‘What I remember of that morning is that the first time I called Filomena I was at Raffaele’s flat … So what may have happened is that I’ve forgotten I called Filomena or that we didn’t manage to communicate because she doesn’t speak English well and I don’t speak Italian well,’ Amanda said.
Mignini now pressed Amanda on what she had known of Meredith’s death on the day the body was discovered. Amanda said neither she nor Raffaele, who were in the sitting room at the time, had seen into Meredith’s bedroom when the door was kicked open.
‘I only remember Filomena saying: “A foot! A foot!” We were all pushed outside, I sat down on the ground and I couldn’t … I was in shock and I didn’t understand what had happened,’ Amanda said.
At the police station that evening, Meredith’s friend Natalie had said: ‘Let’s hope she didn’t suffer.’ Mignini asked Amanda why she’d said: ‘What do you think? They cut her throat Natalie. She fucking bled to death!’
Amanda replied: ‘The police had told me that her throat had been cut and as far as I know it’s terrible; I’ve heard it’s an awful way of dying.’
‘But we found that out afterwards, not straight away.’
‘The police told me her throat had been cut,’ Amanda insisted. She said it had ‘probably’ been a police officer who acted as an interpreter.
Mignini turned next to Amanda’s accusation against Patrick. The prosecutor was convinced that Amanda had wanted to conceal from herself her own role in the murder, and that she had done so again in her writing – just as she had done in covering Meredith’s body with the quilt. Mignini asked Amanda why she had accused Patrick of murdering Meredith after having sex with her in the cottage – a charge she had then gone back on. Mignini reminded Amanda that she had cried when she made the accusation.
‘I was scared, I was confused, I’d been with the police for hours. I thought they were protecting me but instead they were putting me under pressure and they were threatening me,’ Amanda replied.
‘Yes, go on.’
‘The reason I thought of Patrick was that the police were shouting at me about Patrick, they kept talking about the message, that I’d sent a message to Patrick. That was the worst experience of my life. I was never as confused as I was then.’
Mignini was convinced the real reason was that when the police mentioned Patrick, Amanda had seen it as an opportunity to accuse him and protect herself.
‘But in the text you wrote afterwards, before going to prison, you didn’t deny that accusation. You write that you find it difficult to distinguish between a dream and reality, I think you write: “I still see this image in front of me”: you hear Meredith’s screams and you put your hands over your ears. Why do you have this image? Why the hands over the ears? Why the scream?’
Amanda’s lawyers had remained virtually silent but now one of them intervened. ‘But she says she was very confused. She was under a lot of stress,’ the lawyer said.
‘Yes, I imagined these things. I was so scared and confused that I tried to imagine what could have happened. The police told me I probably couldn’t remember very well. So I thought of what might be another answer and so I imagined it,’ Amanda said.
Mignini was convinced that Amanda hadn’t ‘imagined’ the moment of the murder – she had lived it and it had shocked her, which was why she had broken down in tears in front of the police. He decided to keep pressing Amanda, in the hope that she might again break under pressure and even confess.
‘But you made no mention of Patrick in your previous statements, on the second of November nor on the third, so how come this Patrick emerges all of a sudden?’ he asked.
‘They were saying to me: “Why did you send this message to Patrick, this message to Patrick?” ’ Amanda replied.
‘It’s true you sent messages to each other a few hours before the crime so it’s normal that the police should want to know why, and what it meant. But why did you make such an accusation?’
‘Because I thought it could be true,’ Amanda said.
Mignini was so stunned by her reply all he could do was repeat it. ‘It could be true?’ he asked.
Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga intervened, the voices overlapping each other. ‘Why?’ he asked.
Amanda: ‘When I was there feeling confused—’
Mignini, irritated by Ghirga’s meddling: ‘No, no, excuse me. The lawyers can address me but the suspect—’
Ghirga, to Mignini: ‘But you didn’t ask a question.’
Mignini ignored the lawyer: ‘It could have been true. Which means—’
Ghirga, interrupting again: ‘You didn’t ask a question.’
Mignini: ‘What? I’m asking the question now.’
Ghirga: ‘Well, ask it then.’
Mignini: ‘What does it mean, how could it have been true? What were you talking about?’
Ghirga interrupted him again, and the question remained unanswered.
After yet another clash between Mignini and Ghirga, which Amanda followed with her head bowed, looking from one to the other and back again, the prosecutor managed to ask her: ‘Why did you imagine it?’
Amanda hesitated. ‘Why? … Because I was under stress. I was scared, it had been so many hours and it was the middle of the night … And they were telling me I was guilty …’ Her voice began to tremble.
Mignini: ‘Who was saying it? Who was guilty?’
‘After hours—’ Amanda said and then broke off. She brought her hands up to her head and covered her ears – that gesture again, Mignini thought to himself – and started to cry.
As Amanda wiped the tears away with her fingers, Mignini immediately made a point of requesting that her tears be noted for the record. Amanda continued to cry but he pressed on: ‘Why did you accuse Patrick and not anyone else? How many people did you know who could have—’
Amanda, her voice still wavering: ‘Because they were shouting Patrick’s name at me.’
‘What were the police telling you?’
