Having made little progress in four days – they still had no culprit, no murder weapon and no motive – and struggling that afternoon to relaunch the investigation, Mignini and Napoleoni questioned Meredith’s friend Sophie in the prosecutor’s office. For the past few days, Sophie had been staying with her parents in a hotel outside Perugia. She knew that journalists were looking for her and rarely left the hotel, spending much of her days either reading about the investigation or watching the news on television.
Mignini went over the ground that the detectives had covered a few days earlier. He asked Sophie about Giacomo, Hicham and Meredith’s other male friends. Had she and Meredith met a young South African man? he asked. No, Sophie replied. He asked about the Halloween party, showing Sophie photographs of men who’d been there.
Mignini also asked her about the last evening at Amy and Robyn’s flat – what Meredith wore, what she ate, when she left the flat with Sophie, and when did Sophie say goodbye to her? Sophie said she’d looked at the time when she walked into her flat and it was 9 p.m.
That evening, Napoleoni and her colleagues decided to question Raffaele once more because his account – like Amanda’s – was still confusing. The detectives also wanted to check why phone records showed that his and Amanda’s mobiles had become inactive within minutes of each other on the night of the murder, and had remained inactive all night – Amanda’s from 8.35 p.m. to midday the next day, and Raffaele’s from 8.42 p.m. to 6.02 a.m. The records also showed that Amanda and Raffaele both usually kept their mobiles switched on until late at night.
A detective called Raffaele on his mobile. ‘Raffaele, we need you to come to the police station for some more questions,’ the detective said.
‘I’m having dinner with Amanda at a friend’s place; I’ll come when we’ve finished,’ Raffaele said.
When the detective told Napoleoni what Raffaele had said, she exploded: ‘Madonna mia, these two are driving me mad! Shouldn’t you drop everything when the police call you? Surely a dinner isn’t more important than helping to track down whoever’s done those awful things to Meredith? And the police are supposed to wait for Raffaele to have his dessert?’
The Homicide Squad had summoned only Raffaele but like the previous day – when they had summoned only Amanda – both of them turned up at the police station, at about 10.30 p.m.
Remembering that Amanda had complained repeatedly over the past few days that she was tired, Napoleoni told her she didn’t need to stay. ‘Look, you’ve had dinner, you can go and sleep. We’ll call you if we need you,’ she said.
‘No, no, I’ll stay. I’ll wait for him here, it’s no problem,’ Amanda said. She looked tense.
Napoleoni told her she could sit by the lifts just outside the offices of the Flying Squad – she didn’t want Amanda to overhear anything happening inside – and then led Raffaele in.
Amanda sat down and called Filomena.
‘Ciao gorgeous,’ Amanda said.
‘Ciao gorgeous, how are you?’ Filomena asked.
‘Fine, I’ve had a good day without the police, but Raffaele was told to go to the police station so I’m there, waiting for him … What did you do today?’
‘I went to my office to get some information about the contract [for the cottage] … and I’ve got an appointment with the estate agency at 9.30 tomorrow morning … Do you want to come too?’
‘Ah, I’ve got to meet my mother at the station tomorrow.’
‘OK, fine … We’ll meet up afterwards and I’ll tell you how it went.’
‘Yes, and you can meet my mom.’
‘Of course! If you need something, we can meet up, OK?’
‘Yes of course, call me, OK?’
‘OK gorgeous, say hi to Raffaele for me. Hey Amanda, stay calm, all right?’
Amanda took some books out of her bag and started reading.
At 10.40 p.m., Napoleoni and two detectives from Rome began questioning Raffaele in the office of the head of the Flying Squad. The detectives sat on one side of the desk, Raffaele on the other; he kept rubbing his hands, and clasping and unclasping them.
