Richard denied murdering his wife in broad daylight. Her Fitbit contradicted his alibi.

"I'll see you tomorrow, my little love nugget."

These were the words Richard Dabate allegedly wrote to his mistress a day before his wife Connie, 39, was found dead in their Connecticut home.

It was Richard who reported the crime just two days before Christmas in 2015.

He told authorities he had dropped his sons off at the bus stop before returning home to retrieve a forgotten work shirt. It was then, he said, that a masked intruder attacked.

According to Richard, the intruder had zip-tied him and stabbed him in the leg with a box cutter before shooting Connie, who had walked into the room unexpectedly.

When police arrived at the scene, Richard, then 40, had sustained minor injuries while Connie's lifeless body was discovered in the basement.

But as authorities pieced things together, the husband's account began to unravel.

Watch: Sherele Moody on the 98th woman murdered in 2024. Post continues after video.

Investigators quickly found that Richard's alibi didn't match up with the physical evidence at the scene. There were no signs of forced entry at the scene, nothing was taken from the house, and bloodhounds picked up no foreign scents.

"His story made no sense," a spokesperson for the Connecticut State Police told PEOPLE in 2017. "So we had to begin a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of it."

And the more they dug, the more secrets they found in the couple's seemingly perfect 10-year marriage. A relationship that even had their closest loved ones fooled.

"I never saw this coming, never in a million years," Connie's friend Allie Clarke previously told PEOPLE.

But while friends saw Richard and Connie as a happy and "solid" couple, the husband later admitted to police that there had been infidelity on both sides of their marriage. And when investigators turned to Richard's phone records, they found that damning text to his mistress.

Still — it was a different piece of technology that became the nail in the coffin for the investigation: Connie's Fitbit.

The mother-of-two was wearing the fitness tracker at the time of the murder. According to the data recovered from the device, Connie had moved roughly 370m between 9:18am and 10:05am that morning — well after Richard claimed she had been killed.

The mounting evidence against Richard led to his arrest in April 2017. He was charged with first-degree murder, tampering with evidence, and making false statements to police.

While Richard was briefly released on a $1 million dollar bond, by 2022, he was convicted of his wife's murder.

Connie's father, Keith Margotta, told Connecticut Insider that the conviction allowed a "little bit of closure" for himself and the rest of their family.

Richard's defence team, however, maintain his innocence.

As recently as October 2024, his attorneys filed an appeal to reduce his sentence, which is currently set to keep Richard behind bars until 2087.

"I'm hopeful that the justices will side with us," defence attorney Trent LaLima said, as per NBC Connecticut.

"There were just certain questions we thought shouldn't have been asked, or evidence that shouldn't have come in, and eventually did come in, and some comments during summation that we thought harmed our client's right to have a fair trial."

Richard's conviction may have brought some sense of justice, but for those who knew and loved Connie, it can never undo the pain of losing her. 

"She was a loving, cheerful and kind person," reads her public obituary. "Connie was the sunshine of so many lives."

Though her tragic death shocked her community, the case remains a chilling reminder of how technology can help uncover the truth — even when someone goes to great lengths to hide it.

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