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

by Follain, John

  Amanda told her parents about Raffaele; he was very sweet with her, hugging her all the time. She didn’t understand why he hadn’t told the truth like her. It wasn’t fair; there was nothing to be scared of. He must tell the truth, because then she could get out.

  As Amanda talked, Curt suddenly interrupted her, pointing to what looked like a tattoo on her skin. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a fake tattoo Meredith gave me,’ Amanda replied.

  Edda mentioned the lawyers again; they wanted to be sure that Amanda wouldn’t cover for Raffaele.

  ‘No, I mean that I fell asleep in his arms and I woke up the next morning. Of course I don’t remember when I fell asleep, sorry, but I didn’t look at my watch!’ Amanda said. ‘The police are wasting their time, my time and my life.’

  She was sorry for what she had done to Patrick. ‘I feel so bad about Patrick, so bad! I screwed his life up!’ she exclaimed fervently.

  Edda interrupted: yes that was true, but the police had screwed up her life and Raffaele’s.

  ‘Yes, but even so I want to get down on my knees and tell him I’m so sorry!’ Amanda said, again in passionate tone. He’s a good man, she said, but she had been scared by the police questioning and she’d thought then that he could have killed someone.

  She said it once more, strongly emphasising each word: ‘I was so scared!’

  Trawling through the students whom Raffaele knew, Napoleoni found a witness who flatly contradicted him. Raffaele had told detectives that he’d returned to his flat at 9 p.m. on the evening of 1 November, after walking around town (to Napoleoni he said he went home alone; then to Judge Matteini he said he went home with Amanda).

  But Jovana Popovic, a Serbian medical student and a friend of Raffaele’s, said that at about 5.50 p.m. that day – she remembered the time because she had a violin lesson at 6 p.m. – she went to see Raffaele to ask him if he could do her a favour. Jovana’s mother, who lived in Milan, wanted to send her a suitcase on a bus that would arrive at the station at midnight. Jovana needed Raffaele to help her fetch it in his car.

  Jovana pressed the buzzer and Amanda opened the door. Amanda, who had been writing at the computer, told her that Raffaele was in the bathroom. The two talked briefly in the small flat until Raffaele joined them; when Jovana asked him the favour, he glanced at Amanda and then said in a cold tone that he would accompany her to the station. Jovana was surprised by his manner; he was usually very friendly towards her. She thought that perhaps he had been embarrassed by Amanda’s presence, or because Jovana had come to his home.

  At about 7 p.m., Jovana’s mother called to say she had tried to give the suitcase to the bus driver, but he had refused to take it. After her violin lesson, Jovana went back to Raffaele’s flat to tell him she no longer needed his help. Jovana arrived at the flat at about 8.40 p.m. and a very happy-looking Amanda – she smiled at everything Jovana said, and laughed – told her Raffaele was in and invited her in. Jovana stayed outside, asking Amanda to tell Raffaele that she no longer needed his help. Jovana thanked Amanda and left.

  From another young witness, Luis Temgoua, Napoleoni learnt that among the men who played basketball regularly at Piazza Grimana was a young coloured man called Rudy. Napoleoni had nothing else on him.

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  15 November 2007

  Mignini found out about what he immediately saw as a major breakthrough while sitting enjoying a brief after-lunch siesta in an armchair in his mother’s house – the house where he was born. A detective called on his mobile; the biologist Stefanoni from the forensic police in Rome had found traces of Amanda’s DNA on the handle of the kitchen knife seized from Raffaele’s flat, and traces of Meredith’s DNA on the blade.

  The blade was spotless when Stefanoni first looked at it; it had apparently been cleaned and there didn’t seem to be anything of interest on it. But when she looked closely, she noticed there were some scratches and thought that if there was a minute biological trace on the blade, there was a good chance it could have lodged itself in the tiny groove of a scratch. It was in just such a groove that Stefanoni found Meredith’s DNA.

  Amanda’s DNA was on the part of the handle where the hand butted against a small prominence which prevented it from slipping onto the blade; it was the most likely point where the knife would be held in a stabbing action.

