Crime Weekly - S3 Ep187: Crime Weekly News: Michelle Troconis Found Guilty

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Mother of five Jennifer Dulos went missing in late May 2019. At the time, she was going through a bitter divorce and custody battle with her husband, Fotis Dulos, and in 2020 he was arrested and charged with capital murder and kidnapping in connection with Jennifer’s disappearance. At the time of Jennifer’s disappearance her husband Fotis was in a relationship with a woman named Michelle Troconis, and in 2019, both Fotis and Michelle were arrested and charged with tampering with physical evidence after surveillance cameras caught the pair driving around Hartford, Connecticut, dumping garbage bags in dozens of different trash cans. Fotis would take his own life the following year, but Troconis would go on to trial. Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod

Hey everyone, welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derek Levasseur. And I'm Stephanie Harlow. And we don't have a ton to cover before we get into this week's Crime Weekly News. The only thing I'll say is if I started seeing on Instagram some announcements about CrimeCon, a lot of big podcasters, a lot of big personalities, I guess. I don't know if that's the right way to call it, coming this year. And also I was mentioning to Stephanie off record this week, we just covered Maya Kowalski. She's going to be there as well with her whole team. So if you're someone who's interested in true crime and you'd like to meet and speak with some of the people that we talk about all year and also engage with some of your favorite podcasters and TV personalities, CrimeCon is the place to go. It's an incredible time.

So if you're looking to get down to Nashville this year, it's at the end of May. Make sure you head over. Use our code Crime Weekly. You'll get a discount. And it also lets us know how many people have signed up for tickets under our name because we usually do like to try to get some get togethers going, planning that whole thing out. Having an idea of how many people are going definitely makes our job easier. Absolutely. Yes. You were surprised when I mentioned Maya was coming. You're like, what? You're like, oh, OK. I thought it job easier. Absolutely. Yes. You were surprised when I mentioned Maya was coming. You were like, what? You were like, oh, okay. I thought it was cool. I want to talk to her. I want to say hi. It is interesting to talk about these people at such length. What did we do? Seven, eight parts on her? Yeah. It's weird because I feel like I know everything about her life, things I wouldn't normally know about just anybody you meet. And then you meet these

people and it's got to be very weird for them, you know, to know that whoever they're talking about knows way more about you than, than you know about them. Yeah. Not, not comparing it at all, but I kind of felt like that off big brother because I was in the house talking about my friends and family, not even to them. And they were watching the live feeds and then you come out and they're like, oh, how's Tenley? Oh, how's your, how's your grandmother doing? I know your grandfather

passed away. It's like, wait, what? And I've just met this person five seconds before. It's a really, it's an odd feeling, but I think it's an opportunity for us to also show support to these people because they've gone through such traumatic things. And to be able to take this negative and turn it into, I say this vaguely, you know, like very loosely, a positive, right? Because it doesn't change what happened, I think is a good thing. And overall, it's just a really great time. We go every year because we love getting to see you guys, but also it's just, it's a really great event. They do a great job down there. Kevin and Elise, they just, they really know what they're doing at this point. They've got it all figured out.

So if you want to come down to Nashville, go over, check it out. CrimeCon, I believe it's, I don't know the exact web address, but you type in CrimeCon, it's going to pop up and use our code. You'll get a discount. So speaking of people that we've covered in the past, way back when we first started this channel, when we really didn't know who we were. It wasn't even, it was before YouTube. It's not even on YouTube.

It's not even, yeah, not even on YouTube. It was when we still, yeah. Yeah, not even on YouTube. And I've said it before, I'll say it again. This is definitely one of those cases where I would love to have the chance to do it over because where we found our footing was kind of after we went out on our own and also when we started YouTube

and we were in the mindset of doing like, I shouldn't even say we were in the mindset. We were- Told. We were told. We were told that we had to do these episodes really concisely, which doesn't do what we do justice. So it's unfortunate because this case, if we had done it now, it'd probably be seven, eight parts. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's.

I mean, there was so that was really hard for me in the beginning to just like know that it had to be a certain length and only one part. And then to have to kind of pick and choose what to put in the episode. What made the cut. Yeah, that was hard. No, it's hard. It's hard. So the case that I'm referring to is Jennifer Dulos. Now, for those of you who do not know who Jennifer Dulos is, let me give you a quick recap.

