Amanda started taking deep breaths and gulping, as though holding back the urge to yell for joy. Her mother and stepfather wept openly with relief. I was beaming from ear to ear; I couldn't quite believe I was hearing right. I saw the happiness on the faces of my family and thought, Finally, we are turning a corner. My heart was in my throat.
My father seemed to be keeping his composure, but he too was awash with emotion. As he and Mara left the courtroom, Mara overheard Manuela Comodi in the next room shouting Incompetenti at nobody in particular. Then, as they stepped into the elevator and the doors closed behind them, Papa burst into tears—something he'd done maybe half a dozen times in his life. He told me later he'd been close to crying a week earlier when Zanetti made his statement about the court starting from scratch. Now he let it all out; three years of anxiety and consternation and constant defeat finally countered by some real glimmer of hope. When he stepped out of the elevator, he was too undone to face the television cameras and, uncharacteristically, marched away without comment.
It wasn't over yet, of course. We still had to go through the appeals trial, piece by painstaking piece. But we knew now that we were going to get a fair hearing. Finally.
* * *
Back in the prison library, Carlo had no doubts: I was on my way out. "You know," he said, "if the independent analysis goes well and you are released, you'll have to let go of the whole Amanda thing. There's no point thinking about her. You'll just need to move on.
I said he'd misunderstood. I wasn't interested in getting back together with her. I was just allowing myself to imagine us set free; maybe I would get a chance to see her face-to-face before she kit the country. We'd gone through a lot together, and the only times we'd set eyes on each other in the past three years had been in court.
"Come on," Carlo said, "you're still crazy about her.
"No, I'm not."
"You are."
"No, I'm not," I insisted. "Let's get back to work."
* * *
It took the court-appointed DNA analysts, Stefano Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, six months to reach any definitive conclusions, in part because they had to battle as hard as we did to see the raw data from Dr. Stefanoni's original tests. The court issued an order to produce the data, which Stefanoni contested, saying the extra information would add nothing of significance. Not until May 2011 did her office finally exhaust the legal process, raise a white flag, and hand everything over.
In the meantime, Conti and Vecchiotti had an opportunity to analyze my kitchen knife—something our experts had been denied. Not only did they confirm there was no blood on the blade, they also discovered traces of rye starch, presumably from bread Amanda or I had cut. Starch absorbs blood, so the discovery was a huge point in our favor: even if we'd scrubbed the knife clean with bleach, as the prosecution imagined, the residual starch would have given the game away. Instead, it demonstrated what we already knew: that the knife had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder.
We presented other exculpatory evidence, none more satisfying than the research Luca Maori's office had done to destroy Antonio Curatolo's credibility as a witness. Curatolo was the street bum in Piazza Grimana on whom the prosecution had relied to place Amanda and me outside in the late evening of November 1. He had remembered, though, that it was Halloween, with people in costumes and masks and students massing around buses laid on specially to take them to and from the city's discotheques. November 1 was not Halloween; it had been the night before. We called the owners of several bus companies and proved conclusively that they had provided no service on the night of the murder because it was a holiday and the discos were closed. If Curatolo had seen us on October 31, which we doubted, it proved nothing.
When Curatolo took the stand in late March, he more or less self-destructed. Many of his most damaging answers weren't in response to cross-examination by my lawyers; he did it all himself. Mignini asked when Halloween was, and he responded, "It must be the first or second of November, the day we celebrate the dead." If Mignini was embarrassed by that, he didn't show it.
Moments later, Judge Zanetti asked how Curatolo ended up on the streets, and he said it was by choice. He was an anarchist. "Then I read the Bible," he added, "and I became a Christian anarchist." The streets, he explained, were a way to follow the example of Jesus.
Was he still on the streets? No, he was living at "home." Giulia Bongiorno, chiming in between the other lawyers and judges, got him to admit that "home" was in fact a prison, and that he had a lengthy criminal record for drug-related offenses.
Zanetti asked if Curatolo had been using heroin at the time of Meredith's murder. He admitted he had, but added, "I'd like to point out that heroin is not a hallucinogen."
This was the prosecution's star witness? One off the things Maori's staff discovered was that Curatolo had testified in at least two other recent murder trials in Perugia. Clearly, the prosecutor's office found him useful, despite the obvious strikes against him. We had to wonder, was he some kind of informant? Had he been promised a deal on his sentence in exchange for his testimony? After this performance it didn't matter. Judge Hellmann was so flabbergasted by the hallucinogen answer he sent Curatolo packing, and he never troubled us again.
* * *
The next person to self-destruct, at least partially, was Mignini himself. In May he gave an interview to a British journalist named Bob Graham and appeared to be taken by surprise when Graham put him on the spot about how the crime took place.
