The house was L-shaped, with a covered portico at the front that opened into a tiny foyer where the girls hung keys, parked umbrellas, and kept a bulletin board with messages to each other. The foyer opened
into the apartment’s one common area—a live-in kitchen that had been cheaply renovated and filled with IKEA furniture, tattered sofas and a green Formica table. Laura and Filomena had hung fabric on the walls and put down colorful rugs to brighten up the dismal space. Their bedrooms were off this living area at the front of the house, and they shared the larger bathroom next to the kitchen. The sublet rooms were down a short corridor to the back of the house. The hallway gave onto a small terrace and ended at a bare-bones bathroom with a flimsy Plexiglas shower stall. Meredith, arriving first, took the corner room, and Amanda was left with the smaller one next door. Both these rooms were tiny, with just enough space for a single bed, a small closet, and a writing desk. Downstairs, four young Italian men shared an apartment with a similar layout but far less light.
Amanda loved the place.
it’s a cute house that is right in the middle of this random garden int he middle of perugia. around us are apartment buildings, but we enter through a gate and there it is. im in love. i meet her roommate. . . . the house has a kitchen, 2 bathrooms, and four bathrooms [sic] not to mention a washing maschine, and internet
access. not to mention, she owns two guitars and wants to play with me. not to mention the view is amazing. not to mention i have a terrace that looks over the perugian city/countryside. not to mention she wants me to teach erh yoga. not to mention they both smoke like chimneys. and, she offers me one of the open rooms after we hang out for a bit. we exchange numbers. i put down a down payment. im feeling sky high. these girls are awesome. really sweet, really down to earth, funny as hell. neither are students, they actually both work int he same law office, and they are desperate for roommates because the two they had decided they wanted to disappear all of a sudden. they are relieved to meet me believe it or not, because aparently everyone else they have met have been really not cool.
Her rent was three hundred euros a month, which is steep by Perugia standards, but Amanda didn’t care. She had seen worse places for more money, and she was just relieved to find a place to settle.
fuck that. im hooked. we hung out for a good long time the day before yesturday, just laughing about crazy people and in general getting to know each other. then, deanna and i went to grab a sandwich at the same cafe
and i bumped into the most beautiful black man i have ever seen. he said he’d see me when i come back from germany. eheheheh and our waiter, nerti, from albania, hung out with us a bit and talked politics.
After paying a deposit and signing the lease, Amanda went to Berlin, and Deanna went home to Seattle. But after a few days at the Bundestag, things went wrong. Amanda walked out on her internship, leaving her uncle in the awkward situation of explaining why his American niece gave up such a hard-to-get opportunity. Her MySpace page on September 15, 2007, offers little real explanation:
i was in the way and they didnt need me there anyway. i called in the next morning and that was that. then i walked, and walked and walked and walked. all over berlin, for two whole days. it was great. i was supposed to pick up a bus on friday, so i spent wednesday and thursday wandering around berlin, seeing things, meeting people, drinking a glass of wine in a park near my apartment every night. fantastic. then i got back home to hamburg and found out i was in trouble with my uncle who ahd landed me the job at the bundestag in the first place. aparently he had to go to a lot of
trouble to get me my spot there and everyone was confused as to what had happened to me. so i talked to him today and explain ed the mess, but not before freaking out and crying a little becaue i was afraid i made my uncle look bad in front of these very importan people. oops. to say the least.
Meanwhile, Meredith Kercher was planning her own Perugian adventure. As part of the ERASMUS program, she had more structure to her academic life and a built-in network of friends, but she had chosen to live on her own, instead of with a sponsor family or in a supervised dormitory. She, too, went to Perugia in late August looking for a place to live. She called a couple of places before finding the notice that Filomena had hung up the same day she met Amanda. Meredith, called “Mez” by close friends, already spoke good Italian and wanted to live in the community to hone her language skills. She moved into one of the back bedrooms before Amanda Knox returned from Germany.