  Tests showed the two traces were not human blood, but the negative result could be due to the tiny size of the samples. Stefanoni thought the trace on the handle was probably from Amanda’s skin as this was the point where a person would hold the knife; she didn’t make a guess as to what Meredith’s trace could be.

  As he took in the news, Mignini thought of the quilt that had covered Meredith’s body; from the very time he’d looked into her bedroom his hunch had been that only a woman could have been so shaken by the sight of the victim as to seek to hide the body.

  The DNA finding quickly became public, and a senior prison officer showed Amanda a newspaper article about it. ‘How do you feel about this?’ the guard asked.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Amanda replied.

  Soon afterwards, Father Saulo marvelled at Amanda’s calm manner. The chaplain visited the women’s wing five days a week, celebrating Mass there on Saturday afternoons. He would greet Amanda briefly at the cell door, and once a week they usually spent up to half an hour talking in the room opposite her cell.

  A prisoner had once told Father Saulo that to hide her desperation at life in jail, she effectively put a mask on in the morning when she got up for the benefit of her cellmates and the guards, and would take it off only when she went to bed, often crying herself to sleep. But Amanda didn’t appear to be like that. Father Saulo was impressed by her strength, by her self-control: she never seemed anguished, she was never in tears, and he was told that she didn’t need tranquillisers to enable her to sleep, unlike several other prisoners. In just a few days, she had lost the look of desperation she’d had when she first arrived.

  To the priest, whom she affectionately called just ‘Saulo’, Amanda often repeated: ‘I’m calm because I didn’t do anything.’

  In Father Saulo’s experience, most prisoners confessed to the crime they were accused of. He believed Amanda was sincere when she said she was innocent. But he refused to make up his mind on whether she was in fact innocent or guilty. He was certain that even if he read the thousands of pages of the investigation, he still wouldn’t be one hundred per cent certain either way. He preferred not to allow himself to judge any of the prisoners.

  ‘I believe what you say; I believe in everything that the others tell me until proven otherwise,’ Father Saulo told Amanda.

  Amanda smiled and told him she was happy he believed her.

  As with all the other prisoners, Father Saulo spoke mainly about the Bible when he talked to Amanda – she told him she wasn’t a Catholic, but he hoped she might convert one day and gave her a copy of the Bible.

  ‘I hope that one day you can feel the truth of these words, and feel the beauty in them,’ he told her.

  She replied that rationally she could only go part of the way towards believing in God. She told him she wasn’t very religious, even if she had studied religion at high school. But she respected religion.

  Father Saulo and Amanda talked many times about, as he put it later, ‘the meaning of life – including where do I come from, where am I going, love, good and evil, and right and wrong.’ She would read a passage of the Bible before his visit, and they would then talk about it together.

  Once, when the murder came up in their conversation, Amanda told him firmly: ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ She mentioned Meredith only a couple of times, saying she was sorry about what had happened to ‘my friend’. On one occasion, she and the priest talked about forgiveness.

  Mignini and Father Saulo knew each other well and were on friendly terms – Father Saulo had been his mother’s parish priest. But they didn’t see eye to eye on Amanda. Mignini would
discuss what was publicly known about the case with the priest, but the latter refused to accept that Amanda was guilty. However hard Mignini tried, Father Saulo refused to be convinced. Mignini was fond of him but he thought Father Saulo saw Amanda and the other prisoners in his care ‘through a priest’s eyes’ – he was a good man but too ready to see good in others.

  Father Saulo thought the courts didn’t always succeed in establishing the truth behind a crime.

  ‘Giuliano, I pray for you to be enlightened in your task,’ the priest told the prosecutor.

  The two agreed to leave it at that.

  16 November 2007

  A second breakthrough for Mignini and Napoleoni in just two days came at lunchtime as they waited in Raffaele’s narrow street with a team from the Homicide Squad ready to enter his flat for a fresh search. A senior detective drove up to where they stood and reported that the forensic team in Rome had made another discovery: a fragment of a bloody palm print on the cushion which had been found under Meredith’s body belonged not to any of the three accused but to a twenty-year-old man born in the Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede.

