A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case

by Follain, John

  The flatmate Amanda looked up to most was Laura, whom she admired for being strong-minded. She saw Filomena as ever-cheerful and funny. Meredith was the most studious of them all, and the most solitary because she often isolated herself from the others to read, although she would sometimes watch stupid Italian TV programmes with them.

  As they got to know Amanda better, her flatmates began to find her increasingly bizarre and even irritating. Filomena thought Amanda was weird and too extrovert because she would suddenly jump up to do yoga exercises in the middle of a conversation, or start playing the guitar when the others were talking or watching TV. Filomena also thought Amanda lacked common sense and started to mother her, trying to make her understand that they expected her to do her share of the housework.

  Writing about Amanda in an email to her sister, Meredith remembered when she and Stephanie used to dance around the house laughing and singing at the top of their voices. She realised only now, she wrote, how annoying it must have been for other people because Amanda did the same thing.

  To her friend Sophie, Meredith complained about the way Amanda seemed to crave constant attention. One evening when the students from the downstairs flat had come upstairs for a drink, Amanda came in and started doing yoga in front of everyone. ‘It was like she wasn’t getting enough attention. She was showing off,’ Meredith told Sophie.

  Sophie noticed that Meredith was colder towards Amanda than she had been at first when they spent an evening together at Le Chic, a bar in the centre of Perugia. Amanda insisted on speaking in Italian to a Dutch classmate of Meredith’s who spoke perfect English. Talking loudly all the time, Amanda kept saying the word ‘verde’ (green) when she didn’t mean to say ‘green’ at all.

  Meredith looked annoyed. ‘It’s embarrassing. Why is she being so loud?’ she asked Sophie.

  ‘Yes, why doesn’t she just talk English?’ Sophie said. It was the first time, Sophie realised, that Meredith had expressed irritation with Amanda when they were together.

  Sophie thought Amanda must be showing off. Sophie knew Amanda wanted to get a job at the bar, and she was flirting with the barman, being all touchy-feely.

  Amanda came up to the two English girls. ‘Oh, I’m really drunk,’ she said.

  Sophie thought she might be faking.

  In early October, Amanda started work as a waitress at Le Chic, run by thirty-eight-year-old Diya ‘Patrick’ Lumumba. Born in Zaire, Patrick had settled in Italy at the age of twenty-one and was well known to students in Perugia because he helped to organise gigs, often taking the stage with his own band, playing a mix of reggae and contemporary music. He was always ready to help his friends and even strangers; he once ran after a drug addict who had stolen a woman’s bag and recovered it for her. Patrick worked hard at making Le Chic a success: he would often close his bar at 2 a.m. or later, and be out the next morning at 9 a.m. outside the university, distributing leaflets to promote it. But despite his efforts, only a few foreign students went to Le Chic, and it was often nearly empty.

  For the first ten days, Patrick hired Amanda every night from 10 p.m. to about 2 a.m., for £4.50 an hour. But he wasn’t very impressed by her work – he noticed she didn’t clean the table after some customers left – but instead of reprimanding her, he asked her to hand his leaflets out in the street, going in for only two nights a week, on Mondays and Thursdays.

  When Amanda emailed her to say she’d got the job, Edda worried about her walking home late at night. ‘What time are you getting off work?’ Edda asked.

  ‘Sometimes late,’ Amanda replied.

  ‘How are you getting home?’

  ‘I walk home.’

  Edda persisted. ‘Is someone walking you home?’

  ‘There are always people out, it’s not as if you walk home alone; there are people on the steps of the cathedral late at night,’ Amanda told her mother – who didn’t know the cathedral wasn’t on her way home.

  Soon after starting work at Le Chic, Amanda badgered Meredith to go there for a drink. Meredith eventually agreed and Amanda introduced her to Patrick. As they chatted, Patrick found out that Meredith had learnt to make a mojito cocktail with a special kind of vodka, and asked her to make them in his bar. From then on, every time Patrick bumped into Meredith in the street, he would say to her: ‘So, when are you coming to my bar to prepare your cocktails?’ She told him that she went to the Merlin Pub with her friends, and he complained that English girls always went to the Merlin and never to his bar.

