His Wife Secretly Hired Someone to Kill Him | True Crime Documentary

She tried to have me killed.

She gave my location to people.

Truly believe we were trying. I truly

believe with people she truly believed were going to harm me.

[snorts] That is Aaron Goodwin in a Las Vegas courtroom on the 5th of June 2025.

Eight months earlier, 3 hours down Interstate 15, he was asleep in a Best Western off Commerce Parkway in Barstow, California.

He did not know his hotel had been named in a text message that evening.

He did not know a stranger now had a photograph of his rental car, a photograph of his face, and a name for the job that was supposed to happen to him that week.

The stranger was serving three life sentences in a Florida prison for murdering his own parents and his brother, and he was arranging all of it from a phone he was not legally allowed to own.

The woman who gave him the address was Aaron's wife.

This is my cross to bear, and I'll never forgive myself.

[snorts] Aaron Goodwin was born on the 1st of April 1976 in Portland, Oregon, and he built his career around being watched, not around watching.

He worked camera and electrical jobs around Las Vegas, film premieres, a stretch shooting for the UFC until 2004 when two men named Zak Bagans and Nick

Groff needed someone to hold a camera while they investigated haunted locations for an independent documentary.

Aaron took the job.

The documentary became a television pitch, and in 2008 that pitch became Ghost Adventures, which has been airing in one form or another ever since.

First on the Travel Channel, and later on Discovery and Discovery Plus.

His title on the show was equipment technician.

His actual role, the one the audience knows him for, is written into his own network biography.

Referred to by many as a teddy bear or Zak's bait of choice.

He is the one they send into the dark room first.

Left alone in a cell block or a basement with a camera while everyone else watches from somewhere safer. And the

same bio promises you will hear him say "dude" about 20 times an episode.

This show is insanely popular. It has

this colossal cult-like following. It's

huge.

For a very large number of people, that popularity comes down to one man. 18

years of watching someone be frightened in the dark and be decent about it.

And for a lot of viewers, it was something smaller and more particular than fandom. It was the thing they put

than fandom. It was the thing they put on to fall asleep to.

Being isolated on camera for a living is a strange way to build a career.

And by the time this story starts, he had been doing it for over 16 years.

It had already cost him one marriage.

He had been divorced early in the show's run.

And by most accounts, he had not expected to try again.

The travel schedule that came with the job, weeks at a time in unfamiliar towns, chain hotels near whatever building the crew was filming that week, is not incidental to what follows. It is

the reason a Best Western in Barstow, California could later be named with total precision by someone who was never anywhere near it.

Aaron's location was never a secret.

It was printed on call sheets, texted to family, sometimes posted to his own Instagram. For most of his marriage,

Instagram. For most of his marriage, that openness was simply what it looked like to love someone whose job required him to disappear into strange buildings for a living.

Aaron and Victoria had been together since around 2018.

In October 2019, he proposed in front of the castle at Disneyland, a park they both loved enough to want their wedding there too.

They set a date, May 4th, 2020. The

pandemic took it and the several dates that came after it.

The ceremony itself finally happened in August 2022 in front of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, a venue that struck almost everyone as a fitting joke

for a man who investigated haunted houses for a living.

It finally happened.

Aaron wrote afterward. I couldn't be happier.

For the next two and a half years, the public record of that marriage never wavered.

Repeatedly showing a happy couple from decorating a spooky-themed Christmas tree early in their marriage to Aaron posting a picture kissing his wife on New Year's. For less than two weeks

New Year's. For less than two weeks before her arrest, Victoria sharing a video of her Valentine's Day gift for Aaron and posting, "I love you."

One week before her arrest, she posted a picture of the two of them on the couch with their cat.

Aaron would later say that for seven years he believed he was in the most loving relationship of his life and that everyone around them believed it, too.

That is not a figure of speech.

Everyone did.

Before there was an Aaron Goodwin, there was a golf scholarship. Victoria grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, the daughter of a Salvadoran father and an Irish-German mother, and by high school

she was good enough at golf to play through college on scholarship at Warner Pacific University.

"That was pretty much my whole life," she said later, describing fall training, spring training, summers spent working out and playing rather than resting.

She meant to go professional.

Then she was diagnosed with achalasia, a rare disorder that prevents the esophagus from moving food and liquid properly, and the competitive career ended before it could really begin.

