‘Does that mean they’ll acquit?’ a journalist asked.
‘Nope,’ Ghirga replied.
With a keen sense of timing, Rudy suddenly branded Amanda and Raffaele ‘murderers’ – the first time he had ever done so. In a letter to his lawyer, he raged against what they and their lawyers had said about him at the pair’s trial.
‘Two murderers, Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox, are deservedly on trial for the murder of a splendid girl,’ Rudy wrote. ‘Instead of admitting their guilt, but above all the horror they committed, Sollecito and Knox do nothing but slander people, spreading falsehoods and hoping to get off scot-free … Enough is enough.’
3 December 2009
The night before the court was due to withdraw to decide their verdict, Amanda woke up at 3 a.m. and, tormented by anxiety, spent the rest of the night wide awake.
That afternoon, in a trembling voice, she addressed the court for the last time, speaking in her fluent Italian. Dressed in a bright, lime-green coat, she stood with her cheeks flushed, her arms rigid, the tips of her fingers occasionally stabbing the top of her desk.
‘Many times over the past few days, people have asked me: “How do you manage to stay so calm?” But I’m not calm. A few days ago I wrote on a piece of paper that I was afraid of being called what I’m not and I’m scared of having the mask of a murderer forced on to my skin.
‘As far as the decisions to keep me in jail these past two years are concerned, I can say that I feel disappointed, sad, frustrated. Many tell me that if they’d been in my situation they’d have already torn their hair out or smashed their cell but I don’t do these things, I don’t get depressed because I take deep breaths and I try to find positive things to think about.
‘I have to thank the prosecution because quite honestly they’re trying to do their job even if they don’t understand, even if they don’t succeed in understanding. They’re trying to ensure justice after an act which took someone away from this world, and so I thank them for what they’re doing.
‘But the most important thing is that I thank you because it’s up to you now. And so, thank you. So … that’s it.’
After Amanda finished speaking, Judge Massei decreed a break but she didn’t have the strength to move; she staggered slightly and grabbed Ghirga’s arm to steady herself.
‘Some water please,’ she said, then added: ‘I’m fine, it’s nothing.’
54
4 December 2009
On a drizzly morning at 10.35 a.m., Judge Massei led his colleague Judge Cristiani and the six jurors out of the courtroom after the last lawyers had spoken. Both judges, in black robes and white ruffled neckbands, and the six jurors, wearing tricolour sashes, walked a few yards into a small, sparsely furnished room where they would now begin their deliberations.
A pale, drawn-looking Amanda, her hair freshly plaited, and again wearing her bright green coat, turned to glance at her family – Edda and Curt and their spouses, as well as her sister Deanna – as two guards approached to escort her out. Head bowed, she breathed in and out slowly and deeply as she was led away. Raffaele, in a black polo-neck sweater and brown trousers, looked straight ahead of him as he followed her. Both would await the verdict in their prison cells.
The junior prosecutor Comodi watched Amanda and Raffaele leave and suddenly thought to herself: ‘They’re going to be convicted, I’m sure of it.’ She then thought: ‘How absurd, how terrible for two such young kids to have so many years in jail ahead of them.’
As the courtroom was cleared, journalists tried to guess how long it would take for a verdict to be reached. According to one judicial source, Judge Massei had let it be known that he expected a decision by the early hours of the next morning. A rumour said his clerk hadn’t booked a hotel for judges and jurors for the night, so the verdict would come some time during the night at the latest.
The prosecutors, Mignini and Comodi, spent part of the day at their offices across town from the law courts, trying to make a start on the huge backlog of work on other cases that had accumulated during the trial.
Staring out at the rain, a calm, even genial, Mignini told a visitor: ‘I like the rain. It’s clean.’
Down the corridor, the usually vivacious Comodi was more downcast. ‘This is the worst day. There’s nothing we can do any more, and it’s now that I feel things the hardest. I feel so sorry for Raffaele; I really pity him for getting involved in all this. But I don’t feel sorry for Amanda,’ she said.
