Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  I was drinking beer, but everyone else was ladling out cups of what looked like sangria from a big cocktail bowl. It's funny, given all the media gossip about my being addicted to just about every intoxicating substance on the planet, but I'm not a big drinker at all. Like my father, I don't like feeling out of control, so I usually have just a few sips of beer or wine and steer clear of spirits altogether. That night, my caution was my salvation.

  From one moment to the next, the mood in the room changed abruptly. People started pawing and fondling each other, as though they had lost all inhibitions. It was freaky, not sexy at all, and I went looking for my friends to talk about it. But they were as out of it as the rest of the party. The two girls both turned and kissed me on the mouth, one after the other. They had glazed, vacant expressions in their eyes. Some people, I realize, might think this was a fantasy come true. But these weren't the girls I knew—warm, charming, funny, like sisters to each other, and to me. It was as if robots had overtaken their bodies and were now trying to overtake mine.

  The next day, I asked the girls what had got into them, and couldn't say. They remembered nothing.

  I have no idea what was in that cocktail, but the episode taught me how swiftly drinks or drugs can change our perceptions and our personalities. Or rather, it should have taught me. For some reason, I continued to indulge my occasional marijuana habit, per haps because it did nothing more harmful than put me to sleep and scramble my short-term memory, which is usually pretty scrambled to begin with.

  Now I knew I should have been smarter. I smoked no more than three joints with Amanda in the few days before the murder, but that was three joints too many.

  Because our imprisonment had been officially sanctioned by judge, we were at last granted a few meager privileges. I was still in solitary, but I was given a working television and allowed to read t he newspapers. If I asked for extra blankets, I received them. The ban on contact with our lawyers was lifted, and we were told we could receive family visitors very soon.

  Still, I was numbed and bewildered by my surroundings. I bad nothing of my own in the cell except the increasingly dirty clothes on my back, and nothing to structure the days except the regular portions of bland, unidentifiable meat and overcooked pasta. I made friends with a young Romanian who seemed friendly enough when I talked to him through the cell walls; he helped me circumvent the interminable system of paying and waiting for basic supplies like soap and garbage bags by giving me some from his own stash. Only later was I told that he was in prison for attempted armed robbery and running a prostitution ring. This was not my world; what was I doing here?

  Once I turned on the TV, it didn't take long to discover that the media coverage of the case was almost as mind-blowing as the case itself. Amanda was "Foxy Knoxy," a nickname she had originally been given by her soccer coach when she was seven years old, now twisted into an underhanded commentary on her sexual prowess. In Italian this was rendered as volpe cattiva, wicked fox. They also called her luciferina, little she-devil, and reported breathlessly on a lifestyle supposedly centered around sex, drugs, alcohol, and outrageous lies. Her outstanding academic record and close-knit friends and family somehow went by the wayside.

  Reporters mined the Internet for anything—Facebook entries, blogs, videos—that would bolster the predetermined conclusion that we were guilty. A short story about date rape that Amanda had submitted to a University of Washington creative-writing class was held up as evidence of her warped criminal mind. A Myspace video of her boasting about the number of shots she had downed at a party became an excuse to depict her as an alcohol-fueled harpy. I was described as "crazy," based on a line I'd written in a blog entry, and held up to ridicule for a photograph, taken during a high-spirited moment of fun in my first year in Perugia, in which I was wrapped from head to foot in toilet paper, brandishing a machete in one hand and a bottle of pink alcohol in the other.

  None of this was more than standard student nonsense. In the looking-glass world of the media, though, it was tantamount to a criminal indictment.

  I knew a lot of the coverage of the case itself was flawed. It was reported, for example, that the police had found bleach receipts at my house, strongly suggesting I had purchased materials to clean up the crime scene. But my cleaning lady didn't use bleach, and the only receipts the police found from November 1 onward were lot pizza. I wouldn't have needed to buy bleach, anyway, because I had some left over from my previous cleaning lady. It had sat untouched for months.

  Still, I was inclined to believe a lot of what was in the newspapers. Chalk it up to my overprotected childhood, or my naive belief that things, more often than not, are what they seem. In one article, 1 read with alarm that Amanda had not gone straight home to shower on the morning after the murder, but had met a secret Argentinian boyfriend and gone to a Laundromat to wash a pile of clothes including a pair of blue Nike sneakers. This played havoc with my mind because I had not yet let go of my anger over Amanda's statements in the Questura, and I was beginning to wonder if I could trust her on anything, including her sexual fidelity. Not only did I mistakenly give this story credence, I even asked myself if she might have taken my pocketknife and given it to the son of a bitch who murdered Meredith.

  It all seemed so far-fetched, yet I was still working on the premise that something had to be off for the police to act the way they did. I, like much of the reading public, simply could not believe that so much could be made out of nothing at all.

  * * *

  Even before my father received my telegram, he knew he needed to find a second lawyer to back up Tedeschi. If nothing else, we needed someone based in Perugia who could pick up official documents as they became available and develop a, relationship with court officials. My family was given a couple of names and decided to go with a recommendation from Vanessa's contact in the local carabinieri, the one who had called her to apologize.

