He then turned once more to Amanda. ‘Amanda isn’t terrified. Her heart is full of hope. She hopes to go back home. I wish her that and …’ – Ghirga paused – ‘I feel I’m going to cry, that happened last time too,’ he said. But checking his emotion he added: ‘She has so much courage, Amanda.’
2 October 2011
On the eve of the verdict, a Sunday, Mignini was in a tense and reflective mood after attending Mass at the cathedral as, a short walk downhill, TV crews jostled for position in the square outside the law courts – more than 400 journalists, mainly from the Italian, American and British media had been accredited for the final ruling.
Mignini tried to read the court’s mind; he couldn’t help looking back again and again over the past four years. He had only one regret: ‘If I could do it all again, the only thing I would do differently would be to let the pathologist examine the body earlier than I did, to get a more precise idea of the time of death. But the biologist Stefanoni told me not to “to avoid any risk of contamination” – those were her words,’ Mignini confided over an aperitivo in exceptionally warm sunshine.
He was clearly bracing himself for an acquittal. He had spent hours watching the body-language of the judges and the jurors – observing when they took copious notes on what the prosecution or the defence was saying, when they unconsciously nodded in agreement, or smiled at jokes by the one or the other. He felt the DNA review had very probably persuaded the court – assuming it needed persuading in the first place – to cast doubt over his entire case.
Mignini had looked into the chances of America ever extraditing Amanda to Italy if she was acquitted, and then found guilty when the case went to the Supreme Court for a second appeal. Officials told him that yes, there was an extradition treaty between the two countries, but no, America would never send Amanda back.
Meredith’s three closest friends from Perugia – Sophie, Amy and Robyn – spent a long weekend together at Sophie’s home near London as they waited; they had taken time off work to make sure they could be together when the verdict was broadcast live on the Monday.
They had spent much of Saturday talking about the case, and that night Sophie had felt very scared when she went upstairs, alone, to close the windows. She hadn’t felt that frightened for a couple of years and knew it was because they had talked about the details of the murder.
Sophie believed Amanda and Raffaele were guilty and was confident they would be convicted; she couldn’t even imagine an acquittal. Robyn kept telling her to prepare herself for a possible acquittal, but Sophie just couldn’t.
3 October 2011
Monday, the day of the verdict. In jeans and a mauve shirt, Raffaele fidgeted nervously with the microphone for long moments before addressing the court for the last time. Then, reading from prepared notes in a low, feeble voice: ‘I have never, ever, hurt anyone.’ The prosecution had defined him ‘as a boyfriend of Amanda who killed for nothing … and it’s asked for a life sentence for this “Mr Nobody”.’ In the meantime, he was spending every day in prison ‘where the end of every day is already a death.’
The judges and jurors listened to him with rapt attention, several of the jurors leaning forward as they concentrated on his words. Raffaele insisted he did not know Rudy Guede. Looking at the court, he said: ‘I know you better than I know Guede. I’ve seen you many times, Guede I just saw in court a few times, and basta (enough).’
On the evening of Meredith’s death, he had been living ‘a beautiful, I could say idyllic, moment.’ He was about to graduate and had met Amanda a little earlier – ‘a beautiful, sunny, lively and sweet girl with whom I was due to spend the weekend’. They had only one desire – ‘to spend the evening with endearments and cuddles, nothing more.’
Raffaele paused. ‘I don’t have much to say … but I would like to leave you a little gift,’ He fiddled with a bracelet on his left wrist. ‘On this bracelet, it’s written: Free Amanda and Raffaele … I think that now it’s time to take it off,’ he said. The bracelet, he said, expressed his desire for justice, for freedom – ‘and that there be for Amanda and me new hopes, a new future.’
Raffaele took off the bracelet, and held it out to the court. His lawyer Bongiorno told him to put it down on the desk in front of him, and he sat down.
