Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir

by Amanda Knox

  Along with my exaggerated sexual history, people found it tantalizing that I didn’t look like a depraved murderer. The press said that I had “the face of an angel but the eyes of a killer” or “an angel’s face and a demon’s soul.” Suddenly I had a “secret side.”

  Soon after I got to Capanne, I started getting fan mail—some from people who thought I was innocent, and some from strangers who said they were in love with me. I appreciated the encouraging letters and was shocked, and baffled, by the others. It seemed to me that these men—often prisoners themselves—had written me by mistake. Their passionate, sometimes pornographic scribbling had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the media’s creepy, hypersexual creation. I’d never imagined that I would be bombarded with such perverted attention. And if I was drop-dead sexy, it was news to me.

  Vice-Comandante Argirò always made a production out of opening my mail, winking and chattering about how many admirers I had. But I got at least as much hate mail as I did supportive and provocative letters combined. Some of it terrified me, especially the chicken-scratch notes with no return address that said they knew where my parents were staying and planned to cut up their faces. What if they followed through? I warned Mom to be careful, to close her windows at night. And after one particularly threatening letter, I told Argirò, hoping he’d alert my mom right away. “Forget about it,” he said, dismissively. “They’re just words.”

  I felt terrible that my mom and dad had abandoned their regular lives to come to Italy, and that their spouses back home were being hounded by journalists and paparazzi, who staked out their houses, waiting for them to come or go, knocking on the door and phoning them incessantly. The people who hated me couldn’t get to me in prison, but there was nothing I could do to protect my family.

  Nor could I deflect the overpowering attention being given to “the Wicked Fox.” The real me had been lost. It seemed as though people were putting me in a costume that trapped me even more than the iron bars I lived behind.

  The portrait the prosecution and media created of me as sex-charged led some people to make sure that everything Raffaele and I had done in the days following the murder, every errand we ran, appeared sexual. Soon after the first few Foxy Knoxy stories showed up, the owner of Bubble, the cheap teen shop where Raffaele and I had stopped the night after Meredith’s body was found, told journalists that I’d bought a red G-string. Stories ran under headlines such as “Pictures of the Moment Foxy Knoxy Went Shopping for Sexy Lingerie the Day After Meredith’s Murder,” quoting Raffaele supposedly saying, “I’m going to take you home so we can have wild sex together.”

  As usual Luciano and Carlo filled me in on this story. “But I didn’t buy sexy underwear!” I protested. “And Raffaele didn’t say that. It was red, but it’s a pair of bikini briefs with a cartoon cow on it. I was locked out of my house and had only the clothes I was wearing.”

  “I’m sorry to even ask you about it, Amanda,” Carlo said gently. “We just needed to know what to make of the claim.”

  Carlo and Luciano urged my family and me to ignore the media. They organized a short press conference at which my parents read a statement saying that I was innocent. After that, the lawyers refused to allow my family to answer any questions from journalists. We’d learned that anything could be turned around and used against us.

  “The media are about as evil as you can get,” Carlo would say. “They’re going to do whatever makes money. Anyone who meets you will see you’re not the girl the prosecution and press are portraying, but journalists aren’t interested in hearing that you’re a good girl. We have to do that in the courtroom. Don’t worry. We’ll have our chance.”

  I didn’t know that my parents were debating this approach with the lawyers. Mom and Dad wanted to stand up to the media. They understood that once damaging words are unleashed, they stick. To protect one another from added pain, there was a lot Mom, Dad, and I didn’t say during our visits.

  Besides all the lies about my out-of-control sex life, people started pitting Meredith and me against each other. It had never been that way when she was alive. Meredith’s British girlfriend Robyn Butterworth gave a witness statement after my arrest claiming that Meredith had complained about my loud singing and poor toilet hygiene. Police leaked parts of the testimony to the press, and like so many other things, normal moments in the lives of housemates were refashioned into a motive for murder. I do sing loudly and often. And I knew Meredith had been embarrassed to tell me that the toilet needed to be brushed after each use. I’m embarrassed to think that she may have put off bringing it up with me until it happened a few times. Still, I thought she probably hadn’t complained as much as mentioned it to friends or family to ask how to handle it so she wouldn’t hurt my feelings.