  The lawyer's name was Luca Maori, and he introduced himself to my father by pulling up to the piazza outside the public prosecutor's office in a shiny four-wheel-drive BMW 330. He was self-assured, almost cocky, which impressed Papa at first. Maori's father had been an extraordinarily successful lawyer before him, and Luca worked out of a vast, beautifully appointed office with antique furniture and fifteenth-century religious paintings by Mastro Giorgio di Gubbio.

  Maori also had a vast country estate, to which he regularly invited my father and other members of my family. He was happy to take the case without payment—as indeed Tedeschi had been before him. In both cases, I came to believe you get what you pay for.

  I saw Tedeschi first. He did his best to be reassuring, to sound in control. "Don't worry," he said, "we'll work it all out. On the shoe print we just need to get a proper analysis done." I nodded and smiled, but really I had no faith in him. I had almost no faith in anybody at this point.

  Then came Maori. He told me that he too carried pocketknives from time to time. But he didn't seem too interested in connecting with me beyond such superficial niceties. I felt he didn't entirely trust me. His game plan, which became clear over a series of meetings, was to dissociate me as much as possible from Amanda. And that was it. He did not have a clear strategy to undermine the prosecution's evidence on the knife and the shoe print, because—as he indicated to me—he believed there might he something to it.

  I didn't feel any sort of progress until I was at last allowed to see my father and uncle and stepmother on November 10. It was an emotional reunion. 1 was exhausted and demoralized, 1 stank ()I piss and sweat and had several days' growth of beard. Still, it Celt wonderful to hug them.

  They couldn't believe what had happened to me and struggled to hold it together as we talked. "I'll do everything in my power to get you out," my father promised. Years later, I learned that as soon as the guards took me back to my cell, he banged his hands against a wall and wept.

  All three of them, my father, Mara, and Giuseppe, were beside themselves with fury at the police—my fath
er called them "animals" and "fucking bastards"—and also at Amanda. How could she say those things? Who was she, really? Did I have any idea? They had a bit of a go at me, saying I'd allowed myself to fall too easily under her spell and had been too unguarded in what I'd said to the police and in court.

  I wasn't sure, at that point, that I disagreed. I felt that my lack of caution at the Matteini hearing, the casual way I had said the first things that came into my head, had landed all three of us in prison—me, Amanda, and Patrick. I was having a hard time forgiving myself.

  But Papa also gave me some hard information to help structure my thoughts and pull me out from under the miasma. He told me, for instance, that he had texted instead of calling on the night of t he murder, and he reminded me about the earlier Will Smith conversation. With his help, I began to separate out the events of October 31 and November 1. Then it occurred to me: Amanda had most pro') ably spent the entire night at my house after all. It was a comforting

  thought. If she never left, she couldn't have passed my knife, or my shoes, off to someone else. She was just as innocent as me.

  I even allowed myself a little optimism: my computer, I decided, would show if I was connected to the Internet that night and, if so, when, and how often. Unless Amanda and I had somehow made love all night long, pausing only to make ourselves dinner and nod off to sleep, the full proof of our innocence would soon be out in the open.

  If only it could have been that simple. I did not yet know that the Polizia Postale—supposedly experts in handling technology issues—had seized two of my computers along with Amanda's and Meredith's and somehow wrecked three of the four hard disks while trying to decipher them. The police blamed the problem on an electrical surge, although they could not begin to account for it happening three times in a row. The bottom line was that the damaged disks were now deemed unreadable. That left just my MacBook Pro to provide an alibi for the night of the murder. According to the police, it showed no activity from the time we finished watching Amélie at 9:10 p.m. until 5:30 the next morning.

  That sounded all wrong to me, and my defense team's technical experts would later find reasons to doubt the reliability of this finding. But there would be no easy way out of the mess Amanda and I were now in.

  * * *

  The next bombshell dropped days later on the evening news. The murder weapon was no longer thought to be my pocketknife, which had tested negative for traces of blood, but rather the outsize stainless-steel kitchen knife Inspector Finzi had pulled out of my drawer so deliberately on the morning of my arrest. The police claimed to have found Amanda's DNA on the handle, and Meredith's on the tip.

  I wasn't even capable of following the rest of the report. I was overcome with anxiety, felt my heart leaping out of my chest, keeled over, and passed out.

  My first thought when I came to—not that I was thinking straight—was that everything had gone topsy-turvy all over again, that Amanda must have taken the knife from my house and either used it to kill Meredith or given it to the person who did.

  Not until the next morning, when Tedeschi came to see me, did I understand that the evidence was nowhere near as damning as it sounded. Would they dare to convict me on the basis of a knife that I knew, and the police knew, was plucked at random because it was big, and shiny, and sitting on the top of the pile in my drawer? The coroner's report, Tedeschi told me, made clear that the murder weapon could not have been anywhere near that big. The Polizia Scientifica had tested the blade for blood and found none.

