Wicked Words - A True Crime Talk Show with Kate Winkler DawsonFilmmaker Colin Archdeacon had an unusual relationship with convicted killer named Grant Amato in Florida. Amato murdered his parents and his brother in 2018. And the media blamed his obsession with a cam model. But Archdeacon found out that Amato had very different motive. Let’s find out more about the three part series, Ctrl+Alt+Desire on Paramount +.
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This is an arena where the lines between fantasy and reality are always blurred. You're playing a role, you're talking to someone who's playing a role, but inevitably the real use thinks out through the cracks.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. Filmmaker Colin Archdeacon had an unusual relationship with a convicted killer named Grant a Motto in Florida. A Motto murdered his parents and his brother in twenty eighteen, and the media blamed his obsession with a cam model, but Archdeacon found out that a motto had a very different motive. Let's find out more about the three part series Control Alt Desire on Paramount Plus. What kind of experience do you come to this series with? Did you ever do any kind of print writing or journalism? Where do you come from?
So? I actually very much came up through journalism. I was a video journalist for about five or six years before taking on this story. I'd been working as an editor in the documentary field before that, and after making not very much headway, I decided to kind of change gears and get into journalism. So I moved out to New York. I went to the Unity Graduates of Journalism and then was lucky enough to get an internship at the New York Times video department and kind of, you know, paid my bills as a video journalist for the next five or six years after that.
And how did you come to this story which I have told you? I binged in actually more like half a day, not even a day on Paramount Plus. I thought it was wonderful.
So I was I was actively looking for a story that I thought was worthy of a long form treatment, and I was also really interested in finding a story that I thought could kind of expose the way that the Internet is changing the way we feel about ourselves, the way that the Internet is reshaping society, and also an opportunity to kind of talk about how that argument is often exaggerated. And when I saw Grant's case, I immediately saw all those ingredients and kind of took a long shot. I wrote in a handwritten letter, and then we were off.
Now, normally I like to unravel these stories as a mystery, but I think we really do need to start with Grant or where I guess where does it make sense for us to start with this story.
What I could do is I could start the story telling you how I heard about it, and then how I started piecing together the clue. So my experience of the story, like I just said, was, you know, I sort of on the look for a documentary project. I particularly wanted to do something that dealt with the Internet, and I happen to see a headline in the Washington Post about a man who had been arrested for committing a violent crime. He was accused of killing his parents and his brother in the home that they all lived in together. And the way the media was spinning in at the time is that the motivation for this crime was this sort of jilted relationship he had had with a cam model, which is sort of like a live streaming burlesque act that people will watch on the Internet. And I immediately thought, Okay, this man certainly thought that he was in love with this woman. I didn't really question the fact that he had a real, authentic emotional connection with this person, but I did very much doubt that this relationship was the real motivation for the crime. And I knew that because of the lurid nature of this crime and this accusation, that the media, the mainstream media, and certainly the criminal justice system, was sort of flat in the story and likely oversimplify it and make it all about the cam girl. So what I did is I wrote Atto a letter in prison. I think I wrote it to him within three days of his being arrested. I'd never written an inmate before. All I had seen from Grant was some of his interrogation footage, which was surfaced on YouTube very soon after his arrest, and one of the first things that Grant talks about in his interrogation is his love of anime and video games, which is very perverse considering you know that he's under arrest for murder. He immediately launches into this sort of like fanboy monologue about how much anime beans to him. So I saw that as an opportunity to get Grant talking about himself, to get his mind off the case, and I reached out to Grant with a letter and I said, hy, Grant, you know I'm calling. I'm a documentary filmmaker. You know, I'm not really interested right now in talking about the murder, the things that you're being accused of. Let me tell you a little bit about myself and let me ask you, you know, what is it that you loved so much about anime? Tell me a little bit about the games that you played, Tell me a bit about what your life was like before all this chaos. Put it in the mail, didn't think much of it, wasn't sure what was going to happen, started looking around for new stories, and I think later that week I got a giant letter from Grant in the mail, maybe five or six pages, handwritten, and it was almost entire about anime and video games. And what he said at the end of the letter is that the reason he got back to me out of all the other people who've been approaching him was I was the only one who didn't ask if he was guilty. I was really there to listen to Grant to sort of just like bear witness to his own thoughts. I didn't come in with an agenda, and I wasn't immediately kind of getting at the forensics of the crime and the mechanics of the murder or the mechanics of the arrest. That wasn't what compelled me about his story, whereas I think every other journalists that have reached out to him was sort of looking for Corey details right off the bat. And you know, from these humble beginnings, a couple of you know, handwritten letters that sort of generated a rapport between me and Grant that lasted for over four years, me recording phone calls in my apartment and then eventually selling this project to Paramount Plus and going out and filming interviews around the country and even in Europe.
I mean, one of the things that I think is a huge benefit to a series like this, a three part series on a streamer, is you do have the time to dig into these different characters. And I thought you did a great job talking about particularly the dynamics of the family, of the Motto family, between the parents and the two brothers. I would like to start with the relationship between Cody and Grant, which I still am a little confused about. Am I misremembering Grant saying that he feels like Cody, the brother he killed, was the love of his life.
That is absolutely what Grant said. He said it to me very many times. And what became clear to me once I started sort of investigating this case, talking to people who knew the a Moattos and spending just countless hours on the phone with Grant, is this was really the love affair that triggered this horrible crime. It was Cody who broke his heart. It was Cody that he had pledged his life to, and it was Cody that he could not stand to be without. These were brothers that were only a couple of years apart. They had the same career, They played the same games, they watched the same movies. They spent all of their time together. They had plans to live with each other as unmarried adults once their parents passed away. It was something almost beyond obsession. They were kind of living as one spirit in two bodies. Is how Grant would say it to me. And once Grant started to feel his grasp on that relationship weakening, that's when he turned to the cam model. And that's when his life really started spinning out of control.
