Biscotti paid for my lunch, and then, a couple hours later, his prediction came true. Rudy’s sentence was cut to sixteen years. At first, the
innocentisti
thought this might be good news; if Rudy’s sentence was knocked down that much, perhaps Amanda and Raffaele would be set free on appeal. But it soon emerged that the appeals judge agreed that Rudy killed Meredith with Amanda and Raffaele—not alone. Not only had one more judge endorsed their guilty verdicts, but he may have reduced Rudy’s sentence in return for helping the prosecution strengthen its case against the other two on appeal. But Rudy’s lighter sentence is also more in line with those routinely meted out in Italy for manslaughter, not premeditated murder. So it may also reflect that even in the far more exhaustive
trial of Knox and Sollecito, prosecutors never conclusively established a motive for the killing of Meredith Kercher. Very early in the case, investigators suggested that the murder was the product of a Satanic ritual, because of the Halloween paraphernalia found in the villa and at Raffaele’s apartment. Then they theorized that a drug-fueled sex game had gone terribly wrong before settling on the hypothesis that Amanda had encouraged the assault on Meredith to punish her prudish disapproval of Amanda’s lifestyle. In Mignini’s eyes, Amanda’s narcissistic personality fueled a growing anger, and finally her jealousy of Meredith was too much to bear. She killed Meredith in an unstoppable rage.
But the prosecutors could never make any of these scenarios entirely convincing, although they would spend eleven months trying.
7
“DNA Doesn’t Fly”
“M
EREDITH WAS MY FRIEND. I did not hate her,” Amanda Knox tells the jury at her trial, after the prosecution finishes two days of fiery closing arguments, describing Knox as an angry young woman who was motivated by hate and fueled by drugs and who killed in a sexual frenzy. “To say that I wanted to take revenge against a person I liked is absurd,” she continues, speaking in the fluent Italian she learned in prison. Then she adds, “I had no relationship with Rudy—oh,
mama mia!
—Everything that has been said in these last two days is pure fantasy, it’s not true, I have to insist on this.”
Amanda’s insistence on her innocence comes at the end of an eleven-month trial that sometimes feels more like a TV reality show than a legal proceeding—albeit one staged amid fifteenth-century religious art. The
aula,
or courtroom, for Meredith Kercher’s murder
trial is two levels underground in Perugia’s ancient provincial courthouse. A glorified metal ladder and another flight of steep, worn stone steps lead down to the room called the Hall of Frescoes, which has brick walls, giant arches, and incongruous fluorescent chandeliers that look like shiny halos hanging from the ceiling. In this strange netherworld, Judge Giancarlo Massei sits under a huge crucifix facing a painting of a bare-breasted Madonna suckling her child. He is a slight man with a nasal voice that he rarely raises. Instead he gestures like an orchestra conductor to impose order in the court. His nickname among the press is “Woody,” for Woody Allen. He is a serious man with a gentle smile, but he is a tough judge. In the six months before the trial of Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, he has handed down three life sentences.
The trial is procedurally complex, because the criminal charges against Amanda and Raffaele are being tried simultaneously with a civil suit filed by the Kercher family and a defamation action lodged against Amanda by Patrick Lumumba. The forensic duels can be mind-numbing, as when a cell-phone network expert goes into great detail about the vagaries of phone signals in hilly Perugia to dispute evidence from Raf and Amanda’s call logs. Even the prosecutor falls
asleep on occasion, and one elderly juror becomes well known for napping after lunch.
Judge Massei sits in the middle of the wide wooden bench, flanked by his co-judge and six jurors in green, white, and red sashes. The red-haired, middle-aged juror on Massei’s far right glares at the prosecutor and smiles at the Knox family. In the beginning, it was the other way around, but she softened when Edda Mellas testified, feeling a mother’s pain. The brunette next to her appears tortured by her duty and cries sporadically; she does not want to believe that these two young people are killers. The man on her left with long, wavy gray hair looks thoughtful and kind. He is divorced and has lost a son; he knows that life is not predictable and that good people can do bad things. Beside him is Beatrice Cristiani, the second judge. She primly takes copious notes and often checks the legal tomes piled between her and Massei.
To Massei’s immediate left is the jury foreman, a criminal lawyer whose office was involved in an early phase of the Kercher murder investigation. Beside him sits my favorite juror—a pretty woman with short red hair who is surely a student of body language. She listens intently to each witness, watching their hands and faces like none of the other jurors. The juror next to
her is the elderly man who tends to doze off in the afternoons. The final juror is the first alternate, an ash-blonde woman whose face I will never forget. Throughout the trial, she glares at Amanda and her family with contempt.