The rain had stopped by the time the two prosecutors left for lunch, to be replaced by fog which crept up from the valley below Perugia to blanket the main Corso Vannucci so thickly that the cathedral was visible only from some fifty yards.
The Kerchers’ lawyer, Maresca, spent much of the afternoon walking around in a futile attempt to stop thinking about the long wait. He bought a couple of Christmas presents for his young daughter.
Shortly after 5 p.m., the Kercher family arrived at their hotel outside the city centre, sharing a taxi. Meredith’s parents John and Arline, her sister Stephanie and her brothers John and Lyle said nothing as they walked through a crowd of jostling TV crews and photographers. Arline had a stunned expression on her face and Stephanie put a protective arm around her mother’s shoulder as she guided her to the lift up to their rooms.
Soon afterwards, they met their lawyers Maresca and Perna in the lobby of the hotel. Over strong coffees, Maresca told the family he thought the court would find Amanda and Raffaele guilty, but he added: ‘In theory, they could also be acquitted.’
Arline looked taken aback. ‘But if there’s all that DNA of theirs in the house!’ she protested.
‘Yes, there’s their DNA, but the experts named by the defence have been challenging how it got there,’ Maresca said.
‘When will the verdict be?’ the Kerchers asked.
Probably that night, Maresca said, but it could come as late as two o’clock in the morning. The Kerchers looked surprised, but resigned themselves to wait.
At his church, not far from the prosecutors’ offices, the prison chaplain Father Saulo busied himself preparing for early evening Mass. As ever, he had stayed away from the law courts.
‘It seems impossible to me that the Amanda I’ve known these past two years could have done it,’ Father Saulo told a visitor. ‘As for the Amanda of before … well, I don’t know.’
But that evening, Father Saulo prayed for her acquittal.
At 8 p.m., the judges and jurors took a break from their deliberations to have dinner. As they couldn’t leave the room where they had now been closeted for eleven and a half hours, a nearby restaurant delivered the meal: a first course of pasta, followed by a main dish of meat and vegetables, and a dessert.
Anxious to keep their minds sharp, they shared a single bottle of red wine between them.
A two-minute walk away, the prosecutors, Mignini and Comodi, were having dinner with the Kerchers’ lawyers, Maresca and Perna, at the Ristorante del Sole. All four of them were tense – they kept their mobile phones by their plates, waiting for the call from Judge Massei’s clerk which would tell them when the verdict was to be announced – but did their best not to show it. For moral support, Mignini brought along his wife Cristina, who was three months’ pregnant with their fourth child.
As they picked at their food – pasta followed by tagliata, thinly-sliced cuts of almost raw beef – the prosecutors and lawyers dissected the trial from beginning to end. They had plenty of time to do so now.
The call came at 9.35 p.m., on Comodi’s mobile.
‘They’re coming out at midnight,’ the clerk told Comodi – there was no need to say who ‘they’ were.
Comodi thanked her, and gave her the names of her companions to save her making pointless calls.
No one felt like eating any more. Wanting fresh air, Mignini and Comodi went for a walk down the Corso Vannucci. Comodi was struck by how surreal it all was – here she was, strolling along in the Friday night crowd just as
if she was enjoying an evening out like them but she was waiting for the verdict in a murder trial. And Christmas lights were twinkling high over her head; she had always hated Christmas decorations and at that moment she hated them more than ever.
More than two hours to wait, Comodi thought.
Maresca headed to his hotel to change – it was a ritual of his to change into casual clothes after the court withdrew, and then change back into a suit and tie for the verdict. He texted an American journalist who was dining with colleagues at a wine bar opposite the cathedral and told her the verdict would come at midnight.
His message electrified the party. Their meal forgotten, the journalists first called their newsrooms, then rushed to pay the bill and join the queue that was building up quickly outside the law courts. By 10.30 p.m., a crowd of more than a hundred journalists and locals thronged the square waiting for the doors of the law courts to open.
