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

by Follain, John

  In his blog, Raffaele had failed to distance himself from serious criminals – he’d praised a convict who killed two boys – and above all he’d proclaimed his desire for ‘big thrills’. The judges also mentioned the photograph of him in which he brandished a cleaver. Violence, they concluded, attracted him. Both in his behaviour and in his wavering statements, which often fell into line with Amanda’s ‘dream-like’ accounts, Raffaele had shown himself to have a fragile temperament, ‘exposed to impulses and outside influences of every kind’.

  32

  7 December 2007

  After he was extradited to Italy, Rudy gave his most detailed account yet of the night of Meredith’s murder to Judge Matteini, the judge who a month earlier had ordered that Amanda, Raffaele and Patrick should stay in prison.

  In a room at the Capanne prison, with Mignini as a silent observer, Rudy first described how he knew Amanda. After meeting her for the first time at Le Chic in early September, he saw her again a month later when the students in the semi-basement flat invited him there. Rudy and the students had been drinking and made some raunchy comments about Amanda, because she was pretty. ‘One of us imagined her in bed, another said he’d give it to her this way or that way,’ Rudy said. Amanda was a slut, the students told him, and she often came to their flat to smoke joints. Rudy said he’d never seen Raffaele and didn’t even know he was Amanda’s boyfriend.

  When Amanda came into the flat, the young men looked at each other and burst out laughing because they were still talking about her. Amanda sat down and they all smoked cannabis for the rest of the evening. Then Meredith came in.

  ‘I admired her beauty, I mean I looked at her because she was a beautiful girl,’ Rudy said. He noticed her English accent and said to her: ‘There isn’t anything English about you.’ Meredith told him about her parents, saying she was of mixed blood. According to Rudy, they talked the whole evening.

  He saw Amanda a few other times in the street ‘but it was “Ciao!” and that’s it.’ He also met Meredith again in the street, and in bars including the Shamrock where he had gone to watch an England – South Africa rugby match. Meredith was with some English friends and they greeted each other; he supported the South Africans and he pulled her leg after his team won.

  On Halloween night, Rudy went to a party in the flat of some Spanish friends near the Corso Vannucci and at about midnight a girl dressed as a vampire approached him. It took him some time to recognise Meredith, and he said to her: ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to suck my blood?’ – he was pulling her leg because of the South African rugby victory. They talked a lot together, and kissed each other on the mouth. They agreed to meet the following evening at 8.30 p.m. Rudy left the party at 2 a.m. and went on to the Domus nightclub, but he didn’t see Meredith there.

  On 1 November, he met Meredith at the cottage at about 9 p.m. At one point she went to her room and he heard her complaining about something; he went to see and she said she couldn’t find her money. She started complaining about Amanda, and went into her flatmate’s room and opened a drawer there. ‘That bloody drug addict,’ Meredith said.

  Rudy managed to calm her down and they started to flirt in the sitting room. ‘We started touching each other. She asked me if I had a condom but I didn’t have one, so I realised we should stop … We’d both lowered our trousers,’ he said. He also touched her bra.

  Rudy then went to the bathroom; he needed to go to the toilet because of the kebab he’d eaten earlier. He listened to his iPod, heard the doorbell ring and listened to two and a half songs. He’d put the volume up high but he heard a scream; he went out of the bathroom and in Meredith’s bedroom he saw a man a little shorter than him with chestnut hair. Meredith’s body was on the floor. He saw that blood was coming out of the left side of her neck; she was wearing blue jeans and a white woollen top.

  The man struck Rudy on the left hand with a knife and Rudy backed away, throwing a chair at the attacker before the latter made for the front door. Rudy heard him say in Italian: ‘He’s black, the culprit’s been found. Let’s go,’ and then the steps of two people walking away on the gravel outside the cottage.

  Rudy went back to Meredith. ‘I’d never seen so much blood. It was on the floor, the blood was coming out of Meredith and her shoulder was all drenched,’ Rudy said. ‘I didn’t know what to do but I went to the bathroom, I took a small towel and I tried to pack the wound but it got soaked straight away so I went back to the bathroom and I took another towel.’

  At that moment, Meredith tried to speak: ‘She wanted to tell me something but there was a lot of blood coming out of both her neck and her mouth, I was kneeling next to her and I heard her say “af …”, “af …” I tried to write these letters on the wall.

  ‘Meredith took my hand as if to tell me I mustn’t leave her; but I was scared. I don’t remember how I could have touched the cushion and I don’t know how the print of my palm could have ended up on it,’ Rudy said.

  Why didn’t he call an ambulance? Judge Matteini asked. ‘I didn’t call the ambulance because I didn’t have my mobile phone. In that moment I wasn’t lucid, I wanted to call the ambulance but I was scared; my hands and feet were dirty with blood and I started to think things out – who would believe me?’ Rudy replied.

  He fled the cottage at about 10.30 p.m. after hearing the noise of a chair or table being moved in the semi-basement flat. He fled through Piazza Grimana, trying to hide his trousers and hands dirty with blood. When he got home, he washed his hands, undressed completely and dumped his dirty clothes on the floor of his room.