What she built afterward was a public identity around that loss.

On Instagram, she described herself as a rare illness plus CPTSD warrior, posting about surgery scars, flare-ups, and the psychological weight of chronic

pain.

In December 2024, she went on a podcast called Motivational Talks with Ash to talk about it at length. The golf career that ended, the disorder that replaced it,

the sense of purpose she had rebuilt as an advocate for people living with invisible conditions.

None of this explains what came later.

It is simply who she was before any of it. A woman whose public story, like her

it. A woman whose public story, like her husband's, was about turning something painful into something people could watch and admire.

That was the public version of Victoria Goodwin in the spring of 2024.

An advocate, an athlete who lost the thing she was built for, a woman who had made her own pain useful to strangers.

And then she sat down to watch a documentary.

The series was called Control Alt Desire, a three-part Paramount+ true crime production about a Florida man named Grant Amato,

who in January 2019 shot his mother, his father, and his brother inside their family home after they tried to stop him from draining the family's accounts to

support an online relationship with a webcam model he had never met.

A jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree premeditated murder.

He is serving three life sentences without the possibility of parole.

And he has since appealed his conviction.

This is not the first time, and I don't think it'll be the last time that we've seen people who have fantasized and romanticized people who are incarcerated for very serious crimes.

Victoria's interest moved further than most, and faster. She reached out to him.

She would later tell police the contact began in May 2024 and ended that November.

Though some of the earliest reporting placed her first messages slightly before that.

It started on Facebook. It moved before long onto a cell phone Amato was not supposed to have inside a Florida state prison.

Court documents state that Amato was texting and Facebook messaging a woman from Las Vegas, Victoria Goodwin. The

two allegedly messaged about being in love and Goodwin allegedly told Amato her husband wouldn't accept divorce.

She was not using her own name with him.

She was Victoria Kandi.

In September 2024, Aaron found out his wife had been unfaithful. Not about the plot, which he

unfaithful. Not about the plot, which he knew nothing about yet, but about the affairs themselves.

After finding out she was cheating on me in September of last year with multiple men including the man going by the name Vincent

who turned out to be Grant Amato.

I gave her the option of divorce or we could or we could try to work it out.

Because I love her so much.

He would not learn until after her arrest that Vincent was Grant Amato.

He said she seemed devastated. He said

she told him she didn't want to lose him, that she made him feel more special in those weeks than she ever had before.

The correspondence with Amato did not stop that September. It deepened. Within

two weeks of Aaron offering his wife a way to save their marriage the messages that would eventually put her in prison were already being written.

Aaron was filming an episode near Calico Ghost Town the abandoned mining town a short drive from his hotel.

His days that week looked the way they always did on the road. Equipment, call

times, a room booked under a production company's name.

He had no reason to think about who might know where he was.

Victoria told Grant Amato exactly where he was and sent a picture of the two of them along with a picture of a black Dodge minivan being driven by her

husband. Investigators later noted the

husband. Investigators later noted the location had come from Find My, the phone app couples use to track each other.

Not a hotel chain.

Not a general region.

A specific address, a specific vehicle, a specific companion. Assembled by

someone with full ordinary permitted access to knowing exactly where her husband was. By then, Amato was relaying

husband was. By then, Amato was relaying all of it to a third man identified in the messages only as Gordo.

The two of them had set aside $11,515 for when the job was finished.

Amato had asked for $2,500 up front sent by PayPal.

Amato also told the third man how the timing would work.

He said he would phone Aaron himself to keep him occupied.

That is the closest anyone comes on the record to describing what the last few minutes of Aaron Goodwin's life was supposed to look like.

A phone call from a stranger. A friendly

voice from a prison cell in Florida keeping a man on the line in a hotel room in Barstow. "I'm so anxious."

Victoria wrote that day.

"I just can't believe it's happening.

How did I get to this point?

Am I a bad person because I chose to end his existence not divorce?"

not divorce?" The next day, the 3rd of October, Amato messaged Gordo again.

When you have the following day, you have Amato on that phone texting Gordo being like, "Hey, is it done yet? Hasn't

been done."

It was not done. Nobody has ever explained why on the public record. Not

whether Gordo was a real person standing somewhere near that motel.

