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

by Follain, John

  Asked about her latest meeting with the lawyer Ghirga, Amanda said they had talked about ‘the knife with Meredith’s DNA’ – she made no mention of her own DNA on it. ‘I don’t understand how Meredith’s DNA can be on it because I never took it to my house for anything … so it’s a mistake … or Raffaele brought it home … but I think that can’t be either, because he was with me in the house … so there must be a mistake … and [Ghirga] told me: OK, we’ll say it was a mistake.’

  Amanda continued: ‘And then [Ghirga] asked me at what level I know this other man … this Rudy. Is that his name, Rudy?’

  Curt replied no one had said anything yet about his name.

  Amanda told him the TV had given his name.

  From Amanda’s prison diary:

  Updates about me: my lawyers are optimistic that they can get me out of here within the next two weeks. Yeah! Granted, it will be probably a transfer to house arrest, but I’ll be able to see Mom and Dad as much as I want and play [the] guitar …

  … Patrick got out today! Finally! Something is going right! Me next! Well, most likely Raffaele before me, but soon! I’m so happy!’

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  22 November 2007

  In her prison diary, Amanda wrote that a doctor had told her that test results showed she had the HIV virus. The doctor told her not to worry, that it might be a mistake; a new test would be carried out the following week.

  Amanda described this as the: worst experience of my life. I’m in prison for a crime I didn’t commit and I might have HIV.

  I don’t want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to create something good. I want to get old. I want my time. I want my life. Why why why? I can’t believe this.

  Amanda listed seven men she has had sex with, and concludes she could have been infected by three of them.

  Oh please please let it be a mistake. Please oh please let it not be true. I don’t want to die.

  23 November 2007

  Antioco Fois, a slight twenty-nine-year-old with a deceptively mild manner, was one of the youngest reporters on the local Giornale dell’Umbria newspaper when Perugia’s biggest crime case in years, if not decades, began virtually on his doorstep. Fois lived at the bottom of Corso Garibaldi, the same street as Raffaele’s and only a couple of minutes walk away from the cottage.

  Fois had started out as an intern only three years earlier. What he loved the most about his job was investigative journalism – in-depth investigations that exposed facts or even crimes that his targets preferred to hide. He’d sometimes hidden his true identity to get a news story; once he pretended to be an MP’s assistant to show how easy it was to jump hospital waiting lists, and another time he posed as a customer to find out whether arson attacks on shops were the work of an extortion gang.

  Following Meredith’s murder, Fois spent hours at a stretch chatting to as many neighbours and shopkeepers as he could find to discover whether anyone had seen or heard anything that night. The more he thought about Meredith’s murder, the more he thought of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, in which a photographer, confined to a wheelchair, uncovers a murder by spying on his neighbours through his flat’s rear window. Fois thought that no one had seen Meredith killed, but someone must have seen something before or after the murder – something that they would dismiss as unimportant, but could in fact be significant.

  After three weeks of digging, Fois discovered from an acquaintance that the schoolteacher’s widow Nara Capezzali, who lived across the car park from the cottage, had confided hearing a heart-rending scream on the night of the murder. Fois found out Capezzali’s address, timed his visit for just before lunchtime when he expected her to be at home, and pressed the buzzer to her flat.

  A homely, plump figure in a dressing gown, Capezzali appeared a bit wary of him at first but soon described what she had heard, as if it was a relief for her to unburden herself: the long, piercing woman’s scream on the night of 1 November which, she said with her eyes moist and her hands pressed against her chest, ‘was like a scream of pain, and like a call for help’. At the time she’d been walking past the dining-room window which gave out on the cottage. And then the sound of someone running on the iron staircase that led up from the car park, and one or more people ‘scurrying’ along the cottage drive.

  Moved by her account, Fois told her his story would come out the next day and he’d leave her name out of it. As he was about to leave, Capezzali mentioned the scream once more. Every time she walked past the dining-room window she had the impression that she could hear that scream again. ‘It was so ghastly, it must have been the scream of someone who’d been wounded to death. I heard her in the moment she was dying. Poor girl, poor dear, what did they do to her?’

  In her prison diary, Amanda wrote that a senior guard had told her that her cellmate was telling people she had HIV. The doctor came back to Amanda and this time told her that the first result was ‘absolutely unsure’; the second test, he added, would almost certainly be negative.

  Amanda wrote:

  He had a weird way of showing his support however. He said that he would most definitely have sex with me right now he was so sure that I had nothing to worry about.

  … The TV said Rudy said something about being at my house that night with another guy, and it was the other guy who killed Meredith. I don’t know what to think. I mean, could be true, could be not, but I know better than to trust publicity.

  All in all I’m glad something is being figured out. It means finally the creep who did this will go to jail and I’ll get to go free. I might even be able to see my family at Christmas!

  … I want to get another tattoo – the words ‘Let it be’. They mean so much to me now. I don’t know where, I just want them.

  Several days later, the fresh test established that Amanda definitely wasn’t infected.