  Mignini quickly issued a warrant for Rudy’s arrest. Detectives soon found out that he lived in an old yellow house, almost round the corner from Raffaele, in a bedsit on the ground floor. But when they arrived at his home, he was nowhere to be seen. Rudy’s landlord told them he had gone away a few days after Meredith’s murder.

  That evening, three detectives tracked down Rudy’s father, Roger, to a house in which he lived with other immigrants on a busy road south of Perugia. Again there was no sign of Rudy himself. Roger, a labourer whose son was born when he was only nineteen, explained he hadn’t seen him for three years; he didn’t even know his address. Rudy’s mother, Roger said, had abandoned her son when he was a baby. Roger had married again, but his second wife had left him too.

  Napoleoni’s team found out a little more about Rudy from the carabinieri in Milan. They had detained him at a kindergarten in the city on 27 October – six days before Meredith’s murder – and accused him of attempted robbery. Rudy told officers that he had gone there to spend the night, but the head of the kindergarten said he had forced her locker and tampered with her computer.

  In Rudy’s rucksack, officers found a big kitchen knife he had taken from the kindergarten, a hammer of the kind used for breaking windows on trains in emergencies, as well as a laptop and a cell phone they said he had stolen from a lawyer’s office in Perugia in mid-October.

  Meredith’s friend Sophie flew back to Perugia from London to fetch the things she’d left behind in her flat when she’d left the city a little more than a week earlier. She arranged to meet several English students who’d stayed on in Perugia, at the Merlin Pub. But as soon as she walked in she started crying; it had been one of Meredith’s favourite spots.

  She had a drink with her friends and then walked back alone to the flat on Via del Lupo. On the way, she came across a group of people sitting on some stairs; they were only talking to each other, but the sight terrified her. She walked on to the flat, relieved she had decided she could no longer live in Perugia.

  27

  17 November 2007

  Amanda had been moved to a new cell, which she shared with one other prisoner, and was now allowed to watch the television. As soon as she saw her parents in the visiting room at the prison on the morning of 17 November, she started telling them what an awful time she’d had the day before. The TV news had described her as a liar because she’d given two different versions of what happened on the night of Meredith’s death. She insisted again that she had done nothing. The news had made her cry a lot, and she’d felt very cold.

  Edda tried to reassure her daughter: it was just as her lawyers were saying, people were trying to scare her by feeding lies to the media. That’s all they were, lies. People wanted to pressure her into revealing something else. The lawyers said that whatever Amanda did, she must stay calm and not say anything to anyone.

  ‘It’s stupid, because I can’t say anything else. I was there and I can’t lie about this, there’s no reason to,’ Amanda said.

  Don’t talk to anyone, Curt insisted. Was she receiving any letters?

  Thousands, from admirers, Amanda replied.

  Don’t write to anyone, the parents insisted, don’t say anything.

  Her cell was so cold. And she missed her music so much. But going out into the courtyard made her feel better: she was free to move around there, she could sing at the top of her voice and she could also scream and shout. It was good, too, to be in the sun; the electric light was on most of the time in the cell. She was even getting a bit of a tan.

  Amanda mentioned the knife, which according to the forensic police had her DNA on the handle and Meredith’s on the blade. ‘It makes no sense, because I never took a knife from Raffaele’s house to my house!’ she exclaimed.

  Edda asked her daughter whether it was true Raffaele always carried a knife on him.

  Amanda said yes, adding that DJ – her Seattle boyfriend – did too. She told her parents that Raffaele’s lawyers wanted the two of them to appear together before a judge but she would probably refuse.

  ‘Basically, if you two went back to the original story, before they started hitting you and all the rest—’ Edda said.

  Amanda interrupted her: ‘When they said that I’d have been sent to prison for thirty years, and I didn’t know what was happening …’

  Amanda exclaimed that actually she could be dead right now! She could have been in the cottage when the thing happened!

  Edda agreed: she thought of course of Meredith and her family, but she had to say that things could have gone worse.

