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

by Follain, John

  Sophie sounded so upset that Robyn asked: ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get there,’ Sophie said before hanging up.

  Sophie couldn’t believe that something like that could have happened to Meredith. But something must be wrong because Robyn hadn’t heard from her. A girl called Meredith had been murdered, Cornelia had said. But she’d also said she didn’t think it was the Meredith Sophie knew. But then again, why had she called Sophie in the first place, and why did she want to give her number to the police? It didn’t make sense.

  All Sophie knew was that she wanted to get to Amy and Robyn. She was badly shaken, breathing heavily and making little crying noises. She was in such a hurry she took off her pyjama bottoms and put on a pair of jeans, but then just slipped a cardigan over her pyjama top before rushing out.

  Sophie walked fast, nearly running, to Amy and Robyn’s flat – retracing the route she’d taken with Meredith, in the opposite direction, only the previous evening.

  Worried by the sound of Sophie’s voice on the phone, Amy and Robyn were both waiting for her in the street when she hurried up to them.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Amy and Robyn asked as soon as they saw her.

  ‘It’s really hard to tell you. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know whether it’s true or not,’ Sophie replied, breathing more heavily than before, after her fast walk.

  Amy and Robyn both took hold of her and led her through the big front door and up to their flat on the first floor. The two friends held on to her all the way and kept asking her what was the matter as they went up the steps, but Sophie found the strength to tell them only when they reached the landing.

  ‘I really don’t understand but this woman called me and said a girl called Meredith has been found murdered,’ Sophie finally blurted out.

  Amy stared at her, aghast. Robyn cried out. After a moment of silence, they both started saying that couldn’t be right, Meredith must be OK.

  ‘It’s fine, we’ll just go to the house,’ Amy said.

  Amy and Robyn quickly fetched their coats and they all started down the stairs again. They were still on the stairs when Sophie’s mobile phone rang; it was the police. An officer told her he needed to speak to her and would be sending a car to pick her up; it would be waiting outside the university in five minutes’ time. Then he hung up; he didn’t tell Sophie why he needed to speak to her.

  ‘Something’s definitely not right,’ Sophie said. She started crying. Perhaps something had happened to Meredith on her way home after they’d said goodbye the previous evening, she thought.

  Outside, Amy charged on ahead, not saying anything, while Robyn walked next to Sophie, holding on to her arm.

  ‘What if it’s true?’ Sophie asked Robyn.

  ‘No, it can’t be. It’s somebody else, there’s another Meredith. It’s not her, it’s not her,’ Robyn insisted.

  ‘What if it is?’ Sophie asked.

  The three friends got to the university on Piazza Grimana but there was no police car there. As they waited, they found out from a local man that there were several journalists in the caffè opposite the university. The journalists were saying the victim was apparently Welsh, and twenty-three years old – Meredith wasn’t Welsh, and she wasn’t twenty-three, the friends said to each other. Apparently the house where it happened was just round the corner, the man said, pointing down the road which led to Meredith’s cottage.

  Amy called her father. He told her everything would turn out fine; she should just go to the cottage, and she’d see that Meredith was fine. Amy started walking across the street towards the cottage but Sophie and Robyn shouted after her: ‘Amy! Amy, don’t go there.’

  ‘I’m just going to see if she’s OK,’ Amy said.

  ‘No, don’t go,’ Sophie said. She and Robyn were afraid of what Amy might find.

  When the police car arrived, the three all got into the back together. On the way to the police station, they asked the officer driving them what had happened, but all he knew was that an English girl had been killed. He didn’t know her name.

  It couldn’t be Meredith, the three friends kept saying to each other.

  At the police station, they were shown into the waiting room, which was empty at the time. Moments later Meredith’s flatmate Laura walked in.

  ‘Does that mean it’s her?’ Sophie asked – seeing Laura at the police station must mean the victim was Meredith, she thought. Her question went unanswered; Laura walked out without saying anything. Sophie, Amy and Robyn waited, crying quietly. Sophie now had few doubts that it was Meredith who’d been killed. And yet she still hoped it wasn’t, because no one had told her it was.

