Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  We also gained sonic insight into the bra-clasp mystery. On November 2, the day after the murder, the piece of white material with the two metal clasps was photographed on the tile floor directly in front of Meredith's bed. Somehow, though, the Polizia Scientifica did not recover it until December 18, forty-six days later, by which time the room had been turned upside down, Meredith's clothes, bedding, and other possessions had been tossed into great, unwieldy piles, and the missing bra piece had unaccountably shifted under a carpet several feet away near Meredith's desk.

  The likelihood of contamination was so great our experts had doubts that a fair-minded court could attribute any significance to a single biological sample found attached to one clasp. How could it be that my DNA was entirely absent from the murder scene except this one tiny trace? With all the coming and going and the scant at-tendon to protocol, it seemed perfectly possible that my DNA was picked up elsewhere in the apartment and transferred, perhaps by a police investigator wearing a dirty glove.

  My father was confident enough about the incompetence on display that he decided, once again, to take the evidence public—this time to a local television station in Puglia called Telenorba. Again, the strategy backfired, though for different reasons this time. Many television viewers and critics were shocked to see the police's video footage of Meredith's near-naked corpse, including graphic images of the fatal wounds in her neck. The debate that immediately erupted across the country did not even touch on the Polizia Scientifica's shortcomings; it was all about the shockingly poor taste of broadcasting the Footage at all—a decision made by the station, not by my family. Mignini, taking lull advantage, later filed suit against us for violation of Meredith's privacy.

  We should have been more patient. The findings were promising, but we needed to wait for the government to produce its DNA evidence and see what exactly they had. Then, and only then, Could we begin knocking down the most damaging allegations against us.

  * * *

  My last hope to avoid trial, or at least to get out of prison while I waited, lay with the Corte di Cassazione, Italy's high court, which agreed to hear a last-ditch appeal at the beginning of April. Giuseppe and Sara again said we should give this task to Giulia Bongiorno, and again my father demurred. Luca Maori gave him the name Alfredo Gaito, a Roman lawyer specializing in hearings before the Corte di Cassazione, and Tiziano Tedeschi vouched for Gaito as one of the best in the business.

  If he was the best, though, he certainly did not show it to us. He demanded payment up front without offering my family the chance to sound him out. He never came to see me in prison and said nothing to suggest that this assignment excited or moved or infuriated him in any way. We knew the Cassazione would not review the evidence but would examine only the procedural correctness of the decisions made by previous judges. Nobody, though, offered us proper guidance on how best to challenge those decisions.

  As it was, Gaito let Tedeschi—a lawyer with little previous experience of the Cassazione—do most of the talking. Our brief was essentially a rehash of the evidentiary points we considered to be in our favor, not a procedural approach at all. Since the Court was not interested in reviewing documents, it was essentially our word against the lower courts', and the lower courts, inevitably, won.

  Amanda and I were not present, but we were raked over the coals anyway for our supposedly wayward personalities, our "habitual drug use," and the danger to society the Court said we represented. the one victory we eked Out was a finding that we should have been told we were under criminal investigation before our long night of interrogations in the Questura. The statements we produced would not be admissible at trial.

  This was not at all the outcome my family had hoped fig, and my father vented his fury in all directions. He had imagined t hat the white marble halls of the Cassazione were far enough from Perugia for clarity to shine through. Mostly he blamed the lawyers. Why was Gaito such a wash? Why hadn't Luca Maori said anything? What did Tedeschi think he was doing?

  Giuseppe and Sara had been right all along. It was time for a high-powered lawyer inspiring greater confidence to take on my defense. Given the slowness of the Italian justice system, we might now have to wait up to a year for trial to begin, maybe as long as two years for a conclusion. We could afford to make no more mistakes.

  My father not only removed Tedeschi from the case; he never spoke to him again. I was left, once again, facing the darkness of my isolation cell with no end in sight.

  III

  THE PROTECTED

  SECTION

  [Jesus said:] "Woe to you, lawyers! For you have taken away

  the key to knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and you

  hindered those who wanted to enter."

  And as He said these things, the scribes and the Pharisees

  began to assail Him vehemently, and to cross-examine Him

  about many things, lying in wait for Him, and seeking to catch

  Him in something He might say, that they might accuse Him.

  —Luke 1 1:52-54

  Chapter III

  The Protected Section

  In May 2008, the authorities in Terni finally moved me out of solitary confinement. I was moved instead into the sezione protetta, a special "protected section" reserved largely for rapists, pedophiles, and other sex criminals, along with a smattering of Mafia informants and jailhouse snitches—prisoners seen as such pariahs they could not stay with the general inmate population because they were unlikely to survive.

  I was told that the decision to place me there was less about the charges of sexual violence I faced than about my media notoriety. They were, they said, putting me there for my own good.

  My own good? The record wasn't too strong so far on things the authorities had done for my own good.

