‘Possible,’ Vecchiotti said.
Comodi insisted: ‘Probable?’
‘Probable,’ Vecchiotti retorted.
At 4.30 p.m., after five and a half hours, Comodi fired her last shot at Vecchiotti.
‘Has it ever happened that you were appointed by a judge, and the judge failed to follow your findings? I can give you the ruling of the Cosenza court …’ Comodi said.
Her words were drowned out by furious defence lawyers; the judge ruled her out of order. Comodi had no more questions.
Shortly afterwards, Amanda was frowning as she was led out of the courtroom.
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23 September 2011
After a long summer break, the prosecutors launched a new tactic as the appeal trial reached the last stretch during which all sides would make their closing arguments. They were convinced that the court had focused too much on only a few issues – the DNA review especially – and now they wanted to give as thorough an account as possible of their whole case.
Mignini began his summing-up at the beginning – the afternoon that he had first walked into the cottage and seen Meredith’s body: ‘I still remember the staring eyes of this girl, they will never leave me.’ Mignini ranged widely – covering the break-in which he argued had been staged, the comments Meredith’s friends Sophie and Robyn had made about tensions between Meredith and Amanda, Amanda’s own behaviour at the police station, and the wounds Meredith suffered.
Amanda sat with her elbows resting on the desk, her hands clasped in front of her mouth as she stared ahead of her, keeping her gaze away from Mignini.
He accused defence lawyers of slandering the forensic police, comparing the tactic to that used by Joseph Goebbels: ‘Slander, slander, something will always stick. It’s what the Nazis’ propaganda minister used to say in the 1930s,’ Mignini said.
He urged the court not to judge on appearances. ‘They’ve been called “good-looking kids” but everyone has a dark side and it would be superficial to think that just because someone looks innocent they are not capable of killing,’ he said.
He said that it was just when she felt she might be found guilty that Amanda had slandered the bar-owner Patrick. She had accused him not because the police had hit her in the neck, but because the police had told her that Raffaele was saying she wasn’t in his flat with him on the evening of the murder. ‘It wasn’t the police who suggested Patrick’s name, it was Amanda who suggested it,’ Mignini said, turning to point at Patrick sitting a few feet behind him.
‘The slander is inextricably tied to the murder.’ Mignini raised his voice: ‘There is no justification for it whatsoever! There is no justification for it whatsoever!’ The police had simply wanted to find out the truth.
Reaching the end of his summing-up after more than four hours, Mignini stressed the Supreme Court ruling on Rudy that several killers had murdered Meredith. ‘And in this courtroom, Rudy accused his accomplices,’ Mignini said, gesturing towards Amanda and Raffaele. ‘You can’t make a black boy pay for everyone.’
Mignini ended on a personal note. He had been shocked to read in an Italian newspaper that an American TV network had paid for a flight ticket home for Amanda, and for an interview with her – a report flatly denied by her family. ‘I have never seen anything like this in a 32-year career. It’s an offence not only to the prosecutors and the police but to this very court,’ Mignini said.
‘And above all, it’s the last outrage to the girl from Coulsdon who ceased to live that night.’
24 September 2011
The junior prosecutor Comodi started mildly, asking the jurors to tell the judge if they felt the need for a break that day. But within seconds she was decimating the DNA review with a barrage of accusations against the two experts. ‘They betrayed your trust, with false facts. Their whole manner was aggressive when they should have been impartial,’ Comodi charged.
The experts were ‘absolutely inadequate’. She could have easily demonstrated this but the judge had stopped her questioning them about their experience. ‘If they’d been asked how many technical searches they had done, the answer would have been zero – zero,’ she said, holding up her right hand to make a ‘0’ with her thumb and index finger.
The court’s task was not to give a mark for the forensic police’s work, it was to assess the validity of their findings. ‘Because that’s what you’d have to say, that the specialists, (the biologist) Stefanoni …, all of them have lied,’ she said. She claimed that contamination of the bra clasp was out of the question. ‘The only movements of objects were around the room itself, or when they were taken out of it,’ Comodi said. Nor was contamination of what she insisted was indeed Meredith’s DNA on the knife remotely possible.
