that Gatti found joy in. That may have been a coincidence, but maybe not. This omission suggests that Amanda's absence from Gatti's life would make it no less worth living.
There is evidence Gatti himself was unconvinced of the emptiness of a world without Amanda. Days after their 2007 wedding, Gatti visited a New Jersey lawyer with Amanda to tear up a copy of the couple's prenuptial agreement. That agreement left Amanda with nothing in the case of divorce, not even alimony. According to The Canadian Press, Amanda testified that Gatti destroyed a copy of the agreement as an unsolicited gesture of his love for her. Does this testimony really contrast with the one Rizzo provided, which depicted Gatti as a man fearful of not appearing devoted?
This ceremonial shredding may have been a gesture of love, but Gatti made sure the prenuptial agreement remained valid. By 2009, when the couple's marriage was experiencing periods of increasing turmoil, Gatti asked his lawyer in New Jersey to send a copy of the agreement to his divorce attorney in Montreal. Amanda too had been in contact with a divorce attorney by this time. Even the momentary nihilism that might have precipitated Gatti's suicide, then, seems out of place. Gatti had loved, lost, and recovered; he was capable of planning responsibly. There is futurity in these legal proceedings that makes Gatti's suicide puzzling. A man planning for his future does so because he intends to have one.
We accept that love can kill. The world has its share of suffering Werthers who, unable to obtain their sole desire, embrace a liberating nothingness. But the love between Amanda and Gatti wasn't unrequited—they were on a second honeymoon, with their baby no less. Loss too can precipitate suicide. It's called “the widowhood effect,” a term used to capture what is, according to the British Medical Journal, a strong association between spousal bereavement and death.
To see Amanda walk through the iron doors of a Brazilian jail, smiling and waving in the bursts of flashbulbs like a coy paparazzi obsession, was to see a woman who looked anything but bereaved. Perhaps this isn't fair, reading into the body language of a woman moments into her freedom a perhaps criminal absence of sadness. And yet it is an image that stuck in the craw of Gatti's friends and family. So maybe it isn't right to say that analyzing Amanda's behavior as she crossed the threshold into freedom is unfair. It might be unfair if she were innocent. But there were a lot of people who doubted she was.
By the letter of the law, of course, Amanda was indeed innocent. Still, Gatti's family and friends remained unconvinced by the police investigation's results. What they saw in Amanda's smile was the satisfaction of a woman who'd gotten away with murder. And they were going to wipe that smile from her face.
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The first step for the Gatti family was requesting a second autopsy. The initial autopsy indicated that Gatti “may have committed suicide.” It failed to rule out the possibility that he didn't. Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Cannon, supported the family's request for a second autopsy, formally asking Brazilian authorities for further information about the case. According to forensic pathologist Satish Chundru, a second autopsy is most commonly requested by the family of the deceased to get information or answers to questions the first autopsy couldn't satisfy. Not only were the Gattis unsatisfied by the findings of the first autopsy—they were suspicious of it. Gatti's older brother Joe suspected the Brazilian authorities of trying to exonerate Amanda. “Everything points to her,” said Joe, as the suicide speculation first picked up, “No doubt they're trying to get her off.” Lynch echoed Joe's sentiment, saying, “Everyone who knew him would know that's [suicide] far from the truth.”
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