  I'd been languishing in solitary confinement for six months now, presumably for my own good since the authorities had offered no other reason to keep me there. It's difficult to describe just how crazy it can make a person to be deprived of contact with the outside world for twenty-three hours a day. I found it difficult to concentrate on anything for long. I lost my appetite. I struggled to write letters and gave up almost completely on journal entries. I struggled, particularly, to hold on to hope. I felt like a wounded animal, left to whimper in a corner and ignored except for an occasional hard kick to remind me of how little anybody cared. Only the regular visits from my father and my other family members and friends kept me sane; they were the only things I had to look forward to.

  Now my despair was compounded by fear. Who knew what fresh horrors were in store? The way I understood it, this was a whole new form of pressure from the authorities. Nothing was said explicitly, but the subtext seemed clear: If you don't want to tell us what we want to hear, you can take your chances with the perverts and child molesters and transsexuals and see how you like that instead.

  That's what I heard when they said they were putting me in the the protected section for my own good. My only option was to steel myself and figure out a path to survival.

  I was put in a cell on my own at first, which was a blessing, and I did my best to keep to myself. The name of the wing was not entirely euphemistic. The guards did keep a close eye on us, and my fear of immediate physical danger subsided quite rapidly. But I had no idea how I was going to find common ground with these people. They were loud and vulgar and mean and alarming. Almost immediately, they bombarded me with their idle, distorted opinions of Meredith's murder to see if they could get a rise out of me.

  I didn't ignore them, but neither did I rise to their bait. I said, calmly, that my conscience was clear and waited until they changed the subject.

  The experience brought back memories of a trip to Lisbon I took when I was twenty and the night my friend and I went to buy marijuana in the city's red-light district. I remember a street brimming with prostitutes, pimps, and drug pushers; people with scars on their faces and trouble on their minds and who knew what weapons hidd
en beneath their clothing. I was the idiot tourist with a fanny pack and a camera slung around my neck; I had never kit more vulnerable in my life. I could feel everyone's hard stares as the hustlers and lowlifes sized me up as a potential customer, or an easy mark. I felt profoundly ill at ease and out of place.

  I had a similar feeling now about my fellow prisoners. Only t his time there was no beating a hasty retreat. These people were my world, for the foreseeable future.

  Like some weirdly dysfunctional high school, the protected section had its clans and cliques that vied for the attention of newcomers like me. Two groups were considered outcasts and forced to fend largely for themselves: the pedophiles, mostly old men with strange leers and odd personal hygiene habits, and the transsexuals, who put the rest of us on edge because they flirted and giggled and made flamboyant public displays of their silicone boob jobs. The rest were organized largely by geographical region. The North Africans stuck together, as did the Umbria natives. The napoletani (Neapolitans) formed one Southern Italian clique, and the baresi (from. Bari), the natives of my region, another.

  I knew right away that joining any of these groups could spell trouble. They baited each other constantly; violence never seemed far from the surface. The tension was worst at mealtimes, when the prisoners designated as servers were judged by the exact amount of food they slopped on everyone's plate. A little more or less could easily start a fight.

  At times the tension was so great you could almost taste it, especially when prisoners got drunk on the wickedly strong hooch they made in their cell basins from basic supplies of apples, sugar, and yeast. (I tried it just once and found it disgusting.) One inmate who called another figlio de puttana, son of a whore, had boiling oil thrown in his face. Another aggrieved prisoner smashed the gas bottle he kept in his cell for cooking and came after his target with the broken shards.

  To this point in my notably sheltered life, the most violence I'd seen were a few drunken punches thrown at a club. Now I was in the midst of hardened criminals with hair-trigger tempers and feral instincts only heightened by being caged together. This was no place for a self-professed nerd and computer geek; the thought of being attacked by one of these guys, or even being caught in the fray, scared the shit out of me. I was exposed and unprotected in this "protected section" and could only live by my wits.

  The guards did their best to break up the fights and were scrupulous about confiscating weapons. But the inmates were usually one step ahead of them. They made knives by sharpening down baby scissors or filing away at spoons. They would hide them in tubs of shaving cream or behind the radiators in their cells. Actually using these weapons was a big risk because being caught meant a trip to solitary confinement and double time for any charges leading to a conviction. But these were volatile people who sometimes acted first and thought better of it later.

  The Bari group courted me to join them, as did the Neapolitans, but I said no to them all. Sometimes I would make a joke and say 1 wanted to be neutral, like Switzerland. Other times I would explain that I was disgusted with my country and was starting a new clique of my own called the United States—the country where most of my public supporters seemed to come from.

  I was pleased to discover that I had a talent for keeping trouble at bay. I couldn't flinch or run, because that could give my would-be tormentors the idea I had something to hide and encourage them to go after me all the more. Whenever I was taunted about Amanda, or the knife I had supposedly plunged into Meredith's neck, I had to face down my antagonists, if only to show that I wasn't afraid. I was calm but insistent. My approach reminded me a little of the way my father taught me to react if we came across beavers in the wild; the most important idea to convey was that you weren't worth antagonizing, either because you were unflappable or because you might just fight back.

