67 Steps (The Amato Family)

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Speaker 3 All right, Sylvia. Look at me.
I'm outside going to check the mail, and I'm asking you if you can please,

Speaker 3 pretty please, send me one of your videos.

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Speaker 3 I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.

Speaker 5 I'm Anasega Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.

Speaker 3 And this is Anatomy of Murder.

Speaker 5 We live in a world of instant messaging, group chats, and an endless scroll of images that gives us a window into each other's private lives.

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Speaker 3 And much like addictions to drugs, gambling, or alcohol, it can cause not just a rift with the family and friends, it could also lead to a break with reality itself, sometimes with dangerous and even deadly consequences.

Speaker 5 Today's story brings us back to Florida, to a homicide case that unfolded very quickly in January of 2019, but left a community stunned by its disturbing details and bizarre motives.

Speaker 4 My name is Dominic Cleo. I'm the chief trial attorney for the 18th Circuit in Seminole County, Florida, and I've been here for about 19 years.

Speaker 3 Dominic is a nearly 20-year veteran of the prosecutor's office and dozens of high-profile homicide cases, but it wasn't necessarily the role he thought he was born to play. Or was it?

Speaker 5 The answer to that is no. In fact, like many, he admitted that when he first became a lawyer, he was afraid of public speaking and actually terrified to be in court.

Speaker 5 But it was a fear he knew he eventually had to conquer.

Speaker 4 I thought to myself, you know, I'm going to take a crack at getting some baptism by fire and be a prosecutor for a few years and leave. And then when I started, I fell in love with it.

Speaker 4 I've been here ever since.

Speaker 3 And in that time as a prosecutor, one of the cases that really stood out in his career was this one. And it all started on a clear morning in January, about 30 miles north of Orlando.

Speaker 4 The Amato home is out in Chileota, and that's a real rural area of the county. It's horsebacks and horseback riding and target shooting and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 5 It's also where Chad and Margaret Amato had raised three sons, two of whom, Cody and Grant, were still living with them in their large, well-appointed home in Horace Country.

Speaker 4 The father, he was a pharmacist. He worked for CVS at the corporate center in Orlando.
And the mother, Margaret, was in the medical business also.

Speaker 4 She was doing like billing and coding kind of things from home.

Speaker 5 Their sons, Cody and Grant, who had both pursued nursing degrees at the University of Central Florida, also aspired to careers in the healthcare industry.

Speaker 3 But on the morning of January 25th, all those plans came to a sudden and violent stop.

Speaker 4 The older, the brother Cody, he was a nurse anesthetist, and he was a very diligent employee for one of our local hospitals and a very congenial fella. And he

Speaker 4 never missed a day of work, which, you know, you hear folks say that, but he legitimately never missed a day of work.

Speaker 4 And if he was going to be late, he always called his co-workers and let them know.

Speaker 5 But that morning, no one had heard from him, and both his girlfriend and his coworkers were getting increasingly concerned.

Speaker 4 I want to say it was around nine in the morning. One of his coworkers had called the sheriff's office because they had attempted to reach Cody a number of times, and he hadn't answered his phone.

Speaker 4 His phone went straight to voicemail, which was not very common. And so they had asked the sheriff's office to do a well-being check.

Speaker 3 Seminole County deputies arrived at the Amado home at approximately 9:18 a.m.

Speaker 3 Despite there being multiple cars in the driveway, the doors and the windows were all locked and no one seemed to be home.

Speaker 4 They checked for signs of forced entry on the outside.

Speaker 4 They turned on their sirens to try to alert anyone that was in the home that they were out there, knocked on the doors, checked the windows, and there was no response.

Speaker 5 Now, because this is a well-being check in response to a legitimate concern about Cody, there was a sense of urgency and the police had an obligation to make sure everything was okay.

Speaker 4 One of the deputies took it upon himself to sort of walk around the back of the house and after a while since no one answered he took out a credit card and basically popped a lock on a set of French doors that go into the master bedroom of the home.

Speaker 3 When the deputy entered the house, it was immediately clear that those fears were well-founded.

Speaker 4 So as he walked in, he observed Margaret Amato, the mother, sitting at her desk face down with a gunshot wound to the back of her head.

Speaker 5 The deputy soon moved into the kitchen. He found the body of Cody's father, 59-year-old Chad Amado, in his work clothes, and he was laying on the floor in a large pool of blood.

Speaker 4 The blood was such that it was apparent that he was shot also in the back of the head and that he had not immediately passed away because there was fingerprints sort of clawing along the ceramic tile floor.

Speaker 4 And subsequently, there was a second gunshot that ended his life.

Speaker 3 But incredibly, the horror did not end there.

Speaker 4 And as the deputy cleared the house, he found Cody Amato deceased in an area between where the garage enters the home, right by that sort of exterior door and a puddle, of course, of his own blood, wearing his nurse scrubs that he had been wearing and with a backpack.

