MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF: Amanda Wienckowski

- Hi, crime junkies, I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. - And I'm Britt. - And this story today begs the question, what would you do if you knew your missing daughter went into a house and never came out? Would you camp out in front of it all day and night? Refuse to leave. That's what Leslie Brough Messerl did. Her instincts told her that her daughter was inside this one particular house. Police told her not to go in. She didn't realize that the man who lived there was dangerous. So she waited for weeks outside. And after a month on the very night she left, her daughter's frozen body turned up just yards from where she had been camped out. Is that a coincidence? I think not. And now, Leslie is on a hunt for justice. This is the story of Amanda Winkowski. (upbeat music) It's early January 2009, and Leslie Brough Messerl is sitting in her yellow Monte Carlo shivering. It is freezing cold in Buffalo, New York. The ground is covered in snow as she keeps her eyes trained on the house across the street. She's been staked out here for the last four weeks, just looking for a glimpse of her 20-year-old daughter, Amanda Winkowski. Now there's a moment when someone peeks out from behind some blinds in one of the upstairs windows. Whoever's there, they know she's here. They know that she's watching, and she feels them watching her too. It's a bit of a standoff, but she doesn't want to leave, because she is sure that her daughter is inside. You see, a month before in December, Leslie began not hearing from Amanda, who she normally talked to like every day. She had tried calling her several times, left her plenty of voice mails, but was not hearing anything back. So back on December 7th, she had driven over to the house where her daughter had been living for the last three weeks or so. It belonged to an older man that her daughter had been living with, this 42-year-old named Adam Patterson. When she arrived, Adam was there, but he told Leslie that Amanda wasn't. He said that he had dropped her off at some house in Buffalo, New York two days before on December 5th, but something isn't adding up to Leslie, because right there in the house on his coffee table, she sees Amanda's purse make-up bag and phone charger. So she's like, "Well, why do you have all of this stuff?" And Adam says that Amanda just took her phone and left the rest of her stuff in his car, because she apparently was just gonna be right back when she went into this house. But he says that two hours went by, and she still hadn't come back to the car, so he got tired of waiting and just left. Did he ever go back for her? - No, he didn't, which is like Leslie's like, "Well, oh, hell no, like that same day," she says, "You know, you put her in this situation, you're gonna help me find her." So Leslie makes Adam get in the car with her, her husband, and her other daughter, Alyssa, and she's like, "Listen, you're gonna show us exactly where this house is that you dropped her off at." Now they drive for over 30 minutes, from the Tuscarora reservation, where Adam lives to Buffalo. And it's an unsettling 30 minutes. Now we couldn't confirm this, but Leslie says that the whole time, Adam is like rocking back and forth, muttering to himself, just saying like, "I'm sticking to my story, drug deal gone bad." Like over and over again. - And I'm gonna tell you one story that I don't believe right now. - Oh, right, and by the way, listen, Amanda had been struggling with substance use disorder for a few years, but Leslie says Amanda was trying to get clean. She'd actually started a suboxone program, and she was making really big improvements. She was taking her sobriety really seriously. So she doesn't know what he's saying about a drug deal, but like, that wouldn't make sense to her. Now when they finally got to this house on Spring Street, Leslie called the Buffalo PD, and they're like, okay, you know, wait there, we're gonna be out. So she got there and parked near the house, and it was looking at the house when officers called her back five minutes later. And Leslie says that police told her they were there, and there was no sign of a white girl anywhere. But like, when would they have looked? 'Cause she's like, I'm looking right at the house. And she's like, listen, I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not leaving until you get here. Like she absolutely refused. So Buffalo PD pulled up like two minutes later. They went up to Leslie and said, listen, do not go in that house. You don't know the guy who lives there. And while she is arguing with police, 22-year-old Antoine Gardner, the guy who does live there, opened the door and stood in the doorway and started yelling at Leslie, calling her a quote, cracker bitch. And he said that there was no white girl there. Leslie says that she yelled back at him, like she just wanted her kid back. And before things got out of hand, Buffalo PD were like, find you know what? We're gonna go inside. Which