Unsolved Mysteries (2020) s04e02 Episode Script

[unsettling music plays]
[operator] 911. For what town or city?
- [man] Uh, Calgary, Alberta.
- [operator] Ambulance, police, or fire?
[man] Oh my God, all.
[operator] Okay, tell me
exactly what happened.
[man] I don't know. I just came home,
and I found my wife downstairs,
and there's blood everywhere.
- Oh my God.
- [operator] Are you with her now?
[man cries]
[man] I don't know.
[operator] Is she awake?
[man] I don't know.
[operator] Is she breathing?
[man] Oh my God.
[operator] Is she breathing?
[man] Hold on one second.
There's so much blood.
Honey.
No, she's cold!
Oh no.
[operator] I'm sending help.
I'm sending someone to assist you.
[man] Oh my God!
[ominous music plays]
[music fades]
[sirens wail]
[dispatcher] Calgary Police.
What's the address?
[operator] It's EMS.
Can you attend with us, please,
for an out-of-hospital death?
Uh, caller states, uh, patient is cold.
Not awake, not breathing,
blood everywhere.
- [dispatcher] What's the name?
- [operator] Last name, Antoni.
First name, Amanda.
The Calgary Police Service
first learned of Amanda's death
through a 911 call that was placed
by her husband, Lee Antoni.
Lee and Amanda lived
in the community of Castleridge,
which was in northeast Calgary in Canada.
[officer 1] 237, priority 2.
EMS is on the scene
saying they're gonna be
with a hysterical bystander.
Looks like the husband was calling
this in. It's gonna be very frantic.
[officer 2] There's also a fairly large
dog in the backyard, just so you're aware.
[officer 1] Copy, thanks.
I was the district sergeant that day,
which means I was the patrol supervisor.
So I was in command of all
the patrol officers working in this area.
And it turned out
that I wasn't actually all that far away,
so I was the first police officer
on scene.
When I arrived on scene,
there was a male,
who became known to me as Lee,
near the front porch.
As I got near the the front door,
I could see that Lee was shaking.
He was visibly upset.
And pretty much all I could get out of him
was, "She's in the basement."
[tense music plays]
[Trent] So I made my way to the stairwell.
I looked down the stairs.
One thing that stood out to me,
what appeared to be a piggy bank
that was partially broken.
That stuck in my mind.
And at that point,
I started making my way down the stairs.
As I came into the basement,
what really took me aback
was the amount of blood on the floor.
I could see Amanda lying on the floor.
I didn't take a close inspection,
but she appeared to have suffered
quite a significant head injury.
She definitely appeared
to have been struck by something
that caused a significant injury
to the right portion of her face
and her skull at where
where her eye meets her hairline.
I made my way back up the stairs
and joined the backup units
to clear the house,
and I made instruction
for the next responding officer
to stay with the husband.
I wasn't sure what had happened
or what his involvement
would have been at that point.
This was the bloodiest scene
I'd ever walked in on.
Quite frankly, it was gruesome.
[reporter] Good afternoon.
Police continue to investigate
a suspicious death
in the city's northeast.
No one is in custody,
though police are questioning the man
that originally called police
to the scene.
It's what they found inside the home
that makes them believe
the death is suspicious.
[Dave] At the beginning of any
new investigation, a war room is set up,
an operational center
where information will kind of flow in,
and we go through a process
of understanding
and interpreting the scene,
in in an effort to determine
what happened to Amanda.
Amanda Antoni was a 31-year-old female,
found lying deceased
on Monday, October 26th, 2015.
When the medical response
and the police officers arrived,
they had found
that she was in full rigor mortis
on a basement floor
inside of her residence,
which potentially would suggest
that she died sometime on Sunday.
There's no signs, uh,
that there was a robbery that occurred,
or this was motivated by robbery,
or that there had been a break and enter,
or that there were any items
removed or missing from the home.
A chair had been found tipped over,
and we learned
that when Lee went into the home,
he found Amanda's phone
lying on the floor in the dining room.
The phone had been broken,
and the screen had been cracked.
