CHAPTER 29
THE FACTS OF THE CASE
Let’s start with the crime scene. Meredith Kercher had been stabbed multiple times, including three deep wounds in her neck.
When Luca Altieri and Filomena Romanelli and then Raffaele Sollecito and the police first saw her blood-soaked body, eyes open and naked but for a T-shirt pulled up over her breasts, she was on the floor with a pillow beneath her hips and the bloody duvet pulled up over her chest. In the trial, prosecutors Giuliano Mignini and Manuela Comodi would claim this was evidence that a woman had committed the crime and that covering the body was a sign of compassion or pity.
I disagree. For sheer depravity, this murder was absolutely horrific. As soon as I looked at the crime scene photographs, there was no question in my mind that the killer had not an ounce of compassion for Meredith. There was no question in my mind that the killer had no compassion for anyone or anything that could pass for a conscience.
When we see actual evidence of a “soft kill,” such as manual strangulation with a handkerchief or towel, say, followed by a carefully covered or “comfortably” wrapped body, we think of parental or close-relationship murder. This scene had none of those indicators. A blanket thrown haphazardly over a body indicates nothing about a male or female UNSUB. If anything, it shows contempt for the victim, or, if the head is covered up, depersonalization. Or it may simply represent an offender’s discomfort with looking at a mutilated body while he carries out a burglary or whatever else he set out to do.
If the placement of the pillow means anything at all, it could have been put there by an assailant to make sexual assault easier. The pulled-up T-shirt also fits the pattern of a sexually motivated crime. There was a bloody handprint on it, and streaks of blood on the wall, as if the UNSUB had tried to clean his hands.
Two towels were under the body and a third lay on the bed, also soaked with blood. A shape that appeared to be a knife was imprinted in blood on the bed. Several bloody shoeprints on the tile floor led from the bed toward the front door. These were later identified as belonging to a Nike shoe. Finally there was a bloody print from a bare foot on the mat in the bathroom that Meredith and Amanda shared.
Meredith’s handbag was on the bed. It appeared to have been gone through. In addition to her missing mobile phones, cash and credit cards were also gone. Though the scene showed clear signs of either a burglary or a staged burglary, prosecutors used this evidence against Amanda as well, claiming she stole from Meredith to pay her rent. Had they looked seriously into her background, they would have found that she worked part-time for several years to help pay for her studies in Italy. Given this past behavior, I would consider theft completely out of character, and as a motive for such a hideous murder out of the question.
The Postal Police cleared the house and sealed it off. Around three in the afternoon, Public Minister (equivalent to a district attorney, magistrate and senior investigator) Giuliano Mignini arrived with Luca Lalli, the coroner and a professor of pathology at the University of Perugia. Mignini was a portly, balding tyrannical type in his mid-fifties. Lalli noted the three stab wounds on Meredith’s neck and determined that the cause of death was blood loss and suffocation.
Already mistakes were starting to pile up. Lalli did not take Meredith’s temperature, which meant, as in the West Memphis case, there would be no subsequent method of establishing time of death.
At this very point, the public case against Amanda Knox began. As she and Raffaele and the other flatmates waited outside, she was observed whispering to Raffaele, cuddling and kissing him. She later said she had been crying and he had been trying to comfort her, but the image of that lip-lock soon made news around the world. Her roommate had just been brutally murdered and she seemed intent on public displays of affection with her handsome Italian boyfriend. Monica Napoleoni, head of homicide for the police flying squad, the squadra mobile, or quick response team, spoke to the couple and decided they seemed unemotional and indifferent to the murder.
The same phenomenon occurred in the Ramsey case, and I have seen it over and over. Once the media and the public establish a mental image of a suspect or even a potential suspect, that image is almost impossible to shake.
When police and the crime scene team had finished, all of the flatmates and their friends acceded to police requests to go to the questura, the police station, for questioning. After the first round of questioning several hours later, some of Meredith’s English girlfriends happened to meet Amanda in the waiting room. They later said she had given them details about the killing. In trial, prosecutors charged these were facts only someone who had seen the body could know. Or perhaps someone who had been around a police station for hours while everyone was focused on the crime?
Amanda didn’t leave the station until around six the next morning. There were conflicting reports that she “seemed calm, as if nothing had happened,” and “paced nervously.” From my experience, I cannot imagine a twenty-year-old woman who had never been in trouble with the law, and suddenly found herself in a foreign police station being questioned about the murder of her flatmate, not being nervous and frightened, whether she was innocent or guilty. Anyone in such a situation who appears calm, as John Ramsey appeared before JonBenét’s body was found, is merely suppressing outward emotion. I guarantee it.
