Angel Face

Table of Contents

 

 

 

For all victims of sex crimes

Foreword

By Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Beast

 

 

“IT’S SUCH A SHOCK to send your child to school and for them to not come back.”

That was the brokenhearted testimony of the mother of Meredith Kercher, the twenty-two-year-old British student killed in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007, at the trial of her daughter’s alleged killers two years later. “We will never, never get over it.”

As the mother of a nineteen-year-old myself, I shuddered at her words.

Hers is the nightmare that haunts every parent who sends a son or daughter off to one of the “gap year” or study-abroad programs that have become a right of passage for educated Western youth. But the rapid growth of such programs can be credited, in part, to parents’ woeful—or is it willful?—ignorance about what can happen when students suddenly find themselves in a foreign land, free from parental or college
oversight, and surrounded by a new set of peers, all of them eager to experiment.

The picturesque Umbrian hill town of Perugia may have seemed an idyllic setting for cultural and linguistic enhancement. But for the kids who signed up to go, its greater attraction was its reputation as Party Central. The lengthy official and unofficial investigations into the minds and mores of Meredith’s accused killers—her fun-loving American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Knox’s onetime Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito—exposed a merciless culture of sex, drugs, and alcohol that was a chilling eye-opener to parents who learned of it too late. Only with Meredith’s horrific death did it become clear that she and her roommate had been mixing with a crowd that was headed not just for trouble, but, in Amanda’s case, a descent into evil.

Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone’s definition of an all-American girl—attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul? Even when all the facts of the case seem to point so tellingly in her direction, how and why could Amanda, apparently without motive, have helped slash her roommate’s throat with the
aid of her boyfriend and a seedy drug dealer—and then gone on to repeatedly lie about the events of that terrible autumn night?

These questions obsessed all those involved with this case, from the legal professionals to the journalists and spectators who packed the Perugia courtroom for the trial. To the Italian prosecutors and the British tabloid press, she was a drug- and sex-obsessed vixen. To her family and her defenders in the American press, she was a wholesome coed framed by an aggressive and incompetent prosecutor—or, at worst, led astray by a dissolute Italian boyfriend and the drug dealer Rudy Guede, who had gone on the lam in Germany immediately after the crime.

At
The Daily Beast,
we were fortunate, early on, to recruit the most diligent and talented English-speaking journalist covering this case.

Barbie Latza Nadeau, who has been reporting from Italy for
Newsweek
since 1997, arrived in Perugia the day after Meredith’s battered body was discovered in the house she shared with three other girls. A resident of Rome, fluent in Italian, Nadeau (who also happened to have been married in Knox’s hometown of Seattle) was uniquely suited to grasp all the factual and cultural nuances of this confounding case.

And she pursued them zealously. Over the next two years, she attended almost every session of Knox’s murder trial, read the entire ten-thousand-page legal dossier in Italian, and invested countless coffees, dinners, and glasses of prosecco in cultivating cops, lawyers, judges, witnesses, jurors, friends, and families. Nadeau’s regular posts on
The Daily Beast
during the eleven-month trial established her as an authoritative voice on the case—with appearances on CNN, CBS, NPR, the BBC, and NBC’s
Dateline.
But her pieces also got her blackballed by the Knox family because she declined to toe the line they force-fed to a U.S. media eager to get them on-camera: that Amanda was a total innocent railroaded by a rogue prosecutor in a corrupt justice system.

Daily Beast
readers knew otherwise, thanks to Nadeau’s thorough and balanced reporting. But her objective dispatches also earned her the enmity of ferocious pro-Knox bloggers, who hurled insults and threats, hoping to discredit her professionally. Instead, her reputation has been enhanced by her diligent pursuit of a story that most of the U.S. media, including the
New York Times,
badly misread.

Barbie Latza Nadeau’s sensitive, clear-eyed, and compelling examination of a perplexing case is now a
book—the second in our provocative Beast Book series—that brings to American readers the first full account of this baffling case. The book finally gets behind the impassive “angel face” (as the Italian tabs sneeringly called the defendant) to find the real Amanda Knox. Mining diaries, social networking sites, exclusive interviews, and telling moments in the courtroom, Nadeau paints the first full portrait of a quirky young woman who is neither the “she-devil” presented to an Italian jury nor the blameless ingenue her parents believe her to be. What Nadeau shows is that Amanda Knox is, in fact, a twenty-first-century all-American girl—a serious student with plans and passions—but is also a thrill-seeking young woman who loves sex and enjoys drugs and who, in the wrong environment with the wrong people, develops a dark side that takes her over and tips her into the abyss.

In short, every parent’s worst fear . . .