The phone and the tipped-over chair
indicated that there had been
some sort of a struggle,
some sort of a violent altercation
that had occurred inside the home.
In Amanda's case,
we certainly know at this point
that her death is not natural.
We also know at this point
that there's no indication
that it's suicide.
[woman 1] It was quite obvious
that something really violent
had occurred in that basement.
She was covered in blood.
Her clothes were covered in blood.
There was blood on the walls.
She had bruises in a lot of places,
and it looked like she had been beaten.
Wasn't a doubt that it was a homicide.
[Dave] Another thing that was significant
was that there appeared to be a weapon
that had been left at the scene
by an offender.
A ceramic piggy bank on the ledge
leading down into the stairs.
The front of it was, uh, sheared off.
You could see many pieces
of the broken face of that piggy bank,
you know, strewn along down the stairs.
[Dave] Pieces of the ceramic
from that piggy bank
were left embedded in,
uh, Amanda's forehead.
I believed it was a weapon
that had been used, uh, by an offender
to cause those injuries.
The other piece that bothered me
was the fact
that she was partially clothed,
and that the pants had been pulled down
just about past the buttocks.
The way she had been found,
um, on the floor itself,
it appeared like she had been
the victim of a sexual assault,
and in the course of that sexual assault
was murdered.
[phone rings]
[woman 2] I was home alone,
and Lee called.
[phone rings]
[woman 2] He just said, "Amanda's dead."
And it went from there.
I had just pulled into my driveway,
and my phone rings, and it's Mom.
And she says, "Lee came home,
found Amanda at the bottom of the stairs,
and she's not moving."
That's the only information I had.
Lee phoned me, hysterical,
and said that Amanda was dead.
I didn't think it was real.
I just jumped in my vehicle
and raced there as fast as I could
'cause I didn't know what was going on.
And that's when they they officially
told us that, uh, um, something happened
and, uh, Amanda had passed.
- [woman] So I'm gonna show ya.
- [man] Yeah.
See if you can find
anything suspicious with him.
- [girl laughs]
- [woman] We found a recipe on him.
Grandma's strudel.
Grandma's strudel recipe.
[Allen] Amanda was the baby of the family.
I'm the oldest of the three kids,
and my younger brother
is a year and a half younger than me,
and Amanda was 13 years younger than me.
We were foster parents,
and she came into our home as a baby,
at two months.
She had the most beautiful blue eyes.
And, you know, you you just fell in love
with this baby right off the bat.
She stole our hearts.
Allen and I would spend a lot of time
looking after her,
and, you know, entertaining her,
and and, uh, just being big brothers.
[Allen] She'd fall asleep on my chest
while we're watching Flintstones,
and she was so cute and adorable,
and she was a girl instead of a boy,
so, you know,
that was something new for our family.
[Darrell] By the time she was 14 months,
we had adopted her
and brought her in as, you know,
part of our family.
And from that day forward,
she was one of us.
And it was quite exciting
to just watch her personality
develop and grow.
[Allen] She loved to prank and joke.
[Linda laughs] Oh my God.
[Allen] That's what you call hair!
She loved cats. She loved dogs.
She'd love to bring in strays
by the dozens if she could've.
[Linda] She had a very kind heart,
and she just loved people.
She was around 20
when she left home and met Lee.
It was a mutual friend that introduced
Amanda and Lee to each other.
It wasn't long after that
that they got an apartment together,
and and then got married
a few years later.
From this day on,
I choose you to be my wife.
From this day on,
I choose you to be my wife.
She would just light up
when they were together.
They had lots of fun together.
Lots of giggles, lots of laughs.
[Darrell] When they first met, Lee had
a little bit of a wild side to him.
Um, a little more partying
and and and that type of stuff.
Amanda had approached me a couple times
through their relationship, just
I guess you could say a little frustrated.
At the time of her death,
Amanda had started her own business,
doing house cleaning.
She was always having to look after
a lot of the bills, things like that,
when Lee was in between jobs.
[Allen] Amanda was supporting Lee.
Lee seemed to be in and out of jobs.