Speaker 5 Also discovered near Cody's body a nine millimeter handgun, as well as several spent shell casings scattered amongst the three victims.

Speaker 4 So there were no signs of forced entry. All the doors were locked.
All the windows were sealed. There was nothing that was broken.
The house had a number of expensive electronic items.

Speaker 4 Nothing had been disturbed or taken, from what they could tell.

Speaker 3 So it was apparent that robbery was likely not a motive in this brutal slaying that claimed three lives. But that still left open some pretty frightening possibilities.

Speaker 5 Given the location of the gun found at the scene, one of the possibilities was a murder-suicide.

Speaker 5 Perhaps Cody Amato had shot and killed his parents and then retreated to the garage and taken his own life.

Speaker 3 But even an on-scene examination by homicide detectives, of course, and the coroner determined that the scenario was unlikely.

Speaker 3 Cody's wound did not appear to be self-inflicted, and the gun was found too far away to realistically have been used to kill himself. And there were other telling details from the crime scene itself.

Speaker 4 They find all kinds of things. They find shell cases next to each of the bodies.
They are able to recover projectiles from, I believe, a cabinet, drywall, and things like that.

Speaker 4 What's fascinating about this scene is that the shell cases did not match the projectiles.

Speaker 4 So in other words, the shell cases that were left behind after the projectile is discharged, those didn't match what came out of the case.

Speaker 4 And when we had our forensic tool mark folks look at that, they were able to say, there is no way on God's green earth that those projectiles came out of what is sitting next to the bodies.

Speaker 5 In other words, the gun found at the scene, it was not the murder weapon. It appeared that the whole scene had been elaborately staged.

Speaker 3 And that right there suggested that this was definitely not some random home invasion or even a domestic dispute that escalated into violence.

Speaker 3 This seemed not only to be deliberate and planned, but almost professional.

Speaker 4 And then it turned on whether they had any enemies or they owed any money to anybody, and none of that ended up being the case.

Speaker 5 The fact was that Chad and Margaret were devoted parents and well-liked members of their community. Margaret was an avid horseback rider, while Chad was a lifelong caregiver and provider.

Speaker 3 Together, they had raised three sons, encouraging them to excel academically and to value discipline and hard work.

Speaker 3 Cody Amato, who was then 31 when he was killed, was a successful anesthetist known for his kindness and dedication to his patients.

Speaker 3 He was especially close with his younger brother, Grant, who had followed him into nursing and was also living at the home with his parents.

Speaker 5 In other words, these were not the kinds of people that were known to attract trouble or would have found themselves the targets of such a carefully staged execution.

Speaker 3 But when deputies made contact with Amato's oldest son Jason, who did not live in the house, he was able to provide some disturbing background, specifically in regards to his youngest brother Grant.

Speaker 5 According to Jason, there had been escalating tension between Grant and the rest of the family that had recently reached a crisis when it was discovered that Grant had stolen a considerable amount of money from both his parents.

Speaker 3 But according to Jason, it wasn't an addiction to narcotics or alcohol that Grant was desperately trying to finance. It was an online romance with a woman he had never met.

Speaker 5 An obsession that had siphoned off over $200,000 of his parents' money, landed him in rehab for internet and sex addiction, and had caused irreparable damage to his relationships with his family.

Speaker 3 Oh, and we should also mention that Grant's Honda was the only car not still in the driveway.

Speaker 4 As soon as they heard that, that was very powerful motive for them to focus on Grant as their primary suspect.

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Speaker 5 29-year-old Grant Amato was the youngest of Chad and Margaret Amato's three sons. And for most of his life, he had tried to keep up with his brother Cody and his parents' high standards for success.

Speaker 4 Grant and Cody Cody were very close growing up. They lived with their parents throughout their entire life.
Grant was a very intelligent individual. He had become a nurse just like his brother.

Speaker 3 After getting his nursing license, Grant began work at a healthcare facility in Orlando, while in his free time, he pursued a variety of healthy hobbies.

Speaker 4 He did some weight training. He also did airsoft activities with a bunch of his friends.
He was a video game person, was into Japanese culture and Japanese anime and those types of things.

Speaker 4 By most accounts, pretty normal fellow. There was not a whole lot of red flags.

Speaker 5 But in 2018, things began to go off the rails when he was dismissed from his job following some very troubling accusations.

Speaker 4 He was working at the time at a facility with a bunch of elderly folks who were, you know, in need of pain management.

Speaker 3 In the summer of 2018, Grant was suspected of stealing a powerful sedative called propofol and then administering it to patients without a doctor's authorization and without the patient's consent.

Speaker 4 He'd begin to overdose patients so that they would sleep longer and he wouldn't have to be as hands-on with them since they would be unconscious.

Speaker 3 So the first question I would have Anasiga, obviously, this is horrific. But was he trying to lighten his workload by having the patients that are under his care sleeping all the time?

Speaker 3 And of course, just the tremendous danger of administering a powerful sleep agent could easily have turned deadly.