  A few days later, Amanda tagged along when Meredith and her friends spent an evening at the Velvet nightclub. Suddenly, Amanda emptied her glass over the head of the disc jockey. She was promptly thrown out, but Meredith sprang to her defence.

  ‘Poor girl, she’s on her own. We don’t know why she did it but she won’t do it again,’ Meredith promised the staff. Amanda was allowed back in.

  The episode may have been too much for Meredith, because it was around this time, in mid-October, that Filomena noticed that relations between Meredith and Amanda had cooled.

  ‘My impression is that Meredith is a bit sick and tired of Amanda,’ Filomena told Laura. As far as she could tell, it was just Amanda’s extrovert personality that irritated Meredith. From then on, according to Filomena, Amanda and Meredith saw less and less of each other. Amanda herself told Meredith that she only wanted to socialise with Italians because that way she would learn the language – which ruled out the English friends Meredith had tried to share with her.

  Meredith complained increasingly about Amanda to her family and friends. She told her sister Stephanie that her relationship with Amanda was superficial as she had her friends and Amanda had hers and they were now doing different courses at the university. Meredith described her flatmate as ‘very exuberant and sometimes tiresome’.

  To her English friends, Meredith listed the things that irritated her about Amanda. Amanda was always trying to grab people’s attention. She would play the same chord over and over again on the guitar. She insisted on speaking Italian all the time, even to Meredith. She brought men into the house, including an Albanian she met at Le Chic and a man Meredith and her friends nicknamed ‘Internet Man’ – because Amanda had met him in an Internet café – who was ‘a bit strange’.

  One afternoon, a flustered Meredith bumped into her friend Sophie in front of the law courts.

  ‘I’ve just called my Dad, I don’t know what to do,’ Meredith said. ‘Amanda keeps leaving the toilet unflushed. She doesn’t flush the toilet, not even when she’s got her period. I can’t stand it, but it’s so awkward having to say something to her. What do you think, should I say something?’

  ‘You’ve got to be diplomatic about it. You could say: “I’m really sorry to bring this up, but did you know that you left the toilet that way?” ’ Sophie suggested.

  Meredith nodded. ‘You know, one time she left the toilet unflushed and there was a guy around. How could she do that? What if he goes in the toilet? Isn’t she embarrassed she did that?’

  Sophie had never seen Meredith so worked up about Amanda.

  A few days later, Meredith told Sophie she’d talked to Amanda about the toilet. ‘Amanda, you know, you can’t leave it like that,’ Meredith had said.

  The way Meredith described it, it had been just a conversation, not a row. Besides, Sophie thought, Meredith wouldn’t let something like that get between her and Amanda. She had to live with her.

  At first, Meredith had no intention of getting romantically tied up with anyone in Perugia. She confided to Filomena that she didn’t want to get involved with any men there, because she had come to Italy to study. But after a few weeks she couldn’t stop herself thinking about Giacomo, the student who lived downstairs. His flatmates fuelled her interest; initially they said that he fancied Amanda, but now they told Meredith that he preferred her.

  Meredith told Amanda she couldn’t make up her mind whether she was interested or not. But she added that he was ‘a very sweet bo
y’. Amanda insisted that Giacomo really liked her (Amanda); he had followed Amanda practically all night during a party that Meredith had missed.

  ‘I like Giacomo too but you can have him,’ Amanda said. The comment stung Meredith. ‘I don’t need Amanda’s permission to be with someone. I don’t think he does like her, so why is she saying this to me?’ Meredith asked Sophie afterwards. Sophie thought Amanda was jealous; the fact that Giacomo liked Meredith made Amanda feel insecure, and that was why she had made her irritating comment. Once, Meredith told Sophie, Amanda asked her to help her put some make-up on – Amanda rarely wore any – and for some advice on how to do her hair. ‘I’m not good at girlie things like that,’ Amanda had said.

