Now things started getting rough for her. Confronting her with Raffaele’s story, the investigators suggested that “See you later” was not a routine, banal sign-off but an actual arrangement to meet later that night.
Who was she protecting? they wanted to know. Who was it? According to Amanda, when she didn’t have an answer, they kept pressing her. A policewoman called her “stupid” and a “liar” and slapped her on the back of her head. They repeated the blow every time she didn’t give them an answer. They gave her nothing to eat or drink and didn’t allow her to go to the bathroom. It was as if they were going to keep punishing her until she remembered.
When she asked for a lawyer, they told her it would go worse for her if a lawyer was present.
According to Rita Ficarra and Lorena Zugarini, two members of the squadra mobile, no one hit Amanda or insulted her. She was given food, water and hot drinks and allowed to go to the bathroom whenever she wanted. She was asked if she had a lawyer or wanted one and she said no.
The interrogation dragged on. Amanda remained in detention for many hours. She was scared, exhausted and totally strung out. They couldn’t get her to admit anything about being with Patrick Lumumba that night, so one of the police officers asked her to relax and explained that sometimes severe emotional trauma causes a mental block. Since she couldn’t remember anything, she should try to imagine what had happened in the house and what her and Patrick’s parts had been. That exercise often releases the emotional barrier.
As outrageous as this might sound, the “let’s pretend” ploy is not an uncommon interrogation technique. I have used it myself, sometimes with great success, in questioning suspects.
In a particularly heinous 1985 abduction, assault and murder of a high-school girl named Sharon “Shari” Faye Smith in Columbia, South Carolina, I interviewed a suspect who had been traced by a combination of profiling, forensics and first-rate police work.
His name was Larry Gene Bell, and we all knew he was guilty of the crime. We also knew his lawyer would never let him on the stand to testify; so if we were going to get a confession, it had to be soon. I told him about our profiling program and how we knew that these crimes were often committed by men with two warring instincts within their psyches. I told him I understood how this might be one of those situations and to try to imagine how the crime might have taken place.
At the end of his narrative, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, “All I know is that the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done this, but the bad Larry Gene Bell could have.”
That was as close as we ever got to a confession, but it was enough. Larry Gene Bell was executed by electrocution on October 4, 1996, for the murder of Shari Faye Smith. I was glad to see him go.
This investigative technique is like anything else in law enforcement. There are good practitioners and sloppy ones. You have to figure out whether you are “unlocking” the suspect’s mind—giving him a face-saving scenario and a means to confess—or if you’re leading him into a world of fantasy.
When you’re dealing with a subject who is exhausted and at the end of her emotional rope, so empty and disoriented that she literally can’t think straight, then you’ve misused the practice. Like the detectives who questioned Jessie Misskelley Jr., there was no question here of getting to the truth by asking the subject to imagine, or to “dream” as in the David Vasquez interrogation in Virginia.
As Steve Moore commented, “If any FBI agents who reported to me had conducted this interview, I would have had them prosecuted.”
Altogether, Amanda was interrogated over a forty-hour period (an average workweek) by twelve detectives. This is known as “tag teaming.” The interrogators remain fresh and at the top of their game while the suspect grows increasingly exhausted and isolated. All he (Jessie) or she (Amanda) wants is for the interrogation to end.
In 1956, CIA director Allen Dulles sent a memo to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover outlining brainwashing techniques used successfully by Communist operatives in North Korea. The document has since been declassified. It lists and explains techniques such as introduction of fatigue, inducing a feeling of helplessness in attempting to deal with the impersonal machinery of control, and developing a feeling of dependence upon the interrogator. Similar techniques have been employed to interrogate terrorist suspects at Guantá-namo Bay.
They didn’t want Amanda alert and lucid to give an accurate account. They wanted to break her. And they did everything they could that wouldn’t leave physical marks on her body.
Under this haze of fatigue and fright, Amanda spun a tale of meeting Patrick at the Piazza Grimana basketball court, across the street from her house, around eight-thirty and going back with him to her house. Though she said it was dreamlike and she couldn’t tell if it had actually happened, she “recalled” Patrick having sex with Meredith, but she didn’t remember whether he had had to force her. But she vaguely remembered him killing her with a knife afterward, which implied that she was in the room at the time.
There may have been another reason for the full-court press on Amanda that night. The police may have perceived that time was running out for them. Since they were tapping Amanda and Raffaele’s phones, they knew that Edda Mellas was on her way to Perugia to stand by her daughter. She would never let Amanda continue to speak without an attorney present, no matter what the investigators said.
Giuliano Mignini came in at 5:45 A.M. to take her official statement. Everything she had said previously was as a witness, so it couldn’t be used against her. Between the original “confession” and the official statement, several key details changed, such as the time and the added detail that she had heard Meredith scream. Everyone agrees that after she signed the statement, she was given food.
