CHAPTER 32
APPEAL
Less than a month after the verdict, Rudy Guede’s sentence was cut from thirty to twenty-four years on appeal, then to sixteen and then fourteen. It was explained that he was the only one of the three defendants to offer an apology to the Kercher family. It wasn’t, however, for killing their daughter, which he never admitted. It was for failing to rescue her.
Or was the reduction of sentence a proactive technique—an incentive to keep him from saying anything damaging to the prosecution’s case against Amanda and Raffaele? This is a law enforcement establishment that handed out numerous commendation awards for excellence in the Kercher murder investigation; another proactive technique.
 
Of all the amazing things about this case, the most amazing of all is that, like the West Memphis Three, it got to trial at all. The authorities had the real killer as soon as they apprehended Rudy Guede and they should have known it. It was not a difficult case to analyze or figure out. On top of everything else, his DNA was all over the crime scene.
How, in the name of all that is rational, could Amanda and Raffaele have participated in this satanic orgy of sex and murder Mignini so imaginatively described and yet not leave any of their own DNA on the scene?
Mignini said they cleaned it up, and used the recently purchased container of bleach at Raffaele’s apartment as proof.
So tell me, Mr. Public Minister Mignini, how do two unsophisticated kids who’ve never gotten into serious trouble in their lives suddenly figure out how to erase every bit of their own invisible DNA from the crime scene, yet manage to leave gobs of Rudy’s? If you would answer this question, Mr. Public Minister, I would be mightily impressed, because I’ve worked with some of the best crime scene investigators in the world and none of them know how to do it.
Had you gotten to Rudy first, maybe it would have been different. As scary and threatening as Amanda was to you and all you believed in, you still might have left her and her boyfriend out of it if you could have. You had your real killer. His story made no sense at all and was disprovable at practically every turn. But by the time Rudy turned up, it was too late; you’d already proclaimed that an American girl, an Italian boy and a black African had committed the murder. To back down at that point would have been embarrassing and would have destroyed your precious theory of the case.
What you did so successfully during the trial was get the jury to do the same thing you made Amanda do during her long night of interrogation: imagine what might have happened at Via della Pergola 7 that horrible night.
You were willing to ruin two lives and mislead a grieving family for the sake of your own honor and ego. But let’s be honest. It wasn’t just you. There is plenty of responsibility and blame to go around.
On January 22, 2010, Mignini was convicted of abuse of office in relation to his Monster of Florence investigation. He was sentenced to sixteen months in prison, all of it suspended.
By this point, negative reactions to the verdict were popping up all over the world. The case was giving Italian justice a black eye. In a major public relations pushback in July, forty-three officers involved in the investigation of the Kercher murder were given meritorious service awards.
 
As the appeal drew near, Steve Moore decided to find out what he could about Amanda on a personal level to see if there was any validity to the wild and wanton portrait Mignini had painted.
On September 12, he went to the Knox family residence and conducted an interview with Amanda’s sister Deanna, then twenty-one, and Amanda’s best friend, Brett Lither, then twenty-three. He was not expecting them to be objective or unbiased, but he wanted to get insight into her background. Steve is a good and experienced investigator, so he knows how to ask the right questions and how to interpret the responses. He shared the results with me with the family’s knowledge, but he purposely did not ask for their permission or consent.
From the time she was small, according to Deanna and Brett, Amanda was known to “stick up for forgotten people.” Brett gave examples of how Amanda would be nice and supportive to her even when she felt she was being unpleasant or feeling depressed. So many friends seemed completely devoted to her.
Was she a pure, snow-white virgin? Hardly. Was she a high-spirited girl looking for romantic adventure in Italy? Certainly. But as to the suggestion that Amanda was a manipulative, sexually charged vixen, both women just laughed. They said she was “dopey” and “inexperienced,” and so naive about boys that she didn’t even get it when one of them was hitting on her. When they saw the list of her seven sexual partners, they said of the five they knew, all were “geeky young white virginal boys” and questioned whether she’d gone “all the way” with each of them. The way they knew her, they confirmed that if she was told to list her previous partners, she was so cautious and obedient that she would include anyone with whom she’d had any sort of intimate contact. Her sex life, they said, was “plain vanilla.”
At a barbecue at the Knoxes’ house, Steve conducted another discussion with eight of Amanda’s other friends, both boys and girls. The portrait that emerged was similar.
The important point here is not the specifics of what Deanna or any of Amanda’s friends revealed, but the general image. None of these kids was sophisticated enough to fool or mislead Steve, who had interviewed al Qaeda terrorists. He confirmed my impression that the Amanda Knox created by Giuliano Mignini was a myth.
Two weeks after these conversations, on September 28, 2010, Pepperdine University fired Steve after he refused repeated directives to drop the case and stop speaking out in support of Amanda. Previously they had offered him $25,000 if he would resign and sign an agreement never to discuss why he was leaving the institution. He refused this offer as well. So when they fired him, the story at the time was that administrators felt his advocacy was making things awkward for the university’s program in Florence. I hate to see men or women lose their jobs for what they believe in, but I certainly respect the integrity behind it.
Would Amanda’s plight have attracted so much attention and support had she not been a beautiful American girl? Probably not. On the other hand, were she not a beautiful American girl, it’s doubtful she would have been charged at all. As it was, she had to be neutralized and punished for her perceived power to charm men into murder. In an earlier age, one suspects, the high priests of Perugia would have known what to do with her.
 
