Facebook posts and data from murder victim Connie Dabate’s Fitbit helped lead Hartford, Connecticut police to mark her husband, Richard Dabate, as a suspect in a 2015 murder. Dabate originally claimed that the murder had been perpetrated by an armed intruder, but after over a year of investigation, authorities finally managed to get enough evidence against Dabate to file an arrest warrant against him. Connie had reportedly been shot with a .357 magnum pistol, and the evidence in the case thus far points to it being one that Richard had bought several months back. When the police got around to bringing charges against Richard, he was charged with not only committing the murder but also with lying to police and tampering with evidence. He has already been arraigned and is scheduled to appear in court this Friday, April 28.
According to the suspect, the morning of the murder, he left for work at about 8:30 AM, then got a notification on his phone from his home alarm system and drove back home to find an intruder. This conflicts with Connie’s Fitbit data, which shows that she left the house at 8:46. Furthermore, security cameras showed her leaving her local YMCA at 9:18 AM. Later, the house’s garage door was opened, and between 9:40 AM and 9:46 AM, she was active on Facebook. Her last registered movement on the Fitbit was at 10:05 AM. At 10:11 AM, Richard activated the house’s alarm system, which placed a call to police around 10:16 AM. Richard followed up with his own call to the police at 10:20 to report that his wife had been murdered.
Dabate’s story was heavily contradicted by the data obtained by the local police, especially in light of the fact that he had an apparent motive for the crime given how he told his then-pregnant girlfriend that he and his wife were working on a slow divorce. The couple had also been fighting over Richard’s spending habits, but according to Connie’s friends and family, she had never spoken of a divorce with Richard. Connie’s phone told a different tale, allegedly containing a note about the reasons for which she wanted to divorce Richard. Two days after her murder, Richard reportedly liquidated of his wife’s assets, Hartford Courant reports.