He'd get fired, and Amanda
It frustrated her
that he didn't have a job.
I liked Lee, but there was times
when Amanda was hurt
that they had had fights or whatever,
and it bothered me.
It bothered me a lot.
- [detective] Just have a seat here.
- [Darrell] Sure.
When I came into the interview room
at the police station,
he let us know that Amanda had passed,
and and I asked what happened.
And he said, "It's too early to tell,
uh, but it looks suspicious."
And my next question was, "Where's Lee?"
[Darrell] Do we know
what's going on with Lee?
[detective] Don't know. I have nothing
I don't know anything about that.
[Darrell] Wondering how he's doing
Part of me was,
"Make sure you guys are talking to him,
just in case he had something
to do with this." You know, um
You know, that's my little sister.
[chuckles] You know?
[detective] How were things
between Lee and Amanda?
Any bad vibes from Lee,
as the older brothers?
[Darrell exhales]
Yeah
It it was such a blur that day.
[detective] So, your sister, does she
go by Amanda? Is that what she goes by?
I don't remember
a whole lot about the interview.
I did have concerns about Lee.
- I think he loves her.
- [detective] Yeah?
- But I don't 100% trust him.
- [detective] Okay.
[Allen] I I'm not, you know,
saying that he did it, but
- I think he's very impulsive.
- [detective] Okay.
- He could be, with his rage.
- Okay.
The husband is the blinking light
when the wife has been found dead.
If you need to go to the washroom
or something,
you can just knock on the door
and we'll come and get you, okay?
[Dave] He was the person
that found Amanda deceased
and was central to trying to figure out
who's responsible for her death.
- [officer] Knock if you need anything.
- [Lee] Thank you.
[exhales deeply]
Very early on in the investigation,
Lee Antoni always presented
as a, uh, distraught, despondent husband.
[Dave] Did you have anything
to do with Amanda's death?
[Lee] No, sir.
That first interview, Lee told us
that he left the residence on a Friday.
He'd gone to Saskatchewan.
He was going there
to visit with his mother
to help settle the estate of a father
who had passed a a year prior.
Returned back on a Monday
to find his wife dead.
According to Lee,
over the course of their relationship,
Lee and Amanda had never spent
really a night apart from one another.
And so, for him to go away
on this one weekend,
what is the statistical probability
this would happen
the one weekend he goes away?
[Dave] Are you involved in this, Lee?
[Lee] I'm not. I am not, man.
- [Dave] I'm gonna find out if you are.
- [Lee] Yeah. Yeah. You go right ahead.
I was at my mom's all weekend.
[tense music plays]
[Dave] Once we'd learned
how he had driven to Saskatchewan,
two investigators were sent
to travel along his route
and collect video from gas stations
that he told us that he had been at.
And, uh, we did collect video
that absolutely confirmed
that Lee was in Saskatchewan
at the time Amanda died.
[Dave] Do you know who did this to Amanda?
[Lee] No. I wanna know what happened.
[Dave] Well And so do I.
And I guarantee you
we'll find out eventually. Okay?
[Dave] We did consider the possibility
that Lee may have hired somebody
to take Amanda's life,
but there was no evidence found
that would suggest that Lee was
in contact with somebody else
or that there was
any kind of arrangement made
that when he left the residence
that somebody else was gonna
show up on his behalf and kill Amanda.
[reporter] Jamie Mauracher is live
at Westwinds Police Headquarters tonight.
Jamie, police say
they don't have a suspect in custody,
so where is this investigation at now?
They have been speaking with Lee Antoni.
They say he is cooperating.
They're actually ruling Lee out
as a suspect.
[somber music plays]
[Lee] Amanda was my better half.
I fell in love with her personality.
She's a person where,
when she walks in the room,
everyone smiles.
She always makes everyone comfortable.
When they were doing their investigation,
I was not worried.
They were doing their job.
And it's always the spouse, always first.
And I get that.
I was fine with that.
Because why? I want to know what happened.
I want to know what happened to Amanda.
[tense music plays]
You and Amanda live in your home
- [Lee] My wife, yes.
