[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.
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]