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

by Follain, John

  ‘Forget it; what can a girl do to you?’ the man said.

  Further ahead and outside the cottage, Kokomani saw a young black man. He heard the woman tell the other two not to show their faces but he had already seen all three of them. Kokomani recalled that the next day was a holiday and that he slept late. He recognised Amanda and Raffaele ‘without a shadow of a doubt’ when he saw their photographs in the newspaper a few days later, and Rudy too when his picture also appeared. He had failed to speak out before now because he was scared of ‘getting caught up in such a serious thing’.

  35

  The young local journalist Antioco Fois kept digging for a story for his paper in the area around the cottage – his own home was only a stone’s throw from the university – and in January 2008 he struck lucky. A shopkeeper told him that Antonio Curatolo, a tramp who spent much of his days, and most nights, on a bench on Piazza Grimana, had apparently been heard muttering after the arrests: ‘If those two get off, I’ll talk. I saw them that evening.’

  Fois had no difficulty finding Curatolo. He knew the tramp by sight, and spotted him sitting on his usual bench by the news stand on Piazza Grimana. Sixty-one, with a scrawny, weather-beaten face, flowing white hair, long beard and sharp, black eyes, Curatolo had lived as a tramp in Perugia for the past two decades. He was a cheerful figure, who liked to chat with students who stopped by his bench in the square.

  The morning Fois went up to him for the first time, Curatolo was dressed warmly against the cold, a gaily coloured woollen hat on his head. Next to him on the bench was a big plastic bag full of his belongings, among them the news magazines he liked to read from cover to cover. Fois introduced himself and offered Curatolo a cigarette. They started talking.

  Fois waited a while before putting his question. ‘Look, I’m working on this awful story, the English girl who was killed. Did you see or hear anything that evening?’

  Curatolo replied without any hesitation: ‘Well, I saw the two of them.’

  ‘Which two?’

  ‘Those two – Amanda and Raffaele.’

  Fois worried this was too easy. ‘Are you sure it was them?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. I’d seen them around before and I recognised them in the papers afterwards. I was sitting here on this bench, I was smoking. They were hugging and kissing each other. It was at night, between eleven and midnight.’

  ‘But didn’t the police ask you about the night of the murder when they went round the neighbourhood?’

  ‘Yes, the carabinieri asked me the morning after whether I’d noticed anything strange. But I only realised what I’d seen when I saw the pictures of Amanda and Raffaele in the paper a few days later.’

  Wary of irritating Curatolo with a police-style interrogation, Fois stopped questioning him; he could always ask for more details another time. Fois reported back to Giuseppe Castellini, his editor at the Giornale dell’Umbria, and started to tell him that a witness had seen Amanda and Raffaele near the cottage on the night of the murder. Castellini’s eyes shone at the news, but he looked rather disappointed when Fois told him the witness was a tramp.

  ‘OK, here’s what we’ll do: we’ll bring him to Mignini so he can give a statement. That way the prosecutor can establish whether he’s reliable or not. In the meantime, go back to him, ask him all the questions you can think of, see if he contradicts himself,’ Castellini said.

  Castellini decided to hold off publishing until Curatolo had met Mignini. The editor thought it was his duty as a citizen to contribute to the investigation. Besides, if the newspaper published the story the tramp might get scared by the publicity, deny it all and refuse to meet Mignini.

  Fois went back to Curatolo again and again and the tramp gradually told him the full story as they sat side by side on ‘his’ bench. He’d seen Amanda and Raffaele until sometime after 11 p.m., when the last buses taking people to nightclubs outside Perugia had gone. The pair sat on a low wall in the corner of the basketball court closest to the cottage. They talked, hugged and kissed each other. Every so often, one of them would get up, walk to the railing a few yards away and look towards the gate of the cottage.

  ‘I had the impression they were checking on something,’ he said. Their manner was sometimes agitated. They left shortly before midnight, walking down the staircase that leads to Via della Pergola and the gate of the cottage a few yards across the street. Curatolo himself left the square a short time after.

