Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  To an outsider this must sound more like a conspiracy-laden plot line from Umberto Eco than the workings of a public prosecutor's office. I wish I were making it up. But this was the mind-set we were dealing with: a grand, baroque imagination that could never be satisfied with the banalities of a brutal, straightforward murder by a man with a clearly established criminal history. From the beginning, the notion that a burglar broke in, came across Meredith unexpectedly, and killed her in a panic—the simplest and most plausible explanation of the scene at Via della Pergola—could not have been further from the prosecutor's mind.

  * * *

  The head of the Squadra Mobile, Domenico Giacinto Profazio, raced back to Perugia from his own ponte dei morti and quickly concurred, when he arrived in the late afternoon, that breaking in through Filomena's window was too difficult to be plausible. Profazio took a walk around the house and concluded it would have made much more sense for an intruder to clamber over the balcony, the one Amanda had run to, and use a flowerpot or a chair to smash a window. Therefore, Profazio concluded, the murderer or murderers must have come into the house using a key and faked the break-in after Meredith was killed.

  The police never wavered from this view for the next four years.

  * * *

  The night at the Questura seemed to last forever. Amanda and I were put in a waiting room with Meredith's English friends. I went around shaking hands and explained that we were the ones who stumbled on the crime scene. But it was hardly the time to start socializing, and the English girls kept mostly to themselves.

  Amanda curled up on me like a koala bear, grabbing hold of my neck with both arms and resting her body on my lap. We nuzzled, and at one point she stuck out her tongue at me as a joke.

  Police officers passed by regularly and glared at us. "State composti" one shouted. Behave yourselves.

  When they told us to sit separately, I responded, "But it's cold." "This is a Questura," they shot back.

  The English girls later said they were appalled by Amanda's behavior, and I admit, it made me a little uneasy too. This was a public place, in the middle of a murder investigation, and she was acting like a little girl. She even complained about being hungry and thirsty; the Questura offered us nothing but a vending machine and we were not allowed to leave. Days earlier, under very different circumstances, this quirky, unrestrained behavior had drawn me to her. But here it was embarrassing, and I can understand why Meredith's friends were put off.

  In the moment, I didn't say anything because I didn't want to make Amanda feel worse. The whole purpose of my being there was to comfort her. So I defended her, even beyond the point where I felt comfortable or could be said to be looking out for my own interests. I don't know how to account for that entirely, except to say I was not thinking straight and badly underestimated the possible consequences of my actions. Amanda did sit on her own periodically to write in her journal; she said she felt like writing a song about everything that was going on and—as the Italian papers later reported with relish—"could kill" for a pizza. This was Amanda free-associating, as Amanda the West Coast dreamer was in the habit of doing; she too did not stop to think that someone might later read what she was writing and judge her for it.

  I called my father to complain about how long they were making us wait. Papa was only so sympathetic. "Just do what you need to do," he said.

  Eventually, Amanda was summoned. She left for so long I fell asleep. Apparently, they tried to question her in Italian first, then brought in an interpreter because they weren't getting anywhere. Amanda ran through everything she could remember about her few weeks in the house and had her fingerprints taken. My own session was much more straightforward: I gave the police my account of the events of the day, they said thank you and let me go.

  By the time Amanda was through, it was five thirty in the morning. We headed back to my place—the only place Amanda now had—for a proper meal and some sleep. But we couldn't rest long. The police told us she needed to be back by 11:00 a.m.

  * * *

  Amanda was called into the Questura again and again, and each time I grew more perplexed. Why focus on her, and not on Meredith's other friends? I wondered. She and Amanda were new acquaintances, and there was never any animosity between them. How often could the police ask about their jaunts around Perugia, the meals they shared in the flat, or the way they organized the morning bathroom rotation? I just couldn't see what the interest was. I grew frustrated, too, by the way the police seemed to rely on me as a taxi service. I would take Amanda to the Questura in the morning, then pick her up again when she was done. Concentrating on my thesis became increasingly difficult. After the first couple of days, I had to resist the urge to say: If you want her, come and get her yourselves.

  What I did not know was that the pool of available interview subjects was narrowing. At least two of Meredith's English friends, Robyn and Amy, ad left town, apparently terrified that whoever killed Meredith might come after them next. And a third friend, Sophie Purton, inadvertently poured gas onto the fire of the police's budding sex-game theory. Sophie described a string of men that Amanda had invited back to the house (based on secondhand information from Meredith). Sophie didn't mean they were invited back for sex necessarily but that was how the police—and the press, once they heard about it—inevitably interpreted it.

  Amanda noticed the police's sex obsession right away; they couldn't stop asking her about the Vaseline pot and a vibrator they had found in the bathroom. The vibrator was a joke item, a little rubber bunny rabbit shaped to look like a vibrator and fashioned into a pendant, but the police seemed to find this difficult to accept. What about Meredith's sex life? Amanda knew only that Meredith had left a boyfriend in England and was now involved with one of the men who lived downstairs, a twenty-two-year-old telecommunications student with a carefully sculpted beard and outsize earrings named Giacomo Silenzi. Amanda had helped Meredith out a couple of times by giving her a condom from her supply. But Amanda had no

  idea how, or how often, Meredith had sex and didn't feel comfortable fielding questions about it.