Not whether he ever intended to do anything at all. Not whether the whole arrangement was a fiction one man was selling another from inside a prison cell. That question sits unanswered in

cell. That question sits unanswered in the middle of this case.

Aaron finished the shoot.

He drove home to Las Vegas.

He had no idea any of it had happened.

On the same day Amato was asking whether it was done in a prison 2,000 mi away, corrections officers walked into his cell and took his phone.

Not because of Aaron, not because of Victoria. Nobody in Nevada was

Victoria. Nobody in Nevada was investigating this. Nobody in Nevada

investigating this. Nobody in Nevada knew there was anything to investigate.

The reason this case exists at all did not begin with a detective, a tip, or a suspicious spouse.

It began with a routine cell check.

Officers at the Okeechobee Correctional Institution in Florida searched an inmate's cell and found a Motorola cell phone that was not supposed to be there.

Contraband phones are common enough in Florida's prison system that the state runs regular sweeps for exactly this.

The officers had no idea who any people were.

This one happened to belong to Grant Amato.

It was sent to a lab. Its contents were downloaded and read.

Fact that the reason this case got cracked wide open wasn't because they attempted a murder, wasn't because it failed, but because they found the cell

phone of the inmate inside of his cell.

And if they didn't find that cell phone, the question now becomes could have worked.

Could Aaron Goodwin be dead today but for finding that phone?

Then came a gap. Nobody has ever accounted for either. The phone was seized on the 3rd of October. Florida

did not contact the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department until the 4th of March.

5 months later.

For 5 months Aaron Goodwin kept filming.

He posted the New Year's photo.

He posted the Valentine's photo.

He went to work, came home, and slept in the same house while the evidence that his wife had given his location to a man arranging his death sat in a queue 2,000

miles away.

He had no way of knowing that the reason he was still alive, if any of it had ever been real, was a contraband sweep in a prison he had never heard of,

carried out by officers who had never heard of him.

Detectives moved almost immediately once Florida called. They served a search

Florida called. They served a search warrant at the Goodwin house and sat down with Victoria. She told them she'd learned about Grant Amato from a true crime documentary and started writing to

him. She called it a pen pal

him. She called it a pen pal relationship. She said she'd been

relationship. She said she'd been lonely, that the marriage had problems. Shown the messages about money, she said she thought she was paying for cell phones.

Shown the messages about killing her husband, she denied ever wanting him dead.

She said she'd been daydreaming about a different life and that she didn't feel that way anymore. She was arrested on two felony counts, solicitation to commit murder,

conspiracy to commit murder, and booked into the Clark County Detention Center on a $100,000 bail.

250 miles away, Aaron was inside an abandoned medical complex filming a Ghost Adventures lockdown with Zak Bagans and the rest of the crew. The

cameras were rolling when his phone lit up.

Dude.

Hello, officers. I'm Aaron Goodwin.

What's going on?

You all right?

You okay? Well, the police are at my house. What?

house. What?

I apologize.

It's fine, but I'm not staying in here by myself.

He stepped outside. The footage of the moment itself, his face changing, the crew asking if he was okay, made it into the finished episode

anyway. Seven months later, cut down to

anyway. Seven months later, cut down to a few seconds.

At this point, we will not be showing any further footage. But, it is at this moment that Aaron receives a call from the police that his wife has been

arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder by hiring a hitman.

Six days after the arrest, Aaron filed for divorce.

The complaint used standard Nevada language and then added a line that wasn't standard at all. There was no possibility of reconciliation.

For the date the marriage began, it says on or about May 4th, 2020.

They were not married that day.

That was the wedding the pandemic took.

They did not marry until August of 2022.

Nobody has explained the discrepancy.

Within 2 weeks, he amended the filing to add civil claims, assault, false imprisonment negligence.

He told reporters he had been blindsided.

Victoria pleaded not guilty at first. In

April, her lawyers reached a deal. She

would plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit murder, a charge carrying a range of 2 to 10 years. The

solicitation charge would be dropped.

Prosecutors agreed to make no sentencing recommendation at all, leaving the decision entirely to the judge.

Her family could have posted the bond that would have let her wait at home.

She chose to stay in jail. Aaron said

almost nothing publicly that spring. One

Instagram post, a smiling emoji, thanking people for their support.