- Your wife.
A big part of what we do
in the beginning of an investigation
is, uh, we delve into,
in this particular case,
Amanda's activity prior to her death.
On Friday, you decided
to go to Saskatchewan.
There was a plan that Amanda and Lee
were going to travel together
to Saskatchewan.
But at the last minute, Amanda stayed home
because she wasn't feeling well.
[somber music plays]
[Linda] I had talked to her that morning.
She didn't really have any plans.
She wasn't feeling too good.
She had the migraine.
[Darrell] Amanda would get migraines.
Um, not all the time, but when
she got 'em, they were pretty severe.
I I figured her headache
or whatever she was feeling that day
must have been pretty bad
for her not to go with Lee.
[tense music plays]
[Lee] So Amanda knew, like,
"You gotta go help your mom."
"I'll stay here,
and I'll see you on Monday
when you come back home."
So I left on Friday.
That was the last time I saw her.
[tense music crescendos]
[tense music plays]
[Lee] When I got to Mom's,
I talked to Amanda.
I asked her how she was doing.
I asked her about her headaches and stuff.
And she said, "They're still kind of bad."
Lee and Amanda were in almost
constant communication
from the Friday that he left.
There's a very, uh, long record
of text messages back and forth.
The last time he spoke to Amanda
was at about 7:00 p.m.
on the Saturday night.
[tense music plays]
[Lee] She said
her migraines were going away.
Then, all of a sudden, Ruby barked.
[dog barks]
[Lee] Amanda told her to shut up.
Like, "Quiet, Ruby."
Ruby yelped.
[dog yelps]
[tense music continues]
[Lee] She was walking, and I could hear
a [imitates crunching] sound.
Then, all of a sudden, it just cut out.
And I said, "Hello? Honey?"
"Amanda? Amanda?"
And there was nothing.
So I hung up, tried it again.
It went just straight to her voicemail.
So I called on my mom's house line.
No answer. Straight to her voicemail.
When the phone cut off,
I didn't know what to think.
I thought maybe she dropped her phone.
Maybe her phone died.
Maybe she's gonna recharge it.
I'll get a phone call back.
So then I waited for a while.
I texted her.
[tense music plays]
[Lee] No reply.
Sunday, got up. Texted her again.
I didn't get no reply.
So I'm like, "Well, maybe she's busy.
She'll call me later."
'Cause you don't think of the worst.
You never do think of the worst,
especially if stuff like this
has never happened to you.
I thought, "Maybe she's out with Darrell.
Maybe she's visiting Mom."
Her family was very close.
So that's where I thought
maybe she was at Darrell's.
I was so busy with Mom,
and we were trying to organize stuff
and get stuff so Mom could sell stuff.
And I was busy. I was busy.
Then Sunday night, and I'm like,
"You know what? I'm, like
I'm gonna go to bed tonight,
I'm gonna wake up in the morning,
and I'm gonna come home and surprise her."
[uneasy music plays]
[Lee] So Monday, I left. I think
it was around, like, 8:30 in the morning.
Only time I stopped was to fill up gas.
Other than that, just kept on trucking.
[uneasy music continues]
[Lee] When I came home,
I know the front door was locked,
because I had to unlock it.
I walked into the house.
She wasn't there.
Let the dog out the back door,
'cause I know
she had to go to the bathroom.
And then I thought, "I'm gonna go
upstairs. Maybe Amanda's having a nap."
First, I went into our bedroom. Nothing.
Went in the bathroom. Nothing.
And I'm thinking,
"Where else could she be?"
Then I thought, "The only place
I didn't look was down in the basement."
Amanda never really liked
the basement that much.
I don't know why. She just had a creepy
kind of feeling about the basement.
[quiet, ominous music plays]
[Lee] I walked down the first four stairs
and I
found Amanda.
She was laying
in the middle of the basement,
covered in blood.
I can't describe
the feeling I went through.
I yelled, "Amanda! Amanda! Amanda!"
She didn't answer.
I just turned around and started shaking.
I almost dropped my phone.
And I called 911.