As for the lack of traces in Meredith’s room, it wasn’t automatic that a killer would leave such traces. Stefanoni had been convinced that she would find DNA traces of a killer in the streaks of blood on the walls. ‘But there were none, so it’s not that easy for DNA to remain, unfortunately,’ Comodi said.
She went on to ridicule the defence argument that the testing with the chemical Luminol, which had highlighted bare footprints in Amanda’s bedroom, the bathroom and the corridor attributed to Amanda and Raffaele, had reacted not to blood but to other substances it could detect. ‘It’s unthinkable that Amanda and Raffaele could have soaked their feet in a bucket of bleach, or fruit juice, or rust because only this could have produced the strong glow (of the Luminol reaction),’ Comodi said. ‘If the floor had been covered in bleach, the foot would have removed that substance and left nothing on the floor.’
Under Italian law, the accused had the right to lie, she said. ‘But if an accused person gives a false alibi, that has to be considered an element against him.’ Raffaele said he had been at his computer for much of the night, but the only human interaction on it had been at 9.36 p.m. that night.
‘Amanda and Raffaele killed for nothing. What is there that is more futile than killing for nothing?’ Comodi asked.
The court had to believe Amanda and Raffaele were guilty ‘beyond every reasonable doubt’ to convict them. That did not mean, she said, that the court could acquit them simply because they believed in an alternative explanation for the murder. ‘An alternative theory … cannot be based on the presumption that anything’s possible – that DNA flies,’ she said.
At the close of the day’s hearing, the lead prosecutor Costagliola made the prosecution’s final request. He demanded life sentences for Amanda and Raffaele – asking that Amanda be held in isolation for six months, and Raffaele for two months.
Amanda sat with her eyes closed, hands clasped in front of her mouth, immobile save for taking long breaths through slightly-parted lips.
Outside the law courts, Amanda’s father Curt was asked how she had taken the demand for a life sentence. ‘She was prepared for that … She’s holding up, she’ll be strong, she’ll be ready,’ he said. ‘I still have great hopes.’
26 September 2011
‘A diabolical she-devil, an explosive concentrate of sex, drugs and alcohol’ – in late 2009, Patrick Lumumba’s lawyer Carlo Pacelli had made headlines with his portrait of Amanda. Today, almost two years on, Pacelli didn’t disappoint journalists when he made his summing-up. ‘Who is Amanda?’ Pacelli asked. ‘Fascinating, intelligent, cunning and astute. She always seems fragile, with her face like a naïve doll.’
But he claimed that Amanda was ‘muddy outside, a she-devil inside’. She had lied in accusing Patrick of the murder to ward suspicion off herself. She was ‘a sorceress of deceit’.
Patrick himself had no doubt that Amanda was guilty of Meredith’s murder. Seated in a bar opposite the cathedral during a lunchtime break, he described himself as living proof of her guilt. ‘I went to prison unjustly. I was called an assassin. Who said that? Amanda. I’m the proof that she is involved in the murder,’ the soft-spoken Patrick said, pressing his open hands to his chest.
Now studying Media and Adver
tising after having to close his bar, he said he didn’t know whether Amanda had dealt the fatal blow. But he was convinced of her guilt because of her behaviour after her arrest. ‘First, she was held like me in isolation and in that situation, you really want to get out. We knew that to get out, you have to talk to a judge. But when [she appeared before] the judge, Amanda didn’t reply to questions, she preferred to stay silent,’ Patrick said.
‘Why didn’t she say that she had nothing to do with it, that I had nothing to do with it?’ he asked. ‘Second, she told her mother in prison later that she was sorry, that she knew I was innocent. But she never told anyone else, she kept this secret. So I think that all this time she hoped that they would find me guilty.’
For Patrick, Amanda was ‘the world’s best actress’. He explained: ‘Look at how she cried when she told the cops I was guilty, and I saw her cry twice before a judge but she never said I was innocent.’ The apology which Amanda had made to him at the appeal trial ten months earlier was just ‘crocodile tears’.
