bring.
A few hours before sunrise, Amanda descended the stairs of her suite in Hotel Dorisol, Porto de Galinha, a seaside resort in Pernambuco, Brazil, where she was on a second honeymoon of sorts with her husband, iconic boxer Arturo Gatti, and their ten-month-old son, Arturo Junior. The baby needed his bottle. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her husband. He looked as he might reasonably be expected to considering his behavior only hours earlier: naked but for his underwear, a crumpled heap. Knocked out.
She'd seen it before, suffered it before, too. Gatti was, in Amanda's words, “a completely different man when he was drinking.” And he'd been drinking. The crowd outside the pizzeria that served as the setting for their latest fight could attest to that. So could her body, bruised and bloodied as it was. Drunk, angry with her for refusing to join him at a local bar, Gatti had shoved her to the ground.
“He wouldn't let me take my son,” she would later admit. So, hurt and exhausted, she left Gatti with their son, who was asleep in his stroller.
When she came back to their room sometime later, Amanda found Gatti sitting, his arms around a crying Junior, his blood spattered on the baby's bib. Amanda didn't yet know it, but a crowd had witnessed Gatti assault her. It responded with street justice. After she left the bar to return to the suite a mob twenty-deep attacked the boxer. Gatti fought back in a rage but bore the marks of a man hit by fists, rocks, even a bicycle.
“I guess it's over, huh?” he asked. Resorting to a question can be easier than stating the answer—especially an answer you don't want to hear, don't want to speak. A question retains some hope. A question can be a dare.
“It's over,” she told him before going up to bed.
So Amanda said nothing to her husband as she came down the stairs in the early morning, perhaps because with him in that contorted repose, in his peace, she found a little of her own. Perhaps because there was nothing to say, nothing left to fight for—and no fight left. Not enough anyway. Junior needed his bottle, too, and whatever closure she might reach with her husband, at that groggy hour it came second to the needs of their son.
Back to bed then, bottle in hand. Imagine her stealing another glance as she crept up the stairs. Did she narrow her eyes at the cause of so much of her pain or shake her head 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
