58
26 March 2011
Almost precisely two years after the tramp Antonio Curatolo had been wheeled into the Hall of Frescoes to testify that he had seen Amanda and Raffaele in Piazza Grimana on the evening of the murder, the prosecution called him again as a witness. This time the white-haired Curatolo slowly hobbled in using a crutch. A prison guard – acting more as a helper than a guard – escorted him to the raised platform in front of the judge and jury and held a chair steady as he lowered himself into it.
Curatolo wore a navy-blue tracksuit and sneakers – a prisoner’s uniform. His life as a tramp had ended abruptly a month earlier, when he began his one-and-a-half-year jail sentence for drugs charges.
Mignini immediately asked him when he had seen Amanda and Raffaele.
‘I think it was on Halloween, because there were lots of kids around,’ Curatolo replied.
Mignini caught his breath; his colleague Comodi was so shocked that she jumped up and walked out to have a cigarette. Amanda and Raffaele stared intently at Curatolo. The court which convicted them had established that Curatolo saw the couple on the evening of the murder – 1 November – but now he was stating it was the previous evening instead.
Mignini pressed on. ‘What happened the following day?’ he asked.
‘In the afternoon, at about one or two p.m., the carabinieri came to ask questions … At a certain point I saw the “extra-terrestrials” – that’s how I call the men dressed in white overalls – with their equipment, they were outside and inside the cottage,’ Curatolo replied.
His latest remark indicated that he had indeed seen the couple on the evening of the murder, as the forensic police – clad in white – had arrived at the cottage on the afternoon of 2 November.
‘Do you know when Halloween is?’ Mignini asked.
‘On 1 or 2 November,’ Curatolo replied – an error which made his testimony even more confused.
But he remembered it had not been raining on the evening he saw the couple – in fact, it had rained on Halloween, but not on the night of the murder.
Mignini made one last attempt to save Curatolo’s testimony. ‘You’re sure that the day after you see these young people [Amanda and Raffaele], there were police and men in white overalls in the cottage?’
‘Yes, as sure as I’m sitting here,’ Curatolo replied.
Mignini said he’d finished – he had questioned a witness who had been labelled as key to the prosecution for only ten minutes.
Raffaele’s lawyer Bongiorno seized on the opportunity Curatolo had given her. She asked him whether on the evening he said he saw Amanda and Raffaele he had also seen people in fancy dress.
‘Yes, there were kids in fancy dress,’ Curatolo said. He added that he’d also seen buses taking people to nightclubs on Perugia’s outskirts.
At the previous hearing, the defence lawyers had tried to wreck Curatolo’s credibility by summoning staff from several nightclubs located outside Perugia together with the operators of the shuttle bus services; the new witnesses testified that there were no buses to their nightclubs that night, but they couldn’t rule out the possibility that other nightclubs had had some, or that other buses could have been hired for a private party. Municipal buses were known to have been in service that night.
Curatolo looked taken aback when the secondary judge Massimo Zanetti started his questioning by asking where the former tramp used to relieve himself.
‘In the thickets, by the side of the road,’ Curatolo said.
‘So you’d move away [from the square]?’ Judge Zanetti asked in a terse, stern tone.
‘Yes, I’d move away. But I was always close to it.’
‘Why did you choose to be a tramp?’
‘Because I’m an anarchist by nature. Then I read the Bible and I became Christian-anarchist.’
‘And so?’ Judge Zanetti demanded curtly.
‘And so I chose to lead the life of Christ …’
‘Did you take drugs?’
‘I have always used drugs.’
‘Now?’
‘No.’
‘In 2007?’
‘I took heroin. And heroin isn’t a hallucinogen.’
After the hearing, Amanda’s stepfather Chris Mellas exulted: ‘It couldn’t have gone better. Curatolo confirmed it was Halloween and there were the buses for the nightclubs,’ he said. Asked about Amanda, he replied: ‘Amanda’s eating more, and she feels a bit better about how the trial is going.’
