Late one night in November 2015, Connie Dabate texted her husband, Richard, a photo of her in sexy lingerie with the words, “I’m ready for u big boy.”
A day before, Richard Dabate had texted his pregnant girlfriend to assure her that he and his wife have “talked about the divorce and are on the same page.” He told the woman two days later that he and Connie were “getting a slow-moving divorce to make it easier on the kids.”
A month later, Connie Dabate was shot dead in the couple’s Ellington home with the .357 Magnum her husband had purchased months before. Richard Dabate told police he struggled with a masked intruder until the suspect subdued him by applying pressure to his wrists. The killer then chased his wife into the basement and shot her, he told police.
More than a year later, with the help of information from electronic records, including Connie Dabate’s Fitbit movements on the morning of her death, police charged Richard Dabate with his wife’s murder.
The warrant for his arrest and interviews with people who knew the couple reveal that few were aware of the turmoil in their marriage. The records show that there were signs the Dabates had a loving relationship marked by arguments over money.
State police detectives, however, appeared immediately suspicious of Richard Dabate’s version of what happened the morning his wife was killed. On that morning, three dogs picked up no scent other than Dabate’s outside the home, there didn’t appear to be any point of entry for an intruder and the house was remarkably organized given the struggle Dabate described.
One of the first questions detectives put to Dabate as they interviewed him at Hartford Hospital was whether their investigation would reveal any issues with his marriage.
Dabate took a deep breath as the detectives awaited his response.
“Yes and no,” he said.
‘A Frickin’ Soap Opera’
Richard Dabate was a 1995 graduate of Manchester High School who went on to attend technical school and worked as a computer network administrator in Bloomfield. He has no criminal convictions.
Connie Dabate graduated from Ellington High School in 1995 and received an undergraduate degree from the University of Connecticut in 1999. She was a pharmaceutical sales representative for Reckitt Benckiser, according to her obituary. She also was a past vice president and member of the Ellington Ambulance Corp.
They were married on July 4, 2003, and had two sons, ages 9 and 6.
State police interviewed nearly 20 witnesses, many of them friends and family of Connie Dabate. Most said the same thing: She never talked about getting divorced, although some said she was stressed about the amount of money Richard Dabate spent.
Connie Dabate didn’t like guns, and there was no indication she knew her husband was having an affair and had gotten another woman pregnant, they said. Friends contacted by The Courant said they didn’t want to be quoted because they feared reprisal from Richard Dabate, who was released from prison on bond earlier this week.
One friend said Connie never talked about them having marital problems. Every once in a while, she would hear that Rick’s credit was bad, but the money issues didn’t appear to be any different than what many married couples experience.
Rick Dabate always seemed “odd” and “quirky,” but not capable of killing his wife, she said.
“He was definitely an odd character,” she said. “I would say Rick is Rick. He was kind of quirky.”
“Quirky” could explain his infatuation with Superman. He dressed as the superhero for the Manchester Road Race in 2015 and occasionally ended text messages to his girlfriend with the line, “thinking of you from Superman.”
But not every acquaintance was in the dark about problems in the marriage. One friend of Richard’s told state police that he was aware of the impending divorce and that Richard Dabate had “confided” in the unidentified witness that he had been having an affair with a woman who was 10 weeks pregnant. Richard Dabate told the witness that he was concerned that Connie would divorce him, the warrant for his arrest states.
The revelation that Richard Dabate had a pregnant girlfriend had come to detectives’ attention early in the investigation, and the warrant indicates that he provided an interesting, if somewhat cryptic, explanation.
Richard Dabate said Connie and he wanted to have a child, but that Connie couldn’t. He said they discussed artificial insemination, with the unidentified other woman giving birth. But, he told detectives, he instead had done some “untraditional things” and gotten the woman pregnant. Then he said Connie was all right with the situation and was going to “co-parent” the baby.
Ultimately, Dabate told police that the pregnant woman was a high school friend of his and that there was ” a lot of cheating going on in the beginning on both sides.” He acknowledged that the pregnancy was “unexpected.”
“This situation popped up like a frickin’ soap opera,” he said.
He told detectives the mother of his unborn child was expecting him to divorce Connie. But he also said that his wife and he were working to salvage their marriage and that his girlfriend was not aware of those efforts.
If the Dabates were working to save their marriage, they had much to overcome. A December 2014 entry in the “Notes” section of Connie Dabate’s cellphone — titled “Why I want a divorce” — listed reasons why she wanted to end her marriage to Richard Dabate.
The list included claims that her husband took money “from a lot of accounts that don’t belong to him,” is an unfit parent, is uncaring toward her, doesn’t come home on time and “acts like a kid constantly,” according to the warrant.
Richard Dabate had taken out a credit card without his wife’s knowledge and used it to pay for flowers for his girlfriend and more than $1,200 at a Tolland strip club and stays at a nearby Motel 6, the warrant says.
Making A Criminal Case
Detectives learned that, five days after the shooting, Richard Dabate tried to cash in Connie Dabate’s $475,000 life insurance policy but the insurance company denied his claim. Two years earlier, he had stopped making payments on his own policy. In January 2016, he withdrew more than $90,000 from a Fidelity investment account that belonged to his wife.
