Waiting to Be Heard

by Amanda Knox

  I didn’t expect her outburst at socialità that evening. Wilma screamed, “All you ­people talk badly about me.”

  Another prisoner came up to me and demanded, “Why did you tell Wilma everyone hates her?”

  I said, “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you’re not supposed to talk to her! Why did you side with her?”

  Wilma’s behavior wasn’t that different from that of other prisoners—­most were manipulative and liked to stir up drama—­but she wasn’t smart enough to recognize this and to fake loyalty to the other women. ­People were able to see through her actions.

  Raffaele was charged the same day I was. But I was so consumed by figuring out how to navigate this new larger prison world, I hadn’t given him much thought outside of the facts of the case. Within days of our indictment an envelope with his name printed on the back arrived for me. I had never seen his handwriting before, and at first I suspected it was a nasty joke.

  As soon as I read the letter, I realized it was real. I was shocked that he was writing me. I’d felt betrayed by the months of silence and by his comments in the press distancing himself from me. And of course there was the issue of his previous claim that I had left his apartment the night of the murder and asked him to lie for me.

  He wrote that he’d been aching to contact me, and that it was his lawyers and family who hadn’t permitted him to get in touch. He said everyone had been afraid when we were first arrested, but that now he realized it had been a mistake to abandon me and wrong to submit to police pressure and acquiesce to their theory. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I still care about you. I still think about you all the time.”

  I understood. My lawyers had given me the same strict orders.

  I felt completely reassured by his letter. It wasn’t lovey-­dovey, and that suited me fine. I no longer thought of us as a ­couple. Now we were linked by our innocence. It was a relief to know we were in this fight together. It was only much later that I learned how his interrogation had been as devastating as mine.

  I wrote him back the next morning. I was explicit about not wanting a romantic relationship anymore but added that I wanted the best for him and hoped he was okay. I knew I shouldn’t write about the case, so I only said I was optimistic that our lawyers would prove the prosecution wrong.

  As soothing as my correspondence with Raffaele was, I got another letter that summer that undid me, making me realize again how much my situation was affecting my family. My youngest sister, Delaney, who was nine, wrote, “Dear Amanda, I was at the pool a few days ago with Mom, Dad, Ashley, and Deanna. A boy came up and asked if they were my sisters. I said, ‘Yes, but there’s Amanda, too.’

  “The boy said, ‘That sister doesn’t count.’

  “It made me so sad. What should I say when someone’s mean about you?”

  Delaney’s letter had taken two weeks to reach me. My reply wouldn’t get to her for another two. I was as low as I’d been since my first days in prison.

  Still, it meant a lot that she’d asked my advice. As the oldest, it meant the world to me that my sisters came to me when they were upset. I was afraid that connection had been lost. I was terrified my family would stop being honest with me for fear that it would somehow wound me.

  Besides the prison vice-­comandante, Argirò, men were rarely allowed in the women’s ward. One exception was the workers who came on Fridays to fix plumbing and electrical problems. When I was living with Cera, the guard in charge, Luigi, told her he thought I was cute. He often stopped to chat. Once, he sat on my bed and waved in his workers to have their cigarette break in our cell.

  On July 4 the shower in my new cell was clogged. I didn’t know how to say “drain” in Italian, so I said, “The hole in the shower won’t let the water down.”

  “What hole?” Luigi asked.

  I was alone—­Pica and Falda were at their prison jobs—­and Luigi followed me into the bathroom. As soon as the door closed, he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me to him, leaning forward as if to kiss me. I ducked my head and went stiff, as though a steel rod had been jammed down my spine. Somehow I managed to wriggle out of his grasp. I stumbled out of the bathroom, sat on my bed, and pulled my knees to my chest, shaking.

  He didn’t look at me as he came out of the bathroom. He just mumbled that his guys would fix the shower and left.

  I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. Luigi could turn this incident against me. What if he called me a liar? Or said I’d come on to him, that I was obsessed with sex—­as the prosecution was saying? No one would believe me.