  ‘I was confused, I couldn’t stay in the flat because I couldn’t get the sight of the blood out of my head and when I’d touched Meredith I’d touched her neck, I could still smell the smell of blood which was nauseating.’ At about 11.30 p.m., he went to a friend’s house and tried to act normal even though ‘I was on another planet’. Later he’d followed his friends to the Domus and then to the Velvet nightclubs, going home at about 4.30 – 5 a.m.

  On the night of 2 November, Rudy again went dancing at the Domus with three female American students he’d met in another pub. Judge Matteini took Rudy to task for going out clubbing after witnessing Meredith’s death. ‘You were dancing, you were having fun,’ Judge Matteini said.

  ‘Well, it depends how you look at it.’

  ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned when you go to a nightclub and you dance you don’t go there to cry.’

  ‘Yes yes, but in that moment I was trying to be normal.’

  ‘Your try was jolly good,’ the judge snapped.

  As Rudy was dancing at the Domus on the night of 2 November, the disc jockey asked for a minute of silence in Meredith’s honour. The young people who had been dancing until a moment earlier suddenly froze and stood still, some with their heads bowed. Rudy froze too, his face impassive.

  ‘I respected the minute of silence,’ Rudy said.

  ‘You respected the minute of silence but didn’t you say “poor Meredith” or anything like that?’ Judge Matteini asked.

  ‘I didn’t express it out loud, but there was something inside me,’ Rudy replied.

  The judge showed Rudy pictures of Meredith’s body. Rudy remained impassive.

  For Mignini, there was no doubt Rudy was lying: he couldn’t deny his presence in the cottage, or his sexual contact with Meredith, given the evidence showing he was there at the time of the murder. So instead he’d decided to claim that Meredith had agreed to see him and invented a flirtation with her. There was no trace at the cottage of the letters ‘AF’ which Rudy said he’d tried to trace on the wall. Mignini didn’t believe that Meredith had said the letters to Rudy, or that he’d tried to trace them; the prosecutor suspected Rudy wanted investigators to think that she’d been trying to say Raffaele’s name.

  Since her aborted trip to the German border to arrest Rudy, Napoleoni had focused on verifying Rudy’s story. The detective found that his claim to have met Meredith on Halloween
in the flat of some Spanish friends didn’t stand up because Meredith’s friends said she didn’t go anywhere alone that night – they had photographs of them all together and nowhere near that flat. They also denied that she knew Rudy; she’d never talked about him and they’d never seen him near her.

  Napoleoni questioned two female Spanish students who lived in the flat above Rudy’s bedsit. They said they’d spent Halloween with Rudy and other friends, dancing at the Domus nightclub from 1 a.m. until it closed at 5.30 a.m. The only girl they saw him talking to and dancing with had ‘long, straight blonde hair’ – Meredith had dark hair.

  Napoleoni also talked to a friend of Rudy’s, a Somali in his early twenties who like him had settled in Italy as a child. Rudy and Mohamed Barrow Abukar had been friends for the past six years; they played basketball on Piazza Grimana, and went drinking together. Barrow Abukar told Napoleoni: ‘I’ve never liked the way Rudy behaved, especially when he got drunk. And when he took drugs (cocaine and other stuff), he bothered people, especially the girls. He’d overpower them and try to kiss them. A lot of people disliked him and I heard he’d got into trouble for molesting girls before.’ He added that Rudy often lied.

  14 December 2007

  Six weeks after she died, Meredith’s family held the funeral service for her at the medieval Croydon Parish Church next to the Old Palace School where she had studied. One television channel offered the Kerchers more than £500,000 for exclusive coverage of the funeral. ‘How disgusting. How could they?’ Stephanie burst out when told about the bid. Meredith’s father John, himself a journalist, was the most sickened by the cheque-book journalism and insisted that the family shouldn’t talk to the media. ‘The pain is only ours, and we’ll talk when we’ve decided to, not when it suits other people,’ he told his lawyer Maresca.

  At the church, yellow flowers by the coffin spelt out Meredith’s nickname, ‘Mez’. Sophie, Amy and Robyn – Meredith’s friends from Perugia – gave her parents a photo-album of pictures they’d taken with her. Her family were stunned to see more than 500 people come to the church, with friends flying in from as far away as Canada and Japan. Stephanie read a poem she had written in Meredith’s memory. Her brother Lyle made the congregation laugh as he told some funny anecdotes about Meredith. Her friends and teachers would guarantee that Meredith was a bad timekeeper, Lyle said: ‘You could set your watch by her, granted that she would always be twenty minutes late. That’s just the way she was. It was a family trait.’

  A choir from Meredith’s old school sang a requiem and mourners then listened to her favourite song, ‘With or Without You’ by the rock band U2. Meredith’s other brother, called John like their father, read out a passage from the Bible:

  And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

  And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

  And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying … God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

  … He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. (Revelation 21)

  The passage which Meredith’s brother read out stopped just short of the following:

  But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

  The Rev Colin Boswell, vicar of Croydon, said after the service: ‘It is important at a funeral like this that we try to remember things that are happy and good, or else only evil and not very creative things take over and we have got to try and rise above that.’