Speaker 5 And to me, it's also just somehow even worse when we're talking about doing something to people that are already patients because they're already more vulnerable than someone else.

Speaker 5 So of course, you talk about drugging anyone. Our reaction is going to be the same, but it just seems even more, I don't know, sinister, the idea of whatever his motivation.

Speaker 5 I think that your first question is very likely it, right? This doesn't seem like something that he's trying to to ease someone's pain.

Speaker 5 But again, if you keep them asleep longer, then you have to do less work.

Speaker 3 Either way, this action he took had very serious consequences.

Speaker 4 The Orange County Sheriff's Office went out there after it was reported and confronted him, and he was arrested for felony theft over in Orange County for that.

Speaker 4 And that, of course, precipitated him losing his job and having his nurse's license yanked. And then he became sort of a homebody.

Speaker 5 The incident marked the beginning of a downward spiral. With no job, no prospects, and no social life to speak of, Grant Amato found comfort where many isolated young people do, online.

Speaker 3 Grant gave up weightlifting and airsoft and retreated to his bedroom where soon his gaming hobby turned into a gaming habit, then an obsession.

Speaker 4 And he spent more and more time on the computer all hours of the night to the point where the family started to become concerned about him.

Speaker 5 I'm sure there's plenty of parents out there that can relate to this. A kid who seems just glued to their screen at all hours playing games with strangers, but with Grant, it was ultra extreme.

Speaker 3 And remember, Grant was a 29-year-old college graduate, and instead of looking for a new job or his own apartment, he was in his parents' house playing video games, sometimes all throughout the night.

Speaker 4 He had indicated to them that the reason he was spending all this time on the computer is because he was going to become a Twitch gaming streamer.

Speaker 4 And for folks who don't know what that is, that's a streaming service where members can play video games and other folks watch the members play these games.

Speaker 4 And then you can get paid by playing these different video games online. And that did not go well for him.
He didn't really make any money doing that. He didn't really develop any sort of followers.

Speaker 4 He did not become an influencer.

Speaker 5 But what he did find was an escape, an anonymous fantasy world where he could be anyone he wanted to be and where he found all the things that he felt he was lacking in the real world.

Speaker 5 Respect, success, and eventually even companionship.

Speaker 4 He was staying at home in

Speaker 4 his room with a very high-powered computer playing games and chatting and basically living online and creating this persona online. And then his obsession sort of turned to pornography.

Speaker 3 According to his oldest brother, Jason, Grant began frequenting pornographic websites, especially those featuring pay-per-view live streams.

Speaker 3 And it was here that he developed an obsession with a Bulgarian webcam model named Sylvie.

Speaker 5 And we're not here to judge what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes, even their parents' homes. But here's the thing, watching these live streams, they cost money.

Speaker 4 So the way that that works, each particular model has a page. Each model has fans, followers, I guess.

Speaker 4 And for whatever reason, he was real drawn to her and started exchanging real money for fake money for tokens on this website to tip her.

Speaker 3 And with Grant logging hours and hours watching and interacting with this webcam model, he was also spending thousands of dollars on virtual tokens in order to maintain what he believed was a genuine personal relationship.

Speaker 4 And this webcam model, Sylvie, when he started just tipping her this exorbitant amounts of money, she, of course, is going to personalize her messages and give him extra access to things.

Speaker 4 And I think part of it became very personal. Obviously, it became very personal to him.

Speaker 4 But I think it kind of crossed over from fantasy to what became his reality because she was doing extra things for him. And again, not necessarily just sexual.

Speaker 4 I mean, she sent him a Christmas card or a birthday card.

Speaker 4 She would send him videos of her just making breakfast, like nothing necessarily commiserate with a pornography website, although there was plenty of that too.

Speaker 5 As his obsession with this one particular model grew, he began lavishing her with gifts, things like expensive lingerie.

Speaker 3 To fund his obsession, Grant stole directly from his brother Cody. He maxed out his parents' credit cards.

Speaker 3 He even managed to pilfer funds from his parents' retirement account without their knowledge, all to lavish on a woman he had never met.

Speaker 4 It was at that point where they realized, oh my God, he had siphoned money from the family, I think in the excess of $250,000 over the course of a few months.

Speaker 4 That's when the shoe dropped, because at that point, when dad had figured all this out, he had given Grant a list of ultimatums of things he had to do.

Speaker 5 In December of 2018, Grant's family finally staged an intervention, insisting that he seek treatment for his internet and pornography addiction.

Speaker 4 Grant got sent off to have sex rehab done against his will. Okay, they drove him to a facility down in South Florida.
He was only there for a couple days,

Speaker 4 maybe a week. He left.

Speaker 4 But while he was gone, his dad or his brother logged on to this social network for these cam models because Grant had developed this personality in this social group where he had indicated to these folks that he was a doctor, that he drove a BMW, that he was very wealthy, he was successful and handsome and all these things.

Speaker 4 And dad got on there and basically spilled the beans that his son was a fraud and he lives with his parents. He drives a Honda.
He has no money. He has no job.

