Dominic Clio
Appearances
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
So the way that that works, each particular model has a page. Each model has fans, followers, I guess. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. And I think part of it became very personal. Obviously, it became very personal to him. But I think it kind of crossed over from fantasy to what became his reality because she was doing extra things for him.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
And again, not necessarily just sexual. I mean, she sent him a Christmas card or a birthday card. She would send him videos of her just making breakfast, like nothing necessarily commiserate with the pornography website, although there was plenty of that, too.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
Grant got sent off to have sex rehab done against his will. They drove him to a facility down in South Florida. He was only there for a couple of days, maybe a week he left. But while he was gone, his dad or his brother logged on to this social network called
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
He has no job. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. 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. And then everybody went radio silent on, including Sylvie, the woman he was obsessed with.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
And I think that was really the straw that broke the camel's back.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
My name is Dominic Clio. I'm the chief trial attorney for the 18th Circuit in Seminole County, Florida, and I've been here for about 19 years.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
They, from all accounts, were good, decent people, but also private. And I think that that sort of explains some of the decisions that were made to not get the police involved. And all this stuff kind of went sideways with the theft of the funds, you know, keep it inside the confines of the family unit.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
They were avid gun people, all of them. So there were firearms all over the house.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. So they detained him and then brought him back to the sheriff's office for an interview.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
They sort of noticed that his demeanor was peculiar. It was very flat affect. They asked 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 if he knew what was going on at the house, if he knew his parents were dead. He said he had no idea.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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 live and that his brother was, you know, always his protector and always had his back and defended him against his angry dad.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
And 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. I've been here ever since.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
passing by the house but i i inevitably sided against it not what you say it's sort of how you say it and then getting stuck with whatever version you give 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 i mean it was so convoluted and so all over the place that it was frankly unbelievable
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
One of the investigators asked, well, you know, who would possibly do this? 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
It just didn't make any sense. The girlfriend of Cody had always indicated that he was a perfectly well-adjusted, hardworking individual, and it would be way, way out of character for him to do that.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
The detective said it was very clear to them that it would seem to be crocodile tears, not particularly genuine.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
Jason went in towards the end. It was a very heartfelt conversation. 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? Like, did you do this? He gets confronted and his demeanor is just silent.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
You're confronted with that. What is a reasonable person's explanation going to be? You're just going to sit there? No. He sat there quietly and took it.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
The Amato home is out in Chilliota, and that's a real rural area of the county. It's horsebacks and horseback riding and target shooting and that kind of stuff.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
Because in Florida, the moment that you put handcuffs on someone on a felony, the state has 175 days to bring them to trial. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
But if you don't have to, sometimes your case will benefit tremendously just by waiting. Fair enough.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
And it was a death penalty case. So we elected to seek the death penalty.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. And the way that it was sort of explained to me from the very beginning was, hey, listen, we have this case. It's a very circumstantial case, but I think if we piece it together, the digital footprint will be almost undeniable.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
When he got arrested and arraigned, and it was set for the first control date, after that first docket sign, he didn't waive speedy trial. 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 develop a defense that would be beneficial to their client.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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... 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 could put it together.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
He worked for CVS at a corporate center in Orlando. And the mother, Margaret, was in the medical business also. She was doing like billing and coding kind of things from home.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. He said that he was at that house until 11 o'clock or midnight on the 24th. And police were quick to figure out from Margaret's work computer information
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
that the last human interaction that anyone had with that computer was around 4 o'clock in the afternoon on the 24th. And then 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
We knew the shell cases didn't match the projectiles. That we knew. And so we were just, and we didn't, but we didn't have a weapon. You know, we didn't have a murder weapon. And it wasn't until, golly, I want to say a week before the trial that we found out that this gun had come up missing.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
And Grant had been at his house about a week or two prior to the homicide. And so what we think happened was Grant had taken his friend's 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
Cody, was the one that shot and killed his mother and father and then himself.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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 was that note was found in Grant's car. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
And he said this in his interview and saw police there at the house and kept going and didn't stop. 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. But unfortunately for him, the police were already there.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
Margaret that night was making dinner. We know that because there was chicken breast defrosted 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 four o'clock.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
We know from the phone records when his phone was plugged into 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, 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 to the ground. The second shot was fired in the back of his head.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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 never missed a day of work, which, you know, you hear folks say that, but he legitimately never missed a day of work. And if he was going to be late, he always called his co-workers and let them know.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. All of the shots were such that the victims would presumably not have seen who pulled the trigger.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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 a textbook example of that. Let me think about this for a minute. 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? He flees. He flees.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
And then, of course, the motive, right? And, you know, I don't have to prove motive, but when I can, it's phenomenal. 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. What else could it possibly have been?
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. A number of months ago, maybe a year ago now, the documentary was released. And during the course of the documentary, while he's in prison...
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
All of a sudden, when the appeal was denied, Grant started chatting about what actually happened. During the course of it, he basically said, I did it because he was sick of his family.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
I 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. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
I want to say it was around nine in the morning. One of his co-workers had called the sheriff's office because they had attempted to reach Cody a number of times and he hadn't answered his phone. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
Not only is it a tragedy for three wonderful human beings who really did nothing but tried to help their brother and son, it's a powerful lesson to everyone else. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
They checked for signs of forced entry on the outside. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. And subsequently, there was a second gunshot that ended his life. But incredibly, the horror did not end there. And as the deputy cleared the house, he found Cody Amato deceased,
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
in an area between where the garage enters the home, right by that sort of exterior door, in a puddle, of course, of his own blood, wearing his nurse scrubs that he had been wearing and with a backpack.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. Nothing had been disturbed or taken from what they could tell.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
They find all kinds of things. They find shell cases next to each of the bodies. They're able to recover projectiles from, I believe, a cabinet, drywall, and things like that. What's fascinating about this scene is that the shell cases did not match the projectiles.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
As soon as they heard that, that was a very powerful motive for them to focus on Grant as their primary suspect.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
Grant and 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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. By most accounts, pretty normal fellow. There was not a whole lot of red flags.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
He was working at the time at a facility with a bunch of elderly folks who were, you know, in need of pain management.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. And that, of course, precipitated him losing his job and having his nurse's license yanked. And then he became sort of a homebody.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. 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. And then you can get paid by playing these different video games online.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
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. He did not become an influencer.
Anatomy of Murder
67 Steps (The Amato Family)
He was staying at home in 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.