‘I don’t hate Amanda, I never hated her,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgiven her but that doesn’t mean justice mustn’t be done.’
That afternoon, the Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca told the court that all Meredith’s family wanted was a ‘fair’ sentence – he asked the court to confirm the earlier sentence of 26 and 25 years in prison for Amanda and Raffaele respectively.
A big photograph of a beaming Meredith flashed up on the screen in court. ‘That’s the girl, that’s the splendid girl,’ Maresca said, as judges and jurors turned to look. He urged the court not to let itself be influenced by the virulence of what he called ‘the Knox and Sollecito clans’ and denounced the media campaigns lobbying for their release. The Kerchers, in contrast, had rarely spoken publicly over the past four years. ‘They awaited rulings in silence,’ he said.
Meredith ‘had her throat cut like in mafia murders … She met her attackers in her house, not outside. She wanted to rest, she met her death in her room, close to the bed, where you feel most safe,’ Maresca said. ‘It’s obvious that that night, those three were in that house. Beyond the bra clasp and the knife the court’s been talking about for nine months, there’s much, much more.’
Now six photographs of Meredith’s body flashed onto the screen. One showed her lying virtually naked from head to toe on the floor of her bedroom. Others were close-ups of her head and of the wounds to her throat. The eyes of one woman juror became moist as she struggled to look. Amanda, head bowed, never looked at the screen; Raffaele glanced at the photographs occasionally.
‘I want to tell you we are not in a TV film. I show you these photographs to make you understand the suffering of this girl as she died … She had no wounds caused by defending herself, which means she was held down by several people. Remember that when people talk about a single attacker,’ Maresca said.
The photographs vanished from the screen and Maresca paused at length as he shuffled his papers to allow his words – and the photographs – to sink in. Judges and jurors, riveted, all stared at him.
Maresca ended with one last picture of Meredith – this time, of her alive and laughing. He asked the court to confirm the guilty verdict of the earlier trial, and quoted Isaac Newton: ‘Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.’
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27 September 2011
‘Well, today we’re opening a new front!’ Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga exclaimed with a broad grin as he walked through the law court’s arched doorway. After three days of demands for a guilty verdict, it was now the defence’s turn to launch its last offensive.
Giulia Bongiorno, the first to speak and as sharp and forceful as ever, may have been Raffaele’s star lawyer but she lost no time in stressing that she would be pleading for Amanda too. This was an ‘Amanda-centred’ trial, with Raffaele in the dock as a supposedly idiotic, colourless extra. ‘I think it’s the first case in history in which an individual is held to account as merely the boyfriend,’ Bongiorno said.
As for Amanda, she had been depicted as a character in Venus in Furs, a 19th century erotic novel by the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in which the hero aspires to be treated like a slave by his lover. Waving a copy of the book in the air, she said Amanda had been portrayed as a femme fatale, ordering Raffaele about. Jumping to modern times, Bongiorno said Amanda had also been portrayed like the cartoon character Jessica Rabbit from the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: ‘A woman who devours men, but who at the same time is faithful and in love. As Jessica says: “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way”.’
Amanda’s accusation of Patrick, Bongiorno claimed, was no attempt to throw the police off the track because in making that statement she had placed herself at the crime scene. ‘If she’d been a real cunning “Venus in Furs”, she would never have done that,’ she said. There was nothing perverse about Amanda – the game she most enjoyed playing with Raffaele was making faces at each other before going to sleep. The two had indeed embraced each other at the police station after the murder ‘but this was tenderness, not sex obsession’.
As Amanda wrote in her diary, they also liked to rub noses together, which she called ‘unca wunca’. This, Bongiorno said, had nothing to do with ‘bunga bunga’, the erotic after-dinner parties allegedly enjoyed by the prime minister Silvio Berlusconi – the joke prompted smiles from jurors and laughter from lawyers and journalists.