And I remember Grant saying, I think it was Grant saying they hoped to die at the same time. One couldn't live without the other. Cody really felt like that too.
Cody appears who have felt like that too. You know, these were two They were, I believe twenty nine and thirty at the time of the murders. These were two brothers who had strong, lucrative, promising careers in healthcare, and yet they both elected to when their late twenties and early thirties to continue to live at home with their parents, who still did all their laundry, cooked all their meals, did their taxes for them, and they were kind of just free to sit in their bedrooms and you know, play on the internet all day and then go to work when they had to go to work. And that was pretty much their lives. It was very sheltered, very small, and very comfortable for them. Very very deep expression of comfort is what I got from Grant, which is you know, sort of what the you know, the suburbs are designed to provide for its inhabitants, and it's certainly what they were doing. They were living the suburban dream. They had money, they had comfort, they had privacy, they had all the toys they wanted, and they had a future that was very, very secure. Once that position of security was challenged by Grant's own decision making, that's when he really started to spin out of control.
I think one of the things the strengths about this series also is that it feels like you can because of the way you move, you move through the chronological order, I feel like everything, you know, you can really kind of tell where things fall apart, how they start out as a very strong family and then we have these revelations. So will you tell me specifically about the dynamic between the parents and the kids, because this seems at first like both parents are in the medical field. Is that right?
Yep, both parents were in the medical field. I believe that Margaret, the mother, worked on the phones for an insurance company in some capacity, and that the father, Chad was it was a pharmacist who at the time of the crimes was working as a telepharmacist for CBS, so they both had strong careers in the medical field sort of shepherded their sons through it as well. And you know, from the outside, it really looked like the perfect happy family. You know, there's these four people who spent all of their time together, who lived together in this giant house, seemingly peacefully, and they just spent every waking moments of their free times in each other's company, which I think, in a way was not the best for Grant. I think it shrunk his world so that the way that his family felt about him was all that mattered. It was the only thing he knew it was. You know, those were really the four walls of his psychological existence. What these three people thought about him.
Tell me about Chad, because I think later on in the series we find out that Cody and Grant's father seems to be pretty controlling, which makes sense considering they're all in the same house and they're together. I would have guessed that he was controlling. Do you have evidence of that or how do we even know that?
There's very strong evidence that Chad was sort of a controlling, overbearing, domineering father. It's how he would describe himself. It's how his coworkers described him. It's how neighbors and friends of the Amodel Boys described him as very controlling. He certainly seemed like an eccentric, but it didn't seem to be something profoundly pathological or something that you wouldn't see, you know, in any standard neighborhood in America. He was an overbearing father who was obsessed with his children, who wanted to control their lives, but it didn't seem like it was anything too out of the ordinary. That being said, Grant does tell a sort of chilling story about how his father would always talk about how he was in touch with God and how God would come to him in his sleep and tell him what he should do and tell him how he should control the family, and that he had one vision. When Margaret, the mother was in the hospital giving birth to Grant, Chad allegedly had a vision of the devil coming to him and telling him that Grant would be his greatest failure in life. And this was sort of an omen of prophecy that Chad didn't share with Grant until I think a few weeks before the murders took place, So it does give you an idea of sort of the grandiosity that Chad may have had. But I want to be very careful about not dragging Chad's name through the mud. He's not here to defend himself. Grant is certainly an unreliable narrator, and he said lots of awful things about his family that we did not include in the series because we were not able to corrobborat Well.
That's smart, and that's part of being a journalist, you know, as understanding the difference between throwing everything in the kitchen sink and saying, Okay, this is all the information we have versus being able to cooperate with other people. So I'm glad you were able to do that. What do we know about Margaret? Was she someone who was an enabler or did she sign on with this with Chad, or you know, do we think that she was just sort of there and control along with the two guys.
I think you know everything that I was able to learn about Margaret. A motto tells me that she was an incredibly caring person, an altruist and very devoted mother, someone who devoted a huge amount of her free time to rehabilitating animals to doting on her children, probably spent periods of that marriage failing a little under the thumb of Chat Tomato. But ultimately, the portrait that we got of this couple in their old age, nearing retirement is people who've settled into a very peaceful coexistence. You know, they would cuddle up and drink wine and watch old movies on the weekend. And though she had sort of weathered the storm of Chat's eccentricities during their younger years together, it was still a functional marriage and a happy one at times.
Do you think that Cody and Grant, who incidentally I thought were twins, I mean, they look so much alike.
They look absolutely like twins. Yeah, sound canny.
What are the differences in their personalities that you've learned, if anything? Or are they really working in parallel with each other their whole lives.
Cody was a lot more of an alpha. I think he took after Chad a little bit more. He was domineering, he was confident, he was a little more swaggering, and he was certainly more socially well adjusted. He had just entered a romantic relationship with a coworker around the time of these crimes, which is something that seemed just completely out of reach of Grant. So I think what we see as sort of a Cody who was higher functioning, more charismatic, better socially well adjusted, and it was this process of him eclipsing his younger brother Grant that became something that was just psychologically unmanageable for Grant, this parallel track of him and Cody. Suddenly he was on his own course, and it was a darker, lonelier course, and he couldn't stand the separation.