Shortly before midnight, the key protagonists of the eleven-month trial were back in the courtroom. Without exception, the prosecutors and the lawyers wore mournful expressions and waited in silence, or talked briefly in hushed voices, as if they were at a wake. Mignini sat quietly, sucking at an unlit pipe. Comodi sat next to him, not moving. Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga stood facing the public and press gallery, looking grim, his hands thrust in his pockets.
On one side of the courtroom, by the steel cage, Edda and Curt stood waiting silently with their spouses. A woman lawyer stroked the cheek of Amanda’s sister Deanna.
At the opposite end of the courtroom, the Kerchers sat just as quietly. They were all dressed in black.
Guards led Amanda in for the last time. Still wearing her green coat, she ignored the Kerchers as she was led past them, and gave just a curt, unsmiling nod to her own family before sitting down with her head bowed. Ghirga patted her on the back. Two guards stood behind her, an extra three guards standing a few feet away.
Raffaele greeted his lawyer Bongiorno with a tight smile and a kiss on both cheeks.
5 December 2009
At four minutes past midnight, a bell rang for a couple of seconds. More than thirteen hours after they had left it, the judges and jurors filed back into the courtroom. All looked strained; several of the jurors looked exhausted.
Amanda stood up and glanced at Judge Massei, nodding her head slightly in greeting as she had always done when the court entered. She swallowed and looked as if she was making an effort to breathe deeply. Ghirga gripped her right arm.
‘In the name of the Italian people …’ The court remained standing as Judge Massei, the crucifix hanging on the wall just behind his head, began to read. He looked only at the paper he held in his hands, reading quickly in a low monotone.
‘In the trial against Knox, Amanda Marie, and Sollecito, Raffaele, given articles 533 and 535 …’
Amanda realised immediately that she had been convicted. Ghirga had warned her that if the judge began by quoting these two articles, then that meant a guilty verdict. Amanda’s head dropped forward and her chest heaved as she started to sob. Ghirga clasped her right arm even more tightly.
Judge Massei, his voice so quiet he could barely be heard: ‘ … Declares Knox, Amanda Marie, and Sollecito, Raffaele, guilty of the crimes they stood accused of under sub-heading A …’
Two rows behind Amanda, her father Curt and his second wife Cassandra turned away from her for a moment as Cassandra asked an American journalist a few feet behind her: ‘Guilty?’
‘Yes,’ the journalist replied.
The blood drained from Raffaele’s face but he stood immobile, staring straight at the judge. His stepmother Mara, standing a few feet behind him, cried out in dismay then collapsed onto a chair.
The Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca glanced towards Meredith’s parents next to him and made a little punching gesture into the air with his left fist to tell them the pair had been found guilty. He then turned to give a little nod to Stephanie and her two brothers standing behind him.
Judge Massei ploughed on. ‘ … condemns Knox to the sentence of twenty-six years in prison …’
Amanda’s shoulders shook as she sobbed more heavily. Two rows behind her, Curt shook his head slowly from side to side, his face and body otherwise rigid. Edda looked shattered but dry-eyed. Deanna sobbed like her sister, and one of Ghirga’s secretaries stroked her arm.
‘ … and Raffaele Sollecito to the sentence of twenty-five years in prison …’
Raffaele made no movement, still staring straight at the judge, but his stepmother began to wail, occasionally drowning out the judge’s quiet voice.
Arline Kercher and her daughter Stephanie stared at Amanda and tears filled their own eyes.
Without pausing to glance at the scene before him, Judge Massei continued to read. The court found Amanda and Raffaele guilty of complicity in murder, illegally carrying a knife, sexual assault, simulation of a crime – and in Amanda’s case, slander. Only once did he say the word ‘acquitted’ – Amanda and Raffaele were cleared of stealing £270 from Meredith and her credit cards, but they were convicted of stealing her two mobile phones.