  The idea that Meredith and I had been at odds ramped up quickly in the press. A couple of weeks after Robyn’s statement came out, investigators announced they’d found my blood on the faucet in the bathroom that Meredith and I had shared. Prosecutor Mignini hypothesized that the two of us had gotten into a fistfight and I’d wound up with a bloody nose. The truth was far less dramatic—and less interesting. I’d just gotten multiple piercings in both ears, and I took out all eleven earrings so that I could wipe my ears each morning while the shower water heated up. When I noticed the tiny droplets of blood in the sink the day Meredith’s body was discovered, I thought the blood had come from my ears, as it had on another day, until I scratched the porcelain and realized the blood was dry. That must have been what was on the faucet.

  Meredith had been dead for just three weeks. I still could barely process the loss of my friend. It infuriated me that the media were rewriting our relationship to fit their storyline. I was a monster. Meredith was a saint. The truth was that we were very much alike. She was more contained than I was, but we were both young girls who studied seriously and wanted to do well, who wanted to make friends, and who’d had a few casual sexual relationships.

  Raffaele didn’t demonize me, but he did publicly renounce me. Answering questions through his lawyer, he told one journalist, “If I am here it’s her fault above all. I am conscious that contrary to what I thought, our paths have diverged profoundly.”

  When asked what he’d like to say to me, his answer was “Nothing. I have absolutely nothing to say to her.”

  I didn’t know what to think about Raffaele. Hearing that he’d destroyed my alibi was as baffling as it was incensing. Saying I’d put him up to lying was inexcusable and painful. And now this, I thought. Did I misjudge him? I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t at all sure what to make of him. One day we were really close, and the next he announced that he’d dropped me. Had this come from him? His lawyers? Journalists? I rationalized that I wasn’t the Italian girl he needed. I tried to be forgiving. If Raffaele doesn’t want to talk to me again, I’ll understand. This has been traumatic for everyone. But sometimes I was just angry.

  I was nursing these hurts when I got news so shattering that it blotted out almost everything else. I was at my nightly infirmary appointment, where I was meeting with a doctor I’d never seen before. Dressed in a white lab coat, my medical file in hand, he said, “We got the results of your blood test.” His bedside manner was as warm as gelato. “You tested positive for HIV.”

  I was so shocked I couldn’t think. I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying.

  The doctor saw my panic. “Don’t worry,” he said, offering me a spoonful of compassion. “It could be a mistake. We’ll need to do more tests.”

  His reassurance struck me as hollow, as if he were just trying to postpone my inevitable anguish. I thought my head would explode from anxiety. I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed, and now I might be infected with HIV?

  Argirò was standing a foot behind me when I got the news. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you slept with lots of people,” he chided.

  I spun around. “I didn’t have sex with anyone who had AIDS,” I sna
pped, though it was possible that one of the men I’d hooked up with, or even Raffaele, was HIV-positive.

  “You should think about who you slept with and who you got it from.”

  Maybe he was trying to comfort me or to make a joke, or maybe he saw an opening he thought he could use to his advantage. Whatever the reason, as we were walking back upstairs to my cell, Argirò said, “Don’t worry. I’d still have sex with you right now. Promise me you’ll have sex with me.”

  I was too undone to react.

  Sitting on my bed, I wondered if I would die in prison. I didn’t know then that people live with HIV for a long time due to improved meds. Please, please, let it be a mistake. Please let it be wrong. I don’t want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to be able to grow old. I want my time. I want my life.