  Soon after finding Rudy’s palm print on the cushion in Meredith’s bedroom, the Rome forensic police uncovered more evidence placing him at the crime scene: Rudy’s DNA was found on Meredith’s vaginal swab, on toilet paper in the lavatory which had been left unflushed in the big bathroom, mixed with Meredith’s DNA in bloodstains inside her shoulder bag on her bed, and on the left sleeve of her blood-soaked sweatshirt. Experts appointed by Mignini concluded that a shoe print found in Meredith’s room, under the quilt that covered her body, was compatible with Rudy’s Nike Outbreak 2 shoes – they ruled out a previous finding that the shoe print had been left by Raffaele’s Nike Air Force 1 pair.

  The forensic police reported that of the 108 fingerprints, handprints and footprints it found in the flat, it had managed to identify forty-seven. Of these, seventeen were Meredith’s, five Raffaele’s, just one Amanda’s – the print of her right index finger on a glass on the sink in the kitchen – fifteen Laura’s and five Filomena’s. Raffaele’s fingerprints were found on the outside of Meredith’s bedroom door, on the inside of the door to Laura’s room, and on the inside of the fridge door.

  The Homicide Squad still had no idea where Rudy was. From Giacomo Benedetti, a twenty-year-old student from nearby Assisi who was his closest friend, detectives learnt more about Rudy. The two had already known each other for ten years before going to secondary school together.

  According to Benedetti, Rudy had had a very unhappy childhood. His mother abandoned him when he was only a few days old; his parents divorced when he was ten and his father then remarried. The Perugian social services entrusted him to one foster family after another. Rudy had a habit of vanishing when he had a ‘problem’, according to Benedetti, but he would usually call his friend. But not this time. Benedetti had no idea where he was, and nor did his former foster families.

  Detectives found Rudy’s Internet blog, on which he’d posted a year earlier an autobiographical account, entitled A House Without a Roof is Like a Child Without a Father. Rudy wrote that he’d been raised by an aunt after being robbed of a mother, and effectively of a father too. He wrote about himself in the third person and said he’d grown up ‘with a thousand difficulties, a thousand anxieties … at one point he wanted to commit suicide because he couldn’t bear it anymore.’

  H
is aunt kept moving from town to town in the Ivory Coast, so he never made true friends. ‘But one day, while he was sitting quietly under a tree, in the shade on a hot day, a puff of wind caressed his face and he saw a woman next to him who stared at him, her eyes full of tears of happiness. She was none other than his mother, the mother he had never seen before and so he didn’t know what to do, whether to run away or hug her. In the end his heart told him what to do.’

  Rudy and his mother became inseparable: ‘the boy had a mother all for himself at last, now his life had a meaning. He had a bit of affection and he no longer felt alone. He didn’t leave her for a second, they were always together. But one day the woman went away while he was playing with friends, she didn’t even say goodbye.’ When Rudy started school some time later, his aunt was busy at work and he walked to it on his own. ‘How awful it was to see the other children with their mothers while you’re there alone like an orphan – but yours is somewhere or other.’

  From Rudy’s friends and the families who’d cared for him, detectives learnt that when he was fifteen and living in Perugia, his father Roger flew off to the Ivory Coast, leaving his son with a girlfriend he didn’t like. The social services intervened and placed him with a foster family. Later, Roger claimed: ‘I didn’t abandon Rudy; they took him away from me. They said I wasn’t a good father.’

  Two months later Roger came back, but Rudy refused to go back to him. He was living with the wealthy Caporali family who owned the Liomatic Perugia basketball team. Rudy became a keen basketball player and even played with the team. But he failed to settle down, dropping out first from a hotel management school, then a computer studies course. The Caporalis had a farmhouse bed and breakfast and in the spring of 2007 they took him on as an assistant gardener. He worked hard for a couple of months, playing basketball on the Piazza Grimana in the evenings with, among others, two of the students who lived in the flat below Meredith’s. That summer however he fell ill, failed to send his employers a medical certificate, and was sacked.