like, probably makes Leslie feel relieved for all of five seconds because she says, that is how quick they come back out. And they're like, no, we didn't see anything in the house. You can go home now, miss. Now they did take a missing person's report for Amanda that night. And they took Adam in for questioning since he is the last person who's admitting to being with her. And I know police were trying to talk to Antoine too, but like he was sort of dodging them, even though like, he's right there. In the house, I know, whatever. Now Leslie doesn't know what these people are saying to police or if anything is happening. But even if it is, it is all moving too slow for her because she still doesn't know where her daughter is. And even though she feels like Adam is shady AF and his like, drug deal gone bad story clearly sounds like street BS to her, the only thing she does believe is that he did take Amanda to that house on Spring Street. So she did the only thing she could think to do. And that's when she began staking out the house. When she wasn't sleeping in her car across the street, she was at the police barracks trying to get updates on Amanda's case because the state police had started an investigation around the time that the missing person's report was filed. But by January 8th, this is now a little over a month later. There was still no sign of Amanda. But Leslie couldn't keep camping out at the house like the sad reality for loved ones of missing people is that bills don't stop coming just because your daughter is gone. Leslie had recently just gotten a new job and training was the next morning on January 9th. So that morning was her first morning, not waking up in her car. The first day that she didn't spend in her car with her eyes trained on Antoine Gardner's house. And that is the morning that her phone started blowing up. Buffalo PD had found Amanda's body. It was in this snowy alcove of the church that was directly across the street from Antoine's house. Leslie finds out that Amanda was found frozen and naked, head first in a residential garbage bin. She been there the whole time? So that's not really clear? Like sure, that could be what happened. But Leslie thinks that's unlikely. I mean, one, the timing is just incredibly suspects. Like the one day she wasn't watching her daughter's body is discovered, right? But two, what's interesting is that there was a below out for that garbage bin that Amanda was found in from January 5th. This is four days before they find the body. And this garbage can had gone missing from Antoine's neighbor's house around the time Amanda disappeared. So police wanted people to be on the lookout for it. Just to be clear, there was a below for the trashcan, but not for Amanda. Well, so they said that the below for the trashcan was in connection to her disappearance. So it looks like they were, again, like doing something and clearly making connections, but it's unclear like exactly what or how or anyways. As this is all happening, they send Amanda's body off for an autopsy and officers back at the church are processing the scene. The responding officer notes that there are no wheel tracks or footprints leading up to or around the bin. So whoever put the garbage bin there did it before it snowed that morning, probably in the middle of the night when Amanda's mom had gone home. Probably whoever was like peeking out the window was like waiting for her to leave. Right. Looking at the records, police get a search warrant for Antoine's house finally and actually do a larger search. And they collect a bunch of trace fingerprints and some other items like women's clothing and earrings, probably just trying to find any proof that Amanda was actually inside that home at some point. And they also collect a weekly newspaper from Buffalo, specifically an art voice newspaper, which stands out to me because in a police report, it says that Amanda had put an ad in the paper offering adult services. Now, according to police records, in one of Buffalo PD's interviews with Adam, he told police that he and Amanda had this arrangement where she could live with him for free if she had sex with him. That's not technically free, but okay. Yeah, exactly. And he also tells police in the records that the real reason that he brought Amanda to Antoine's house was to meet up with a guy. So I don't know if this was to work or not, but Adam's story to police is that he didn't just wait outside, which is what he had told Leslie. He says the plan was always for him to drop her off and then pick her up later. So he says after he dropped her off, he drove around, grabbed some pizza, and grabbed a lottery ticket, and then waited for Amanda to be done. And he said that she'd called him and said to pick her up at 735, very specific. But when he came back together, she just never came out. And he's like, I did wait for over an hour, but I left around 830. And looking at her phone records, it shows Amanda did call him twice for eight seconds a little after 6 p.m. that day. Now, he never told her