Does it seem like Cody was going to at some point get serious with someone and then move out, and that was what Grant's fear was.
It's unclear exactly what Cody's long term plans were. He certainly had no financial reason to be staying at home and living with his parents. I think there was a sense that, you know, this was a committed unit and the Amatos stuck together, and that's how everyone in that house wanted it. Certainly, anyone there could have left. Margaret could have filed for divorce. Cody or Grant could have gotten their own apartment, and they decided not to do so. So the evidence that we have is that Cody, while maybe bristling a little more under Chad's regimen than Grant had, was comfortable with the relationship and did love, you know, living in his childhood room down the hallway from his brother, watching anime, playing video games, and sort of like having family dinner every night, Which is not to say that he wasn't, you know, the kind of person who's going to grow up and get married and eventually move out. But at the age of thirty, he was not that kind of prison.
Let's talk about their careers. Both of these men go into the medical field, and then Grant loses his job, which I thought, oh man, he must have really screwed something up. But the way that it's framed in the series feels like not something like he is, you know, Angel of Death or anything like that. It just seems like he was thinking differently, tell me what happens in his job before he's let go.
So Grant and Cody were both studying to become nurse anesthesiologists, which is sort of the person that puts a patient to sleep before a major surgery. I'm sure it's much more complex than that, but that was sort of the general gist of what they did. At the time where Grant's career was sort of derailed. He was in nurse anesthesia school, so he was at the point where he was doing his clinicals sort of like working as an intern performing anesthesia in a hospital. Not quite a full fledged antestesiologist, but someone who had, you know, a man with the amount of medical training and could be trusted to put patients to sleep. He was working in an L and D ward or a neonatal ward, I'm not sure exactly which, but working with pregnant women preparing to give birth, and ultimately I'm sure in labor and he was giving someone who was giving a female patient an epidoral, which is like a very long syringe that goes into the spinal cord. And basically he had a disagreement with the doctor in charge over how to play the needle, how to insert the needle in, how much drug to administer, and instead of sort of backing down and being the student and accepting instruction from his superior, he sort of bristled and started a big argument and insisted that he was right and the doctor was wrong. This confrontation sort of boiled over into the hallway where they were having this frankly very unprofessional disagreement in front of other patients, and once word of this confrontation sort of made its way up to the school, they immediately kicked Grant out. Not necessarily because he was right or wrong. I'm certainly not qualified to say if he was right or wrong about how this medication should be administered, but just the idea that in the middle of training he would call out his doctor and do so in front of patients who are depending on the team of medical professionals to administer appropriate care was sort of beyond the pale. So all of a sudden, Grant is now kicked out of nurse and ansthesia school and forced to work as registered nurse, which he sort of saw as a position beneath him, beneath his education level, beneath his intellectual level, and certainly now beneath his brother Cody. So this is really the first the first time where the chain is broken and these two men are not living identical lives. Now Cody is a nurse anesetist. He's on track to have an enormous income, to have prestige, to have control of his schedule, to sort of attain a lifestyle similar to the kind that his father was able to provide for the family. And Grant is now knocked down a level. He's a registered nurse, which he saw as a pedestrian job. He kind of saw the prospect of him ever achieving a higher degree is almost impossible now that he had this black mark on his record. And then, believe it or not, Grant makes another very similar mistake. He's now working as a registered nurse. He is at sort of one of these generic drive up clinics that you see all over Orlando. There's a huge medical industry in Orlando, and again involving pain medication. Grant felt that some of the patients under his care as an r end were not being, as he put it in the police statement, adequately relaxed. What he was doing is he was basically as strange as it sounds, in these medical clinics, as far as I could gather, there's sort of like a vending machine for these painkillers, and what Grant was doing, and you know, you have to type in a lot of very specific information in order to get the medicine to pop out, and Grant was going to these vending machines and taking out way more medicine than he needed, storing it in his pockets and doling it out as he saw fit to patients, and this resulted in some people being over medicated. It's certainly completely illegal to be taking out these super strong sedatives. I think it was prope ful in this case, which is what killed Michael Jackson. And he was sort of, I don't want to say, playing god because he wasn't killing anybody, but he again, you get a sense of the arrogance, the egomania, and sort of the disdain for authority, all things that Grant, you know, was not really able to express in his family life. In his life as the younger brother, his life is sort of the you know, the hen pecked son. But at work he was very comfortable being this sort of domineering, aggressive, swaggering, know it all and he got busted almost immediately for doing this. And when he was confronted by his bosses at this clinic, he started shivering and shaking, started saying he had nothing left to live for anymore, and he scared them to the point that they thought he might commit suicide, which is what they called the cops. So again, you know, what could have been a simple disagreement at work that, if handled professionally, could have been swept aside. Grant let his emotions get the better of him. The police were called, he was arrested and charged with I think a felony, theft of medication. It may not have been a felony, but he was certainly charges were pending, and he was kind of, you know, made bail sent home awaiting the results of that case. So now, all of a sudden, not only is Grant no longer able to work as a nurse anesthetist, he is looking at the possibility of having to forfeit his entire medical career. He's not going to be able to work as a nurse. I'll never be able to achieve any kind of higher degree in the medical field. He'll be blackballed. And again, not only does this set him off track with his brother Cody. Now he can't support himself. He's discribed the family. He can't work in the field that the entire family works in. He is now completely outcast from the life that he had created for himself and also very much the life that Chad, his father had created for him. You can live in my giant suburban home you can play games all day so long as you get a degree, you work hard, and you achieve success in the medical career. All of a sudden, in a very short amount of months, Grant had thrown all of that away.
