Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  Aviello believed me and respected me for refusing to bend. He wasn't a friend in the ordinary sense of the word; he would be sweet at times and then fly into theatrical fits of rage. But he did stick by me. After a while, he admitted that he'd been in touch with the Squadra Mobile in Perugia, and they had asked him to get me to say something incriminating. When he told them he'd had no luck, they asked him to sign a statement saying that I had talked about protecting Amanda anyway. He refused.

  I can't be sure if the police did pressure him as he described, because I have only his account to go on. But I do know he did one interesting thing seemingly designed to get the Squadra Mobile off his back once and for all: he came out with a manifestly ridiculous story that his brother Antonio had come home one night covered in blood and admitted he had killed Meredith Kercher.

  This story came as total surprise to me; Aviello and I never discussed it. I would have loved to thank him in person for the way he threw the police effort into confusion, but our relationship ended rather abruptly. I stopped visiting him as soon as I knew he had been in touch with the Squadra Mobile, because I understood that our continuing relationship was dangerous—to both of us. Soon after, he was transferred out of Terni; I can only assume this was because his presence there no longer served any useful purpose to the authorities. Much later, I sent him a present, an embroidered handkerchief, to express my gratitude.

  * * *

  On May 8, the prosecution hit a technical glitch. Manuela Comodi, Mignini's deputy, could not get her computer to play a video of the forensics team finding the bra clasp. The judge suggested a ten-minute break so Comodi could get things working, but she kept flailing. I stepped in. I was, after all, a computer expert, and it seemed only natural to take the DVD and format it correctly on one of my defense team's computers.

  I'd been looking forward to this day in court for some time be cause I was outraged by the way the clasp had been recovered a month and a half after the murder, and outraged too that Monica Napoleoni was in the room when the Polizia Scientifica made their discovery. She had no place being there; the only logical explanation, I felt, was that she knew about the clasp in advance and was directing traffic to make sure it was found.

  My thinking was, let them play the tape. And if it's thanks to me, it will bolster the impression that I'm unafraid of the evidence.

  Unfortunately, nobody else felt that way. Bongiorno was astounded that the prosecution had come to me for help at all; the whole thing struck her as inappropriate from start to finish. In the media, I was ridiculed for what was deemed to be extraordinary naivete, and I earned no credit whatsoever with the prosecution or the judge.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, my lawyers had another crack at Dr. Stefanoni and pried a lot more information out of her. Over two days of testimony, she acknowledged that the laboratory where she worked was not certified to do DNA analysis, although she claimed this made no difference to the quality of her results. She admitted that the amount of DNA recovered from both the bra clasp and the tip of the kitchen knife was extremely small—so small that she could not do a complete reading of my DNA. What she obtained is known in technical parlance as a "low copy number," a warning from the machine that the result may not be reliable.

  Stefanoni further acknowledged that the DNA she claimed to be picking up could not be associated with a specific time period, so there was no way of knowing for sure if my DNA—assuming it was there at all—became attached to the bra clasp on the night of the murder, or weeks later as a result of evidence gatherers moving back and forth in the apartment.

  Stefanoni was at a loss to explain how the bra clasp, which had been photographed on the floor near Meredith's body on November 2, could have found its way under a rug near Meredith's desk on December 18 without being contaminated more or less by definition. The phrase she came out with was "traslato." It made its way over there. But the words in Italian also carry the connotation of miracles and religious apparitions. When the Catholic Church talks about saints appearing in two places at once, or the house of' the Virgin. Mary flying from the Holy Land across the Adriatic, it uses the same term.

  One other strange thing: Amanda and I were on trial 1)r sexual assault, yet Stefanoni confirmed that a stain on Meredith's pillow case that looked a lot like semen was never tested in her lab. She made all sorts of excuses about how testing it might compromise tile lab's ability to use the pillowcase for other things. The semen might well be old, she added, the result of Meredith's consensual sexual relations with Giacomo Silenzi.

  This seemed extraordinary to my defense team, so much so that we asked for—and obtained—permission to inspect the pillowcase ourselves and soon discovered signs of semen on one of Guede's shoe prints. How could the prosecution have missed this? If the semen was fresh when Guede stepped on it, that meant it must have been produced on the night of the murder. We thought long and hard about demanding a full analysis, but we did not trust the Polizia Scientifica as far as we could spit and were deathly afraid they might choose to construe that the semen was mine. So we held back.

  As it was, Stefanoni's testimony was an unmitigated disaster for the prosecution, in this and every other respect. We could now make a compelling case for access to the data underlying her DNA results, because the results themselves raised so many questions. Over the next month, my consultants and lawyers prepared a brief' to present to the court, knowing that Judge Massei's response could determine the outcome of the entire trial. If the DNA evidence collapsed, the court would have nothing else to tic me to the crime scene.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, we had to worry about Amanda taking the stand. Her lawyers decided that the best way to refute the stories about her wayward personality was to have the court take a good, hard look at her up close. But my lawyers were deeply concerned she would put her foot in her mouth, in ways that might prove enduringly harmful to both of us. If she deviated even one iota from the version of events we now broadly agreed on, it could mean a life sentence for both of us.