Was it possible, Graham asked, that I was not involved at all? (The interview, conducted through an interpreter, was recorded and later transcribed.) Yes, Mignini responded after some hesitation, that was a theoretical possibility, except that Curatolo—Mignini was still relying on Curatolo—had placed Amanda and me together on the night of the murder. Amanda, for Mignini, was the principal instigator of the murder; either Amanda on her own, or Amanda and Guede together.
Why was the sperm on the pillowcase never tested for DNA? "We had to make a choice," Mignini answered lamely. "We couldn't analyze everything."
Then Graham moved in for the kill. He said he had spoken to numerous forensic experts, veterans of Scotland Yard and the FBI, and they agreed it was a physical impossibility that someone involved in the murder could have kilt no trace in Meredith's room.
"In that room, there isn't a single trace of Amanda," Graham noted. How come?
"But there is a trace," Mignini said. "There's the bra clasp with Sollecito's DNA."
But what about Amanda?
"The two of them say they were together—there's a witness who saw them together. So Sollecito was there. Therefore Amanda was
there."
This was extraordinary, circular logic. It was a theoretical possibility, according to Mignini, that I wasn't involved, but the only proof that Amanda, the "main instigator," was at the scene was a controversial biological trace attributable to me!
Graham did not let up the pressure. "That's not good enough. Where's Amanda in all this?"
"Amanda is there because of the knife."
"But you didn't find the knife in the room."
"Listen, listen . ." Mignini was clearly scrambling. "I think there probably were traces but the police couldn't see them. . . . The police didn't analyze all the traces they found. They made choices."
Graham went back to his experts. According to them, he said, standard procedure in such cases is to search exhaustively for traces of the most likely suspects. If at first those traces don't materialize, you go back in and keep looking. "So we're left with two possibilities," Graham said. "Either she wasn't there, or the analysis was not done properly. It has to be one or the other."
Mignini was once again flustered. He cast doubt on the reliability of Graham's experts. But he also raised a further, extraordinary possibility. "Theoretically, Amanda could have instigated the crime. . . . Someone could have instigated the crime standing in the next room." He then said my name several times as if to sug
gest—though he did not say so explicitly—that I was her robot and murdered Meredith on her instructions. Somehow, according to Mignini, this related to the version Amanda had been forced to give in the Questura when she said Patrick had murdered Meredith and she was in her bedroom blocking her ears.
My family and I read this with our jaws hanging open. Would Mignini dare raise this new theory of the crime in court? We were half hoping so because it was so inherently absurd. But Mignini did not dwell on it and changed the subject as soon as Graham allowed him to.
Mignini preferred to focus on what he said were indications or our presence outside Meredith's room: footprints, shoe prints, bloodstains. Our experts had countered a lot of these already; the shoe prints and all the footprints, except those made by Amanda after her shower, were Guede's. And we would soon learn that the footprints supposedly made in blood something Mignini had argued for and Judge Massei had accepted—were no such thing. The most Patrizia Stefanoni had said on the stand was that she hadn't tested the prints for traces of blood. But even this was not true.
As her own documentation now showed, she had tested the prints for blood, and the tests came back negative.
* * *
Sometime that spring, I made friends with a Neapolitan named Corrado, a former policeman now in solitary confinement for raping a prostitute. He reached out to me, for some reason, and I saw him on the exercise yard for games of soccer during the few hours a day when he was not forced to he alone. In one game, Corrado got hurt; he argued furiously with some of the other players about who was to blame and filed a formal complaint.
The others found this unforgivable and beat the crap out of him the next time they saw him. The guards rushed over, and again Corrado's fellow soccer players were written up.
I wasn't involved, but I got an earful from both sides and found myself caught awkwardly in the middle. One day, out on the yard, the old Neapolitan gangster Vittorio Vespa approached me and explained that a group of Neapolitans and Tunisians were planning to stab Corrado as we climbed the steps back up to our cells after the game. "Whatever you see on the steps," Mosca advised, "keep walking. Don't look at what is happening."
I decided to tip off Corrado, which I did as discreetly as I could. As soon as the game was over, he ran up the stairs at full speed, as I had suggested, and escaped. The men who were supposed to stab him were confronted by some of their fellow prisoners and beaten up as punishment for failing to fulfill their mission.
Fortunately, nobody found out what I had done. And Corrado never showed his face on the exercise yard again.
* * *
At the end of June, the defense teams made an all-out effort to discredit one of the stranger witnesses who had produced testimony against us: Rudy Guede. I say "produced testimony" because he had not, to this point, actually testified in court. Rather, he had change his version of the murder several times, making no mention at first of Amanda or me, and then belatedly "confirming," in a letter to Mignini, that we were the culprits.
My lawyers had never been given a chance to cross-examine him. So they could not demonstrate, for example, that when he chatted with his friend, Giacomo Benedetti, in the days before his arrest, he had said categorically that Amanda had nothing to do with Meredith's death. Nor had they had a chance to correct the public perception—as reported in the newspapers—that Guede had "identified" me as a culprit as early as April 2008, just before our hearing before the Corte di Cassazione. (The reports, as we learned once we were shown the official documentation, were flat-out wrong.) Now a number of' Guede's cellmates had come forward in the wake of our lower-court conviction and said he had confessed parts of the murder to them. We had a handful on the witness stand ready to repeat their stories.