Mother of five, Jennifer Dulos went missing in late May of 2019. At the time, she was going through a bitter divorce and custody battle with her husband, Fotis Dulos. Some people say Fotis, some people say Fotis, you go with what you want. And in 2020, he was arrested and charged with a capital murder and kidnapping in connection with Jennifer's disappearance. Now, a little bit of a side note here. To this point, Jennifer has still never been found. She's presumed dead, but she's never been found. She's been declared legally dead, I believe in 2022, maybe? Exactly.

And there's a lot to this case. And although it's not our best episode, if you haven't checked it out yet, go back and listen to that episode. It's a good recap, at least. It's a great recap. And we do get in, that was one of the episodes where we did do a few parts on it. It wasn't one part. I think we did two. Yeah. It might've been two. We went over the timeline and there was another

involved participant, Fotis' girlfriend, Michelle Draconis. That's why we're coming to you tonight. We always try to give updates on cases that we've covered. So Stephanie's going to give you all the insight because there's been a major, I guess, development in the case. So there you go. I remember when we covered this, we didn't really talk about Michelle at all because then that's when we had the lawyers breathing down our necks and we couldn't even really bring her up. We mentioned her in passing and we wanted to talk about it more, but we were aware that that she was still just a suspect and hadn't been legally charged or or like found guilty of anything. But that has changed because. So what happened here is at the time of Jennifer's disappearance, her husband Fotis was in a relationship with a woman named Michelle Traconis. She worked at his real estate office.

And this is the same woman that Jennifer had accused Fotis of having an affair with during their marriage. In 2019, both Fotis and Michelle were arrested and, Connecticut, dumping garbage bags in dozens of different trash cans. And these garbage bags would contain what is believed to be the remains of Jennifer Dulos. And Fotis would take his own life the following year in 2020. But Traconis would go on trial for charges of conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit tampering with physical evidence, and tampering with physical evidence. It looks like it was one count of conspiracy to commit murder and then two counts each of conspiracy to commit tampering with physical evidence and tampering with physical evidence. She was accused of helping her late boyfriend Fotis kill his estranged wife and then also helping him cover up his crime. Now, Michelle initially had three separate interviews with the

police during which she changed her story. For instance, she said she'd been at home with Fotis the night of the murder or the night of Jennifer's disappearance. And later she admitted she had not been. And then she said he had told her to lie for him and he had manipulated her to get her to help him. But either way, there is surveillance footage of Fotis disposing of these bloody garbage bags. And Michelle, in one of these videos, can be seen wiping her hand on the ground, which is to suggest that she had blood on her hands, literally, that she was wiping off on the ground. And her lawyers during her trial were like, no, it was gum. She was wiping gum.

I don't really think it matters. She's like standing there while he throws, you know, body parts of his dead wife into garbage cans. But either way, during the trial, the prosecution showed a shirt, bra and zip ties that had been found in one of the garbage bags. And forensics experts testified that the DNA on some of these items in bags were highly a likely match to Fotis Doulos and Michelle Traconis. So Michelle went on trial for this. The trial is over now and she's officially been found guilty on all charges. And at this point, she faces a maximum of 50 years in prison and all for what? Fotis Doulos? Gross. Gross. Yeah. I mean, we, like you said, we had to be careful when we covered this initially because Gross. Gross. although we don't implicate her directly, there's a lot that she's involved in that we just couldn't

leave out involving the swapping of the vehicles and obviously mixed up testimony as Stephanie said. And then you have the surveillance footage where, you know, in hindsight, do I think, I mean, I don't know. What do you think, Stephanie? Do you think that, like, was this a premeditated thing that Michelle was in on from the beginning? Or do you think it's something where Fotis comes home and says, this is what went down. If we don't, if you don't help me with this, I'm going to prison. What do you, what do you think? No, I think she was involved with it from the beginning. I don't think Fotis would have- I could have guessed that. I don't, I don't think he would have felt comfortable bringing her in

afterwards if she wasn't already implicated in the planning. It's kind of like a, we're going to go down together thing. Not you can potentially turn me in and get me in trouble thing. I think that they both wanted Jennifer out of the picture so they could be together, so they could have the kids, so there wasn't any custody issue. I think there's some money involved too, right? Of course. They got a lot of money. Of course. So I definitely think that she was. And, you know, a lot of people will do speculation about like the Chris Watts case and whether or not Nicole Kissinger was involved. And I think in in this case with Jennifer Dulos, Fotis and Michelle, there's just a preponderance of evidence that you can't ignore that Michelle at least was involved with helping him dispose of Jennifer's remains. And she was charged with, you know, what was it?