  In fact, she performed magnificently. Judge Massei let Patrick's bulldog lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, have at her first, and Pacelli was so aggressive that Amanda's lawyers complained he was grilling her like the Inquisition. Pacelli wasted no time in raising the coerced statements Amanda had made during her long night in the Questura--statements the prosecution was barred from using, but he, as a civil lawyer suing for damages, was authorized to bring up.

  It could have been a bloodbath, but Amanda pushed back, explaining calmly how she had been pressured both verbally and physically during her interrogation, repeatedly told she was a "stupid liar" and given respite only after she tentatively agreed, at the police officers' suggestion, that Patrick could have been responsible for the murder.

  "Under pressure," she said, "I imagined lots of different things . . . including the suggestion that she [Meredith] had been raped."

  "Was it the police who suggested that you say this?" Pacelli asked.

  "Yes."

  "And to make you say these things, they beat you?"

  "Yes."

  Amanda proved equally tenacious with Mignini and Comodi, and they responded by filing a new charge against her slandering the police—based on her own sworn testimony. This characteristically nasty maneuver demonstrated, to me, that she'd given diem nothing else to work with.

  I was proud of her. She was soberly dressed, with her hair in a ponytail, spoke clearly and simply (mostly through an interpreter), and held her ground despite being obviously tense and exhausted, with black rings around her eyes. Even the newspapers gave her credit for her assured, unflappable tone.

  A fair court, I felt, couldn't help believing her. But we didn't know, yet, how fair Judge Massei intended to be.

  * * *

  I lived through the trial in constant anxiety. Soon after it began, I developed such acute digestive problems it was difficult to keep anything down. I lost weight steadily until I was positively skeletal. '1 he d
octors prescribed all sorts of things—simethicone (usually given to colicky infants), laxatives, anti-flatulence pills—but nothing worked until I hit upon another baby product, soluble barley. It was the only thing that reliably agreed with me.

  My life in prison had no consistency because of the constant transports to and from Perugia. When I got there, I would often gin(' excrement and old scraps of food embedded in the cell floor, which required hours to remove. I tried to study, but the second round of exams I took in Verona was simply beyond me and I failed them all. If I couldn't find a professor to help me, I could not continue.

  I also tried to stay focused on the trial itself. But I found myself' lapsing into depression, anger, and sheer consternation at my situation. How much longer would all this go on? It became ever harder to see it ending at all.

  "0 Almighty God," I scribbled in my journal one day, "thank You for putting me to the test every day and, as proof of Your omnipotence, sending me idiots who don't know what they are doing or what they are saying, to remind me I am just a miserable human being compared with You. Sooner or later they will pay for their misdeeds and for the suffering they have caused. May Your name be praised. Amen."

  For several months from the end of 2008 to the spring of 2009, those of us in the protected section enjoyed several hours of relative freedom each day—"office hours," as they were called—when our cell doors were left open and we could roam the corridors at will. That privilege came to an abrupt end after a fight broke out between Ahmed, the Lebanese who didn't like me, and a Southern Italian wife-beater named Beeped Fontanelli. There were rumors that Beppe had been talking to the prison authorities—presumably about the rest of us—in a bid to get his sentence reduced. When Ahmed found out, he stormed into Beppe's cell and lashed out. They'd both been drinking the section's homemade hooch, which they called "vodka."

  It wasn't pretty; I heard the whole thing from three or four cells away. Beppe was hit in the head with a gas bottle and screamed, "Fate tutti schifo!" You're all disgusting! Then he broke Ahmed's nose, grabbed his finger, and tore off the tip with his teeth.

  I did my best to stay calm. This was a gangland vendetta, I rationalized, and had nothing to do with me.

  Having the cell doors closed most of the day certainly made the section feel safer, even if it was more claustrophobic. And I had some protective friends. Some time before the fight, I had shared a cell with another mafioso, a Neapolitan drug trafficker 1 knew just as Gennaro. He made me cakes and told stories of' his life on the streets. I also struck up a friendship with a gangster named Vittorio Vespa, who sang Neapolitan songs through my keyhole. "Ask song," he would say, "and I'll sing it." Vespa would then sing what he wanted regardless, and we would both laugh.

  These weren't bad people to have looking out for me.

  One solace was a new passion I discovered for painting; I threw myself into it and spent weeks at a time working on reproductions of famous artworks or copies of Japanese manga images. It was a great way to empty my mind of all its troubles and focus on something creative.

  Another solace was a blossoming correspondence with Amanda. Not only did we smile at each other in court, we sent each other music and magazines and books—which the prison authorities permitted long as they were all paid for—and exchanged frequent letters. It was a way for each of us to break the tension of the trial. Amanda wrote to me about all sorts of mundane things, everything from the new music she was discovering to her efforts to be better at "girly" things and turn out more formally in court. She also let me know that she had my back, just as I had hers. Io lo so che non sono sola, anche quando sono sola, she wrote in Italian at the end of one letter. I know I'm not alone, even when I'm alone. And then her familiar sign-off: Ti voglio bene. I love you.

