Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story
By Rich Cohen

The crime:

Fotis Dulos was charged with the murder of his wife Jennifer, a wealthy heiress whose family fortune had funded Fotis’s business (building luxury homes) and playboy lifestyle. The two had been involved in a bitter divorce battle, including a fight over custody of their five children. Jennifer’s body, however, was never found and Fotis committed suicide before he could be brought to trial.

The book:

You don’t have to look to hard to see what made this case such a media sensation at the time, with the courtroom surrounded by broadcast anchors and sound trucks. “It was the wealth and privilege, the beauty of the participants, that made it tabloid fodder. The mansions, the money, and the unsolved mystery: Where is Jennifer?” But these same factors also created a backlash:

Some criticized the dozens of national news stories about the case as overkill, saying they were published only because Jennifer was beautiful, wealthy, white. They even had a name for the phenomenon: “missing white woman syndrome.” But it was more than just the surface details that made the story mesmerizing. It was the horror, the universal nightmare, the way death arrived amid the quotidian details of an ordinary American morning. Jennifer had restraining orders, bodyguards, and every possible resource, but when someone is determined to do you real harm, no amount of money can protect you.

I’m not sure though that there was much more here than the “surface details.” Or, as Rich Cohen puts it in his note on sources, “the granularity of the status markers.” Without that backdrop of money, or what Jennifer’s family called “bank” (the privilege, the status, the elite lifestyle) this was one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest, true crime story in the book: angry, controlling husband kills his wife in the midst of bitter divorce proceedings. Nor would I take the case as standing for the proposition that “no amount of money can protect you” in such situations. Yes Jennifer had some security, but she could have used more. This was premeditated murder, but Fotis wasn’t some criminal mastermind with a foolproof plan.

The everyday nature, however tragic, of the crime itself leads to the question of why we find the suffering of rich people more interesting than those of others. We don’t live like them and so can’t relate on that level. So maybe we just like to see how dysfunctional our socioeconomic elites are. To have all that wealth and privilege and still be trapped in such an unhappy life does make you consider what’s really important. It’s interesting that one of Jennifer’s early boyfriends, Tom Beller, recognized this and described her life as the proverbial gilded cage:

Life was too easy with Jennifer, explained Tom, who believe in the upside of the downside. Discomfort builds character, giving you the needed material to write. There was no grit with Jennifer, no sand in the gears. That bothered Beller; the relationship felt like a trap, like a feather bed he couldn’t escape.

I think money, or the good life more generally, really is this kind of a trap. But of course that has never stopped anyone from trying to get more of it. Certainly one such person was Fotis Dulos. An ambitious Greek immigrant, the good life in America (and he first met Jennifer when they were students together at Brown) turned his head completely. “He wanted the most and the best: big houses, luxury travel, power boats, yachts.” But for all of his talk of being an Old World and Old School man of traditional patriarchal values, he was really just a Eurotrash gigolo who liked to play at being a playboy and man of business. In fact, without Jennifer’s (and specifically her father’s) money he would have been a quick bankrupt. I honestly don’t know what women saw in him, but I guess he was cute and had charm. I wouldn’t have thought that was enough to get him as far as he got though.

In the case of Jennifer it seems to have been most obviously a case of “baby rabies.” She was a woman in her 30s who wanted to settle down and have a bunch of kids. This meant she was “just about out of time” and had to get going. Fotis was available. Indeed not just available:

A psychopath is a chameleon. He sees what you want, then becomes that thing. It’s unfortunate that Jennifer Farber met Fotis Dulos when she was vulnerable, when she feared her window on motherhood was closing. Fotis’s talent was to recognize Jennifer’s problem and turn himself into the solution.

That said, Fotis seems to have had no trouble pulling other attractive women anytime he felt the need. Were they just stupid? “How crazy is this dumb girl?” one observer asked of the lover who took Jennifer’s place. Were they chasing notoriety? Or were they like the woman who became his girlfriend after his arrest, a graduate magnum cum laude with a successful career in wealth management who was attracted to the “doomed, forsaken, damned, and dangerous”? The technical term for this is hybristophilia and it’s just one of those things you have to shake your head at.

Fotis’s own psychopathy took some odd turns as well. He went to his grave with a suicide note insisting on his innocence (the murder was “something I had NOTHING to do with”). I thought this strange in at least a couple of ways: to still be claiming innocence when his guilt was obvious, and for killing himself. But according to one expert Cohen interviewed it makes sense, or is at least “typical of the behavioral profile of a psychopath. No remorse. These are people who see the world through the filter of narcissism – no matter what, they are the victims.” Or, in terms we’ve all become more familiar with: “It’s like a suicide note written by Donald Trump. It’s everyone’s fault but his own.”