Did you get a sense from anybody in Chad and Margaret's world about what their reaction was to all of this or Cody's reaction. Was it, in fact shaming? I can't believe you did this. You such are moron. You know, what are you going to do with your life now? Was that their reaction?
I think in private, there was a little bit of browbeating against Grant. Of course, any father who had worked so hard to provide such a comfortable lifestyle would be, you know, scandalized by what Grant had done, and they would say, I don't understand this, what are you doing? How could you have done this? But more importantly, what the family did is they locked arms and they did everything they could to rally around Grant and support him. They got him therapy, they got him lawyers, They did everything in their power to get him back on his feet. And they were the same supportive, committed, devoted parents that they always had. That and Grant, as we see again, was just surrounded by support and love. Maybe it was a bit of a crooked love. Maybe it wasn't always expressed in the most supportive or effective way, but clearly these were two parents who desperately loved their son, wanted him to get better, and would spare no emotional or financial expense to help him do so.
Now, this is I think the first time I really understood the concept of a cam girl, and you explained it. I thought, very well, kind of burlesque show, sexy woman on camera. But when does the camgirl concept enter into Grant's life, because it feels like it just takes over almost instantly.
So yeah, very shortly after Grant lost his second job, you know, was charged with felony theptic medication. He's at home now, all that, never leaving the house, spending what he told me, eighteen to twenty four hours a day on the internet. He tried to start a streaming career on Twitch, which is where people will sort of watch you play video games. Maybe sort of unimaginable to people my age and older, but very popular, very popular online today, which is a mammoth platform with lots of really talented broadcasters on it, and Grant, you know, kind of convinced his family, Hey, I'm going to broadcast myself playing video games and it will be my new career. And again, you know, I'm sure with enormous amounts of skepticism. You know, they helped him buy all the equipment he needed to be a streamer. They encouraged him. He tried it. Now, all of a sudden, he's in his bedroom all day alone playing video games quote unquote professionally, and he's bringing in something like one hundred dollars a month. It's clearly not going anywhere. It's a ridiculous fantasy. There's no future in it. And then one day alone at night, as Grant tells the story, he's downloading anime on a tour in site and he sees an ad from myfreecams dot com, which is an extremely popular camming website, camming platform. He clicks on it. He's whisked into this world. You know, I've seen it now. It's sort of like, you know, this carousel of different women that you can click on, and then all of a sudden you're transported into a room with them. They're sitting in front of a computer with a camera on it. Often just chit chatting with members they're in, you know, often underwear revealing outfits, and then over the course of like you know, a two or three hour performance, the vast majority of which is just sort of small talk, it evolves into sort of like more erotic acts and performances. The way Grant tells it, he saw this woman and fell in love at first sight. Her stage name was Eddie Sweet. She was a Bulgarian camperformer, you know, with dark hair, beautiful blue eyes. To Grant, must have sounded like a very exotic accent. She had sort of a dark, biting sense of humor, and Grant was head overheels, you know. Even though these are you know, communal spaces where there's maybe one hundred guys watching a single performance, Grant was able to feel like he was forging a really personal connection with Addie Sweet. And what he did is he started spending more and more money in this sort of camming ecosystem to the point where, you know, if you spend enough money in this system, you're able to have one on one conversations with the camp performer. So him and Addie Sweet, whose real name he later found out was Sylvie, started spending huge amounts of time on the phone together. He got her personal numbers, so they were texting all day. What's this is called, you know in the sex work industry, is the girlfriend experience. This person will sort of performed the emotional role of being your girlfriend. Well, of course, never meeting with you in person, you get to feel like you have a girlfriend. And while I think the vast majority of people on these camming sites understand that this is fantasy play, that this has cause play. Of course, if you're paying someone to be your girlfriend, they're not your girlfriend. It's after all, not called the girlfriend. It's called the girlfriend experience, right, This is all a mediated fantasy, and the rules of the game are were still clear. I was looking for sort of any kind of academic literature about camming that I could read to sort of educate myself to feel like I wasn't coming in It's a total neophyight, when I eventually interviewed these cam workers and so that I wasn't just sort of getting the perspective of online users. So I wanted to find some kind of expert who had done the heavy lifting and the heavy thinking that I couldn't do on my own. And I found doctor Angela Jones, who was a professor at SUNNI. She had written a book called Camming, which was the only serious academic work I could find about the camming industry, and it was sort of became the bible of our show. I had everyone working on the series read the book, and it provided a lens and a language and a system of empathy and sympathy for understanding this world that was totally out of reach for us as non experts.
And I thought that doctor Jones made some really excellent points. One of the things that I think is interesting about this world that I think you showed both sides of is On the one hand, Grant talked about what he felt like was the manipulation of the world, which is literally like a ranking system if I understood him, of the amount of money that these men would pay Sylvie and then of course, you know, she would be effusive for the top men who happened to be Grant.