The investigation would take many months and relied heavily on police reviewing a wide array of digital footprints from cellphones to laptops to security alarm records. Police also used Connie Dabate’s Fitbit to track her movements, a tool used rarely in criminal cases.
Those records showed that her last movements inside the Birchview Road home were at 10:05 — nearly an hour after Richard Dabate told detectives she had been killed by the masked intruder. She was wearing the Fitbit because she had gone to a YMCA fitness class.
“To say it is rare to use Fitbit records would be safe,” said Lancaster, Pa., district attorney Craig Stedman. Stedman used Fitbit records to prove that a woman had fabricated a story about a stranger breaking into her home and sexually assaulting her.
“It is an electronic footprint that tracks your movements,” Stedman said. “It is a great tool for investigators to use. We can also get the information much faster than some other types of evidence such as DNA tests.”
Richard Dabate told detectives that on the morning of Dec. 23, after he took his sons to the bus stop, he left for work at a Bloomfield-based computer company, at about 8:30 a.m.
His wife was still home getting ready for her spinning class at the YMCA. Her Fitbit indicates that she likely left for the nine-minute drive to the facility around 8:46.
Richard Dabate said he was driving for around five minutes when he got an alert on his cellphone that the alarm back home had been activated. Dabate said he sat at the side of nearby Reeves Road for about five minutes, e-mailing his boss and checking the alarm status before turning around to go home. He estimates that he got back to Birchview Road at about 9 a.m.
Surveillance cameras from the parking lot of the YMCA show Connie Dabate arriving at about 8:53. She sent a message from her phone via Facebook to a psychotherapist requesting an appointment to be hypnotized “because there’s a lot going on right now.”
Richard Dabate said that when he got home he heard a noise upstairs and thought it might be one of the family’s cats until he got upstairs and saw a masked man — about 6-foot-2 and stocky with a Vin Deisel voice “looking through things” in the walk-in closet.
As they start to fight, Dabate said he heard his wife come home and enter the house through the garage door. He yelled for her to run.
Dabate said the man incapacitated him by using pressure points on his wrist and then ran down the stairs after his wife, who was headed to the basement. He chased after him and saw the man about five feet from his wife, but as he approached a gunshot went off, disorienting him.
He said the intruder then approached him and once again did some “sort of pressure point thing to his wrist and neck” and then started tying him to the metal chair. He said the man then grabbed Dabate’s own tool box and began burning him with a torch, put something around his neck that made it hard to swallow and started “poking” him with a box cutter.
Dabate said he used his right arm, which hadn’t been tied to the chair, to direct the torch to the intruder’s face, setting his mask on fire and sending him running out of the basement. Dabate said he then crawled up the stairs, still partially tied to the chair, pressed the panic button on his alarm and then hurled himself up to the stove top to get his cellphone and call 911.
A Timeline Before A Killing
Armed with Richard Dabate’s explanation of what happened that morning, state police set about obtaining search warrants to get cellphone records for the couple, computer records for Richard Dabate’s laptop, Facebook records for both of them and the girlfriend, text messages, and Fitbit records for Connie Dabate.
The records show Richard and Connie Dabate’s activities in the hour after Richard Dabate told police he was confronted by the intruder and Connie was killed:
At 9:04, Richard Dabate sent an e-mail to his boss indicating he would be late to work. It was sent from his laptop, not from Reeves Road as he had said.
At 9:18 a.m., Richard Dabate visited the website of the Indian Valley YMCA to view the group’s exercise schedule. Two minutes later, he searched the ESPN website for the “Mike and Mike” show, the last time he used his computer that morning.
At 9:18, Connie Dabate called someone from her cellphone after surveillance cameras indicated she had left the YMCA. The call lasted 3 minutes and 23 seconds.
At 9:23, Connie Dabate’s Fitbit, idle for nine minutes while she drove home, became active again at the same time alarm records show the garage door opening at their home. State police believe that is when she arrived home.
From 9:40 to 9:46, Connie Dabate posted two videos on Facebook using her iPhone and then posted a message to a friend through Facebook. The IP address is assigned to the couple’s house.
At 10:05, Connie Dabate’s Fitbit registers its last movement. Between the time she came home and when it stopped, she moved a distance of 1,217 feet inside the house.
At 10:11, the panic alarm for the security system is activated from Richard Dabate’s key chain fob. It is only time the panic alarm went off that morning, although Dabate said he had gotten one earlier that morning while driving to work.
At 10:16, the state police barracks in Tolland received a 911 call from the alarm company. Richard Dabate called 911 at 10:20.
One friend of Connie Dabate told The Courant that she believes her friend loved Richard Dabate. In text messages state police obtained between the couple, Connie Dabate calls her husband “sweet pea” and “buttercup,” and he tells her he loves her numerous times.
The tone was decidedly different the day before she was killed, records show.
Connie Dabate tells him she has spent two hours on the phone with Comcast arguing about a cable bill that doubled because he had ordered sports channels to the package. She accuses him of lying and that she “once again had to clean up his mess.”
Her last text to him said “great day off and merry [expletive] Christmas.”
Courant reporters Christine Dempsey and David Owens contributed to this story.
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