  Silenzi had taken extraordinary precautions from the moment he heard about Meredith's murder. When he took the train back to Perugia from his parents' house, he got off one stop early and waited for one of his university professors to Meet him. He then sat in the Perugia train station, with the professor, until is parents could make the journey themselves. By the tim the police spoke to him, he also had a lawyer. Clearly, Silenzi either suspected the police would pursue a sex angle and felt vulnerable, of was appropriately skeptical of authority. We could have used a dose of that skepticism ourselves.

  The day after the discovery of the body, on November 3, Amanda asked if we could go shopping because she'd retrieved nothing from the house, not even underwear, and it was now inaccessible. We first tried an outlet called Timbro, which specializes in fashions for our age group, but it was too expensive. So we moved on to a bright pink teen discount store, Bubble, where she tried on some jeans and eventually settled on a laughably childish hong with a cow motif.

  I made a joke in English, saying something long the lines of, "Wow, you're going to look smoking hot in those."

  A few days later, this episode would be distorted in the newspapers to make it seem as if the first thing we did aft ,r the murder was to buy sexy lingerie—specifically, a G-string—and tell each other how we couldn't wait to try it out. The store owner, who did not speak English, corroborated the story in pursuit of his own brief moment in the spotlight. True, the surveillance video in the store showed us touching and kissing, but that was hard a crime. I wasn't making out with her in some vulgar or inappropriate way, just comforting her and letting her know I was there for er. Besides, there was nothing remotely sexy about Bubble. A much sexier underwear store was next door, and we didn't set foot in there.

  The police were at last pointed in the right direction by Stefano Bonassi, another of the boys who lived downstairs from
Meredith and Amanda, who mentioned Rudy Guede as soon as he was interviewed and described the strange night about a month earlier when Guede slept on the boys' couch.

  Guede himself had been behaving strangely. At 2:00 a.m. on the night of the murder, he was spotted dancing at a Perugia club called Domus. The following night he was back, smelling as if he hadn't washed in a while, according to one Italian student acquaintance who was there with him. The news of Meredith's murder had broken just a few hours earlier, and everyone was talking about it. When the dancers were asked to observe a minute's silence, they all complied immediately—except for Guede, who kept right on dancing. That got several people's attention.

  The next morning, perhaps in reaction to the ubiquitous banner headlines describing Meredith being slaughtered like a farm animal, he hopped on a train to Milan. And a day after that, he fled to Germany.

  As the days went by—it was now Sunday, November 4, three days after the murder—I realized I had not properly acknowledged my own discomfort with Amanda. I was not scandalized by her, in the way that so many others later said they were, but I shouldn't have allowed her to climb all over me in the Questura, and I should have counseled her quietly not to complain so much. I understood the gallant side of being her boyfriend, but I could have given her better advice and protected myself in the process.

  What brought my discomfort to the surface was her old boyfriend, D.J. He kept calling from China to find out how she was, which was understandable, except that she clearly shared an intimacy with him that I was not welcome to intrude on. Amanda would Skype him at five o'clock in the morning and, when he asked, say only that I was half her boyfriend and half not. So that's the thanks I get, I couldn't help thinking.

  One time when he called, I picked up the phone and told him to try again later because Amanda was in the bathroom. Another time, Amanda put me on the line so D.J. could thank me in person for everything I was doing. The conversation made me extremely uncomfortable. What was I, just the stand-in to get her through her time of difficulty in Italy while he was unavoidably on the other side of the world? I didn't think I was a jealous person, but this was about more than jealousy. Nobody seemed to be considering my feelings at all.

  In retrospect, I realize we were all under tremendous pressure. Amanda stayed up until three in the morning one night writing a long e-mail for her friends and family back home to describe everything that had happened. She talked about the "hurricane of emotions and stress" involved in dealing with everything from her grief over Meredith, to the constant barrage of police questions, to the avalanche of practical issues that she, Filomena, and Laura faced as tenants in a house that nobody was likely to be able to enter for weeks or even months. Hours after sending that message, Amanda was back at the Questura—with me tagging along—answering questions about every man she'd met in Perugia since she'd arrived.

  She told them, quite openly, about a guy from Rome she went to bed with a few days before meeting me. She had no problem being open about her sex life, and that made her interrogators suspicious. How many men, they wondered, did she plan on getting through during her year in Perugia? The American attitude to sex—the embrace of youthful experimentation as a normal stage on the way to adult maturity—was entirely alien, even abhorrent, to them.

  Amanda was getting her period, one more reason for her to feel uncomfortable and moody, and she sent me out to buy tampons and a slice of pizza. As I left the Questura, I noticed that a policewoman had followed me out. She approached surreptitiously, as though not wanting to be seen.