  I went to the window and cried—­not out of sadness, but from a place of deep, black anger. It was one thing to have ­people saying things about me on TV and another to be overpowered.

  The unwanted attempt to kiss me happened five days before my birthday. So this is the gift the prison has to offer me, I thought cynically. A reminder of my helplessness.

  My mom and Deanna came to visit me on July 9, the day I turned twenty-­one. They sang “Happy Birthday,” but bringing in cake was not allowed. “Don’t worry, Amanda,” Mom said, putting her best spin on it. “We’re not celebrating anything until you get home. And I’m sure that will be soon.”

  I erupted into sobs when I hugged my mom and sister good-­bye. Back in my cell, I’d barely pulled myself back together when I was called down to the ground floor again. Raffaele had sent me a huge bouquet of white lilies. The guards were shaking their heads and chuckling about it, as though they’d never seen anything so absurd. When I reached for the vase, the guard said, “Prisoners aren’t allowed to have flowers.”

  I guess that was another hiding place for drugs.

  Nothing eased my pain that day. Ever since I was a little girl, I’d always dreamed of being older, counting off the years until I’d be a teenager and then again to the day I’d finally be grown up. The previous year, when I turned twenty—­not long before I left for Italy—­everyone in my family had said, “Next year’s birthday is going to be the real party.”

  Instead, here I was now, literally sweating out my twenty-­first birthday in a sweltering Italian prison. I learned strategies from the other women for how to stay cool. We took frequent cold showers, wetting our hair over and over. We drenched our sheets and tied them to the bars of the windows in a vain attempt to cool any whisper of a hot, dry breeze that might pass through.

  All this happened while Luciano and Carlo were preparing the defense for my pretrial. They didn’t have everything they needed to break down the case completely—­Meredith’s DNA on the knife and my “bloody” footprints were going unanswered.

  Two days before the pretrial started, we got news that was both heartening and unnerving. Police investigators revealed that they’d found an imprint of the murder weapon in blood on Meredith’s bedsheets, making it clear the weapon wasn’t in fact the knife with the six-­and-­a-­half-­inch blade the prosecution was claiming. The imprint was too short to have been made by Raffaele’s kitchen knife.

  I’d thought that being charged marked the true end of the investigation. Now I felt catapulted back to the spot I’d been for the past several months—­back to wondering what the prosecution was going to spring on us next.

  At the same time, we had evidence that Carlo called “the murderer’s signature.”

  I reminded myself that we also had common sense on our side. There was no motive. I had no history of violence. I’d barely met Rudy Guede. Raffaele had not met him at all.

  Luciano and Carlo came to see me the day before the pretrial started. “We’ll be as strong and forceful as we can,” Luciano promised.

  Carlo, the pessimist, said, “Don’t get your hopes up, Amanda. I’m not sure we’ll win. There’s been too much attention on your case, too much pressure on the Italian legal system to think that you won’t be sent to trial.”

  Chapter 23
/>
  September 18–October 28, 2008

  The agente slid the cage door closed and turned the lock. Terrified and claustrophobic, I was alone inside a cramped, cold metal box barely large enough to sit in. I put my mouth up to the honeycomb panel and sucked in air. I heard the van’s double doors slam and felt the vehicle lurch as we pulled away from Capanne. The four blue-­uniformed guards could see the countryside; I could not. I knew we were twisting and turning our way to the courthouse in downtown Perugia for the pretrial that would decide if the prosecution had enough evidence against Rudy Guede, Raffaele, and me to send us to trial.

  The excursion made me feel more trapped than I felt in jail. I was like a package on a FedEx truck—­on board but untended. The guards’ job was to deliver me. Nothing more.

  I longed to look out the window. I’d been outside the prison only once since my arrest, and that was only because I needed to see an eye doctor. Being in prison where the vistas are all broken by bars had made my eyes nearsighted. During that earlier trip, I heard children playing, and I started sobbing. It made me think of my family and of all I’d lost.

