When Fotis Dulos attempted suicide earlier this week, he was potentially going to lose the privilege of home ankle-monitoring and be on his way to prison to await trial on the charge of murdering his estranged wife, Jennifer Farber—possibly never to see freedom again. The court had called him back after it was discovered that one of his properties used to make his $6 million bond had been overvalued. Two other properties used as collateral were also found to be subject to foreclosure.
Dulos’s attempted suicide, by attaching a hose to his car exhaust in his garage and shutting himself inside the car, and the subsequent media reports that he’d died—and then that he hadn’t, in fact, died (it was reported that EMS workers had detected a faint pulse after 30 minutes of resuscitation efforts) and was being airlifted to a hyperbaric chamber at a Bronx hospital—made up the latest twist in what may be Connecticut’s most gruesome and spectacular murder mystery since Martha Moxley. Dulos was charged with murder even though Farber’s body has never been found. On paper the couple had everything: She was from a very wealthy New York City family, and he was a luxury real estate developer in 2010s Connecticut, not exactly a difficult market. They had five adorable children with Greek names, a nod to his heritage and country of origin. The couple met at Brown University in the late ’80s and then reconnected many years later, in the early 2000s, and married in a big affair at the Metropolitan Club.
But it was mysterious, to old friends of Farber’s, that she married Dulos at all, even if he was a gregarious, well-liked man, and handsome. She was beautiful, rich, and smart—and he did not seem to be as intellectual, says a friend. Farber made her name as a writer and playwright in 1990s Manhattan, part of a literary scene centered around Open City, a journal started by Rob 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 became something of a New Age guru; and writer Thomas Beller, Farber’s boyfriend at the time. “Jennifer really dug music—especially Brit-pop of the time like Oasis and Blur,” says a friend. “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.’”
Farber soon tired of the Manhattan scene, craving light, air, and solitude, and took off for Aspen and Los Angeles. When she married Dulos, she was in search of a solid future with a husband she loved, and badly wanted to be a mom. Both she and Dulos were athletes: He was a water-skier, and she was a nationally ranked junior squash player when she went to Saint Ann’s. She kept writing a bit but basically took care of the kids. Many years earlier, she had written in an essay—extremely semi-ironically, in the Gen X style—that this was the life she wanted. “The New York Times wedding pages held a hypnotic sway over me since I discovered them at age 11. Entering the structured, ambitious black-and-white world at the back of the Sunday paper, I was window-shopping for a life. My young eyes filled with photo images of correctly poised supergirls, well educated, accomplished, thoroughbred.”
In many ways the story of Farber’s demise is an old one: Dulos reportedly began an affair with a Venezuelan woman, Michelle Troconis, and the couple later began divorce proceedings. Because Farber’s family was a primary source of Dulos’s funds to run his development business—her parents gave him many loans—he also considered the dissolution of the marriage the beginning of the end of his financial freedom. Their divorce documents include Farber explaining that Dulos had threatened to take the children to Greece and that she was afraid he would harm her.