Speaker 4 All this money that he's been sending over via tokens for this particular webcam model, Sylvie, to do things was all predicated upon him stealing.

Speaker 3 As you can imagine, this is where the tension between Grant and his family really started to come to a head.

Speaker 3 Being exposed as a fraud online was a devastating embarrassment that jeopardized the identity he had created within his online community.

Speaker 4 And so dad outed him. Grant, when he got back from this sex rehab, he found out, of course, that his dad had done this.

Speaker 4 and he had written an apology letter where Grant had said, I'm sorry that I lied to everybody. He owned up to it or whatever.

Speaker 4 And then everybody went radio silent on it, including Sylvie, the woman he was obsessed with. And I think that was really the straw that broke the camel's back.

Speaker 5 At home, Chad Amato installed an internet monitoring system to keep Grant off the computer. But even then, his compulsion to be online proved to be too strong.

Speaker 5 And soon Grant was sneaking away to use public Wi-Fi to reconnect with his overseas paramour.

Speaker 3 All All right, Sylvia, look at me. I'm outside going to check the mail, and I'm asking you if you can please,

Speaker 3 pretty please, send me one of your videos. I'd love it so much when you just send them to me.

Speaker 5 And just sidestepping for a moment, because we're really talking about internet addiction, according to the American Journal of Psychiatry, internet addiction is apparently a common disorder that soon merits inclusion in the textbooks.

Speaker 5 It's a diagnosis in the compulsive-impulsive spectrum disorder. And here's what it always will include.

Speaker 5 There's basically three subtypes: excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, and email text messaging. And they all share the following four components.
And I thought this was really interesting.

Speaker 5 One, excessive use, often associated with the loss of sense or time or neglect of basic drives. Two, withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, or depression when the computer is inaccessible.

Speaker 5 Three, tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, more hours of use.

Speaker 5 And lastly, negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue.

Speaker 5 And Scott, that certainly seems to check off the boxes of what we're hearing about here.

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 3 I mean, you're looking at Grant and Sylvia's alleged relationship or what he thought was a real deep connection and perhaps maybe call it naivety or just a complete compulsion, as you mentioned.

Speaker 3 I mean, he was paying lots of money to be in this online relationship and feeding this habit, this compulsive habit, as you mentioned. You need money.

Speaker 3 And apparently, it sounds like he needed a lot of it.

Speaker 5 And as we know, with many types of addictions, one of the unfortunate things that often come with it when you need that money is that you use all the money you have and you need more.

Speaker 5 And so there are other things similar. We hear this with narcotics addiction all the time, that that also comes with other things like stealing, breaks with reality.

Speaker 5 And then family members don't know what to do, you know. And here we know that the family did not involve the police.
And that just comes down to most often a parent's love.

Speaker 4 They, from all accounts, were good, decent people, but also private.

Speaker 4 And I think that that sort of explains some of the decisions that were made to not get the police involved when all this stuff kind of went sideways with the theft of the funds, you know, keep it inside the confines of the family unit.

Speaker 5 Now, it was around this time that Grant's brother Cody had expressed to his girlfriend that his youngest brother's increasingly erratic behavior was starting to get frightening, and he even feared for his family's safety.

Speaker 3 Compounding that fear is the fact that Grant had access to firearms, and he also knew how to use them.

Speaker 4 They were avid gun people, all of them.

Speaker 4 So there were firearms all over the house.

Speaker 5 An angry and increasingly unstable young man in a house full of guns. It was a dangerous combination, and it might have proved deadly.

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Speaker 5 According to Cody Amato's girlfriend, on January 24th, his father had finally issued an ultimatum to his troubled youngest son. Grant had to move out.

Speaker 5 The family would no longer tolerate his obsessive and criminal behavior.

Speaker 3 The very next day, Chad Amato, his wife Margaret, and their son Cody were found shot to death in their home.

Speaker 5 Now, the troubling backstory on Grant's relationship with his family was still in the process of being fully uncovered in the hours after the discovery of the murders.

Speaker 5 But just his absence from the scene made it imperative for law enforcement to locate him.

Speaker 4 Really, all they knew was his car was missing. He was the only person there at that house that had not been shot and killed.

Speaker 3 But as the full story began to unravel, Grant quickly became a significant person of interest. So Seminole County sheriffs issued an APB to locate either him or his vehicle.

Speaker 4 They had a hard time finding him at first. We ended up locating him through toll records and a tag reader at a hotel close to the Orlando International Airport.

Speaker 5 The fact that he was at a hotel by the airport was already a clue that Grant was demonstrating the behavior of someone on the run.

Speaker 5 So police approached carefully, more than aware that the 29-year-old was likely desperate and probably armed.

Speaker 4 They went to that hotel room, knocked on the door. He came out without much of any issues.
He had a bag packed. He had his passport.
He had some cash.

Speaker 4 So they detained him and then brought him back to the sheriff's office for an interview. We've come and talked to you.