  Shortly afterwards, Sophie was led into an office of the Flying Squad, where she sat across a desk from two officers who began by asking her questions in Italian about what she’d done the previous evening. Sophie asked them several times what had happened, but they didn’t answer her; they just said, ‘It’s really bad,’ and kept on asking her questions.

  The questions were mostly about Meredith. When had Sophie last seen Meredith? What had they done together yesterday? What the friends had eaten together seemed to be very important, for some reason Sophie didn’t understand. Sophie said they’d had ice cream. ‘What ice cream?’ one of the officers asked. Struggling to understand what the point of the question was, Sophie said she couldn’t remember. They asked her about drugs, but Sophie said she didn’t know anything about that – she didn’t want to get the students in the semi-basement flat into trouble by mentioning the marijuana plants there.

  She asked again what had happened, but still they didn’t reply. They pressed on with their questions. Tell us about Meredith’s friends, they said. What about her foreign friends? Did Meredith know any black men? Adding to her confusion, one or the other of the officers kept going away to talk to some colleagues before coming back again. One officer gave her some dark chocolate to eat.

  Sophie’s phone rang and she asked if she could answer it. The officers nodded, and Sophie took the call from her father, Terry.

  ‘Oh, so you’re not the British girl who’s been murdered in Perugia then!’ Terry exclaimed with relief.

  The sound of her father’s voice made Sophie burst into tears.

  When Sophie was led back to the waiting room after an hour or so of questioning, she found it crowded with Meredith’s Italian flatmates and their boyfriends, her English friends and other people she didn’t know. They were sitting or standing around looking devastated, several of them in tears.

  Sophie heard someone say that Meredith had been found dead in the cottage, and that Amanda had found her. Just then, Amanda walked into the waiting room. ‘God, what she’s gone through …’ Sophie thought to herself and quickly went up to her.

  ‘Oh, Amanda, I’m so sorry!’ Sophie exclaimed as she instinctively put her arms around her and gave her a bear hug.

  Amanda didn’t hug Sophie back. Instead she stiffened, holding her arms down by her sides. Amanda said nothing.

  Surprised, Sophie let go of her after a couple of seconds and stepped back. There was no trace of emotion on Amanda’s face. Raffaele walked up to Amanda and took hold of her hand; the couple just stood there, ignoring Sophie and gazing at each other.

  Sophie was puzzling over Amanda’s manner when an officer came in and told the two girls to follow him; they must have their fingerprints taken, he said. In her agitated state, Sophie began to worry; she had hugged Meredith the previous evening – would the police find her fingerprints on her friend and think she had something to do with the murder?

  The officer led them and Samantha Rodenhurst, another friend of Meredith’s, down a corridor. As Raffaele tagged along, Sophie turned to Amanda. ‘Amanda, what’s going on? Can you tell me exactly what happened?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘I know everything. What do you want to know? Are you OK?’ Amanda said.

  ‘I can take it. Just tell me what you know because I don’t know anything a
nd I’d like to know. Tell me what you know,’ Sophie said. She braced herself.

  ‘Her throat was cut, and then she was put in the cupboard,’ Amanda said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone – as if what she was describing happened every day, Sophie thought. Amanda was the first to tell Sophie how Meredith had died.

  Amanda explained she hadn’t seen the body herself. Raffaele and Filomena had told her Meredith’s foot was practically dangling out of the cupboard.

  Amanda paused when they reached the lift and the officer told Raffaele he couldn’t come up with them. The couple kissed each other on the lips before Amanda got into the lift with the others. Amanda then talked in a loud voice to Sophie; she was very animated, gesticulating a lot.

  Amanda told Sophie she’d gone home, found the front door open and then seen blood in the bathroom – ‘I thought it was menstrual blood.’ Then she had a shower. It was only when she went to the other bathroom, and saw ‘shit’ in the toilet there, that she thought something was wrong.

  ‘I freaked out a bit; I thought hang on, something’s not right,’ Amanda said.