Amanda, still in tears but in a steadier, forceful tone: ‘The police were saying to me: “We know you were in that house, we know you were at home,” and just before I said Patrick’s name, someone was showing me the message I sent him.’
‘But that’s normal. I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon … the police wanted to know about the relationship between you and Patrick. And that’s normal,’ Mignini said.
‘I couldn’t understand why they insisted I was lying, they kept saying I was lying.’
Mignini noted aloud, for the second time, that Amanda was crying: ‘But why did you accuse … ? You’re crying again a long time, I mention it for the record, I mention it for the record, you’ve been crying for ten minutes. Why did you accuse a person whom you say today is innocent? You told us earlier “it could be true”; what does that mean?’
Ghirga: ‘Can we suspend this please?’
Mignini: ‘Eh …’
Ghirga, addressing Mignini: ‘We request a suspension … she’s calm, you say she’s crying but it doesn’t seem so to us.’
Mignini: ‘I mention it for the record because I saw the tears, she cried and we could all hear her.’
Mignini agreed to suspend the interrogation for a few moments. When it restarted, Ghirga asked for permission for him and Amanda’s other lawyers to speak with their client privately for ten minutes. Mignini tried to brush him aside, saying the lawyers could talk to her after the interrogation was over.
But Ghirga then played his last remaining card: he asked Mignini to ask Amanda whether she wanted to stop the interrogation completely, as was her right. Mignini had no alternative but to put the question to her.
‘I prefer not to answer any more,’ Amanda replied.
For the record, Mignini noted that she had stopped the interrogation – after almost five hours – at her lawyer’s suggestion.
Mignini was still seething as he strode out of the prison. He had never carried out such a tense interrogation. He was convinced
Amanda had decided to grab the lifeline thrown by her lawyer and stop the interrogation to get herself out of a tight spot. The prosecutor always attached a great deal of importance to the body language of suspects he confronted – it revealed things they would never want to admit – and what with her tears and that gesture of covering her ears with her hands, Amanda was an open book. The gesture meant she was trying to blot out the screams she really had heard, he was sure of that. She was desperate to forget what had happened at the cottage – she was trying to deny to herself that it ever happened – but it kept coming back to her and her tears were tears of frustration.
How could Amanda say that the possibility that she was at the cottage and heard Meredith’s screams as someone killed her ‘could be true’? Simply admitting this was a confession that she had been at the scene of the crime. Mignini was convinced that her decision to stop the interrogation was a further sign of her guilt.
Ghirga was just as angry after the interrogation as the prosecutor was. Amanda had simply wanted to defend herself by answering questions but she’d been prevented from telling her story calmly. The exchange had become so tense he’d felt compelled to interrupt the interrogation.
34
18 December 2007
For the first time in more than a month, Mignini returned to the cottage on a cold morning to watch a fresh survey by the Rome biologist Patrizia Stefanoni and her forensic team. Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga, Raffaele’s lawyer Maori and the prosecutor climbed into a Volkswagen camper van parked outside the cottage. The police had set up a big flat-screen monitor, which would allow them to follow the forensic team on a live relay without entering the flat. Napoleoni however, dressed in white overalls like her forensic colleagues, walked inside with them.
As the first images of the flat appeared on the screen, the two defence lawyers began to protest loudly. Why on earth, they asked, was Meredith’s mattress no longer on her bed but now on its side in the kitchen? And why was Meredith’s room itself a scene of chaos, as they called it? Clothes were crumpled up on Meredith’s bed, both cupboard doors had been dismantled and were now leaning against a wall and – most shocking of all for Ghirga – the cushion found under the body with the bloody imprint of Rudy’s palm had been stuffed inside the cupboard. Mignini dismissed the lawyers’ protests as theatrics; detectives were notorious for making a mess of crime scenes once forensic police had done their job.
Standing just outside Meredith’s bedroom, Napoleoni watched in silence as officers slowly searched it. Suddenly, one of them, pointing at the floor, exclaimed: ‘Ah, here’s the bra clasp.’
After no fewer than forty-six days, the clasp from Meredith’s bra that had first been spotted by the Perugia forensic police on the day after the murder, then overlooked by their Rome colleagues, had at last been found. The clasp was under a rug near the desk, a little over a yard away from where it had first been found on the day after the murder under the cushion placed below Meredith’s body. Stefanoni seized the clasp, examined it briefly and then put it away carefully in an evidence bag.
At her office in Rome some time later, Stefanoni found DNA traces of Raffaele and Meredith on the clasp, and DNA traces of Rudy on a bra strap, close to where it had been cut from the rest of the bra. The clasp was to become one of the key – and most fought-over – pieces of evidence in the Kercher case.
In the eyes of the investigators, the forensic team found more new evidence placing both Raffaele and Amanda at the scene of the crime after spraying the floor with Luminol, a chemical that gives a striking blue glow when it reacts with the iron in red blood cells and bleach among other substances; the chemical can detect traces which are invisible to the naked eye.