family that stuff. And he tells police the reason he didn't is because he was afraid that they would think that he was her pimp or something like that. And when we asked Leslie about this, she said she had no idea Amanda was even engaged in sex work. But all in all, police seemed to believe Adam's story about just dropping her off. Is it the whole truth? Who knows? But her body's been found across the street from Antoine's house. It is his neighbor's trash can that she is found in. He or the house feels involved in some way. So the day Amanda was found, some patrol officers approach who they think is Antoine on the street. And at first, he gives them a fake name, but they get him to the homicide office, and he's like, okay, yeah, like, it's me, I know Amanda, but I only know her as summer. And then he gives like two different dates for the last time she came to his house. First he says it was right before Christmas, and then he changes it and he's like, oh no, it was before December 1st. And he says he had sex with her before, but not that last day that she came over. He tells detectives that summer, aka Amanda, that day came over for drugs that last time and ended up leaving with a friend of his named Mont, and that is the last time he saw her. But I don't get the sense that they believe him, because I don't see anything in the police records about this Mont guy. I only see more about Antoine and Adam. Now in the records, I think it seems like Antoine is a person of interest. But they're also collecting statements in DNA from Adam, because their stories aren't exactly matching up. Do they know each other? I don't know, Adam didn't tell investigators if he knew Antoine or not. But during the month that Amanda was missing, you know, as it was spending a ton of time at the state police barracks, she says that one time she saw a note on one of the lead detectives' desks about a three-way call on the day that Amanda disappeared between Adam, Antoine, and Amanda. Now according to police records, a woman told police that Antoine called her that day from Amanda's phone, but that doesn't necessarily mean they all know each other. Okay. Because according to police records, there is this woman who told police that Antoine called her that day from Amanda's phone at 6.49, so basically almost an hour after she got there. And he asked her to tell someone on the other line that she needed more time and to stop calling. And she, for whatever reason, agreed to do this, so he clicks over to the other line. She said what he asked her to say, and the line went dead. So Antoine has her pretending to be a man that makes me feel like maybe Adam actually doesn't have anything to do with this. And that's like what kind of what I said. But Leslie told us that that doesn't make sense to her. She thinks someone is lying, because Leslie says like, okay, if all of you don't know each other, how does Antoine even know to call Adam and have this woman say she needs more time? Wouldn't his name have been in Amanda's phone? Like, especially if he was calling her a lot of time. She was like, she was in contact with him. She knew him. Yeah, especially if Amanda is texting him, he's sitting outside, right? You can see someone outside the house. And we know from the phone records that she's in contact with him. So I think it'd be pretty easy to piece that together. But what doesn't make sense is that if Amanda and Adam lived together, then he should know that that wasn't Amanda's voice on the other end of the line. And I'm not sure how Leslie knows this next part, but she told us that the woman on the other end, saying that she needed more time, wouldn't have sounded anything like Amanda. And in interviews with police, here's the other weird thing, Adam never even brings up anything about someone calling him from Amanda's phone. He just says that Amanda called him and texted him until she didn't. So it's a little fuzzy and unclear, like if Adam and Antoine really know each other. Or if they were complete strangers, or if they were involved in some other way. But there is something beyond the three way call that kind of connects them all together. So if we fast forward to February 5th, that's when Amanda's autopsy results come in. And the office rules her death accidental, and her cause of death, is acute opiate intoxication. Which, again, like completely shocks Leslie, right? Like she said, it wasn't impossible that her daughter is doing drugs again, but it would be really surprising to her. Well, when she sees Amanda's talks results, she feels vindicated, because there are, yes, small amounts of opiates in her system, and cannabinoids and ethanol. But I'm talking trace amounts, not an amount that would have been fatal. So that's when she is adamant that her daughter was murdered. And when the rest of the forensic analysis comes back from samples taken at her autopsy, she is even more sure, because there are two DNA samples found on Amanda's body, both Adam and Antoine's. Adam's semen is found inside Amanda. Now we know that he