You know, I think a really perfect word for this story is gamified. You know, the Camming ecosystem is gamified, so you get points by how much you tip, and there's a leaderboard for who's scoring the most points and inevitably, all the men in these rooms are competing for who can be the leader, who can win the game. It looks like a video game, It feels like a video game. It sounds like video games with all the you know, the digital sound effects and the icons and the badges, and it's just very much mirrors gaming culture down to a t and Grant, whose social status had I don't want to say had been stripped of him, but who had sort of set his social status on fire in his real life, all of a sudden found this world where he could be a top dog again, and he could kind of get that swagger back, and he could kind of be thea that he wasn't able to be in real life. And the way to do that was by spending as much money as possible to become the top of the leader board and ultimately become, you know, the main receptacle of Sylvie's attention. So what he started doing was burning through his life savings, spending more and more money every single night, every single performance. Tipping is he set a little bell jingles inside the room and everybody looks at you like you're some special guy. He basically, you know, he felt like a celebrity in this room. And when he burned through his own savings, this is where you know it took a turn that he was ultimately not able to get out of. Randt started spending his family's money. He started stealing credit cards, he started taking out loans and other people's names. He started, I believe he was even able to mortgage the to mortgage the home. And what he ended up doing was stealing over two hundred thousand dollars from his family and giving it all to Sylvie in the course of something like six months, and again in another act of I think at this point we'd have to say unconditional love. His parents discover all this, They discover grand subterfuge, they discover all the theft. They confront him and they forgive him. They offer to pay back all the money, They offer to sweep any criminal probes that might be going on under the rug. They take him to therapy, they allow him to continue living in the house, and they do everything they can to rehabilitate their son. And sadly, what we see in the story is that all of their best efforts fail.
Let's talk about the girlfriend experience, because this is the part of the series where I was the most conflicted, and I understand the concept. So you know, like you're making a personal connection. Certainly, if we believe Grant, she is drawing him in and it seems like really sharing some personal aspects of her life. He feels like he can draw a line between her online persona and Sylvie, the woman who has vulnerabilities. But do you get the impression that this is all an act? Because you had a cam girl in the series who has a really what felt like an authentic conversation with one of her anonymous clients on the phone, And man, I just had a hard time reading what is real and what is not with you know, some of these people, both with the clients and with the women.
Yeah, I think it's definitely this is an arena where the lines between fantasy and reality are always blurred. You're playing a role, you're talking to someone who's playing a role, but inevitably the real use sneaks out through the cracks, and there always is some kind of authentic emotional transaction where you're chit chatting about what she did that day, which you watched on TV last night. How annoying it is to sit in traffic when you're just trying to get groceries. You know. Real life inevitably insinuates itself in all these relationships, but there is this underlying, like heartbeat of capitalism pulsing through all of these interactions where money is being exchanged, money is being asked for. Though, as Grant says point blank in the series, Sylvia or asked him to spend money on her, he did all of it on his own. You know, something that doctor Jones says, I'm not sure if this made it in the series, is like, look, if you want a girlfriend, if you want a relationship, there are websites for that. You can go on Tinder, or you can go on Hinge. When you go onto one of these camping platforms, you're very much entering the world of a game. And the vast majority of people understand this. It's rare that someone completely loses perspective on real life and where the roles begin and end, and develops this kind of obsession that being upset. Of course, it does happen, and people who work in this industry know the signs, they know what to look for, and we are told they're very quick to cut off people when they feel that it's becoming completely psychologically destructive to enter into one of these sort of like almost like a cause play relationship. The way Grant tells the story, he was spending something like eight or ten hours a day texting or talking to Sylvie or watching her performances. They certainly got very close, but again Grant was lying to Sylvie, probably a lot more than she was manufacturing an identity herself. He told Sylvie that he was a millionaire doctor who drove a BMW and lived in his own house. He sold Sylvie the fantasy life that he thought he deserved, all the things he thought him and Cody were sort of set up to earn on their own and that he had destroyed. He told Sylvia that he had achieved all those things. So from Sylvie's point of view, I can imagine that it is somewhat flattering to have a wealthy American doctor who's obsessed with you and spending all of his money on you, And of course that must be somewhat intriguing. I would never try to intinunate that she had any sort of romantic feelings for him, but it probably wasn't so horrible to get on the phone and in chit chat with this successful man who's obsessed with you every day. Grant is educated, he's intelligent. I'm the same is true for Sylvie, and I think it's quite believable that they could have, you know, stimulating, friendly conversations with each other, and they very likely did. But of course, you know, Grant again refused to acknowledge the boundaries of this world, and there are very clear boundaries psychological boundaries about what is real, what is love, what is not true. As some of the men, some of the other men in the group were also like Sylvie's super fans told me, you know, this is like a strip club. It's a place that I come to after work to let off a little steam. Of course, it's erotic, and you know, I'm stimulating that part of my life. Of course I do like chit chatting with the girls. But you know, just as sort of pathetic and misguided and sad it is when you know a man thinks that to use their language, you know, the strippers falling in love with them. That's exactly what they saw happening with Grant. These were all, you know, functional adults who had the money again to spend. They'd become these big tippers to enter this sort of like rarefied class of of top tippers, but they absolutely understood where the lines were and they had never seen someone spin out of control the way Grant did so, which I think, you know, further establishes how taboo his behavior was, and that well, certainly, you know, the camming world, there is a world designed to get users to spend money, just like a casino or a Walmart. It's not quite as predatory as it was made to seem during the trial.
I had wondered that that was the point I wanted to bring up, is after these murders happened, this story, as lured as it could be made in the media, becomes fodder for sort of like late night talk shows, I mean, every media you can think of, and it always goes back to this guy killed his parents and his brother over this beautiful international camgirl, and we now know it was so much more complex. And also Sylvie is not responsible for what this man did to his family. I had wondered what the reaction was from the camgirl community. Have you had any reaction or at least for the people who appeared in your show.
