ to me,” she wrote of her youngest daughter. “I am smitten. She’s my kitten. My prize-fighter. My dream come real.” Farber connected with her children on a level that often eluded her with men. No fear of intimacy here.

Though Farber didn’t read Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother until much later, when she finished the book, she felt Cusk was describing some of the complexities of mother love she herself had experienced, says the friend. “When I think of my child I am seized by the desire to make good all my former powerlessness, to love as I would like to be loved: mercifully, completely, unambiguously,” writes Cusk. “I realize that in love I have always considered myself to be a victim rather than aggressor, that I have cherished a belief in my own innocence, in what nevertheless I have styled as a conflict, an irreconcilable struggle. Like a state benefit, love has always seemed to me something to which people have inalienable rights, a belief that is a mere mask for my terror at the possibility of being unloved.” In another chapter, Cusk puts her finger on what had made her look so hard for love. She writes, “The physical fact of her [my daughter] remains a surprising embodiment of my feelings of emptiness…. I have felt them before, throughout my life: a yearning for some correspondence with an object outside myself, a yearning to have, to experience otherness through ownership.”

Resolving to try to work harder on the marriage, says the friend, Farber started to write online. These bits of Farber’s writing come from a Patch.com blog she started in 2012, as well as her own, Five Plus Two Equals Seven. Sometimes the children drove Farber to her edge, of course, but she chronicled the ways they were more likely to fill her with delight: “The boys declared at their pick-up that I should go to Mommy Jail (where they corner you in a kitchen, tie you up in a striped apron, and beat you with wooden spoons) for over-dressing everybody…into their overheated parkas.” Each one had a particular personality that she tried to unravel: “He wants an Escalade and a Chevy. I said, ‘Why don’t you go Christmas shopping with Donald Trump?’ I think he means miniatures or toys, but who really knows? He is enigmatic, elusive, sometimes I don’t even understand what he says.”

In these posts, her conflict with Dulos comes out between the lines. She wrote, “Don’t be number two to anybody. That’s what my father always told me. It’s hard for girls, now women, wives, mothers. It’s hard to know this, for real.” She also talked obliquely about conflict. “I wish I were a stronger person and that confrontation did not both scare and appall me,” she wrote. “I just need quiet, peace and calm.” She continued, “They are so very lucky, monks. They’re the same gender. They don’t have to worry about misunderstandings that could arise in opposite sex relationships.”

In the mid-2010s, the family moved into what would be their final home, a brick Colonial measuring over 14,000 square feet at 4 Jefferson Crossing in Farmington. But the marriage continued to deteriorate. Dulos’s parents moved to the States; tragically, Farber and Dulos’s nanny ran his mother over with the car in a freak accident. She was hospitalized and died shortly after. As Farber’s father developed complications from an autoimmune disease, Farber tried to hold down the house. Dulos became more absent, off on what he said were waterskiing trips for as many as 10 days a month. He wanted the big life, to ski and travel on the private plane of his best friend’s dad; he didn’t want a depressed wife spending more and more time in her third-floor attic library, nose in her books.

While he did not engage in the machinations of literature’s worst husbands like Heathcliff or even Bluebeard, Dulos also began denigrating some of Farber’s friends and encouraging her to cut them out of her life. But by now, Farber’s father and her friends became increasingly concerned about Dulos’s escalating aggression, which included punching out a parking lot attendant at her parents’ apartment building, according to the New York Post; and controlling the kids, particularly when he was training them in waterskiing on their local pond. “The children have told me that they do not want to waterski at this level,” Farber later said. “They are physically and emotionally exhausted and have begged me to do something about it. We are all terrified to disobey my husband.” And after her father died in 2017, Farber also learned Dulos was not a Rochester who would end up a hero in their relationship. He was having an affair.

