REAL LIFE NEWS: MURDERING HUSBAND FOILED BY FITBIT
by Hazed
A man has recently appeared in court, charged with murdering his wife – all because the victim’s Fitbit tracker contradicted his version of events.
Richard Dabate claimed that a masked intruder broke into his Connecticut home, shot his wife, then tied him up and tortured him.
Sounds horrific. But police were doubtful about the sequence of events.
Dabate said he had left for work, and not long afterwards his wife had gone to a fitness class – with her Fitbit on her waistband. Then Dabate returned home between 8.45am and 9am because he had forgotten his laptop.
Then he had spotted the intruder: tall and stocky, wearing a “camouflaged suit with a mask.” He heard his wife return home and yelled for her to run. But after a brief struggle, the intruder shot the wife, killing her. Dabate was then half tied to a chair and burned with a torch. He struggled, and tussled with his assailant, managing to turn the torch on him. The intruder dropped the torch and ran off. Dabate was able to crawl upstairs (with the chair still attached to his wrist) and call 911. By then, it was 10.11am.
At first, police took his report at face value, and searched the area. They used dogs to look for evidence that someone had fled the property. But they didn’t find anybody, nor was there any indication that the house had been broken into.
So they turned to the technology, obtaining search warrants for Connie Dabate’s Fitbit, both of their cell phones, their computers and the house alarm logs. Synchronizing the logs, they found that Dabate’s story just didn’t add up. Among the things they found:
- At 9:01 a.m. Richard Dabate logged into Outlook from an IP address assigned to the internet at the house.
- At 9:04 a.m., Dabate sent his supervisor an e-mail saying an alarm had gone off at his house and he’s got to go back and check on it.
- Connie’s Fitbit registered movement at 9:23 a.m., the same time the garage door opened into the kitchen.
- Connie Dabate was active on Facebook between 9:40 and 9:46 a.m., posting videos to her page with her iPhone. She was utilizing the IP address at their house.
- While she was at home, her Fitbit recorded a distance of 1,217 feet between 9:18 a.m. and 10:05 a.m. when movement stops.
All of this meant that Connie couldn’t have been killed as soon as she entered the house. Dabate was lying about the sequence of events.
It wasn’t just the Fitbit that made police suspicious. Five days after the incident, Dabate attempted to make a claim of $475,000 on his wife’s life insurance police. He also admitted later to having an affair with another woman, who he had made pregnant.
Dabate’s lawyer says he is innocent of all charges, but it sure looks like the technology speaks against him.
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/25/us/fitbit-womans-death-investigation-trnd/