Speaker 7 He wrote up here voluntarily with us to talk to us. Why do you think we're having this conversation? I honestly don't know, but I'm pretty freaked out at this point.

Speaker 3 Now, watching the video from this taped interview with Grant Amato, he appears pretty composed and even cooperative with law enforcement.

Speaker 3 He does not really present as a person who might be involved in the cold-blooded murder of his entire family.

Speaker 5 But I will say, and of course, it's never one size-fits-all, he also doesn't behave like someone who would have just learned that both his parents and his older brother had just been murdered, a fact that was not lost on investigators in the room.

Speaker 4 They sort of noticed that

Speaker 4 his demeanor was peculiar. It was very flat affect.

Speaker 4 They asked

Speaker 4 when he was at the house last, where he was in the morning. He had indicated that the following morning he had a job interview that he was at, which was true.
They discussed with him

Speaker 4 if he knew what was going on at the house, if he knew his parents were dead. He said he had no idea.

Speaker 7 I'll give you that opportunity.

Speaker 7 Right now, tell me

Speaker 7 something you want to get off your chest it's there i can see it in your face it's in your eyes i genuinely don't have anything else that i can say about the night or you know the the period of time afterwards

Speaker 3 grant claimed he had spent the night out at a hotel after his father had kicked him out of the house and while he admitted that his relationship with his dad was strained he did deny having anything to do with the murders.

Speaker 4 And then they asked him questions about, you know, who would want to do this and then grant went into a scenario where he explains that his father was abusive to his mother and that it was a very unpleasant place to to live and that his brother was you know always his protector and always had his back and and defended him against his angry dad my dad was a very

Speaker 7 like angry violent type person so you're afraid of him oh yeah you you are actually afraid that he could kill you. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Grant tried to establish an alibi for the day of the murder, but both the information he was providing and the way he provided it, they just weren't that convincing.

Speaker 7 You go to the interview. Let's say you're there until maybe 11 o'clock, approximately.
Where do you go from there? From there,

Speaker 7 I pretty much just drove around. I was thinking of

Speaker 7 like passing by the house, but I inevitably decided against it.

Speaker 4 It's not what you say. It's sort of

Speaker 4 how you say it and then getting stuck with whatever version you give.

Speaker 4 You know, he says he left the house at like three o'clock or something and then just kind of drove around and then wanted to get out of there, not come back, and because his dad threw him out, they got into this big argument.

Speaker 4 I mean, it was so convoluted and so all over the place that it was frankly unbelievable.

Speaker 3 But I think his most telling, let's say, mistake was perhaps when Grant Grant suggested that his brother, Cody, was responsible for his parents' murder.

Speaker 4 One of the investigators asked, well, you know, who would possibly do this?

Speaker 4 He said, I think maybe Cody killed everybody and then killed himself, you know, as a way to, like, protect Grant and his family. That was sort of the version that he gave during the interview.

Speaker 7 Did Cody

Speaker 7 have the gun affinity you have? He did. He liked guns like you did.
Right, yeah. Did he keep any guns on him? I think Cody had his pistol.
Okay. And then he...
What did he keep normally carry?

Speaker 7 It was like a

Speaker 7 Smith and Weston M9

Speaker 7 shield or armor or core, core something.

Speaker 5 Considering Cody had never shown signs of depression or self-harm behavior, it was at least on its face a pretty unconvincing and even outrageous suggestion.

Speaker 4 It just didn't make any sense. A girlfriend of Cody had always indicated that he was a perfectly well-adjusted, hard-working individual, and it would be way, way out of character for him to do that.

Speaker 5 But Grant's suggestion did support the theory that staging a murder-suicide was indeed part of the killer's plan to get away with the homicide.

Speaker 3 And I think it also suggested that they were dealing with not just an angry young man with a vendetta against his parents. They may just be dealing with a cold-hearted sociopath.

Speaker 3 And Anasega, I did notice, as you probably did watching this, is that he's being very open. He's talking.
And I guess the real plan here is to keep that open line of communication going.

Speaker 4 They presented him with crime scene photos. So I think it was about four or five photos of the house and his deceased parents and brother.

Speaker 5 Horrific pictures of his own father in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, his brother curled up in the room off the garage, and his mother, the woman who tried so hard to save him from his own demons, face down on on her desk.

Speaker 5 Photos that would be disturbing to anyone, let alone a family member. But in the interview room, they were met with a blank stare and then a half-hearted attempt at genuine emotion.

Speaker 4 The detective said it was very clear to them that it would seem to be crocodile tears, not particularly genuine.

Speaker 3 Investigators even allowing Grant's oldest brother, Jason, to go into the interview room and confront him about their parents' murders.

Speaker 4 Jason went in towards the end. It was a very heartfelt conversation.
He's, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he's like, listen, man, what's going on? Who would have done this to mom and dad?

Speaker 4 Like, did you do this? He gets confronted and his demeanor is just silent.