The girlfriend, a Venezuelan woman named Michelle Troconis, sometimes worked as a marketing and P.R. manager for high-end resorts, and was an advanced skier with a teenage daughter from a previous marriage. She was lithe and athletic (on Instagram, she posted that one of her goals was to rank in the top 50 female waterskiers), not a wry writer. Dulos told Farber he had fallen out of love with her, according to the friend, but still wanted Farber and the children to remain with him, and even floated the notion that Troconis and her daughter could move into Jefferson Crossing; the home was enormous, after all. Soon after this, despite Farber and Dulos’s common agreement to keep guns out of the home while raising small children, Dulos bought a 9-mm Glock. She learned about the gun from her kids after he showed it to them before informing her he’d purchased it.

One evening in June 2017, very much under the cover of night, Farber piled the kids in the car (movers gathered the bare minimum of their stuff) and reemerged after a little while to serve Dulos with divorce papers from a new home in New Canaan. Dulos and Farber had discussed expanding the Fore Group to the area and even applied to enroll the kids in the New Canaan Country School; this made the kids’ schooling seamless. “Jennifer stayed in the state to do everything by the book,” says her friend. Nevertheless, Farber was terrified. One of the most dangerous times for women leaving abusive relationships is their immediate departure. And indeed Dulos called 911 when he realized Farber was gone, reporting his children missing and alleging his wife had stolen property.

Ensconced in New Canaan, Farber requested emergency custody of the children. She knew she was embarking on an expensive, complicated divorce. The matter of the outstanding loans of at least $1.5 million her parents had made to Dulos also came into play; Farber’s mother, Gloria, sued Dulos to recoup. From Dulos’s perspective, Farber and her family were emasculating him. He claimed Farber said to the kids, “Your father likes Farmington because he is not that smart; successful people live in New Canaan.” Dulos was enraged and offended by this on a personal level, but also felt Farber was on a mission to redirect the children’s love away from him, even though she had long been more in love with them than him.

Dulos could not have expected that he would come out the victor in any of the legal matters, as a father who had an affair, bought a gun, and benefited greatly from the Farber family wealth. Yet he seems to have been unprepared for exactly how many pegs he would be taken down. “Why do I always get the raw end of the stick?” he asked a judge. And both he and Farber were rattled by the length and intensity of the court battles. The divorce records include more than 300 motions. When a judge learned Dulos had hung out with the children and Troconis at the same time, which was not permitted, then instructed the kids to lie about it to their mother, his visits with the children were curtailed. It began to seem like, at the end of the legal process, Dulos would not only lose custody but go bankrupt.

On May 24, 2019, nearly two years after the divorce began, but not at its end, authorities believe Dulos woke up at 4:20 a.m. in Farmington, and, an hour later, drove an employee’s red Toyota Tacoma to a preserve near Farber’s home in New Canaan. Dulos grabbed a vintage Mercier French racing bike from the back of the truck, then pedaled to Farber’s home around 7:30 a.m. There, it was quiet. Farber was dropping off the kids at school. At 8:05, she pulled into the driveway in her Suburban, then drove into the garage, the door closing via remote behind her.

Did Dulos intend to kill his wife then and there? He not only allegedly brought along black tape and Husky gloves, among other items, but a poncho. The day before, he had also been in contact with Kent Mawhinney, his attorney in the civil suit with Farber’s mother who was embroiled in his own terrible divorce. Dulos had recently called Mawhinney’s wife to ask if she would be willing to meet with Mawhinney to talk at one of Dulos’s homes. And six days before Farber disappeared, two members of a gun and rod club Mawhinney belonged to stumbled on a hole—two feet wide, six feet long, and three feet deep—in the woods behind the club. Two bags of unopened lime sat within it. When one of those members checked out the hole two days before Farber’s disappearance, the bags of lime were gone. (Mawhinney’s attorney did not comment when asked about this chain of events.)

In the New Canaan garage, according to prosecutors, Dulos restrained Farber with four zip ties around her wrists and feet, though she hardly had the strength to fight him. Then Dulos allegedly stabbed her with a murder weapon that has yet to be located. Allegedly, after rummaging in her closets for 10 rolls of paper towels, and using them to clean up, he loaded Farber’s body and his bike into the Suburban and drove back to the preserve. He left the lights on in the Suburban to make it appear as if Farber had left the car hurriedly, perhaps abducted. Then, prosecutors believe, he threw his bike in the back of the Tacoma with Farber’s body. He was back in Farmington to meet Troconis by 1:37 p.m.

