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

by Follain, John

  During the service, Amanda sat bolt upright and chanted along with the others and laughed with them when Father Saulo, helped by two Franciscan friars, cracked jokes. When the priest, after the Lord’s Prayer, invited the congregation to exchange a sign of peace, Amanda shook hands with the women next to her and kissed them on the cheek.

  The service ended with the women chanting in unison, over and over again, ‘Let our suffering be your joy’ – a chant they had adopted as their own. Then they applauded and got up to return to their cells. Amanda rushed up to Father Saulo and the two friars and hugged each of them in turn. She chatted with them, then started walking back down the aisle.

  Father Saulo called out: ‘Amanda! Do you know John?’ She stopped and smiled as Father Saulo introduced the author. Her handshake was firm, her eyes still bright, her cheeks flushed after the chanting in contrast with the pallor of the rest of her face.

  Asked how she was, Amanda replied with a smile: ‘Fine.’ She then asked abruptly, her eyes now wary: ‘Who are you?’

  Told about this book, she replied with another broad smile – ‘Oh great!’

  As Amanda was banned from granting interviews under prison rules, the author asked whether he could write to her; Amanda said yes. She was then led away back to her cell. The author sent her a letter shortly afterwards, but this went unanswered.

  For the supervisor Rapponi, Father Saulo and the nuns and friars who visited Amanda and the other inmates almost daily had helped ‘to make her less tense, less emotional. Now she’s got her feet firmly on the ground.’

  Amanda had built a rapport with Father Saulo, but she kept both the guards and the other prisoners at a distance; the only exception was her American cellmate. ‘It’s understandable. Amanda is a foreigner so she gets close to someone who speaks her own language. She gets on well with the other prisoners, she’s never quarrelled with anyone, but she doesn’t have a deep relationship with anyone else. She’s very reserved,’ Rapponi said.

  Despite this reserve, most of Amanda’s fellow prisoners not only liked her, they believed she had committed no crime. ‘She’s a great girl, she’s never been a problem. She behaves so well. Most of us think she’s innocent,’ one prisoner said. ‘She respects other people and she’s never sad,’ another echoed.

  Amanda never talked to either the guards or the other prisoners about Meredith’s murder. Prisoners didn’t talk about the reason that, rightly or wrongly, got them into jail. ‘Most of us don’t talk about their crimes. The worse the crimes are, the less people admit they’re guilty,’ one of them said.

  Bernardina di Mario, the prison governor, also had only praise for her most infamous prisoner. ‘Her behaviour is excellent. She’s calm, she’s serving her time with serenity. She works, she studies, she isn’t a nuisance,’ di Mario said. ‘It wasn’t the case during the trial, but these days she’s always smiling. The blow of the verdict has become softened.’

  In the 130-square-foot cell she shared with her fellow American – a woman in her early fifties held on drugs charges – Amanda spent much of her time reading through the thick judges’ review which her lawyers had brought her.

  If the review made Amanda’s spirits flag, she betrayed no sign of it. To the contrary, she appeared optimistic, telling the supervisor, Rapponi: ‘I’ll be out soon.’

  1 November 2010

  On the third anniversary of Meredith’s death, her family brought flowers to her grave in Mitcham Road Cemetery, near Croydon. ‘I miss you,’ read a message from her father John. The family also left dozens of messages from her friends, who wrote to her about their boyfriends, or their new jobs, as if she were still alive.

  ‘Like us, they hope – really, they do – that Meredith might somehow know what they have written,’ John explained later in an article he wrote for the Daily Mail. ‘None of us, you see, wants to forget her for even one second. So she is here, among us, everywhere.’ At her home in Surrey, Meredith’s bedroom was left just as it was when she’d left it, with make-up lying next to a pile of books on a table.

  ‘Sometimes, even now, I find it hard to believe she is not still with us. Her passing is easier to bear if I pretend she has just gone away for a while; that some day soon she will ring me – her voice bubbling with laughter and enthusiasm – to tell me about her latest adventure,’ John wrote.

