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

by Follain, John

  Amanda wanted to speak, she explained, because she was deeply upset by Meredith’s death and very afraid of Patrick, whom she had met at about 9 p.m. ‘Patrick and Meredith went into her room, and I think I stayed in the kitchen. I can’t remember how long they stayed there; all I can say is that at a certain moment I heard Meredith’s screams. I was frightened and I put my hands over my ears. I don’t remember anything after that; I’m all muddled up in my head. I don’t remember if Meredith was screaming or if I also heard thuds because I was really upset, but I imagined what could have happened.’ She wasn’t sure whether Raffaele was with her that evening. ‘But I remember that I woke up at my boyfriend’s house, in his bed.’

  Amanda stopped talking. She was in tears and Mignini, who had been scrutinising her carefully, broke his silence to dictate to the assistant transcribing her words: ‘It is noted that Knox repeatedly raises her hands to her head and shakes it.’ A detective put his arm around Amanda’s shoulders to comfort her and spoke reassuringly to her.

  Watching Amanda, Mignini had the impression that Patrick terrified her. He didn’t doubt her sincerity; he thought she had unburdened herself in accusing him and had then cried with relief. The prosecutor hoped Amanda might tell them the rest of the story. ‘Come on, go on talking. Tell us what happened, you can get this weight off your shoulders,’ he said to her.

  But Amanda refused to say any more. Mignini saw he could do nothing but wait; she might talk some more if she got some rest and if he and the detectives managed to win her trust. ‘You’re tired, why don’t you get some sleep?’ he suggested.

  Mignini gave her a copy of her statement; the interpreter translated it for her, and Amanda signed it. When Mignini said goodbye to her, she had an absent, blank look on her face. What Amanda revealed fitted Mignini’s theory that someone inside the flat had let an outsider in who first sexually assaulted Meredith and then killed her. Mignini wasn’t sure whether Amanda had been directly involved in the murder itself, but he believed she had been in the cottage at the time and had helped Patrick in some way. ‘Amanda may be a fresh-faced beauty, but she’s also an actress, very calculating and a shameless liar,’ Mignini commented.

  That morning, Mignini made up his mind. He decided to arrest all three suspects, worried they would otherwise flee or tamper with the evidence.

  Mignini was confident that Amanda’s account was more than enough to enable him to take her in. The law required serious circumstantial evidence to hold a suspect in preventive custody – proof of guilt was not necessary. He had no proof as yet but the collapse of an alibi was seen as serious evidence of guilt, and this in his eyes applied to both Amanda and Raffaele. The prosecutor was worried that Amanda might flee abroad; her mother Edda was on her way to Perugia and there was nothing to stop her taking her daughter straight back to America on the first flight home. As for Raffaele, his family was wealthy and might well decide to suddenly spirit him away to Australia for all Mignini knew.

  He consulted his superior – Perugia’s chief prosecutor – who gave him the green light, then started work on drafting the three arrest warrants and drawing up a concise list of the grounds for their arrests. There were the contradictions in Amanda’s statements and her accusation against Patrick; Raffaele’s surprise retraction of the alibi he had given Amanda in saying he had spent the whole night with her; and the fact that Amanda and Raffaele’s mobile phones had become inactive at virtually the same time in the evening. The prosecutor also listed Patrick’s text message to Amanda and her reply.

  Two pieces of evidence the investigators had found could incriminate Raffaele. One was a shoe print, size 42.5 (size 9 in the UK), discovered under the quilt which covered Meredith’s body and which the local forensic police said could have been left by a pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes similar to the ones owned by Raffaele. The other was a jackknife with a blade just over three inches long and almost an inch wide, which detectives had found in his pocket that morning, and which Mignini wrote could have caused Meredith’s fatal wound.

  Amanda, he concluded in the warrant, had ‘demonstrated herself particularly unscrupulous in lying repeatedly to investigators and in involving the young [Raffaele] Sollecito in such a serious affair.’ He accused Patrick, Amanda and Raffaele of aggravated murder and aggravated sexual violence, and ordered them to be held in isolation without access to lawyers. The crime of sexual violence carried a sentence of five to ten years; that of aggravated murder, a maximum sentence of life in jail.