This was one of the tensest episodes in our whole legal saga. One of the witnesses Amanda's lawyers wanted to question was Luciano Aviello, the gangster who had befriended me in prison and later blamed the murder on his own brother. He had gone on to spend time with Guede in a prison in Viterbo. Giulia Bongiorno was vehemently opposed to calling him because she didn't believe the story about his brother and didn't expect the court to either; his testimony risked casting a shadow on the credibility of the other witnesses. She exchanged words with Amanda's lead counsel, Carlo Dalla Vedova, but to no avail. Dalla Vedova appeared to think that any testimony blaming someone other than his client was worth having in the trial record. And so Aviello appeared.
The prosecution went into overdrive to stop any of the witnesses talking. When the first one was called—his name was Mario Alessi—he began to describe how he had held lengthy discussions of the crime with Guede, only to be swiftly interrupted by the lead appeals prosecutor (not Mignini, who remained actively involved, but Giancarlo Costagliola). In a spectacular intervention, Costagliola informed Alessi that, based on just the start of his testimony, he was now under investigation for lying.
Alessi asked for a minute or two to consult with his lawyers, at which point he fell entirely silent. The next witness, Aviello, was similarly told he was under investigation, in his case for slandering his brother. Clearly the prosecution intended to cow each of the witnesses by any means at their disposal.
Then Judge Hellmann stepped in and issued an order not only insisting that the witnesses be brought back in, but also stipulating that they would not be granted the usual right to remain silent. They had come to testify, Hellmann insisted, and he wanted to hear what they had to say. As long as they were in his courtroom, they would enjoy a modicum of protection.
This was excellent news, not because these witnesses were necessarily all that reliable, but because they indicated that Guede was completely unreliable. They also added alternative explanations for parts of the case that had either gone unexamined or had simply been blamed on us. Most useful in this regard was Alessi, who said Guede had talked about masturbating over Meredith's body during the fatal attack. If anyone wanted an explanation of the semen stain on the pillowcase, this could be it.
A little over a week later, Guede himself took the stand. He was invited to offer specific rebuttals to the prison-house witnesses' testimony, but he refused. Mignini revealed the existence of a letter Guede had written in response to Alessi and the others, and invited Guede to read it to the court. He said he had trouble deciphering it. So, farcically, Mignini read it himself. The letter was full of rhetorical flourishes about "blasphemous insinuations" and "scurrilous gossip," as well as acrobatic uses of the subjunctive and other verbal sophistications that seemed entirely beyond a person like Rudy Guede. We could prove nothing, but our impression was that Guede had considerable qualms about saying, under oath and in his own voice, that the prison witnesses were lying.
We would have much preferred him to speak up. Amanda and I were particularly incensed that Guede refused to answer questions directly addressing his role in the murder. Somebody needed to rebut his most recent contention that we'd all plotted the murder together. So Amanda and I both rose and gave impromptu statements.
Amanda went first. "The only times that Rudy Guede, Raffaele, and I have been together in the same place," she said, "is in a courtroom." The prosecutors glowered; this was one of the few points that Judge Massei had conceded to us, and raising it again was clearly effective. I mentioned the fact—also incontrovertibly in our favor—that Guede had not originally incriminated either of us. "How am I supposed to defend myself [from Guede's accusations]," I added, "if he won't answer any questions?"
Honestly, I didn't even want to think about Guede. But I wasn't about to let him spread lies so he could pin his murder on Amanda and me. Our indignation did not go unnoticed.
* * *
Two days later, Conti and Vecchiotti issued their report. It was even better than we could have hoped. Not only was there no trace of blood on the kitchen knife, they wrote, but the way in which Stefanoni and her colleagues had examined the tip for traces of Meredith's DNA violated international protocols for "low copy number" DNA testing and cou
ld not be regarded as reliable. 'I hey were equally scathing about the bra clasp: they cited multiple reasons why the evidence might have been contaminated before it was analyzed and said there were at least three Y chromosomes on the clasp, not just the one we knew about, pointing to any number of possible male subjects besides me.
We had to wait almost a month before Conti and Vecchiotti could be brought into court to present their results in person, and when they did, it was devastating to the prosecution. They took turns reading out chunks of testimony from the transcripts of previous hearings and overlaid them with extracts of the police's own video footage, which they projected in the courtroom. The disconnect was so stark that at times it made people laugh out loud. While Stefanoni, Finzi, and others were quoted giving assurances that they used clean gloves at all times and observed all the appropriate protocols, the images gave a very different impression of police officials coming and going without gloves, without face masks, sometimes without protective clothing of any kind.
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