The Knox-Sollecito appeal began in November 2010 under Judges Claudio Pratillo Hellmann and Massimo Zanetti. They appointed two forensic experts from Sapienza University in Rome, Stefano Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, to review the collection and analysis of the DNA evidence.
Like just about everything else in Italian justice, the trial dragged on for months through sporadic court sessions. Meanwhile, Amanda and Raffaele remained in prison.
For the January 2011 issue of Maxim, the magazine did a profile on me, relating my FBI experience and describing how I now consulted with police departments and legal teams. The article mentioned that I was working to clear both the West Memphis Three and Amanda Knox.
“In both cases—West Memphis and Knox,” I was quoted, “the police allowed theory rather than evidence to direct their investigations, and that is always a fatal error.”
This attracted the attention of Il Messaggero, the national newspaper that is the most widely read daily publication in Rome and Central Italy. Editor Paolo Graldi assigned Krista Errickson, an American writer with extensive international journalistic experience, to interview me. She was assisted by Italian journalist Gianmaria Giulini. Krista contacted me and I agreed to talk to her.
Of the more than five thousand cases I’ve worked on, she asked, how many of these had been international? About 250, I replied—mostly in Canada, England, Australia, Germany and South America.
After probing my background, experience and investigative techniques, she asked for my conclusion on the Knox-Sollecito case, the one the paper’s readers would be most interested in. I answered her:

“From the profiles I created, none of the behavioral or forensic evidence leads to Amanda and Raffaele. There is no history or experience related to violence in their backgrounds. Guede has the history; he was an experienced criminal, he had the motive, and all evidence points to him. The crime scene does not indicate the presence of three individuals in the room where Meredith was murdered. Behavior reflects personality. And that behavior fits only Rudy Guede.”

The article concluded with me saying: “I know Meredith’s family wants this nightmare to end. But they have the person that killed their daughter: It is Guede. Only Guede.”
Apparently, this was not what the paper wanted. Krista “was ordered to fall in line” by Graldi and come up with a version more to their taste, which would result in undercutting everything I said. There were admonitions added to the effect that I didn’t have the real evidence and there is “no legal recognition of [my] profession [in] Italy.”
If she didn’t agree to do this, the article would run with an editorial response tacked onto the end by Messaggero’s legal expert Massimo Martinelli, who, according to Graldi, had been on the Knox case “since the beginning.” The Martinelli response was six paragraphs, characterized by commentary such as this (in translation):

We have an interview of such that would be seen as interference, seemingly humble, in respect to the work of the investigators, and the prosecution’s theory: in reality, the entire prosecution is swept away with one stroke, and without many issues, in personal opinions of Douglas.

Graldi’s note to her included the warning (translated): So unless you will edit the article to an acceptable form, Martinelli and I cannot bring ourselves to accept the interview in this form, because it would only cause problems.
Krista was appalled and refused to have it published this way. She called me and said, “John, I want to pull the article. I don’t want to do this to you, but I’ll leave it up to you.” I asked her to send me a translation of the proposed new version; when I read it, I agreed completely.
“Pull it!” I said; and I told her to warn the publisher that if they published it in that form, I would sue them.
She then sent a long e-mail to my attorney, Steve Mark, explaining why it would not run, along with “Before” and “After” versions. She recounted:

This was an assignment, requested by the editor and publisher of Il Messaggero. . . . It seems what John had to say is not what they expected to hear. Again, I deeply regret this outcome. I spent three days in a complete daze. I felt as if I had been hit by a bus. Paolo Graldi, the editor, is someone I have worked with, and moreover, has been a very close personal friend for over 17 years. This shook my faith to its very foundations. After a 2 hour phone argument with Graldi, the last thing he said to me was, “This article, as you wrote it—is too dangerous for Italy.”

I admired Krista’s integrity. Not only did she refuse to recast the article, she resigned from Il Messaggero after twenty years as a contributing political writer.
Fortunately, some other people also considered the truth above all else. Appearing in court on July 25, 2011, scientists Stefano Conti and Carla Vecchiotti demolished the prosecution’s assertions and singled out its lead forensic examiner, Patrizia Stefanoni, for gross negligence in the handling, processing and interpretation of the evidence.
The month before, Greg Hampikian, a DNA expert, professor at Boise State University and the founder and director of the Idaho Innocence Project, announced, according to the Idaho Statesman, that “the prosecutors drew the wrong conclusions from that evidence, twisting it to fit their preconceived theory of Knox’s guilt.”
“I looked at the data,” Hampikian said, “and it was just horrible.”
He even staged an experiment that replicated his theory of DNA transfer in the case. Using techniques identical to how the knife DNA sample was collected, he got DNA from another researcher’s soda can to show up on a clean knife the researcher had never touched.
 
In her closing statement, given in Italian, Amanda told the judges, “People always ask, ‘Who is Amanda Knox?’ I am the same person I was four years ago. The only thing that now separates me from four years ago is my suffering. In four years, I’ve lost my friend in the most terrible and unexplainable way. My trust in the authorities and the police has been damaged. I had to face charges that were totally unfair, without any basis. And I am paying with my life for something I haven’t done.”
On October 3, 2011—nearly a year after the procedure began and four years since Amanda and Raffaele had been locked up—the appeals court overturned the convictions, stating in their opinion that the original verdict “was not corroborated by any objective element of evidence.” They described the interrogation sessions of Amanda as of “obsessive duration” and acknowledged that the account she gave was due not to fact but “great psychological pressure.”
The Kercher family released a statement:

We respect the decision of the judges but we do not understand how the decision of the first trial could be so radically overturned. We still trust the Italian judicial system and hope that the truth will eventually emerge.

Amanda and her family left Italy the next day.
At long last, justice was served.