  At his home in a block of flats on Perugia’s outskirts, Patrick was woken up before dawn by his eighteen-month-old son crying. Patrick got out of bed, went to fetch the baby and carried it to the kitchen where he prepared some milk. When the milk was ready, Patrick switched on the TV, put a cartoon on for the baby and started to feed him.

  Patrick heard a knock at the door. He thought it must be a neighbour complaining about the noise of the TV, so he lowered the volume. There was another knock. Patrick went up to the door and asked ‘Who’s there?’

  A woman’s voice replied: ‘Open the door.’

  Keeping the security chain on the door, Patrick opened it a fraction and looked out into the hallway. He saw the word ‘POLICE’ on the dark jackets of several people outside.

  ‘Police, police, open the door,’ one of them said.

  ‘There’s a baby, wait just a moment,’ Patrick said before opening the door.

  The officers swept in and handcuffed him in front of his baby son; he estimated later that there were about ten of them. ‘What’s happening, why?’ Patrick asked as the baby started crying again and his pretty Polish girlfriend, Aleksandra Beata, rushed in from the bedroom.

  ‘You know what you did,’ an officer replied.

  ‘What did he do?’ Aleksandra asked.

  ‘He knows,’ was the only reply.

  Patrick was taken to the police station, where he kept thinking that perhaps the police had been looking for someone called ‘Patrick’ and had got the wrong man. He asked the officers: ‘But are you sure I’m the person you’re looking for?’

  21

  Before arresting Amanda and Raffaele, the Homicide Squad made a search of their homes. At the cottage, where the forensic police had completed its work only the previous day, Napoleoni seized three diaries belonging to Amanda as well as her Toshiba laptop. She ignored some knives in a suitcase under Amanda’s bed – the suitcase also contained kitchen utensils including saucepans for making pasta – because they were new and still in their plastic wrappers. The detectives failed to find Meredith’s keys – both to her room and to the front door – and her wallet.

  At Raffaele’s one-bedroom flat, detectives noticed a strong smell of bleach when they walked in. Armando Finzi, a veteran investigator with thirty years’ experience, opened a cutlery drawer in the kitchen. Only one knife attracted his attention: made by the Italian firm Marietti, it was twelve inches long, including the black handle. The stainless steel blade was six-and-a-half inches long.

  Finzi pointed it out to Chiacchiera: ‘Boss, could this knife be the one we want?’

  Chiacchiera glanced at it. From what he knew of the wounds on Meredith’s neck, it was worth taking a closer look at – the blade seemed big and sharp enough, and only one side of it was sharp, and smooth edged.

  ‘Take it,’ Chiacchiera replied. Finzi put the knife in an evidence bag.

  Chiacchiera went up a couple of steps into Raffaele’s bedroom and leafed through some comics. He was shocked by their content, ‘a mix of pornography and horror’ as he described it later. The comics had titles like Blood: The Last Vampire, and MPD-Psycho: In the Labyrinths of the Mind; he found out later they were Japanese manga. He ordered them to be seized because they seemed so strange to him.

  The detectives also took two local newspapers dated 3 November, the day after Meredith’s body was found – the Corriere dell’Umbria and La Voce di Perugia Nuova. ‘KILLED IN THE BEDROOM WITH HER THROAT SLIT’, ran the front-page headline in
the Corriere; ‘STUDENT KILLED IN BED – BOYFRIEND AND FRIENDS ARE SUSPECTS’ said La Voce. Amanda and Raffaele’s fingerprints were found later on both of them. The newspapers were probably the ones which the journalist Kate Mansey had given Raffaele when she met him by chance in the street.