Experts attributed four bare footprints allegedly stained with blood – they spoke of ‘probable identity’ – to Amanda and Raffaele. Amanda’s were in her bedroom, pointing to her door, and in the corridor in front of Meredith’s room, pointing towards it. Raffaele’s were on a bathmat in bathroom next to Meredith’s room, and in the corridor outside her room, also pointing towards it. A shoe print on a cushion under Meredith’s body was seen as being of a woman’s small shoe size, possibly Amanda’s.
On the floor in Filomena’s room, the Luminol test revealed two bloodstains. One had Meredith’s DNA; the other, closer to the doorway, had both Meredith’s and Amanda’s DNA.
That afternoon Francesco Camana, in charge of the ballistics section of the Rome forensic police, carefully measured and photographed the twenty-seven traces of blood he found on one of the cupboard doors, which would enable him to carry out a Bloodstain Pattern Analysis with the aim of establishing Meredith’s position at the time she was stabbed.
In a report he sent Mignini later, Camana established with what he said was a certainty of more than 65 per cent that, based on the bloodstains on the cupboard, Meredith’s neck at the time the blow or blows were inflicted was some sixteen inches from the floor, some twelve inches from the wall and some thirteen inches from the cupboard.
Camana came up with three alternative positions Meredith could have been in when she was stabbed. In the first, Meredith lay on her back, her elbows on the floor and her chest raised, with her head back and turned towards the window; it suggested she was moving backwards in a defensive position – her attacker facing her.
In the second, Meredith lay face downwards, her hands and pelvis on the floor, her chest raised and her face turned towards the cupboard, before falling to the floor when she was knifed – her attacker behind her.
The third scenario, Camana wrote, explained better than the other two some of the traces found on the floor: Meredith was face down as in the previous scenario, but this time she was on her hands and knees.
Camana deduced that traces on the floor indicated that Meredith had dragged herself, or had been dragged, to the point where she was found. The many bloodstains on her left hand, especially on her index finger, indicated either that the hand was already close to her neck when the fatal wound was inflicted, or that she had touched it soon afterwards.
Spurts of blood in the middle of Meredith’s chest and other bloodstains indicated that she was wearing her blue sweatshirt – it was more bloody on the right side, corresponding to the fatal wound, than on the left – and white T-shirt at the moment the wound was inflicted. The T-shirt and sweatshirt had been rolled up towards her shoulders.
24 December 2007
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Ghirga left his family to go and see Amanda in prison. Usually calm and smiling when he came, she broke down and cried, talking to him about her family: it was the first Christmas she had ever spent away from them. Ghirga tried to give her something to hope for, telling her that he would soon be making a new appeal for her release, this time to the Supreme Court, Italy’s highest.
Amanda’s mother Edda also spent a tearful Christmas. ‘If I didn’t have [Amanda’s sister] Deanna and the rest of my family, I don’t know that I would get out of bed,’ Edda confided. Going to work got her mind off ‘it’ for a little while but the nights were the worst: ‘I don’t sleep, I sleep in chunks. A few hours and then I’m up, another few hours and then I’m up again. I was always very fit – I played for two soccer teams – and my blood pressure was fine but now I have to take medicine to keep my pressure down. I lost twenty-five pounds in two months, I have this constant sick feeling in my stomach because my child is suffering and there’s nothing I can do about it.’
Amanda cried again early in the New Year when Curt went to see her. He held her in his arms, doing his best to calm her down but she kept crying for half the hour-long visit. Over and over again, Amanda said she couldn’t understand why she was in there when she hadn’t done anything. Guards looked in repeatedly as she wept and when the visit ended, several of them – Curt noticed one had more stripes on his uniform than the others – came up and asked him: ‘What can we do for her?’
They took Amanda into another room nearby, shutting the door on Curt and leaving him on his
own. That had never happened before. Curt thought angrily to himself: ‘Do they think they’re going to get her “confession”?’
After a short Christmas break spent with their families, Mignini and Napoleoni pursued their investigation. A police officer called Fabio D’Astolto, whom Amanda had said was ‘probably’ the officer who told her Meredith’s throat had been cut, said that all he knew when he was acting as her interpreter was that the body of an English girl had been found at her home. It proved impossible to find an officer to back Amanda’s version.
During a new search of Raffaele’s flat, detectives seized an inventory of the contents drawn up by his landlady. The list of cutlery included the knife, which investigators believed was the murder weapon. Mignini immediately thought this explained why the knife had been placed back in the drawer after the murder – its absence would have been noticed.
In late January, a thirty-three-year-old Albanian farmhand, Hekuran Kokomani, asked to give a statement to Mignini. Kokomani told the prosecutor that on Halloween or on the evening of 1 November – he remembered it was raining – he had been driving past the cottage when he saw what looked like a black bag in the middle of the road. Kokomani sounded his horn but the ‘bag’ didn’t move. He moved forward slowly and touched the ‘bag’, which he now realised was actually a young man and woman who suddenly stood up. The woman had a black scarf around her neck that partly covered her face, and the man wore some kind of hat.
The man stood in front of the car while the woman walked towards him, threatening him with a long knife which she held up in both her hands, shouting in Italian: ‘Get out of here or I’ll show you!’ The knife was about twelve inches long, and the blade an inch wide.
Kokomani lowered his window and told them to fuck off.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 21