told police they had been having sex, but Antoine's DNA, one of his hairs, actually, is found between Amanda's butt cheeks. Hmm, how do you explain that when you allegedly didn't see her before she went missing? Right, now listen, we actually got a hold of Antoine ourselves and asked him about this. And he says that his hair ended up on Amanda because he had gotten a haircut, two hours before she came over. On the fifth. This is the thing, he doesn't specify the date. He just says that he had given her a hug when she got there. But didn't he tell police that she wasn't there that day? So this is the thing about the stories, like they do change. But I'm not even buying that. Like, okay, you give her a hug and you got a haircut. How does her hair, or how does your hair, get under her clothes and in between her butt cheeks? Yeah. Like that doesn't make sense. But for whatever reason, this DNA evidence does not seem to move anything forward. And I don't know if that's because they're thinking of Amanda in the light of a sex worker and so they're like, oh well, you know, she could have had sex or intimate contact with Antoine and Adam around the time she disappeared. The DNA, she like makes sense to me there. And the accidental death ruling sure isn't helping either. So even despite getting these results back, the case just comes to a standstill. But Leslie isn't going to let their ruling impede justice for her daughter. She calls 1-800-AUTOPSI, a number I did not know existed. Okay. Which is a private autopsy company in California that does independent autopsy for families. And almost a year later, in December 2009, they get Amanda's body exhumed. Do a second autopsy. And these results are much different. They rule her cause of death as manual strangulation with blunt force trauma. And they say her manner of death is homicide. Now we got access to the over 100-page report. And the second autopsy found Amanda was strangled so badly that it damaged her larynx, dislocated part of her thyroid, and caused her to bite her tongue so hard it almost severed. She also had defensive wounds on her arms, bruising on her face and injuries consistent with a victim of sexual assault that tried to fight off her attacker. Now Leslie told us that she didn't actually see Amanda's body after she was found. But her son told her that it was the most awful thing. So finally, now Leslie feels like someone is seeing what she's been seeing. And Dr. Comparini, who did the second autopsy, has multiple experts look over her findings and they all back her up. But you can probably guess what happens next. Because this is a frustrating reality for so many families that we've talked about. Nothing. Nothing happens. It seems like Erie County's decision not to change the ruling may have come from doubts about Dr. Comparini's findings. Bye! But no one from that office has ever said this outright. And the DA's office seemingly never moved forward with charges either. Now maybe, it's because it would require them to get the Emmy ruling change, or maybe they didn't feel like this was a strong enough case to get a win. I don't know. I mean, we interviewed a DA who knows the case and worked for Erie County until 2024. And he told us that Buffalo PD were initially treating this as a potential homicide, but once her death was ruled accidental, there wasn't much more they could do. So if Amanda was murdered, I guess my question is why? There could be a number of reasons. Most of which, to me at least, make me think it centered around Antoine. Did it involve drugs? Was it about sex? It could be either. It could be both. It could be something we don't know. The secret third thing, right? Yeah. And secret third thing Wesley has a theory, she says that Amanda was working with Niagara County undercover officers as a confidential informant. Now we weren't able to confirm this ourselves, but Leslie told us that apparently officers would call Amanda up at any time and be like listen, you need to go buy some drugs from specific people so that they could go arrest those people. So she got into it because her boyfriend got in trouble with the police and investigators approached her and were like, listen, if you want to help your boyfriend out, if you want to help him get out of jail, you'll work with us. And she was even getting paid like $150 every time she did this. $150 is not nearly enough to put your life on the line like that. No, that's exactly what Amanda's other sister Danielle felt about it. She was also working as a CI because she had been caught with a hypodermic needle. And Danielle told us that they basically told her to do these buys or she would get into some serious trouble. So Leslie told us she felt like the whole program is centered around getting vulnerable people to do these dangerous things for the police. So in this scenario, she was there to like set Antoine up or I don't know. And honestly, again, this is just like information Leslie gave us, but like, there's something about the drug angle that doesn't make a ton of sense to