Later that day, police went with Amanda back to the house. The prosecution would describe her as having sobbed uncontrollably outside. Eventually her tears, or lack of them, became a major point of contention in the case. But there are enough eyewitnesses at various times to suggest that she cried quite a bit in the hours and days after the murder.
Following the visit to the house, they took her back to the station for more questioning. Despite the intensive probing over several days, she was officially considered a witness at this point and was not asked if she wanted an attorney.
Back in London, the Kercher family’s agony was nearly beyond description. Meredith’s mother, Arline, was chronically ill, and Meredith was in the habit of calling her daily. So when she and John didn’t hear from her and couldn’t reach her on her mobile phone, they were instantly worried. John, a journalist, had heard the rumors of an English student murdered in Italy; but it was not until about five-thirty in the afternoon, the day after the murder, that one of his press contacts was able to confirm for him that it was his beloved daughter.
He went back home to Coulsdon to be with the other children, Stephanie, John Jr. and Lyle. Arline was in the hospital, but she had already spoken to someone in the British Foreign Office. As soon as she got out of the hospital, and she and John could make arrangements, they flew off with Stephanie to Perugia. Around the same time in Seattle, Amanda’s mother, Edda Mellas, made plans to journey to Perugia, soon to be joined by her former husband, Curt Knox.
All of the flatmates were again questioned at the police station on November 4, then brought back with Giuliano Mignini to the house to see if any kitchen knives were missing. None seemed to be; but as they were examining the knives, Amanda again broke down uncontrollably.
On the evening of November 5, police asked both Amanda and Raffaele to come to the station to discuss apparent inconsistencies in their accounts. And here occurred another incident that slammed the public relations lid on Amanda. While Raffaele was being questioned, Amanda sat in a waiting room. As the free-spirited, athletic Pacific Northwest girl she was, Amanda was into yoga. When she felt stiff or stressed, she would often resort to her routine of yoga stretches and poses.
Late in the evening, a male police officer observed her stretching, admired her flexibility and asked if she could do a split. Whether out of fear, openness or pride in her body, she complied, much to the officer’s delight. But out of this incident developed the widely reported story that she was doing cartwheels in the police station as she awaited questioning on Meredith’s murder.
Napoleoni and other homicide detectives questioned Raffaele for more than six hours, until after 3:00 A.M. During that time, according to the police, he began wavering on his story that Amanda had slept over with him and that they’d been together the entire night of the murder. Maybe she had gone out for a while—around 9:00 P.M. or so—and hadn’t come back until 1:30 A.M.; he wasn’t sure.
What seems to have happened is that in his fear and fatigue, Raffaele eventually confused and transposed the nights of October 31 and November 1. On Halloween night, Amanda did go out around nine o’clock, dressed as a sexy cat with a nose and whiskers that Raffaele had painted on her face. Halloween celebrations were a much bigger deal to the foreign students than to the Italians, so Raffaele stayed home that night and waited for her. She returned around 1:00 A.M., just as he told police occurred the next night.
This turned out to be the real beginning of the case against the two, and the parallels to Jessie Misskelley Jr. and so many others are almost uncanny. Amanda and Raffaele became suspects despite the fact that bugged rooms in the questura and tapped telephones that picked up numerous private conversations between them revealed not a hint of any secrets or conspiracy.
When they got around to interviewing Amanda, it was well after midnight. They brought her into an interrogation room and told her that Raffaele had said that Amanda had left his flat about nine on the critical evening to go to Le Chic and hadn’t come back until after 1:00 A.M. They had checked the records of Amanda’s mobile phone. The last exchange was a text from Patrick Lumumba saying she didn’t have to come to work that night because business was slow and a texted reply from her: Ci vediamo piu tardi, buona serata, which translates as “See you later. Have a good evening.” After that point, both she and Raffaele had turned off their cell phones for the night, uncharacteristic for both. When asked about it, Amanda said she was afraid Patrick would change his mind.
Now things started getting rough for her. Confronting her with Raffaele’s story, the investigators suggested that “See you later” was not a routine, banal sign-off but an actual arrangement to meet later that night.
