One witness, Christian Tramontano, co-owner of the Coffee Break bar, told Napoleoni that at six o’clock one morning in early September, he’d surprised a young black man rummaging through his flat. Tramontano had jumped out of the bed where he’d been sleeping with his girlfriend and tried to chase him out of the flat.
The intruder, finding the front door locked, grabbed a chair to keep Tramontano at a distance and brandished a jackknife. He spoke good Italian and Tramontano was close enough to smell wine on his breath. Tramontano turned, fled back to his girlfriend and called the police. Shortly afterwards, the intruder left the flat, having stolen a five euro banknote (worth just over four pounds) and three credit cards. That evening, Tramontano recognised the thief at the Domus nightclub: Tramontano said his name was Rudy Guede. Tramontano went to the police station to report the theft, but gave up after three trips to the police station because the queue was always too long.
This was about the same time that Rudy went to Le Chic after he was handed a leaflet advertising the bar’s opening. Amanda was working as a waitress that evening. She went up to Rudy and asked, in English, if he wanted to drink something. Rudy asked for a sangria and the two chatted briefly. Amanda told him she came from Seattle, and Rudy mentioned a student friend of his came from there too – did she know him? Amanda said no, and their chat ended there.
Since vanishing in early November, Rudy had only been in touch with Gabriele Mancini, a friend of his from one of the foster families. Twelve days after Meredith’s murder, Rudy tried to contact his friend through his Messenger account. Mancini sent Rudy two messages, but received no reply. Then Mancini sent Rudy a third message, telling him off for disappearing yet again.
This time, Rudy replied. ‘I can’t,’ he wrote.
‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ a surprised Mancini asked.
‘You know,’ Rudy messaged back.
‘What am I supposed to know?’ Mancini wrote, even more surprised.
Rudy disconnected himself.
On 13 November, Rudy sent a brief message to a German student he’d played basketball with: ‘Hey, I’m in Sweden now.’
As they searched for clues to Rudy’s whereabouts, detectives went through the statements they’d gathered so far. Amanda had mentioned a man she described as a short ‘South African’. She’d said he played basketball on Piazza Grimana and had once been to the semi-basement flat when Meredith was there too. Stefano Bonassi, one of the students in the flat, had said the ‘South African’ was so drunk on a visit there that he had fallen asleep on the toilet without flushing it – a detail that had reminded Napoleoni that someone failed to flush the toilet in Meredith’s flat around the time she was killed. Bonassi also said the ‘South African’ was very attracted to Amanda.
Several of the young men who used to play basketball with Rudy told detectives that he liked ‘white girls, not black ones’ and that he often went to the Merlin Pub – Meredith’s favourite. Rudy sometimes drank too much and danced on the tables. One acquaintance said people didn’t like dancing too close to Rudy because when he got sweaty he stank.
Another friend of Rudy’s, an Australian student called Alexander Crudo, had met Rudy in the centre of Perugia on the afternoon of 2 November, the day after the murder. When Crudo mentioned Meredith’s death, Rudy told him she was the girl they’d seen watching an England – South Africa rugby match at a pub some three weeks earlier. He also told Crudo he was leaving for Milan to go dancing there. That night, Rudy was seen dancing at the Domus nightclub long after midnight.
In a video he’d posted on the web some time ago, Rudy is sitting in front of the camera pulling faces, rolling his eyes and his tongue, and groaning and giggling. He ends with the words: ‘I’m a vampire. I’m Dracula. I’m going to suck your blood.’
Mignini signed decrees ordering phone taps on many of Rudy’s friends, but they yielded no clues to where he was hiding.
28
18 November 2007
On a Sunday afternoon, Amanda’s lawyer, Ghirga, had agreed to see a couple of journalists with her father, Curt, at the Caffè Turreno opposite the cathedral. The old-fashioned bar, once popular with anti-fascist partisans during the Second World War, was Ghirga’s favourite haunt. He had a rigid routine and every day at 8 a.m., after taking his daughter to school, again at midday and then at 7 p.m. he would go there for a chat with friends and clients.