  ‘How do you know it was the night of the murder?’ Fois asked.

  ‘Because it was a holiday, the buses on the square were waiting to take kids to the nightclubs,’ Curatolo said.

  ‘But there are buses on other nights too,’ Fois pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but I remember that the next day the carabinieri asked me if I’d seen something strange the previous night,’ Curatolo said.

  Fois made some checks on Curatolo. He found out that the tramp had paid several visits to a centre for drug addicts just behind the university and sometimes got drunk. But Fois was convinced that he’d seen what he described. Together with his editor Castellini, who wanted to make sure for himself that Curatolo was reliable and not just a crank, Fois kept on going back to talk to him.

  When Castellini, impressed by the precision of Curatolo’s account after a few meetings, was satisfied that the tramp was speaking the truth, he told him: ‘I believe you. But you’ve got to talk to the prosecutor, it might be important.’

  Curatolo grimaced. ‘I want to stay out of this. Besides, I’m a tramp. No one will believe me.’

  ‘If you tell the truth, no one can prove you wrong. It’s important: a girl was killed,’ Castellini insisted.

  But Curatolo feared for his own skin: ‘I could get killed. I’m out here on the street; it’s easy to kill me.’

  Castellini reassured him: ‘If you talk to the prosecutor, you’ll become an official witness. That will protect you more than if there’s just a rumour flying around, as there is now. Making a statement to the prosecutor would be like taking out an insurance policy.’

  But Curatolo was worried, and it took almost a month to persuade him. ‘Amanda and Raffaele say they weren’t there, but a girl died and I saw them,’ Curatolo said when he agreed to go at last. He then asked how long it would take.

  Fois pulled his leg: ‘What’s the problem Antonio, have you got a business appointment?’

  Castellini tipped off Mignini, and they agreed Curatolo would go to him on a Saturday, because the prosecutor’s offices would be almost deserted then. The editor told Mignini the story was ready to run in his newspaper, but agreed to wait until Curatolo had talked to him.

  2 February 2008

  On the day Curatolo was due to meet the prosecutor, Castellini, Fois and the paper’s crime reporter, Francesca Bene, spent much of a rainy, cold morning looking for him, afraid the tramp had pulled out at the last minute. They finally found him in a shelter for down-and-outs; Curatolo complained he hadn’t slept the previous night and was aching all over.

  The journalists drove Curatolo to Mignini’s office. They first watched in amazement and then laughed as Curatolo kept setting off the alarm, obliged to pass several times through the metal detector in the lobby of the prosecutors’ building, and making a small pile of the metallic belongings he reluctantly pulled from the many pockets of his big army surplus jacket: a penknife, keyrings, even a couple of chargers for mobile phones and other odds and ends. Curatolo became more and more irritated each time the detector beeped. Then a security guard asked him to take his boots off because they had metal buckles.

  ‘Basta! I’m leaving!’ Curatolo burst out.

  The journalists managed to persuade him to stay; Castellini worried about the tramp’s smelly feet. The problem was solved when it was agreed an assistant of Mignini’s would accompany Curatolo upstairs, with his boots on.

  Shortly before midday, Curatolo sat down opposite the prosecutor, ready at last. Asked for his address, he replied without hesitati
on: ‘I live in Piazza Grimana in Perugia and I sleep in the open, near the news stand.’ Curatolo said that on the evening of 1 November he’d seen on Piazza Grimana a young couple he had seen several times before at the bar on the square.

  ‘Every so often, Raffaele would lean on the iron railing and look out towards Via della Pergola, as if he was waiting for someone. The girl would also look out from the railing, and then they would go back and sit on the wall,’ Curatolo said.

  He didn’t see the couple leave, but they’d gone by the time he left at about 11.30 p.m. or midnight to go and sleep in a nearby park. That evening, he also noticed young men and women wearing masks or dressed in black costumes with several women dressed as witches. The next day, carabinieri officers came to Piazza Grimana asking if anyone had seen anything related to Meredith’s murder the previous night. Curatolo told them he hadn’t; he recognised the couple as Amanda and Raffaele only when he saw their pictures in the newspaper a few days later.

