by Amanda Knox
My only hope and constant thought during that winter and spring was that the judge might allow me to live with my family in an apartment, under house arrest. My first plea had been rejected, but my lawyers had another hearing scheduled for April 1. Even though Carlo and Luciano weren’t confident about the outcome, I was sure it would happen. I was counting the days.
Less than a week before the hearing, I heard on TV that Mignini had interrogated Rudy Guede again. I listened to the newscast, hoping Guede would tell the truth.
My heart started pounding as I listened. “Amanda and Raffaele were at the house that night,” Guede reportedly said. “I saw them. When I came out of the bathroom, I saw a male figure. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he had a knife in his hand. I also heard Amanda Knox. She was at the door; I saw her there. The two girls hated each other. It was a fight over money that sparked it off. Meredith accused Amanda of stealing three hundred euros from her drawer.”
“That’s a total lie!” I burst out. I’d never felt so much hatred for another person as I did toward Guede in that moment.
Cera looked over at me with a pitying glance. “Now you’re really screwed,” she said. “Once defendants start blaming each other, it’s all over—for him and for you. That’s what the prosecution wants. That’s how they make it impossible for you to defend yourself.”
Luciano and Carlo came to see me the next day. They reassured me that no one, not even the prosecution, believed Guede. “He ran away, he’s a liar, a thief, a rapist, a murderer,” Carlo said. “No one could ever consider him a reliable witness, because he has everything to gain from blaming you. The prosecution is making a big deal about it because it incriminates you.”
“Please, Amanda,” Luciano said. “This is not what you need to worry about. You need to stay strong.”
Still, I couldn’t be consoled. With Guede’s testimony against me, there was absolutely no chance a judge would free me from prison.
In early April, Carlo came to Capanne. His face gave away his worry. “Amanda,” he said, “the prosecution now says there’s evidence of a cleanup. They contend that’s why there’s no evidence that you and Raffaele were in Meredith’s bedroom—that you scrubbed the crime scene of your traces.”
“That’s the most ludicrous reasoning I’ve ever heard!” I screeched.
“Amanda, the investigators are in a conundrum,” Carlo said. “They found so much of Guede’s DNA in Meredith’s room and on and inside her body. But the only forensic evidence they have of you is outside her bedroom. Raffaele’s DNA evidence is only on the bra hook. If you and Raffaele participated in the murder, as the prosecution believes, your DNA should be as easy to find as Guede’s.”
“But Carlo, no evidence doesn’t mean we cleaned up. It means we weren’t there!”
“I know,” Carlo said, sighing. “But they’ve already decided that you and Raffaele faked a break-in to nail Guede. I know it doesn’t make sense. They’re just adding another link to the story. It’s the only way the prosecution can involve you and Raffaele when the evidence points to a break-in and murder by Guede.”
Judge Matteini sent me her decision about house arrest on May 16: “Denied.” By then the prosecution had stacked so much against me that Guede’s testimony hadn’t even figured in her decision. Even though I hadn’t left the country before my arrest, the judge was certain that Mom would have helped me leave when she was to have arrived in Perugia on November 6. That, she said, is why the police planned to arrest me before Mom could get to me. It turned out that they’d gotten her itinerary the same time I did—by bugging my phone.
Before concluding, the judge criticized me for not showing remorse for Meredith’s death.
When Carlo and Luciano came to tell me my request for house arrest had been denied, my mind rolled back to the questura on the morning of November 6. After my interrogation had ended, I was distraught and whimpering, sitting in the empty office with the lead interrogator, Rita Ficarra. My cell phone started ringing, vibrating loudly against the desktop, and I’d begged Ficarra to let me answer it. I was sure that it was my mom, and I knew she’d be undone with worry if I didn’t pick up.
This new setback conjured up all the desperation, the nauseating helplessness, I’d felt that morning. I could hardly breathe thinking about it. I remembered how relieved I’d been that my mom was flying over, how much I needed her. As soon as she said she was coming to Italy, I realized I’d been stubbornly, stupidly insistent that I could help the police find Meredith’s killer on my own.
I’d been tricked.
I understood that this regret went beyond me. My mom was eating herself up with guilt for not having come sooner. When I saw her over her spring break, she’d lost twenty pounds. She wept at every visit.
After the judge’s decision, everything seemed darker. I talked to Don Saulo a lot about how claustrophobic I felt with the possibility of house arrest off the table. I couldn’t concentrate on reading, Italian grammar, or even on writing letters home, for all the anger, disappointment, and sadness I felt.
Cera started trying to prepare me for the chance of another fifteen years in prison. “I think you should say you’re guilty,” she advised me one day, “because it will take years off your sentence.”
“I will not lie!” I yelled, spitting out one word at a time. “I’m not scared of Guede or the prosecutor! I’m ready to fight! I don’t know anything about this murder, and I will go free!”
Luciano and Carlo tried to steel me for what they knew would eventually happen.
“You have to be ready to take this case to trial,” Carlo said one day in May, his finger poised over the mouse pad of his laptop. “The prosecution is going to say things about you. You’re going to see and hear all the horrible details of Meredith’s murder. It’s going to be tough on you, Amanda.”