But both Ghirga and Curt were completely unprepared for what they saw when they arrived at the caffè: a mob of journalists, photographers and what felt like a hundred TV cameras were waiting outside it. It was the first time Ghirga realised how fascinated the media was with the Kercher case, and with Amanda in particular.
Ghirga was no publicity-hungry lawyer and to him the media interest was an act of aggression. He turned down a flood of interview requests that he received from the world’s media, declining TV talk shows and true crime programmes. He was even offered £9,000 merely to ask Amanda five questions and write down her replies. He rejected such offers out of hand, and when journalists and TV crews mobbed him as he walked out of a hearing he would sometimes curse loudly as he strode away.
He saw it as a question of self-respect, convinced that right now silence was truly golden, even though he believed investigators were leaking confidential information to the newspapers. Now wasn’t the time to rock the boat; there would be plenty of opportunity to challenge the investigators if the case ever came to trial. Journalists were always stalking him at the Caffè Turreno. Ghirga often bought a round of aperitivi but when they steered the conversation to Amanda, he’d often clam up and they would end up doing most of the talking.
Ghirga and his colleague Dalla Vedova were not only concerned about journalists. They warned Edda to be very careful whenever she talked about sensitive aspects of the case. She must assume that her mobile phone was bugged, that her emails were being intercepted, that mikes might be hidden in her car and even in the flat where she was staying. They often asked her to go for a walk in the open air with them when they needed to talk – even when she was staying in a cottage in the middle of the countryside.
19 November 2007
From Amanda’s prison diary:
I received twenty-three ‘fan letters’ today … The majority comment on how beautiful I am. I’ve received blatant love letters from people who love me from first sight, a marriage proposal, and others wanting to get to know ‘the girl with the angel face’
… If I were ugly, would they be writing me wishing me encouragement? I don’t think so … And jeez, I’m not even that good-looking! People are acting like I’m the prettiest thing since Helen of Troy!
With still no clues as to where Rudy had fled, the police decided to recruit his closest friend, the student Giacomo Benedetti. He agreed to keep trying Rudy on his mobile phone, but it had apparently gone dead. Benedetti also tried contacting him on the web, through the MSN Messenger service. At about 6 p.m., Benedetti logged on to the service and saw that Rudy was online.
Benedetti immediately phoned his police contact, a detective from Rome who had been sent to Perugia to work on the Kercher case. ‘Is it you or him?’ Benedetti asked, thinking the detective was using Rudy’s account to get to his friends, and that’s why Rudy was coming up as online.
‘No, it isn’t us, so it’s him. Try to keep him talking, we’re coming over. Try to set up a meeting with him; say you could give him some money,’ the detective said.
Detectives raced to Benedetti’s flat and guided him as, after switching to instant messaging on the Skype network, he quizzed Rudy.
‘hey rudy, where are you? feel like talking?’ Benedetti typed.
‘I’ve got fuck all to do with this thing but i’m scared,’ Rudy replied.
‘you’ve got to stay calm.’
‘i was there when it happened. I’ve got fuck all to do with it.’
‘but where are you now?’
‘i tried to help her but then i fled.’
&n
bsp; ‘i can help you if you try to explain things to me better. but you’ve got to stay calm.’
‘i’m not in italy now.’
‘so where are you?’
‘it’s not that i don’t trust you but i can’t tell you now. i’m sorry but i’m afraid.’
‘what of?’
‘the funny thing is that i tried to help her. it happened while i was in the bathroom having a shit. but he fled.’
‘who he?’
‘Amanda doesn’t have anything to do with it.’