  Insecure or not, Amanda spoke openly about men and her sex life to Meredith – so much so that Meredith felt embarrassed listening to her. Amanda told her she had no problem being seen nude and that in America she had once talked to a friend’s boyfriend even though she was stark naked. She also told a shocked Meredith that she had had an erotic dream, written it up and sent it to DJ.

  Meredith talked about Amanda’s sexuality with her friend Sophie. For Meredith, it was strange the way Amanda would meet a man and be straightaway ‘very full on’, either spending hours with him, or sleeping with him. For Meredith and Sophie, it wasn’t a question of judging Amanda; they simply found her hard to understand. Sophie’s impression was that Amanda slept with men simply because she could – there didn’t seem to be any romance involved.

  At first, Meredith told Sophie, she’d thought Amanda was sexually very self-confident in the way she approached men, but the more Amanda told her about her men the more Meredith became convinced there was more to it than that. It was as if Amanda felt she had to have these relationships.

  ‘Amanda’s actually quite vulnerable. I feel a bit sorry for her,’ Meredith told Sophie.

  Meredith’s friends began to see less and less of Amanda, but what they did see made them sympathise with Meredith. Once, when Sophie went to the cottage, Amanda greeted her with a very loud ‘Ciao! Come stai?’ (Hi, how are you?), drawing out the last word: ‘staaaiiii’.

  Why couldn’t Amanda just speak English to her? Sophie thought to herself, not for the first time; Meredith and Sophie were both shy about speaking Italian in front of their English friends, even though Meredith’s Italian was pretty good. Amanda suffered from no such shyness, and Sophie thought her insistence on speaking Italian to her was over the top, that she was clamouring for attention rather than simply practising. With Amanda, everything was so exaggerated, all the time, Sophie thought.

  Meredith still missed her family, and worried about her mother. Arline had just had two operations, only to be taken ill as soon as she returned home and rushed back to hospital by the emergency services.

  ‘Meredith was very upset and wanted to come home but I didn’t want to disrupt her studies and I was better … Her brother and her sister rang her to tell her not to worry,’ Arline recalled later. Meredith was however set on flying home again to celebrate Arline’s sixty-second birthday on 11 November; Arline’s children always got together to celebrate the birthday together, and Meredith’s absence and Arline’s poor health made her want to be with them all the more.

  Meredith was so concerned about Arline that she walked out of a cinema halfway through a film she had gone to see with Sophie to call her father for news. Sophie was impressed by the fact that even when Meredith was anxious about her mother, she was as bubbly and smiling as ever with her friends.

  In a phone call in mid-October, Meredith talked about her plans for the trip with Stephanie. The sisters discussed where they would take Arline for her treat and what presents they were going to give her. Stephanie told Meredith she had booked time off from her job to be completely free when Meredith came home.

  ‘I’m glad I said that because she was looking forward to it,’ Stephanie said later.

  It was the last time Stephanie spoke to her sister.

  5

  At about 2 a.m. one night in mid-October, Meredith, Amanda, Giacomo and one of the other students who lived downstairs were heading home past the Shamrock pub opposite the cathedral when they bumped into a twenty-year-old immigrant from the Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede, whom Amanda had met a few days earlier at Le Chic. Tall and with an athletic build, Rudy had lived in Perugia since he was a child. He spoke perfect Italian and had a Perugian accent.

  Rudy had often played basketball with the students from the downstairs flat on Piazza Grimana and as they walked down the steep hill leading to the cottage, he asked them if Amanda had a boyfriend; they didn’t think so. When they reached the square, the two boys invited Rudy to the cottage. Amanda went to her room while Rudy sat in the kitchen with them talking about her. They all thought she was good-looking.

  ‘I’d like to screw her,’ Rudy said.

  Moments later, Amanda herself knocked on the door; the men burst out laughing but couldn’t tell her what the joke was. One of them rolled a joint and passed it round. Rudy was impressed by how deeply Amanda inhaled when she smoked it. ‘She’s a great smoker, she often comes here and we smoke joints together,’ one of the boys told him.