It was conspiracy to commit murder and she was found guilty. So they must have had the evidence that was needed, even though the lawyer, Michelle's lawyer afterwards was like, this was a completely circumstantial evidence case. I don't know how these juries, how this jury came to this conclusion, but regardless, they did. They came to the conclusion that Michelle Traconis not only helped Fotis plan this, but also helped him carry it out and clean up his mess afterwards. Although, as we will see, they didn't really clean up their mess that well. However, Jennifer's body has still not been found, which would be a nice thing for her kids to have a place to visit her body. There's a high likelihood at this point, if they haven't found her yet, they may not find her. I mean, I hope I'm wrong,

but that may be the case. But I hope that Jennifer's family with this last person who's involved with this whole ordeal, being in prison for the rest of your life gives them some peace. It's not going to bring Jennifer home. It's never going to make them whole. I think even if they found Jennifer tomorrow, that wouldn't help. I'm assuming that at this point they're under the assumption that Jennifer is no longer with us based on the amount of evidence. And just a quick thing, There was a lot of evidence of blood in the house where Jennifer lived that suggests a cleanup. And more blood than you would find for someone who was injured. The amount of blood they found, it would be highly unlikely that the person

would be able to survive unless they were treated for those injuries, which is what law enforcement eventually came out and said. As far as the charges against Michelle Traconis, yeah, I'm with you. There wasn't a lot of evidence, if I remember correctly, in this case that showed premeditation. It was all kind of done. There was notes and things that were left behind, but nothing where it was like a scheme. And so more than likely that meant that Michelle and Fotis were planning this verbally together, doing what they were doing. And it really did take two people to carry this out. There was the exchange of vehicles. There was the cleaning of vehicles. There was the movement of cars. And like you said, she's on video in the truck with Fotis on numerous occasions. So more than likely, she was involved with this from the beginning. I don't know how Fotis

convinced her to do it, but this isn't the first time this has happened. I'm sure it was something along the lines of, if she's out of the picture, we can be happy together. Yeah, it's a legal battle, right? It was this ongoing, horrible legal battle. And anybody who's been embroiled in one of those knows that at some point you feel like the other person's torturing you. So it's likely Fotis made a sob story to Michelle, like, I can't believe she's still doing this to me. Like, she's never going to let me live my life as while she lives and breathes air, I won't want to, etc., etc.

And, you know, turning Jennifer into the villain and the enemy. And Michelle was like, well, he'll just be happy with me if he can just like get over this horrible, stressful time. We can have the normal life we've talked about having you know but but he can't do it while he's in this divorce and custody battle he can't he's got so much pressure on him my poor photos he did play the victim alive you guys have seen the interview he did some interviews and stuff where the guy went through and through he did a couple national interviews where he looked right at the camera and said he had no involvement and then obviously i think even in death he was saying he was doing this because

he was already convicted in the court of public opinion. He never admitted to what he did, even before his death, which shows how much of a coward he really is. And you brought up something interesting. With this threshold, you said preponderance of evidence. And obviously, preponderance of evidence, that would be the threshold for a civil case. Just preponderance of evidence is more would be the threshold for a civil case. Preponderance of evidence is more likely than not. That's all you need in a civil case.

A good example of that is O.J. Simpson. He was found innocent in a criminal trial, but found guilty in a civil trial because the threshold is much lower. So in this case, they still had to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And I think for this investigation, it was more about the prosecution's ability to produce multiple pieces of inculpatory evidence and the defense's lack of ability to produce any exculpatory evidence, which would essentially prove that she wasn't somehow involved with this. There was too much evidence. It was overwhelming. So yes, at the core, it is circumstantial. But as we've seen before, there are numerous cases where individuals are convicted based on circumstantial evidence because sometimes I think people associate a circumstantial evidence with a bad thing. Not all cases are going to be this physical thing where you see the video of the person shooting the other