Speaker 5 And of course, investigators cannot use a person's silence against them.

Speaker 5 But if a person is confronted with something that awful and shocking, sometimes a glaring silence, at least out of the courtroom, can start to feel like a tacit admission of guilt.

Speaker 4 If you're confronted with that, what is a reasonable person's explanation going to be? You're just going to sit there?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 4 He sat there quietly and took it.

Speaker 5 But while the circumstantial evidence against him was substantial, including his history of conflict with his parents, his financial motive, and his lack of a strong alibi, there still wasn't any direct evidence to either tie him to the crime scene or disprove his alibi.

Speaker 3 At this point, investigators hadn't even recovered the murder weapon because remember, the gun found at the scene was not the one that fired the bullets that killed Cody, Chad, and Margaret Amato.

Speaker 4 As a matter of fact, after that interview, we did not approve an arrest warrant because there were still too many questions that had yet to be answered.

Speaker 4 And without having a timeline yet developed as to when all this stuff happened, at that point, it is probable that he was involved, but it just wasn't quite there yet.

Speaker 5 And this is another one of those examples where sometimes the pace of criminal justice can seem frustratingly slow.

Speaker 5 But as a prosecutor, I can tell you it is crucial to first gather enough evidence and also to manage the ticking clock between arrest and trial.

Speaker 4 Because in Florida, the moment that you put handcuffs on someone on a felony, the state has 175 days to bring them to trial.

Speaker 4 We were not confident, at least at that first interview, that we had enough in the event of a speedy trial that we could get a conviction. You may want to act immediate, and sometimes you have to,

Speaker 3 but if you don't have to sometimes your case will benefit tremendously just by waiting fair enough but they didn't wait very long just three days later on january 28th 2019 grant amato was arrested and charged with three counts of first degree premeditated murder and it was a death penalty case so we elected to seek the death penalty

Speaker 5 According to the arrest affidavit, Grant Amato's response was that his family had been blaming him for for ruining their lives, stealing, and not following the rules of their home.

Speaker 5 So he might as well, quote, be blamed for this too.

Speaker 4 I was approached by our lawyer who does our indictment work, because in Florida, every first-degree premeditated or felony murder case has to be indicted by grand jury.

Speaker 4 And the way that it was sort of explained to me from the very beginning was, hey, listen, we have this case.

Speaker 4 It's a very circumstantial case, but I think if we piece it together, the digital footprint will be almost undeniable.

Speaker 3 The prosecution were betting that the suspect's near constant internet use, digital forensics would quickly dismantle his alibi and possibly help build an accurate timeline of the murders.

Speaker 3 But without a murder weapon and any convincing physical evidence, they still had their work cut out for them.

Speaker 4 When he got arrested and arraigned, And it was set for the first control date after that first Akestan, he didn't waive speedy trial.

Speaker 4 And typically a defendant and his lawyers will waive speedy so they can do due diligence, right? They can do depositions, they can file all kinds of different motions, they can

Speaker 4 develop a defense that's going to be beneficial to their client.

Speaker 4 And I guess from a strategic standpoint, and certainly in this case, the defendant and his lawyers elected to not waive speedy trial and keep our feet to the fire. And frankly,

Speaker 4 it was effective. In this particular case, the gamble was they're not going to be able to get all this stuff together in time.
So let's just see how quickly they can put it together.

Speaker 5 So essentially, the prosecution was still collecting evidence in the immediate lead up to the actual trial. Not uncommon at all.

Speaker 5 But here it was also trying to gather the pieces of evidence that might prove pivotal in that trial. So talk about a ticking clock.

Speaker 3 Luckily, the digital forensics in this case, from the movements of each family member's cell phones to financial records and, of course, internet search histories, they all proved to be as valuable as prosecutors hoped they would be.

Speaker 4 And what they did is they started to sort of go through what he said during his interview and kind of pick it apart. He established a timeline during his interview of where he was.

Speaker 4 He said that he was at that house until 11 o'clock or midnight on the 24th.

Speaker 4 And police were quick to figure out from Margaret's work computer that the last human interaction that anyone had with that computer was around 4 o'clock in the afternoon on the 24th. And then

Speaker 4 they're like, okay, well, if she presumably was deceased at around 4, that meant that Grant, by his own admission during the interview, would have been hanging out in the house with his dead mom until 11 or 12 at night.

Speaker 5 There was even disturbing evidence that hours after he had returned home, Chad Amato's fingerprint had been used to access his bank account.

Speaker 5 The implications that his son Grant had pressed his dead father's finger to his phone to access his money. It's almost too horrible to imagine.

Speaker 3 Even after Cody, Chad, and Margaret's bodies had been discovered, one of the family's credit cards had been used to buy $600 worth of tokens for access to Sylvie, the Bulgarian webcam model.

Speaker 5 But it wasn't all digital forensics that was pointing to Grant Amato's guilt. Because just before the start of the trial, investigators finally made the most important discovery of all.

Speaker 5 The murder weapon.