The court granted Amanda and Raffaele a reduced sentence for their youth and their clean records, and ordered them to pay £900,000 in compensation to each of Meredith’s parents, and £720,000 to each of her siblings. Amanda, also convicted of slandering Patrick, must pay him £9,000 in damages. Both must also pay legal costs.
Mignini felt first a wave of serenity at the fact that the court had backed him. He had done his job properly, and justice had been rendered to Meredith. But his satisfaction was tinged by sorrow both for Meredith, and for Amanda and Raffaele – they were all so young, he thought.
Mignini then caught sight of the crucifix behind Judge Massei and he drew comfort from it. In his suffering, he thought, Christ represented us all – prosecutors, defence lawyers, the accused and the victim – and was also a bearer of hope.
His colleague Comodi sometimes felt a wave of exultation when a verdict went her way. But not this time. ‘Good, this is right,’ she thought to herself. But she felt no happiness.
Standing not far from the prosecutors, the detective Napoleoni thought how terrible this case was. For her, the most terrible thing about it was that there was no motive for Meredith’s death. ‘The only motive was the emptiness inside these kids, their lack of humanity. Meredith died for nothing, and she was killed by people who should have been her friends,’ she reflected.
If there was one thing the case had taught her, it was that a young woman could die ‘for no reason at all’.
When Judge Massei finished reading and turned to leave, followed by his colleague and the jurors, a still-weeping Amanda turned towards Ghirga and buried her face in his shoulder. Deanna wept uncontrollably, gasping for air.
Ghirga, still clasping Amanda tightly by the arm, then escorted her out of the courtroom, Amanda leaning heavily on him as if to stop herself slumping to the floor. It wasn’t Ghirga’s job to escort her, but no one stopped him and a woman guard held her other arm.
Amanda sobbed so heavily she didn’t see those she passed on her way out – the prosecutors Mignini and Comodi, Napoleoni and her police colleagues, and finally the Kerchers. Raffaele followed, walking stiffly, a dazed expression on his face. Arline stared at both Amanda and Raffaele as they passed only a few feet away.
Moments later, as Amanda was escorted to the prison van, she gave a desperate scream which could be heard in the courtroom: ‘No, no, no!’ she shouted.
‘Will you fight on?’ a journalist asked Curt.
‘Hell, yes,’ he replied.
Comodi was in a hurry to leave. ‘Giuliano, let’s go,’ she said to Mignini.
As she said goodbye to Arline, Meredith’s mother kissed her on both cheeks.
‘Thank you very much,’ Arline said.
Comodi just smiled; she couldn’t manage to say anything.
‘What we’ve done is very little,’ Comodi thought. As a mother of two girls herself,
she realised that Arline felt comforted by the fact that those who had killed her daughter had been found and punished. ‘At least Arline can tick that box, but for the rest of her life she’ll be mourning a missing daughter,’ she thought.
Meredith’s father John embraced Mignini, then turned to Napoleoni; he hugged her, cupped her cheeks in his hands and then hugged her again.
‘Got to go,’ he told Napoleoni with a smile. ‘See you some time.’
Stephanie wiped the tears from her eyes and shook Napoleoni’s hand. ‘Thank you, for Meredith,’ Stephanie said to her.
Napoleoni stared at Stephanie and was stunned by what she saw. She had always been struck by how much Stephanie looked like her younger sister but today, with Stephanie having grown her hair longer, Napoleoni thought: ‘She’s just like Meredith now.’
She felt as if it was Meredith who was standing in front of her.
Soon afterwards, when Stephanie was asked what the last two years had been like for her family, she hesitated and then replied: ‘It just feels as if our lives have been on hold. It won’t ever be the same without Mez so …’—she left the sentence unfinished, then added: ‘She is still a very big part of our lives. She’s still very much with us.’
Meredith’s friends Sophie, Amy and Robyn had arranged to be connected to each other via the Skype network when the verdict came. Sophie was in a hostel in Ecuador, on holiday; Amy and Robyn were both back in England.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 35