  24 November 2007

  Fois’s interview made the front page of the Giornale dell’Umbria, with the story headlined ‘A HEART-RENDING SCREAM, THEN SEVERAL PEOPLE FLEEING’. The question was, Fois ended his story, why none of those who had heard the scream – he reported that a female student had also heard a scream from the cottage – had called the police. Fois quoted a local shopkeeper: ‘In this area, hearing screams at night is something which is completely normal.’

  As he’d promised, Fois didn’t name Capezzali in the story. But he gave her name to Mignini and the prosecutor questioned her soon afterwards. For Mignini, there was no doubt the scream was Meredith’s and had been prompted by the last, fatal blow to her throat. The prosecutor estimated that Meredith had died after 10 p.m., most likely between 10.30 and 10.40 p.m., killed by the people who had run away just after her scream.

  Another witness helped Mignini estimate the time of the murder. Shortly before 8 p.m. that evening Alessandra Formica, a surveyor in her mid-twenties, and her boyfriend parked in the car park opposite the cottage. Formica had booked a table for 8 p.m. at the restaurant Il Settimo Sigillo, at the top of the steep street that leads from Piazza Grimana to the cathedral. The restaurant was so crowded they would have to wait a long time for a table so they took a walk down the Corso Vannucci despite the cold night.

  After dinner, they walked back out into the cold and down towards Piazza Grimana. At 10.30 – 10.40 p.m., they reached the bottom of the stairs on the edge of the square, with the basketball court on their left when, Formica said, ‘a coloured man who was running bumped violently into my boyfriend’.

  The man, who was coming up the stairs – away from the cottage – had his head down and bumped into her boyfriend with his shoulder; he was young, well built but ‘not tall’ and wore a heavy jacket. He ran on without stopping or apologising.

  ‘This area’s really full of good-for-nothings; he didn’t even say sorry,’ Formica complained to her boyfriend.

  Amanda confided to her father Curt in the prison visiting room that she was worried about what Raffaele was goin
g to tell the court, which would soon hear a new appeal for their release.

  ‘Apparently, Raffaele seems to be saying that I’m innocent: OK, great! But I don’t know if that’s true. Yesterday I spoke to Luciano [Ghirga, her lawyer], who told me that Raffaele wants to say I’m innocent, while his lawyer wants him to say I’m guilty,’ Amanda said.

  Ghirga had also told her the previous day that the police wanted to portray her as a girl with an angel face and the devil inside her. Everyone in the jail knew that an Italian newspaper called her ‘Amanda, angel face’, and the police was saying that yes, she had an angel face, but she also had the soul of a devil.

  Amanda burst out laughing. Curt said this was the first he’d heard of it, as he didn’t speak Italian. Better that way, Amanda said as she laughed again, it was all crap anyway.

  Amanda laughed again and again as Curt described driving around the Umbrian countryside to find a mail-delivery office, and how he’d left Ghirga’s office ‘walking like Dracula’, as he put it, to avoid waiting journalists and get to his small red Fiat.

  Amanda told Curt she was reading the New Testament in Italian, which the chaplain had given her. She didn’t talk about personal things with the priest, but even though she wasn’t religious she found their conversations interesting.

  She told Curt she’d again been moved to a new cell. Two of her new cellmates were in their forties, and the oldest was fifty-five years old. Amanda felt like a little girl in front of them; in fact, in prison she felt like a little girl. Her new cellmates had taught her how to clean the bathroom and how to do her laundry in the bidet.

  While Amanda worried about what Raffaele would say in court, her former boyfriend tried to work out, as he put it in a letter to his father, what her role had been ‘in this affair’. He had known her only a week, and for all that time Amanda had been ‘slippery’.

  He wrote: ‘I think she was living on another planet. She lives life as if it was a dream, she can’t distinguish between dreams and reality … The Amanda I knew is an Amanda who lives life in a thoughtless way. All she thinks of is seeking pleasure all the time. But it’s impossible to even imagine that she’s a murderess.’

  In a self-critical note, Raffaele blamed himself – to a limited extent – for Amanda, Rudy and him being arrested: ‘I realise that if we’ve all ended up in prison it’s also because of my irresponsibility concerning what happened that evening. And also because of the fact that we smoked such a lot of joints and I’m very sorry about that … I’m paying the price for my superficiality, and this time I’ll pay everything, down to the last penny.’

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  26 November 2007

  At the Forensic Medicine Institute of the University of Perugia, forensic pathologists appointed by Judge Matteini, Mignini and lawyers representing Amanda and Raffaele met to study body parts taken during Meredith’s autopsy, including parts of her neck, lungs and pelvis area. They would then study photographs and films taken at the time to try to establish how and when Meredith died.

  The three professors appointed by the judge – Anna Aprile, Mariano Cingolani and Gian Carlo Umani Ronchi – quickly agreed there was no need to carry out a new autopsy. This was a relief to Meredith’s family, who had been waiting for a decision before planning the funeral; there would have been nothing worse for them than burying Meredith only to have to exhume her just a few days later. But the family faced a long wait; it would take the professors several months to complete their report.

