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In a chilling incident occurring just two days before Christmas, Connecticut state troopers responded to an emergency at the home of Rick and Connie Dabate, only to uncover a disturbing tableau.
Upon their arrival, Rick was discovered sprawled on the kitchen floor, surrounded by blood, with one of his hands secured to a folding chair. This unsettling scene is recounted in detail in Oxygen’s series, A Plan to Kill.
Rick conveyed to the authorities a terrifying tale of an intruder—a large man clad in camouflage with a voice reminiscent of Vin Diesel—who had allegedly broken into their Ellington residence. According to Rick, the intruder tortured him using a box cutter and blow torch before committing a botched robbery that ended with the murder of his wife, Connie.
Connie, a devoted mother of two, was tragically found in the basement, having suffered two fatal gunshot wounds.
The incident shattered the tranquility of the usually peaceful neighborhood, prompting authorities to lock down the area and initiate an intensive search for the alleged assailant. However, as investigators delved deeper, they began to uncover inconsistencies suggesting that not all was as it initially appeared.
And the key to revealing the chilling truth would ultimately come from the most unexpected source.
Friend Describes Rick Dabate and Connie Dabate as “Match Made in Heaven”
While Rick was known to many as the life of the party, his wife Connie, a pharmaceutical sales rep, stood out for her kind nature.
“She just had this vibe about her that drew you to her,” friend Peggy Giotsas remembered in the April 19 episode. “She was the most caring, loving, thoughtful person that I have ever met in my life.”
The couple—who met at a party after college—moved to the quiet town of Ellington, Connecticut to raise their two sons.
“Connie and Rick were the couple that everybody was a little jealous about,” Peggy recalled. “They never fought, they joked around a lot together. He doted over her. They were a match made in heaven.”
Rick Dabate Told Police He Suspects Disgruntled Contractor
Their love story came to a sudden end on Dec. 23, 2015, when Rick called 911 at 10:16 a.m. and told the dispatcher, “I need help.”
Police rushed to the house with their guns drawn and discovered Rick on the kitchen floor with puncture wounds to legs, his left shoulder and cuts to the head.
As retired Connecticut State Police Detective David Lamoureux explained, “Rick Dabate appeared to be injured, but stable.”
He pointed police to Connie, who had a gunshot wound to the back of the head and another to the stomach.
At the hospital, Rick told authorities that he thought a disgruntled contractor could be behind the deadly attack.
“Rick said they were taking him to court,” retired Connecticut State Police Detective Jeff Payette explained. “This was the only person we knew so far that could have a problem with the Dabate family.”
Investigators also learned that the month before, there had been two separate vandalism incidents. In the first, Connie discovered someone had shoved rags into her tail pipe.
“Then the following week, my window was smashed,” Rick told investigators. “Freaked us out a little bit.”
Feeling unnerved, he said the couple decided to buy a gun for protection.
Rick Dabate Described Harrowing Encounter With Armed Intruder
Investigators had Rick walk them through the timeline of the day Connie was murdered.
He told detectives that he left his home around 8:30 a.m., then realized he’d forgotten his laptop and returned home around 9 a.m. It was then he discovered an intruder, armed with a knife, in a closet in the couple’s bedroom.
“I opened up and there’s this camouflage dude,” Rick recalled. “This is where it all gets so…I never had anything like this happen.”
He claimed the man threatened him and demanded his wallet and pin numbers, which he handed over, but then Connie came home from the gym.
“That’s when I yelled, ‘There’s someone in the house,’” he said. “She must have ran in the basement because we have two guns in the house. One was in the basement in a lockbox and one’s in our closet.”
According to Rick, the intruder ran down to the basement and, before Rick could intervene, he heard “the loudest bang” and then saw Connie on the ground.
Police discovered drops on blood on the basement floor, a butane torch, zip ties, a hammer, a bloody utility knife and the revolver. They also found a bullet projectile lodged into a ceiling joist.
Rick told investigators the assailant zip tied him to a chair and began to torture him, but at some point, he was able to break free and run up the stairs, though still attached to the chair. The intruder ran out a door and Rick called 911.
Troubling Clues Discovered At Scene of Connie Debate’s Murder
After hearing his account, investigators sought out the family’s contractor. Although he admitted to having bad blood with the family, he said it never reached a point of hatred. Plus, he told investigators he had been at a job site all day, providing them with a solid alibi.
With the contractor ruled out, detectives began to notice some unusual aspects of the crime scene. A small window in the basement—which Rick claimed had been the intruder’s point of entry—had no damage. However, when an investigator pushed a window next to it from the outside, it shattered. They also noticed no signs that anyone had been outside the window, even noting that cobwebs remained in the frame.
“The detectives at the hospital, they were relaying to us that Rick had very superficial injury,” retired Connecticut State Police Detective David Lamoureux said. “Why would a reported armed intruder murder his wife in front of him and then not injure him seriously and leave that witness behind?”
Troopers found Rick’s wallet—complete with all its contents—in the yard not far from the house. K-9 dogs brought in to trace the intruder’s scent also kept leading authorities back to Rick.
Rick Dabate Admitted to Having an Affair
The timeline also didn’t seem to match. Though Rick told investigators he returned around 9 a.m., the call to 911 wasn’t placed until 10:16 a.m., creating a large gap in his story.
“After learning all of this stuff from the scene, at the hospital we ask Rick Dabate, what are we going to find during our investigation that’s going to put you in a bad way?” Payette explained. “Then Rick drops a huge bomb and tells us that she’s having a baby with a woman named Sara Ganzer.”
He claimed Connie had wanted to have a third baby, but had health issues that prevented that from happening, so they arranged for Rick and his high school sweetheart to get pregnant. He later admitted the relationship had really been an affair, but still claimed that his wife knew about the pregnancy and wanted to help co-parent.
However, when detectives spoke with Sara, she insisted Rick had promised to leave his wife, admitting Connie didn’t know about the pregnancy.
“At this point,” Payette noted, “we know Rick is lying to us, and we started thinking that there was a plan here to get Connie out of the picture.”
Connie Dabate’s FitBit Held Final Key to Murder
Friends doubted that Connie would have kept a loaded gun in the basement next to the room where her children played, causing investigators to suspect that she’d never known about the second gun.
Meanwhile, Rick increased his wife’s life insurance to $475,000 just before the murder. Internet searches also showed that Rick began to search for information on how to poison someone.
But the final clue came from a surprising place: Connie’s Fitbit. It showed that she had stopped moving at 10:05 a.m. about half an hour after the timeline Rick had provided to investigators.
“In this case, obviously we found the pregnancy with the girlfriend, insurance money, avoiding the whole divorce,” Lamoureux said. “It just didn’t happen out of the blue. The scheme took months of planning.”
Rick was arrested in 2017. After years of delays, he was convicted in 2022 and sentenced to 65 years in prison with no chance of parole.