  She slipped a business card in my hand and said it was for a lawyer. "Give him a call," she said deliberately. "You're going to need him for sure."

  It could not have been a more explicit warning. But I didn't know this woman and I refused to take her seriously. I thought, What do I have to be worried about?

  I put the card in my wallet and forgot about it. Regrettably, I never saw the policewoman again.

  * * *

  My family did not share my breezy optimism about the way things were going and worried about the endless time I was spending with the police. Officially, I was a persona informata dei fatti, a "person informed of the facts" and helping police with their inquiries, no more. But my father decided he'd call a friend who was a criminal lawyer and ask his opinion.

  I'd grown up thinking of Tiziano Tedeschi as an uncle. When I was little, he and my father were almost inseparable, although the closer friendship was now between my father and Tiziano's older brother, Enrico. My father knew Tiziano as a friend, not by reputation. Still, he imagined Tiziano would do everything lie could to safeguard my interests.

  Papa couldn't help feeling a little disappointed by the response. Tiziano said he put a call into the Questura and there was nothing to worry about. He was told it was all routine.

  My sister, Vanessa, made her own separate inquiries and felt much less reassured. The first time she called the Questura, they left her waiting on the line, even though she announced herself as a lieutenant in the carabinieri, and never took her call.

  The second time, she had herself put through from the carabinieri's regional switchboard, to make it more official. This time she got through, but only to a junior policeman clearly her inferior. (In Italian law enforcement, protocol on such matters is followed scrupulously. "Listen," the man told her impatiently, "everything is fine."

  "Is there someone I can talk to who is in charge of this case?" Vanessa insisted.

  "No, no. It's all routine. Don't worry."

  Unlike Tiziano Tedeschi, though, my sister did worry. To her, the conversation raised a lot more questions than it answered.

  * * *

  Amanda was exhausted. She would sprawl out on the chairs in the Questura, complaining of feeling unwell. Her interpreter noticed she was unusually pale and further noticed that her pallor revealed a small red mark on her neck. The police seized on this as possible evidence of injury during the murder, but it was nothing, most likely the residue of a love bite I had given her myself.

  Shortly after I returned with pizza on the afternoon of November 4, Monica Napoleoni announced that Amanda, Filomena, and Laura needed to accompany her back to the murder house. 'I hey were gone for two or three hours. Later, I learned that Amanda had broken down, shaking and weeping, after she was asked to go through the knife drawer in the kitchen. Napoleoni asked her it* anything was missing. Nothing was.

  It didn't seem to us that the investigation was going anywhere. What we didn't realize was that they had already decided we were somehow involved and were watching us like hawks for any word or sign or gesture that would corroborate their suspicions. The waiting room where we sat was bugged, and our phones were now tapped too.

  That night, still at the Questura, Amanda started asking me the meaning of various Italian swearwords. I gave her the English equivalents of vaffanculo (fuck off) and li mortacci tux (I spit on your dead ancestors), and we started laughing. It was just a stupid conversation to pass the time. But, to the eavesdropping Perugia police, it added to a mounting body of evidence that something was seriously wrong with us.

  Pressure to solve the case was growing by the day. In a city that made a significant part of its living off foreign students, a brutal murder such as Meredith's was hardly good for business. "Perugians," the city's mayor, Renato Rocchi, said, "expect the culprit to be identified quickly and punished in exemplary fashion." r1 he police chief, Arturo De Felice, was getting the message loud and clear. "Every investigative tool at our disposal," he promised, "every resource and area of expertise, has been deployed to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible."

  The truth, though, was that the authorities were still clueless about the most important pieces of. evidence—in particular, the identity of whoever made the bloody shoe prints and footprints, and the source of the DNA samples found around the house that did not belong to anyone who had come forward so far. If. Rudy Guede had not skipped town, he might have been tested, ide
ntified, and apprehended by now. Instead, the police could only turn to what they had, the DNA and fingerprint traces in the house that they could identify. Laura had an incontrovertible alibi because she had been out of town on the night of the murder. The same went for the boys downstairs. Filomena had not only been with her boyfriend, but with Luca and Paola too. That left Amanda and—since I was always with her when she came to the Questura—me.

  What did they have on us? Nothing of substance. But they did find our behavior odd, and we had no real alibi for the night of November 1 except each other, and we did not have lawyers to protect us, and we seemed to have a propensity for saying things without thinking them through. In other words, we were the lowest-hanging fruit, and the police simply reached out and grabbed us.

  How could they do that in the absence of hard evidence? Edgardo Giobbi of the Servizio Centrale Operativo, the country's serious-crime squad, essentially gave the game away in a British television documentary that aired six months after Meredith's murder. Giobbi came up to Perugia from Rome to oversee the interrogations, so he knew the sequence of events as well as anybody. He had had it in for Amanda ever since he'd seen her bend down to put on protective footwear at the murder house on November 3 and thought he saw her do a suggestive hip-swivel known in Italy as la mossa, "the move.