Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: The Murder of the Amato Family

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Most men will do just about anything for a girlfriend, but would you murder your own family? Grant Amato did for a woman who was only his girlfriend in his own mind. After losing his job, Grant Amato became obsessed with a Bulgarian Webcam model. Night after night, Amato watched "Silvie" model, dance and more. He paid upwards of $200,000 for access to "Silve" and her online content, including sexually explicit photos and videos. When Amato began stealing money from his family to keep his "connection" to "Silvie," his family stepped in, getting him professional help. This did not stop Amato. His family gave him an ultimatum. Stop communicating with Silvie or move out. On January 25 ,2019, Grant Amato shot and killed his mother, father and brother inside their Orlando home. Amato was convicted of first-degree murder and a sentenced to life in prison. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. You work hard all your life. You raise a family, three boys. You're coming to the end of your career. You're looking forward to retirement. You've been sweating away in Central Florida all these years and you decide to buy a retirement home up in the mountains of Tennessee. You've got your eyes set on the prize, and suddenly one day, your life

comes to a swift and violent end at the hand of your own child. Today we're going to talk about the massacre of the Amato family and their son, Grant Amato. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Back with me today is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, tell us about this tragedy. Joe, Grant Amato is a 29-year-old nurse, and he is accused of killing his family members at their home. The reason is an obsession with a Bulgarian webcam model that he met as a result of his addiction to online porn. He had stolen $200,000 from his family to pay this online model. The police investigation into the Amato family began after a co-worker called police.

When Cody Amato had not come into work, the deputies circled the Amato home, and inside, about 9 a.m., they found three people dead. According to Grant's arrest warrant affidavit, Chad Amato, his dad, was found dead in the kitchen of their home. Cody Amato was killed in a storage room and Margaret Amato, his mom, was found shot dead in an office chair. Police officers say Cody and Margaret Amato suffered execution-style wounds. Of that money that was stolen from his family, the $200,000, $60,000 was stolen from his brother Cody. He also stole Cody's guns and sold them without his permission, all to fund his obsession with this Bulgaria model.

What Amato was doing was taking the money that he had received or stolen from his family and was wiring it to Bulgaria to this model. Granamato was not a stupid person. You would, you know, hearing all of this, you would think that he didn't have two cents in his brain to rub together. But this kid was professionally sound to a certain degree. He was a registered nurse. He and his brother had both graduated from nursing school. And just prior to these events, he was actually practicing as a nurse. But his life kind of went

down this dark path. At one point in time, he had kind of been bulked up, was involved in weightlifting. He participated in airsoft competitions. He loved shooting guns with his brother. And he and his brother got along really, really well. But over a period of time, Jackie, he became very, very diminished as he got into this world of the sexual addiction, where he's just feeding money to this woman in Bulgaria. And friends have talked about how he almost took took on almost a skeletal like appearance. Eyes were sunken back in his head. His weight had dropped precipitously, probably lost close to 50 pounds or so.

So when he, you know, would pass through an area, he had almost like a spectral appearance to him and, you know, kind of ominous when you begin to think about it. His brother, Cody, had actually gotten a degree as a nurse anesthetist. And Grant had attempted to go through the same program, but unlike his brother, he actually flunked out of the program. Some people say that this was the moment in time when his life began to kind of tumble down. He had these aspirations of becoming like a super duper millionaire, you know, independently wealthy. And he and his brother had planned on having matching BMWs that they would drive around in. And, you know, they were going to live in this house that their parents had down in Florida. And the parents were going to retire to Tennessee. As a matter of fact,

they had already targeted a home up there that they were going to move into. So it's all a bunch of tragic circumstances that led to these fatal events, Jackie. We know that the surviving brother, Jason Amato, told police that Grant Amato had spent about two weeks at a facility getting treated for depression. Grant Amato was actually enrolled in a 60-day treatment program for internet and sex addiction but he only completed about two weeks of that program before he came home according to the testimony from grant amato he was in a heated argument with his father and got kicked out of the home because he did not cut off communication with the bulgarian model as advised and instructed by his family. My question to you, Joe, is obviously these parents are not forensic specialists and would not have been looking at it with this critical of an eye as you do.