Amanda, wearing a light green blouse and black trousers, struggled to begin as she took pauses repeatedly and tried to take deep breaths. ‘It’s been said many times that I’m someone different from what I am …’ – she paused to breathe again – ‘fear …’
‘It’s alright, you can sit down,’ Judge Pratillo Hellmann interrupted, kindly.
‘Anywhere, I’m a bit …’ She stopped, and said to herself out loud: ‘OK.’ She remained standing. ‘I am the same person I was four years ago. The only difference is what I have suffered in four years, I’ve lost a friend in the most brutal, unexplainable way possible,’ she said in her fluent Italian.
Four years ago she had never suffered, she didn’t know ‘what tragedy was.’ She went on, the court hanging on her every word: ‘I didn’t know how to tackle it … So how did I feel when it was discovered that Meredith had been killed?’ she asked rhetorically.
‘I couldn’t believe it. How was it possible that someone I was spending my life with, whose room was next to mine, had been killed … and if I had been there that evening, I would have been dead, like her.’
Amanda kept raising and lowering her hands, clasping and unclasping them as she spoke. She had helped the police out of a sense of duty, for the sake of justice. ‘I was betrayed. I wasn’t just squeezed and stressed, I was manipulated,’ she said. ‘I didn’t kill, I didn’t rape, I didn’t steal, I wasn’t there.’
She spoke again of Meredith: ‘I shared my life with Meredith, we had a friendship, she was always nice to me. Meredith was killed and I have always wanted justice for her. I’m not fleeing the truth, I insist on the truth, I insist after four desperate years on my innocence, on our innocence because it is true.’
‘I want to go home. I want to go back to my life. I don’t want to be punished and deprived of my life for something I didn’t do, because I’m innocent …’ Amanda paused again, and struggled to breathe deeply. ‘I have much respect for this court and so I thank you. I ask for justice,’ she finished.
A good actress, Sophie thought, as she watched Amanda live on TV from her home with Amy and Robyn. Amanda had chosen all the right things to say and had rehearsed her lines well.
Sophie was struck by Amanda echoing the words she had said in front of Meredith’s friends at the police station almost four years earlier: ‘It could have been me in her place.’
Judge Pratillo Hellmann cautioned the courtroom: ‘This is not a soccer game so there is no space for rival groups of fans. Let’s remember a beautiful girl died in a horrible way so when we read the verdict, please, let us have respect and silence.’
At 10.45 a.m., he led the court out of the Hall of Frescoes. They would be returning shortly once it had been cleared, to consider the verdict there. Guards led Amanda and Raffaele back to prison to await the verdict. It was their 1,450th day behind bars.
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Shortly after the court withdrew, Meredith’s mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and her brother Lyle flew into Perugia. They had got up at 3.30 a.m. that morning to catch their flight. Officers of the Homicide Squad met them at the airport and escorted them to a hotel opposite the prosecutors’ offices, where they met their lawyers Maresca and Perna.
At lunchtime, Maresca and Perna left the Kerchers with David Broomfield, the British consul in Florence. The two lawyers then set off for the centre of Perugia to meet the prosecutors at the Ristorante del Sole, where they had dined together as they awaited the verdict at the end of the first trial. They hoped that returning to the same restaurant might bring them luck, but none of them were in high spirits.
At a packed news conference at their hotel that afternoon, the Kerchers refused to be drawn on what verdict they
wanted. Asked whether they felt abandoned by the media’s neglect of Meredith, Stephanie – her resemblance with her late sister struck many journalists – replied: ‘It’s nearly four years now … Mez has been almost forgotten in all this, there isn’t much about what happened in the beginning. It’s really hard … We’re here to remember Meredith, and the city she loves.’
Could they forgive Meredith’s killers? ‘Forgiveness doesn’t come into it without a final ending,’ Stephanie said. ‘You have to remember the brutality of what happened that night, what Meredith went through that night, the fear and the terror and not knowing why.’
At 8.45 p.m., Amanda’s family and friends filed into the courtroom, Amanda’s mother Edda holding her daughter Deanna by the hand.
