Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir

by Amanda Knox

  Six weeks later, when the Polizia Scientifica returned to No. 7, Via della Pergola, they spotted the bra clasp again. Only this time, it was a yard from where it started, lying beneath a rolled-up carpet and a sock. Between the forensics team’s two trips, other police units had ransacked the villa. Unlike the Polizia Scientifica, those units had made no pretense of keeping the crime scene safe from contamination.

  Replaying the video of this second trip into the villa, Raffaele’s forensics expert pointed out, “The clasp goes from one scientist to another, and we don’t see gloves being changed. We then see it being put on the floor and picked up again. These procedures are all wrong . . . By not changing gloves and by touching other objects, cross-contamination of DNA is highly possible.”

  When Stefanoni was asked how the bra clasp got from one spot to another without being contaminated, she responded, “È traslato”—“It moved”—the same phrase Italians use when they’re talking about religious miracles.

  “It didn’t get contaminated in that process?” Raffaele’s DNA expert asked her.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because DNA doesn’t fly,” she snapped.

  “It was trampled and dragged across the floor and you’re saying there’s no possibility it was contaminated?”

  Had Raffaele been in the room, his DNA would have been as abundant as Guede’s. It would be illogical to suggest that it was left on a single small hook on Meredith’s bra and nowhere else. Furthermore, one of Raffaele’s defense experts pointed out that the genetic profile was incomplete, and could have matched hundreds of people in Perugia’s small population. But the main point is that this piece of cloth and metal had been underfoot and moved around by the dozens of people who went through the house in the six weeks since it had first been photographed. The contents of the room had been moved, and many items piled in heaps. The cloth fragment had clearly been moved around the floor, and who knows where else.

  The prosecution worked hard to convince the judges and jury that their forensic findings made sense.

  One morning, Manuela Comodi, the co-prosecutor, told the court that to show her dedication to the case, she had brought in her own bra.

  She was carrying a white cotton underwire bra, the closest match in her drawer to what Meredith had been wearing, although, she said, chuckling, it was larger than Meredith’s. Comodi hung the bra on a hanger to mimic a person wearing it. Using her index finger, she showed the mesmerized court how Raffaele could have hooked his finger to pull the back strap of Meredith’s bra (somehow leaving DNA on the clasp but not the cloth) and then sliced off the fastener section with a knife.

  Jury members tittered. The explanation and demonstration were absurd, but no one looked skeptical. Are people actually buying this?

  Another day, the prosecution said that finding my DNA in the bathroom was proof I’d been involved in the murder. They didn’t consider that I had lived in the villa and used that bathroom every day for weeks. Even rookie forensic scientists know that roommates leave DNA in bathrooms, but the prosecution insisted it was incriminating evidence. They claimed that the only way my DNA could have been collected with the samples of Meredith’s blood was if I’d been washing her blood off my hands.

  The prosecution said they were certain the murder had been a group attack. Why, then, was none of my DNA or Raffaele’s DNA in Meredith’s bedroom? Their answer: because Raffaele and I had scrubbed the crime scene clean of our DNA, leaving only Guede’s.

  That theory gave me super powers. DNA is not something you can cherry-pick; it’s invisible. Even if I could somehow magically see DNA, there is no way I could tell one person’s DNA from another’s just by looking—no one can.

  The prosecution contended that, as representatives of the state, they were the impartial party and maintained that their conclusions were legitimate. Our experts, they said, couldn’t be trusted because they were being paid to defend us. And our critiques, objections, and conclusions were just smoke screens created to confuse the judges and jury.

  The divide between experts for the defense and the prosecution grew wide and bitter. The two sides had reached a stalemate. Both defense teams decided that an independent review of the evidence was essential.

  I’m sure some people thought we were grandstanding when Carlo asked the judge to order such a review. I didn’t want to extend my time in the courtroom, or to make the Kerchers sit there an extra minute. It distressed me that Meredith’s family thought I was guilty, but I always had huge empathy for them. No matter the verdict, they would leave Perugia without their daughter and sister. I knew their pain would stay fresh, casting sadness over everything good. But I also knew I had to ask for an independent review. What was at stake for me was how I would be allowed to live my life. No one else’s future depended on this trial except Raffaele’s and mine.