Farber may have been moving into the later part of one’s life, her children coming into their own as her energy ebbed, but it was far from her time to leave this earth. Even though Dulos wasn’t arrested for murder right away, he was all but assured to be a prime suspect in her disappearance. In Dulos’s haste, authorities claim he left a speck of blood containing his DNA on the faucet in Farber’s kitchen and on the interior knob of the mudroom. Plus, the night of her disappearance, according to the police, Dulos and Troconis drove to Hartford and dropped some things in trash cans, not realizing they’d be captured here and there by roadside cameras. Searching the local dump for trash, police found zip ties, duct tape, ponchos, and some of the clothes Farber was believed to be wearing on the last day of her life, including an Intimissimi bra and an extra small Vineyard Vines shirt. Their alibis seemed questionable too: Though Troconis swore that they’d woken up together the morning of May 24 and had sex—thus Dulos couldn’t have possibly gone to Farber’s home and back in such a small window of time—authorities found crumpled pieces of paper at 4 Jefferson Crossing with what they called “alibi scripts,” or the exact chain of events Troconis insisted on to the police. She said she’d only made the notes to jog her memory at Dulos’s former attorney’s prompting.

While it was likely beginning to dawn on Dulos that he was in quite a bit of trouble, the kids had been whisked out of Connecticut to Gloria’s apartment in Manhattan. A security guard was posted to the front of the building to protect them. Farber’s family released a statement: “Jennifer, we love you and miss you, and we remain hopeful that you will return to us safe and sound,” they said, adding, “we are immensely grateful to the investigators for their work around the clock, 24/7, to locate Jennifer.” The cops roamed widely to find her: They searched the pond where Dulos taught the kids waterskiing, a home Gloria Farber owned in Pound Ridge, and Fore properties. They brought a German shepherd to Dulos’s home in Farmington. They had a yellow Labrador trained to sniff out electronics search the preserve near Farber’s home, hoping to find her phone, which was missing. They shut down an incineration plant in Hartford and let loose cadaver dogs. But though it didn’t make sense that Dulos could have moved fast enough and with enough expertise to disappear Farber’s body, she was gone.

Though the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming—a long divorce, financial frustration, a girlfriend—without a body, Dulos might walk free. His attorney Norm Pattis was certainly mounting what is known as a “vigorous defense,” particularly outside the courtroom. He admitted a vicious divorce was going on: “One of the things Jennifer said to Fotis in one of their last communications was ‘You’ll never see these kids, I’ll see to it,’ and she said it in anger,” he tells me. But Pattis put forth the speculation that Farber was actually responsible for her own disappearance. Maybe she disappeared herself, as in Gone Girl; she was a troubled woman, with a motive to disrupt Dulos’s life, and perhaps even with a fatal illness (there were some medical records showing she’d recently had a large amount of blood work). Luft, who took the role of spokesperson for the family, responded, “This is not fiction or a movie. This is real life, as experienced every day by Jennifer’s five young children, her family, and her friends. We are heartbroken.”

Even with the deck stacked against him, Dulos could make some progress by taking his story public; the prospective jury pool in Connecticut would have a natural inclination to trust a handsome, educated man with a flawless physical presentation who could easily turn on the charm. Pattis told Dulos to prepare a multimillion-dollar bond for an eventual arrest on murder charges, but at the same time, Dulos began granting interviews to the press, and damned if he wasn’t convincing while passionately asserting his innocence. He made good eye contact. He didn’t give sidelong glances or fidget. He just kept stating, matter-of-factly, that he not only had nothing to do with Farber’s disappearance but he too was concerned about her whereabouts. “This is a very, very challenging time for my whole family, and we just have to be patient to get to the other side,” he explained in one interview, as well as, “I send my prayers. I had my differences with Jennifer, like many people do when they go through a marriage…but that doesn’t mean that I wish her ill in any way.” In another interview, he said, “Jennifer was always a very beautiful person, and she continues to be.” He added, “I wish she were here to sort this mess out, and I’m still hoping that she’s going to show up.”