But should there have been things that they noticed or maybe they did and that's what led to this? Well, yeah. You know, you talk about forensics and, you often have students ask me, well, Professor Morgan, what should I do in forensics? And one of the biggest growing areas, two of the largest areas in forensic practice are actually forensic computer science and forensic accounting. And certainly, that came into play in this case, Jackie. I mean, can you even begin to fathom seeing your bank accounts literally drained away? I think that it was close to the actual dollar, specific dollar amount. It's like $150,000. And that was just liquidity of cash that was

drawn away. And then I think that there was a loan that had been taken out on the family home for in the range of about $60,000. And in addition to that, Grant had swiped in excess of $10,000 from his brother. So, we're above $200,000 at this point in time. So, when you're piecing this together from a forensic standpoint, you know, everything, everything, you know, has a contact back in time with with an investigation. You look for these little points of connection all the way through the forensic narrative. And so you would when you're piecing this together, you try to match up the narrative of what you're hearing as an investigator with the cold hard facts. And if you can look at the numbers, and there are very specific numbers here, you can kind of see this drain. If you put it on a graph, you can see this kind of downward tumble that was taking place.

Now, in addition to this, let's keep in mind, Grant Amato was not hopping on a plane and flying to Eastern Europe. He was doing all of this. Let me rephrase that. He was in contact with this CAM model via the Internet. So every time he would engage with her, there is actually a digital footprint that's left behind. And one more interesting thing I found about this, you know, when we begin to talk about electronic forensics and how this kind of sex trade works like this. In order to facilitate this kind of on-camera session that he would have with her, he had to purchase these digital coins, if you will. And there's even evidence that he had purchased roughly $600

worth of these coins just prior to what they believe were the deaths, the murders of his family members. And that goes to tell you how obsessed he was in this world that he had kind of buried himself into. During the course of my career, I've walked into many scenes where there have been multiple deaths, but I don't know that there is anything that kind of literally rips my heart out than walking into a blood-soaked environment where a family has almost literally been completely wiped out. In the case of the Amato family, save the perpetrator and the brother that was not at the house, that's basically what happened, Jackie.

Grant Amato is accused of shooting his father first in the kitchen and then killing his mother and brother execution style. What does that mean? What makes a murder an execution style death? Classically, when we begin to think about execution style homicides, what we're talking about is the perpetrator being in a dominant position over the victim. And generally, the individual that is shot will either be in a seated position over the victim. And generally, the individual that is shot will either be in a seated position below the level of a standing perpetrator. They'll be kneeling. They'll be laying. That is the victim I'm referring to. And in this particular case,

when you see the mother, Margaret, she is actually positioned at her desk, Jackie. And if folks at home will feel on the back of their head, there's a little protuberant area on the back of your skull that's called the occiput. And if you'll put your hand to the right side of the midline, that's actually where Margaret's entrance was. And that gunshot wound that she sustained is a classic execution style gunshot. It passes through the right occiput. That bone is very bony structure. It's very thick. As a matter of fact, it's one of the thickest bones of the skull.

And it goes from right to left and it actually comes out below her left eye. It exits out of the cheek. You know, in my estimation, she probably never knew what happened. And it's an interesting thing. I was kind of contemplating this. How many times had her child, Grant, walked into her office space in that area? And she thinks nothing of it. I mean, she's sitting there. She might hear the click of his heels on the floor, you know, approaching from the rear. She feels safe in this environment. And you would feel safe. This is your home. And then all of a sudden, I don't even know if your brain can calculate hearing the sound as you're shot in this

primal area of the brain that causes everything to shut down. You know, people always ask me, you know, is this an instantaneous death? This is probably about as close as you can have to an instantaneous event because you're knocking out the primal brain center. This is passing through most likely at least the top aspect of the brain stem, taking out the cerebellum, and then, you know, crossing over the midline of the brain and then exiting out of the face. It's, it's very horrific, but in her case, it was very, very quick.

