Killed in Brazil?. Jimmy Tobin
in disgust? Did she breathe a heavy sigh for him, for their family, and maybe with it feel her resolve soften just a bit? It is a terrible thing to break up a family, after all.
What the morning brought was worse.
Around nine in the morning, Amanda made her way back downstairs, still upset, still ready to say goodbye. This time she went to him, shook him. He was cold. Face-down. A halo of blood fanned out around his head. A knife lay nearby. The anger that had fortified her nerve, that had fixed her jaw as she came down to confront the aftermath of the night, disappeared.
“Arturo, I forgive you! Please wake up! Please wake up, Arturo!”
Then came the screams.
“My husband's dead! My husband's dead! Please, someone, help me!”
▾ ▾ ▾
Alone in that hotel room with her baby—the body of her dead husband, so powerfully inanimate, anchoring her to a nightmare she wished only to escape—Amanda needed help, alright. But dead bodies demand an explanation, and once she was safely removed from the scene, Amanda was expected to explain as best—as convincingly—as she could what happened. More specifically, she was expected to explain her role in it. The first explanation left the twenty-three-year-old suddenly single mother in desperate need of help again.
▾ ▾ ▾
Amanda Rodrigues was arrested in Recife, Brazil, on July 12, 2009, the primary suspect in her husband's murder. If she had felt alone the morning before, it was nothing like the sense of isolation she felt now, separated from her baby, in the custody of Brazilian police. Yes, dead bodies demand an explanation, and at that stage of the investigation the most likely explanation for Gatti's death was that he'd been murdered by his wife. There were strangulation marks on Gatti's neck, marks that seemed to have been caused by the blood-stained purse strap found at the scene. The assumption among Brazilian law enforcement was that Amanda had strangled a drunken Gatti while he slept, a state that would've allowed her to overpower a man who not only outweighed her by some seventy pounds but who knocked people cold for a living.
Moreover, she acted alone. This much was confirmed by Mosies Teixeira, the lead investigator in the case. Teixeira told the Associated Press that it was “technically impossible for a third person to have been in the flat.” There were no signs of forced entry and the electronic locks on the door confirmed that no one other than Amanda and Gatti had entered the unit. “The investigation isn't finished,” said Teixeira, “but we continue to think she did this alone.” Teixeira's suggestion that the investigation had not yet ruled anything out misrepresented the matter somewhat. What had been ruled out thus far was the possibility that Amanda acted with an accomplice. And implicit in that belief was the assumption she had acted.
Amanda was less certain about what happened. In her version of the story, she had been sleeping, ignorant of the ending being engineered downstairs. She suggested Gatti might have killed himself, or that someone might have somehow entered the apartment and murdered him. She was innocent, however, on this she could accept no doubt.
Teixeira dismissed both explanations. Brazilian law dictates that although police accuse a person of a crime, the prosecutor is responsible for formally filing a charge. Police had until July 22 to share their findings with the prosecutor, and it boded poorly for Amanda that Teixeira, already analyzing the case as a murder, hoped to have the investigation completed before the deadline. Ten years later, Main Events CEO Kathy Duva would come back to this point in explaining her sense of what happened that night. “That they arrested her immediately tells me they had good reason to think that she did it.”
Seemingly unfazed by Teixeira's expectations, Amanda welcomed a speedy resolution. In a letter from prison, she wrote: “I am innocent, and I know that this will be proven in a few days.”
▾ ▾ ▾
A few days? Not given the evidence. The early defenses offered on Amanda's behalf were unlikely to dissuade Teixeira. Amanda offered one herself, sharing a letter she wrote from jail with the Associated Press on July 15. In it, she stressed the strength of her bond with her husband. “The people most important to my life,” she wrote, “who know us, know the size of our love.” Speaking to her suffering, she continued: “What hurts me is knowing the suffering of my family and friends. What hurts me is to know that my husband will not be in my house waiting for my return.”
Confronted with the possibility of Amanda somehow being a murderer, with the despair of having to reevaluate their image of her as a result, Amanda's family urged the world to understand her as they did. In an interview with TV Jornal, a Recife news station, Amanda's sister, Flavia, expressed her family's support: “Amanda told us that she didn't kill Arturo, and we believe her,” she said, adding, “My sister, like us, is very religious and would be incapable of killing anyone.”
Leaving aside that very religious people often commit murder, the use of “like us” here is telling. It is an attempt to confine Amanda to a context where murder is an aberration, unthinkable. In the context of the family, Amanda couldn't be a murderer. It was membership in a group, in their group, that made Amanda's guilt impossible for her family. The Gatti family would use a similar logic in their steadfast refusal to believe one of their own could take his own life.
Even Flavia, who gave no ground in defending her sister's innocence, struggled to understand Gatti's suicide. Nor could she understand what might precipitate the kind of fight between the two that would result in tragedy. “Sure they had fights,” said Flavia, “but he was crazy about her.” Amanda and Arturo didn't just have fights, though. To suggest as much was either naive or dishonest. The dysfunction in their marriage would come to light. And when it did, it would take more than character witnesses to see Amanda exonerated.
For now, though, the puzzling physics of the crime scene were in Amanda's favor. Speaking to Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, Flavia argued that Amanda could not have strangled her husband, who physically dwarfed her. It was a line of argument echoed by Celio Avelino, Amanda's attorney: “She is fragile, young and skinny—how could she kill a boxing champion?” he asked. A fair question, though one that excluded some pertinent details. What about Gatti's inebriation, the injuries he suffered at the hands of that angry mob? Avelino wasn't finished though. Even had Amanda succeeded in subduing and strangling Gatti in his drunken state, she still had to suspend him from the stairs, and from a height of seven feet. That too seemed a physical impossibility. Avelino believed these feats eliminated Amanda as a murder suspect. “When she awoke,” he said, “she presumed he had committed suicide. But she had nothing to do with it.” This statement, too, is a little curious, if only because it introduced another possibility. The possibility that Gatti committed suicide, and that Amanda had played a role in his doing so.
▾ ▾ ▾
That Amanda had nothing to do with her husband's death is something the Brazilian police eventually accepted. On July 30, they ruled Gatti's death a suicide. Police official Paulo Alberes told the Brazilian newspaper Diário de Pernambuco that Gatti used Amanda's purse strap to hang himself from the hotel-room staircase. “The case has been resolved,” said police spokeswoman Milena Saraiva. “While the evidence at the scene first led us to think Gatti was murdered, the autopsy results and a detailed crime-scene analysis simply pointed to a different outcome.”
After nearly three weeks in jail, Amanda was released when judge Ildete Verissimo de Lima ruled that there were no grounds for retaining a suspect in an investigation that excluded the possibility of murder.
The final moments of Gatti's life then, in the eyes of Brazilian police, were entirely his own.
Grimly fashioning a noose, adjusting it for size, positioning a stool, calculating the stability of his makeshift gallows—alone in this despairing ritual, one imagines, despite the world around him, despite the reason for living asleep upstairs. He had to climb the stool too. His body betraying him from the “seven cans of beer, along with two bottles of wine” he'd consumed at dinner, betraying him from the head injury he'd suffered when that mob attacked him for throwing