When Troconis, who had moved out of the Jefferson Crossing home, met with the cops in mid-August, a source says, they presented information meant to upset her. Dulos was now involved with a third woman. Anna Curry, a colleague from Capgemini, the firm where Dulos worked in his 20s, lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, but now she was spending time with Dulos in Connecticut. She was another good-looking brunette in middle age, this time an equestrian. (Troconis’s attorney Jon Schoenhorn says Troconis did not have knowledge about Curry until much later; he also alleges that the police ill-used Troconis, strip-searching her, taking pictures of her semi-nude, and interrogating her in her second language, English, instead of Spanish.)

Soon Troconis diverged from the “alibi script.” She said she hadn’t actually been intimate with Dulos on the morning of May 24, nor had they woken up together. Dulos had slept separately in one of his spec homes. Troconis also admitted that she helped Dulos clean the Tacoma after he arrived to meet her that afternoon. (Mawhinney’s part, if any, in the scheme remains unclear.)

“When Michelle turned on Fotis as reported in the second warrant, Fotis didn’t believe what he read—he thought she had been misquoted, or they were lying,” says Pattis, who insists that in their conversations, Dulos maintained he did not kill Farber. He continues, “Fotis was always of the opinion Michelle would come around. And I was brutal with him, I mean, really brutal: ‘You lost the prisoner’s dilemma. She’s the first one to the state.’ ”

But the notion that Troconis would have truly pursued a joint defense agreement with Dulos was his own hubris. Who among us would sacrifice his own life if he had a chance of saving himself? Troconis’s mother, Marisela Arreaza, was no stranger to legal trouble; the federal government indicted her in 2016 on Medicaid fraud charges. She pled guilty, but the case was later dismissed.

Dulos and Troconis seemed to have a love between them that the Greeks would define quite differently than the one between Farber and her children. Troconis told the police that on the afternoon after the murder, in the driveway of a spec house, they were “physical” standing up against the Tacoma.

Farber’s disappearance was in the spring, but Dulos was still waiting for an indictment for murder more than nine months later, during Christmas. Even with Troconis’s testimony, the state needed time to make a case without a body or murder weapon. Dulos’s new girlfriend, Curry, was living at Jefferson Crossing by this point, though she was gone for most of the holiday. At the same time, Pattis says that Troconis had made contact with a family member of Dulos’s to express that she still loved him. (Troconis’s attorney says he has no knowledge of this.) But even while splashing in this bath of female attention, Dulos’s mood was increasingly dark. The media onslaught he thought would save him had backfired, becoming increasingly negative. What kind of unhinged narcissist would tell the national news over and over he didn’t kill his wife while the police were preparing his indictment, people wondered. Nor could he travel around Connecticut unmolested; onlookers shouted at him on the street. In December, a man even appeared at his home, saying that he too was alone over the holidays without his family. Dulos invited him in for a glass of wine. They sat for several hours, talking heart to heart. A source contends the man then tried to sell covert tape recordings of the conversation to the press.

After the new year, Connecticut finally indicted Dulos for Farber’s murder. He had his $6 million bond prepared and was quickly sprung from jail. But within weeks, authorities realized that the properties he had put up for bond were not actually in his possession. Some of the money, including $147,000 in cash and a $3 million promissory note secured by Curry’s home and bank accounts, was still acceptable. But that wasn’t enough to keep Dulos a free man.

On the morning of January 28, Dulos learned the bond would likely be revoked at a hearing in court later that day. Ira Judelson, a celebrity bondsman, was interested in putting up the money. Pattis told Dulos he was likely to be incarcerated through the trial and its verdict. One imagines Dulos realized this was his last day of freedom.