But a senior investigator insisted Curatolo had seen Amanda and Raffaele on the evening of the murder. ‘The linchpin is that Amanda was working at the bar Le Chic on Halloween, so Curatolo couldn’t have seen her on Piazza Grimana. He’s confused about when Halloween is. He says it wasn’t raining on the evening he saw Amanda and Raffaele, and that he saw the forensic police the day after. You know, you can be imprecise but still be reliable. The precise witness, who says he remembers everything to the second, is usually the least reliable.’
The questions Judge Zanetti had put to Curatolo, and his harsh tone of voice, had struck the investigator. ‘Why was he asking Curatolo about relieving himself and about drugs? Does he want to show that Curatolo wasn’t always at the square, and that he was high on heroin that night?’
‘The appeal court should stick to discussing the earlier court’s review of the evidence, but here people want to redo the whole trial. It’s not looking good …’
17 June 2011
On a warm afternoon, Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga sat sipping mineral water on a tall metal stool outside the hillside Caffè Turreno, watching locals and students strolling past. New witnesses would be heard in court the next day, but Ghirga, sporting sunglasses and a mauve Lacoste polo shirt, could afford to relax – he had had plenty of time to prepare.
Almost three months had passed since Curatolo’s second appearance. The deadline for the DNA experts to submit their review had come and gone as they had demanded more time. The slowness of the trial was nothing extraordinary for Ghirga, who had spent most of his life in Italian courts; it irked him however that Amanda had to wait what he saw as an outrageously long time behind bars for a verdict.
‘So, will the court acquit Amanda and Raffaele?’ a journalist asked Ghirga.
Ghirga looked mildly surprised by the question. ‘Everyone asks me that, but I don’t know. How could I? What I do know is that the jurors who acquit them will have to be heroes to do so, simply because Amanda and Raffaele will have been in jail for almost four years. There’ll be consequences, including demands for damages …’ Ghirga left the sentence hanging.
‘You feel the court is pro-Amanda?’ the journalist insisted.
‘I can’t say!’ Ghirga exclaimed. ‘The facts are that the court agreed to a new DNA review – no lawyer could have asked for more than that. Plus, we’re showing the court that the prosecution’s evidence, taken one element at a time, doesn’t stand up.’
‘And how’s Amanda? What is she expecting?’
‘Amanda is more hopeful than she was, but she says: “It’s not going to be like the first trial is it, everybody nice and friendly and then they screw us?” She’s more angry than she used to be,’ Ghirga replied.
But he gave the impression of being more optimistic than he wanted to let on.
The prosecutor Comodi, in contrast, was increasingly unhappy with the way the trial was going. She felt the defence – and only the defence – had been playing a series of cards one after another, with the prosecution scrambling to catch up. For her, the prosecution wasn’t getting through to the court as it had in the first trial. She worried the court might acquit Amanda and Raffaele – all it would take was for the defence to plant enough doubt in the minds of the judges and jurors about some of the evidence.
She herself had no such doubts, and sometimes felt so frustrated she wanted to give up on it all.
59
18 June 2011
‘What a charming cast of characters!’ a prosecutor jok
ed as he went through the list of five convicts that Amanda and Raffaele’s lawyers had summoned as witnesses for the day. They included a child-murderer and a mafia collaborator, and all of them claimed they had evidence showing the pair were innocent of Meredith’s murder.
Amanda needed the support of these fellow convicts, but the elegant way she dressed for the day appeared to signal that she had nothing in common with such underworld company – a long flowered skirt, smart black flats, a sleeveless navy-blue top and pearl-drop earrings.
Gone was the prisoner’s ‘uniform’ of jeans, sweatshirts and sneakers she had worn so often at the previous trial. Gone also was the Amanda who used to gesticulate, grin broadly and even laugh as she chatted and joked with guards in court during the first trial; now she only talked briefly with one guard, gave him just a couple of tight smiles and kept her hands still.
The first witness on the stand was one of Italy’s most notorious killers – Mario Alessi, a Sicilian bricklayer who five years earlier had kidnapped eighteen-month-old Tommaso Onofri for ransom, only to murder him by hitting him in the temple with a shovel because he was crying. Alessi was serving a life sentence, and had also been convicted of sexual assault in a separate case.