At noon, the police formally arrested Amanda at the police station. They had their killer.
Pathologist Luca Lalli, accompanied by a female officer, conducted a physical exam on Amanda Knox and took DNA swabs and saliva, urine and head and pubic hair samples.
When Amanda recovered her wits enough to realize, like Jessie Misskelley Jr., what had just happened to her, she was shocked. She immediately felt as though the police had led her down the primrose path to a murder charge. Up until now, she had been feeling vulnerable because of how close she thought she had come to being another victim of the killer.
Clearly, for the police to question Amanda and Raffaele intensively over the course of several days, for them to hammer on Raffaele until he changed his story to say that Amanda left him for several hours the night of the murder, for them to interpret a simple text message with its most unusual and outlandish meaning, for them systematically to stress Amanda to the point of stripping her of all logic and emotional resources and essentially get her to make up a story they liked, someone already had to have had a theory of the case that he or she wanted all the facts to fit into. Aside from all the other pressures she was under, Amanda had a poor command of Italian, and the translator was essentially helping the police, not making it easier for her to communicate.
A compulsive diarist, Amanda wrote in her green notebook journal that day that she already doubted the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. She noted that she had been hit on the back of her head when she didn’t give interrogators the responses they wanted and was threatened with a long jail sentence if she didn’t cooperate.
She was clearly strung out and confused. A guilty person would either acknowledge to herself that they had caught her or, if she thought the journal might be made public, steadfastly deny the charges to vindicate herself. Amanda does neither. She is very doubtful of what she has said and even cuts the police a break in saying she understands their behavior.
If Amanda had taken part in murder, she certainly would not have gone about her business and come back to the house. She had the means and the time to get out of Italy before authorities caught up with her. She did not exerc
ise this option because it never occurred to her she might need it.
At a news conference on November 6, Perugia chief of police Arturo De Felice announced the arrests of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Patrick Lumumba for the murder of Meredith Kercher. The case, he assured reporters, was “substantially closed.” An outraged Lumumba, insisting he had no idea what this was all about, had been arrested at home and taken from his family earlier in the day.
That same day, executing a search warrant, the squadra mobile, or flying squad, officer Armando Finzi searched Raffaele’s flat and took away, among other items, a kitchen knife he found in a drawer among other knives. How did he know the murder weapon came from Raffaele’s kitchen rather than from the crime location itself? And how did he know that particular blade, rather than any others in the drawer, was the murder weapon? Investigator’s instinct, he proudly proclaimed.
Later, the lab would report having found a tiny amount of Amanda’s DNA on the handle—no leap of logic since she had prepared food in Raffaele’s kitchen—but also an equally tiny speck of Meredith’s DNA near the tip. Since she had not been in Raffaele’s flat, this looked as if it might be real evidence.
But there were a couple of problems. To start, it was never definitive that Meredith’s blood was ever on the knife blade, as was acknowledged in the final appeals report, and the testing may have been manipulated or amplified to indicate her DNA in ways that were never apparent to other independent testers. Moreover, the blade, which effectively had been selected by the investigators at random, did not match the blood outline on the bed and was too large to have made two cuts in Meredith’s neck. Mignini didn’t let this stop him, though. All it meant was there must have been two knives.
The chain of custody would have been laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. Finzi admitted he had given the knife to another officer, Stefano Gubbiotti, who had been at the murder scene that day, meaning an easy case could be made for cross-contamination. He put the knife in a box and stored it before it was sent to the lab in Rome, so there is no way of telling what happened to it or who touched it in the meantime.
Later, the results of the DNA assay itself would be challenged by numerous experts as being too small a sample to render a reliable match.
On November 8, the three defendants were arraigned before Judge Claudia Matteini. Under Italian law, they easily could have been released pending trial, but the judge ordered all three held for a year, concerned particularly that Amanda and Patrick would flee.
If you read Amanda’s “My Prison Diary,” which was given to me by investigators helping with her case, you see no evidence of guilt or culpability. It is more observational than anything else. Clearly, it was written for herself, no one else. In it, she expresses confusion about the whole situation rather than anger or even sadness. She knows she has to wait out the workings of the system, but she fully expects to be out and going home soon.
Even the diary was used against her in a selective leaking campaign. As Candace Dempsey, a Seattle-based Italian-American journalist, noted in her comprehensive and insightful book Murder in Italy, the language problem became a further opportunity for the prosecution and media. This is a section that was translated into Italian, leaked to the press, and then translated back into English:
That night I smoked a lot of marijuana and I fell asleep at my boyfriend’s house. I don’t remember anything. But I think it’s possible that Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her and then killed her. And then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he put my fingerprints on the knife. But I don’t understand why Raffaele would do that.