  The court’s deliberation over whether to grant an independent review was unnervingly quick. I sat between my lawyers for just fifteen minutes. “What do you think they’ll decide?” I asked Carlo and Luciano. “It’s hard to see why they wouldn’t grant it. It’s the only fair thing to do.”

  “We made a legitimate argument,” Carlo answered, “but it’s hard to tell with this judge.”

  “It’s not the end for us if the request isn’t accepted,” Luciano said. “It doesn’t mean we’ve lost. Coraggio—courage—Amanda.”

  When the court came back in, I squeezed Luciano’s hand under the table and waited, barely able to breathe.

  With zero fanfare—the way he did everything—Judge Massei stood at the microphone and announced, “There will be no independent review. The court has heard enough expert opinion to make a decision in the case.”

  This was by far the biggest blow yet. Carlo and Luciano looked weary and disappointed, and neither met my eyes that afternoon.

  But I was still so blinded by hope, and my faith in my own innocence, that I actually read this news as positive. I could be accused, but they couldn’t possibly convict me of something I hadn’t done. There was only one honest outcome. I couldn’t imagine that the jurors would side with the police without question. They couldn’t ignore everything that our defense had put forth. “They must think we don’t need the review because there’s already enough reasonable doubt,” I said to Luciano.

  He patted me on the arm but didn’t answer.

  I was convinced that my perspective was right. If the two sides are saying completely different things, that has to mean reasonable doubt. I’ll take reasonable doubt. That’s good enough for me. I really did feel that turn meant that my freedom was near.

  After so many witnesses, and so many words over so many months, there were no more questions to be asked or answered. The judge announced that the court would adjourn until November 20, to allow the prosecution and defense lawyers to prepare their closing arguments. I couldn’t believe I had to wait six weeks! Barring an emergency, with the finality of a curtain drop, the court would render a verdict on Friday, December 4.

  Chapter 28

  October 10–December 4, 2009

  In the weeks leading up to the closing arguments, I put our chances of winning at 95 percent.

  Carlo gave us fifty-fifty. “Judge Massei challenges the defense a lot more than he does the prosecution,” he said. “And the judges and jury nod whenever the prosecution or the Kerchers’ lawyer talks, but look bored when it’s our turn.”

  Still, I held tight to optimism.

  Not without reason. Journalists told Mom and Dad they weren’t convinced by the prosecution’s arguments. Even the Italian media, uniformly negative since the beginning, seemed to be turning around. A show I saw on the second anniversary of Meredith’s death replayed Rudy Guede’s first recorded conversation, in which he said that I wasn’t at the villa. If the press can see the truth, surely the judge and jury can, too.

  I got daily mail from strangers who had faith in me. And now that the forensic information was public, two renowned DN
A scientists, Dr. Elizabeth Johnson of California and Dr. Greg Hampikian, a professor and head of the Idaho Innocence Project, had written a letter of concern signed by seven other experts from around the United States. “No credible scientific evidence has been presented to associate this kitchen knife with the murder of Meredith Kercher,” the report read. The problem with the bra clasp, it said, was contamination. The scientists concluded that the DNA evidence on the knife and the bra clasp “could have been obtained if no crime had occurred.”

  The science would win the day. I would be acquitted, if not outright, then for reasonable doubt. The prosecution’s talk was just that—talk. It wasn’t enough for an intelligent jury to convict me.

  But sometimes my confidence flagged, and I felt a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. In high school I’d learned that 95 percent of criminal cases in the United States end in conviction, and I couldn’t get that statistic out of my head. I was too afraid to ask if it was the same in Italy.

  The prosecution had undermined my credibility in every way possible. Mignini had called my family “a clan”—intending a Mafia connotation—that falsely proclaimed my innocence. He and his co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, had argued that my lawyers’ pitch for reasonable doubt was a technique to create confusion and prolong the Kerchers’ grief.