Another person who stares at Amanda is Lumumba, attending most hearings because of his civil defamation case. A Congolese refugee, he is a kind soul who managed, against all odds, to build a successful business in Perugia—until Knox accused him of murder. Then, many who had loved him quickly nodded their heads and said, “Well, yes, of course. He is black. Of course he killed her.” His club, closed while he was under investigation, soon failed because of a falloff in business, and Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, lit into Amanda with the self-righteous fury of a Baptist preacher when it was his turn at summation.
“Amanda is a talented and calculated liar who went deliberately out of her way to frame Patrick,” he tells the judge, reminding the jury how she had told police that she “covered her ears as Patrick murdered Meredith.”
Amanda stares forward as the jury turns to see her reaction. One of her lawyers, Luciano Ghirga, put his arm around her. The other, Carlo Dalla Vedova,
touches her hand. “It was all a lie that marked his destiny,” continues Pacelli, his face turning red. “It was ruthless defamation that destroyed Patrick as a man, husband and father.” As Pacelli builds up steam, his voice grows louder and louder, and Amanda slumps further in her chair.
“You’ve heard the stories about her hygiene, about how messy she is. Well she is unclean on the outside”—he pauses, allowing the courtroom to go silent in anticipation—“because she is dirty on the inside.”
“Who is the real Amanda Knox?” he asks, pounding his fist on the table. “Is she the one we see before us here, all angelic? Or is she really a she-devil focused on sex, drugs, and alcohol, living life on the edge?”
“She is the
luciferina
—she-devil.” At that point, even the judge is regarding Amanda quizzically, trying to decide whether that description could be true.
AMANDA AND RAFFAELE don’t come to court through the front door, like most defendants. Their shared police van pulls up to the back of the building, and they are escorted into cells in the back dungeon, where they wait with their lawyers for court to convene. The photographers stand on chairs and jostle on ladders to
get the best view of Amanda coming in. She smiles coyly and, like Princess Diana, lowers her head then lifts her eyes to look up at people. She is a pretty woman, and she knows it.
Each day, the Anglo press forms a consensus on her appearance. Is this light blue or powder blue? Do we say hooded sweatshirt or just hoodie? Who do you suppose French-braided her hair? followed by laughter and a lesbian joke. Obviously, no one on Knox’s mostly male legal team thought to coach her on courtroom demeanor until the very end of the trial: Don’t wear sexy clothes when you’re on trial for a sex crime. Don’t smile at Raffaele. Don’t look so happy. On Valentine’s Day, her tight pink T-shirt read “All You Need Is Love,” and the Beatles reference was a particular affront to the British press, covering the murder of a British student.
Raffaele got better advice and always wears effeminate, nonthreatening hues—lime green, baby duckling yellow, bubble gum pink. He started lifting weights in the fall, and his growing muscles are obvious through his pastel shirts. Amanda and Raffaele interact with each other in the courtroom, mouthing
how-are-you’s
and passing chocolates. Amanda frequently looks confused. She studies each witness and
then, eyes wide, looks at the prosecutor, often as if she has never seen him before. Many times, she doodles on a yellow pad. Occasionally, she lays her head on the desk. Sometimes, Raffaele just stares at Amanda, completely fixated. By the end, he looks desperate.
LIKE MOST TRIALS IN ITALY, this one was in session only two days a week—with additional time off for holidays and a summer break. This is the true flaw in the Italian judicial system: a lack of sufficient courtrooms and judges to handle an overabundance of cases, so it is rare to have any trial run on a Monday-to-Friday schedule. In addition, Raffaele’s lead lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, is a member of parliament in Silvio Berlusconi’s party, so she could not devote full time to saving Raf from prison. As a result, the hearings stretched over eleven months. The prosecution took the first five months to present its case, embellishing thin forensic evidence with circumstantial inferences and testimony meant to convey the dark character of Amanda.
Early on, a string of witnesses who became known in the press room as “the British virgins” appeared one after another in conservative, buttoned-up clothes.
They blushed when they described Amanda’s vibrator and her many lovers—never mind that they had all been out partying with Meredith until 6:30 A.M. on Halloween.