So the cam models that we spoke to in our show, I'll work for a studio called Models for Models in Romania. It is run by former cam models, run for former cam models. It's an all female staff. It's very nurturing, protective environment from what we were able to see. They pay their taxes, they're above board, they advertised on the radio, their address is publicized. It was a very normal workplace in a lot of ways. They were totally unaware of this case, even though you know, they were performing within, you know, just a couple hundred miles of where Sylvie was. And I think ultimately where this case really got a football in the public imagination was in the true crime internet. You saw these sort of explosively popular YouTube videos and Twitch streams, and it was, you know, this sort of species of internet culture that I was sort of unfamiliar with, where there's I think there's a Grand Model YouTube video where a woman does a makeup tutorial while explaining every detail of the case, and I think I believe this one had something like thirteen million view And it was really this community that latched on to the story and that sort of invested it with you know, conspiracy theories and pop psychological analysis and stuff like that. But outside of you know, Grant's you know community of you know, basically the fifty mile radius of Orlando where he grew up, the case didn't have a lot of national attention on him.
I felt like when Grant really jumped the shark was when he made that video meant for Cody before the murders. And of course when he starts the video, I'm thinking, this is what he's leaving behind after he dies by suicide, which was not the case. It was a I need fifty thousand dollars to go meet this cam model and you need to give it to me, Cody. That felt like a big switch to me. Do you think that that was really the beginning of Grant thinking I'm going to go down the road and I can't get off this road, and it's going to end with the murders of my family.
Well, Grant told us is that when he first started hatching this plan to commit this, you know, absolutely horrifying triple homicide, was in therapy. His family had sent him to sort of a rehab clinic to get over his to the internet, to get over his addiction to this woman, to sort of hopefully start to allay his self destructive behavior, and it was the indignity of being sent to a rehabilitation clinic with, as he described, scummy drug addicts. Again, this sort of absolute loss of social status that he saw as his birthright, this level of shame and indignity, was something that Grant couldn't stand, and it was in that facility that Grant started to hatch the plan that was a few weeks after he filmed these incredibly disturbing videos dedicated to his family begging them for I think fifty thousand dollars so that he could go visit Sylvia in Europe and see if she really did love him or not. As you can imagine, his parents and his brother were immediately Saint Grant, this is a fantasy world. She doesn't love you, she's not even pretending to love you. You're paying her for a girlfriend experience. You can't blame this woman. The Amados never blamed Sylvie. Chad actually wrote her a letter sort of absolving her of guilt. They just begged her to off her relationship with him and to stop taking his money or to stop receiving his money because it wasn't actually his. But yet in these videos that Grant recorded sort of begging his parents for the funds to go start a life in Europe with Sylvie. We could see that he's totally lost touch with reality. He's pale, his face is drawn. He's speaking like he's in the midst of some international espionage plot, using all this James Bond type language about how his secrets need to be protected and the mission needs to be completed and the plan needs to be enacted, And you see a man who's completely lost touch with reality. But I don't know if we're necessarily looking at a man ready to commit a triple homicide at that point in those videos. It wasn't until, like I said, the final indignation of having to talk to a professional therapist about his fantasies, that Grant really could no longer take his fall from grace, could no longer stomach what he had become, could no longer really look in the mirror. And as someone on my team put it, this was a man, you know who really just couldn't withstand his own shame, couldn't deal with what he had become, and had to destroy everybody who was casting judgment on him, which again, his world was so small. There were only three people Grant really knew. Grant really spent time with, Grant shared his life with, And if his life had been destroyed, then those three people who constituted his life had to be destroyed as well.
Take me through that experience. Tell me about the crime, what happened.
What we know about the crime is that Grant killed his three family members with four bullets. It was very calculated, it was very precise. Grant and his brother had an enormous amount of experience with guns. They went to shooting ranges all the time. They had many many guns in the house. They played airsoft, which is sort of this like militarized paintball game with all of their friends. And he was a weapons expert. And what he did is he came down one afternoon while everyone was at work. His mother worked at home, so it was just Grant and his mom at home. His mom was on the computer playing Candy Crush. Grant snuck up behind her and shot her in the back of the head. He then waited for his father to get home. His father came in through the kitchen. He walked in said hey Dad. When his dad turned around, he shot his father once failed to kill his father with that shot. His father struggled for a bit and then Grant shot him one final time, killing him. Then he got on the phone with his brother. We're not sure what happened in this phone call, but Grant somehow enticed his brother to leave work and come home. This is what we know from Cody's co workers. He got some kind of call, seemed very distressed, and left work, which is not something Cody was likely to do. He was a very committed and regimented professional. Him leaving work in the middle of a ship was unheard of. Cody comes home, takes one step through the garage, Grant is waiting there on the side of the wall, and kills Cody with one shot the moment he walks in. Grant then spends hours at home with the corpses of his family, organizing hard drives, trying to get into his family member's bank accounts, making sure that he has the entire archive of Sylvie videos, and eventually leaving the home in the middle of the night, going to a supermarket parking lot and logging onto Sylvie's website so that he can watch a performance and spend another night tipping her and being you know, being a big dog in the winner's circle. He then goes to a job interview the next morning, performs decently well at this job interview, and is arrested at a hotel the next day and he's taken in for questioning. He's very timid, he's docile, he's in scrubs, and he gives I think. Over the course of a six hour interrogation, he speaks very placidly about his love of anime, his love of video games, his love of weapons, his love of Sylvie. He narrates the downfall that he had experienced, and this very shocking short of crescendo to the interrogation. Grant is presented with the photographs of his dead family members and asked, did you leave the house with your family like this? Grant breaks down in tears and immediately says no. He holds his ground, claims his innocence, says he didn't do anything like this. Went to trial claiming his innocence, saying he never did anything like this, received a life sentence, went behind bars claiming he was innocent. Spent months and months on the phone with me, claiming his innocence, saying he never did this. No one ever believed it. I never believed it. He didn't have a credible theory of what had actually happened that night. And then he took his case to appeal. The Department of Justice in Florida denied his appeal, and once it became clear that Grant was going to be behind bars for the rest of his life with no chance of parole, that is when he decided to tell me the truth. That is when he confessed to me that he had committed these murders. He told me what happened that night, and then all of a sudden, I was kind of treated to like the real Grant, you know, the mask had fined cracked off, and I was able to talk with the real grand someone that he had in part been hiding from me all these years, on the phone. And what we saw was all this sort of egomania, these recriminations, the pathology of thinking that he was better than everybody else and that he deserved the world on a platter. All of that really came to the foreground in a very unguarded and shocking way once Grant's appeal was denied. And that is the Grant that we introduced audiences to in the third and final episode, and that is the Grant that I hope audiences remember when they think back on this project.