When you consider dad, this is Chad. He was found in an adjacent area adjacent to the kitchen and this sort of thing. He also had gunshot wounds to the back of his head on the right aspect as well. So that gives you, when you begin to look at entrance wounds and examine them, not only are you getting an idea of the position of the victim, you're also getting an idea of the position of the perpetrator. So if you will just imagine that in this case, Grant Amato would have been to it. One of these actually clipped through the right aspect,

the rear aspect of his head, came out, went back in through his ear, and then back into his head. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again? What was the trajectory of the bullet? Yeah, what you're talking about is, and many times you'll see this, Jackie, you'll have these cases where you'll have an entrance, then an exit, and then a re-entrance. And then finally, you may have another exit. And it's all the same bullet that is creating this cavity in the brain. And interestingly enough, you know, when the forensic pathologist, Dr. Jones, actually testified in this case at trial, the prosecution was asking

her questions. How exactly do you track these wounds? And this is something we do in the morgue, and this is kind of fascinating. When we have multiple gunshot wounds, particularly that are so close together, like in the case of Chad Amato, we'll use what are referred to as dowel rods that you can buy at any large box store or home depot you know lowes or walmart and they're wooden dowels and we have tiny ones in the morgue and we can actually pass these through the defect that's created by the projectile and it'll give you an idea of the trajectory of the round, if it travels from above to below or from below to above. And also the directionality, if it goes from right to left or left to right, or if it just stays right straight, straight away down the midline.

And when you do this, it's kind of odd when you think about it, but as a demonstration tool, particularly when you go to court, if you have these dowel rods in place with multiple gunshot wounds and you've got tracks that are crisscrossing one another, and it makes it highly complex. When you put these static little pieces of wood in there and they're projecting in and out of the body and you snap a photograph of that, suddenly the jury gets an instantaneous picture of the relationship between the shooter and the victim. And that's powerful stuff when you're a jury member and say you're not used to seeing this sort of thing. And Lord knows who in the world would be, particularly in a case like this, that's just absolute pure butchery.

But it orients them to that space and time and the orientation between Grant and his father's head when he executed. So let's talk a little bit about each crime scene, because we have three. We have the kitchen. We have the room that the mother was in in the office chair and a storage room. Would you not have heard the shots being fired for the dad? I mean, the mother and the father were home at the same time. So would you not have heard the shot that killed the father? You know, that's a fantastic question, Jackie. And I have to tell you, I think that in my estimation, at least, I don't think you could pull this off with all three of these individuals in the house at the same time. I think he laid in wait and kind of worked this out systematically.

In my opinion, the mother is in a very static position, Jackie. When you see, and I've seen these crime scene images, and they are absolutely horrible. The mom is just kind of in a very restful position. There's no evidence of struggle or twisting about or this sort of thing. She is literally laying forward, pitched forward, if you will. And that's a pretty accurate term, pitched forward on the surface of this desk. The dad, however, is laying in what we refer to as a supine position. And that's kind of fancy talk for laying face up. And what's so interesting about this is that when he is observed at the scene, Jackie, one of the investigators that was out there noted that even though he is face up, there's

an indication, Jackie, that he had been moved. He had been moved post-mortem. And the way that we determine that is that when a body is laying in a specific position dead, blood will settle to a particular area. Okay. So let's just say for instance, someone is like Mr. Amato was lying on his stomach. Okay. Blood will settle to his chest, his anterior chest, and to his abdomen, maybe to his thighs. You'll have points of contact that will be blanched out. And that blood is going to settle to those areas and fix. Remember, their bodies weren't found until the next day.

But if you manipulate that body in any way, which we believe happened with Chad, you will still have this anterior or frontal presentation of lividity, but it'll be absent on the back. And that's one of the things we'd look for to see if a scene has particularly been staged. And the term staging came up over and over and over again, that he tried to make this case or try to make the scene appear different. And one other very interesting element with Chad's body is the fact that he was wearing a holstered weapon. Can you imagine that? He's wearing a holstered weapon on his belt in his home, and it's oddly positioned.

It's on his right side, but it's turned so that the butt of the weapon is facing forward. So you would that's called a cross draw configuration where an individual you think about an old cowboy movie where a gunfighter would reach across her body and pull the weapon out. Say for left handed, you pull it from your right hip and hold it in your left hand. But here's the twist. Chad's right-handed. But yet this oddly positioned weapon is positioned on his right hand so that if he had to draw that weapon, he would have had to literally twist his arm around at the elbow in order to facilitate that. And that's another indication that this happened after death. They believe that Grant probably moved the body around in an attempt to strap this weapon onto his dad.