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Speaker 4 We knew the shell cases didn't match the projectiles. That we knew.
And so we were just, and we didn't have, but we didn't have a weapon. You know, we didn't have a murder weapon.

Speaker 4 And it wasn't until, golly, I want to say a week before the trial that

Speaker 4 we found out that this gun had come up missing.

Speaker 5 The gun that had disappeared belonged to a friend of Grant's, and its ammunition was a match to the projectiles found at the crime scene.

Speaker 4 And Grant had been at his house about a week or two prior to the homicide.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 4 what we think happened was Grant had taken his friend's gun gun about a week or two prior, used that gun to kill his family, and then took another firearm and went outside and licked off four rounds, collected the shell cases, and planted the shell cases next to the bodies to make it look like it was Cody's gun, i.e.

Speaker 4 Cody, was the one that shot and killed his mother and father and then himself.

Speaker 3 During the trial, Dominic argued that it was just one of several clumsy attempts Grant had made to try to frame his own brother for murdering their parents.

Speaker 3 Another included a botched scheme to plant a forged suicide note.

Speaker 4 In other words, he's writing the note as his brother, and this particular note was very clearly a suicide note. And what was interesting about that is that note was found in Grant's car.

Speaker 4 And we were able to establish that the morning after this all happened, the morning that the police showed up and after Grant's interview, he had actually driven back to the house.

Speaker 4 And he said this in his interview, and saw police there at the house and kept going and didn't stop.

Speaker 4 And obviously, the plan there was for him to drive back to the house because he thought he must have thought about it overnight, written this note that explains it as a murder-suicide, and was going to drop it off.

Speaker 4 But unfortunately for him, the police were already there.

Speaker 5 So, given both the physical and circumstantial evidence collected, what did the prosecution believe happened on January 24th, 2019 at the Amato home.

Speaker 4 Margaret that night was making dinner. We know that because

Speaker 4 there was chicken breast defrosting on the kitchen counter. It was still there the morning of the 25th.
Grant came down. Grant shot his mom while she was at her desk sometime around 4 o'clock.

Speaker 3 In dissecting the crime scene more, they determined that the position of her body suggested that the shot came without any warning.

Speaker 3 The youngest Amato then waited alone for more than an hour until his father arrived home from work. And again, data from Chad Amato's cell phone helped recreate the scene.

Speaker 4 We know from the phone records when his phone was plugged in to his car, when he unplugged his phone from the car, and that he took 67 steps from the car to the kitchen. And then all movement stopped.

Speaker 4 And that was around six. He was shot in the back of the head first while he was putting away his lunch from the counter.
He fell fell to the ground. The second shot was fired in the back of his head.

Speaker 5 Just to stop for a moment here, the wonders of technology never cease to amaze me. Just think about this, Scott.

Speaker 5 Your watch or your phone can now accurately paint a picture of not only your day, but down to the path you walk and the number of steps you take.

Speaker 5 It's amazing and here's so helpful for law enforcement and prosecutors as they tried to piece together what was happening on the day of these homicides.

Speaker 3 This is a hyper-reconstruction of this crime scene. Not only are they using the ballistic evidence, Sanasegan, to determine, for instance, the brother had a holster on his body and the gun.

Speaker 3 And even though he was right-handed or left-handed, the holster was put on backwards.

Speaker 3 So, you know, they were digging into so many different ways that this did not play out the way the defendant was saying, that what the evidence was saying and how this evidence coupled with old-style police work and understanding what could not really be possible in a crime scene to what really is possible in a crime scene using this digital evidence.

Speaker 5 And the picture it paints, it's just so truly awful.

Speaker 5 After killing his father, Grant Amato then spent another several hours alone with the bodies of his murdered parents, attempting to access their banking information.

Speaker 4 Then there was a phone call from the house that we were able to pull from phone records that was made that lured Cody home. He, of course, was shot as soon as he walked in.

Speaker 4 All of the shots were such that the victims would presumably not have seen who pulled the trigger.

Speaker 3 Now, the defense countered that the prosecution's evidence was circumstantial and highlighted the lack of direct forensic proof tying Grant to the crime scene.

Speaker 3 But even in a world where DNA and trace evidence seems to get all of the attention, sometimes it's the totality of the circumstantial evidence and common sense and a holistic view of the crime that tells the most convincing story.

Speaker 4 So often it's not what the defendant does. It's what he does afterwards.
That is key in so many cases. And this is like a textbook example of that.
I mean, think about this for a minute.

Speaker 4 He drove to the house where he lived, where his parents and brother, who he loved, are. And he pulls up the morning of the 25th and he sees police cars all around it.
And again, what does he do?

Speaker 3 He flees.

Speaker 4 He flees. That is not the act of someone who is concerned about, you know, what's going on at my house.
That's the act of, oh, I just shot everybody in the house. I got to get the hell out of here.

Speaker 5 Dominic pointed out to the jury that these were the actions not of a grieving son, but of a guilty man.