[tense music plays]
[Lee] The 911 said,
"Do you know if she's alive?"
And I said, "No." She said, "Can you go
back downstairs and see if she's alive?"
I didn't want to go back downstairs.
[breathes heavily]
I didn't want to
[Lee cries]
[Lee] That was the hardest thing,
and I didn't know how to do it.
As I was talking, I was screaming.
And as soon as I touched her,
she was cold.
[somber music plays]
[sirens wail]
[police official] An autopsy by the office
of the Chief Medical Examiner is ongoing.
I can assure everyone that we're,
uh, devoting sufficient resources
to ensure that we conduct
a complete and thorough investigation
to identify the person responsible
and hold them accountable.
[tense music plays]
[Dave] Based on the facts
and the evidence in this case,
we believed the assault on Amanda
likely occurred around seven o'clock
on the Saturday evening.
That is the last time
we know that she was alive,
because there was no activity on her phone
after that time.
We had significant concerns
that a violent offender
was running around northeast Calgary.
And so we put a lot of reliance
on our forensic crime scene unit
to assist us in identifying somebody
using evidence from the scene,
including fingerprints, footprints,
and offender DNA.
[tense music continues]
I was a sergeant, uh, within the unit,
and I was also the bloodstain,
uh, pattern analyst as well.
It's one of the worst scenes
that I've ever actually been in,
and I've never had one
with so many different types
of patterns and stains that were visible.
This here is the stairwell coming down.
And then this was the basement.
Um, and then this is the location
within the basement
of where Amanda was located.
You could kind of see the outline
within the blood
once she was removed from here.
[camera shutter clicks]
[T.L.] I was the primary
forensics investigator,
responsible for processing the scene
and seizing all the exhibits.
One thing that I did
was to dust doors for fingerprints,
which might assist us in determining
who might have been
in the house with Amanda.
I didn't find any fingerprints.
In the blood,
we found about 12 impressions.
Most of them appeared to have been made
by a foot rather than a hand.
[tense music plays]
[Dave] One of the things
that was very perplexing
is there were two footprint impressions
facing up the stairs.
They were right in this area here.
[Jodi] The toes were practically touching
the base of the stairs,
but they didn't proceed up the stairs.
[Dave] You could also see
at the base of the stairs two slippers.
Amanda must've been wearing slippers,
or I would presume she was wearing
slippers at the time this occurred.
[Jodi] I think
the most puzzling part for me
was the fact that I couldn't find
any shoe impressions.
And the only impressions
that we did locate
were barefoot impressions.
But in this area here,
there were swipe marks,
kind of back and forth,
back and forth in the blood.
And I thought, "Okay, somebody
is covering up their footwear
to get out of the scene and be undetected.
[Dave] There was no, um,
obvious defensive wounds on her body.
However, Amanda was covered
in a number of bruises.
[Jodi] A lot of the times
in violent crimes,
the offender also ends up
with some kind of a bloodletting injury.
And, uh, usually when they're exiting
the scene or moving around the scene,
they'll drip blood as well.
In grid number seven, we have
these nice, dark brown bloodstains.
When you find
a bloodstain drip pattern like this,
it automatically makes me think,
"Okay, maybe this is our offender
who would have bled
in this particular area."
Blood swabs are collected and sent off
to the lab for a DNA analysis.
[Dave] So as we waited eagerly
for our crime lab results to come back,
we needed to turn our mind
to looking for any other clues
that may assist us
in identifying an offender.
There was no signs of forced entry.
So whoever the offender was
either gained access to the residence
with a key, or using a key,
or entered into the home
through an unlocked back door.
[Lee] What beats me up every day
is the back door.
I cannot stop thinking
about that back door,
if it was locked or unlocked,
'cause I just automatically
grabbed the knob,
opened the door, let the dog out.
[woman on radio] 70-3-5, Code Six
[Dave] Investigators canvassed the area
in and around, uh, Amanda and Lee's home.
Castleridge has a statistically
higher level of crime
over most other communities
within Calgary.
[woman] It's just not a good neighborhood.