With that, he turned his computer around for me to see. He scrolled down. Meredith’s face, tilted upward, showed up yellow and wide-eyed on the screen. A grotesque, dark, gaping gash seemed to burst from her neck.
Ah! I gasped and turned away. I felt as if I were choking.
Carlo half-rose and said, “Amanda, calm down.”
I struggled for breath that came in painful hiccups. “I can’t!”
“We should call it a day,” he said, standing. He knocked on the door. “Assistente!”
I could not stop wailing.
Carlo helped me out of my chair. He held his hand gently against my back when the agente opened the door.
“It’s a rough day,” he explained.
The agente grasped my shoulders firmly and steered me around the corner, almost into the ispettore—“supervisor”—who was walking down the hall.
“What’s wrong with you? What happened?” she asked.
“I saw Meredith’s autopsy photo.”
“What?”
“Meredith’s autopsy photo,” I mumbled.
The ispettore looked at me bewildered. “But you’ve already seen her dead!”
I wanted to break away from the agente’s grip. The ispettore thought I had killed Meredith. Everyone thought I’d killed Meredith.
I wanted to go back to my cell, to be by myself. I wanted everyone to stop looking at me. I wanted to breathe. I couldn’t get Meredith’s face out of my mind—the complete absence of expression, the grayish yellow tone of her skin, the dark and vivid red of the wound. I couldn’t reconcile the Meredith I knew with the image I’d just seen.
Instead of walking me to my cell, the agente led me into the infirmary and directed me to sit down in front of the doctor on duty.
“What happened?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Meredith’s autopsy photos,” I said, my hysteria having dwindled to a sniffle. “I just saw them for the first time.”
“I can prescribe a sedative for you.”
“
No. Please, I just want to go back to my cell.”
He paused a moment, then met the agente’s eyes. “As you wish,” he said.
Chapter 22
June–September 2008
Everything—and nothing—changed the morning in late June when I was called downstairs to sign yet another document. The guard barely raised his eyes while pulling out the paperwork and pointing to the line awaiting my signature. When I finished, he handed me the last copy from the stapled pile. I recognized Mignini’s illegible scrawl and Judge Matteini’s loopy cursive that always made the M look like a W. Watteini.
It was only after I went back upstairs and sat down on my bed that I read:
—NOTICE OF THE CONCLUSION OF THE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATIONS—
The Prosecutors Dr. Giuliano Mignini and Dr. Manuela Comodi;
considering the documents in the proceedings indicated in the epigraph registered on 6/11/2007 in regard to:
KNOX, Amanda Marie, born in Seattle (the state of Washington—USA) on 7/9/1987 . . . presently detained in the Casa Circondariale Capanne of Perugia;
SOLLECITO, Raffaele, born in Bari on 3/26/1984 . . . presently detained in the Casa Circondariale of Terni;
GUEDE, Rudy Hermann, born in Agou (the Ivory Coast) on 12/25/1986 . . . presently detained in the Casa Circondariale of Perugia;
persons subject to the preliminary investigations all, for having, in collaboration, murdered Kercher Meredith by strangulation and a profound lesion by a pointed, cutting weapon . . . and taking advantage of the late hour and the isolated position of the apartment . . . and having committed the act for trivial reasons while Guede, in collaboration with the others, committed rape; Knox and Sollecito, for having, in collaboration, carried out of Sollecito’s apartment, without justifiable reason, a large, pointed, and cutting knife; Guede for having, in collaboration with Knox and Sollecito, forced Kercher Meredith to suffer sexual acts, with manual or genital penetration, by means of threat and violence; all because, in collaboration, for having procured for themselves an unjust profit by having taken possession of a sum of 300 euro, two credit cards, and two cell phones, all belonging to the same Meredith; Sollecito and Knox, for having, in collaboration, simulated an attempted robbery with the break-in in the bedroom of Romanelli Filomena, breaking the window with a rock found around the house and left in the room, near the window, all in order to assure themselves impunity for the crimes of murder and rape, attempting to attribute the responsibility to strangers having entered the apartment.
Events having occurred the night between 1 and 2 November 2007.
Knox, for having, with further acts executed in the same criminal design, knowing him to be innocent, in declarations made to the Police Flying Squad of Perugia on 6 November 2007, falsely blamed Diya Lumumba, called “Patrick,” of the murder of Kercher Meredith, in order to assure herself impunity for everyone and in particular Guede Rudy Hermann, also of color like Lumumba, in Perugia the night between 5 and 6 November 2007.
NOTIFY
the persons subject to the preliminary investigations: that the preliminary investigations are concluded.
Oh my God. I’ve been formally charged with murder.
I wanted to scream, “This is not who I am! You’ve made a huge mistake! You’ve got me all wrong!”
I was now fluent enough in Italian to see how ludicrous the charges were. Along with murder, I was charged with illegally carrying around Raffaele’s kitchen knife. It was galling. Real crimes had been committed against Meredith; the police owed her a real investigation. Instead, they were spinning stories to avoid admitting they’d arrested the wrong people.