me, mostly because in my mind, if what Leslie says about Adam mumbling like stick to the story, drug joke on wrong, like if that's true, that makes me think that was made up to cover up something else or whatever really happened. Well, and it makes me feel like he did more than just drop her off. Yes, but if he did actually go into that house with her, then why would they need a three-way call call doesn't make sense because he's there. None of this makes sense. What does make more sense to me is that this is somehow related to sexual violence because it turns out that Antoine has a disturbing history. Antoine Gardner has charges against him dating back years. According to the Eerie County DA, he has pleaded guilty to three counts of rape in the third degree and three counts of criminal sexual act in the third degree. He admitted that in the same month Amanda went missing. December 2008 to January 2009, he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl. He also pleaded guilty to two counts of robbery and was convicted in 2013 of second degree strangulation and third degree assault. And he is currently in prison for those charges. But no matter the past charges, Antoine says that he had nothing to do with Amanda's death. Though the way he goes about saying that does him no favors. In 2011, Antoine actually sent some really nasty Facebook messages to Leslie and I'm just going to have you read them, like I can't summarize this. He wrote, "Listen, you stupid bitch. I wasn't the last one to see it daughter alive. And if you put my name on your FB again, I'm a file a suit for defamation you crackhead. You white people kill me. You're always trying to blame me for this. But was it my DNA or Patterson's DNA that was found in the. You can stop there. Yeah. And the rest is basically a string of insults to her, to police and to her lawyer. I mean, he's clearly read in on the case though if he knows that Adam's DNA was found inside Amanda. And I'm also like, so you agree she was murdered. So you're saying she's murdered? Interesting. And listen, like he says it's not my DNA, it's Adam, that's what Patterson is. And here's what I'll say about Adam. He's not totally off the hook in Leslie's mind. She told us that she thinks both of them have something to do with Amanda's death. And here's the thing that I'll say about like his DNA being there. When you think about it, Adam is really the only person who is claiming that he had this arrangement, this sexual agreement with Amanda. We've got nobody else backing that up. Which in my mind, like that would be a pretty convenient story to tell police under these circumstances, just saying. And by the way, it was a story that he only told the second time he talked to police. In his first interview, he told police that they had had sex, but like he first said that he met Amanda at a bar like two months ago, and she moved in because she just needed a place to stay. And then two days later, he comes back into police and says, no, you know, I actually met her because I was driving around looking for a sex worker. That's how I met her. And that's how we started this whole arrangement where we would be regularly having sex. So like, you know, making it not weird if they found something, right? So I don't know. There's something about like his, his changing stories, like the stuff that I'm hearing that's just not adding up. Like why are we chanting stick to the story in the back of her mom's car? I can see why Leslie thinks that he might at least know more. Now, at the end of Adam's first statement to police, this was on December 9th, back when she was just missing. Adam says, I believe the answer to her whereabouts will come from Spring Street. So is he saying that because he knows because he's guessing or hear me out? What if it was staged by someone who knew she was at that house? We tried so many different ways to reach Adam to ask him about his story to police and his odd behavior around Leslie, but we were never able to reach him and ask him for comment. Like I said, we did get in touch with Antoine. He told us that he did not harm Amanda. He told us that obviously there is a reason he was never charged with a crime. But according to the case file, he may have been telling inmates in prison a different story. According to police records, the first account that they get is super vague and the guy didn't want to talk unless detectives could help him with his own case. So like that could be a lie. I'm not even going to get into that one. But the second guy, it seems interesting. So he came forward in January of 2013 and tells detectives that he was sitting in a holding cell with Antoine while they were waiting for their court appearances. Not exactly sure what they were in for at the time or whatever, but apparently Antoine told him what really happened the day Amanda came over. The inmate says that he and Antoine were talking, can't remember when, but investigators confirmed later that it was early 2012, and the man told Antoine that he knew Amanda and Antoine said