Less than a half hour into the questioning, Napoleoni went out to fetch a bottle of water from the vending machine downstairs and was astonished to see Amanda doing the splits followed by a cartwheel. That she could even think of doing such a thing in a police station shocked Napoleoni. ‘Amanda’s attitude was always over the top,’ Napoleoni said later. That night, detectives saw her do the yoga bridge position, lying on the floor on her back with her knees up, hands at her side, and arching her back upwards several times as she took slow, deep breaths. A detective reprimanded her, telling her a police station was no place for yoga.
In his statement to Napoleoni and her colleagues, Raffaele said that on the morning of 1 November, he had woken up at 11 a.m. and had breakfast with Amanda at his flat. She left and he went back to bed until lunchtime, when he went to the cottage. They saw Meredith there; she seemed to be in a hurry and went out at 4 p.m. Some two hours later, he and Amanda walked into the centre of Perugia, but he couldn’t remember what they’d done.
At about 9 p.m., Raffaele returned to his flat on his own; Amanda had told him she was going to Le Chic, where she wanted to meet some friends. Raffaele sat at his computer for a while, and smoked a joint. At about 11 p.m., his father called him on the flat’s phone; Amanda hadn’t returned yet. Raffaele then surfed the Internet for another two hours, stopping only when Amanda arrived at about 1 a.m. He couldn’t remember what he had for dinner, how Amanda was dressed, or whether they had sex that night.
They woke the next morning, 2 November, at about 10 a.m.; Amanda told him she wanted to go and have a shower at her house and change her clothes. She left half an hour later carrying an empty plastic bag, telling him she needed it to bring back her dirty laundry. Raffaele went back to sleep. At about 11.30 a.m. Amanda came back, having changed her clothes.
The couple sat down in the kitchen where they chatted and ‘maybe’ had breakfast. It was only then, according to Raffaele’s account, that she told him what she had discovered that morning: ‘Amanda told me that when she arrived at her house she found the front door wide open and traces of blood in the small bathroom. She asked me if I thought this was strange. I answered that yes, it was strange, and I told her that she should call her friends. She told me she’d called Filomena, but that Meredith wasn’t answering her phone.’
At midday, the couple set out for Amanda’s house and reached it ten minutes later. Raffaele saw the mess and the broken glass in Filomena’s room. He saw that Meredith’s door was locked, and the blood in the bathroom. ‘I went into Laura’s room and I saw that everything was all right. At that moment Amanda went into the big bathroom, next to the kitchen, and came out looking frightened. She hugged me tightly and told me that earlier, when she had taken her shower, she had seen excrement inside the toilet, but that now it was clean … At that point I asked myself what was happening.’
They went outside to try to climb the wall to Meredith’s window, but Raffaele said it was too dangerous. Then they went back in to try to break down her door; Raffaele kicked it several times and tried forcing it with his shoulder several times, but without success. He called his sister, an officer in the carabinieri, and she told him to call them, which he said he did, before the postal police arrived.
Raffaele’s statement contradicted his earlier accounts to police. Previously, he had said that Amanda had returned to his flat with him on the evening of 1 November; now he was saying that Amanda didn’t return with him.
Napoleoni asked Raffaele why he was giving her a different version.
‘I told you a lot of bullshit in my earlier statement, because she’d convinced me that her version of what happened was right, and I didn’t think of the inconsistencies,’ Raffaele replied.
It was the first time that Raffaele had distanced himself from Amanda’s account.
Shortly after Napoleoni saw Amanda doing the splits and th
e wheel, a man went to sit next to her, saying he just wanted to chat. He didn’t say he was from the police, but Amanda later guessed he was. She vented her frustration with him: it was ridiculous that the police called Raffaele and her in at ridiculous hours of the night and kept them at the police station for hours on end, with only food from a vending machine available.
The man asked her who she thought the murderer could be. How could she know, Amanda replied, she didn’t know anyone dangerous. Soon several detectives joined them, asking the same questions again: ‘Which men have been in your house? Who knew Meredith? Who do you think the murderer is?’