“Meredith complained that she brought men back to the house,” said Sophie Purton, the friend with whom Meredith had had dinner the night of the murder. “This was something we didn’t do, but Amanda was quite open about her sex life.”
Amy Frost had her own complaints. “Amanda would play the guitar, but sometimes she would play the same chord over and over.”
All of the British friends concurred that Amanda seemed strangely unaffected by the murder in the days after Meredith’s body was discovered. “I found it difficult to be with her because she showed no emotion when everyone else was really upset. We were all crying, but I didn’t see Amanda cry,” said Robyn Butterworth. “She and Raffaele were kissing and joking together, there was laughter at some point. I remember Amanda stuck her tongue out at Raffaele. She put her feet up on his lap and they were kissing and cuddling and talking.”
In Italian court cases, defendants can make spontaneous declarations at any moment, although there is
usually nothing spontaneous about it. Whenever Raf or Amanda were going to speak, their lawyers tipped the press to make sure everyone was present. You could see the defendants rehearsing beforehand, reading notes and mouthing the words. Amanda first spoke on February 13 after listening to Meredith’s British friends. Breaking a silence of fifteen months since her arrest, she tried to explain the vibrator and reclaim her image.
“It was a gift, a joke,” she said, laughing. Then she showed the judge how long it was—about four inches—by spreading her thumb and forefinger. She ended her three-minute interjection with “I am innocent. I have faith that the truth will come out.”
Raffaele also intervened on three occasions. But each time he opened his mouth, he sounded like a spoiled rich kid. He complained that the trial was a “terrible mistake” and that he “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He complained about being cold in his jail cell and about how, during the investigation, the police took his shoes and left him in stocking feet on marble floors in the November cold. Barely mentioned in the testimony about Amanda for months on end, he declared at one point that he was not her “dog on a leash.” Yet minutes later, he would be staring and smiling at her across the table. Raffaele was the odd character at the trial, at
times looking more like a pimply teenager than a twenty-four-year-old university graduate accused of a sex crime. His moment of glory came when Prosecutor Manuela Comodi’s computer froze as she tried to show a video of the crime scene. Raf, who had just completed his computer technology degree in prison, got up and expertly fixed the problem, his every move broadcast on the giant monitor in the courtroom.
THE PROSECUTION’S strongest forensic witness was Patrizia Stefanoni, the pretty, dark-haired specialist from Rome who collected most of the key pieces of evidence from the crime scene and then personally tested them in her lab. She was on the stand for two days and proved unflappable despite the fact that much of what she was presenting was open to challenge.
The most solid evidence came first. Five spots of mixed DNA and blood were found around the house.
Because the girls lived together, it was not so surprising to find their DNA mixed. But in the bathroom the girls shared, there was a spot of Amanda’s blood mixed with Meredith’s blood on the tap, on the edge of the sink and again on the side of a cotton-swab box and the drain of the bidet. The most damning spot was in
Filomena Romanelli’s room, where there had been an attempt to suggest a break-in. There, investigators again found a spot of Meredith’s blood mixed with Amanda’s DNA. As Stefanoni noted, the spots on the sink and in Filomena’s room were found only after the application of Luminol, which can reveal stains that have been wiped clean.
“Isn’t it logical that two people who share a house would have mixed DNA in the house?” asked Amanda’s lead lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, on cross-examination.
“Not in the context of a homicide,” replied Stefanoni, later adding, “although we may never know exactly what happened that night, the DNA evidence points to the fact that both Knox and Sollecito were there.”
The alleged murder weapon, a twelve-inch kitchen knife found in Raf’s apartment, proved to be the most contested exhibit in the case. It only matched one of the three wounds on Meredith’s neck and did not match the bloody knife print left on her bed sheet, suggesting that a second knife had been used in the crime. Also, the knife was mishandled on its way to Stefanoni’s lab, transferred from a plastic bag to a box. Stefanoni testified that the knife had tiny scratches on
the side “consistent with scrubbing” and said that she had found traces of bleach on it. At the top of the handle, she detected Amanda’s DNA profile, as if it had been left by a thumbprint. She also found seven traces of human biological matter—flesh, not blood—between the grooves at the tip of the blade. But the samples were small, and there was only enough to run one test. She notified the defense’s forensic experts, who were invited to join her in the lab in accordance with the protocol for criminal investigations in Italy. They all declined, saying they felt sure there would be no match and traveling to the lab in Rome would be a waste of their time.