  Back in the offices of the Flying Squad, the detectives handed the evidence bag containing the kitchen knife to Officer Stefano Gubbiotti who – worried that someone might get injured if the point of the knife pierced the bag – took it out and put it in an empty cardboard box that had previously contained a large diary, and sent it to the forensic police in Rome.

  Later, Mignini noticed that among Raffaele’s manga comics was the story of a heroine who lived in an American military base in Japan and whose task was to kill vampires who hid among students at a nearby school. On Halloween night, the prosecutor remembered, Meredith had dressed up as a vampire. Mignini also came across a picture of a murdered young woman – the position of the body was very similar to that of Meredith’s.

  Amanda was arrested at midday in the offices of the Flying Squad, her arrest witnessed by Napoleoni and thirty-five other officers who had worked on the Kercher case – it was standard practice in the squad for all officers involved in an investigation to sign as witnesses to an arrest. When Amanda discovered what she was accused of, she burst out: ‘You used me, you stressed me out, you yelled at me and now you put me in prison accusing me of having killed my friend? But I could be dead now! And you tell me I’m a murderer?’ She asked the detectives to tell her mother what had happened to her.

  Detectives seized a diary with a light green cover that she had begun in August and which they found in her bag; the last pages, from early October onwards, had been ripped out. The pathologist Lalli was called and, helped by a woman doctor, made a physical examination of Amanda, taking samples of her DNA, her saliva, hair, pubic hair and urine.

  Mignini suspected that on the night of the murder Amanda and Raffaele had taken drugs stronger than the marijuana they had admitted to; maybe cocaine, he thought. But no such traces were found in either Amanda or Raffaele’s hair.

  When the three arrests had been carried out, the Perugia Police Chief Arturo De Felice held a triumphant news conference. He announced the arrests and declared that the investigation was ‘substantially closed’ – a choice of words that dismayed many investigators who knew they still had much to discover about the murder. ‘Mamma mia! How could he say such a thing?’ one senior investigator asked.

  As detectives prepared to take Amanda to prison, she asked Ficarra – the woman detective she had told Patrick killed Meredith – for pen and paper. ‘I want to give you a present,’ Amanda said. ‘All the detectives should read it,’ she added.

  Ficarra gave her what she had asked for, and Amanda started writing. She took so long that Napoleoni burst out impatiently to Ficarra: ‘Let’s go; she’ll finish writing in prison.’

  But Amanda insisted she wanted to finish before they left, and the detectives agreed to wait. When she finished, she handed the papers to Ficarra who told her she would have it translated into Italian and then pass it on to Mignini.

  In her handwritten account, Amanda wrote that she spent the afternoon of 1 November watching the whimsical film Amélie – a romantic comedy starring Audrey Tautou as a shy Parisian waitress who decides to change the lives of those around her – until she received Patrick’s message and replied to it. She couldn’t remember what had happened afterwards because of the marijuana she’d smoked. She couldn’t remember whether she had sex with Raffaele, but she did remember having a shower with him, having dinner with him at home at about 11 p.m. and seeing blood on Raffaele’s hand, which may have come from fish they ate. They had gone to bed late and got up at 10 a.m. the next morning.

  As for the ‘confession’ – as she herself called it – that she made the previous night, she wrote: ‘I’m very doubtful of the entity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for thirty years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly.’

  It was under this pressure and after ‘many hours of confusion’ that she saw Patrick ‘in my mind in flashes of blurred images’: she saw him near the basketball court, and at the front door of the cottage. She also saw herself ‘cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming.’

  But, she explained: ‘These things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened or are just dreams my mind has made to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions I am being asked. But the truth is, I’m unsure about the truth.’

  All Amanda knew for sure was that she didn’t kill Meredith. She then returned once again to Patrick: ‘In these flashbacks that I’m having I see Patrick as the murderer, but the way the truth feels in my mind, there is no way for me to have known because I don’t remember FOR SURE if I was at my house that night.’