This all sounds pretty damning and definitely locks Raffaele into the murder scene—particularly, if you accept, as I do, that the diary was not intended for anyone else’s eyes. But like some diabolical version of the children’s party game telephone, this is how the passage actually read in context in the original English:
Raffaele and I have used this knife to cook, and it’s impossible that Meredith’s DNA is on the knife because she’s never been to Raffaele’s apartment before. So unless Raffaele decided to get up after I fell asleep, grabbed said knife, went over to my house, used it to kill Meredith, came home, cleaned the blood off, rubbed my fingerprints all over it, put it away, then tucked himself back into bed, and then pretended really well the next couple of days, well, I just highly doubt all of that.
Giuliano Mignini now had a complete theory of the case, which was outlined in a judge’s report issued by lead judge Claudia Matteini on November 9. The logic of arriving at his conclusion, if I follow it correctly, is decidedly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The inconsistencies between Amanda and Raffaele’s stories had to do with timing. The first led them to speculate that the call to the Carabinieri had been placed a few minutes after the Postal Police arrived, rather than before, which would imply that the two young lovers had never called the police at all on their own initiative, only to cover themselves when an investigation was already under way.
But here’s where it gets interesting: If Raffaele suddenly changed his story and said there was a gap of time when Amanda wasn’t with him—when she said she was going to Le Chic to meet Patrick—then she was lying and she must have gone back to the house. But then if she said he was with her all night, then he must have been with her in the house when she and Patrick killed Meredith, which meant that he was involved, too. As goofy as this sounds, it is the same type of approach WMPD followed; that is, take the “best” part of each account or piece of evidence to come up with a theory that meets the police’s needs.
And what was that theory here? Actually, there were two. One was that Meredith and Amanda’s friendship had broken up over a number of issues, including Amanda owing Meredith rent money and refusing to do her part in keeping the house clean. In other words, assuming either or both of these charges were accurate—which I do not believe—so as not to have to pay her back and/or resentment over being called out for being something of a slob, Amanda solicited the help of two male friends and plunged a knife three times into Meredith’s neck.
This falling-out must have happened shortly before the murder, because up until then, the two had been close friends, hanging out at bookstores, restaurants and clubs together and going together to Perugia’s celebrated EuroChocolate Festival in late October, only days before the murder.
The investigators seemed to be projecting their own distaste for Amanda’s perceived habits into a murder scenario. In the judge’s report, they took her to task when she found traces of blood, which she did not worry about cleaning, and noticed that in the other bathroom the toilet water was full of feces that she was astonished to find but did not try to clean.
So Amanda helped indict herself by not touching a potential crime scene.
But that motive was only a secondary theory. Mignini’s main theory of the case started out with Patrick having a crush on Meredith, who allegedly had turned him down, and with Raffaele, as shown from writing on his online blog, seeking “extreme sensations,” which he apparently felt Amanda was capable of fulfilling. The murder, then, was either part of a drug-fueled satanic ritual, a sex game that got out of hand, or else Amanda decided she wanted to have an orgy. When Meredith wouldn’t play along, Amanda and the others had to kill her.
Sounds convincing, no?
Giuliano Mignini, locally born and bred and a student of history, must have known he was acting on precedent. Perugia had been the site of a series of witch trials in the fifteenth century, and the public minister understood the bewitching power of certain women.
Upon reflection, the investigators decided it was more likely that one of the men had plunged in the knife while Amanda held Meredith down. As far as I can tell, there was no evidence, forensic or otherwise, to support this. Mignini figured the crime, whatever it was—orgy, murder or satanic ritual—and whatever the exact motive, had been planned ahead of time. Since there was a strong satanic component, it was supposed to t
ake place on Halloween. But since that didn’t work out, the Day of the Dead would be just as auspicious.
This line of reasoning reminds me of “Dr.” Dale Griffis’s wacky logic in WM3. There were a bunch of cultic holidays on the calendar; and if you acted on either the day before or the day after, it had the same effect. When you think that people’s lives and freedom are being determined by listening to this kind of nonsense, the effect does become scary indeed.
Curiously, though he and other investigators considered Amanda and Raffaele prime suspects, they never even seemed to consider Filomena Romanelli, who had pretty much the same alibi as Amanda, or Giacomo Silenzi downstairs, who had already been identified as Meredith’s sometimes boyfriend. This pattern of arbitrariness would characterize the entire investigation.
But the police knew they had the right girl. As Edgardo Giobbi, head of Central Operation Service in Rome, put it, “We were able to establish guilt by closely observing the suspect’s psychological and behavioral reactions during interrogations. We don’t need to rely on other kinds of investigation as this method has enabled us to get to the guilty parties in a very quick time.” I guess this is their idea of profiling.
Here is an exercise I’ve tried a number of times with people who either assumed or insisted to me that Amanda Knox was guilty:
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