  After Curatolo had finished, an assistant of Mignini’s went up to Castellini and asked him to hold off publishing anything about the tramp for a couple of months; the prosecutor needed to check his account and an article could jeopardise that. The request frustrated Castellini – it was a first-class story, and it was exclusive – but he promised to wait.

  Wary after seeing much of his work leak to the media over the past three months, Mignini formally classified Curatolo’s statement as secret, and locked it in his safe. He then reached to the shelf behind his desk for an air-spray and sprayed some disinfectant in the air, which had grown heavy with the tramp’s smell.

  A month after Curatolo met the prosecutor, Castellini was having lunch in a restaurant when one of Rudy’s lawyers went up to his table and asked: ‘What’s this about a tramp? Is it true?’

  Swearing inwardly, Castellini mumbled something incomprehensible and rushed back to his office. He called Mignini and told him word had leaked out; he would publish the story the next morning.

  The editor splashed the story across the front page of the next day’s Giornale dell’Umbria. The headline read ‘HERE IS THE SUPER-WITNESS. ’ A smaller one proclaimed ‘The Perugia Murder’ – there was no need to specify which one – and with more than a touch of pride: ‘We tracked him down.’

  36

  Amanda’s first winter in prison was weighing heavily on her. From early March onwards, she complained repeatedly to Edda and Curt about one of her cellmates, Rosa, who at twenty-three had already served five years in jail and had another seventeen to go. Rosa was more lesbian than heterosexual, Amanda said, and when they were first assigned a cell together Rosa had thought she was too. Rosa had made ‘advances’ to her, but Amanda had rejected them.

  Rosa was obsessed with cleanliness and made Amanda clean everything in the cell, even parts of the washbasin no one could see – for six hours on one Saturday and for another five hours the next day. As Amanda scrubbed away, Rosa would follow her every move, finishing off with a sponge. Rosa even insisted on cleaning the walls and the windows, and Amanda showed her parents the red blotches on her hand she had as a result of all the cleaning. Even when she just washed her hands, Rosa made her wash the basin immediately. To survive life in jail, Amanda explained, Rosa had convinced herself that the prison was her home.

  Amanda had her own strategy for coping with life in prison. She was studying five foreign languages – German, Italian, French, Chinese and Russian – trying to spend forty minutes every day on each. She had chosen Chinese because she wanted to use it to communicate with her Seattle boyfriend DJ – she often wrote to him – who was learning it on his long stay in China. Her sister Deanna had started Russian before Meredith’s death, and Amanda wanted them to have a language they could talk together ‘that no one else would understand’.

  Amanda said she felt exhausted. She tried to stay in shape doing exercises in her cell – using bottles full of water as weights when she swung her arms – but she was putting on weight all the same. She often had dizzy spells and her vision was getting blurred, so much so she had trouble seeing people some distance away. She had blood tests done but the results were normal. Curt told his daughter she must be straining her eyes doing so much reading. She had just turned vegetarian, so he urged her to eat more proteins, such as eggs and beans.

  When in mid-March detectives searched her cell, seizing some of her clothes, her Italian notebooks and a few books – a novel of the fantasy Dragonlance series, two romance novels,Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, about a lost boy’s wanderings and animals slaughtering each other on a lifeboat, and a comic called I’m Ready for my Movie Contract – Amanda lost her temper and wept with rage. She told Curt afterwards that she’d felt like shouting ‘Vaffanculo!’ (Fuck off!) at them, but had thought better of it. What mattered to her wasn’t so much the things they’d taken away, but the feeling that it was her life they were taking away.

  A week later, when Edda visited on her own, Amanda told her about the service marking the Last Supper which she’d attended in the prison chapel. She was stunned when it came to the ritual washing the feet and the Bishop of Perugia chose to wash hers and even kissed them – she was a nobody. She had volunteered for the washing of feet part when the chaplain Father Saulo mentioned it to her before the service, even though she’d said she wasn’t a Catholic. She had played the guitar during the ceremony.

