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

by Follain, John

  At about 9 – 9.30 p.m., the two met Patrick in Piazza Grimana and walked to the cottage. More or less at this time, both Amanda and Raffaele switched off their mobile phones; they turned them on again only the following morning. Meredith returned to the cottage shortly afterwards, or was already there when the three arrived. Meredith went to her room with Patrick after which, the judge wrote, ‘something went wrong – in the sense that [Raffaele] probably intervened too and the pair started to demand something which the girl refused to do.’ Meredith was threatened with a knife, which Raffaele always carried with him. She was then stabbed in the neck.

  The bruises and grazes on Meredith’s lips, as well as on her gums and on her left check and chin, were compatible with her being held forcibly with her face downwards and pressed hard against the floor. The bruises to her anus, and the fact that it was amply dilated, could be due to constipation but also to anal intercourse. The bruises on Meredith’s neck, compatible with the pressure of an attacker’s fingers, indicated that she was held by the neck. The bruises inside her vagina that were due to lack of lubrication indicated that Meredith was also held down on her back for sex, which was either hurried or against her will. The judge concluded that Meredith was the victim of sexual violence.

  Taking into account the fact that Meredith had had dinner early in the evening, the judge estimated she died between 8.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m. Afterwards Amanda, Raffaele and Patrick created chaos in the flat, staging a fake robbery and dirtying the floor and the sink in the bathroom with blood as they tried to clean themselves. Then they fled, taking Meredith’s mobile phones before getting rid of them.

  As for the reason why Meredith died, the judge wrote that at first the three attackers – especially Amanda and Raffaele – wanted ‘to experience some new sensation’. Patrick wanted sex with a girl he fancied. Meredith refused, the attackers tried to bend her will by using Raffaele’s knife and the sexual violence turned into murder. Meredith died because an attacker or attackers wanted to have sex with her, which she refused. The motive was, in the judge’s words, ‘completely futile’.

  When the postal police arrived at the cottage the following day, Amanda and Raffaele lied in telling them that they had already called the carabinieri because they had been surprised at the house and wanted to justify their presence there. The judge pointed to phone records which timed Raffaele’s two calls to the carabinieri – the first at 12.51 p.m., the second 12.54 p.m. – after the postal police arrived.

  In his statement to police, Patrick had failed to explain why he said he’d opened Le Chic between 5 and 6 p.m. on the evening Meredith died, while the first receipts were timed from 10.29 p.m. onwards. Nor had he identified precisely any customers who could say that he was at the bar during that time: he had named simply as ‘Usi’ a person whom he said had entered the bar at 8 p.m., but he didn’t have a phone number for him even though he called him a friend. Patrick had probably intended not to open the bar because he thought he could spend the night with Meredith, but after the murder he decided to open it to create an alibi for himself.

  Judge Matteini ordered Amanda, Raffaele and Patrick to be jailed for a year as they awaited trial. During this time Mignini would finish his investigation and then it would be up to him to decide whether to request that the accused stand trial, or whether to shelve the case and request they go free.

  Amanda was handed a copy of the ruling in her cell shortly before midday. She wrote in a letter to her lawyers soon afterwards: ‘It says I must remain here in prison for one year. I’m assuming this means only if they can’t prove I did it or not. So I’m not so sad, I just have to wait until they prove I’m not guilty, and that I wasn’t there.’

  24

  When Raffaele’s lawyers, Luca Maori and Marco Brusco, visited him for the first time in prison on the morning of 9 November, they were struck by how young and frightened Raffaele seemed. Brusco, a cheerful figure with a goatee beard, had followed the case in the papers and on television and he thought Raffaele was probably guilty in some way. The shoe print looked like quite strong evidence. He believed the case against Amanda was even stronger.

  Despite the look of fear on his new client’s face, Brusco decided to be frank with him: ‘Listen Raffaele, as I see it there are three possibilities. One, you killed Meredith. Two, you didn’t do anything. And three, perhaps you arrived on the scene at a later stage to help Amanda and others clean up. Whichever one it is, you should tell us. And if it’s number three, you’d better tell us immediately because we’re going to have to move fast.’