After a barrage of questions, a detective asked Amanda to come into the Flying Squad’s offices; he said it would be warmer there. She asked where Raffaele was, and was told he would be done soon. At about 11 p.m., at the request of Chief Detective Inspector Rita Ficarra, a thin, slight officer from Sicily, Amanda looked in her mobile’s address book and made a list of the names and mobile phone numbers of men whom Meredith had known, on a piece of paper she ripped from her notebook. She drew maps to show where they lived.
Among the men she mentioned were Patrick, an Algerian called Yuve who sometimes worked at Le Chic, ‘Shaky’ who worked in a pizzeria, and a short, black ‘South African’ who played basketball on Piazza Grimana and who had once been to the semi-basement flat when Meredith was there too.
Until then, Amanda had denied ever using drugs but she now admitted to Ficarra that she and Raffaele both smoked hashish. Raffaele himself had earlier confided to Amanda that he had in the past taken cocaine and acid, but said that now he limited himself to joints; Amanda added that he suffered from depression.
Earlier that evening at home, Mignini watched a crime programme on TV about Meredith’s murder which focused on a North African man spotted washing his clothes and shoes in a laundry on the day of the murder and who had since disappeared. The programme irritated the prosecutor; the Homicide Squad had first heard about the man on the evening of the day after the murder, and had quickly ruled him out as a suspect.
Exhausted after catching little sleep for three nights in a row, Mignini went to bed soon after 10.30 p.m., looking forward to a good night’s sleep. He fell asleep immediately but only half an hour later the phone rang and he lost all hope of rest: Giacinto Profazio, the head of the Flying Squad, had also been bothered by the TV programme and worried that if the investigation kept going round and round in circles for much longer, it could even stall permanently. He had launched another round of questioning and asked Mignini to come to the police station.
Mignini didn’t hesitate. Some of his colleagues kept the police at arm’s length, simply giving them directions and then waiting for the results, but Mignini wanted to be as closely involved as possible; he carried out his job as if he was a detective himself.
‘I think this one’s also going to be a long night,’ Mignini told his wife Cristina as he got out of bed.
Mignini’s family had long become used to the long hours that kept him away from home. He never discussed the confidential details of an investigation with Cristina or his daughters, and they knew better than to ask. He once asked his daughters about the various bars Meredith went to. One, the Domus, was very close to where they lived. ‘We’ve probably walked past Meredith in the street, the Domus is just around the corner from us,’ he mused. But his family followed the case closely on TV and in the newspapers. They had seen dozens of students gather that evening for a candlelight vigil on the white and pink marble steps of the cathedral, and talked occasionally about ‘Meredith’ – like most Perugians, they called her by her first name, a sign of affection.
At the police station, Mignini found detectives bustling back and forth, despite the late hour. Profazio told the prosecutor that Napoleoni was questioning Raffaele next door and, together with other detectives, they discussed what had emerged from the investigation so far, trying to envisage every possible scenario for the murder.
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6 November 2007
It was now after midnight and Raffaele was still being questioned when Napoleoni suddenly slipped out to speak to the Flying Squad chief Profazio. She felt they were at last on to something.
‘Listen, Raffaele isn’t giving Amanda an alibi any more. He’s admitted he told a pack of lies because of Amanda,’ Napoleoni said.
With her boss’s approval, Napoleoni instructed her colleague Ficarra: ‘Question Amanda again, on the record. Something’s not right here.’
At 1.45 a.m. in an office of the Robberies Unit, away from where Raffaele was still talking, Ficarra and two other detectives started questioning Amanda again with the help of an interpreter. During the questioning, detectives repeatedly went to fetch her a snack, water and hot drinks including camomile tea.
Asked why she hadn’t gone to work at Le Chic on the evening of Thursday, 1 November, Amanda replied she’d received a message from Patrick at 8.18 p.m. telling her that the bar wouldn’t open that evening because there were no customers, and so she didn’t need to come to work.
Amanda said she hadn’t replied to the message, but a detective showed her that her reply was still on the display of her mobile phone. ‘Sure. See you later. Have a good evening!’ the message read. The message from Patrick was no longer in the mobile’s memory.