Who was she protecting? they wanted to know. Who was it? According to Amanda, when she didn’t have an answer, they kept pressing her. A policewoman called her “stupid” and a “liar” and slapped her on the back of her head. They repeated the blow every time she didn’t give them an answer. They gave her nothing to eat or drink and didn’t allow her to go to the bathroom. It was as if they were going to keep punishing her until she remembered.
When she asked for a lawyer, they told her it would go worse for her if a lawyer was present.
According to Rita Ficarra and Lorena Zugarini, two members of the squadra mobile, no one hit Amanda or insulted her. She was given food, water and hot drinks and allowed to go to the bathroom whenever she wanted. She was asked if she had a lawyer or wanted one and she said no.
The interrogation dragged on. Amanda remained in detention for many hours. She was scared, exhausted and totally strung out. They couldn’t get her to admit anything about being with Patrick Lumumba that night, so one of the police officers asked her to relax and explained that sometimes severe emotional trauma causes a mental block. Since she couldn’t remember anything, she should try to imagine what had happened in the house and what her and Patrick’s parts had been. That exercise often releases the emotional barrier.
As outrageous as this might sound, the “let’s pretend” ploy is not an uncommon interrogation technique. I have used it myself, sometimes with great success, in questioning suspects.
In a particularly heinous 1985 abduction, assault and murder of a high-school girl named Sharon “Shari” Faye Smith in Columbia, South Carolina, I interviewed a suspect who had been traced by a combination of profiling, forensics and first-rate police work.
His name was Larry Gene Bell, and we all knew he was guilty of the crime. We also knew his lawyer would never let him on the stand to testify; so if we were going to get a confession, it had to be soon. I told him about our profiling program and how we knew that these crimes were often committed by men with two warring instincts within their psyches. I told him I understood how this might be one of those situations and to try to imagine how the crime might have taken place.
At the end of his narrative, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, “All I know is that the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done this, but the bad Larry Gene Bell could have.”
That was as close as we ever got to a confession, but it was enough. Larry Gene Bell was executed by electrocution on October 4, 1996, for the murder of Shari Faye Smith. I was glad to see him go.
This investigative technique is like anything else in law enforcement. There are good practitioners and sloppy ones. You have to figure out whether you are “unlocking” the suspect’s mind—giving him a face-saving scenario and a means to confess—or if you’re leading him into a world of fantasy.
When you’re dealing with a subject who is exhausted and at the end of her emotional rope, so empty and disoriented that she literally can’t think straight, then you’ve misused the practice. Like the detectives who questioned Jessie Misskelley Jr., there was no question here of getting to the truth by asking the subject to imagine, or to “dream” as in the David Vasquez interrogation in Virginia.
As Steve Moore commented, “If any FBI agents who reported to me had conducted this interview, I would have had them prosecuted.”
Altogether, Amanda was interrogated over a forty-hour period (an average workweek) by twelve detectives. This is known as “tag teaming.” The interrogators remain fresh and at the top of their game while the suspect grows increasingly exhausted and isolated. All he (Jessie) or she (Amanda) wants is for the interrogation to end.
In 1956, CIA director Allen Dulles sent a memo to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover outlining brainwashing techniques used successfully by Communist operatives in North Korea. The document has since been declassified. It lists and explains techniques such as introduction of fatigue, inducing a feeling of helplessness in attempting to deal with the impersonal machinery of control, and developing a feeling of dependence upon the interrogator. Similar techniques have been employed to interrogate terrorist suspects at Guantá-namo Bay.
They didn’t want Amanda alert and lucid to give an accurate account. They wanted to break her. And they did everything they could that wouldn’t leave physical marks on her body.
Under this haze of fatigue and fright, Amanda spun a tale of meeting Patrick at the Piazza Grimana basketball court, across the street from her house, around eight-thirty and going back with him to her house. Though she said it was dreamlike and she couldn’t tell if it had actually happened, she “recalled” Patrick having sex with Meredith, but she didn’t remember whether he had had to force her. But she vaguely remembered him killing her with a knife afterward, which implied that she was in the room at the time.
There may have been another reason for the full-court press on Amanda that night. The police may have perceived that time was running out for them. Since they were tapping Amanda and Raffaele’s phones, they knew that Edda Mellas was on her way to Perugia to stand by her daughter. She would never let Amanda continue to speak without an attorney present, no matter what the investigators said.