  The pretrial was a far more jarring experience.

  As the van rolled down the ramp and into the courthouse’s underground garage, one agente said, “The journalists are waiting for you, Kuh-­nox.”

  “You’re going to be a good girl so we don’t have to handcuff you, right?” another guard said. I had always been so polite and docile that a guard had once said to me, “If all the inmates were like you, we wouldn’t need prisons.”

  I’d thought to myself, Because I shouldn’t be a prisoner.

  Between leaving the van and entering the double doors of the courthouse, I had a few moments in the open air but not free rein. A guard held my arm, using it to steer me into the building and, from there, into the antechambers used to confine prisoners. Later, in the courtroom, one guard stood behind me. Another was stationed a few steps to the side.

  Walking down the hall, I was sandwiched between two guards, with a third agente ahead of us. “Remember. Do not say anything to the press. Don’t even look at them,” one cautioned.

  As we rounded a corner, cameras flashed. Media ­people were yelling questions in Italian and English—­“Are you guilty?” “Are you innocent?” “Why did you do it?” “Did you do it?” “What happened to Meredith?” “What do you have to say?”

  The journalists and photographers were barricaded behind a rope. I didn’t notice their faces, only huge black camera lenses and blindingly bright explosions of light. I felt so self-­conscious that I instinctively ducked to hide my face.

  And then it was over. The courtroom—­closed to anyone who wasn’t involved in the case—­was pin-­drop quiet. My team’s table was on the far right. The table for Raffaele’s lawyers was next to mine. Rudy Guede was to sit with his lawyers behind Raffaele’s table. But on the first day, I was the only one of the three defendants there.

  Relieved that the room wasn’t full of ­people, I sat down and waited for the judge. Then the double doors I’d come through opened again, and the Kercher family walked in.

  My first thought wasn’t They think I’m a murderer. It was Meredith’s parents? I finally get to meet them.

  I asked Carlo if it would be okay to say hello. He checked with their lawyer, Francesco Maresca, and came back saying, “Maresca said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Now is not the time.”

  Will there ever be a right time?

  I knew I had to listen to my lawyers on this one, but I was still waiting for a moment when we could exchange glances so that I could convey my sympathy.

  When I tried to catch their attention, they glared at me, and I felt as if I’d been slapped. I also felt completely humbled. Meredith’s mom’s expression was both hard and sorrowful.

  I was devastated. I’d anticipated meeting them for a long time. I’d written and rewritten a sympathy letter in my head but had never managed to put it on paper. Now I felt stupid. How had I not anticipated their reaction? Why are you so surprised? What do you think this has been about all along? My grief for Meredith and my sadness for her family had kept me from thinking further. Of course they hate you, Amanda. They believe you’re guilty. Everyone has been telling them that for months.

  The first day of the pretrial was mostly procedural. Almost immediately Guede’s lawyers requested an abbreviated trial. I had no idea the Italian justice system offered this option. Carlo later told me that it saves the government money. With an abbreviated trial, the judge’s decision is based solely on evidence; no witnesses are called. The defendant benefits from this fast-track process because, if found guilty, he has his sentence cut by a third.

  Guede’s lawyers must have realized that he was better off in a separate trial, since the prosecution was intent on pinning the murder on us. The evidence gathered during the investigation pointed toward his guilt. His DNA was all over Meredith’s room and her body, on her intimate clothing and her purse. He had left his handprint in her blood on her pillowcase. He had fled the country. The prosecution called Guede’s story of how he “happened” to be at the villa and yet had not participated in the murder “absurd”—­though they readily believed his claims against Raffaele and me. One of the big hopes for us was that with so much evidence against Guede, the prosecution would have to realize Raffaele and I hadn’t been involved.

  I felt the way about Guede that Meredith’s family felt about me. As soon as I saw him, in a subsequent hearing, I thought angrily, You! You killed Meredith!

