Waiting to Be Heard

by Amanda Knox

  As with everyone who’d phoned, I wanted Dolly to believe that I had my life under control. I was still trying to believe it myself.

  In retrospect I understand that Dolly had a hunch I was headed for a train wreck—­that in keeping me awake, calling me back in, the police were interested in me as more than just a “person informed of the facts.” I didn’t see these things as I should have, as foreshadowing, or that Dolly’s advice was now my last chance to alter the course of coming events. I just viewed her suggestions as moral support, like other calls I was getting from my family and friends.

  She said, “You’re a strong girl. I love you. Your mom’s going to be there tomorrow, so stay tough.”

  When class ended I headed back toward Raffaele’s apartment. As I walked through Piazza Grimana, I saw Patrick standing in a crowd of students and journalists in front of the University for Foreigners administration building. He kissed me hello on both cheeks. “Do you want to talk to some BBC reporters?” he asked. “They’re looking for English-­speaking students to interview.”

  I said, “I can’t. The police have told me not to talk to anyone about the case.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put you in a difficult position,” he said.

  “That’s okay. But Patrick . . .” I hesitated. “I’ve needed to call you. I don’t think I can work at Le Chic anymore. I’m too afraid to go out by myself at night now. I keep looking behind me to see if I’m being followed. And I feel like someone is lurking behind every building, watching me.”

  “No problem. I completely understand. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Thank you.”

  We kissed again on each cheek. “Ciao,” I said.

  That afternoon at Raffaele’s, I got a text from one of Meredith’s friends—­a student from Poland—­telling me about a candlelight memorial ser­vice for Meredith that night. Everyone was supposed to meet downtown, on Corso Vannucci, at 8 P.M. and walk in a procession to the Duomo. I kept wondering about what I should do. I wanted to be there but couldn’t decide if it was a good idea for me to go to such a public event. I was sure the ­people I ran into would ask me what I knew about the murder. In the end my decision was made for me—­Raffaele had somewhere else to be, and I wouldn’t have considered going alone. It didn’t occur to me that ­people would later read my absence as another indication of guilt.

  At around 9 P.M. Raffaele and I went to a neighbor’s apartment for a late dinner. Miserable and unable to sit still, I plucked absentmindedly at his friend’s ukulele, propped on a shelf in the living room. At about ten o’clock, while we were eating, Raffaele’s phone rang. “Pronto,” Raffaele said, picking up.

  It was the police saying they needed him to come to the questura immediately. Raffaele and I had the same thought: This late? Not again.

  Raffaele said, “We’re just eating dinner. Would you mind if I finished first?”

  That was a bad idea, too.

  While we cleared the table, Raffaele and I chatted quickly about what I should do while he was at the police station. I was terrified to be alone, even at his place, and uneasy about hanging out with someone I didn’t know. I could quickly organize myself to stay overnight with Laura or Filomena, but that seemed so complicated—­and unnecessary. Tomorrow, when my mom arrived, this wouldn’t be a question we’d have to discuss.

  “I’m sure it’s going to be quick,” Raffaele said.

  I said, “I’ll just come with you.”

  Did the police know I’d show up, or were they purposefully separating Raffaele and me? When we got there they said I couldn’t come inside, that I’d have to wait for Raffaele in the car. I begged them to change their minds. I said, “I’m afraid to be by myself in the dark.”

  They gave me a chair outside the waiting room, by the elevator. I’d been doing drills in my grammar workbook for a few minutes when a silver-­haired police officer—­I never learned his name—­came and sat next to me. He said, “As long as you’re here, do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

  I was still clueless, still thinking I was helping the police, still unable or unwilling to recognize that I was a suspect. But as the next hours unfolded, I slowly came to understand that the police were trying to get something out of me, that they wouldn’t stop until they had it.

  To the unnamed police officer, I said, “Okay, but I’ve told you everything I know. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Why don’t you keep talking about the ­people who’ve been in your house—­especially men?” he suggested.

  I’d done this so many times in the questura I felt as if I could dial it in. And finally someone there seemed nice. “Okay,” I said, starting in. “There are the guys who live downstairs.”

  As I was running through the list of male callers at No. 7, Via della Pergola, I suddenly remembered Rudy Guede for the first time. I’d met him only briefly. I said, “Oh, and there’s this guy—­I don’t know his name or his number—­all I know is that he plays basketball with the guys downstairs. They introduced Meredith and me to him in Piazza IV Novembre. We all walked to the villa together, and then Meredith and I went to their apartment for a few minutes.”

  While we talked, I got up to stretch. I’d been sitting hunched over a long time. I touched my toes, flexed my quads, extended my arms overhead.

  He said, “You seem really flexible.”

  I replied, “I used to do a lot of yoga.”

  He said, “Can you show me? What else can you do?”

  I took a few steps toward the elevator and did a split. It felt good to know I still could.

  While I was on the floor, legs splayed, the elevator doors opened. Rita Ficarra, the cop who had reprimanded Raffaele and me about kissing the day before, stepped out.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice full of contempt.