I will say it's pretty disgusting. His smirk just transforms I think, his whole personality, like you said in that last episode, and it pops up a couple of different times. I think, tell me about the little bit of a wild goose chase that he sent you and then it sounds like quite a few police officers on which ends up with that damn smirk.
Yeah. One of the weak points in the prosecution's case is that there was no more weapon. They couldn't find the gun that had actually killed the Amatos, which was a glaring hole in their case. It made it seem like for a long time that Grant could actually be found innocent and walk away from this trial of freeman. Like I said, once it's appeal was denied and Grant finally confessed to me, I asked him right away. I was like, Grant, where's the murder weapon? And he said, oh, well, I actually, after I killed my family, I went back to one of my friend's houses and I buried it in his backyard, which seemed strange, as many of the lawyers said the second I told this theory to the lawyers, they jumped on it right away. It was like, this doesn't sound credible, this sounds bizarre. Wouldn't there be evidence of digging. Why wouldn't he just throw it in a lake. There's a million lakes around here. Why would he do this? Nevertheless, Grant held tutor that story. I felt legally obligated to tell the sheriffs that I had been told this information that there could potentially be a murder weapon buried in this backyard somewhere out in Florida. I had to give them, you know, some sworn testimony, and they allowed us to film them digging for this, this murder weapon in the backyard, and they didn't find it. Grant, of course, had a theory that, you know, he had buried it under a tree, and in the years intervening between when he was arrested and when we went to dig it up, those trees had been removed, and maybe the landscapers had sort of excavated the gun and just thrown it away in a landfill somewhere. But you know, the story wasn't quite convincing, and at that point, I think we saw that Grant was you know, a manipulator, a narcissist, someone who was enjoying this cat and mouse game that he was now playing with me. And that was sort of the conclusion that we all drew from this event. You know that here's another lie, another manipulation, another desperate grasp for attention, and also, I think, frankly, another desperate attempt on his part to attack his friend. You know, the man who Grant said had the gun buried in his backyard was another innocent bystander, another victim of this crime, and another victim of Grant's you know, machinations.
And I think, to your credit, that last episode really does put so much separation between Grant, this love sick puppy, you know, who was so desperate to be with this cam model that he killed his parents and his brother for the money and they were pressuring him to stop and all of that, and this manipulative woman. And now the reality of it is, you know, I wonder if this would have happened in some way, shape or form, whether he had met Sylvie or gotten into that world or not, just because he seems so much more authentic now after this mask is pulled off. It just seems like inevitable that something bad was going to happen. But as I was starting to say, now, to your credit, there's so much space now between I think, you know, Sylvie was an excuse and the cam model world was an excuse that now is not very legitimate.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think that's you know, grantstonfatuation with Sylvie was a symptom. It wasn't the disease, and it's very important to distinguish between the two. I think without Sylvie there still would have been a tragedy in this family. And I think that, you know, even if Grant's life had gone exactly how he wanted it to and he had achieved all of this success, I think he still would have hurt the people in his life in some sort of savage way. It might not have been this unbelievably tragic, violent outburst, but I think this man has serious mental health problems and he was going to hurt the people in his life in one way or another. Sylvie was in, you know, sort of the wrong place at the wrong time and became this object of fascination for Grant. But I don't think she twisted his mind or his motivations or preyed on his emotions in any sort of unusual way whatsoever. There are millions of people engaged in these kind of relationships around the world. They don't end in violence. What was that work here? With something a lot more complicated, a lot more human, a lot more idiosyncratic to Grant's own, you know, particular psychology and emotional makeup.
You hire an investigator, translator, investigator to try to find her, and when ultimately this investigator tracks her down, Sylvie sounds like another victim to me. I mean, she is scared, senseless, and I'm sure if she were to pick someone to speak with it would be your crew, just because you have done such an in depth job. But she seems frightened and of course not trusting Grant and feeling betrayed in all sorts of things, but mostly frightened.
Yeah. I absolutely consider Sylvie to be one of the victims of this crime. I told her so in many letters. She you know, as doctor Jones says in our series, she was just doing her job and this terrible thing happened. When we speak to where she absolutely sounds scared. She says that she had to go to therapy to recover from this event. That has taken a lot of work for her to get back on her feet, but that luckily she has. She's still working, she's still successful. And I think very telling is that she's never in this conversation we have from her, she never says Grant's name, she never says, you know, the term the murder or the crime. She just says this thing. It's still something that she can't speak. It's still something that clearly is a weight on her. And again, it's just another crystal clear portrait of and I hate to use this language, but how effective this crime was. Grant destroyed so many people, He destroyed so many lives, and the legacy of his actions still live on. It's not over, and it will not be over for anyone who lived through this.