Half an hour later, Arline walked in slowly, a woman officer of the Homicide Squad guiding her with an arm around her shoulders. Arline, Stephanie and Lyle sat down in the back row and waited. As soon as Mignini saw them he went up to kiss Arline and Stephanie on the cheeks, and to shake hands with Lyle.
At 9.35 p.m., Amanda and Raffaele were led in. Amanda kept her black coat on over her shoulders although the courtroom was warm – partly because of the lights set up by a handful of TV crews which the judge had agreed could film his reading of the verdict. Amanda talked to her lawyers, every so often taking slow, deep breaths. Her face showed intense strain. She glanced at the door through which the judges and jurors would come, then looked away.
At 9.46 p.m., the bell rang, the clerk called out ‘The Court!’ and everyone stood. After eleven hours of deliberations, the judges and jurors walked to their places. Judge Pratillo Hellmann adjusted the collar of his robe, put on his glasses and began to read.
‘In the name of the Italian people,’ the court found Amanda guilty of slandering Patrick and sentenced her to three years and eleven days in prison – a sentence which it said had already been served as Amanda had spent almost four years in jail.
Amanda stood almost motionless, the only sign of movement the deep breaths she was concentrating on taking.
The court, the judge went on, acquitted both Amanda and Raffaele of all the remaining charges, including murder, sexual assault and staging a break-in – it ruled that there had been no such staging.
Amanda became convulsed by sobs, but managed to hug each of her lawyers tightly. From behind her came a couple of whoops, muffled cries and a brief burst of applause. Edda and Deanna stood next to each other, in tears and looking bewildered, before Deanna managed to get past a couple of prison guards to hug her sister.
A few feet away, Raffaele remained impassive save for a timid smile. His lawyer Bongiorno spun round and gave him a bear hug, slapping his back loudly. The court filed out again and six guards rushed Amanda away as, bent forward, she sobbed heavily; she was due to be released at the prison within a couple of hours.
The Kerchers sat down and looked straight ahead of them, their eyes averted from the outbursts of joy to their right. Stephanie began to cry, and Lyle put his arm around her. Arline sat still, chewing her lower lip.
Seeing her lawyer Maresca looking crestfallen, Arline asked him: ‘Are you alright?’ Maresca was amazed that she should be concerned about him at such a moment. ‘Yes, yes,’ he replied, ‘and you?’
‘Yes, ok,’ Arline replied.
Mignini went up to the Kerchers and shook hands with each of them in turn. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told them.
Sophie, Amy and Robyn were sitting side-by-side on a sofa, holding hands as they watched TV, when the verdict came.
Robyn burst into tears and Sophie hugged her. Sophie and Amy felt numb. Sophie felt what she was seeing on the screen wasn’t really happening, and both she and Amy were angry with themselves for not feeling anything. Then Sophie started crying, but that was because she saw Robyn was so upset.
Sophie turned the TV off; she didn’t want to see Amanda leave court. The three friends just sat there for a long moment, the only sound that of Robyn crying, before Sophie turned the TV on again.
Late that night they wrote a card for the Kerchers, wishing them well.
Outside the law courts, a crowd some 4,000 strong had gathered to await the verdict and almost filled the cobbled square, some of them perched on lamp posts for a better view. When the lawyers for Amanda and Raffaele emerged, they were greeted by whistles and chants of ‘Assassini, assassini (murderers, murderers)!’ and ‘Vergogna, vergona (shame, shame)!’ Raffaele’s lawyer Bongiorno had to be escorted by police officers as she made her way to TV reporters waiting to interview her. Perugians had long been overwhelmingly convinced of Amanda and Raffaele’s guilt, and were stunned by the reversal.
A beaming Ghirga ignored the protests. ‘Perhaps I don’t fully realise it yet but I think I’ve won the most important trial of my life,’ he said.