  I thought about a much-misunderstood line from the Bible, when Christ talks about turning the other cheek. People often think that Jesus was encouraging his followers to play the victim and say, "Go ahead, punish me some more, I'll even make it easy for you." But I think that interpretation is absurd, and makes Christianity seem like a religion fit only for masochists. Turning the other cheek really means meeting provocation with indifference and just a hint of defiance. It means telling your antagonist, "Do what you must, but you're not going to get what you want, and it might just backfire."

  * * *

  My sister, Vanessa, had her own daunting environment to deal with. She was the only uniformed woman in a teeming office of about a thousand carabinieri, and while she was used to attracting unwarranted attention, she became aware, over the spring of 2008, that she was being more than just noticed; she was being spied on.

  This, as Vanessa saw it, was the start of something that Italians call mobbing—essentially, the slow process of making someone's ilk a living hell. She noticed eyes on her when she walked into the office first thing in the morning, and more eyes on her when she left. One of her few remaining friends confirmed what she already suspected, that people were taking notes on her every move: when she came and went, when she took a coffee break, how long she spent at lunch. Later, she even stumbled across worksheets where her movements were carefully tracked.

  Officially, the workday was eight hours, with a half hour for lunch. But officers, including Vanessa's bosses, commonly took off for two or three hours in the middle of the day and then stayed late. They would even put in for overtime for the extra hours.

  Before Vanessa felt all eyes on her, she had enjoyed going to the gym for an hour or so in the middle of the day. It was longer than the rules allowed, but she was always back before her superiors and made sure not to leave any pending tasks undone. Now she didn't dare leave at all, even if it meant sitting and staring into space for hours.

  Over time, she was given less and less work, even when her bosses were present. She complained to the officer overseeing her, but he was unsympathetic. "Go to the maresciali—the noncommissioned officers—"and ask them for extra work," he said. It was a direct putdown, as the marescialli were junior to Vanessa, and her job was to tell them what to do, not the other way around.

  * * *

  Vanessa is not the only tough nut in the family. My aunt Sara is more than a match for her; she is one of those forceful, gregarious, elegantly turned-out Italian women whose every move lets you know she takes no crap from anyone. Sara has always been a political animal. As a young woman she fell under the spell of Giorgio Almirante, a populist rabble-rouser who took on the mantle of the defeated Italian Fascist Party after World War II and turned it into a grassroots movement to counter what he and his supporters saw as the festering corruption and self-satisfaction of the mainstream parties in Rome. 'The Movimento Sociale ltaliano, as Almirante's group was known, was regarded with deep suspicion, if not out right contempt, in much of the country, which had fought hard and sacrificed much to bury the Fascist movement in the 1940s. But it had a bedrock appeal in the South, which did not enjoy many of the fruits of Italy's postwar boom and felt nostalgic for Mussolini's ambitious public works projects, his commitment to rooting out organized crime, and—something that rarely gets talked about—the galvanizing effect his education and labor policies had on emancipating women in our ultraconservative region.

  Sara worked tirelessly as an organizer, and when the movement finally gained mainstream acceptance in the 1990s- -changing its name to the Alleanza Nazionale and repudiating the more obviously unacceptable aspects of Mussolini's legacy—she suddenly had a lot of influential friends. Giuseppe Tatarella, godfather to the other Raffaele Sollecito (the son of Giuseppe and Sara), was now deputy prime minister and an important vote-wrangler in the Chamber of Deputies, Italy's lower house of parliament. Sara made an unsuccessful run for mayor of Giovinazzo, my hometown, and later served as cultural assessor in Bitonto, a Bari suburb.

  The rest of my family is not especially political, but we have all been brought up to admire a strong sense of social order. We like public figures
who value personal integrity above the usual Machiavellian intrigues of Italian politics; we like anyone willing to take a stand against obvious injustice. What we like, in other words, are gente con le palle, people with balls. Despite the terminology, these people don't have to be men; on the contrary, as both Sara and Vanessa have shown, the people with the biggest balls are often women.

  What drove Sara crazy for the first several months of my imprisonment was that she didn't see anyone qualified or willing to show real guts and take charge. Her role models were people like Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two fearless prosecutors who paid with their lives in their unrelenting quest to root out Sicily's top Mafia leaders in the 1980s and early 1990s. Those were the sorts of people we needed, Sara felt. The person who should really be running my case was Giulia Bongiorno.

  Bongiorno was accomplished and articulate and knew criminal law backward and forward. She hardly lacked for courage; we would later nickname her a signora trentapalle, the lady with thirty balls. She was even a member of the same political party as Sara, so they had plenty of connections.

  The question was how to recruit her. Bongiorno was not only a full-time member of parliament, she was also about to assume the chairmanship of the parliamentary justice committee. The political risks she ran if she took on my case were considerable. Still, my family thought they should at least give her a try.