When her message was shown to her, Amanda suffered what the interpreter later described as ‘an emotional shock’. She lifted her hands up to her head and put them over her ears, hunched her shoulders forward and started crying.
‘It’s him! It’s him! He did it! I can hear it,’ she burst out. Shaking her head, she added: ‘He’s bad, he’s bad.’
A detective asked Amanda: ‘Why are you crying?’
‘I remember that I was inside the kitchen,’ she said.
Still distraught, and repeatedly putting her hands over her ears and shaking her head, Amanda now said she was in Raffaele’s flat when she received Patrick’s message, and replied at 8.35 p.m. ‘I answered the message saying that we’d see each other straightaway, and then I left the house telling my boyfriend that I had to go to work. I have to say that in the afternoon Raffaele and I had smoked a joint and so I felt confused because I don’t often use either light or heavy drugs,’ Amanda said. ‘I met Patrick just afterwards at the basketball court on Piazza Grimana and I went home with him. I don’t remember whether Meredith was already there or whether she arrived a short time later. It’s hard for me to remember but Patrick had sex with Meredith, he was infatuated with her, but I don’t remember if Meredith was threatened first. I remember confusedly that he’s the one who killed her.’
Ficarra abruptly ended the interview. With only a couple of sentences, Amanda had turned herself from witness to suspect, placing herself as she had at the scene of the crime.
Ficarra rushed to fetch Napoleoni out of the room where she was still questioning Raffaele. Out of Raffaele’s hearing, Ficarra announced: ‘Amanda’s confessed, she says Patrick killed Meredith.’
Amanda’s turnaround electrified Mignini and the detectives. Shattered and tense after so many sleepless nights, they urgently discussed what to do next, but couldn’t agree on the best strategy. Chiacchiera, the deputy head of the Flying Squad, wanted to put Patrick, Amanda and Raffaele under tight surveillance, phone taps included, hoping they would say or do something that would incriminate them. Arresting them now wouldn’t help the investigation, he insisted.
Napoleoni however argued that Patrick, Amanda and Raffaele should all be arrested. She was convinced Raffaele was lying, and so was Amanda; that was the reason why he and Amanda had never wanted to be separated over the past few days, she reasoned. Backed by several other detectives, Napoleoni argued that Amanda’s involvement in the murder was certain – she was at the cottage, so she must have let the killer in, and there was the text message in which she told Patrick, in Italian: ‘Sure. See you later. Have a good evening!’ For Napoleoni, ‘See you later’ meant the two planned to meet. Several det
ectives were however less certain as far as Raffaele was concerned, objecting that the evidence against him was weak.
Mignini decided he had no choice but to arrest Patrick as soon as possible since Amanda had accused him of murdering Meredith – a team started work on finding out where he lived and seizing him there. The prosecutor also decided that he would hear Amanda himself. He was anxious to get what she had told the police on the record in his presence, in order to be able to use it against her in future; under Italian law, what Amanda had said as a witness could not be used against her, although it could be used against others.
While Mignini and the detectives talked, other officers brought Amanda buns and more hot camomile tea – they gave her so much it irritated Napoleoni, but she said nothing. Napoleoni asked Amanda whether she wanted a lawyer, but she refused. Then – surprising Napoleoni yet again – Amanda stretched out over a couple of chairs and fell asleep. Raffaele’s questioning lasted almost five hours, until 3.30 a.m.
At 5.45 a.m., Mignini summoned Amanda. Speaking through an interpreter, the prosecutor asked if she was willing to make a statement. He opened a copy of the penal code and read out an article to her, which the interpreter translated. The law, Mignini explained, said that he couldn’t ask her any questions and would limit himself to taking down her statement. ‘You talk, and I listen,’ Mignini said. He pointed out that from now on, anything she said could be used against her, and she was entitled to a lawyer. Amanda said she didn’t need one. As he talked, Mignini noticed a red mark in the middle of her throat, but thought nothing of it.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 13