“Man Claims ‘Choosing Compassion’ by Shooting Family to Spend Money on Obsession”

A male nurse from Chuluota, Florida named Grant Amato, 35, shockingly murdered his mother, father, and brother to make it appear as a murder-suicide. This dreadful crime was carried out with the intention of acquiring their money to support his addiction to a Bulgarian cam girl.

The tragic incident took place on January 25, 2019, when Grant fatally shot his parents, Chad and Margaret, as well as his brother Cody. This ruthless act came after revelations from his father and brother to the woman he was infatuated with over webcam, disclosing his true financial situation which did not match his earlier claims of success.

The nurse had blown $200,000 on the Bulgarian beauty, after stealing  $150,000 from his father and even taking out a loan on his parents’ house.

Grant’s distorted belief that he was romantically involved with Silviya grew due to her assistance in helping him cope with his depression following losing his job for a grave mistake – administering an excessively high epidural dosage to a patient.

Speaking in a new BBC Three series,  The Man Who Murdered His Family, Grant has confessed to the murders for the first time. 

The documentary is based on four years of phone conversations between TV director Colin Archdeacon and Grant while he was in prison before and after his trial.

Things started to spiral out of control for Grant when he lost his job and with a criminal charge for stealing medicines, he was unable to find other employment which caused him to turn to the online world to escape. 

Speaking in the documentary, Grant said: ‘That was the first time I ever went to a site like that and I kind of fell in love with the first girl I met. 

‘Her screen name is AdySweet but through getting to know her I found out that her name is actually Silviya.’ 

Silviya became a compulsion and obsession for Grant but he had to pay and bid against other men online for her attention. 

‘We would be on the phone for four hours and she would rationalise that by saying “well we don’t get to see each other physically, like be right next to each other and this is the only outlet that we have, digital pretty much.”‘

For Grant to gain access to a more intimate online relationship with Silviya he had to pay more.

Grant said: ‘It’s like a hierarchy. She did a kind of medieval ranking system where the highest “tippers” rank are called Lords. 

‘It became like a competition with other guys to tip the most.

‘When you reached the top of the table a bell would jingle and everybody would see your name. 

‘That’s why I was tipping the way that I did, for the attention and the glory of it.

 ‘I ended up sending between $12,000 to $15,000 a day, it gets out of hand, it gets crazy.’

‘She had the proverbial power of a Cleopatra.

‘She could get any man she wanted but when you actually interact with her, she isn’t like that.

‘We were acting like a couple of high schoolers who had fallen in love. 

‘She would teach me Bulgarian. We became so close.’

Grant presented himself online as a witty, charismatic successful anaesthetist, who lived by himself, when in reality he had lost his job and was living with his parents. 

He added: ‘The way I acted in that chatroom was comedic, sarcastic, playful. 

‘But whenever I came back, and interacted with the physical world, I was distant. 

‘I was closed off.’

Angela Jones, PhD, author of Camming, explained the relationship between Grant and Silviya in the documentary.

She said: ‘A lot of these men are not just looking to log in for immediate sexual gratification. They want the girlfriend experience.

‘They want to spend time with the girl, have conversations. They are looking for emotional support. Silviya was just doing her job.’

After noticing the mental decline of his brother, Cody took Grant on a trip to Japan so they could relax and unwind from the stresses of everyday life. 

As the end of the trip came closer Grant started falling back into a depression and on the way home he confessed to Cody about Silviya.

Cody had sympathy and even financed more money for him to spend on Silviya but back home, he told their parents.

Back in Florida, Grant asked Cody for $50,000 so he could fly to Bulgaria to meet Silviya in person, however this is when the family decided to step in and they told Grant that they were taking him to rehab. 

The family found out that Grant had spent $200,000 by fraudulently opening up separate credit cards in the names of his family without their knowledge, which led to  Chad having to remortgage their home.

Chad also managed to find Silviya’s email address and he wrote to tell her who his son really was which forced Grant to come clean.  

‘Silviya gave me one chance to come clean with her and I decided just to tell her everything.

‘Afterwards, she said that the room was closed to me.’ 

Grant said it felt like a break up.

His parents booked him into 60-day stay in rehab, but he left after a couple of weeks.

He then returned home, but his parents put strict restrictions on him.  

‘It was three individuals who had no family ties whatsoever, my dad was very dark and disturbed, my mom was a ghost and I was addict. 