  I didn’t know how to tell Mom or Dad. I desperately wanted to talk to them, but their next visit wasn’t for two more days. I miserably reasoned that I’d had such a fortunate life that all my bad luck was catching up to me now.

  I was aware that there were consequences to being careless about sex. I thought I’d been careful enough. But what had I really known about my sexual partners? Why hadn’t I seriously considered the risk? I’d been trapped by prison; now I felt trapped by my own body, trapped by my stupidity, trapped because bad things happened to people for no reason, with no way of anticipating them. Thinking about the life I might have had instead of the one I was living made me understand for the first time how people in mourning tear their clothes or rip out handfuls of hair. I wanted to undo everything—to be out of my body, out of this prison, out of this life that had caved in on me. I buried my face in my pillow so no one could hear me and wailed.

  So much had happened that I didn’t know how to handle emotionally or practically: Meredith’s death; my interrogation, arrest, and imprisonment; HIV. Any one of them would have been a hard burden for a twenty-year-old. To have them all at once was devastating. Every problem put before me was foreign, and the tools I had—stubbornness, optimism, the support of my family, and the certainty of my innocence—weren’t nearly enough for the situation.

  Part of me couldn’t believe I really had HIV. Even though the media were portraying me as a whore, I knew I wasn’t one. It seemed too ironic, too overwhelming that all this was happening at once. Just breathe. Write down that you’re freaking out and then stop. You’re not going to make anything better by going crazy over it. Relax. The doctor said they don’t know that you have it for sure.

  I got out my diary to think this over rationally, imagining who could have infected me, replaying my sexual experiences in my mind to see where I could have slipped up. I wondered if a condom had broken, and if so, whose. If it had, did he know?

  I’d had sex with seven guys—four in Seattle and three in Italy. I tried to be logical, writing down the name of each person I’d slept with and the protection we’d used.

  Writing made me feel a little better. I knew I needed to get out of prison and get checked by someone I trusted before I started thinking and acting as if my life were over. I forced myself not to anticipate the worst.

  That Saturday, I told my parents what the doctor had said. My mom started crying immediately. “But I haven’t had unprotected sex,” I said, trying to reassure her. “I’m sure it’s going to be fine.”

  My dad was skeptical. He asked, “Do you even think they’re telling you the truth?”

  That possibility hadn’t occurred to me. But when I told them, Luciano and Carlo seconded that idea. “It could be a ploy by the prosecution to scare you into an even more vulnerable emotional state so they can take advantage of you,” Carlo said. “You need to stay alert, Amanda, and don’t let anyone bully you.”

  In the end, I don’t know if they made up the HIV diagnosis. It wasn’t the doctor who said I should think about whom I’d had sex with, but Argirò. It might have been that the test was faulty, or Argirò could have put the medical staff up to it so he could ask me questions and pass the answers along to the police.

  It was nearly two months before the doctors let me know that the HIV test had come out negative. When they did, I thought, Oh, thank God! But I was still seeing the doctors twice a day, and it had been a long time since anyone had even brought it up. The possibility no longer scared me as much, and I’d begun to assume everything was okay.

  A week after I got the original HIV news, a guard took me down to the offices on the main floor, where three police officers were waiting for me. “We have a warrant to search your cell,” they said. “We’ll give you a five-minute head start to destroy whatever you’d like, or you can let us go up immediately.”

  “You can come now and look through whatever you want,” I said.

  I wondered what they were hoping to find. Did they want to search my clothing for traces of Meredith’s blood? I felt almost smug, because I knew they wouldn’t find anything incriminating, and I hoped it might convince them that I truly had nothing to hide.

  The cops spread out all my papers and documents on my bed. They confiscated anything with my handwriting on it—my grammar exercises, unfinished letters, notes, my prison diary—and left everything else. That’s when I understood. They wanted to see what I was thinking.

  The physical chaos they left behind was nothing compared to the chaos in my head. They’d penetrated my innermost space, demonstrating to me that nothing was safe from them.