And again, another just oddball set of circumstances. When you get to Cody's body, the brother, and this is so sad, you know, because Cody and Grant were very close. And I remember watching this trial, and you can see Grant sitting at the table and just weeping when they're talking about his brother that he shot. And, you know, we talked about execution with mom and dad, with Cody, Jackie, he shot his brother in the face. And what that tells us is that he was eye to eye with his brother, who was roughly a year and a half to two

years older than him, a kid that he had grown up with, that they participated in the airsoft with, they'd gone hunting with, they'd done martial arts, they traveled to Japan together. Can you imagine? You're there with your sibling and you are so obsessed. You're so obsessed with the sexual addiction that you have to this person that, that lives in Eastern Europe, that you would take a handgun and pointed at your own brother's face and kill him. And that's what he did. He shot him right below his right eye. And that bullet, that bullet traveled through his brother's head and knocked him down to the

ground. He's still standing there. He had just gotten home from work. Jackie was still wearing, you know, his brother's head and knocked him down to the ground. He's still standing there. He had just gotten home from work, Jackie. He was still wearing, you know, his brother's a nurse as well. He's still wearing his green scrub suit. And even his lunchbox, you know, it's one of those insulated lunchboxes like the zip, you know, that you can pack all. It was laying immediately adjacent to his brother. And in another attempt to stage a crime scene, he had taken a weapon and laid it immediately adjacent to his brother's hand. And investigators believe that Grant had done this in an attempt to make this look like a murder-suicide, that his brother had walked in

the house, shot his mom and dad, and then took his own life. And, you know, the problem with that, when you begin to look at it out of all of the suicides, and I think I've said this before, but it bears repeating, you know, as medical legal death investigators, you think that, oh boy, you know, you work at the coroner's office, medical exam, you work a lot of homicides, you know, suicides actually outnumber homicides probably two, probably three to one, actually. So we work a lot more suicides. I don't recall in the course of my career, I can probably count on one, maybe two hands, how many cases I've worked with self-inflicted gunshot wounds where people shot themselves

in the face. It's just an aid. It's what we call an atypical gunshot wound. It doesn't fit the pattern. It's more consistent. And, and here's, here's the even bigger problem. When the forensic pathologist was describing these injuries, you know, she's, she's relating the fact that this, that this was not a close contact gunshot wound. So again, that would mean him holding the weapon away from his face in order to shoot himself in the face. Cases like this that involve a lot of trauma, there's a lot of blood there. For the investigators, people that work in my field of medical legal death investigation,

it's very difficult to kind of make your way through these scenes. First off, you're worrying about the complexity of it, how you can cross-contaminate things, how you're going to destroy evidence. And I got to tell you, this case, the Amato case, stands out to me because it is so very complex that these investigators would have really had to take their time in processing this scene, Jackie. Well, especially considering that they had three scenes to process. So I'm wondering, Joe, in looking at how this was staged, you have each victim in a separate room. And as you said, it was thought that these individuals were killed one at a time. The dad was killed first in the kitchen.

The mom must have come home and not gone into the kitchen. And the brother was found in a storage room. I'm curious about the storage room. How do we get the brother to go to the storage room? Was it in the garage? I mean, how do we keep the brother from not going through the house and discovering what's going on. Was this planned or was this a crime of passion and opportunity for it to happen that way? I think that this was planned, Jackie.

And, you know, I go back to my earlier point that it's my belief that that he laid in wait for these individuals. He knew he kind of if you ever, you know, if you ever watch a cat, that's going to spring on something. I think that that's what he was. He was sitting on go in the house as the opportunity presented itself as he presented himself as stealthily as possible in this environment, which he knew very well. Remember, this is his home. He knows all the blind spots. He knows the places to hide. He also knows the tendencies of the people that he lived in the house with, mom, dad, and brother. And just think about it. I mean, for those of us in our audience that live with individuals, you know what the tendencies are. You know where they're going to

come and go and that sort of thing. You know their their timing, you know, when they're going to arrive at a home. So he everything is stacked in his advantage. And, you know, this is this is quite interesting little side here. But, of safety, a place of security. So your guard is down, you know, when you walk into a home. It's not like you're turning down a dark alley and you don't know what's down there. It's someplace you've never been before. But in the context of coming home and making your way through the house, it's going to give you a false sense of security. So if you've got somebody that means to do you harm, in this case, grant a motto, then your guard will be down for that amount of time. And it's easy for him to pray. And, you know, and this is another thing. And when you have this familiarity, remember, I was talking about the mom, how she was kind of in this relaxed position at the desk. You don't expect for your son to kill you. If your dad, same thing.