Giuliano Mignini came in at 5:45 A.M. to take her official statement. Everything she had said previously was as a witness, so it couldn’t be used against her. Between the original “confession” and the official statement, several key details changed, such as the time and the added detail that she had heard Meredith scream. Everyone agrees that after she signed the statement, she was given food.
At noon, the police formally arrested Amanda at the police station. They had their killer.
Pathologist Luca Lalli, accompanied by a female officer, conducted a physical exam on Amanda Knox and took DNA swabs and saliva, urine and head and pubic hair samples.
When Amanda recovered her wits enough to realize, like Jessie Misskelley Jr., what had just happened to her, she was shocked. She immediately felt as though the police had led her down the primrose path to a murder charge. Up until now, she had been feeling vulnerable because of how close she thought she had come to being another victim of the killer.
Clearly, for the police to question Amanda and Raffaele intensively over the course of several days, for them to hammer on Raffaele until he changed his story to say that Amanda left him for several hours the night of the murder, for them to interpret a simple text message with its most unusual and outlandish meaning, for them systematically to stress Amanda to the point of stripping her of all logic and emotional resources and essentially get her to make up a story they liked, someone already had to have had a theory of the case that he or she wanted all the facts to fit into. Aside from all the other pressures she was under, Amanda had a poor command of Italian, and the translator was essentially helping the police, not making it easier for her to communicate.
A compulsive diarist, Amanda wrote in her green notebook journal that day that she already doubted the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. She noted that she had been hit on the back of her head when she didn’t give interrogators the responses they wanted and was threatened with a long jail sentence if she didn’t cooperate.
She was clearly strung out and confused. A guilty person would either acknowledge to herself that they had caught her or, if she thought the journal might be made public, steadfastly deny the charges to vindicate herself. Amanda does neither. She is very doubtful of what she has said and even cuts the police a break in saying she understands their behavior.
If Amanda had taken part in murder, she certainly would not have gone about her business and come back to the house. She had the means and the time to get out of Italy before authorities caught up with her. She did not exercise this option because it never occurred to her she might need it.
At a news conference on November 6, Perugia chief of police Arturo De Felice announced the arrests of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Patrick Lumumba for the murder of Meredith Kercher. The case, he assured reporters, was “substantially closed.” An outraged Lumumba, insisting he had no idea what this was all about, had been arrested at home and taken from his family earlier in the day.
That same day, executing a search warrant, the squadra mobile, or flying squad, officer Armando Finzi searched Raffaele’s flat and took away, among other items, a kitchen knife he found in a drawer among other knives. How did he know the murder weapon came from Raffaele’s kitchen rather than from the crime location itself? And how did he know that particular blade, rather than any others in the drawer, was the murder weapon? Investigator’s instinct, he proudly proclaimed.
Later, the lab would report having found a tiny amount of Amanda’s DNA on the handle—no leap of logic since she had prepared food in Raffaele’s kitchen—but also an equally tiny speck of Meredith’s DNA near the tip. Since she had not been in Raffaele’s flat, this looked as if it might be real evidence.
But there were a couple of problems. To start, it was never definitive that Meredith’s blood was ever on the knife blade, as was acknowledged in the final appeals report, and the testing may have been manipulated or amplified to indicate her DNA in ways that were never apparent to other independent testers. Moreover, the blade, which effectively had been selected by the investigators at random, did not match the blood outline on the bed and was too large to have made two cuts in Meredith’s neck. Mignini didn’t let this stop him, though. All it meant was there must have been two knives.
The chain of custody would have been laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. Finzi admitted he had given the knife to another officer, Stefano Gubbiotti, who had been at the murder scene that day, meaning an easy case could be made for cross-contamination. He put the knife in a box and stored it before it was sent to the lab in Rome, so there is no way of telling what happened to it or who touched it in the meantime.
Later, the results of the DNA assay itself would be challenged by numerous experts as being too small a sample to render a reliable match.
On November 8, the three defendants were arraigned before Judge Claudia Matteini. Under Italian law, they easily could have been released pending trial, but the judge ordered all three held for a year, concerned particularly that Amanda and Patrick would flee.
If you read Amanda’s “My Prison Diary,” which was given to me by investigators helping with her case, you see no evidence of guilt or culpability. It is more observational than anything else. Clearly, it was written for herself, no one else. In it, she expresses confusion about the whole situation rather than anger or even sadness. She knows she has to wait out the workings of the system, but she fully expects to be out and going home soon.