person. In a lot of cases, you're going to have to put the puzzle pieces together. I would say most, most, most trials kind of depend on that circumstantial evidence. There's very few. I mean, if they had that, the defendant probably wouldn't even go to trial, right? If they had them dead to rights, they'd make a plea deal. Yeah. They wouldn't go to trial. So yeah. No, I mean, so it's like, it takes some work by the investigators and then it takes even more work by the prosecutors to take that circumstantial evidence and paint a picture for the jury. And then the jury has to decide, OK, based on everything we have here, does this prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person was involved? And they're going to come to that. They're going to come to that conclusion one way or the other. But I think we just gave you five minutes of it here. It's very easy to see that Michelle Draconis was involved through numerous stages of this process, which allowed Fotis to carry out

whatever he did after the fact. I don't believe, and you could stop me if I'm wrong on this, I don't think there was any evidence that she was present during the murder, but you don't have to be present during the murder to be found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. So. Which we've, we just figured out with the, with the Adelson case, right? We have all of these people, pretty much the entire Adelson family, besides Wendy being charged with conspiracy to commit murder and they were not present. And someone like Michelle, like it was it for love of Fotis, her motive? Probably not. There was a $2 million trust fund for Fotis' kids that if Jennifer had

lived, she would have had access to that. She would have had some rights to that money. And with her gone, not only does Fotis get the kids, not only do Fotis and Michelle get to ride off into the sunset happily ever after, but they've got $2 million to do it with. So money's always a motivating factor for people, even if love isn't enough. Yeah. I also think there's probably a jealousy factor too, because Jennifer was beautiful, smart, intelligent, talented, like had it all going for her, like just had everything going for her. So Michelle probably looked at her and said, you know, as long as she's in the picture, I think Fotis was probably still in love with her. You know, probably still wanted to be with her.

Obviously, Jennifer was the one who made the move. I don't think he was. I don't think he was in love with her. I think he's a narcissist who just wanted to control her. I mean, you know, like, but that's what he that's what he would know as love that he thought he was still in love with her. And most likely, yes, Michelle was like, damn, this is a rival for me for a lifetime. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm with you.

It's a sad story. Obviously, I'm glad to hear that both Fotis and Michelle are now, well, Fotis is no longer with us, but he's, you know, depending on what you believe, he may be answering even worse than a prison cell. Do you remember when he killed himself and his lawyers were like, this is not an admittance of guilt? Oh yeah, no, it's ridiculous. Which is like, he may be answering even worse than a prison cell. Do you remember when he killed himself and his lawyers were like,

this is not an admittance of guilt? Oh, yeah. Which is like, he's gone, dude. He's not paying your bills anymore. You can stop defending him. Yeah, let it go. Let it go. And Michelle, I'm sure she's going to appeal this.

I'm sure she's going to try something. But I think she's going to fall on deaf ears. But we'll see. We'll keep you updated. That's what we want to do here. This is an older one. We try to do this with these cases. If there are developments, that's originally why we started Crime Weekly News, not only for more headline stuff that didn't really have the meat on the bone to do a whole Crime Weekly on it, but I think the last part that I really want to hear or see is hopefully law enforcement finding Jennifer. And like you said, mainly for the parents, but mostly for the kids so that they have somewhere to go and visit their mother.

Five kids, man. Five kids who no longer have a mother or a father because of one person, Fotis. Two kids, right? Didn't they have two kids? I could be wrong on that. Two or three. I thought one person, Fotis. Two kids, right? Didn't they have two kids? I could be wrong on that. Two or three. I thought she had five. They have five kids, dude.

Five. Oh my God, five kids. Yes. Wow. That's terrible. I know, it's terrible. I think they're staying with her parents now, right? Yes, yes.

They're being raised by her parents. But still, I mean, that's like, you know, not only do you have to grow up without parents, but you have to grow up knowing your father killed your mother. Like, this is not a great start. I can't imagine. Yeah. I cannot imagine. We're thinking of them them and we hope you guys are as well. That's going to do it for it this week. We're going to get into the Roden Family Massacre Part 3 come this

Friday on audio and it'll be out on YouTube on Sunday. You guys have really responded well to this series. It's a great series. It's got a lot of different elements to it, and we're going to continue on with that later this week. So if you haven't already, make sure you're liking this video. Make sure you subscribe to the channel. We really appreciate it, and it helps us get seen more on YouTube so more people can be exposed to the cases that we're covering and the format that we're covering it. Stephanie, any final words from you or your putty? It's not putty. It's slime. But no, we are all set. We're all set. We're good to go. Okay, guys, we appreciate you being here. Everyone stay safe out there.

We will see you later this week. Bye.