By sentencing, the two sides of this case had split and they never came back together. The defense's position, laid

together. The defense's position, laid out by attorney David Brown, was that the plot had a clear ending.

Miss Goodwin, it's clear that as of November, she had completely distanced herself from the group. She had moved on from it. There was very little to

from it. There was very little to contact. She had nothing further to do.

contact. She had nothing further to do.

No efforts were made and the the phone exchange ends. I'd also comment

exchange ends. I'd also comment Whatever money moved after the first payment, Brown argued, was extortion, not conspiracy.

He asked Judge Nadia Crowl for probation. His client had no criminal

probation. His client had no criminal record. 92 days in jail, he said, had

record. 92 days in jail, he said, had already gotten her attention.

The state's position, [music] laid out by Deputy District Attorney Christopher Hamner, was narrower and more troubling. He agreed she had no

more troubling. He agreed she had no record. He agreed this wasn't some

record. He agreed this wasn't some fleeting, angry text from an unhappy wife.

This is not a situation where a unhappy wife simply kind of made a fleeting text that said, like I can't stand my marriage. Like I

wish he was just gone or something along those lines. It it it was far more than

those lines. It it it was far more than that.

What the investigation had traced, he told the court, was far beyond the sum discussed that October.

And ultimately, this investigation revealed about $60,000 sent from Miss Goodwin over to Mr. Amato.

And nowhere in those messages, he said, was there a single moment where she tried to take it back.

In that report was simply at no point does Miss Goodwin ever try to claw it back.

Aaron told the court what that $60,000 actually was.

Not an investment, not a transfer, not a figure on a spreadsheet.

Almost his entire life savings, money earned across 18 years of being sent into dark rooms first, gone without his knowledge to the associates of the man

who had arranged to have him killed.

And in the same sentence, he used a phrase the plea agreement never had to account for.

Now, this company should put a hit out to kill me more than once.

Blackmailed and spent almost all our savings to keep it quiet.

More than once. The defense's case rested on the plot having a clear ending. Aaron's account of it did not

ending. Aaron's account of it did not have one. Both readings fit the same set

have one. Both readings fit the same set of facts. The public record does not

of facts. The public record does not resolve which one is true. [music]

Sentencing was held on the 5th of June, 2025, a Thursday, before Judge Nadia Crowell in the 8th Judicial District Court in Las Vegas.

Victoria spoke first.

Firstly and most importantly, I would like to apologize to Aaron.

I'm so immensely sorry for the pain and anxiety I've caused you and the betrayal you undoubtedly and rightfully feel by my actions.

I need you to know that I will always hold love for you. My absolute promise to you is that you will never see or hear from me. I intend to leave the state of

me. I intend to leave the state of Nevada and you and anyone else will never be in danger of me ever again.

And then, near the end, she offered the court an account of the months before her arrest.

Prior to my arrest, I was taking steps toward mending my marriage and correcting my mistakes that led me here.

Then Aaron was sworn in.

Your honor, for 7 years I thought I was in the most loving relationship and marriage with my best friend.

Someone who I trusted wholeheartedly and laughed with every day. Someone who made me feel like I was someone and that I was her one and only.

I was loyal to her. I'd do whatever I could to make her happy. I thought we were something very special.

And so did everyone else.

He described the affair, the choice he'd offered her, the savings gone.

And he described finding out only after her arrest, only from detectives, never from her, what the relationship with Amato had actually become.

He fell more in love with Amato.

They even got spiritually married.

And now I was called the first husband.

[snorts] They talked until she was arrested.

And she sought out She sought She sought his help to kill me.

[snorts] But worse of all, she lied to me every day. I didn't know about any of the

day. I didn't know about any of the murder plot, the hit man, or the blackmail until the detectives told me after she was arrested.

He talked about armed security, therapy, a fear that hasn't gone away.

I'll always wonder why.

He told the court he didn't know what sentence was right.

Whether she got minimum or maximum time, I still won't feel safe whenever she's released.

I feel like this deserves prison time. I

don't know.

[snorts] So just hearing your answer today, thank you.

Crawl did not grant probation.

Victoria Goodwin will serve between 36 and 90 months in prison on one count of conspiracy to commit murder.

36 months, 3 years minimum before she is eligible to be considered for release.

She had already served 92 days, and those came off the front. Some context

for what that number is and is not.