And when Cody comes home, he doesn't, you know, you know, his brother could approach him quite easily and he would have his guard down. He'd just be holding his lunchbox in his hand. He'd be there in his scrubs and he'd be, you know, hey, bro, how are you doing? And the next thing you know, the last thing he sees is maybe a puff of smoke and his life comes to an end. And so all of these, given the close proximity of kind of this storage area that's there, which is near a point of entrance, you've got mom that is there in her office area, which most of us feel very safe. And then dad that's in the kitchen, their guard is going to be down at those moments in time. What's kind of interesting about this case though, and you really have to, just let me say this to you and let you wrap your brain around

this. After mom and dad had died, investigators estimate, and just listen to this very carefully and let it sink in, investigators estimate that Grant Amato stayed in the house with his executed parents, these individuals that had loved him, taken care of him, tolerated him through all of this nonsense that he was involved in. He stayed in that house, Jackie, for four hours with their bodies. Can you imagine? Staying in there as your parents lay there on the floor and in their office area, waiting, just waiting for your brother Cody to come walking through the door so that you can end his life too.

Another interesting aspect of this, Joe, is that, well, actually there's more than one. Grant was a member of a competitive aerosol team, which means he had firearms experience, maybe not lethal firearms experience, but to be able to win an aerosol competition, you have to be accurate. And also, Grant Amato had some medical training, so he would have known the best place to shoot to kill. Yeah, right. You are, Jackie. Yeah, he was part of an airsoft team, as was his brother. I mean, he had firearms proficiency in addition to airsoft proficiency. You know, airsoft proficiency, even though it's not the same as an actual firearm, it gives you proficiency in the area of being able to aim and put the weapon on target, if you will, and moving targets, you know, because's dressed and he's carrying these weapons that look like military style weapons, but they're airsoft weapons.

But you have to keep in mind, he also owned, and the family did, multiple real firearms as well. And there's even images of him out, you know, firing shotguns and all these sorts of things. So he was not uncomfortable, uncomfortable in a world of firearms. And so, um, that, that becomes kind of rote, you know, when, when you begin to think about, uh, the family coming home and him essentially ambushing him. I mean, it's like he had been practicing for this for a while, um, in his mind, um, because, you know, when everything began to collapse around him and, you know, one thing I forgot to mention to you had mentioned that he he was was a nurse and he was a nurse. He just he flunked out of anesthesia school.

And but he was a practicing nurse. But this is interesting as well, Jackie. You know, he had been caught at work in the Orlando area at his job stealing a drug that is used as a sedative, what they refer to as a pre-anesthesia drug. It's one of these drugs that they'll give you, like I'll give you an example for anybody that's ever had surgery. You know, that when the nurse goes to inject your IV line, they'll say, now you're going to feel something cold in your line. And then all of a sudden the world begins to get kind of milky and warm and that sort of thing. And that's kind of what they do before they give you the jolt of the anesthesia. Well, this drug in particular, Jaggi, he had stolen in excess of $4,000 worth of these drugs.

And not only had he been fired from the hospital, but they were pressing charges for grand theft in addition to this. And I think that this probably wound up in the suspension of his nursing license. So all of this was like kind of this perfect storm that was cycling about in his life that what, you know, that was going to send him down in flames. And unfortunately, you know, his family wound up bearing the brunt of it. Why would he have stolen these drugs, Joe? Is it possible that he intended to use them on his parents or maybe sell them to get more money for his webcam girlfriend?

That's a fantastic question, Jackie. And I think that it's probably going to be the latter, more than likely. And I'll tell you why. First off, there was no evidence that they had this particular drug. Propofol is the name of it. There was no evidence of this in their system. And this had happened a couple of months prior to, but he had been acquiring these meds. I think that there would be a higher possibility that he could have sold them.

What he his rationale that he gave when he was questioned was, I guess he viewed himself as some kind of Florence Nightingale because he presented himself to the staff and to the police. He's like, well, you know, the patients on the floor were under-medicated. So I wanted to assist them by injecting them with this medication in order to, I don't know, alleviate their pain or their anxiety or whatever it was. But I found that quite telling as well. environment for somebody that has this kind of proclivity, if you will, to be around really sick people and applying this very, very powerful hypnotic drug that can really depress the system. They're very fortunate that if he did apply it to these people, that he didn't kill them. So, you know, no one really knows what he did with the drug, but they know that the drugs were missing and they tied it back to him. And I think that that's, again, this goes into this kind of pathology that he's dealing with.

He was on a real downhill slide. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.