There was crime constantly,
with break-ins, shootings.
Physical attacks and assaults
were constant.
There was always police cars.
[Dave] This alley was an alley that was
of concern to Amanda back in 2015.
Amanda and Lee both reported
that people had been entering
into their backyard
and actually stealing bottles and cans
from inside here.
Sometimes our back fence was open.
Like, left open, the door.
Sometimes you could see footsteps
through the snow.
Through this back gate,
we get to, uh, Lee and Amanda's back door.
And, uh, this is the door
that Lee is not certain
whether or not he unlocked
at the time of his return.
[Darrell] There was a lot of transients
in that neighborhood.
If they're that brazen
to come in her yard and do that,
what else are they capable of doing?
And she was a little concerned about that.
[Dave] We were going to obviously
have to consider all possibilities,
including a stalker.
[uneasy music plays]
[Dave] Somebody who followed her home
at some point in time,
and then used the opportunity
of Lee, uh, being away from the home
as their opportunity to strike.
[uneasy music continues]
[Dave] We did learn from one neighbor
that between 6:30 and seven o'clock
on the Saturday night,
around that same time that Lee is saying
that he heard the the, uh, dog yelp
and the the phone disconnect,
that Amanda's and Lee's dog
had been barking.
[dog barks]
[woman] A scary dog bark.
Like, "Get out of here" dog bark.
You'd hear it from time to time,
but you wouldn't
It wouldn't be to the point
you're wondering what's going on.
Except that night.
Then we heard, like, a yell
coming from Amanda's house.
[ominous music plays]
[dog barks]
[Amanda] And then our neighbor
to the right of us,
they said that they'd seen someone
running through our yard.
It was really unnerving.
[Lee] For Ruby to bark, something
would have had to cause her to bark.
She was not that type of dog.
So Ruby would have barked
if someone came in the house.
And if someone confronted Amanda,
Amanda would have put up a fight.
She was a little girl,
but she could hold her hold her ground.
[detective] Okay, Linda, I have the
[Dave] As we delved
into the investigation,
we're talking
to family members and friends,
and we go through phones,
electronic devices,
journals, diaries, things of that nature.
One question we have,
is it possible that Amanda
could be involved in an affair
that had gone wrong?
And was it possible that she was expecting
somebody to come over to the home,
uh, while Lee was away?
When he arrived home
and found Amanda deceased,
Lee had noticed
that she appeared to be wearing
a fancier pair of undergarment
or underwear,
outside of the casual sets of underwear
that she would wear throughout the week.
And so that was certainly something
that was considered.
But this theory
was quickly dismissed by us,
because there is nothing that we found
that would indicate that there was
any sort of a, uh, a relationship
with another intimate partner
outside of the marriage.
[Allen] Lee and Amanda had fights,
like most people,
but I have no doubt
that they loved each other the whole time.
Like, Amanda loved him
just as much as he loved her.
[Dave] She wasn't involved
in drug activity, or gang activity,
or any of those kinds of things.
It was quite clear that Amanda
did not have a lot of enemies.
But during Lee's interview,
Lee identified somebody
he thought could be a suspect.
[Darrell] We were called back into
the police station for a family meeting.
Lee was sitting there with us,
and he looked across the table
at Allen and I, and said,
"I think my sister
had something to do with this."
[Lee] My sister hated my wife.
[Dave] And what would the reason
for your sister be to kill your wife?
[Lee] My sister, at that time,
was into bad drugs.
So then I called child services
on my sister.
Because all I care about is my my niece.
It was my sister and Lee that phoned
social services, or child services,
and had the child taken away.
[Lee] My sister called every day,
20-some times, man, a day,
"Where the fuck is my daughter?"
[Lee] My sister was really mad at me.
And she was mad at Amanda.
[Allen] There had been threats
that Lee's sister had made to Amanda.
And for my sister to be scared
was something significant,
because not much scared her.
[Darrell] So I thought, "Did Lee's sister
have some guy come over,
knowing that Lee was out of town?"
'Cause his sister would have known
Lee was out of town that day.