Another psychiatrist further observed: “That is what makes them [narcissistic psychopaths] suicide risks. You would think somebody so egotistical would not kill themselves, but they will if it’s to protect their ego and self-image, which to them is more important than living.” That’s something else you have to shake your head at. Their self-image is more important than their life. The image becomes a sort of idol that they worship, something greater than the self. I think this is connected to the way some narcissists go on about their “legacy.” What they really want is to be immortal, and a legacy is the only way this can be accomplished. So they become willing to sacrifice anything to that end. In life, the one thing they can’t stand is being ignored. In death, the worst fate they can imagine is to be forgotten, or to leave the stage with any stain on their reputation.

This is a good book, in large part because Cohen is writing about a world he felt connected to. This makes him different from his audience. As I began by pointing out, few of us have any real awareness of how the very rich live, and so we can’t relate to them on that level. But Cohen can, and it’s what drew him to the story:

Though the world is big, the world is also small, and while reporting this story, I kept running into reflections of my own experience. Maybe that’s why I became so fixated not only on Jennifer’s disappearance and death but also on her life. In reading about her, in visiting the places she had been and talking to the people she had known, I felt like I was seeing the story of my own generation in a convex mirror – distorted but recognizable.

I don’t know which of the two worlds Cohen says Jennifer inhabited – uptown or downtown – he identified with the most, but in both cases he manages to present himself as something of an insider. Not in any kind of a gossipy way but just as someone who knows the lay of the land, the rules and the roles. I found the insights he provided, particularly in the behaviour of Jennifer’s father, to be of real value in coming to a fuller understanding of the case and its tragedy.

Noted in passing:

“A mistress is more expensive than a wife.” Well, it depends. A mistress is certainly cheaper than an ex-wife.

“According to Wikipedia, J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash is the story of ‘car-crash fetishists who become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents.” According to Wikipedia? Come on, Rich. Read the book. Or at least watch the movie.

Before Michael Jordan shaved his head in 1988, men clung to their hair, no matter how little of it they happened to have. If three wisps remained, they prized those wisps, which they gelled and combed back to front. Such men were in search of “coverage.” In some cases, that meant long in back, spare on top. In others, it meant miracle treatments, Rogaine, implants, or hair plugs. But after Michael Jordan shaved his head and appeared on TV as a chrome-domed futuristic warrior, a certain sort of man, seeking to join the ranks of the powerfully neat, shaved the wisps and faced the world pure and bald – on the field, in front of students, and in the courtroom. For the most part, these bald professionals tended to be of a certain class – aspirational graduates of schools not one but two tiers below Ivy. They were strivers, the last believers in the dream. They drove BMWs and Audi 2000s and played adult softball on the weekend. While others downed Gatorade or talked about stocks on the sideline, they wiped the seat from their bald heads with a single confident towel stroke.

Sure this is a caricature, but caricature works by exaggerating some truth. That said, I felt it was being a bit mean.

There was some good news to come out of this sordid affair, and it has to do with a situation that I’ve noted several times already in these True Crime Files.

Just to cut and paste a bit of background: in two previous books by John Glatt (Love Her to Death and Tangled Vines) I’ve made mention of how bad an idea it is for women to meet up with their exes, or soon-to-be-exes, on their own. In both of those books the wives in question ended up being murdered. In The Doomsday Mother there was a gender reversal in that it was Lori Vallow wanting to meet with her estranged husband Charles. Charles had a bad feeling about this, and even mentioned to Lori’s brother Adam some misgivings. He ended up being shot to death by Lori’s other brother Alex.

In this book Fotis had befriended another fellow, named Mawhinney, who was in the midst of a bitter divorce. They may have entered into some kind of agreement, with Fotis getting rid of Mawhinney’s wife, a woman named Monica, if he would return the favour and take care of Jennifer. To this end Fotis met with Monica at a restaurant and tried to convince her to come back to his house where, he told her, she could meet with her husband and reconcile. Since Monica had taken out a protective order against her husband she sensibly wanted no part of this, and turned the offer down despite Fotis’s insistence. When she got home she reported what had happened to her lawyer and to the police:

“Dulos abruptly paid the bill and left when [Monica] “felt she was being ‘baited’ and was uncomfortable with the fact that Dulos kept inviting her back to his residence. She stated that she believed that Dulos was ‘indebted’ to Mawhinney and that she believed Dulos was working on behalf of Mawhinney to get rid of her. She believed ‘Mawhinney wanted her dead.’”

You think? In fact, there was evidence that they’d already dug a grave for her. So just to underline a lesson that’s now come up several times: don’t agree to meet an ex on your own! When it’s over, it’s over.

Takeaways:

I know it’s a double standard, but a consciously hypergamous man is always a contemptible figure. What’s more, they know how other men view them and that just makes them worse.

True Crime Files