‘All the electronics were monitored, all the door locks were changed, I wasn’t going to have access to my car, there were no weapons in the house anymore because everyone was scared of me.’

Chad gave his son an ultimatum, if he speaks to Silviya again then he will kick him out of the house. 

When Cody failed to arrive at work, on January 25 2019, a work colleague contacted police, who drove to the house.

Police found Cody, Chad and Margaret dead in the home, they had all been shot in the back of the head.

Grant went on the run for two days but was later tracked down and arrested at a hotel in Orange County, Florida, after his car was recognised outside. 

It was claimed Grant used his dead father’s fingerprint to access a USAA banking app on his killed brother’s phone and add his own PNC bank account.

While Grant’s lawyer, Jeff Dowdy, argued there wasn’t any blood on Grant when he was found, despite the scene being a bloody mess, prosecutors said Grant’s medical job at AdventHealth Orlando helped him cover up and stage a murder-suicide.

He was found by authorities with his passport in possession and prosecutors believe he wanted the webcam woman to invite him to Bulgaria. 

He was charged with murder, which he denied and continued to deny, even after he was given a life sentence in August, 2019.

However after his appeal was rejected 18 months later, he eventually confessed to BBC filmmaker Colin Archdeacon.

He explained: ‘I don’t want to keep wearing masks or keep up anything false.

‘That’s the realisation I’ve come to. Basically, this whole time I’ve been protecting my innocence for the sake of my future with the appeals process, but the truth is I did commit those murders.

‘I was very resistant to therapy and I felt so betrayed when my family said I was going into rehab. I was told that I could not have my cell phone or any electronic device for 60 days.

‘Being detached from the online world was all the more traumatic. My one outlet that had brought me joy, this alternate lifestyle that I had developed, was gone.

‘So now, this life that I was left with was pointless. That was when I thought about killing my family. I am remorseful. I wish I could go back in time and have my family back.’

Grant revealed he had shot his mother in the back of the head as she sat at her computer playing Candy Crush, then waited for his father to arrive home, shooting him once and when he tried to crawl away he shot him again. 

He then used his father’s phone to message Cody and summon him to the house – before shooting him in the kitchen.

Grand claimed that he regrets killing his family, saying his brother was ‘the love of my life’, while his mother was ‘completely selfless’. 

Grant said: ‘Cody was the love of my life. We were so compatible. He’s that person that I could always turn to in both happiness and sadness and I knew that he was always going to be there for me, his little brother.

‘He was kind of my angel on this Earth. We didn’t mind staying at the house that we always lived at as we got older because my dad really wanted to stay close to us. He was afraid of letting us go.’

Grant’s mother new he was in deep trouble but she supported him regardless. 

He said: ‘My mother was completely selfless, she sacrificed a lot of her life for other people, she was laid back funny, the quintessential coolest mom.

‘When I was in rehab my mom was the one who always let me maintain my connection to Silviya, my mom being my mom she smuggled her Iphone into Cornerstone recovery for me.’

Grant claimed that his father said the marriage between himself and his mother was over and they were staying together for financial reasons. 

He added: ‘I was constantly being reinforced that there was no hope in this situation and look at all the damage that I had done.’

Grant broke down in court when he was shown a picture of his murdered mother, claiming he thought it was ‘distasteful’ for the prosecution to show the images. 

Speaking about the murders of his family, Grant said: ‘I didn’t happen like it does in video games or the movies, it was all very tactful, it didn’t end up the way that I thought that it would.

‘It wasn’t as immediate as I imagined it to be, after each one you are kinda faced with the fact that well you can’t run away from them now.

‘I believe that people perceive me to be monstrous and it’s so polar opposite to who I am. I can’t think of a better way to commit those crimes because no one saw me, nobody knew what was about to happen 

‘I did that on purpose because I don’t want that final thought to be ”wow I can’t believe you are about to this to me.”

‘The fact that I have that compassion that’s the way that I am, even in the process of doing something terrible I still had that compassion.’ 

Surviving half brother Jason Amato, who didn’t live with the family, took to the stand in his brothers court case and he said he still ‘loves’ Grant.  

Investigative journalist Sofia in Bulgaria was hired in the hope of getting Silviya’s side of the story.

Silviya told her on the phone: ‘This thing has caused me extreme stress. Literally almost ruined my whole life.

‘I have barely managed to somehow feel normal again and survive this stress.’