Connie Dabate’s Fitbit did more than record her daily activity on the last day of her life. Police allege that the fitness tracker implicated her husband in her 2015 shooting death.
Richard Dabate, 40, of Ellington, Connecticut, was arrested earlier this month and charged with murder in his 39-year-old wife's Dec. 23, 2015, slaying. He is also charged with tampering with evidence and filing a false statement, according to the Hartford Courant.
Dabate is free after posting a $1 million bond, the Courant reported.
Dabate's arrest warrant, obtained by People magazine, said Dabate told police that a masked man broke into their home the morning of the slaying and that he walked in on him after returning home from work to retrieve his laptop and because he got a text message saying that the home's alarm system had been activated.
Dabate claimed that he was struggling with the intruder when his wife came home from working out at the YMCA, and that he screamed for her to run. The masked man chased her into the basement and shot her to death before he could stop him, Dabate said.
Dabate said the man subdued him, tied him to a chair and tortured him by burning him with a blowtorch and stabbing him with a box cutter. He said he was able to grab the torch and burn the intruder's face, causing him to flee the house. Dabate said he pressed a panic button on the house alarm and called for help, People reported.
Dabate’s leg and arm were attached to a chair with zip ties when police arrived.
The Courant reported that investigators were skeptical of Dabate's story from the beginning. No one showed up at any medical clinic or hospital in the area with burns to the face, and police tracking dogs picked up only Dabate's scent outside the house.
One dog tracked Dabate’s scent to the ambulance that took him for treatment of his own wounds, which were described as superficial.
The couple's house showed no signs of a struggle and nothing was taken, the newspaper reported. Dabate's wallet was found in the grass behind the home, but nothing was missing from it.
Credit: Mark Mirko/Hartford Courant via AP
Credit: Mark Mirko/Hartford Courant via AP
Evidence from Connie Dabate’s Fitbit, along with cellphone and computer records and house alarm logs, also contradicted Richard Dabate’s story, police said. The fitness tracker showed that she was alive and moving for nearly an hour after her husband claimed that she was dead.
The warrant obtained by Peopleand by the Courant included this timeline:
8:46 a.m.: Connie Dabate’s Fitbit showed that she left for a fitness class at the YMCA.
9:01 a.m.: Richard Dabate logged into a computer at his home. He sent his supervisor an email three minutes later saying that the house alarm had activated and he had to return home to check on it. Records showed that the email was sent from his laptop, not from his phone as he drove, as he told police.
9:18 a.m.: Richard Dabate visited the website of the YMCA where his wife worked out, looking at the group exercise schedule. He visited the ESPN website two minutes later, the last time he used his computer that morning.
At that same time, Connie Dabate used her cellphone to make a call. Surveillance cameras at the YMCA showed that she had left the building at that point.
9:23 a.m.: Connie Dabate’s Fitbit registered her moving around after remaining idle for the nine-minute drive home. At the same time, the house’s alarm system registered the garage door opening as she arrived home.
According to her husband’s statements to police, the intruder was already inside.
9:40 to 9:46 a.m.: Connie Dabate’s Facebook page showed that she posted videos to her page, using her iPhone, from inside the home. She also messaged a friend through Facebook.
Her Fitbit last recorded her movements at 10:05 a.m., and the device showed that she had walked a total of 1,217 feet since arriving home. Investigators on the case found that it would have taken her no more than 125 feet to walk from her car to the basement, where she was killed, People said.
10:11 a.m.: The panic alarm for the couple's security system was activated from Richard Dabate's keychain fob, the Courant reported. Despite Dabate's claim that the alarm had activated earlier that morning, the security company shows only the 10:11 a.m. alarm that day.
10:16 a.m.: Connecticut state police received a 911 call from the alarm company. Richard Dabate called 911 four minutes later.
An in-depth report by the Courant showed that the Dabates' marriage was marked by secrets, including the fact that Richard Dabate had a girlfriend whom he had gotten pregnant. Friends interviewed by Connecticut state police investigators said Connie Dabate never indicated that she knew of the affair or the pregnancy.
She also never talked about divorce, the friends said. Police found, however, that Richard Dabate texted his girlfriend a month before the homicide, assuring her that the couple had discussed divorce and were “on the same page.”
He told the woman that they were “getting a slow-moving divorce to make it easier on the kids.”
A day after that text to her husband's girlfriend, Connie Dabate sent her husband a photo of herself wearing lingerie, telling him, "I'm ready for u big boy," the Courant reported.
While Connie Dabate’s friends knew nothing about a divorce, a friend of Richard Dabate’s told police that Richard had confided in him about the affair and pregnancy. Dabate told the man that he was afraid Connie would divorce him.
When police confronted Richard Dabate about the pregnancy, Dabate told them that he and Connie wanted to have another child, but that she couldn't get pregnant, the Courant said. He said his wife was all right with his girlfriend's pregnancy and planned to "co-parent" the child.
Detectives found evidence that the Dabate marriage was troubled even before the affair and pregnancy. A note on Connie Dabate’s cellphone from December 2014 -- a year before she was killed -- listed reasons why she wanted to divorce her husband.
Those reasons included him "(acting) like a kid constantly," being uncaring toward her, being an unfit parent and taking money "from a lot of accounts that don't belong to him," the Courant reported.
The investigation into Connie Dabate’s death showed that Richard Dabate attempted to cash in his wife’s $475,000 life insurance policy five days after she died, but the insurance company denied his claim. Dabate stopped making payments on his own life insurance policy two years before the shooting.
A month after Connie Dabate’s death, Richard Dabate withdrew more than $90,000 from a Fidelity investment account that belonged to his wife.
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