Within moments of the verdict, prosecutors said they would be appealing against the verdict to the Supreme Court in Rome; they wanted it overturned in the hope that a re-trial would be ordered. For a bitter Comodi, the court had partly decided the outcome before the trial even began – the secondary judge Zanetti, she recalled, had said at the start that the only certainty about the case was Meredith’s death. The Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca said the family would support the prosecution in that appeal.
Late that night, Amanda was driven out of the Capanne prison in a black Mercedes with tinted windows, headed for a hotel on the coast south of Rome, close to Fiumicino airport.
4 October 2011
On the morning after the verdict, Sophie was driving to the school where she worked as a teacher when it all hit her. She hadn’t even been thinking about the verdict when she started crying ‘out of nowhere’ and had to pull over and stop the car.
She made it to the school but told her colleagues she didn’t feel up to working that day. She needed to be on her own.
Sophie was tempted to just sit at home and do nothing, as she had in the first months after her friend’s murder. But she decided she would go back to work the next day and keep going. ‘They’ve already destroyed Meredith’s life, I won’t allow them to destroy mine – it’s not what Meredith would have wanted,’ she told herself. That morning, as Amanda flew to London from which she would board another flight to Seattle, Arline, Stephanie and Lyle Kercher sat close to each other at the end of a long table in a bare, basement, conference room at their hotel. In an interview with the author, they were smiling and friendly despite the strain of the last few days. But their words highlighted their sense of bewilderment.
For Lyle, the acquittal felt ‘like being back to square one’. He explained: ‘It almost raises more questions than there are answers now because the initial decision was that it’ – he didn’t use any more specific term for the murder – ‘wasn’t done by one person but by more than that. Two have been released, one remains in jail, so we’re now left questioning who are these other people or (this other) person?’
Did the family have doubts about any of the evidence presented by the prosecution? ‘It’s hard to say at the moment whether the DNA was contaminated,’ Lyle said. ‘We don’t know if the jury looked at it and said actually there isn’t enough DNA evidence to grant a conviction or even if it’s incorrect. Perhaps the DNA matches with more than one person and therefore it’s hard to say it’s definitive.’
Did they still believe that Amanda and Raffaele were guilty, as John, Meredith’s father, had written in a recent newspaper article? ‘In a way we have to believe what the police say because they are the ones compiling the evidence,’ Arline said. ‘We haven’t a clue. I think that’s what he was saying. It’s the police, it’s their job.’
‘It’s difficult for anybody to make a valid opinion on any case, not just this one, unless you’re a trained expert,’ Lyle echoed. ‘There are forensics, detectives, psychological profilers and so on who are trained to do this and read the information and draw the hypotheses from that, which of course no lay person really is. So if that’s the conclusion they come to then w
e’re happy to stand by that.’
‘We have to accept, don’t we, just like now we have to accept this,’ Arline said.
‘And that’s why it’s so disappointing, because we don’t know,’ Stephanie said.
Asked about predictions in the world media that Amanda stood to earn millions of dollars from book and film deals back in America, Lyle expressed disquiet. ‘I think any right-minded person would find it difficult to gain profit from such an incident. I’m sure Amanda and Raffaele, like us and anybody else really, want to get back to a normal kind of life which if it was me would mean maintain as low a profile as possible rather than feed media attention.’
‘Of course, that’s a decision that’s out of our hands and it really boils down to any individual’s integrity and preferences,’ he added.
What was their strongest memory of Meredith?, the author asked. ‘Her smile, definitely her smile,’ Stephanie replied. ‘Her laugh and her smile just make you laugh as well and we giggle for hours,’ she added with a short laugh – and speaking in the present tense.
‘I think it’s as Stephanie says, her wicked sense of humour I think I shared with her. I always remember her for that, she’s always been full of life and very funny,’ Lyle said.
‘Yes, a lovely, lively person,’ Arline nodded with a warm smile. ‘A whirlwind going through the house at times because she was late. She was always on the run.’
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 41