  Later, when Mignini read through Amanda’s writings again and again, he thought that Amanda might have a dissociated personality: why else did she write that she might have been at the cottage on the night of the murder, but that she might also have been at Raffaele’s flat? The prosecutor considered appointing a psychiatrist to analyse Amanda, but quickly dismissed the idea; such analyses were rare in Italian courts and besides, he had no reason to think that Amanda was suffering from diminished responsibility at the time of the murder.

  The squat, cream-coloured blocks of the Capanne prison, a half-hour drive south-west of Perugia, and its grounds sprawl across an area as big as fifty soccer fields. Opened only two years earlier, Capanne is a ‘medium-security’ jail with separate wings for 235 men, mostly North Africans and Eastern Europeans convicted of drug offences and robbery, and forty women, many of whom are African prostitutes or Latin Americans who have ferried illegal substances to Italy and are being weaned off drugs themselves.

  Amanda was taken to Capanne with only the clothes she had on – a pair of jeans and a blue woollen Disney Store sweater bearing the American flag above the name ‘MICKEY’. When Ficarra handed her over to the prison guards, Amanda kissed her goodbye on both cheeks. Like Patrick and Raffaele, who were also taken to Capanne that afternoon, Amanda was searched, then handed over to one of the prison psychologists whose job it was to assess whether there was any risk of her committing suicide or being attacked by other prisoners.

  Led through two sets of double-entrance security doors and a series of steel gates, then down endless, spotless corridors of pink granite floors, yellow walls and pastel-green steel doors, Amanda was locked into an isolation cell that was damp and cold. The cell had its own shower room and toilet; spyholes allowed guards to check on her there too. She had a reading lamp but wasn’t allowed any books or TV.

  The view through her barred window had none of the beauty of the one from the cottage she had loved so much – the grey blocks of the prison, the busy road which runs by it, bare fields and in the distance, dark low hills. The only sounds were those of people walking down the corridor, the jangling of metal keys, steel doors slamming shut and – from outside the prison – traffic on the road and the occasional church bell from a village she couldn’t see.

  On her arrival in Perugia, Amanda’s mother Edda had planned to meet her daughter at the station; they would then go together to a flat in the city centre where they would both be staying. The mayor, who wanted to give Edda a helping hand because Seattle and Perugia were twinned cities, had found the flat for them. But when Edda’s plane landed after the long flight from Seattle, she discovered that her daughter had been arrested.

  Later that day, Daniela Borghesi from the mayor’s office called Luciano Ghirga, one of Perugia’s most prominent lawyers who was also a close friend of the mayor, to ask: ‘Have you heard about the Meredith Kercher case?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ replied the
sixty-three-year-old Ghirga, a heavily built, silver-haired figure with sharp, blue eyes and the typical Perugian temperament – good-natured but often diffident and uncommunicative, and fiercely proud of his city.

  ‘Would you be ready to defend the young American, Amanda Knox?’

  Ghirga had only come back to work ten days earlier after a tough hip operation, and felt snowed under, but this was a request no lawyer could refuse. ‘Fine, of course I am,’ he said.

  A printer’s son, Ghirga had become a local celebrity at the age of sixteen when Turin’s First Division Juventus team bought him to play first as a full back and then as a sweeper. After a few years he moved back to Perugia to play for the local team, before turning his back on football to study law. During his thirty-five-year career, he’d defended public officials and businessmen accused of corruption and worked on twelve murder cases – defending Mafiosi accused of shooting a clan boss near Perugia, and of hanging a prisoner in jail.

  All Ghirga knew about the Kercher case was what he’d read in the newspapers. He’d been horrified by how ugly and how big the fatal wound was. The killer or killers had almost severed her throat, he thought, something completely foreign to the Perugia he knew and to its community of youngsters. It had to be a crazed act, a murder committed on impulse by someone who’d lost their head, and didn’t know what they were doing.

  Meredith’s friend Sophie felt nothing when she saw the news of Amanda’s arrest on the television. She wasn’t surprised. Her father had been the first to say to her that Amanda might be guilty when she’d told him three days earlier about Amanda’s behaviour at the police station.