  25 March 2008

  Amanda complained to Edda that Rosa had been in a foul mood all week, forcing her to clean the cell on Easter Sunday, even though they’d already cleaned it the previous day. Rosa had criticised Amanda for being cold and unfriendly, insisting she wanted to be her friend.

  But Amanda had no intention of becoming friends with anyone, especially inside the prison, because she didn’t trust anyone. The other prisoners must think she was unfriendly, but she didn’t care what they thought: all she wanted was to mind her own business. She never chatted with anyone and she just stayed on her own, crying or writing. She was so sick of prison.

  Amanda told Edda how much she enjoyed writing and wanted to write a book one day. She realised it would be difficult to promote but she was sure someone would do it for her. She complained that the police had seized some notes of hers.

  Amanda suddenly put her head back and looked up at the ceiling, mocking any hidden listener: ‘I’m innocent. Thanks very much. I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I’m innocent.’ She then pulled a face.

  26 March 2008

  Rudy proved very talkative when Mignini questioned him at the Capanne prison. Asked about his attraction for Amanda, he stunned the prosecutor by saying: ‘Yes, I’d like to – sorry about this – do her.’ Mignini was amazed that Rudy had used the present tense.

  Early on in the questioning, he again denied ever meeting Raffaele. He was anxious to correct a mistake he had made before a judge, when he’d said that he’d kissed Meredith at the home of Spanish friends of his on the night of Halloween. The truth was, he told Mignini now, that he’d kissed her at the Domus nightclub later that night.

  ‘We talked and talked. I gave her a kiss but it wasn’t a passionate kiss, it was a so-so kiss, and afterwards I told her how much I liked her and I asked if we could meet the next day and she said yes,’ Rudy said.

  At about 9.20 p.m. the next evening, 1 November, Rudy said, he’d met Meredith, who was wearing jeans and a white top, at the cottage. He was drinking some fruit juice in the sitting room when he heard her complaining angrily about something down the corridor. He went to see what the matter was and she pointed at a drawer in her bedside table, saying money she had put there had disappeared.

  Meredith started to accuse Amanda. ‘That bloody drug addict, I can’t bear her anymore,’ she exclaimed. She was sick of Amanda bringing men home.

  Rudy tried to calm her down with a joke. ‘Don’t get angry or you’ll get wrinkles,’ he said.

  The two went to sit down in the sitting room and Meredith gradually calmed down. Rudy started to talk about himself,
telling her that he didn’t know his mother from Adam but that he considered himself lucky ‘because I’ve got so many mothers’.

  Meredith looked sad. ‘You’ve got lots of mothers but I’ve got only one and I’m scared of losing her,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rudy asked.

  Meredith told him about her mother’s illness, but Rudy’s English wasn’t perfect and he didn’t fully understand what she said; he understood that her mother had a cancer of the kidney.

  After talking for a half hour or an hour, Rudy leant forward and kissed Meredith on the mouth. They caressed each other, but stopped when Meredith asked him if he had a condom. He didn’t have one, and they stopped. Rudy went to the bathroom – he had eaten a kebab earlier and needed to go to the toilet. Rudy was still there when he heard the doorbell ring.

  He heard Meredith call out, ‘Who is it?’ He then heard Meredith say in English in a tense tone of voice: ‘We need to talk.’

  A woman’s voice – Rudy thought it was Amanda’s – answered in English: ‘What’s happening?’

  This was the first time Rudy had accused Amanda.

  Rudy didn’t follow what Meredith and the other woman said next. He took his iPod out of his pocket, put the headphones on and listened at a high volume to one hip hop song, then another, and then another. The third song was halfway through when he heard a scream over the music. He rushed out of the bathroom without stopping to flush the toilet.

  The light in the sitting room had been turned off but he saw a man with his back to him standing by Meredith’s room, where the light was still on. There was no sign of anyone else in the flat.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Rudy asked. He looked in and glimpsed Meredith on the floor between the bedside table and the cupboard. The man turned quickly and Rudy saw he had a knife in his left hand.