  Meredith was buried at Mitcham Road Cemetery, near Croydon.

  Some time later, Amy, Robyn and Sophie had lunch with Meredith’s parents – they’d had little chance to talk at the funeral. The three wanted to answer any questions Arline and John might have for them.

  ‘If you want to ask us anything …’ they gently prompted Arline and John.

  But Meredith’s parents didn’t have any questions; they just talked about their dead daughter, telling stories about what she’d been like as a little girl.

  Sophie kept in touch, especially with Arline. When Sophie told her to take care, Arline replied gently: ‘You look after yourself. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.’

  Not a day passed without Sophie thinking of Meredith. The first thing she did every morning was to check the news by going on Google and typing the name of her dead friend. Depressed, Sophie spent most of her days on the sofa in her sitting room. Day in, day out, there was nothing she wanted to do. Bristol University allowed her to put her studies on hold, and she simply stayed at her home, east of London.

  One thought tormented Sophie, and she talked about it again and again with Meredith’s other friends Amy and Robyn: was there anything they could have done that last night to prevent Meredith being killed? Sophie, Amy and Robyn all blamed themselves.

  ‘Why didn’t we tell Meredith to stay with us that night? Why didn’t we ask her who was in the cottage?’ they asked each other. ‘Why didn’t I call her to see if she got home OK?’ Sophie said.

  And, for Sophie, the hardest question of them all: ‘Why didn’t I walk her all the way home?’ But Sophie had never walked Meredith all the way home after a night out; she’d accompanied her to the cottage only once, when Meredith had wanted to change her shoes before going clubbing.

  At the end of the day, Sophie reasoned, why should that last night have been any different? Rationally, Sophie knew that Meredith’s death wasn’t her fault, but the sense of guilt haunted her.

  33

  17 December 2007

  Shortly before 11 a.m. in a cramped room of the Capanne prison, Mignini sat down opposite Amanda and her lawyers Ghirga and Dalla Vedova, and began questioning her in a steady, neutral tone. Amanda had agreed to be interrogated – her lawyers insisted she had nothing to hide – and the prosecutor had carefully drafted a long list of questions, which he expected would take all day to get through.

  Mignini had thought long and hard about the best way to tackle Amanda. Her greatest strength, he thought, was her intelligence; her greatest weakness was her fragility. He started by asking Amanda about her return to the cottage on the morning of 2 November, when she took a shower despite finding the front door open and blood in the bathroom. ‘Were the doors of the rooms open or closed?’ Mignini asked.

  Speaking in English with an interpreter translating what she said into Italian, Amanda replied in as steady a tone as the prosecutor’s. ‘No, they were all closed. Filomena’s was closed, Meredith’s was closed and Laura’s, I think, was a bit ajar,’ she said.

  ‘Did you try to open them, to knock?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why didn’t you try? There was the blood, the open front door …’

  ‘I didn’t see any reason to.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, but you find the front door open, you find the blood in the bathroom and you take a shower all the same. If you’ll allow me this is rather strange, there could have been somebody dangerous in the house,’ Mignini insisted.

  ‘In my whole life nothing remotely like this ever happened to me; I didn’t expect to go home and find something wrong.’

  Mignini pressed on: ‘You found the excrement in the bathroom, which was a sign that an outsider was there, but you didn’t feel the need to call the police?’

  ‘No, because if you go into the house and there’s nothing missing usually that means no outsider came in.’

  ‘Yes, I understand but there was the blood …’

  ‘There was only a little …’

  ‘Did you check there was nothing missing?’

  ‘I didn’t really check,
but the computer was still in my room and that was a big clue, and in the rest of the flat everything was fine.’

  Mignini next tried to pick apart Amanda’s account of how she had arrived at Raffaele’s flat at about midday, but didn’t immediately mention what she’d discovered at the cottage. She helped Raffaele clean up the water which had leaked from the kitchen sink the previous evening, and it was only after about an hour, when they sat down to have breakfast, that Amanda told him.

  ‘What did you tell Raffaele when you arrived at his flat?’ Mignini asked.

  ‘At first I didn’t tell him anything because I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know yet whether there was something strange …’

  ‘What did you think? Can you please explain this to me, because quite honestly it’s a version which …’ Mignini trailed off.

  ‘I was trying to understand what it all meant … At first I didn’t tell Raffaele because I didn’t know if there was something really serious … I’d realised there was something strange but I didn’t know whether it was serious.’

  ‘But … at one point you told me “blood, open door, excrement etc. I became worried” and now you tell me “I wasn’t worried” … I mean, really, explain yourself because it’s not at all clear.’

  ‘It seemed strange to me but not that worrying or alarming because the flat was exactly as it should be except for those small things,’ Amanda said. Her first words to Raffaele about this were: ‘Hey, listen to the strange things that happened to me this morning. ’ He told her to call her flatmates.

  Amanda said she had called her flatmate Filomena from Raffaele’s flat. But Mignini pointed out that according to Filomena, Amanda had told her in that first phone call that she planned to call Raffaele – which meant she had called Filomena before talking to him.