Speaker 4 And then, of course, the motive, right? And, you know, I don't have to prove motive, but when I can, it's phenomenal.

Speaker 4 The guy who has stolen and spent a quarter million dollars of his parents' money now has been outed by his father and brother, and that online life has been, frankly, murdered.

Speaker 4 What else could it possibly have been?

Speaker 3 After over eight hours of deliberation, the Florida jury found Grant guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder.

Speaker 5 During the sentencing phase, Grant Amato was spared the death penalty. Instead, he will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 3 Never during his trial did Granamato ever show any remorse for the three murders, but he did eventually make some pretty startling revelations.

Speaker 4 Well, lo and behold, he develops a relationship with this fella who is putting together a documentary. He's the only person that he talks to in the jail.
And he talks to him almost every day.

Speaker 4 A number of months ago, maybe a year ago now, the documentary was released.

Speaker 4 And during the course of the documentary, while he's in prison, all of a sudden, when the appeal was denied, Grant started chatting about what actually happened.

Speaker 4 During the course of it, he basically said, I did it because he was sick of his family.

Speaker 5 But even in his confession, Amato showed a disturbing lack of remorse and a refusal to accept the full responsibility for his actions.

Speaker 4 He made it sound almost like he was a martyr. He shot everybody in the back for their own benefit because I was showing them mercy so that they wouldn't know that I was the one that did it.

Speaker 4 It was one of the most chilling things that I have seen in my 20-year career. Just not even what he said, which in and of itself is disturbing, but how he delivered it.
It was unbelievable.

Speaker 5 He even managed to record video messages from prison for the object of his infatuation.

Speaker 4 Hi, my precious little kitty. I just wanted to let you know that I'm thinking about you and that I miss you very much.
And I can't wait to hear you soon.

Speaker 3 Any addiction can lead to an irrational and often dangerous break with reality.

Speaker 3 And it was Grant Amato's addiction to a fantasy, both an unattainable woman and an unattainable version of himself that led to a series of escalating crimes that ended tragically with the murder of three innocent people.

Speaker 4 Not only is it a tragedy for three

Speaker 4 wonderful human beings who really did nothing but tried to help their brother and son. It's a powerful lesson to everyone else.

Speaker 4 If you have someone in your life that is looking for an escape, whether it's through alcohol or drugs or the internet or whatever else, better to act as soon as you can, wait it all.

Speaker 4 I don't know that any of this could have been prevented, but certainly the warning signs are out there, at least amongst the nuclear family.

Speaker 5 And so we should endeavor to stay vigilant against the false connections that lure us away from the people we love and treasure the very real connections that keep us together.

Speaker 3 This case forces us to confront just how profoundly obsession can warp human behavior, leading to devastating consequences that ripple far beyond the individual. Here's the irony.

Speaker 3 At the heart of this case, a man who wanted so desperately to be loved, to be admired, ending up destroying the very family that gave him that unconditional love.

Speaker 3 Grant's obsession with an illusion, one he curated through a virtual relationship, became more real to him than the family who stood by him, even in the face of disappointment.

Speaker 3 And when his fragile world of fantasy was threatened, he chose violence over accountability.

Speaker 3 A chilling reminder of how the human mind can distort reality when fueled by obsession, entitlement, and the refusal to face consequences.

Speaker 3 It forces us to ask tough questions about priorities, emotional insulation, and the dangerous intersection of technology and human vulnerability.

Speaker 3 In the end, Granamato destroyed what he said he wanted most, connection. And yet he now lives in a place defined by its isolation, a prison cell.

Speaker 3 It's a haunting irony, one that leaves us not with answers, but with a sobering look at the fragility of the human psyche.

Speaker 5 From what I know, internet addiction disorder is not yet recognized as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or as we call it, the DSM, 5th edition.

Speaker 5 It's almost like the Bible on the subject of mental disorders. My guess is that that may soon change and it probably should be included.

Speaker 5 I think it's fair to say that almost anyone hearing about this case will be baffled by the lengths someone went to for an internet fantasy.

Speaker 5 But it's the incredible criminal tragedy that really impacts me most. You have a young man who lost touch with reality and the people that actually loved him, his family.

Speaker 5 He lashed out at them rather than embracing their care. As a result, Chad, Margaret, and Cody Amato were murdered by Grant Amato, their son and brother.

Speaker 5 Margaret and Chad Amato tried to protect their son as they watched him slipping away into a screen.

Speaker 5 His brother, Cody, also tried to help him as he watched his brother stealing so much from him and their parents, money they had all worked very hard for.

Speaker 5 The healthcare community mourns the colleagues that they lost. Their family and friends will never be the same.
Jason Amato, the oldest son, is now alone and I'm sure in some ways will never recover.

Speaker 5 And I hope all of us who have now heard their story will never forget it or them.

Speaker 5 Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an audio chuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media.

Speaker 3 Ashley Flowers is executive producer.

Speaker 5 This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Phil Jean-Grande.

Speaker 3 So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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