  Despite her shock at what she was hearing, Sophie felt more and more annoyed with Amanda – with the way she was acting and with the way she was talking about it all. ‘How can she be so indifferent about it?’ Sophie thought to herself. She stopped asking her questions.

  When they reached the forensic police offices, Sophie and Samantha sat down on chairs in the corridor. Amanda stood in front of them, still talking.

  ‘The worst thing about all this is that if I’d been home last night it could have happened to me,’ Amanda said.

  The comment infuriated Sophie. She was so angry with Amanda she wanted to give her a good slap in the face. But instead Sophie just sat there, head bowed, weeping, not looking at Amanda; she didn’t want to see her, or hear her, anymore.

  Later, as they waited for the fingerprint testing, Amanda fished two pieces of paper out of her pocket, on which she’d already written her phone number. She handed them to Sophie and Samantha.

  ‘Here’s my number, if ever you need anything,’ Amanda said.

  Amanda was the first to have her fingerprints taken and came back complaining that her hands were dirty. She was calmly rubbing them together in an effort to clean them.

  Soon afterwards, while Samantha was comforting Sophie, Amanda suddenly raised her eyes to the ceiling and shouted vehemently: ‘Those fucking bastards!’

  Sophie and Samantha stared at each other, bewildered. They thought Amanda must mean the murderers, because she then started to talk about what could have happened to Meredith. She repeated: ‘Why? Why? Why?’

  Sophie and Samantha had assumed there was only one murderer. ‘Are you all right?’ Samantha asked Amanda.

  ‘I’m angry because I’ve been here a long time. I’m hungry, I can’t go and get my clothes, I’m tired,’ Amanda explained. Then, after buying something to eat from the vending machine she complained it gave her ‘a hell of a stomach ache’.

  The fingerprinting finished, they were led away back to the Flying Squad’s waiting room. Sophie left the piece of paper Amanda had given her with her phone number on her chair. She felt she never wanted to talk to her again.

  Back in the crowded waiting room, Sophie kept her distance from Amanda. She sat quietly with Amy and Robyn, but couldn’t help staring at Amanda and Raffaele; Amanda sat with her feet resting on Raffaele’s lap. As they talked to Laura and Filomena sitting opposite them, the two caressed and kissed each other; sometimes they’d even laugh.

  How could Amanda act like that? Sophie asked herself. Doesn’t she care?

  Laura noticed that Amanda had a long vertical red scratch in the middle of her throat. Laura was certain that Amanda didn’t have that scratch on the day Meredith died – the last day Laura had seen Amanda. Questioned by Napoleoni, Laura said, ‘I absolutely rule out that it could have been a love bite or an injury other than a scratch.’

  Most of Meredith’s friends were in tears or looked devastated, but Amanda and Raffaele made smacking noises with their lips when they kissed or sent kisses to each other. Amy saw Amanda sitting with her knees raised close to Raffaele and making faces at him. She stuck her tongue out, curled it up, and crossed her eyes; the two then burst out laughing and kissed each other. She’s either going mad or she’s mad already, Amy thought.

  14

  Pisco, the owner of the Merlin Pub, was among Meredith’s acquaintances summoned by the police. In the waiting room, he went up to Amanda – he knew her by sight as she’d been to his bar.

  ‘You’re Meredith’s flatmate, aren’t you?’ Pisco asked.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ Amanda told him about how the body was found, saying: ‘I went inside the room with the police.’

  Soon afterwards Patrick, the owner of the bar Le Chic where Amanda worked, called her.

  ‘Amanda, is it true that your friend, the English girl, is dead?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘It’s true. I can’t talk now because I’m with the police,’ Amanda replied.

  ‘Oh, OK, sorry.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Patrick said friends of his had told him, then hung up.

  Late that evening, after four hours of questioning, Natalie Hayward, an English friend of Meredith’s, was shown into the waiting room where she heard Amanda say, in an aggressive tone, that if she had been in the cottage that night, she too would be dead now.

  ‘Let’s hope she didn’t suffer,’ Natalie said.