Slowly, Benedetti and the detectives prised Rudy’s account out of him. Rudy said he went to the cottage after Meredith agreed to see him there. They started having sex – ‘we both wanted it’ he said – but they didn’t go all the way. Rudy went to the bathroom and, while he was there, he heard a scream. He rushed out of the bathroom and was attacked by a young Italian man. He thought the man was Raffaele, but he wasn’t sure because he didn’t see his face. Patrick had nothing to do with it all; neither did Amanda, but he wasn’t as sure about her as he was about Patrick.
Right now, Rudy needed money. Promising to send Rudy £100, Benedetti found out that he was hiding in Düsseldorf. They agreed that he would pick money up from the Western Union branch there, using the name of Kevin Wade and the codeword ‘basket’.
‘please don’t betray me,’ Rudy typed.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Benedetti replied.
After saying goodbye to Rudy, the detectives rushed Benedetti to the offices of the postal police where they arranged the money transfer. He then called Rudy and the two chatted, this time on the phone.
Rudy insisted repeatedly on how loud Meredith’s screams had been. ‘She yelled really loudly, she yelled so loudly that if someone had been passing by, they’d have heard it,’ Rudy said, adding that the time was between 9.20 and 9.30 p.m.
He had run out of the bathroom in such a hurry that he didn’t even stop to pull up his trousers. He saw the wound on Meredith’s neck, and fetched a towel, which he tried to hold against it. ‘She was holding me tightly, tightly … I don’t know why I didn’t call the ambulance because I was the only one then, the only one … I was all filthy with blood and I was scared I would get all the blame,’ Rudy said. He fled the cottage.
Rudy wanted to send his friend a statement about Meredith’s murder for him to give the police. Benedetti tried to persuade Rudy to come back to Italy. He urged him to take a train to Milan; they would meet at the station in the early afternoon the next day and consult a lawyer he knew. Prompted by the detectives, Benedetti advised Rudy to wear a hat and scarf so that the German police wouldn’t recognise him – the Italians wanted to seize their man themselves.
Rudy finally agreed. ‘I’ll be seeing you. In any case, as soon as I get there they’ll throw me into prison,’ he said.
‘Come on, come on,’ Benedetti said. ‘I’ll sort things out. I won’t make you go to prison, don’t worry.’
That evening Napoleoni and a couple of other detectives rushed out of Perugia, racing up the motorway. She hoped to arrest Rudy as he crossed the border into Italy.
Mignini signed a warrant for Patrick’s release from jail; the case against the owner of Le Chic had clearly collapsed. In his warrant, the prosecutor wrote that Amanda may have blamed him for the murder in order to protect Rudy. As far as Mignini was concerned, he had done his job. The law demanded that a prosecutor should be impartial, looking for evidence both against a suspect and in his favour. He must also be ready to free a suspect if new evidence came to light to clear him. Mignini had been convinced that he had no choice but to arrest Patrick after Amanda’s accusation, and now, when the investigation showed Patrick’s alibi had been backed by several witnesses, he released him.
29
20 November 2007
At 6 a.m., as the Intercity 2021 heading south from Hamburg sped along the river Rhine between Koblenz and Mainz, a ticket inspector asked Rudy for his ticket. Rudy didn’t have one and only had four euros (just over three pounds) on him so the guard detained him. A routine check revealed an international arrest warrant had been issued, and he was taken to a prison in Koblenz.
Rudy told prosecutors in Koblenz that he’d been in the country for two weeks. He’d left Perugia with forty-five pounds, three pairs of jeans, three sweaters, three T-shirts, a thick sweatshirt, a woolly hat, two combs and a small towel wrapped around his toothbrush. Investigators found out later that Austrian police had already stopped him once, and the German police three times – on 4 November in Munich, on 6 November in Stuttgart and on 7 November in Karlsruhe. There was no warrant out for his arrest at the time, so he was simply booked for not having a residence permit, and left free to go on his way every time. He was on his way to meet his friend Benedetti in Milan when he was arrested.