  From Amanda’s prison diary:

  To all those who believed I was a criminal mastermind and a murderer:

  I forgive you. How could you have known? You believed the recycled rumours of newspapers … Heck, if I were in your shoes, I would do the same thing …

  Who wants fifteen minutes of fame for being accused of murdering a friend? Meredith was my friend and I’ll never forget how wonderful she was. How is anyone else supposed to know what it feels like to feel like your own death was just as close? It was my home after all, and I could have just as likely been found there with my own throat split like no one’s should ever be.

  28 November 2007

  In a report the Rome forensic police sent Mignini, it described the DNA evidence it had found following its three-day survey of the cottage after Meredith’s body was discovered. The most signifi – cant in the prosecutor’s eyes were mixed traces belonging to both Amanda and Meredith in blood on the bidet. At Raffaele’s flat, traces of Amanda and Raffaele’s blood were found on a dishcloth and on a sponge.

  With every new bit of bad news for Amanda – the DNA on the knife, and now the mixed DNA traces of both Amanda and Meredith – her lawyer Ghirga assured her there was still everything to play for. The more Ghirga studied the case files, the more he became convinced there was nothing to prove she was in the cottage at the time of the murder.

  ‘I’ll save you because there isn’t any proof against you in the files,’ he told her.

  He thought a trial was likely given the gravity of the charges against Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy, and he started to plan his strategy. What he saw as the lack of direct proof would be his main card. The law stated clearly that without it, circumstantial evidence should be considered to be direct proof only when it was certain, of sufficient gravity and when the various elements pointed to the same conclusion – Ghirga would therefore fight to demolish whatever circumstantial evidence the prosecution put forward, challenging the methods and findings not only of the investigators but of the forensic experts as well.

  29 November 2007

  Three weeks after her arrest, detectives searched Amanda’s cell and seized a diary with a pink cover. Inside were two handwritten sheets of paper, which included a repeat of how she said she had spent the evening of 1 November with Raffaele, and a passage in which she wrote that both when she was alone and when she was with the police, ‘I fear my mind.’ She described how she imagined ‘the horrors my friend must have gone through in her final moments’:

  I know my friend was raped before she was murdered. I can only imagine how she must have felt at these moments, scared, hurt, violated. But even more I have to imagine what it must have felt like when she felt her blood flowing out of her. What must she have thought? About her mom? Regret? Did she have time to come to a moment of peace or did she only experience terror in the end?

  At the bottom of the second page Amanda drew a castle, two girls smiling and holding hands, and a smiley face behind a smiling mask.

  30 November 2007

  Amanda and Raffaele’s hopes of freedom – a fortnight earlier both had made a new appeal for their release – were drastically dashed by a panel of three judges headed by Judge Massimo Ricciarelli. The judges endorsed much of Mignini’s reconstruction of the murder and decreed they should stay in prison.

  Their ruling was scathing in its analysis of Amanda. She had ‘a many-sided personality – self-confident, shrewd and naïve, but with a strong taste for taking centre stage and a marked, we could say fatal, ability in putting people together.’ She acted on her desires ‘even when they can lead to violent and uncontrollable acts.’ As for Amanda’s statements since Meredith’s death, they were a ‘constant attempt to do and undo, to say something and then immediately deny it, as if she wanted to please everyone. Such behaviour seems to be the result of slyness and naïvety at the same time.’

  For the judges, there was no burglary at the cottage. Only Spiderman, they said, could have entered the cottage through Filomena’s broken window. Why would a thief have got rid of Meredith’s mobile phones so soon after the crime? And why would a killer take the phones with him in the first place, only to abandon them a short distance away? Meredith’s killers had taken them from the cottage, the judges surmised, because they didn’t want the phones to ring there. The killers needed to pretend to call Meredith after her death, and they didn’t want their call to help track her down to her room.

  ‘The killer did not have to exercise any type of violence in ord
er to enter the house, having used the keys or having been allowed in by the victim herself,’ the judges said. Meredith was killed by someone she knew, and probably by more than one person.

  Raffaele had lied in claiming to have called the police before they arrived at the cottage. Nor had he gone to bed the previous night at about midnight or 1 a.m. He had spent a turbulent night, so much so that he had switched his mobile on again very early and received a message from his father at 6 a.m. – it was a goodnight message, clearly sent when the mobile was switched off and for that reason had reached him only the next morning.

  The judges mocked Raffaele for claiming he could recall spending a long time at his computer as well as smoking joints on the evening of 1 November. Appearing before the judges themselves a few days earlier, he’d given new details of his time at the computer which, they remarked, ‘clearly conflict with the pitch darkness that would have reigned in his mind after taking the drugs, unless he suffers from a particular pathology – the selective loss of memory.’

  An expert’s analysis of Raffaele’s laptop showed there had been human activity between 6.27 p.m. and 9.10 p.m. when the film Amélie was screened. There was no trace of human activity between 9.10 p.m. and 5.32 a.m. – ‘a formidable corroboration of Raffaele’s involvement’ as the dawn activity, they said, pointed to a virtually sleepless night.