In many ways, Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood created the modern true crime book, which remains one of the only literary genres that continues to grow in an era of shrinking readership. At its inception, Capote put the victims at the center of the genre. Yes, he wrote about the killers of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, but he focused his most attentive energy on the innocents. What makes that book fascinating, so hard to put down, is its vivid portraits of Kenyon, Nancy, Bonnie and Herb Clutter, each depicted on the last day of their gorgeously ordinary lives. If you don’t know who they were, if you can’t see them, you can’t understand the enormity of the crime.
But over the last few decades, there’s been a disturbing trend in true crime, which has shifted focus from the victims to the killers — to such an extent that the true price of evil threatens to disappear. Fascination with the murder scene, the blood and gore, and the geometry of the violence itself often turns the victims into props. If they exist at all, it’s as little more than mutilated bodies in forensic photos.
I tried to do it differently in my book, Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story, the account of the rich and beautiful Connecticut mom who vanished after dropping her five kids off one morning in May 2019 at the New Canaan Country School. The case and the mystery — Jennifer’s body has never been found — made headlines around the world. Reporting on the story for Air Mail as the police investigation unfolded, I, like everyone else, became fixated on the suspected murderers: Jennifer’s estranged husband (she was in the midst of one of the most contentious divorces in Connecticut history) Fotis Dulos and his girlfriend, the South American socialite Michelle Troconis, who appeared in police documents as “the paramour.”
The crime and its perpetrators seemed so familiar and so close to home, yet so inscrutable. For months, every time I lay down, the same questions came into my head: What can drive a person to such violence? Are those who kill the same as the rest of us pushed to irrational extremes, or are they entirely different? How does the violence that ended life make us reevaluate everything — good and bad — that came before?
When I decided to expand my articles into a book, I expected to produce a work typical of the true crime genre. But the nature of the case — what I found when I immersed myself in the world of killer and victim — changed my plans, and, in a sense, rewrote my book. What I learned convinced me that the depiction of such a crime must be about the victim, in this case Jennifer Dulos, who I wanted to return to the center of her own story. I had rediscovered what Capote never forgot: The murder is only the end; it’s the life, the individuality of the person who led that life, that makes the story worth reading. Taking that away had been the object of the killer. I refused to go along.
People often pick up true crime for the tabloid stuff, the gore, the astonishing wizardry of investigation. But in an age of increasing dehumanization, when even our eccentricities can be mimicked by A.I., I think the job of a reporter and writer of true crime should be to recover and restore the victim’s human singularity.
Who was Jennifer Dulos?
She was a daughter and a mother and a playwright and a woman who decided to give up her career to have a family. She was a person with the wrong dream — she sought a domestic perfection that does not exist. She was a woman who trusted too much, a woman handicapped by wealth and privilege, which prevented her from recognizing evil and from understanding the nature of the world. She was a beautiful, talented mother of five whose life was extinguished on an ordinary morning in New Canaan. If you don’t know that, if you don’t know who she was, what she wanted and loved, you will never understand what was lost.
Rich Cohen is the author of Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story, and an editor-at-large at Air Mail and a columnist at the Wall Street Journal who has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. He’s also the author of the New York Times bestsellers Tough Jews; Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football; Sweet and Low; When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead (with Jerry Weintraub); The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones; The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse, and Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent.