A tall fifty-year-old who clenched his powerful hands as he walked in to court, Alessi looked unwell and had to be led out again moments after having his handcuffs removed, complaining of feeling faint. A clerk called an ambulance, but he was soon pronounced fit to testify and brought back to court; he had suffered a sudden drop in blood pressure.
Bongiorno, Raffaele’s lawyer, led Alessi through what he had told her when she visited him in the Viterbo prison after he had written to her. Alessi had befriended Rudy in prison, and if the Sicilian was to be believed, Rudy had changed his story yet again.
Alessi spoke in a steady, unemotional tone, but he often chewed his upper lip in a nervous twitch. He testified that in November 2009 – nine days before Rudy’s appeal trial was due – Rudy had taken him by the arm in the prison courtyard and said: ‘We’ve got to get away from the others because we’ve got important things to talk about.’
Out of earshot of other prisoners, Rudy told Alessi: ‘As you know, my trial’s coming up in a few days. I’m very worried.’
‘Cheer up, you’ve got to face it,’ Alessi told his friend.
‘That’s not the point; the point is whether to tell the truth or not,’ Rudy said.
‘Isn’t the truth what we’ve all heard?’ asked Alessi, who’d been following the case on the TV news.
‘No, the truth is completely different, and only two of us know it,’ Rudy said.
Alessi also told how, over the next two hours in the prison courtyard and as they talked to each other from their cells, a tearful Rudy explained how he had first seen Meredith while out drinking with a friend identified only as ‘The Drunkard’ in a nightclub. Later, with another friend identified only as ‘Fatty’, Rudy had followed Meredith to find out where she lived.
A few days later, Rudy and ‘The Drunkard’ went to Meredith’s house. A surprised Meredith let them in, and the three of them sat down. ‘I asked Meredith if she’d like to have a threesome,’ Rudy recalled. Meredith got up and told the two men to leave. Rudy went to the bathroom, and spent some fifteen to twenty minutes there.
As he told his story in court, Alessi said in a cold, detached tone of voice: ‘Rudy came out and found a different scene.’
Alessi paused to take a long drink of water, then went on in the same unfeeling tone as before: ‘Meredith was on her back on the floor, Rudy’s friend was holding her down. Rudy got astride Meredith and masturbated himself, then he and his friend switched positions. Rudy held her with one leg pushing down on her back while his friend forced her to have anal intercourse. Then suddenly this knife appeared, almost out of nowhere, the friend pointed it close to the neck of the girl, and the girl injured herself as she gesticulated.’
Rudy then looked for something to pack Meredith’s wound, but his friend snapped at him: ‘Now what are you doing? We’ve got to finish off this slut, otherwise we’ll rot in jail.’ With the knife – ‘a small knife, with an ivory handle’ – the friend continued to attack Meredith, and killed her.
Later that evening, Rudy met ‘The Drunkard’ in a nightclub. The friend gave Rudy some money and told him: ‘Get out of Italy!’
Alessi ended his account by saying that he had quarrelled with Rudy afterwards, because Rudy had failed to keep a promise to tell the truth at his appeal trial. ‘I couldn’t tell the truth,’ Rudy had told him afterwards, ‘because if I had, the sentence wouldn’t have been thirty years, it would have been more.’
Alessi claimed he had challenged Rudy: ‘You’ve got a nerve, how can you say these things when you told me these two kids are innocent?’ The two had come to blows and had to be separated by a cellmate. From then on, they stopped talking to each other.
Bongiorno had one last question for Alessi: ‘So Rudy’s role was to help Meredith?’
‘Yes,’ Alessi replied.
This was apparently too much for Judge Pratillo Hellmann, who pointed out: ‘Well, the judicial truth is different …’ – a reference to Rudy’s murder conviction, which the Supreme Court had upheld.
Maresca, the Kerchers’ lawyer and father of an eleven-year-old girl, held up an A4-size copy of a photograph of Alessi’s victim, the toddler Tommaso. It showed Tommaso’s chubby face; the boy had curly hair and big wondering eyes.