  ‘What do you think? They cut her throat, Natalie. She fucking bled to death!’ Amanda retorted.

  Amanda’s words chilled Natalie; she was surprised both by Amanda talking of several killers, and by the coldness of her tone. Natalie thought it was as if Meredith’s death didn’t concern her.

  That evening, Robyn too was shocked by Amanda’s manner. Describing in a loud voice how she had found ‘shit’ in the toilet, Amanda kept on repeating the word: ‘shit’. Robyn thought this was strange as Meredith had told her she had argued with Amanda, criticising her for failing to flush the toilet even when she was menstruating. Amanda kept talking too about how she had found Meredith; she seemed proud of it.

  Talking in English, again loudly, to someone on her mobile phone, Amanda repeated over and over again ‘I found her’, ‘I was the first to find her’ and ‘It could have been me in her place’. She repeated that she had seen Meredith’s body in the cupboard, with a blanket over her. All the time, Amanda’s tone was exuberant, which for Robyn was inappropriate and disrespectful.

  Robyn was also shocked to see the way Amanda translated the word ‘minaccia’ – threat – for Raffaele when Meredith’s friends talked about an English media report of a threat made before the murder. This was in fact the phone call received by Elisabetta Lana who lived near the cottage, telling her not to use the toilet ‘because there’s a bomb inside’ – police quickly established it was a prank. It was in her garden that Meredith’s mobile phones had been found.

  Robyn saw Amanda repeat the Italian word ‘minaccia’ to Raffaele several times, her face up close to his. She would say the word, then kiss him, then repeat it, kiss him again and then they both laughed.

  Throughout the long hours at the police station, Amanda tried several times to talk to Meredith’s English friends in Italian, just as she always did. How could she be thinking about improving her Italian at a time like this? Sophie asked herself. At one point Amy answered Amanda in Italian just to shut her up.

  As she waited, Sophie suddenly realised she hadn’t told the police about Hicham Khiri, the Moroccan chef whom she’d met with Meredith a couple of times, and who had dropped his trousers while dancing with Meredith. The police had asked Sophie repeatedly about any foreign friends of Meredith’s, so she went to talk to an officer.

  This time, she was questioned by a senior detective who asked her many questions about Hicham. Sophie felt awful telling the police about him; she’d even kissed him once on the night of Halloween,
and now the detective was asking her whether he could have killed Meredith.

  I don’t know, perhaps, was all she could say.

  Like Amanda, Raffaele complained about being kept at the police station. At one point, he went up to an officer to ask: ‘We’re tired, can we go home?’

  The policeman was taken aback by the question – if a friend or an acquaintance of his had died, he was sure he wouldn’t dream of asking to leave – but he simply asked Raffaele to be patient.

  Like Amanda, Raffaele seemed bizarrely unemotional to Meredith’s friends. Speaking to his sister on his mobile, he told her in a cold tone: ‘They’ve slit the throat of my girlfriend’s flatmate’ – he stressed the words ‘slit the throat’ and he too spoke of several killers. But they noticed that Raffaele kept rubbing his hands and, from time to time, he would go red in the face.

  When Filomena’s boyfriend Marco emerged from his questioning, Raffaele bombarded him with questions about the murder – to Marco, it felt like a second interrogation.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ Raffaele asked first. ‘Who do you think did it?’ he asked next.

  ‘I’m sure it was someone who knew her,’ Marco replied.

  Napoleoni and her colleagues asked Meredith’s flatmates and friends about the students in the semi-basement flat, and which men had been to the cottage. They wanted to know if anyone had taken a fancy to Meredith or flirted with her in Perugia or if anyone had ever bothered her, and they searched for men pictured with her in the photographs taken on Halloween night, which the friends had given them. The detectives quickly learnt that Meredith went out almost exclusively with her English girlfriends, and had met Giacomo several times in the past few days.

  Napoleoni went back and forth between the waiting room and the offices where the questioning took place. She saw that most of Meredith’s friends were either tearful or in shock, while Amanda was pulling faces at Raffaele, and putting her feet up on his knees.