I mean, I hate to bring this up, but this man has gotten a tremendous amount of attention from women. I never understand it. I don't need to understand it, but he claims, and I'm sure it's true, that he has gotten just hundreds of solicitations from women who want to communicate with him. And kind of grossly he explains how he knows when someone is authentic and is an authentic and how he can now be picky. It is clear that Grant A. Motto is getting more attention now than he ever has in his entire life, and is kind of getting what he wants in an odd way.
I think that's true, and that is an inevitable byproduct of this project is that Grant is going to get some attention, and it's going to be, you know, attention from people who are likely not doing very well themselves. What I hope is that this project once and for all dispels the idea of Grant potentially being innocent, which was still you know, in the public record that he was claiming his innocence until I was able to extract this confession for him. It's now a matter of public and permanent record that Granted Motto did commit these murders, has confessed to these murders, and I think, as we expressed in the final the final minutes of the series, experience is almost no remorse. So I think the idea of him being a and this is language that I got from speaking to some of these women who reach out to these convicted murderers, is this is not you know, a poor, broken boy, a victim of a modern society who didn't understand his vulnerability. This was a cold, calculated, heartless act by a very disturbed man who, as a human being deserves some sympathy, but as a rational actor and a victim of circumstance, I think deserves no sympathy whatsoever. And what I'm hoping is that this actually dampens the appeal of the Grand Model story going forward.
What was your last conversation like with Grant or have you had a last conversation with him yet?
So I would say that we haven't had our last conversation without giving away too many details. Grant and I were able to communicate with a contraband cell phone that he was able to smuggle into prison. Oh, we were able to text fairly regularly, and he always had read receipts, so I would know when he received my messages. As far as I know, Grant hasn't received any of my messages since Thanksgiving. We're recording this in April, so it's been about four months since I was able to communicate with Grant. I think it's very likely that Grant is being punished for this series coming out, being punished for communicating with a journalist without the prison's intervention, and is very likely in solitary confinement right now. This is a risk that Grant knew he was taking. He kind of saw it as sort of the inevitable consequence of him pt disicipating in the story is that he would have his phone confiscated, he would be punished by the guards, and he'd be thrown in solitary And it appears that that's what's happening right now, though of course I don't know for sure. But what I can tell you is that Grant has not communicated with me since I finished the show in November. As far as I know, he hasn't seen the show and might not be able to get his hands on any kind of technology for a long time, which could be a good thing.
What would be the purpose for you to keep communicating with him once the show is out? Is there another step after this?
I feel that I owe Grant sort of the respect of staying in touch with him. You know, he did share his story with me. We spent a long time getting to know each other. That being said, I always had to create, you know, a very firm wall between us. This could never be a friendship or a therapeutic relationship for him, And certainly that was something that Grant wanted. You know, he's in prison for life, and he needs partnership, and he needs sympathy, and he needs people to listen to him. And once I realized that he was sort of developing this kind of attachment to me into our calls, I had to pull back a little bit and make sure that Grant didn't view me as a friend. That being said, I do feel that I owe him staying in touch. I'm curious to hear what he has to say about the show, But yeah, I certainly don't feel that Grant deserves my sympathy or my empathy any more than he's already received it.
I'm just so curious about why did they not pursue the death penalty in this case. I am not going to talk about my politics around the death penalty, but we're in Florida. You would think that with a triple murder that would be the first thing on their minds.
Well, it was certainly on the table. And the reason that Grant did not get the death penalty is that his one surviving brother, this was a half brother of his who had moved out of the house, was much older than Grant, sort of isolated from the family, but still a half brother. Nonetheless, someone who intimately knew Grant's parents went on the stand and said, despite everything, despite my absolute, rock solid belief that Grant did kill my family, I still love my brother, And that statement saved Grant's life, and again is yet another piece of evidence of the unconditional love and support that Grant received from his family every step down the rabbit hole.
Did other family members say something similar or was there anybody else there to represent Chad and Margaret?
No one else took the stand to defend Grant or to talk about the impact that this murder had had on the family. I think the Amatos were estranged from certain parts of their family. They were very isolated family. I think they all kind of just went to work and then went home and spent all of their free time at home together. So there were not a lot of people who had insight into what these tumultuous last six months of the Amado's lives were like. I think Margaret was upfront about the fact that she was going through family problems and she was distressed, but no one really knew what the nature of them was, and I think certainly everybody was disgusted with Grant. Everyone was completely convinced of his guilt and didn't feel like they needed to take the stand in order to put this man behind bars.
Tell me a little bit about what your feelings are with that fem fatale storyline, the manipulated man, poor man who has fallen into the web of this woman who is specifically targeting him to kind of play with his emotions.
I think it plays into the fantasy here that you know, men are not responsible for their own sexual impulses. It's something hardwired into them. They can't be taken to task for acting on these impulses, which obviously serves a patriarchy in you know, completely transparent ways. It puts a target on the backs of any women with sexual agency, any women who want to explore their sexual capital, who want to spend their sexual capital in the open marketplace. And what it does is it I think it's a way of you know, subjugating women. You know, you have the responsibility of not praying on men's sexuality, Whereas I think we all know that time and again, what most often happens is that women are the victims of male sexuality, and I think that's exactly what we're seeing in this case here, where Sylvie ends up becoming the victim of Brandon Motto, just like so many other people in this story.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and on Facebook look at Wicked Words Pod