[Dave] Lee's sister
was brought to our police facility
and was interviewed
by an experienced investigator.
But there's no evidence to suggest
that she was the person responsible
for, uh, taking Amanda's life.
[ominous music plays]
[reporter 1] Police still don't have
any suspects in custody
since Amanda Antoni's body was found slain
in her northeast Calgary home.
[reporter 2] Amanda's family
released this statement.
They're pleading with the public
for any information,
saying the family needs
and deserves closure.
[Dave] Despite a heavy media presence,
no tips from the public came in,
which, just from my own experience,
is highly, highly unusual.
When the autopsy results came in,
toxicology showed signs of cannabis
in her system,
but to quantify the amount of cannabis,
to say whether it's intoxicating or not,
it's very difficult to do.
And finding cannabis in her system
is consistent with the fact
that Lee told us that she may have been
using cannabis for a migraine.
Cause of death was blunt-force trauma,
but it was as a result of that injury
that she actually bled to death.
[T.L.] There was no trauma to the brain.
There weren't any broken bones,
aside from a broken right orbital bone.
[Dave] I was surprised.
I thought that you would see
skull fractures
and and things of that nature.
None of that was there.
Amanda's body was, uh, bruised
in a number of locations.
Uh, her elbows were bruised.
She had bruises on her knees.
She had bruises on her hips.
But there was no reason
for Amanda to have died,
except for the fact
that she had lost so much blood.
At this point in time
in the investigation,
we were very anxious
to, uh, get results back from the lab
that I had hoped would identify a suspect.
But when the DNA results came in,
there wasn't one swab that came back
attributed to anybody else but Amanda,
including those passive drip stains.
[Jodi] I had hoped
it would be the offender,
and was anticipating that it would,
because it was such a violent scene.
And was quite surprised
and shocked, actually,
to find out that it was all Amanda's DNA.
They found no evidence that she had had
any contact with any other person,
which means that Amanda
had not been sexually assaulted.
Beyond that,
fingerprints, palm prints, and footprints
collected from the basement of the home
all were attributed to Amanda.
There was no evidence
that anybody else had been in the basement
except for Amanda.
[tense music plays]
[Dave] Throughout the year and a half
that we investigated,
I was in contact with a very experienced
group of behavioral science investigators.
And when they examined Amanda's case,
and the lack or absence of evidence
in the home,
they actually suggested
that Amanda's death
wasn't as a result
of somebody else's wrongdoing.
That her death
may actually be an accident.
[somber music plays]
[Dave] I go back
through the whole entire investigation.
There was no fingerprints
found on the pig.
The dust on the top of the pig
was settled, you know.
It didn't look like
it had ever been picked up.
There's no evidence to suggest
that piggy bank ever left the shelf.
Could she have struck the piggy bank
in a fall down the stairs?
Is that a possibility?
So we hired a biomechanics engineer
to also review the case.
They found that,
although very rare
for a woman of, uh, Miss Antoni's age,
the type of injuries that Amanda suffered
were consistent in the literature
for accidental stair falls.
And so we had to look at the possibility
that this was just a tragic accident.
And if it's an accident
how that happened.
I do believe, based on all of the evidence
that we've collected,
that this opening is really ground zero
for what happened to Amanda.
Is it possible that Amanda tripped
over the dog and fell down the stairs?
It's possible.
What we do know
from examining this opening,
there was an impact that occurred
where Amanda came through this space,
struck the pig,
and the pig was driven
into the back of the wall.
We know that
because behind the piggy bank,
a small divot was left in the drywall.
But what nobody can ever say
with 100% certainty
is that did she fall down the stairs,
or could somebody
have pushed her down those stairs?
What works against the accident theory
is that, if she fell down the stairs,
why isn't the laundry basket that you see
at the top of the stairs disturbed,
or how did the pig not get knocked off
the the ledge as as she fell?
Or how was it that the phone
was lying about eight to ten feet away,
far away from where
she would have fallen down the stairs?
There was a possibility that, yes,
she had been pushed into the piggy bank
by our culprit or our assailant.
