My guest today spent 20 years as a Connecticut state trooper, and he was one of the detectives

on the inside of the Jennifer Dulo's case, one of the most followed true crime stories in the

country. His name is Kenneth Vintreska, and he's finally talking about what the public

never got to see.

I grew up in the valley. Beacon Falls, you ever hear of it? Yeah, yeah. A small little town, you know, I was a valley boy. Not a, my parents didn't have much money growing up, which I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It was a great thing for my childhood. Yeah, I grew up in the valley, grew up Beacon Falls. I went to high school in Waterbury. I ended up going to Holy Cross in Waterbury. We didn't have a local high school growing up. So we got to choose, you know, through a couple public schools surrounding schools. And for me, I just, for whatever reason, I wanted to go to this Holy Cross, this private school for whatever reason. You know, and I just felt like I needed to get out of my area, get out of my element. So yeah, it's like I went to high school there. I went to college at University of New Haven. I played football. I played football in high school. I played football in college for a couple years. And then at 21 years old, I was, they put out this, and I knew I wanted to get into some type of law enforcement and and where I'm

at now in life being older like looking back I wanted I didn't realize it at the time but I was led

into law enforcement because of my childhood upbringing for things I've been through as a kid in

my family early childhood traumas stuff like that nothing I'm a victim of, you know, and place in blame. So I got into law enforcement. I was 21 years old. I was two weeks old enough to take the state police exam. And it was my first police test. And so I take the test, take the written, you know, go through the process. And back then there was no, you know, it wasn't like, you know, you got emails of your, it was letters. You'd wait for a letter in the mail for five months. I'm like, oh, I've got to go take my polygraph now. Okay. You know, and then I go through the process. And by 22 years old, I was hired. And here's a stake of me, you know, going to the academy. mean, Academy wasn't bad for me. I don't want to downplay it because it's paramilitary.

It's like, think of like the Marine Corps training or boot camp. You know, it's seven months of it. You know, you're grinding it out in there. Yeah, you get to go home on Saturdays and Sundays and come back, you know, early Monday morning. But physically, I had just got done playing college ball. So like everything we were doing in there, it wasn't, you know, the punishment. They'd smoke you, you know, pushups and I'm like, that was easy for me, the academy. The hard part about the academy was the head games, the no freedoms, right? I'm a 21 year old kid. What do I want to do? I want to go, go chase some tail, you know, or go all my friends, you know, and I'm,

you know, confined to the academy and it's discipline. And, and what I did learn in that academy was

discipline was very important part of your life. It really is. Like being squared away and discipline,

it shines in your personal life as well. So yeah, graduated the academy. Not the best in the class, not the

work, you know, I'm just trying to be, you know, we call them a wallflower. If you're a wallflower,

it means you try to blend in. You don't want to bring heat on yourself. And so, yeah, graduated.

And those are the best grades I ever gotten in a schooling setting, right? I was the kid in high school, I mean, middle school.

Like, in my grades, I was not in the classroom at all.

I'm not going to pretend I'm a scholar.

The last thing I was doing was homework.

I mean, to backtrack a little bit.

When I was 17 years old, I was bouncing in a bar when I was in high school. You know, Thursday nights. And I would skip school Fridays because I was tired coming in, right? And, you know, at that point, you know, my dad was out of the house. I was a little my mom. I had my car. So I was fairly independent from a young age. But yeah, so I graduate the and, uh, I had moved down to the shoreline down

in the West Haven area with a close, close friend of mine who was also the academy. Um, we had,

you know, the bachelor pad life, you know, two years I'm living with him, but I was assigned,

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