I shouldn’t have been thrown when I received these formal charges. For nearly eight months, I’d been jailed as a suspect. I’d been expecting my indictment to be sent down since the awful day when Carlo had made me face up to the gruesome autopsy photos.
But a tiny part of me had held out hope that when Mignini spread all the evidence before him, he would see that his theory didn’t hold up.
Luciano and Carlo came to see me soon after.
“Now’s our chance to stand up and fight,” Luciano said, punching the air. “This is what we’ve been waiting for.”
Finally we could combat all the misinformation leaked to the media. We could explain that the knife had never left the kitchen, the striped sweater had never gone missing, the receipts weren’t for bleach, the underwear I bought wasn’t sexy. We could describe how the prosecution had come up with the bloody footprints. We’d explain why Meredith’s blood had mixed with my DNA in our shared bathroom, how my blood got on the faucet, and correct the notion that the crime was a sex game gone wrong. We could object to the prosecutor painting me as a whore and a murderer. My lawyers would finally get to see the prosecution’s documents. No more surprises.
“Our forensic experts are already reviewing the files to prepare for the pretrial in September,” Carlo added. “Now that the investigation’s over, we’ll have a different presiding judge. We hope whoever it is will have a better sense of logic than Claudia Matteini.”
“You have to be kidding me! We have to wait all summer?” I moaned.
That’s when I found out that the Italian courts shut down almost completely for the last half of July and all of August.
I spent that afternoon jogging alone: round and round in small, dizzying circles in the courtyard outside the chapel. I’d long ago figured it took about eighty laps to make a mile. Suddenly, Argirò opened the door. “Kuh-nox,” he called, waving me inside.
Odd. Prison is all about routine, and this had never happened before.
“What’s going on?” I asked, confused.
“We’re taking you off your restricted status.”
Just like that. While I was being investigated, I was under judge’s orders to be kept separate for my own safety. But now, as an accused criminal, I passed from the judge’s responsibility to the prison’s.
Up to that moment, I didn’t believe this would ever happen. Only a few days had passed since I’d been moved out of Cera’s cell due to mutually agreed-upon incompatibility—I wasn’t fastidious enough for her, and to me, she was intolerably controlling—and switched to a cell with two big-bosomed, middle-aged sisters named Pica and Falda, who defined themselves with the politically incorrect word zingare—the feminine for “gypsies.” They were kind and uneducated—neither had learned to tell time, and when I tried to explain that Seattle was on the other side of the globe, they didn’t know what I was talking about. Finally, I realized they didn’t know the earth was round.
Prison officials had always claimed I was kept separate—I had cellmates but, with the exception of a few prescribed events, couldn’t interact with the broad population—because other inmates would probably beat me. Now, with only the mildest caution—“Be careful of the other girls!”—Argirò opened a second door. Instead of having passeggio by myself, I was in the company of fifteen sweaty women.
As soon as I walked outside, the gaggle of prisoners started hooting and hollering, “She’s out! She’s with us! Way to go!”
I was in a concrete-walled area about a third the size of a football field. The ground was covered with hard, orangey-purplish-red rubber. It was the angriest red I’d ever seen—and bare except for a few white plastic benches and dozens of cigarette butts. I didn’t care. This was the most open space I’d seen since coming to prison. I took off in a sprint, making wide loops, skipping, and whooping, “I’m out! I’m out!” My fellow inmates stared, probably thinking I was just as incomprehensible as the media made me out to be.
I introduced myself to women I’d seen around Capanne—at movie time or Mass or guitar class—but hadn’t been able to meet. I’d had only my cellmates for company before, and those relationships were ultimately frustrating and upsetting.
At 3 P.M.
, when passeggio ended, we lined up to be patted down by an agente. A girl I didn’t know came up to me. “I’m Wilma,” she said. “Will you buy me two packs of cigarettes?”
“I guess,” I mumbled. Caught off-guard, I didn’t know what to say.
I amended. “I’ll buy you one pack.”
That night, I went to my first socialità full of pent-up energy I didn’t even know I had. Being thrust in with all these new people—talking and playing Foosball and cards—reminded me of my freshman year in high school. All I have to do is find my clique and get along.
My excitement didn’t last long. A couple of women came up and started heckling me. “Why are you buying cigarettes for Wilma?” they demanded. “She doesn’t deserve anyone’s help.”
That started a chorus of grumbling: “Fricking infame.”
Infame—“infamous person” or, in prison, “snitch”—was the worst label you could have there. At best you’d be ostracized. At worst you’d be abused by other prisoners.
Wilma, it turned out, was an outcast in this small circle of prisoners. I didn’t know her story, but I felt bad for her. Just as in high school, when I hung out with the less popular crowd, I instinctively sided with her. I spent hours listening to her mope about how sad and confused she was. One day she said, “Amanda, can you explain why everyone hates me?”
By then I’d heard enough of the gossip to figure it out. “It’s because you talk about people behind their backs and tell on prisoners to the guards,” I explained. “Maybe you can change your behavior and people will start liking you.”
Just like high school.