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.
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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 Amanda to the ground. Did he stand resolutely atop that stool, his faulty balance countered by the firmness of his resolve? Did he think of the wife he would leave permanently, the son who may never grasp why he was separated from the man whose name he shared, that unforgettable man he could never fully remember? Did Gatti think he was giving up? Did he think he had a choice?
These are questions an autopsy can't answer. And Gatti, leaving no suicide note, left them unanswerable, lost forever at the thud of a toppled stool.
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So many questions left to be answered by the people who cared most for him. And these people couldn't agree on an answer. Amanda had her own explanation for Gatti's suicide. “I believe that when we got home and he saw he hurt me, he thought I would leave him, that I would tell him to just let me go, that I would separate from him,” she told the Associated Press after walking out of jail. “He did that in a moment of weakness. He was drunk, maybe he didn't know what he was doing, maybe he thought I would leave him the next day.”
A charitable treatment of this explanation might read as follows: a new widow, one who discovered her husband's dead body, who spent nearly three weeks in jail while being investigated for murder, who answered countless questions about her knowledge of the events that widowed and jailed her, provided the only explanation she could imagine.
As far as explanations go, it is a poor one, maybe understandably so, but a poor one nonetheless. Because while Amanda might well have been about to leave Gatti in the morning, it is hard to imagine that Gatti, even in his despair, would consider a failed marriage reason enough to make his two children—Junior as well as a daughter from a previous relationship—fatherless. Yes, it appeared like he and Amanda were trying to salvage a tumultuous marriage with their second honeymoon. And yes, Gatti's friends and family pleaded with him to escape a toxic relationship. But he told them he'd submit to a spin on the marital Catherine Wheel to preserve his relationship with Junior.
Accepting—as many did not—that Gatti and Amanda were trying to find happiness together does little to make Amanda's explanation more satisfying. If their union was so strong, so important that ending it would show the world what Gatti was ultimately capable of, why couldn't Amanda provide greater insight into what drove him to suicide? Granted, she may not have known him any better than anyone else. Their relationship was only a few years old. It can take much longer than that to learn who a person is, especially if they're afraid to lose you. Still, Amanda's explanation for Gatti's death hinged on the importance of her in his life and his drunkenness. And that may have been all she could honestly offer. She didn't have to offer more given the conclusions of the police investigation (her explanation was mostly immaterial where that was concerned). But it did little to dampen suspicions.
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Just how strong was the bond between the two, anyway? In a phone interview she gave shortly after Gatti died, his mother Ida said that the couple was always fighting, that Amanda was “yelling all the time,” telling Gatti “I'm going to kill you!” And there was hostility in more than their speech. In April of that year, Gatti violated a restraining order filed against him. Who filed the restraining order wasn't clear in the record but Ida confirmed it was Amanda. She had called 911 claiming that Gatti hit her. He was charged with assault and released on bail. Gatti was ordered to stay two hundred yards away from Amanda and to abstain from alcohol. Not that he did; not that Amanda wanted him to.
Then there is Duva's story about the night she learned Gatti died. It was July 11. Duva was standing in her kitchen when her phone rang. Rick Reeno of boxingscene.com was on the other end. “Did you hear the news?”
“I thought it was a hoax,” remembers Duva. It wasn't, and so with Gatti's manager, Pat Lynch, in Italy, she traveled to the Prudential Center in Newark, where Tomasz Adamek was fighting Bobby Gunn. Gatti's friends were at the fight, and Duva made it her duty to break the awful news. She remembers walking through the arena, telling Gatti's friends as she saw them. One of his friends responded in a way Duva has never forgotten:
“She finally killed him.”
“The people that were closest to him,” says Duva, remembering all those difficult exchanges, “this was their reaction.”
This was the same reaction Gatti's younger brother Fabricio had to the news. “The first thing that popped into my mind? She killed him.” At a time when the details were unclear, when there was little more to process than loss and shock, mariticide was the only explanation for those who knew Gatti best.
Further domestic dysfunction was revealed in 2011 when the Gatti family tried to annul the final version of Gatti's will (a will that left everything to Amanda). In Quebec's Superior Court, Gatti's friend, Antonio Rizzo, testified to the marriage's stormy nature. Rizzo said it was a union marked by continuous fights, that Gatti had become increasingly worried that Amanda might take Junior from him, and feared what she was capable of while in Brazil. Recounting a conversation he had with Gatti about this fear, Rizzo remembers his friend saying, “She wants me to sign a Brazilian passport for him. But if she takes my son I'll never see him again.” These fears weren't the product