  Raffaele listened in silence, his gaze fixed steadily on his lawyer. He replied without hesitation: ‘No, I wasn’t there that evening. And I didn’t get involved afterwards.’

  ‘And Amanda? Look, let’s be frank; she’s in it, isn’t she?’ Brusco asked.

  ‘I’m interested only in my position but I don’t think Amanda has anything to do with it either,’ Raffaele said calmly.

  Soon afterwards, in a written interview with the author, Raffaele stuck to his version of events which backed up Amanda’s. ‘I spent that whole evening at my home, having fun at the computer until I went to bed, at about 3 a.m. Amanda slept with me and it was only the next morning that we discovered what had happened at her house. I went to Meredith’s home with Amanda and after seeing the chaos there I became alarmed and I called the police,’ he wrote.

  From the moment Meredith’s body was found, Raffaele had lived through ‘hell’ with exhausting interrogations and now prison. ‘All I can say is that I am a simple and honest student, who cannot celebrate his graduation with his own family and who finds himself in prison on he doesn’t know what charge.’

  To his lawyers, who questioned him about the sex he had with Amanda, Raffaele replied: ‘We made love in the traditional way.’

  10 November 2007

  Shortly before 8 a.m., dressed in a heavy brown coat with a hood that she pulled over her head to hide her face from photographers, Edda queued with relatives and friends of other prisoners outside the Capanne prison. After a long wait, she was shown into a small visiting room with a window too high to see out of. The room felt even smaller than it really was because almost all the available space was taken up by an L-shaped table, chairs and a filing cabinet. There was barely space to open the door. A guard told Edda to sit on one side of the table; Amanda would sit opposite her. As she waited, Edda looked up to the ceiling and saw what she thought must be a microphone in the overhead light; wires ran out of the light and across the ceiling. It made her feel even more apprehensive.

  Amanda was led into the room; mother and daughter cried as they hugged each other. Hardly stopping for breath and gripping Edda’s hands tightly on the table, Amanda started to explain what had happened: Raffaele had changed his version, contradicting hers, and the police were accusing her of lying, but she was so stressed out she couldn’t remember anything of what happened. She’d been at Raffaele’s house that evening to watch a film and then she’d sent a message to Patrick. She’d been hit twice by a policewoman – a claim later denied by police.

  As they talked, Edda saw prison guards outside the room keep looking at them through a glass panel in the door. She told her daughter as calmly as she could that she had spoken to her lawyers, and they wanted her to ask Amanda why she had changed her version of events.

  Because the police threatened her, they told her that if she didn’t tell the truth she would go to jail for thirty years, Amanda replied. She told the police she wanted to help but she didn’t know what happened exactly. ‘I’m not a liar,’ Amanda said. ‘I’m sorry about Patrick. Perhaps it’s my fault he became involved, but it was the first name I thought of when I was pressed by the police.’

  Edda asked her about her days in jail. Amanda told her about the food and about the priest Father Saulo, but she then started crying again, saying how sad she felt at seeing her mother in a place like this.

  Amanda again mentioned Patrick. ‘I didn’t intend
to lie when I mentioned Patrick. I simply imagined that … I was so scared because they told me I would go to jail immediately, telling me: “Give us a name, give us a name!” And I told them: “I don’t know it.” And they told me: “No, you know it! No, you know it! No, you know it!”

  But despite everything she was calm now, she insisted, because she wasn’t guilty of anything. Today, she’d tried to remember when she last saw Meredith. She really liked Meredith; Meredith was a friend. How could they think she’d killed her? ‘Why would I have done it? There’s no reason why I should have done it! Why?’ she said.

