One of three masked intruders who told a Connecticut multimillionaire and her partner that they had been injected with a lethal virus and would receive the antidote only if they paid $8.5 million has pleaded guilty in the 2007 home invasion, prosecutors said.
After spending more than a decade as a fugitive, the man, Stefan Alexandru Barabas, 38, pleaded guilty last week to an extortion charge, the federal prosecutor’s office for the District of Connecticut announced. Three co-conspirators have already been sentenced.
Prosecutors said that just before midnight on April 15, 2007, Mr. Barabas, a Romanian citizen, and two other men entered an estate in South Kent, Conn., wearing masks and carrying knives and imitation guns. A fourth man drove them close to the home and later picked them up.
The men bound and blindfolded Anne Bass, an arts patron, and her longtime partner, Julian Lethbridge, an artist.
The men injected each of them with a substance that they claimed was a deadly virus and ordered the couple to pay $8.5 million or they would be left to die from the injection, prosecutors said.
The couple did not have a way to pay, prosecutors said, so the men drugged them with sleeping pills and left in a stolen Jeep Grand Cherokee. The vehicle was found abandoned the next morning at a Home Depot in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Ms. Bass and Mr. Lethbridge were taken to an emergency room in New Milford, Conn., where doctors found nothing poisonous in their systems, The New York Times reported in 2007.
The substance they were injected with was later identified as gentian violet, an antiseptic dye used to treat fungal infections.
Ms. Bass, who died in 2020, was the ex-wife of Sid Bass, one of four billionaire brothers from Texas whose family fortune was initially made in the oil business. They divorced in 2008 and Ms. Bass received an estimated $200 million in the settlement.
Mr. Lethbridge could not immediately be reached for comment.
In 2012, during the trial for one of the other people involved in the plot, a lawyer for Ms. Bass read a statement on her behalf, The New Haven Register reported. “Anne and Julian believed that each moment could well be their last,” the statement said.
The statement noted that her fear was “heightened” because she was looking after her 3-year-old grandson at the time and she did not know whether he was safe. The child had slept through the ordeal, The Register reported.
Investigators connected four men to the home invasion using information, including DNA evidence, the license plate of a car seen near the home on the night of the invasion and the victims’ testimonies.
Also, a few days after the home invasion, an accordion case filled with an unusual set of items washed up in Jamaica Bay in New York.
Among the items inside were syringes, latex gloves, a stun gun and a laminated telephone card with the Connecticut address of the victims. The accordion case was eventually tied to the men, including one whose father was an accordion player.
During the investigation, the four men had fled the United States. They have all since returned and been sentenced, except for Mr. Barabas, who was arrested in Hungary in August 2022.
His sentencing is scheduled for September. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to interfere with commerce by extortion. If the plea agreement is accepted by the court, he is expected to be sentenced to a prison term of seven to eight years, prosecutors said.
Mr. Barabas’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.