  The police's contention was that Amanda and I had scrubbed the knife clean with bleach before throwing it back in the drawer. Not only did I know that to be false, but it seemed an unlikely scenario from any perspective. Why take the risk of carrying the murder weapon back through the streets of Perugia to my house, instead of just ditching it? Who cleans a murder weapon and puts it back where it belongs for the police to discover and analyze in microscopic detail?

  Still, there was something I could not fathom. How did Meredith's DNA end up on my knife when she'd never visited my house? I was feeling so panicky I imagined for a moment that 1 had used the knife to cook lunch at Via della Pergola and accidentally jabbed Meredith in the hand. Something like that had in fact happened in the week before the murder. My hand slipped and the knife I was using made contact with her skin for the briefest of moments. Meredith was not hurt, I apologized, and that was that. But of course I wasn't using my own knife at the time. There was no possible connection.

  As I worked through all that in my head, I was close to panic. My stomach was burning and I felt ready to leap out of my skin. Somehow, I was still looking for reasons to blame myself, however small the oversight or misstep or omission. Did some part of me, despite everything I thought I knew and felt, resemble the other Raffaele Sollecito, the spoiled, mysterious, darkly perverted one on the TV? Chalk it up to Catholic guilt, or the deeply disorienting circumstances I found myself in, but whenever I watched the news, I felt I was being stripped away from my true self and flung into some grotesque Big Brother comedy-horror reality show. The normal me seemed to shrink down to nothing and give way instead to the sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde alter ego most people only ever confront in their nightmares. In this alternate reality, a nasty surprise always lurked around the next corner. And the punch line of every joke was reliably the same: me and my hands, soaked in Meredith's blood.

  For several days my heart kept fluttering, I kept fainting, and the prison infirmary became concerned enough to write me a prescription for lorazepam.

  I took it two or three times, and I suppose it must have worked, because the fainting fits stopped. Still, I didn't like the way the tranquilizer made me permanently drowsy, so I stopped taking it.

  I didn't want to sleep through my captivity. If I wanted it to end, I realized, I needed to fight every step of the way.

  * * *

  My father was not entirely displeased about the kitchen knife, be cause, as he saw it, plenty of evidence indicated it could not have been the murder weapon. In his perennial optimism, he preferred to hold on to the fact that the police had found nothing else at my house despite picking the place clean. If the knife was the best they had, he calculated, we were still in the running to heat the charges.

  Papa knew exactly how hard the police had searched, because he had seen them at it with his own eyes, on his first or second day in Perugia. He had stood in the entranceway to my building, as close to my front door as the police cordon would allow, and watched them cart away bath sponges, drainage plugs, detergent bottles—anything that might have been useful in cleaning up after a murder.

  While he was there, he had come face-to-face with prosecutor Mignini. Mignini knew who Papa was right away, extended his hand, and, when my father said he was a doctor, asked what his area of specialization was. We later heard that Mignini had asked questions about my father's professional reputation. It was a prescient line of inquiry, because my father was indeed good at what he did. He knew enough science to be attuned to the fine details of forensics, bloodwork and DNA analysis, and would soon become Mignini's toughest and most unforgiving adversary.

  * * *

  The nuts and bolts of the investigation, the hard evidence, kept yielding good things for us. We were told that my Nikes had tested negative for blood and for Meredith's DNA. So had my car, and everything else I had touched around the time of the murder. ken the mop Amanda and I carried back and forth on the morning of November 2, an object of particular suspicion, was reported to be clean.

  But a smear campaign was also in full swing, and in the media these things were barely noticed. Two days after the papers ran their sensationalist headlines about the knife, they trumpeted what they said was confirmation from Amanda that she was at the house on Via della Pergola when the murder took place. During a conversation with her mother in prison, they reported, Amanda had blurted out, "I was there, I cannot lie about that." She seemed not to realize the conversation was being recorded, and th
e police picked up on it right away.

  As we later learned, her words were completely twisted. The context for the line was Amanda's exasperation that she was being asked to change her story and concede that she wasn't with me on Corso Garibaldi on the night of the murder. So the word there did not refer to Via della Pergola at all, but to my flat. "This is so stupid," she said, according to the police's own transcript, "because I can't say anything else. I was there, I can't lie about that, and there's no reason I should."

  Her mother had no particular reaction to this. It was in keeping with the rest of the conversation, in which Amanda expressed her frustration that the truth was somehow not good enough for Mignini and her police interrogators.

  A few days later, another leak in the press pointed to a similar intent to do her—and me—harm. This time the papers quoted what they said was an extract from her diary. "I don't remember anything," the passage read, "but maybe Raffaele went to Meredith's house, raped and killed her, and then put my fingerprints on the knife back at his house while I was asleep."

  Again, this was a malicious distortion. But, again, by the time it was uncovered, the damage was done, and it didn't matter that the truth had been flipped almost entirely on its head. The actual passage, expressing Amanda's consternation about the kitchen-knife allegations, read as follows: "Raffaele and I have used this knife to cook, and it's impossible that Meredith's DNA is on the knife he cause 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 into bed, and then pretended really well the next couple of days, well, I just highly doubt all of that."