  When this was all over, Amanda said, she would ask the police to apologise to her. She planned to write a book about it all and all the ‘bullshit’ that had come out, even if she knew she couldn’t give some details because she didn’t know them. Amanda told Edda more about her life in prison. She was being held in isolation, and wasn’t allowed to watch TV. So she spent all her time in bed, crying and trying to remember.

  Amanda cringed visibly when a guard opened the door and announced that the hour-long visit was over. Mother and daughter said goodbye and as Edda left the prison, she again pulled the hood over her face and kept her head down with her eyes on the ground. She ignored the waiting journalists and got into a car which drew up just outside the prison gates. From then on, Amanda’s family were allowed two hour-long visits a week and began alternating with each other to make sure someone was always there for her. Later, Edda said of her visits to Amanda in prison: ‘Walking away is just the hardest thing. Leaving her there is unbearable.’

  11 November 2007

  For the first time in her career, Napoleoni found herself leading a major investigation when her boss Chiacchiera, who had argued against arresting Patrick, Amanda and Raffaele, dropped out of it – officially because he was too busy with other cases. Working now under Mignini’s authority and in daily contact with him – the prosecutor appreciated and trusted her – Napoleoni took the Kercher case to heart more than any other she’d come across. One of her two daughters was almost the same age as Meredith had been and Napoleoni talked to them both about the case. Once the teenage daughter was watching a TV report about the accused when she exclaimed: ‘Look at them, they say they’re innocent!’ Napoleoni retorted: ‘What they say isn’t important,’ before explaining the evidence against them.

  After Amanda accused Patrick of killing Meredith, Napoleoni tried to find out what precisely he had done on the evening of 1 November. Among the first witnesses she came across in her search were two Belgian students who said they’d seen Patrick working at Le Chic from about 10 p.m. to about midnight. But Patrick still had no alibi for the early part of the evening.

  Then, an Italian – Swiss schoolteacher, Raffaele Mero, called the Perugia police from Zurich to say that he wanted to talk about Patrick. He agreed to come to Perugia and was questioned by Mignini and Napoleoni at the police station. Both the prosecutor and the detective were impressed by Mero’s memory; he could remember where he had eaten, what he had eaten and how much he had paid for it, for each of his meals during a stay in Perugia which had ended on 2 November.

  The day before leaving, he went to Le Chic at about 8.30 p.m. and stayed there until 9.55 p.m. When he arrived, Patrick was the only person in the bar – Mero had been there several times over the past few days and knew him. ‘Patrick was behind the counter and doing absolutely nothing. I asked myself why the bar was empty. The more I stayed the more I was struck by the fact that it was empty. I didn’t ask him about it because I didn’t want to offend him,’ Mero said. The two talked about Patrick’s decision to rent the bar out, and about politics in Congo, his homeland.

  Mignini and Napoleoni faced a major setback: Patrick’s alibi seemed to be genuine. If so, he would of course have to be released despite the embarrassment it would inevitably mean for all the investigators. But if Amanda had lied, why had she done so?

  That day, Meredith’s mother Arline turned sixty-two. There was no family celebration. The chocolate presents Meredith had bought for them stayed in the suitcase she had placed under her bed, in the bedroom where the dried blood turned darker and darker as the days went by.

  Meredith’s body was flown home the next day. ‘We’re pleased that Meredith will be back in the UK with her family,’ her father John told journalists. He said he hoped to hold the funeral in two weeks’ time. In fact, the family had to wait an agonising six weeks while the investigation was carried out.

  25

  Amanda’s prison cell was so cold that she spent much of her days in bed, under a blanket. After lunch, she would sleep for a while, then try to read Italian literature and other books. Sometimes she was allowed out into a small yard, for an hour or so, and walked around stretching and doing other exercises. Guards always kept her away from other prisoners.

  At her first meeting with Ghirga and Dalla Vedova in a room reserved for prisoners and their lawyers, Amanda instructed them: ‘Look, try to do your best. Make sure that I get out of here one day. Make sure that it happens … Remember I’m innocent!’