  I stood up and returned to my chair. “Waiting,” I said.

  The silver-­haired officer said, “I was just asking Amanda some questions.”

  Ficarra said, “If that’s the case, we need to put it on the record.”

  She led me through the waiting room and into the same office with the two desks where I’d spent so much time. As we were walking, she looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “You said you guys don’t smoke marijuana. Are you sure you’re being honest?”

  “I’m really sorry I said that.” I grimaced. “I was afraid to tell you that all of us smoked marijuana occasionally, including Meredith. We’d sometimes pass a joint around when we were chilling out with the guys or with Filomena and Laura. But Meredith and I never bought any pot; we didn’t know any drug dealers.”

  She shut the door and signaled for me to sit down on a metal folding chair, taking the seat across the desk from me. The silver-­haired officer pulled up a chair next to me, effectively cutting the room in half. The light was bright. The walls were blank. I had nowhere to look but at the police. They said, “We’re going to call in an interpreter.”

  While we waited for the interpreter to arrive, they said, “Tell us more about the last time you saw Meredith.”

  I did.

  Then they said, “Okay, minute by minute, we want you to tell us what happened.”

  I still thought they were using me to find out more information about Meredith—­her habits, whom she knew, who could possibly have had a motive to kill her. I started trying to describe the exact time I saw Meredith leave the house. I said, “I think it was around two P.M.—­one or two. I’m not sure which. I don’t wear a watch, and the time didn’t matter—­it was a holiday. But I know it was after lunch.”

  Then the questions shifted. They asked, “When did you leave your house?”

  At first, when they started questioning me about what I did, I thought they were just trying to test whether I was telling the truth—­maybe because I’d lied about our marijuana use.

>   I said, “Before dinner—­four-­ish maybe.”

  They said, “Are you sure it was four-­ish? Was it four o’clock or five o’clock? You didn’t see the time?”

  “No. Then we went to Raffaele’s place.”

  “How long it did it take you to get there?”

  “I don’t know—­a ­couple of minutes. He doesn’t live far away.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Nothing happened. We had dinner; we watched a movie; we smoked a joint; we had sex; we went to bed.”

  “Are you positive? Nothing else?”

  “Well, I got a text message from my boss telling me I didn’t have to work that night.”

  “What time did that happen?”

  “I think around eight P.M.—­maybe. Maybe it was before then.” I was thinking, It had to be before I’d normally go to work. “Maybe seven or eight?”

  That wasn’t good enough for them.

  They kept asking me for exact times, and because I couldn’t remember what had happened from 7 P.M. to 8 P.M. and 8 P.M. to 9 P.M. they made it seem as if my memory were wrong. I started second-­guessing myself. Raffaele and I had done some variation of watching a movie, cooking dinner, reading Harry Potter, smoking a joint, and having sex every night for the past week. Suddenly it all ran together so that I couldn’t remember what time we’d done what on Thursday, November 1. I kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  I was afraid to say that I didn’t know the difference between 7 P.M. or 8 P.M., and I was beginning to feel panicky because they were demanding that I know. My heart was hammering, my thoughts were scrambled, and the pressure on the sides of my head made it feel as if my skull were going to split apart. I couldn’t think. Suddenly, in trying to distinguish between this time or that time, this sequence of events or that one, I started forgetting everything. My mind was spinning. I felt as if I were going totally blank.

  “Which was it?”

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t remember.”

  Ficarra thrust her hand out aggressively and insisted, “Let me see your cell phone.”

  I handed it to her. As they looked through it, they kept pounding me with questions. “What movie did you watch?”

  “Amélie.”

  “How long is that movie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you watch it all the way through?”

  “Well, we paused it at some point, because we noticed that the sink was leaking.”

  “But you said you’d had dinner before that.”

  “I guess you’re right. I think the sink leaked before we watched the movie, but then I remember pausing it.”

  “Why did you pause it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why? Why? What time?”

  “I don’t remember!” I said it forcefully, trying to shake them off, but it didn’t work. They were peppering me relentlessly. The questions seemed simple, but I didn’t have the answers. And the more they asked, the more I lost my bearings. I was getting hot, looking around for air. I was having my period, and I could feel myself bleeding into my underwear. “I need to use the bathroom,” I said. “I have a feminine issue.”

  “Not right now,” they said. “Did you pause the movie before dinner or after?”

  “I think it was after we had dinner, but now that I think about it, it seemed pretty late when we had dinner.”

  “Why can’t you remember? Did you have dinner before or after the movie?”

  “You’re freaking me out,” I yelled. “I can’t think when I’m freaked out. It just seemed late when we ate.”

  By now their tone was shrill. “Why can’t you just tell us? Why can’t you remember?”

  I could tell they thought I was lying. I said, “I’m sorry, it’s hard to remember, and I’m really tired. There are some nights we had dinner earlier and some nights later. It seemed late to me, but I don’t remember what time it was.”

