Grant Amato — whose case I covered in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 8 — murdered his parents and his brother Cody in their Chuluota, Florida home in January 2019, after his family tried to cut off his obsessive online relationship with a Bulgarian webcam model. A jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder, and he was sent to prison for three consecutive life terms. That seemed to be the end of the story. It wasn’t.
Amato’s public defenders filed an appeal in August 2019, arguing in part that the trial judge should never have allowed evidence about a stolen gun. It failed. On May 4, 2021, Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal affirmed his convictions and sentences without a written opinion, finding no error worth discussing.
The far stranger development came later — and it carries an unsettling echo of the original crime.
In 2024, Amato’s case was dramatized in the Paramount+ true crime series Ctrl+Alt+Desire. Somewhere along the way, a woman named Victoria Goodwin saw Amato in a true crime documentary and began writing to him in prison. Victoria was married to Aaron Goodwin, a longtime cast member of the paranormal reality show Ghost Adventures. According to a Las Vegas police arrest report, the letters turned romantic, and investigators say the two fell in love.
By October 2024, they were allegedly planning a murder. Using a contraband cell phone, Amato is accused of messaging a third party to arrange the killing of Aaron Goodwin, while Victoria shared her husband’s schedule and tracked his location through Apple’s Find My app. She set aside $11,515 to pay for the hit. One of her messages reportedly read, “Am I a bad person? Because I chose to end his existence. Not divorce.”
The plot collapsed when corrections officers seized Amato’s phone. Victoria Goodwin was arrested in Nevada on March 6, 2025; Aaron filed for divorce six days later. In April she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, and on June 5, 2025, she was sentenced to between 36 and 90 months in prison. Aaron told the court he would “never feel safe again.”
To date, Grant Amato faces no additional charges over the plot. He remains at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach, still serving the three life sentences he received for killing his family.
There is a grim symmetry to it all. Amato’s undoing began with a relationship he built with a woman he had never met in person — one who told him she loved him, and whom he believed without question. Years later, from a prison cell, he became the object of that same kind of fixation: a stranger who knew him only from a screen, certain she was in love, and willing to arrange a murder to prove it.