  Amanda told her lawyers her life was in their hands. She was only twenty years old and they were the ones who could decide her fate. Ghirga replied that her case was very important to him, precisely because she was twenty and because she was innocent.

  ‘Let’s see how we can help you,’ Ghirga said briskly. Amanda and her lawyers agreed that the first step would be to lodge a new appeal for her release with a special panel of three judges, which they did a few days later.

  Amanda told her two lawyers that she’d been hit by the police during her questioning on the night she accused Patrick, but Ghirga didn’t see anything worth making a fuss about. ‘Amanda wasn’t ill-treated,’ Ghirga said later. ‘A policewoman just said to her, “Come on, tell the truth. It’s in your interest; otherwise you’ll get thirty years.” It was just a cuff on the head, which in Italy is something a father would give his son. It’s all completely understandable.’

  Ghirga was taught early in his career never to ask a client if he or she was guilty, and he’d always stuck to that rule throughout the three decades that followed. He believed almost all the clients he had defended were innocent; only in two or three cases had he realised the person he was defending was guilty and had suggested at least a partial confession to avoid a heavy sentence. But what a lawyer thought about his client didn’t matter much; Ghirga believed his job was to guarantee the accused’s presumption of innocence, full stop. Ghirga never did ask Amanda outright whether she was guilty or not, and he always insisted both publicly and privately there was nothing in the investigation to prove that she had killed Meredith.

  Ghirga grew fond of Amanda. He thought she was a wonderful young woman, who had become drunk on the freedom she had found in Perugia. She had made mistakes, but then so had thousands of other kids who smoked joints, or who met someone in a nightclub and had sex with them that very night. Ghirga knew what kids got up to – one of his children was a year younger than Amanda, and the other a year older – and he admitted that he felt like a father to her. ‘Amanda is pretty, she’s intelligent, I’d love to have her as my own daughter,’ the lawyer confided to a friend.

  It irritated him the way witnesses like Amanda’s flatmates and Meredith’s English friends judged her. The way they talked, it was fine for Meredith to ‘make love’ with Giacomo who lived in the semi-basement flat, but Amanda was little more than a prostitute for ‘having sex’ with a man whom she’d met in a nightclub.

  13 November 2007

  In a visiting room of the Capanne prison, Edda and her ex-husband Curt, who had flown from Seattle to join her, exchanged only a few words in low voices, deliberately avoiding any serious conversation that might be picked up by microphones, as they waited for their daughter. Curt asked Edda how to pronounce ‘Perugia’; Edda wondered whether Amanda was doing yoga in prison.

  Amanda was shown in, wearing socks but no shoes. They kissed and hugged each other, and Amand
a explained that her shoes had been taken away for the investigation. Edda said she had brought her a pair of slippers, some knickers and comics. Amanda described her days in jail – she had been told to clean the bathroom and to do her own washing in the basin. She had been allowed outside for a bit after lunch that Sunday but wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone.

  Curt interrupted her to pass on a warning from her lawyers; there were probably hidden microphones in this room, and perhaps also spies inside the prison. She shouldn’t talk to anyone anyway.

  Edda tried to reassure her daughter. The legal section of the US Consulate had said it would take at least two to three weeks to get Amanda out of jail. Amanda said she’d been told that too; the idea that she would have to stay in prison had stunned her. But on the other hand, she comforted herself, if the Italian authorities weren’t rushing things, they must be looking for objective evidence and that could only be good for her. Otherwise, she risked staying in jail for the rest of her life.

  The time she had spent at the police station had been the worst of her life, Amanda said. She had told a man from the US Consulate that the police had beaten her, and he had been amazed to hear this.

  Edda cautioned Amanda: accusing the police of intimidating her would be counterproductive right now, especially given that there were no visible signs of violence. It would be hard to prove.

  The police had treated her in different ways, Amanda said: one woman had beaten her, then the police had been nice to her when they took her to prison, and then they’d accused her. She felt very confused; when Edda had told her she was flying over, she had been looking forward to introducing her to Raffaele. And instead …