At 10:30 a.m., Dulos sent Curry out of the house on an errand, then headed into his own garage. There he attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his Suburban. In a brief, entirely unemotional suicide note on yellow lined paper and in blue ballpoint pen, he wrote, “If you are reading this I am no more. I refuse to spend even an hour in jail for something I had NOTHING to do with. Enough is enough. If it takes my head to end this, so be it.” He claimed Mawhinney and Troconis “had nothing to do with Jennifer’s disappearance” and apologized to Curry for letting her down, though both in tone and content, this was not an expiation. Of his kids, he said only, “Please let my children know that I love them, I would do anything to be with them, but unfortunately we all have our limits.”

Concerned Dulos hadn’t shown up for an important bail hearing, police arrived to check on his whereabouts and found him slumped over in his car. Within minutes of an ambulance’s arrival, the news that Dulos had died by suicide exploded online. But after resuscitation, Dulos began to have a faint pulse. He was airlifted to a hospital in the Bronx with a hyperbaric chamber, in hopes he could be saved. Dulos’s sister Rena grabbed the next plane from Athens, and his friends and family congregated at the hospital, praying for his life.

The friend of Farber’s calls Dulos’s act a “Rumpelstiltskin suicide,” or the act of a narcissist who can’t reconcile his grandiose sense of self with reality. Who knows, as well, if Dulos meant to die at all? “With this attempt at suicide, Fotis completely turned the focus back to himself,” she continues. “He managed to squeeze out a few drops of sympathy, probably from people who didn’t really think they had any sympathy for him.” She adds,“I think that if we accept that he intended to die that it was to deny Jennifer’s family, friends, supporters, but also his children any chance at—I don’t know, closure seems such an inadequate and kind of inaccurate term, but any sense of understanding or narrative. In a literary sense, he basically took control of the narrative.”

Dulos seems to have carried out what could be called a slow-motion murder suicide. Two days after he was found, doctors said that Dulos would not recover his faculties. Though he had a cemetery plot next to his mother’s in Connecticut, there were concerns about whether the grave would be desecrated if he was laid there. His body was cremated, and plans made to send the ashes to Greece.

Despite Farber’s and Dulos’s high-flying lifestyles, Farber’s tragic fate isn’t that different than others’ who find themselves suffering at the hands of abusers. Nor is Farber the only woman who was damaged in this situation. All three of the women in Dulos’s life have been ruined in one way or another. Farber is gone. Troconis’s case may have a different outcome now that Dulos is no longer in the picture. Curry must have suffered some trauma. As early as this fall, depending on the trajectory of the pandemic and its effect on court cases, Troconis and Mawhinney will go on trial for conspiracy to commit murder and other charges. (Schoenhorn, Troconis’s attorney, says he will concede that the female figure captured by cameras with Dulos disposing of garbage bags in Hartford was Troconis. But, he says, Troconis didn’t know what was in the bags, adding that she’d often witnessed Dulos, to avoid fees for garbage disposal, “throwing things in public dumpsters so it didn’t come out of his pocket.”) It’s unclear if either Mawhinney’s or Troconis’s testimony will solve the remaining mystery: the location of Farber’s body and whether another party was involved in disposing of it. Authorities seem to think they know the contours of this entire story, but there is still this piece we do not know.

Before doctors pulled the plug on Dulos, his five children were brought to the hospital for a visit by his bed. They wanted to see their father one last time: It was some sort of closure, if a gruesome one. And even if that meeting does not ultimately add much to their understanding of the events that led to the loss of both parents in the space of under a year, it was an important moment of bonding. “There’s always a blessing with a curse, I guess, or at least I try to think of life that way, and the fact that there are five kids is a blessing here,” says Rybicky, one of Farber’s ’90s friends. “They are their own little Olympic luge team in a way. They have each other, and that is one good thing, truly.” The love between the siblings, which may grow and flower in unexpected and beautiful ways, will be a special thing, most likely deserving of its own, unique Greek name.

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