The estranged husband of missing Connecticut mom Jennifer Dulos was allegedly caught on tape dumping 30 garbage bags that police say contained her blood.
Fotis Dulos’ attorney, Norm Pattis, says there is a reason for that.
“There is an explanation, but we’re not going to give it,” attorney Norm Pattis said Wednesday afternoon, the Stamford Advocate reports. “I think when we do it, it will appear a lot less troubling.”
Jennifer, 50, was last seen dropping her five kids off at the New Canaan Country School in Connecticut on May 24.
Investigators say they believe “a serious physical assault” took place in the garage of her New Canaan home after they found blood in the garage shortly after she vanished, the arrest warrant states. Jennifer, it says, “was the suspected victim.”
Fotis, 51, and his girlfriend Michelle Troconis, 44, were arrested a week after Jennifer’s mysterious disappearance. Video footage showed a man police say is Fotis dumping more than 30 trash bags containing clothing and sponges stained with Jennifer’s blood the night she vanished, court records show.
They have each pleaded not guilty to charges of tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution. They are both out on bail.
Pattis and the state’s attorney did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s requests for comment.
On Wednesday morning, Pattis talked about the highly publicized case on the Connecticut-based Chaz and AJ morning radio show on 99.1 WPLR, saying, “From our perspective, this very much remains a missing person case, and the solution as to why she is missing is not obvious.”
Saying he understands why his client is a suspect, Pattis told the show, “Spouses are always suspect in the missing person cases of this sort and we get it. Something happened, obviously, on the morning of May 24, 2019. We’re just not at all sure that Mr. Dulos was involved in it.”
Pattis said he is waiting for the state’s attorney to give him police reports, diagrams and photos from the investigation as part of the discovery process, which should arrive “any day now.”
In the meantime, he told the show he’s relying on “sources close to the investigation” that have allowed him “to monitor” what they’ve been doing.
Where Was Fotis the Day Jennifer Vanished?
Pattis said no when asked if he had come upon new evidence that would make him concerned for his client. He said he wants more information about the struggle in the garage on the day Jennifer vanished.
“Obviously, it’s a matter of grave concern to us,” he said on the morning show. “But I have not yet heard that they have a smoking gun, so to speak.”
Police have not yet been able to prove — via video, at least — that Fotis left his house in Farmington, 70 miles north, the morning of May 24 – or that he went to Jennifer’s house that day, he said.
“The videos that we are aware of do not show him leaving or entering either of the houses,” Pattis said.
Law enforcement, he revealed, is focusing on whether Fotis left his home from the back — and entered her home from the back, so he wouldn’t be seen.
“We do not have video footage that confirms or denies that,” he said on the show.
Pattis says he is still waiting for cell phone records from that day.
“We were told that there is an indication that his cell phone remained at home the entire morning that Michelle, or excuse me, Jennifer, went missing,” he said, quickly correcting himself.
“The state arguably believes that’s because he did not have the cell phone with him and that he may have left it at home.”
‘Gone Girl’ Defense
Pattis also admitted that he “created a little bit of a dust-up” by recently suggesting that Jennifer staged her own disappearance a la Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel and movie about a woman who vanishes and presumed death to frame her husband.
“I mean, la dee da, as Diane Keaton once said in a Woody Allen film,” Pattis said on the show about how author Gillian Flynn dismissed the claim.
Flynn, he said, “wrote a wonderful book” but “fell into the very trap that made her book a commercial success. Sometimes the obvious answer isn’t the right answer” as we saw in Gone Girl.
“Do we believe that Miss Dulos is in hiding somewhere watching this on television?” he said, echoing the plot of the book. “No, we don’t, but we don’t believe this is as simple as everyone else seems to be prepared to believe.”