  I liked hearing from her so much I asked for permission to phone her from time to time. My lawyers thought this was a terrible idea, as the line was bound to be tapped and anything we said could be used against us in ways we might not even be able to imagine. My family was similarly unimpressed. "Sei coglione!" my sister, Vanessa, railed at me. You're an idiot!

  The prison authorities granted my request, but for the phone calls to happen, Amanda needed to give her consent too. She never did; most likely she was was listening to her lawyers a little more carefully than I was listening to mine.

  * * *

  At the end of July, just before a month long summer vacation, the court granted our request to see Dr. Stefanoni's underlying data. When we reconvened in September, my consultants came out swinging. Not only had the DNA test on the kitchen knife come back "too low," Dr. Stefanoni had overridden the machine to force it to come up with a result on a single, irreproducible sample. Recognized scientific protocols should have told her that no reliable result was possible.

  The test on the bra clasp, meanwhile, had also come back "too low" and presented an incomplete genetic profile, meaning that the identification of my DNA was far from confirmed. Adriano Tagliabracci, the specialist we hired from the University of Le Marche in Ancona (whose DNA lab is, unlike Stefanoni's, certified by the International Society for Forensic Genetics), told the court the identification she obtained was common to three to four people out of every thousand. So in Perugia, a city of 160,000, the identification—even assuming it was not compromised by contamination at the scene—would potentially apply to five or six hundred people.

  The prosecution, in response, accused Dr. Tagliabracci of trying to smear the good name of government crime-lab workers so courts would stop using them and turn to private labs like his instead. It was a curious argument. They also produced the kitchen knife itself, parading it around the courtroom like a holy relic inside a clear plastic box, stamped HANDLE WITH CARE in English for the benefit for the foreign press. They did not mention, of course, that the way the knife had originally traveled from my kitchen to the Polizia Scientifica lab in Rome broke recognized chain-of-custody rules. As the prosecution's own paperwork showed, it was not put in a sealed evidence bag but was placed in an envelope and mailed inside an ordinary box.

  The defense found plenty of other problems with the knife. One of Amanda's expert witnesses, Carlo Torre, explained that it was way too long to be the murder weapon. Meredith's skin around the wound showed signs of bruising, suggesting that whatever knife was used was plunged all the way in. The length of the wound was eight centimeters, far shorter than the seventeen-centimeter blade on my kitchen knife. Still, the government insisted the knife was "not incompatible" with the murder weapon.

  Amanda's lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, asked the government's own expert witness, Giancarlo Umani Ronchi, just how loose the definition of "not incompatible" was. "Aren't you saying, Professor, that any knife with the same basic characteristics, which is to say with a single blade that cuts on one side only, would meet the same standard of 'non-incompatibility'?"

  Umani Ronchi replied, "Basically, yes."

  Umani Ronchi also drew inadvertent attention to the problem of Meredith's last meal and the time of death when he argued that the coroner might have made a mistake during the autopsy. Perhaps the reason no food was found in Meredith's upper intestine, he said, was that Dr. Lalli, the coroner, forgot to place a tie at either end of the duodenum, allowing whatever food was inside to slip down to Meredith's lower intestinal tract before it could he detected. 11c argument was dubious to begin with because human intestines are long and convoluted and it is difficult to see how half-digested food could simply slip through. But the argument was also wrong: video of the autopsy showed Dr. Lalli had in fact tied each end of the upper intestine, just as Umani Ronchi said he should have.

  By early October, we were ready to petition the court for an independent analysis of the prosecution's most important data: the DNA evidence, the autopsy results including the estimated time of death, and the computer analysis that had burned through three computers and potentially compromised a fourth. We didn't bother to ask for a review of the footprint analysis by Rinaldi and Bo
emia because we had demonstrated some elementary measuring errors and felt confident that would suffice. But we did ask for tests on Nara Capezzali's double-glazed windows to settle once and for all the question of whether she could have heard Meredith screaming.

  It was all for naught. After two hours of deliberation, Judge Massei emerged from his chambers and decided he had enough information already. "The consultants [for each side] have brought an abundance of data to the court's attention, which makes further analysis unnecessary," he said in his written ruling.

  It was perhaps the most shocking moment of the trial. The court was not interested in digging further into the scientific truth behind Stefanoni's DNA tests, or the rest of the evidence we were contesting. Massei said he was content to have the arguments on either side and simply evaluate them himself. What that meant, in effect, was that he was calling an abrupt cease-fire in the war of attrition we were successfully waging against the prosecution's case.

  More bluntly, Massei had taken Mignini's side, and we were going down.

  * * *

  Not everyone wanted to recognize the gravity of the situation away. Amanda, for one, remained optimistic. "It's only one part of the battle," she told me as we walked out of the hearing. "We hive so much more in our favor." Most of our lawyers sought to put a similarly positive spin on things.