  A few months after that, they released my prison journal to the media, where instead of reporting that I’d had seven lovers altogether, some newspapers wrote that Foxy Knoxy had slept with seven men in her six weeks in Perugia.

  Chapter 19

  November 18–29, 2007

  I was stunned one morning when I looked up at the TV and noticed a breaking news report. There was now a fourth suspect, and an international manhunt for him had been launched.

  The police didn’t say who the suspect was or how this person fit into the murder scenario they’d imagined, only that they’d found a bloody handprint on Meredith’s pillowcase that wasn’t mine, Patrick’s, or Raffaele’s.

  The news rattled me, but it also gave me hope. Maybe this meant the police hadn’t completely given up trying to find the truth. For the next twenty-four hours I was consumed by the question Who is this unnamed person?

  I, and everyone else watching TV, found out the next day. His name was Rudy Guede. The police had his fingerprints on file because he was an immigrant with a green card.

  The name didn’t click until I saw his mug shot.

  Oh my God, it’s him.

  I thought back to November 5, when I was sitting in the hall at the questura, assuming I was just waiting for Raffaele, and talking to the silver-haired cop. As I’d been doing for days, I was trying to recall all the men who had ever visited our villa, when I suddenly remembered one of Giacomo and Marco’s friends. It had annoyed me that I couldn’t remember his name. “I think he’s South African,” I told the detective. “All I know is that he played basketball with the guys downstairs. They introduced him to Meredith and me in Piazza IV Novembre in mid-October. We all walked to the villa together, and then Meredith and I went to their apartment for a few minutes.”

  I’d seen Guede just one time after that. He’d shown up at Le Chic, and I had taken his drink order. Those few words were the only ones we ever exchanged.

  I was still living in semi-isolation, meaning that I wasn’t allowed to participate in group activities or speak to other prisoners. But when I’d asked to be moved from Gufa’s cell, I’d really hoped that meant they would put me by myself again. Instead I’d been moved into a cell with three older women. And just as with Gufa, the TV in Cell No. 10 was on all the time.

  The only difference was that with the announcement about Guede, now I couldn’t watch the news enough.

  I learned that Guede was twenty and originally from Ivory Coast. He’d been abandoned by his parents and taken in by a rich Perugian family who treated him like
a son. He was a talented basketball player who’d made a lot of friends on the court. But over time, he’d been more inclined to loaf than to work, and his surrogate family disowned him. He’d lost his job in the fall of 2007, before Meredith and I met him. Guede had been caught breaking into offices and homes and stealing electronics and cash.

  Another report said that in mid-October he’d thrown a large rock through a window at a Perugian law office to get inside. A broken window and a rock on the floor? Exactly what we’d found in Filomena’s room. He’d stolen a laptop and a cell phone from the firm.

  I couldn’t believe that none of us had picked up on how shady Guede was. Just a few days before Meredith was killed, the director of a Milan kindergarten arrived in the morning and caught Guede coming out of her office. When the police got there, they found one of the kindergarten’s kitchen knives in his backpack, along with the laptop from the law office, a set of keys, a woman’s gold watch, and a small hammer he’d used to break glass. The police were on the verge of arresting him for that crime but released him without giving a reason. I couldn’t understand how they’d let Guede slip through their fingers. All I could think was that if he’d been put behind bars then, Meredith would still be alive.

  It didn’t make sense to me that they had let him go but had leapt to arrest me.

  I’d met but didn’t know Rudy Guede. I didn’t know if he was capable of murder. I couldn’t imagine why he might do something so brutal. But I believed that he was guilty, that the evidence could only be interpreted one way. Finally the police could stop using me as the scapegoat for some phantom killer whom no one could name—a phantom whose place I’d been filling.

  For nearly three weeks I’d been unable to think of anyone, however distant, who could have stabbed Meredith to death. Now there was a face and a name. It was awful, but it was a relief.