Erie judge approves $10M settlement
Wrongful death suit brought by estate of woman killed by husband
John Grazioli shot his wife in the head before he went out for a sandwich and a beer, his last meal as a free man.
Then, he attended Mass and confessed to a priest, leading to his arrest and eventual first-degree murder conviction for killing Amanda Grazioli. It landed him a life sentence without parole.
More than three years after the shooting, a judge has approved a $ 10 million settlement in the wrongful death suit against Grazioli,
47, by the woman’s estate. Adam Barrist, the attorney for Amanda Grazioli’s family, said it was one of the largest settlements in Erie County history.
“This ends one of the chapters in this saga,” Mr. Barrist said last week.
The case remains something of a mystery due to Grazioli’s apparent lack of motive — despite spending nearly 40 minutes out to eat after the killing, he claimed at trial the shooting was an accident — and the sudden, shocking loss of a 31year-old woman who appeared to be in a loving marriage.
“She just had so much going for her and so much to live for, and just such a future ahead of her,” said Erin Connelly Marucci, who prosecuted the criminal case. “Her family was so wonderful. She just had such a great family, they were all very close.”
The couple had been married for less than six months, Mr. Barrist said, when Grazioli purchased the gun he would use to kill his wife. He later claimed he bought the firearm for her birthday, which was over a month away.
“That’s just as outlandish as it sounds,” Mr. Barrist said. “Amanda was not a hunting type, she was not somebody who owned a handgun, who wanted a handgun.”
The two lived in an upscale neighborhood that rarely saw crime or violence until March 8, 2018, when Grazioli shot his wife in the back of the head as she lay in bed.
“She was probably asleep through the whole thing and didn’t even know,” said Ms. Connelly Marucci, who now is an Erie County Common Pleas Court judge.
Then he went to a restaurant for a sandwich and beer before attending Mass at St. Jude the Apostle Catholic Church in Millcreek, where his children attended school, according to the Erie Times-News. He later confessed to a priest and was arrested without incident at St. Peter Cathedral in downtown Erie.
“The whole thing is nauseating, the whole thing is so shocking to the conscience,” Mr. Barrist said.
Throughout the trial, attorneys and the judge were unable to get Grazioli to explain why he did it, with the man claiming it had been an accident fueled by substance use and drinking. The jury didn’t buy that claim, and neither did the state Superior Court after he appealed his conviction.
Prosecutors pursed the possibility that Grazioli, who reportedly was a successful financial manager at one point overseeing $1 billion of other people’s assets, had fallen on hard times and didn’t want his wife to know, said Mrs. Connelly Marucci. But those leads didn’t pan out.
They also looked into the possibility that he was having an affair, digging up private correspondences that showed he’d sent lewd messages to other people, but prosecutors were never able to find out whether he acted on those words.
“Every time we’d think we’d potentially had a motive, we’d kind of fall backwards,” Mrs. Connelly Marucci said.
The facts of the case were clear enough, though, to show that Grazioli’s intent was to kill Amanda, Mrs. Connelly Marucci said.
For Mr. Barrist, the challenge now becomes finding where Grazioli’s assets are to begin paying the $10 million settlement.
“What I plan to do now is serve writs of execution and levies upon every bank known to man and find out if he has money there,” he said. “And whatever we come up with goes to the estate, and whatever we get is deducted from the judgment account accordingly.”
The judgment would also allow the estate to collect any future money Grazioli could make from the case, such as getting a book deal to tell his story, Mr. Barrist said.
The attorney said he had “a lot of leads” on where Grazioli keeps his money, but declined to say where he planned to begin looking, citing the possibility that the money could be moved by someone connected to the killer.
“I’ve had a lot phone calls and reporters will say, ‘Oh, this is make- pretend money.’ No, it’s not. It’s not make-believe money.”
More than anything, Mr. Barrist said, he hopes the judgment will give pause to “crazy jerks” who value money more than human life. “This is less about the money than it is about preventing more violence to women,” he said. “These crazies who do harm to their wives, it seems that they don’t care about spending time in jail, but when it comes to the threat of their money going away, that’s when they have issues.”