Even the diary was used against her in a selective leaking campaign. As Candace Dempsey, a Seattle-based Italian-American journalist, noted in her comprehensive and insightful book Murder in Italy, the language problem became a further opportunity for the prosecution and media. This is a section that was translated into Italian, leaked to the press, and then translated back into English:
That night I smoked a lot of marijuana and I fell asleep at my boyfriend’s house. I don’t remember anything. But I think it’s possible that Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her and then killed her. And then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he put my fingerprints on the knife. But I don’t understand why Raffaele would do that.
This all sounds pretty damning and definitely locks Raffaele into the murder scene—particularly, if you accept, as I do, that the diary was not intended for anyone else’s eyes. But like some diabolical version of the children’s party game telephone, this is how the passage actually read in context in the original English:
Raffaele and I have used this knife to cook, and it’s impossible that Meredith’s DNA is on the knife because she’s never been to Raffaele’s apartment before. So unless Raffaele decided to get up after I fell asleep, grabbed said knife, went over to my house, used it to kill Meredith, came home, cleaned the blood off, rubbed my fingerprints all over it, put it away, then tucked himself back into bed, and then pretended really well the next couple of days, well, I just highly doubt all of that.
Giuliano Mignini now had a complete theory of the case, which was outlined in a judge’s report issued by lead judge Claudia Matteini on November 9. The logic of arriving at his conclusion, if I follow it correctly, is decidedly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The inconsistencies between Amanda and Raffaele’s stories had to do with timing. The first led them to speculate that the call to the Carabinieri had been placed a few minutes after the Postal Police arrived, rather than before, which would imply that the two young lovers had never called the police at all on their own initiative, only to cover themselves when an investigation was already under way.
But here’s where it gets interesting: If Raffaele suddenly changed his story and said there was a gap of time when Amanda wasn’t with him—when she said she was going to Le Chic to meet Patrick—then she was lying and she must have gone back to the house. But then if she said he was with her all night, then he must have been with her in the house when she and Patrick killed Meredith, which meant that he was involved, too. As goofy as this sounds, it is the same type of approach WMPD followed; that is, take the “best” part of each account or piece of evidence to come up with a theory that meets the police’s needs.
And what was that theory here? Actually, there were two. One was that Meredith and Amanda’s friendship had broken up over a number of issues, including Amanda owing Meredith rent money and refusing to do her part in keeping the house clean. In other words, assuming either or both of these charges were accurate—which I do not believe—so as not to have to pay her back and/or resentment over being called out for being something of a slob, Amanda solicited the help of two male friends and plunged a knife three times into Meredith’s neck.
This falling-out must have happened shortly before the murder, because up until then, the two had been close friends, hanging out at bookstores, restaurants and clubs together and going together to Perugia’s celebrated EuroChocolate Festival in late October, only days before the murder.
The investigators seemed to be projecting their own distaste for Amanda’s perceived habits into a murder scenario. In the judge’s report, they took her to task when she found traces of blood, which she did not worry about cleaning, and noticed that in the other bathroom the toilet water was full of feces that she was astonished to find but did not try to clean.
So Amanda helped indict herself by not touching a potential crime scene.
But that motive was only a secondary theory. Mignini’s main theory of the case started out with Patrick having a crush on Meredith, who allegedly had turned him down, and with Raffaele, as shown from writing on his online blog, seeking “extreme sensations,” which he apparently felt Amanda was capable of fulfilling. The murder, then, was either part of a drug-fueled satanic ritual, a sex game that got out of hand, or else Amanda decided she wanted to have an orgy. When Meredith wouldn’t play along, Amanda and the others had to kill her.
Sounds convincing, no?
Giuliano Mignini, locally born and bred and a student of history, must have known he was acting on precedent. Perugia had been the site of a series of witch trials in the fifteenth century, and the public minister understood the bewitching power of certain women.
Upon reflection, the investigators decided it was more likely that one of the men had plunged in the knife while Amanda held Meredith down. As far as I can tell, there was no evidence, forensic or otherwise, to support this. Mignini figured the crime, whatever it was—orgy, murder or satanic ritual—and whatever the exact motive, had been planned ahead of time. Since there was a strong satanic component, it was supposed to take place on Halloween. But since that didn’t work out, the Day of the Dead would be just as auspicious.