A Note on the Sources

MOST OF THE MATERIAL in this book comes directly from official court materials, which are available only in Italian. All references to forensic evidence are based on the transcripts of court testimony and the ten-thousand-page crime dossier known as the Digital Archive. The archive includes police reports, photos, and most of the interrogation transcripts, as well as Amanda Knox’s and Raffaele Sollecito’s prison writings and intercepts of their visiting-room conversations. I also refer to PowerPoint presentations, slide shows, and other exhibits presented in court by key witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense. Rudy Guede’s testimony comes from interviews with his lawyers and official transcripts of both his fast-track and his appellate trials. The rest of the information about the trial was garnered by my attendance at every session of the eleven-month trial of Knox and Sollecito, except for two sessions in mid-June 2009. In addition, I viewed roughly ten hours of video taken during the crime scene investigation and listened to
audiotapes of Amanda’s and Raffaele’s interrogations in prison and the Skype call to Rudy Guede in Germany. Amanda and Raffaele’s MySpace quotes and Amanda’s short stories come from downloads of their MySpace pages made before this material was removed from the Internet in 2007. I obtained Amanda’s personal e-mails to friends through sources in Seattle.

I first arrived in Perugia on November 3, 2007, the day after Meredith Kercher’s body was discovered. I was on assignment for
Newsweek.
Over the next two years, I became personally acquainted with the prosecutors and lawyers on all sides of the complex case mounted against Knox and Sollecito and the simpler fast-track prosecution of Guede. I interviewed the principal players in both cases several times and often videotaped the interviews, which resulted in more than twenty hours of exclusive footage pertinent to the case. Unless otherwise attributed, quotes from Edda Mellas, Curt Knox, and the Sollecito family come from formal interviews and informal conversations throughout 2008 and 2009. Comments from the jurors come from interviews I conducted with them soon after the verdict in December 2009. Quotes from the lawyers and prosecutors are from text messages, e-mail exchanges, formal interviews, and informal conversations
in Rome, in Florence, in the halls of the courthouse, and on the streets of Perugia. I spoke to all these attorneys frequently in various settings; Perugia is a small town where all sides involved in Italy’s “trial of the century” were constantly crossing paths.

I also made a valuable friend in Italo Carmignani, a seasoned crime reporter for
Il Messaggero
with great local contacts; he generously shared his exclusive knowledge of the case. In addition, I did extensive interviewing in Perugia among the students familiar with the social scene in 2007 and traveled to Seattle in the summer of 2008 to investigate Amanda’s background. Andrea Vogt of the
Seattle Post Intelligencer,
who is based in Bologna, shared photos of Amanda’s neighborhood and schools in Seattle.

Finally, I traveled frequently to Florence in 2009 to attend court sessions in the abuse-of-office case against Giuliano Mignini, the lead prosecutor in the Knox trial.

Cast of Characters

THE VICTIM

 

Meredith Kercher, student

 

THE CONVICTED

 

Rudy Guede, local drifter
Amanda Knox, student
Raffaele Sollecito, student

 

THE ACCUSED

 

Patrick Lumumba, bar owner

 

THE JUDGE

 

Giancarlo Massei, decided case with second judge

 

THE PROSECUTION

 

Monica Napoleoni, head of Perugia’s homicide squad Giuliano Mignini, co-prosecutor for Knox and Sollecito

 

Manuela Comodi, co-prosecutor
Patrizia Stefanoni, forensic specialist

 

THE DEFENSE

 

Valter Biscotti, lawyer for Rudy Guede

Giulia Bongiorno, lead lawyer for Raffaele Sollecito
Carlo Dalla Vedova, lead lawyer for Amanda Knox
Luciano Ghirga, local lawyer for Amanda Knox
David Marriott, Knox family spokesman

 

THE FAMILIES

 

Curt Knox, Amanda’s father
Edda Mellas, Amanda’s mother
Chris Mellas, Amanda’s stepfather
Deanna Knox, Amanda’s sister
John Kercher, Meredith’s father
Arline Kercher, Meredith’s mother
Francesco Sollecito, Raffaele’s father

1

“Perugia Is Not for the Weak”

I
T IS 2 A.M. on a sticky September night, and Perugia is a cauldron of illicit activity. A thick fog of marijuana hangs over the Piazza IV Novembre. Empty bottles and plastic cups litter the cobbled square. The periphery is lined with North African drug dealers, selling their wares like the fruit vendors who occupy this spot in daytime hours. A group of pretty young British students giggle, easy prey to the Italian guys pouring their drinks. The American girls are more aggressive, eager to nab an Italian lover. Down an alley, a young man has lifted the skirt of his conquest and is having clumsy sex with her under a streetlamp while her drink spills out of the plastic cup in her hand. Dozens of students are passed out on the steps of the church. There is not a cop in sight.