  A public opinion poll on TV said that more than 60 percent of Italians thought I was guilty. The people who only watched television reports most likely sided with the prosecution. That realization spawned a deep-down fear that I’d be convicted, my innocence be damned.

  Prisoners gossiped about my case all the time, behind my back and to me. “Come on, Amanda. You can tell me.”

  Over the many months of the trial, I grew more and more numb, too afraid to feel lest my emotions overwhelm me. But the closer we got to a verdict, the more my anxiety spiked. I started losing my hair. Each time I washed it, a huge clump would come out in my hands. I cried suddenly over nothing. Panic attacks left me gasping for air. My energy was so low that just walking made me stiff and dizzy. Desperate to shut everything out, I climbed into bed each night at seven or eight, earplugs in, covers over my head.

  Guards often sent me to see Don Saulo. He was the only person who calmed me. I’d sit quietly on his couch holding his hand. One of the few comments he made was “I hope you will go home. As far as I know, you are innocent, and you don’t belong in prison.”

  That meant the world to me.

  Another day, Don Saulo suggested I try praying. “You can just say, ‘God, if you exist, I really need your help right now.’ ”

  So I did pray. It made me feel ridiculous, since I don’t believe in God. But I was also relieved. I thought, I’m covering my bases, just in case. My conversations with God were always the same: “Look, I know innocent people suffer—Meredith didn’t deserve to die. But I don’t think I can handle this. Please let it be part of your plan not to have me go through this, because I don’t know how.”

  Deep down, I didn’t believe a bad outcome was possible. My confidence always overrode the worst-case scenario. My mind could not go there.

  Instead, I daydreamed about home.

  I thought, In my new life, I want to be healthy and productive and musical.

  I cut out décor ideas I liked from magazines and sent them to Madison, my friend from college, for our new apartment in Seattle. I worried about finding a job. I didn’t want to have to rely on my parents. I’d already cost them way too much time and money and caused too much emotional upheaval.

  When they visited me at Capanne, my family would ask, “What’s the first thing you want to do when you get home? What if we escape to Arizona together”—where Chris is from—“to go rock climbing? We can go where no one would find you.”

  My wants were simpler. I imagined being surrounded in the doorway of my mom’s house in West Seattle by everyone who meant something to me—my family; friends like Madison, DJ, James, Andrew, and Brett; my soccer team girlfriends; teachers. All the people who gathered there for the once-a-week, middle-of-the-night ten-minute phone call I’d been allowed to make home for the past two years.

  If the trial goes badly, I thought, I’ll cut my hair.

  It was a superficial, stupid, melodramatic idea. But it was as far as I could go to wrap my mind around an ending that was too enormous and too terrifying to handle.

  One day I got up the courage to ask Chris, who was in Perugia leading up to the closing arguments and verdict, “What would a conviction mean?”

  So afraid to acknowledge that uncharted, dark place, I could only whisper.

  “There would be an appeal, and if you didn’t get acquitted, then the Supreme Court would exonerate you. At the most, Amanda, it would take five years,” Chris explained.

  “Five years?!”

  That was way more than I wanted to know.

  Chris jumped in to reassure me. “If that happened, Amanda, we’d find a way to save you! But don’t worry! It’s not going to happen! And if for some utterly bizarre reason it goes the wrong way, I’m moving to Italy.”

  Chris was already doing his IT job from the cold, stark apartment my parents had rented on the outskirts of Perugia, but his promise sounded so drastic it underscored the absurdity of a conviction.

  There was only one person who, while she cheered me on, also cautioned me against what she called my “Mickey Mouse view.” An inmate in her mid-fifties, Laura was my new ally in prison. She’d been transferred to Capanne over the summer. As the only two Americans there, we’d bonded immediately over how displaced we felt. Leading up to my verdict, she often said, “Amanda, you have the optimism of a Disney movie, but that’s not how the real world is. Things don’t always work out just because they should.”

  And then, just like that, the final act was upon us.