Rudy told the German prosecutors a similar story to the one he gave his friend Benedetti. He said that he had tried to stop Meredith’s bleeding, fetching first one towel and then another after the first became drenched with her blood. Meredith was still alive, and dressed – blue jeans, a white pullover and a dark jacket – when he fled the cottage.
‘She was very strong and she was still breathing. In that moment Meredith lay diagonally across the floor … close to the cupboard. When I tried to stop the blood with the towel, she was still moving. I can’t say for sure if she was conscious or not when I left,’ Rudy said.
He’d read about the supposed burglary in the newspapers. But when he and Meredith went into the cottage, Filomena’s window wasn’t broken, he said.When he ran away home, he left Meredith’s door open.
Rudy’s long-estranged father, Roger, found out about his son’s arrest watching the TV news that lunchtime, and immediately burst into tears. ‘Rudy is a very gentle, good-hearted boy; he loved everybody and he loved to have fun,’ Roger said. ‘I love him as a son.’ Did he feel at all to blame after allegedly abandoning Rudy when he was sixteen? ‘No, no, I don’t feel guilty because he was taken from me and given to another family.’ His son’s arrest was just racism: ‘They found a first black man, then they had to let him go, so now they’ve grabbed another one.’
Roger knew nothing about his son’s friends or girlfriends. But surely he’d had news of his son over the past few years? ‘Since Rudy was sixteen and went to live with other families, I’ve heard nothing from him,’ Roger said. He did however bump into his son on a bus that summer. ‘Rudy said hello to me. I asked where he lived and he told me in the centre of town, that he worked as a gardener during the day and that he made pizzas in a restaurant in the evening. He got off at the next stop,’ Roger recalled. Rudy clearly had nothing to say to his father.
Delighted that Rudy had been caught, but frustrated that she hadn’t been the one who arrested him, Napoleoni and her colleagues turned their car round and headed back to Perugia.
Amanda’s father sounded an optimistic note as he greeted her in the visiting room. Curt said he was hopeful she would get out of prison soon, because investigators were seeking a suspect he called ‘the fourth man’ – Curt didn’t yet know that Rudy had been arrested three hours earlier.
‘Ah yes, because this fourth man … I know him, but not well … I’m not sure, but I met him through … I saw him first with the neighbours,’ Amanda said.
Curt asked whether she meant the male students who lived in the downstairs flat.
‘Yes … And also one evening when I was with the neighbours in town … we bumped into him … And then I saw him once in the basketball court, and I think I saw him once when I was at work … but the fact is I barely knew him … I don’t know his phone number … I don’t even know his name because I’ve forgotten it, simply because I’ve never spoken to him; I don’t even know him. And the lawyer told me the police says I phone him or something … but I don’t even know him.’
Curt passed on the news he’d got from the lawyer: first of all they were looking for this person …
Amanda interrupted: ‘Oh yeah? Why?�
�
‘Because there’s his palm print on the cushion which was under Meredith …’
Amanda interrupted again: ‘And it’s his?’
‘Yes, it’s his, and it was established that it was his palm print because he’s apparently from the Ivory Coast and he was adopted by an Italian family … so his prints are on file and—’
‘Oh my God!’ Amanda cried out.
‘Yes, so they’re looking for him because apparently he’s disappeared …’
Her tone incredulous, Amanda commented that this whole affair was in a way ‘unreal’ for her, it was as if it wasn’t really happening to her; she was in prison but at the same time she wasn’t there, because she was always thinking about when she’d get out. ‘I mean, just the idea of knowing who might have done it … I mean I know him, I saw him before, I spoke with him a bit before … oh my God!’
‘Yes, but it seems that … this is what I heard, it seems there’s that imprint on her cushion and some other imprints … one in the bathroom … I don’t know, so—’ Curt said.
Amanda interrupted once more: ‘Oh my God! What a bastard!’
‘I don’t know … I don’t know who it is.’
‘I know, I know … I mean … I’ll have met him, but it’s pretty strange that … him just there, because I never invited him to the house before,’ Amanda said.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 18