[Linda] I don't believe Amanda's death
was an accident.
There's something not right.
I just feel it in my heart
that there's something not right.
[uneasy music plays]
[Lee] If I didn't see what I saw
and they would have told me
that she fell down the stairs,
I would have believed them.
But because I found Amanda
in the basement and what I saw,
it just it didn't add up.
[Jodi] When I heard that they thought
it might have been an accident,
my gut reaction was,
"No way. She was beaten."
"She had way too many markings on her."
I've attended a lot of accident scenes,
and it was never that amount of blood.
[Allen] There was more to it.
The dog was barking.
There was a chair overturned in the room.
I just don't
I don't believe it was an accident.
Somebody pushed her down the stairs.
[Dave] Amanda did not die right away.
You know, it took some period of time
for her to sort of lose
that amount of blood
that would actually ultimately
be the reason for why she dies.
We know that Amanda, after receiving
the laceration to her forehead,
spent a lot of time moving around.
At points in time,
she was clearly standing and walking,
and that's evident
by, uh, footprint impressions
found in the blood itself.
It was almost 48 hours from the time
that Lee last spoke to Amanda
and that phone disconnected
at 7:00 p.m. on the Saturday evening
to the time he returned back to Calgary
on the Monday.
Part of this mystery is the fact
that the animals that lived in that home
never ventured down into the basement
during that 48-hour period
that Amanda laid there, uh, dying.
We didn't see any paw prints in the blood,
which just didn't seem logical.
[Lee] To find no paw prints
in the basement,
that does sound kind of unusual,
because if Amanda or myself ever got hurt,
or we were crying,
Ruby would come up to us
to kind of comfort us.
I have a Lab myself,
and wherever I go in the house,
the dog goes.
If Amanda fell and is in distress,
why does the black Lab not go downstairs
and check on her, or go to see her?
Was there somebody in the house
to prevent the dog from going downstairs?
[footsteps echo]
[dog barks]
[T.L.] There are still a lot
of unanswered questions with this case.
Factors that I can't explain.
Things that just
don't make any sense at all.
One thing I know for certain,
there was a point in time in that basement
where Amanda stood
at the base of those stairs,
because of the bloody footprints
seen on the floor.
She was right here.
Why did she not make the ascent
back up the stairs?
I will to this day
never really truly understand,
because she was capable of it.
[Darrell] Why the heck
did she not try coming upstairs?
As stubborn as she was,
hell or high water,
she would have made those stairs.
Hell or high water.
So, why didn't she even attempt?
That haunts me.
[Dave] There's only two things
that could have happened.
One, the loss of blood
could have potentially diminished
her ability for rational thought.
Or two,
whoever caused her injury
was still inside the home.
The threat was still inside the house,
and she felt safer in the basement
than going back up to the stairs
to face the threat.
[uneasy music plays]
[Dave] I don't have all of the answers,
and, ultimately, the accident theory
can never answer everything at the scene.
A case like Amanda's case is never closed,
but the case at this point is inactive
until new information is received.
[tense music plays]
[Dave] There are days
where I think, you know,
if I ever get to the same place
that Amanda went,
she's one of the first people
I want to run into.
I'm gonna ask her,
"What happened to you, girl?"
"What happened to you?"
[tense music continues]
[melancholy music plays]
[operator] Is she awake?
[Lee] I don't know.
[operator] Is she breathing?
[Lee] Oh my God.
[operator] Is she breathing?
[melancholy music continues]
[Lee] It's been eight years
since Amanda passed away.
It changes a person,
especially losing the love of your life.
One that you always thought
that you could grow old with.
[melancholy music continues]
If I could have changed the past,
I would have stayed home.
Because then she'd still be here.
[music fades]
[sniffs]
[Darrell] Amanda comes to my mind
every day.
You know, we had that brother-sister bond,
and she's telling me not to quit.
She's telling me that something happened.
I just know it.
She doesn't want me to give up.
So if anybody out there knows anything,
I beg 'em just to come forward.
Say something.
[melancholy music plays]
[music fades]
[ominous music plays]
[music fades]