  22 November 2010

  Two days before the start of Amanda and Raffaele’s appeal trial, John watched a breakfast-time interview with her parents Edda and Curt on the ITV1 programme Daybreak. ‘Once again, I felt the pain and the anger and the raw grief resurface,’ he wrote in the same article.

  Amanda had been convicted of killing his daughter, and yet she had been accorded the status of a minor celebrity. ‘Sometimes it seems that there is no escape from her or her jaunty nickname, “Foxy Knoxy” (doubly hurtful, for the way it trivialises the awfulness of her offence),’ John protested.

  For the first time, he expressed anger at Amanda’s parents: ‘Curt Knox and his ex-wife Edda Mellas have never expressed their condolences to our family for our grievous loss. There has been no letter of sympathy; no word of regret. Instead, I have watched them repeatedly reiterate the mantra of their daughter’s innocence.’

  He acknowledged that, to many, Amanda seemed an unlikely killer. ‘Yet to my family she is, unequivocally, culpable.’

  John had no illusions about what awaited his family. The appeal would drag on for months which would make it ever harder for the Kerchers ‘to grieve for Meredith in peace’. And if Amanda was found guilty on appeal, she might then take her case to Italy’s Supreme Court.

  ‘Put simply, our ordeal could go on for years.’

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  24 November 2010

  The Amanda who walked into the Hall of Frescoes at the start of the appeal trial had little in common with the Amanda who had smiled, chatted and laughed with her lawyers and guards during her first days in the same courtroom almost two years earlier. Now twenty-four years old, she looked pale, and thinner. Heavy dark circles were etched under her sad eyes.

  Returning to the same courtroom unnerved her. ‘I’m scared. Why are you bringing me here? This is where I was convicted in December,’ she protested as she was led in. She managed to smile faintly at Raffaele, greeting him in a low voice: ‘Ciao, how are you?’ Raffaele, in contrast, was his usual smiling self, yet at the same time there was a lost expression on his face.

  The prosecutor Comodi was struck by the change she saw in Amanda. ‘It’s as if the light inside her has gone out,’ she thought. Comodi herself felt depressed as she waited for the new trial to begin. Amanda and Raffaele had already been convicted; the same lawyers, she knew, would wage their new battle chiefly by repeating old arguments; and they were all back in the same courtroom.

  In coming months, Comodi and her colleague Mignini would take turns in sitting by the chief prosecutor in the appeal court, Giancarlo Costagliola. Costagliola had a long career behind him – in the late 1970s, he had sent police to a Milan hotel to block illegal negotiations on the transfers of soccer stars, and over the next ten years he had sent what amounted to a small army of Mafiosi to prison in his native Naples.

  The two judges now presiding over the fate of Amanda and Raffaele had both been picked from the civil courts, and not the penal ones as several of the judges there had already been involved in the case.

  For the past five years, the senior judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann – a tall, imposing figure in his late sixties with silver hair and black bushy eyebrows – had dealt mainly with labour and welfare cases. But he was no stranger to penal offences as he had previously headed the law courts in the town of Spoleto. Although he too came from the civil section, the secondary judge Massimo Zanetti had more recent experience of penal cases, having dealt with several in recent years. He was to dismay prosecutors by stating, in his outline of the case to the court: ‘The only certain and undisputed fact is the death of Meredith Kercher.’ Six jurors – five of whom w
ere women – would also decide whether Amanda and Raffaele’s conviction should be upheld, or quashed.

  Because Raffaele’s lead lawyer, Bongiorno, was absent – she was heavily pregnant with a son due in January – Judge Pratillo Hellmann kept the first hearing short, ruling that photographers and TV crews would be allowed to record only Amanda and Raffaele entering and leaving the courtroom.

  When the hearing was over, Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga confided: ‘Amanda is tense and worn out. She’s worried and demoralised. Let’s hope she regains her peace of mind.’