This line of reasoning reminds me of “Dr.” Dale Griffis’s wacky logic in WM3. There were a bunch of cultic holidays on the calendar; and if you acted on either the day before or the day after, it had the same effect. When you think that people’s lives and freedom are being determined by listening to this kind of nonsense, the effect does become scary indeed.
Curiously, though he and other investigators considered Amanda and Raffaele prime suspects, they never even seemed to consider Filomena Romanelli, who had pretty much the same alibi as Amanda, or Giacomo Silenzi downstairs, who had already been identified as Meredith’s sometimes boyfriend. This pattern of arbitrariness would characterize the entire investigation.
But the police knew they had the right girl. As Edgardo Giobbi, head of Central Operation Service in Rome, put it, “We were able to establish guilt by closely observing the suspect’s psychological and behavioral reactions during interrogations. We don’t need to rely on other kinds of investigation as this method has enabled us to get to the guilty parties in a very quick time.” I guess this is their idea of profiling.
Here is an exercise I’ve tried a number of times with people who either assumed or insisted to me that Amanda Knox was guilty:
What would you say if your teenaged daughter, studying abroad, called you one day to say that she had suddenly taken it upon herself to stage a satanic-themed orgy, and when her roommate refused to go along, she stabbed her to death?
If you have, or are close to, a teenaged girl, your response would be, “Absurd!”
If I then asked you why it was absurd, your response would be, “Because she would never do anything like that!”
When I asked you how you knew that about her, you would reply, “Because she’s never done anything like that.”
You would undoubtedly be right, and you would have just participated in some basic profiling. And the same exercise would be valid for a son like Raffaele.
Past behavior predicts future behavior. It is one of the elemental tenets of what we do. Just as we could tell a lot about what John and Patsy Ramsey were capable of by evaluating their past behavior and treatment of their children, we can tell a lot about what Amanda and Raffaele are capable of by looking into how they’ve acted in the past. Nothing in Amanda’s neo–flower child background or behavior suggested that out of nowhere, she would suddenly become homicidally violent, especially to someone she lived with and was close to.
Don’t people without a past history of violence ever commit murder? Yes, they do. But not without a motive.
So what supposedly gave Amanda the idea to kill her friend brutally that night? Giuliano Mignini had an answer for that, too. Raffaele was a fan of Japanese manga comic books, particularly those featuring violent themes and sexual domination of women. They found one in his possession they thought fit the bill, Blood: The Last Vampire . They also found a short story online that Amanda had written the year before that involved a rape.
If Mark and I were prosecuted for what we’ve written about, we’d be in jail for the rest of our lives.
Under questioning, Amanda and Raffaele admitted smoking hashish that night, and it was not the first time for either one of them. While certain substances—alcohol being prime among them—do lower inhibitions, they do not make you a different person or prone to committing violent acts that you wouldn’t do while sober or straight.
True, a person who commits vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence would likely not have done so if he had not been drinking. But that is a question of diminished capability, not altered intent. This individual simply couldn’t drive as well. The crime had nothing to do with transforming his character or choices.
That’s one aspect of profiling. Now let’s look at another as it applies here. What elements of the crime, the forensic evidence, the statements of the witnesses or anything else led Giuliano Mignini to conclude this murder was satanic or orgiastic in nature, or that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito had anything to do with it? Where are the clues? Where are the behavioral indicators? I’ve studied this case quite closely and I just don’t see any.
Aside from the fact, as we’ve noted, that satanically motivated murders by sane people are essentially nonexistent, the kind of group cause homicide Mignini had conceived was almost as unlikely. Gangbang-style rapes are not uncommon, though they seldom involve another woman. This had all the hallmarks of a break-in/ robbery/sexual assault/murder scenario, which is also unfortunately not uncommon. But sadistic or power-excitation rapists don’t welcome watchers; it spoils the sense of control, and it is just too easy to be ratted out afterward. Unless DNA or other strong forensic evidence turned up to the contrary, there was nothing about this scene to indicate more than one assailant.
By this point, both the Italian and British media had picked up the story. The once-venerable London Times ran the headline: MEREDITH KILLED AFTER REFUSING ORGY, and that was one of the tamer ones.
The beautiful, mercurial Amanda was a defendant almost too good to be true. This was a classic archetypal morality play: Virtue against evil; the good girl against the bad girl. What could have possessed this sultry temptress to kill her equally lovely friend, enlisting the help of her sexy Italian boyfriend and black African boss, even though Patrick had a young, beautiful wife at home? Oh, the powers of seduction this American must have!