  I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept but a few hours in the past four days, and the back-­and-­forth to the police station—­on top of the shock I felt over Meredith—­had left me empty. I didn’t know I could say, “We need to stop, because I’m too tired.” I was ashamed that I couldn’t answer their questions, that I was failing. I didn’t know what to do to make it better. I wanted so badly to appease them so they would go away.

  The interpreter, a woman in her forties, arrived at about 12:30 A.M. It’s inconceivable to me now that all the questioning up to that point had been in Italian. For a ­couple of hours I’d done my best to hang in there, to grasp what they were saying. I kept saying, “Okay, I understand.” I was always mortified when I had to admit that my Italian wasn’t up to speed.

  The truth is that although I could guess what they meant, this was another case of my false bravado. By that time, my Italian was fine for exchanging pleasantries over a cup of tea. But in no credible way was it strong enough, after only six weeks in Italy, for me to be defending myself against accusations of murder.

  The interpreter sat down behind me. She was irritated and impatient, as if I were the one who had rousted her from bed in the middle of the night.

  The silver-­haired cop and Ficarra were in the tiny room almost nonstop. When they left, it wasn’t for long, and other cops came in to take their place. Sometimes a crowd of ­people closed in on me. The room was becoming uninhabitable for me. I really had to use the bathroom, to take care of my period, but now I was too afraid to ask.

  Just then a cop—­Monica Napoleoni, who had been so abrupt with me about the poop and the mop at the villa—­opened the door. “Raffaele says you left his apartment on Thursday night,” she said almost gleefully. “He says that you asked him to lie for you. He’s taken away your alibi.”

  My jaw dropped. I was dumbfounded, devastated. What? I couldn’t believe that Raffaele, the one person in Italy whom I’d trusted completely, had turned against me. How could he say that when it wasn’t true? We’d been together all night. Now it was just me against the police, my word against theirs. I had nothing left.

  “Where did you go? Who did you text?” Ficarra asked, sneering at me.

  “I don’t remember texting anyone.”

  They grabbed my cell phone up off the desk and scrolled quickly through its history.

  “You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”

  “My boss at Le Chic.”

  “What about his text message? What time did you receive that?”

  “I don’t know. You have my phone,” I said defiantly, trying to combat hostility with hostility. I didn’t remember that I’d deleted Patrick’s message.

  They said, “Why did you delete Patrick’s message? The text you have says you were going to meet Patrick.”

  “What message?” I asked, bewildered. I didn’t remember texting Patrick a return message.

  “This one!” said an officer, thrusting the phone in my face and withdrawing it before I could even look. “Stop lying! Who’s Patrick? What’s he like?”

  “He’s about this tall,” I said, gesturing, “with braids.”

  “Did he know Meredith?”

  “Yes, she came to the bar.”

  “Did he like her?”

  “Yes, he liked Meredith. He was nice to her, and they got along.”

  “Did he think Meredith was pretty?”

  “Well, Meredith was pretty. I’m sure he thought she was pretty.”

  “When did you leave to meet Patrick?”

  “I didn’t meet Patrick. I stayed in.”

  “No, you didn’t. This message says you were going to meet him.”

  “No. No, it doesn’t.”

  They read the message aloud: “Certo ci vediamo più tardi buona serata!”—­“Okay, see you later, have a good evening!”

  “
That means ‘we’re going to see each other,’ ” they said, translating the Ci vediamo for me. “You said, ‘See you later.’ Why did you go see him? ”

  “I didn’t see him!” I shouted. “In English, ‘see you later’ means good-­bye. It doesn’t mean we’re going to see each other now. It means see you eventually.”

  In my beginner’s Italian, I had had no idea that I’d used the wrong phrase in my text to Patrick—­the one that means you’re going to see someone. I’d merely translated it literally from the English.

  The interpreter balked: “You’re a liar.”

  “No, I’m not! I never left Raffaele’s apartment.”

  The detectives said, “You did leave. Raffaele said you left. You said you were meeting Patrick.”

  How could I make them believe that I’d been at Raffaele’s all night? My protests seemed so flimsy, especially when they ganged up on me. I couldn’t make them believe anything.

  I said, “I didn’t leave.”

  “Who did you meet up with? Who are you protecting? Why are you lying? Who’s this person? Who’s Patrick?”

  The questions wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t think. And even when it didn’t seem possible, the pressure kept building.

  I said, “Patrick is my boss.”

  The interpreter offered a solution, “Once, when I had an accident, I didn’t remember it. I had a broken leg and it was traumatizing and I woke up afterward and didn’t remember it. Maybe you just don’t remember. Maybe that’s why you can’t remember times really well.”

  For a moment, she sounded almost kind.

  But I said, “No, I’m not traumatized.”

  Another cop picked up the same language. He said, “Maybe you’re traumatized by what you saw. Maybe you don’t remember.”

  Everyone was yelling, and I was yelling back. I shouted, “I don’t understand what the fuck is happening right now!”

  A beefy cop with a crew cut thought I’d said, “Fuck you,” and he yelled, “Fuck you!” back.

  They pushed my cell phone, with the message to Patrick, in my face and screamed, “You’re lying. You sent a message to Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”