  11 December 2010

  Looking frailer than ever, Amanda stood up in court and took off her heavy black coat. Dressed in jeans and a grey sweater, her head bowed, she began to read in Italian from her handwritten notes.

  She began with a lengthy apology. She’d always found it difficult to express herself, even with her friends, she said. ‘I am the weakest in this courtroom as far as expressing myself goes,’ she said, her voice tense.

  Taking a deep breath, she addressed Meredith’s family – none of whom were present – for the first time in more than three years. ‘To Meredith’s family and her loved ones, I want to say I’m very sorry she isn’t here any more. I cannot know what you feel but I have little sisters too, and the idea of their suffering and of losing them for ever terrorizes me,’ Amanda said, beginning to sob.

  ‘What you are suffering and what Meredith suffered is incomprehensible, unacceptable …’ – Amanda paused for more than ten seconds as she sniffed repeatedly, the only sounds in the hushed courtroom. ‘I’m sorry that all this has happened to you, that you will never have her next to you where she belongs. It isn’t fair and it can never be. But you are not alone when you remember her because I am thinking of you too. I too remember Meredith,’ she said.

  Sitting some distance away behind Amanda to her left, the Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca found it unbearable listening to her words about the family. He didn’t like what she was saying, he didn’t like the tone in which she said it, and he didn’t like the fact that she was addressing the Kerchers only after Meredith’s father had pointed out that Amanda’s parents had never offered their condolences.

  He got up and walked out of the courtroom.

  Amanda didn’t notice Maresca leave, and went on to apologise to Patrick, the owner of the bar where she used to work, whom she’d initially accused of killing Meredith – this was another first, as she had never apologised to him before.

  Describing how afraid she’d felt after Meredith’s death, she praised Raffaele, whose eyes were fixed on her, as ‘a source of reassurance, comfort and love’. Three years on, the truth about her and Raffaele had still not been recognised. ‘I am innocent. Raffaele is innocent.’ Amanda’s voice was now steady, and she articulated each syllable. ‘We did not kill Meredith.’

  Amanda appealed directly to the judges and jurors: ‘I ask you to recognise that an enormous mistake was made, and that no justice is rendered to Meredith or her loved ones by taking our lives away from us.’ She said how the prosecution had depicted her as ‘a dangerous, diabolical, jealous, uncaring and violent girl … but I have never been that girl. Never.’

  ‘How could I be capable of using such violence as Meredith suffered? How could I hurt a friend of mine’ – Amanda’s voice rose – ‘with such violence as if this was more important and more natural than all I have been taught, my values, my dreams and my whole life? ‘All this is not possible. I am not that girl.’

  Amanda’s eyes were still wet as she sat down after speaking for a quarter of an hour – the longest and most emotional statement she had made in any of the court hearings.

  But for at least one investigator watching her in court, Amanda’s protestations were insincere. ‘Amanda is very wily, and she’s certainly not the first convict who claims she’s innocent – the great majority of convicts in any prison will tell you they’re innocent. My guess is that Amanda has convinced herself that she is,’ he said.

  ‘It’s possible that she is feeling awful about Meredith’s death, and that’s why she’s almost apologised to the Kerchers, for the first time. What strikes me is her extraordinary self-centredness; what she said was all “me, me, me”,’ he added.

  For their part, the judges and jurors had sat attentively through Amanda’s statement, their eyes fixed on her. Their faces betrayed no emotion.

  16 December 2010

  Three weeks after the start of Amanda and Raffaele’s appeal trial in Perugia, the Supreme Court in Rome – Italy’s highest court – sealed Rudy’s fate. Five judges upheld his sixteen-year prison sentence.

  The judges refused to be drawn on whether Amanda and Raffaele were also guilty of Meredith’s murder; their responsibility, they wrote, was to judge Rudy only. However, they made no secret of their belief that Rudy had not been alone in murdering Meredith, describing as ‘convincing’ the findings of the lower courts that she had been killed by ‘several people’.