  They were still smoking when Meredith joined them. She took just one pull on the joint; she was no habitual smoker. Rudy said later he found her attractive and they talked until about 4.30 a.m. when Meredith announced: ‘I’m off, I’m going to sleep.’ Amanda followed her out. That night, a drunken Rudy went to the toilet, leaving the door open, and fell asleep on it. He woke up later, failed to flush the toilet, and then crashed out on the sofa.

  Not wanting to be on bad terms with her flatmate, Meredith made an effort to get on with Amanda and the two went together to Perugia’s Eurochocolate festival. Every year, for a week, stands selling chocolate mushroomed on the Corso Vannucci and nearby streets, as well as in palace courtyards and in the city’s parks.

  Meredith and Amanda strolled between stands offering lessons in chocolate tasting, in making chocolate cakes and ice cream. There were elaborate chocolate sculptures, and a beauty salon selling only chocolate-based products. Meredith bought a chocolate-scented bubble bath and a candle and went back to the cottage loaded with presents she intended to give to her family when she flew home in three weeks’ time. She put them in a suitcase under her bed. Amanda emailed Edda to say she’d got to taste all this chocolate and eaten far too much of it. Meredith was fun, she wrote, they’d had a great time together.

  When a kitten suddenly turned up outside the cottage one day, both Meredith and Amanda befriended it. They fussed over the kitten, stroking it and leaving a bowl of milk out for it; the kitten kept coming back. But some days later it was found lying still outside the cottage; it looked as if it had been hit by a car. The kitten’s death greatly saddened Meredith and she told Sophie she was shocked that no one had been willing to move it, and bury it.

  On the night of 20 October, a Saturday, Giacomo and the three other students from the downstairs flat took Meredith and Amanda to the Red Zone nightclub outside Perugia, where they danced to throbbing house music until dawn the next morning. With them was Daniel De Luna, a student from Rome who, at Giacomo’s birthday party the previous month, had made a pass at Amanda.

  He had never met Amanda before but he had gone straight up to her at the party and pointed at her lower lip: ‘I like you because you’ve got herpes.’

  ‘No, it’s a cold sore,’ Amanda replied.

  ‘No, it’s herpes. It means you like sex,’ Daniel said.

  At the Red Zone nightclub, Amanda and Daniel danced under the fake, gold-lit palm trees until about 5.30 a.m. Back at the cottage, Amanda took him to her room. He left the following afternoon but the two didn’t bother to exchange phone numbers.

  Meredith and Giacomo were also flirting at the Red Zone that night. They kissed for the first time and spent the rest of the night together. Afterwards, Giacomo confided to a friend that he was ‘with’ Meredith; he felt happy with her, he said, but
it wasn’t love or anything big.

  Giacomo’s lack of commitment weighed on Meredith. One evening, when she was strolling down Corso Vannucci with her friends Sophie and Pisco, the owner of the Merlin Pub, he asked her abruptly: ‘Don’t you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘To be honest, there’s a boy I like very very much, I think I’m almost in love with him but I can’t make him out. When we’re alone together he’s very nice and gentle with me, but if we meet in the street he barely says hello. He behaves as if I was just a friend,’ Meredith replied.

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t know what he wants himself. Why don’t you tell him you want a more steady relationship – tell him you want to be his girlfriend?’ Pisco suggested.

  Moments later, they came face to face with Giacomo who was heading in the opposite direction with some friends. He didn’t stop; he just gave a little wave and shouted ‘Ciao!’ to Meredith as he walked past her.

  ‘You see!’ Meredith said to Pisco.

  ‘That was him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, looking unhappy.

  From Amanda’s diary:

  [Amanda lists the names of seven men she has had sex with, grouping them under the two headings ‘US (Seattle, New York)’ and ‘Italy (Florence, Perugia)’. Three of the men she names are in Italy.]

  Interesting, isn’t it? I think it means that my sex life doesn’t correspond to my emotional romantic life. An obvious statement because the only one I’m in love with (even if to tell the truth he’s not the only one I want to have sex with) is incredibly far away.