Amanda had come over the night of the fifth and he and Amanda did Molly together. And Antoine told him that after taking Molly, he and Amanda had sex and she started "tweaking" but instead of stopping, he called his cousin over for more Molly, I guess they took more and then Antoine says that he and Amanda had sex again. And afterwards, he blacked out and when he woke up, Amanda was on the couch, not moving, so he called his cousin to come out and together, they put Amanda's body in the garbage bin. Now a couple of problems with this. Yeah, she didn't have Molly in her system. Correct. Now, there's something else that bothers Leslie's family about this story. Now, this story has them placing her body in the trash can right away, which I know we said was possible because the trash can went missing so early, but Leslie's lawyer, this guy Steve Cohen, he gave a statement to the Buffalo News in 2011 and he's saying that the way Amanda's body was frozen seemed consistent with someone being put in the trunk of a car. How? He said that it was because of the shape that her body was frozen in, like he said it was a horseshoe. So we had our team go back and actually like look over the second autopsy and it says that the levity shows that basically all of the pooling of blood was in her head neck and shoulders, which proves that she was placed upside down in some kind of container shortly after her death. So I don't know what the lawyer is referencing when he's saying like the trunk of the car thing, so like it's a little bit out in my mind. Okay, so even if you just go off Antoine's story from the holding cell about the Molly situation, he's still admitting to getting rid of a body at the very least, isn't that something you can charge him with, like improper disposal of a body or something along those lines? In the state of New York, when this is like, or when the story's coming out in 2013, getting rid of a body like that is only a misdemeanor at best. Oh, surprised me. Okay. It wasn't until 2015 when Leslie herself helps push to get a bill passed called Amanda Lin's Law that made the unlawful disposal of a body a Class E felony. But- It happens after Amanda because steamed after her- Exactly. Can't be charged with something because it happened prior to this law being passed. Exactly. Great. Awesome. Cool. So here's the scary part. I told you that Antoine is in prison. in for that other crime, that's not going to last long. Antoine is set for a parole hearing in December of 2026 and conditional release in 2027. So unless he gets charged with something else, he is going to be walking the streets again very soon. Antoine Garner is a proven, violent offender. So I want to encourage anyone who is a victim of Antoine's to please come forward. Your story may be the key to keeping him locked away. And in order for anyone to be charged with Amanda's murder, Leslie needs it to actually be called a murder. In 2021, she filed a petition against Eerie County to change the Emmy's ruling. But it turns out that in the state of New York, you only have four months to do that. Which I, I guess I'm like learning so much in this episode. Yeah. And this is happening years later. Like if she would have known that from the get-go, she says that she would have challenged it. So once she figured out that there's nothing she can do to change the ruling, she has been rallying legislators. She helped get a bill introduced by Congressman Bill Conrad to amend Article 78, which would change the statute of limitation on an Emmy's ruling in New York. But the current bill would only extend it to 10 years. This is still a win. Leslie is happy that the bill finally got assigned a number. And it's set to get floated in January 2026 at the New York State Assembly. But Leslie is asking us the crime junkies to call the New York legislator and put pressure on them to consider extending it to 20 years. So we are going to put the contact info for them in the show notes. 20 years is the same amount of years Amanda had before her life was cut short. And she had so many plans for the future. She was about to start school. Leslie told us she wanted to be a part of the drug task force and get dealers off the street. And she hopes that through this law, Amanda can get justice, which is something that Amanda was passionate about. And as she waits for that to happen, Leslie is still trying to do what she can to change the manner of death on Amanda's death certificate to homicide. And she plans to file a potential lawsuit against the state of New York. If you're listening to this episode and you're a victim of sexual assault, you can text Hope to 64673 for Reigns National Sexual Assault Hotline. And if you are loved one, wants to explore treatment for substance use, you can seek help by calling 211 here in the U.S. We'll have more details in the show notes. You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkie.com. And you can follow us on Instagram @crimejunkiepodcast. [Music] Crimejunkie is an audio-check production. I think Chuck would approve.