Maresca held the photograph steady for a moment; Alessi only glanced at it, but the judges and jurors stared – as did Amanda and Raffaele.
Maresca made no effort to keep the contempt out of his voice. ‘You recognise this child?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Alessi said.
‘That’s fine, we recognise him,’ Maresca shot back.
Pressed by Maresca, who was given a helping hand by Judge Pratillo Hellmann, Alessi said that he had broken off his friendship with Rudy because he thought the latter was ‘a despicable person’ who had left two innocent people – Amanda and Raffaele – in prison. Alessi had fallen headlong into a trap. Maresca promptly flicked through the rulings which had led to Alessi’s life sentence, which accused him of lying again and again, and of trying to frame an innocent person.
‘We believe this Signore [gentleman]’ – Maresca spat the word out, he didn’t even deign to name Alessi – ‘is lying, and the “despicable person” is someone else.’
After Tommaso had been seized from his home, Alessi had pretended he knew nothing about his fate, telling a TV interviewer: ‘All children are angels who come down from the sky. Children must be left in peace. They need to be with their parents who brought them into the world.’ And, appealing to the camera: ‘Let him go now; free Tommaso.’
When Alessi gave that interview, he had already killed the boy.
That day, the court was given a variety of gangland witnesses to believe in – or not. Marco Castelluccio, a short and burly robber and police informer, hid behind a light blue screen and was flanked by two bodyguards, one with a gun in its holster slung across his chest. He testified that he had once heard Rudy say that Amanda and Raffaele were innocent.
But Luciano Aviello, a member of the Naples mafia who had turned state’s witness, claimed that not only Amanda and Raffaele, but also Rudy, were innocent of Meredith’s murder. Aviello, a boyish forty-two-year-old, said the killers were in fact his brother Antonio – who had long disappeared – and an Albanian named only as Florio who had been commissioned to steal a valuable painting but had burgled the wrong house. The pair had been spotted by ‘a woman in a dressing gown’ whom they stabbed to death.
Maresca pointed out that Aviello had been convicted of slander no fewer than nine times, and his credibility was later decimated by police officers and fellow prisoners; his account, they said, was a tissue of lies.
After the hearing, an exasperated Comodi burst out: ‘Ok, so now we’ve heard the jailbirds. Can we get back to the case now
?’ She was convinced that the experts’ DNA review, due by the end of the month, would decide the outcome of the trial.
But before then, and at the prosecution’s request, the court was to summon Rudy to hear what he had to say about the story he had supposedly told the child-killer Alessi. It would be only the second time since Meredith’s death that Rudy would come face-to-face with Amanda and Raffaele. The first time – more than two years earlier at Amanda and Raffaele’s first trial – Rudy had refused to answer any questions whatsoever.
The prospect of Rudy testifying in front of Amanda and Raffaele prompted many observers to wonder – yet again – whether he would now say more about how Meredith died. Surely Rudy knew more, much more than he had revealed so far about the part Amanda and Raffaele had played in the murder, they speculated. The prospect was so tantalising that the Corriere dell’Umbria newspaper promised its readers ‘the mother of all hearings’.
27 June 2011
‘The mother of all hearings’ began with Rudy walking into court wearing a white T-shirt with ‘ARMANI’ in big capital letters across the chest. He had a slight slouch, as if to show the day’s proceedings didn’t matter all that much to him; he didn’t look at either Amanda or Raffaele as he waited for the guards to unlock his handcuffs.
Behind the judge and jurors, the sun’s strong rays struck the bars outside the windows, their shadows projecting a stark gridlike pattern on the glass panes. The Hall of Frescoes felt more like a dungeon than ever.
Amanda wasted no time in trying to tell the court just what she thought of anything Rudy might have to say. Guards were still fiddling with Rudy’s handcuffs when her lawyer Dalla Vedova asked for permission for her to address the court. But Judge Pratillo Hellmann was in no hurry to hear her. Given that Rudy was waiting to testify, hearing Amanda now was ‘inopportune’, the judge said curtly.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 38