Richard Dabate convicted of murder in death of his wife | Crime & Courts

As the court clerk asked each juror in turn if they’re verdict on the charge of murder was guilty, they stood one-by-one and answered, “yes it is.”

Judge Corinne Klatt then set bond for Dabate at $5 million, and he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, returning him to custody for the first time since he was arrested in April 2017. If he posts bond, he will have to wear a GPS monitor.

Prosecutor Matthew Gedansky had argued for a much higher bond of $10 million, saying that Dabate has made “not so veiled threats” to people he feels have wronged him.

With a minimum 25-year sentence ahead, “jail is a certainty at this point,” Gedansky added.

Standing on the courthouse steps later, Connie’s family and friends remarked on the moment they had been waiting so long for.

“It’s a weight lifted off my shoulders. But it’s bittersweet. Everything kind of hits home. Everything that we went through, and tried to put behind us six years ago is right in front of us right now,” said Connie’s brother, Keith Margotta.

“I felt like I was gonna hit the floor. I was in shock,” Margotta said of the moment the jury foreman announced the verdict.

Margotta said the family had been discussing the potential for a verdict Tuesday, but most of them didn’t believe it would come so soon. “Then we heard that court was in session, and we heard there was a verdict, and I was just stunned,” he said.

One person who hadn’t doubted the jury’s speed was Margotta family spokesman Wayne Rioux.

“This murderer has been convicted as he should be,” Rioux said in a statement outside.

“Hopefully, Judge Klatt will take Connie’s life sentence into consideration during the penalty phase and sentence this murderer to life behind bars, where he will no longer be able to cause the pain suffered by the Margotta family to anyone else,” Rioux said.

Defense lawyer Trent LaLima said Tuesday wasn’t the end of the road, and his team will keep fighting for Dabate moving forward.

“We’re very disappointed in the outcome here. We felt we put on a very strong case for Rick as to why he’s not guilty of this offense,” said LaLima, who added he was surprised by how quickly the jury reached the verdict.

“They only started about 24 hours ago, and it was a five-week trial, so I’d say we’re a bit surprised,” he said. “It was a lot of evidence to go through. There were 130-something witnesses for the state, 600 exhibits, so there was a lot in this case.”

According to Dabate, on the morning of Dec. 23, 2015, he returned home after an aborted trip to work to find an intruder in the house, who shot his wife Connie in the basement, and then tied him to a chair and injured him with a box cutter and other tools, before fleeing out of the basement.

The prosecutor has theorized that Dabate planned to kill his wife to avoid the fallout of a divorce, as he was expecting a baby with another woman. He presented the case to the jury in a chronological, methodical manner, beginning with the first state police personnel who arrived at the Dabates’ home in response to a 911 call, and concluding with electronic evidence obtained from Connie and Richard Dabate’s cellphones and other devices .

Only the jurors know which evidence led them to reach a guilty verdict, but there were a few points that were likely on their minds.

One of the earliest came in the second week of the trial from state police troopers who searched the scene with their K9’s and reported finding no evidence of any trails leaving the property despite using a few different techniques.

Instead, one trooper testified that his dog tracked from the home’s basement bulkhead doors, through which Dabate said the intruder fled, around the side of the house to where Dabate was lying on a stretcher.

In a second attempt the K9 took the same route, except by then Dabate had been loaded into an ambulance. The K9 attempted to climb inside to reach Dabate, Trooper Ryan Cloukey said.

Two other troopers testified about bringing their K9’s to the scene, and how they failed to find any signs that someone had left the property on foot.

In more recent days, the prosecutor called an FBI forensic examiner who said he found no evidence to show Dabate left his property the morning his wife was killed. That was based on GPS data from Dabate’s cellphone, which recorded nearly 60 coordinates between 8:00 am and 10:30 that showed he was always in the area of ​​his home.