The House Remembered: The Record Behind Our Richard Dabate Documentary

Richard Dabate told police a masked intruder killed his wife. The house kept a different record. This is the sourcing behind Crime Docket’s documentary The House Remembered, released August 15, 2026, beat by beat, with the documents each claim rests on.

The case in one paragraph

On December 23, 2015, Connie Dabate, 39, was found shot to death in the basement of the family’s home on Birch View Drive in Ellington, Connecticut. Her husband Richard, then 40, told investigators that a masked intruder had entered the house, attacked him, restrained him with zip ties, and shot Connie. Sixteen months later, in April 2017, the state charged him with her murder. A jury convicted him in May 2022 of murder, tampering with physical evidence, and making a false statement, and he was sentenced that August to 65 years. On March 11, 2025, the Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed the conviction. The case is final.

Two columns: his statement against the machine record

The spine of the documentary is a single exhibit: a vertical timeline of the morning of December 23, 2015, with Richard Dabate’s statement to investigators on one side and the timestamped record from the household’s devices on the other. Every timestamp on that exhibit is the state’s own, drawn from the arrest-warrant application and affidavit filed in Superior Court in 2017.

The machine side of the ledger, as the affidavit lays it out:

• 8:26 to 8:27 a.m. Activity on Richard Dabate’s Facebook account, including a search for tattoo ideas.
• 8:41 a.m. A login to his Outlook e-mail account, originating from the house’s IP address.
• 8:47 to 8:59 a.m. The home alarm system is disarmed and re-armed.
• 9:04 a.m. The e-mail to his employer saying he would be late, which he told police he sent while driving to work, is logged as sent from the house’s IP address.
• 9:40 to 9:46 a.m. Activity on Connie Dabate’s Facebook account, from the house.
• 9:18 to 10:10 a.m. Connie’s Fitbit, a Fitbit One clipped to the waistband of her leggings, records 1,217.68 feet of movement. The last movement is logged at 10:05 a.m.
• 10:11 a.m. The alarm system’s panic function is triggered from a key fob.

Against that column sits his account: that Connie came home, that the intruder shot her at about the time she arrived, roughly 9 a.m., and that he was restrained and only later able to trigger the alarm. The affidavit’s point is arithmetic. On the device record, Connie was moving for about an hour after the moment the statement places her death, and stopped six minutes before the panic button was pressed.

The motive ledger

The affidavit also sets out what investigators found in the couple’s finances and in Richard Dabate’s private life. In the documentary we call it the second ledger:

• A credit card his wife did not know about, with charges that included motel rooms and flowers.
• A withdrawal of roughly $93,000 from an investment account that carried Connie’s name.
• A woman with whom he was having an affair, who by December 2015 was seven months pregnant with his child. Crime Docket does not name her.
• A claim on Connie’s $475,000 life-insurance policy, filed five days after her death.

What the physical scene showed

Investigators reported no sign of forced entry, nothing of value taken, and no scent trail leaving the property when a police dog was run along it. The zip ties Richard Dabate said the intruder used to bind him were loose. Those findings are summarized in the Connecticut Supreme Court’s 2025 opinion as well as in the affidavit.

The interrogation

Hours after the panic alarm, Richard Dabate gave investigators a lengthy recorded account, including his description of the intruder as a large masked man in camouflage with a voice he compared to the actor Vin Diesel. The recording was played at trial. The documentary uses excerpts of it, and the interrogation is the one place where the film stays in a single room for an extended stretch, because the statement itself is the evidence.

Trial, verdict, sentence

Trial began in Rockville Superior Court in the spring of 2022. Richard Dabate took the stand in his own defense, and the prosecution’s cross-examination walked him through the same digital timeline. A researcher testified to the reliability of the Fitbit’s clock, and a state digital-forensics examiner presented the device data. The jury returned guilty verdicts on all three counts in May 2022. In August 2022 he was sentenced to 65 years: 60 for murder and five, consecutive, for tampering with evidence.

The appeal, and why it matters beyond this case

Richard Dabate appealed directly to the Connecticut Supreme Court. Among his claims: that the Fitbit data should never have been admitted, and that prosecutorial impropriety at trial denied him a fair trial.

In State v. Dabate, 351 Conn. 428 (SC 20749), decided March 11, 2025, the court affirmed. On the Fitbit, the court held that the trial judge did not abuse his discretion in admitting the data under Connecticut’s Porter standard for scientific evidence, citing the state expert’s credentials, a peer-reviewed study of the device, its general acceptance, its testing and accuracy, and the fact that the device was developed for purposes unrelated to litigation. On the prosecutor’s conduct, the court found four distinct instances of impropriety, including a question about a “little mini Cheshire scene” that violated a trial-court order, and comments in closing that the defendant was counting on jurors to be “gullible, lazy, and unintelligent,” but concluded that neither individually nor together did they deprive him of a fair trial. The court declined to reverse under its supervisory authority.

Six justices heard the case: Chief Justice Mullins and Justices McDonald, D’Auria, Ecker, Alexander, and Dannehy. The decision was unanimous. In Connecticut, State v. Dabate is now the citation that governs whether a wearable device’s activity log can be put in front of a jury.

What the Records Desk has requested

Crime Docket’s documentary was built from the arrest-warrant affidavit, the interrogation recording played at trial, courtroom pool footage, and the Supreme Court’s opinion. Our Records Desk has since requested the underlying records directly. The Connecticut State Police have produced the recorded interviews and the incident report. The Rockville Superior Court has produced part of the court file; the trial transcript, exhibit list, and sentencing records are outstanding. A request to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is pending. Documents will be added to this page as review is completed.

A note on how the film was made

The narration in The House Remembered is a synthetic voice. The timeline, ledger cards, step chart, and audio waveform are data visualizations built from the warrant and the court record, not footage of events. The interrogation audio, the courtroom footage, and the warrant pages are real. There is no re-enactment of the crime and no AI-generated depiction of any person involved. A family friend named in the record is not named here, and the couple’s two sons appear only as ages.