  We’d been going to court, trying our case once or twice a week, for so long that it seemed we’d been living in a suspended state forever. But as we neared the end, it was like somebody had pushed the Fast Forward button. Hearings were now held nearly every day, one tumbling into the next, all leading toward the verdict, scheduled for the first Friday in December. My family bought me a plane ticket home to Seattle as soon as they found out when the verdict was due. “We’re going to get you out of here and back home,” they promised.

  Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini gave his closing argument first. Alternating between a calm, almost quiet recitation of the “facts” and the fiery rants of a preacher at a tent revival, Mignini summarized Raffaele’s and my part in the savagery that took Meredith’s life. He started with the idea that Filomena’s window was too high to be a credible entry point into the villa and ended with our tossing Meredith’s stolen British and Italian cell phones over the garden wall.

  Raffaele and I had accused “this poor Rudy,” as Mignini called him, of “being the only one” to attack Meredith. “He has his own grave responsibility, but the responsibility is not only his own,” Mignini intoned.

  I couldn’t believe what the prosecutor was saying. He, who was championing himself as the bearer of truth for Meredith’s family, was calling the murderer “Poor Rudy”? Evidence of Rudy’s crimes was everywhere, and his history of theft matched the burglary. Poor Rudy? Guede had stolen! He had killed Meredith! He had left a handprint in Meredith’s blood! He had fled! He had lied! Poor Rudy?

  Mignini went on. “For Amanda, the moment had come to take revenge on that simpering girl, that’s how she thought, and in a crescendo of threats and violence, which grew and grew, the siege on Mez”—Meredith’s nickname—“began.”

  Revenge for what?!

  “By now it was an unstoppable game of violence and sex. The aggressors initially threatened her and demanded her submission to the hard-core sex game. It’s easy to imagine Amanda, angry at the British girl for her increasing criticism of Amanda’s sexual easiness, reproaching Mez for her reserve. Let’s try to imagine—she insulted her. Perhaps she said, ‘You were a little saint. Now we’ll show you.
Now you have no choice but to have sex.’ ”

  He’s perverse! How did he come up with such a twisted scenario? He’s portraying me as a psychopath! Is Mignini allowed to put words in my mouth, thoughts in my head? I would never force anyone to have sex. I would never threaten or ridicule anyone.

  Mignini continued: “The British girl was still on her knees with her head turned toward the armoire. Rudy was to the left of Mez. Raffaele brought himself around behind her and tried to tear off the infamous bra clasp and there was the successful cutting of it. Amanda was in front of Mez with her back to the armoire, wielding the knife from below, pointing it upward toward Meredith’s neck.

  “Raffaele also took out his knife,” Mignini said. “And used it to threaten and wound Mez from the right.”

  I went from seething to stunned. For the entire eleven-month trial there was only one knife discussed. Having heard the evidence proving that the kitchen knife was not the murder weapon, Mignini had now invented a second knife—a knife that has never been found or even mentioned. In fact, the police had confiscated Raffaele’s entire pocketknife collection. None had shown any trace of blood or of Meredith’s DNA, and the double-edged blades couldn’t have made Meredith’s wounds. But suddenly Mignini was saying that Raffaele had used another knife he’d somehow stashed away. I knew why. Not only did Mignini’s fantastic scenario explain away the bloody imprint on Meredith’s bedsheet and the wounds that couldn’t have been made with the kitchen knife, but it also allowed the prosecutor to put a knife in Raffaele’s hands. Otherwise, Raffaele had no role in the murder.

  Mignini kept going: “By now, seeing the resistance of the victim and the growing rage of the aggressors, who realized the British girl wouldn’t give in, she wouldn’t submit herself to rape, the game had to end. Amanda provoked the wound on the right side of Mez’s neck and tried to strangle her friend . . . It is a plausible reconstruction. Obviously it is a hypothesis . . . At this point it’s probable that Mez, realizing that the violence was unstoppable, made that terrible and desperate scream . . . Amanda provoked the deepest wound, the one on the left . . . Mez collapsed onto her right side. One of the aggressors looked for the girl’s cell phones, probably Raffaele, and he set down one of the knives on the bedsheet.”