The charge she pleaded to carried a range of 2 to 10 years.

Prosecutors, as part of the deal, had agreed to recommend nothing at all, no number, no floor, no argument for any particular outcome, leaving the entire

question to one judge. The prosecutor

explained why in open court.

One of the reasons we're not making a recommendation as to the is we kind of acknowledge that look, this is someone who doesn't have a record, right? Who's

never kind of done anything like this before. But,

before. But, the concern I've always had is when you look at the facts of the case, they they are serious.

The defense asked for probation. Judge

Krall did not go to the top of the range, and she did not go to the bottom of it.

She landed near the bottom.

Counting from the credit applied that day, [music] Victoria Goodwin becomes eligible for parole consideration in or around March

of 2028. She will be 35 years old.

of 2028. She will be 35 years old.

There is a question underneath this case that the plea agreement never had to answer, and it is the one almost everybody arrives at eventually. What

was supposed to happen next? Grant Amato

is serving three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole for the murders of his mother, his father, and his brother.

He will not be released. He will not be paroled. Florida does not permit

paroled. Florida does not permit conjugal visits.

Whatever Victoria Goodwin believed she was building with him, there was no version of it that ended with the two of them in a room together.

So, the record was searched for something simpler, and what it produces is thinner than people expect. No life

insurance policy on Aaron Goodwin has been made public in this case. No will,

no beneficiary change, no financial instrument that would have paid out on his death has been reported by any outlet or entered into any filing that has surfaced.

The only money the investigation actually traced ran in the other direction. Roughly $60,000 out of the

direction. Roughly $60,000 out of the marriage to the associates of a man in prison.

Money the prosecution said left, and Aaron said was almost everything he had.

What is on the record instead is a relationship. Investigators described

relationship. Investigators described the messages as two people discussing how much they were in love.

Aaron testified that the two of them had gone through what he was told was a spiritual marriage and that inside it, he was the first husband. He said he found out about that from detectives.

That is the whole of it.

A man who could never leave the prison.

A woman who could never join him there.

A marriage that existed entirely in text messages and a husband who was in the way of it.

Whether that was ever a plan in any real sense.

Whether Gorda was a person or a story, whether the money bought a killing or bought a lie, the public record does not say.

After the plea, nobody was ever required to find out.

By late 2025, the Las Vegas investigation had closed with no further charges filed against anyone but Victoria.

Whether that is a failure of the system or simply the limit of what the evidence could prove, the record does not say.

Aaron went back to work. The show was already filming.

The divorce did not end when the criminal case did. On the 1st of August, 2025, 8 weeks into her prison sentence, 5 months after her arrest, 2 months

after she stood in a courtroom and promised a judge that Aaron would never hear from her again.

Victoria Goodwin formally responded to his petition for divorce. She did not agree to it. In her response, she indicated that she believed the marriage could be reconciled.

Aaron's position had not changed since the day he filed.

His complaint had said it in the flattest language the form allows, there is no possibility of reconciliation.

That October, Discovery+ aired the Downey episode, the one with the call.

Zak Bagans narrates the moment. The

footage runs a few seconds and then it stops. Aaron said he would not be

stops. Aaron said he would not be watching it because he did not want to relive that night or what had happened before it. There is something worth

before it. There is something worth sitting within that. He is the one they send into the dark room first. He has

spent 18 years being left alone in places people are afraid of on camera for other people's entertainment. And the worst thing that

entertainment. And the worst thing that ever happened to him also happened on camera and also aired.

And he is the only person involved who has never seen it.

In an Instagram statement declining interviews that same month, he wrote that he couldn't talk about any of it yet, that he probably couldn't get through an interview without crying, and

that he just wanted the divorce to be over so he could move on. This has been the worst year of my life, he wrote.

It would be easy to remember this case for the parts that made it travel.

The prison correspondence, the false name, a man who hunts ghosts for a living being hunted himself.

That isn't really what it's about.

It's about a man who believed for 7 years that he was loved and who found out otherwise across 4 days in March, largely by accident.

He is alive because a guard in a state he had never set foot in opened a cell door looking for a phone. Nobody was

watching out for him. He was simply lucky in a year that otherwise gave him almost nothing to be lucky about. He was

there for the whole thing. He just

didn't know until it was already over what he'd been living inside of.