  He didn’t look like a murderer. He was wearing jeans and a sweater. It was almost impossible to imagine that he had cut Meredith’s throat. But if he hadn’t, his DNA wouldn’t have been everywhere in Meredith’s room. And he wouldn’t have lied about Raffaele and me. The other thing I noticed: he wouldn’t look at me.

  I was relieved when Raffaele appeared on the second day of the pretrial. He smiled as soon as he saw me, as though he couldn’t suppress it. After almost a year being apart from him, my second impression was the same as my first: he was honest and smart—­and, even with shoulder-­length hair, just as handsome as when I met him at the concert hall. It made me miserable to know that being my boyfriend had cost him so much. On the other hand, I felt grateful that he, out of all the ­people in Perugia, was the person I was going through this with. Getting his first letter had renewed my faith in him, and we now wrote each other regularly. I knew I could trust Raffaele with my life. And I was.

  Mignini and his co-­prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, were determined to establish a connection between Guede, Raffaele, and me.

  Their theory seemed to be that I knew Guede from the time Meredith and I had met with the guys downstairs in front of the fountain in Piazza IV Novembre—­the night Guede told the guys I was cute. He hadn’t made an impression on me at all then. The prosecution hypothesized that, after that night, he’d gotten in touch with me, perhaps about buying drugs. They stressed that we had a relationship, and although they allowed that it wasn’t necessarily romantic, they insisted that Guede, like Raffaele, was obsessed with me. They further decided—­based on a blurb Raffaele had written on his Facebook page way before he met me—­that we’d been bored on the night of November 1 and headed to Piazza Grimana. There, Mignini said, we ran into Guede at the basketball court. I purportedly said, “Hey, let’s go hang out at my place.”

  The prosecution spun this assumption further. According to Mignini, we found Meredith at the villa and said, Hey, that stupid bitch. Let’s show Meredith. Let’s get her to play a sex game.

  I was horrified. Who thinks like that?

  In their scenario, I hated Meredith because we’d argued about money. Hearing Mignini say that I told Guede to rape Meredith was upsetting. He added that I was the ringleader, telling Raffaele to hold her down. When he said that I threatened Meredith with a knife, I felt as if I’d been kicked. Even worse was hearing him sa
y that when Meredith refused to have sex, I killed her.

  When he initially said we were bored and went to the piazza, it sounded spontaneous, but now he said I’d tried to trap Meredith on Halloween—­a holiday he saw as evil. Mignini based this on a text I’d sent Meredith asking her to hang out on Halloween. He emphasized Raffaele’s and my supposed immorality and inclination toward violent fantasy. His “proof”? Raffaele’s Japanese comic books about vampires and the one Marilyn Manson song he had downloaded. In closing arguments, Mignini said Meredith’s murder was premeditated and was a rite celebrated on the occasion of the night of Halloween—­a sexual and sacrificial ritual that, in the intention of the conspirators, should have occurred twenty-­four hours earlier.

  He was throwing motives against the wall ­to see which one stuck.

  I wasn’t used to the court lingo and depended on the young American woman who’d been appointed as my interpreter to fill me in on what was said.

  The pretrial judge, Paolo Micheli, allowed testimony from two witnesses. The first was DNA analyst Patrizia Stefanoni for the Polizia Scientifica.

  Starting right after we were indicted, Raffaele’s and my lawyers had requested the raw data for all Stefanoni’s forensic tests. How were the samples collected? How many cotton pads had her team used to swab the bathroom sink and the bidet? How often had they changed gloves? What tests had they done—­and when? Which machines had they used, at what times, and on which days? What were the original unedited results of the DNA tests?

  Her response was “No. We can’t give you these documents you continue to ask for, because the ones you have will have to suffice.”

  Then, during pretrial, the defense lawyers pressed again, and this time Judge Micheli granted the request. Stefanoni gave us some documents—­but not enough to interpret the data. When we objected, the judge shrugged and said, “Well, I asked her and she said those files aren’t important for you.”

  Our only option was to question Stefanoni face-­to-­face about her methods.