Reporters had already picked up on her Foxy Knoxy moniker, presumably through her Facebook page or similar source. What they didn’t mention was that Amanda had picked up the nickname years before as a preteen for her elusive moves on the soccer field. But it fit in so well with the seduction narrative and balanced so perfectly with the well-scrubbed, all-American “girl next door” image (Which is she?!) that it seemed like another gift from the gods of media. As with Ramsey, the tale they wove was simply a better story than the one that made sense. And as with Ramsey, the mainstream media shamefully took to parroting the sensationalistic tabloids, giving their lurid accounts validity.
The clue to the real Amanda actually lay in her voluminous diaries. As Nina Burleigh stated in her book The Fatal Gift of Beauty: For most of her life, Amanda explained herself to herself in her scribbled pages. She didn’t spend much time looking for answers in front of the mirror. By that we mean her introspection was based on her mind and what she was pondering, rather than trading on her looks or appearance.
As far as the press and local observers were concerned, though, she couldn’t do anything right. A couple of days after the murder and shortly before she and Raffaele were arrested on November 6, she was observed in a local clothing store called Bubble sorting through a table display of panties with him. Raffaele was reported to have said to her, “We go home and have hot sex.” (“Hot” in Italian had the connotation of wild, rough or kinky.) Let us stress reported because the salesman who sold the anecdote to a British tabloid did not speak English, so in reality had no idea what they actually said to each other.
Whatever their intentions for the afternoon, the fact was, she had not been allowed back into the house and had run out of clean underwear. She paid for the purchase herself; and instead of jumping into bed, they ate lunch and then met with Amanda’s two Italian flatmates. But prosecutors were so taken with this lingerie outing that they had the Bubble manager testify at the trial.
They also made a great to-do and feigned prudish shock over the vibrator Amanda supposedly kept in plain view in the bathroom she shared with Meredith. Obviously, this girl was sexually insatiable. What they did not say was that it was two inches long and in the shape of a pink bunny. It had been given to her as a going-away joke by her best friend, Brett Lither, and was kept, unused, in a container with the rest of her toiletries.
Throughout the ordeal, Patrick Lumumba maintained his alibi that he had been at Le Chic the entire evening; and because it wasn’t busy, he had been talking to a visiting Swiss professor there for several hours. On November 11, a teacher from Zurich confirmed the story. It looked as if the police case was falling apart.
But then they caught a break. Actually, it was the first real break of the case.
On November 16, forensic police in Rome scored a match on fingerprints lifted in Meredith’s bedroom. They belonged to Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old Ivory Coast native who had been living in Perugia since he was five. His father, Roger, a construction worker, abruptly decided to move back to the Ivory Coast when Rudy was sixteen. But Rudy got lucky. A wealthy local businessman named Paolo Caporali, who had met him playing basketball on a court the family had built, took him in and informally adopted him. Paolo had tried to give him every advantage and a stake in life, finding him jobs, introducing him to the right people, and encouraging him to study and better himself. When Rudy dropped out of hotel management school, Paolo found him another job. When he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep it, Paolo finally threw up his hands. All Rudy wanted to do was hang out at bars, play basketball and video games, and chase girls.
What cracked the case was that all immigrants in Italy were fingerprinted, so Rudy’s prints were available.
Rudy, on the other hand, was not. He was a known habitué of Perugia’s bars, disco and club scene; so when friends stopped seeing him, they wondered. He lived in a room near Via della Pergola and had met the women who lived in the house through the men downstairs, with whom he was friendly and with whom he dealt in illicit substances. But he had left or, probably more accurately, fled the city soon after the murder. On November 20, he was arrested for riding without a ticket on a train near Mainz, Germany. Once German police figured out who he was, and what he was wanted for, they extradited him back to Italy.
Authorities took DNA samples from the toothbrush in his room, which they were able to match up with samples in Meredith’s body and on toilet paper in the larger bathroom.
That made it extremely awkward for Rudy to deny he’d been at the crime scene. His story was that he was in the house on the fateful night. He had run into Meredith at a Halloween party the night before; they’d flirted and arranged to meet the next night. He came to the house as planned and they began engaging in consensual sex play. But before the activity reached climax, Rudy suddenly felt the urgent call of nature as a result of kabobs he had eaten earlier in the evening. While he was sitting on the toilet in the larger bathroom and listening to his iPod, a stranger must have broken into the house and attacked Meredith. When he heard the commotion, he got up and rushed to help her. This accounted for the unflushed toilet.
