While building their case accusing Jennifer Dulos’s estranged husband of murdering her, the police impounded cars and seized dozens of electronic devices.

Additionally, they requested data from cellphone towers across Connecticut and asked Google and Waze whether anyone had searched for directions to Ms. Dulos’s suburban mansion in the hours after her disappearance.

But well before that, the police — responding to reports that Ms. Dulos, 50, had disappeared shortly after dropping her children off at school — encountered a gruesome, bloody crime scene at her home in affluent New Canaan, Conn. They quickly concluded that she had suffered a violent attack there.

Those procedural details of the rigorous investigation into Ms. Dulos’s disappearance in May were revealed last week, when a state judge unsealed 467 pages of search warrants that helped explain how officials came to charge her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos, 52, with murder and kidnapping despite not having recovered Ms. Dulos’s body.