  Meredith had died for ‘futile motives’ – a desire to have sex with her, which she had resisted. The judges denounced ‘the brutal and dictatorial violence of a multiple, collective conduct which reveals in its sad protagonists the orgiastic will to give vent to the most criminal impulses.’ This, the judges added, ‘caused a deep sense of dismay, revulsion and contempt in every individual of average morality.’

  The judges highlighted the DNA and handprint evidence found against Rudy, dismissed his claim of a flirtation with Meredith, and quoted a remark Rudy had made on 19 November 2007, nearly three weeks after the murder. Messaging his friend Giacomo Benedetti on the Skype network, Rudy had typed: ‘I got scared they’d put the blame only on me.’

  The ruling was the first definitive condemnation in the Kercher case as, in Italy, the presumption of innocence held until all appeals – the last, to the Supreme Court – had been exhausted.

  In Perugia, a senior investigator hailed the verdict as ‘a milestone’ for Amanda and Raffaele. ‘It will put them in a tighter spot,’ he said.

  18 December 2010

  Amanda sat as if praying with her eyes closed, her elbows on the desk and her hands clasped in front of her face as Judge Pratillo Hellmann read out the appeal court’s decision on requests which had been made by the defence teams for a new review of DNA evidence and for new witnesses to be called.

  The court, the judge announced, had decided to grant demands for a fresh review of DNA traces on Raffaele’s kitchen knife and on Meredith’s bra clasp. The forensic police had found traces of Amanda’s DNA on the knife handle, and traces of Meredith’s on the blade. On Meredith’s bra clasp they had found traces of Raffaele’s DNA as well as Meredith’s own.

  The judge explained that the court had approved the requests in line with the principle that an accused person could only be convicted if their guilt was ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ and because the assessment of highly technical DNA analysis was ‘objectively difficult’. He appointed two experts to analyse the DNA traces found by the forensic police. If that was not possible due to the destruction of samples during testing, they would establish the reliability of the police findings and investigate ‘possible contamination’.

  The court also granted a request to summon Antonio Curatolo, the tramp who had testified that he saw Amanda and Raffaele near the cottage on the night of the murder, as well as several new witnesses whom the defence hoped would refute his testimony.

  Amanda burst into fresh tears at the news – but this time, she was smiling through her tears. A couple of rows behind her, her mother Edda clapped silently and started sobbing too; she had felt sick during the wait for the court’s decision, but her nausea vanished immediately, she said later. Tears also came to Raffaele’s eyes; he turned to smile at his family. Before Amanda was led out of court, Edda went up to her. Edda told her she loved her, and urged her to hang on. Amanda just beamed at her.

  For Amanda and Raffaele, it was the first courtroom victory in months. Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga called it �
�a victory in the search for truth’. Raffaele’s lawyer Bongiorno proclaimed it ‘a turning point’. His other lawyer Maori went even further. ‘At last, after three years, the trial is just beginning,’ he said.

  Although the prosecutors publicly welcomed the new review as a chance to demonstrate yet again the validity of the DNA tests, in private they were less confident. The last thing the court needed, one investigator said, was a repeat of the case of Luigi Chiatti, the so-called ‘Monster of Foligno’ – whom Raffaele had admired in a blog before Meredith’s murder. Chiatti had first received two life sentences for killing two boys. But in the appeal trial, an expert new to the case had pronounced him unsound of mind, with the result that his sentence was reduced to thirty years.

  ‘What if the experts don’t agree among themselves?’ the investigator worried. ‘That would just confuse the court. And what if you get an arrogant expert who claims to know everything and slams the tests by the forensic police? The court is supposed to reach a verdict independently, based on all the evidence, but there’s a danger an expert could influence it too much.’

  For one lawyer convinced of Amanda and Raffaele’s guilt, the new review was ominous. ‘Allowing a review is pointless, and it’s without doubt a very dangerous thing to have done,’ he said.

  After the hearing, when Amanda was led back into the women’s wing of the Capanne prison, several fellow inmates clapped and cheered.