Turning serious again, Bongiorno acidly reprimanded Mignini – for not giving Amanda a lawyer when she made her ‘false confession’, and for failing to question Raffaele at the first trial. She then took to task the detectives of the Homicide Squad who, she said, had insulted Raffaele’s relatives in the notes they scribbled on intercepts of their phone conversations. They had called them ‘vipers’ and ‘bitches’. Bongiorno raised her voice: ‘You don’t call a suspect’s relatives “cretins”. This is unacceptable!’
But her heaviest attack was on the way the crime scene itself had been handled. She screened a series of photographs to show how police had made a mess of Meredith’s bedroom before her bra clasp was finally recovered forty-six days after her death. The sequence appeared to unsettle the prosecutor Comodi, who had a coughing fit and had to leave the courtroom briefly. Bongiorno ploughed on regardless. ‘The bra clasp is an exhibit which you must declare un-u-sa-ble,’ she emphasised.
The DNA trace attributed to Raffaele on the clasp had failed to yield the genetic profile of only individual. It was a mixed trace, and experts said that such traces should be disregarded. The biologist Stefanoni ‘for the first and last time in her life, made a mistake.’
Bongiorno then sought to use Rudy’s traces to support her argument. His presence at the crime scene was ‘a proof worth thousands of proofs’ because it demonstrated how anyone present in Meredith’s bedroom would have left traces there. ‘Why does that room speak only of Rudy?’ she asked.
Bongiorno ended with one last attack on the prosecution: ‘I heard that Amanda and Raffaele killed for nothing. To me that’s a fitting epilogue to a trial in which Raffaele is “Mr Nobody”, who killed for nothing. This whole trial is based on a DNA trace which has been demonstrated to be a mistake.’
Bongiorno turned to Amanda and gave her a copy of Venus in Furs, the erotic novel she had mentioned. Amanda thanked her with a smile.
29 September 2011
Ghirga began with a fatherly gesture – he turned to Amanda, ‘this young friend, whose age means she’s just between my daughter and my son’. Someone, he said, his tone suddenly turning angry, whose image had been ‘massacred’ in the media. He had met her 400 times in prison, and he was convinced of her innocence.
Throughout his closing argument, Ghirga alternated comical quips with loud, theatrical outbursts in which he lashed out at investigators. Stefanoni, the biologist, and Finzi, the officer who seized the kitchen knife, were ‘too skilled and too lucky’. Stefanoni should have gone no further after writing in her
notes that the DNA sample on the blade was ‘too low’ – Ghirga held up his silver pen to inches in front of his face and pretended to write the words in the air.
Indignantly, Ghirga rubbished the tramp Curatolo, who the prosecution claimed had seen Amanda and Raffaele near the cottage on the night of the murder. ‘He came in here like Al Capone in a wheelchair,’ Ghirga joked, making Amanda laugh. ‘Curatolo sees them at 8.30 p.m. the first time, then he says he sees them at 11.20 p.m., then he says between 9.30 p.m. and 11.30 p.m.,’ he said – which had prompted the prosecution to delay the time of death. The grocer Quintavalle, who claimed to have seen Amanda in his supermarket early on the morning after the murder – contradicting her alibi that she was at Raffaele’s flat at the time – should also be ignored.
Ghirga blamed the police for Amanda’s accusation of Patrick as the murderer. ‘They’ve got into my head,’ he quoted Amanda as saying of the detectives. It had been a terrible week for the police, he said: they had obtained nothing from intercepts, it was 3 a.m. and then they saw the text message ‘and out came Patrick’. But Ghirga claimed that Amanda had immediately afterwards said her accusation was false, that it wasn’t true that she had stuck to it. Nor, he said, was it conceivable that Amanda and Raffaele – ‘these two artists of crime’ – had cleaned up to remove their traces, leaving only Rudy’s as the prosecution claimed.
Just as he had done at the end of the earlier trial, Ghirga turned to point at Amanda’s family sitting behind him. ‘Please consider the Knox clan, two extended families which have been united. Don’t see them as creators of a plot from across the Atlantic. They are parents who deserve absolute respect,’ he said.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 40