He grappled with a white male stranger, but since he hadn’t had time to pull his trousers all the way up, he stumbled and the intruder rushed off. When he saw Meredith covered with blood, he tried to help and comfort her, which explained the bloody towels and why his DNA was all over the scene, as well as a shoeprint matching his Nikes. He panicked when he heard a sound downstairs and ran out. He realized that if authorities found him there, they might think he had attacked Meredith. He blamed himself for not having the presence of mind to call an ambulance, but he was in total shock.
Apparently the shock had worn off sufficiently by 2:00 A.M., when he was seen by several witnesses dancing in a local nightclub.
Nowhere in his account did he mention Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito.
One of the most common defenses in rape cases is that it was not forced, that the victim was actually a partner and only changed her story later. If this victim is dead, however, this complicates the defense. What are you going to say—that after consensual sex, he killed her? So you have to add a third individual to actually perform the murder. For Rudy Guede’s story to carry any weight, he would have had to call for help as soon as he saw Meredith’s condition.
Given the matchup of fingerprints and DNA samples and the absence of any evidence to support a ritualized or group cause homicide, had I been advising the police I would have said, “Looks like you’ve got your killer. He had the means, motive and opportunity. How can I help you with his prosecution?”
Of course, that’s not the way it actually went down. The day before Rudy’s arrest, Giuliano Mignini bowed to the inevitable and signed an order for Patrick Lumumba’s release. Amanda was thrilled because he was now cleared and she thought it would mean that she and Raffaele would soon be cleared as well. Not only did this not happen, but it signaled the end of her friendship with Patrick. Eventually he filed a defamation suit against her for naming him as a killer.
Mignini didn’t let Patrick’s release damage his theory of the case. He merely plugged in Rudy to fill Patrick’s place. He even played basketball on the same court where Amanda was supposed to have met up with Patrick. The equation still worked: Amanda Knox plus Raffaele Sollecito plus one black African.
But looked at another way—the correct way, in my professional judgment—the like-for-like swap of Rudy for Patrick is one of the most compelling pieces of behavioral evidence for Amanda’s innocence.
If the police were right and Rudy was part of a murderous trio, why wouldn’t Amanda have named him to begin with? She had an important and friendly relationship with Patrick, who was also helping her support herself. She had no relationship with Rudy and barely knew who he was. Why would she have defamed Patrick to protect Rudy? Another way of posing the question is: If her confession was true and it finally came out when it did because she was just so worn-out that she no longer had the energy or wits to lie, why did she mention Patrick rather than Rudy?
The answer is: Because the police had already identified Patrick from the text exchange, so he was in her mind and she knew they were interested in him. In her fear and exhaustion, trying to do anything to get the police off her back, he was the only person she could come up with in any context. She didn’t know Rudy well enough to even think about using his name.
Any other scenario makes absolutely no sense, and Giuliano Mignini, Judge Claudia Matteini and the Perugia Police Department should have known that.
It got worse. Late in the evening of November 22, Amanda was taken to see a prison doctor she hadn’t met before, who told her he had the results of tests that had been taken in the police station and it looked like she was HIV positive. He told her it could be a mistake and they would conduct another test to be sure, but Amanda was terrified. She wrote in her journal that she was afraid of dying and missing out on marriage, children and her whole life.
They made her list everyone with whom she’d ever had sex and include the method of birth control, if any. Given the language gulf and her own relative inexperience, she wasn’t even sure what they meant by having sex, so she listed seven individuals with whom she’d had some degree of intimacy. When this information was inevitably leaked to the Italian press, they stated she had had seven lovers in the two months she’d been in Italy.
The next week, they told her the test had not been positive and she was healthy.
Even considering the rampant incompetence of the Italian forensic personnel in this case, it is nearly impossible to believe that this was a simple mistake. It was an obvious trick to get her to admit private and intimate information about herself that could be used to further the image of her as a sexually manipulative vixen. The sham medical report had nothing to do with Amanda’s health. It was a cold-blooded ploy to prejudice opinion against her.
It took weeks for Italian authorities to release Meredith Kercher’s body, and then more time for Arline and John to bring her back home to England. They buried her on December 14, 2007, after a funeral service at her parish church, St. John the Baptist, in Croydon. More than four hundred mourners attended.