The two Anglophone girls were instant friends. They spent a lot of time together in the first weeks and often stayed up late chatting about their lives and loves. But they were in different programs at different
schools, so their circles began to diverge once Meredith started classes. She attended the ERASMUS orientation events and parties; Amanda found it hard to meet people. Meredith tried to include her housemate in gatherings with her new British friends, but Amanda didn’t fit in. They were put off by her loud voice and the way she always tried to be the center of attention. In the middle of a conversation, she would start singing at the top of her voice. The British girls were a far cry from her Seattle crowd, and Amanda seemed rough and crude to them. She spent a lot of time at Internet cafés and playing her guitar on the tiny terrace. She also realized she didn’t have enough money to carry her through the semester, so she started looking for work. Within a few days, she found a job at Le Chic, a funky reggae bar owned by Congolese immigrant Patrick Lumumba, forty-four.
Within a month, the relationship that began so warmly between two girls far from home had soured into the sort of chronic, low-level irritation that often afflicts roommates. The mystery that has riveted two continents since November 2, 2007—when Meredith’s slashed and battered body was found in their shared flat—was how and why the relationship deteriorated rapidly to the point of extreme violence. How is
it possible that two well-brought-up young women became parties to such a grisly crime? What actually went on that night? Who is the real Amanda Knox behind the inscrutable mask she presented in court—the wholesome innocent described by her family or the heartless seductress portrayed in the most lurid media accounts? After a year of intense investigation, eleven months of trial, and three murder convictions, answering those questions still involves a certain amount of speculation. But the more one knows about the evidence in the case—much of it overlooked in U.S. press accounts—the easier it is to understand how these young women fell prey to the temptations of Perugia, with tragic results.
2
“Here Is the List of People I’ve Had Sex With”
T
WO MONTHS BEFORE Meredith Kercher moved to Perugia, she made a sultry appearance in a music video, sauntering down a dark spiral stairway as Kristian Leontiou sings “Some Say.” The song is bubblegum pop, and the video, in which a number of pretty young women dance under falling petals, is amateurish and low-budget. But the lyrics are haunting, given that the video was released on October 24, 2007, one week before Meredith was murdered. “No more trouble in my soul, no more time to make me whole.”
Leontiou was not well known, and the video went largely unnoticed until two years later, when Meredith’s parents drew press attention to it during her murder trial. This was part of a calculated effort to remind the public, judge, and jury that their daughter was a
vibrant, beautiful young woman, not a one-dimensional crime victim. Up to then, Meredith had been known primarily through two photos—one in a gray tank top with a smiling face, the other made up as a vampire for Halloween the night before her death, with fake blood on her chin. In the fourteen months between her death and the murder trial, public attention focused almost exclusively on the accused, Amanda Knox, the enigmatic All-American beauty who seemed such an unlikely killer.
The music video momentarily turned the spotlight back onto Meredith. (When the video became popular online, Amanda’s most ardent supporters tried to discredit it by claiming that the girl in the clip was not Meredith; Leontiou eventually confirmed that it was.) But the release of the video also highlighted a sensual side of her at odds with the prosecution’s theory of the case. She had, since her murder, been portrayed as a somewhat prissy British girl who was scandalized and intimidated by her roommate’s aggressive sexuality. In reality, though, Meredith was hardly a prude.
“She was no angel,” her family’s lawyer, Francesco Maresca, fifty, once told me at his office in Florence. “She was simply a young woman of her time. She had more than one boyfriend. She was normal.”
When she arrived in Perugia, Meredith behaved like most of the other students, reveling in the freedom of being so far from home. She hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend back at Leeds University, Patrick Cronin, then twenty-three, and in fact was wearing a pair of his blue jeans when she was killed. But they had decided to loosen their ties while they both studied abroad, and she quickly became interested in a young man who lived in the basement apartment on via della Pergola. Giacomo Silenzi, twenty-two, was a long-haired, earring-wearing student from the Marche region in eastern Italy. He played guitar in a band and was well known around town as a party guy. Meredith met him in early September, when she first moved into the house, and both she and Amanda had been to his apartment to smoke pot on more than one occasion. It was in the downstairs apartment that both girls met Rudy Guede, twenty-three, an Ivory Coast immigrant who had come to Italy as a child. Whenever the guys downstairs needed hashish or marijuana, they called Rudy, who often stayed on to enjoy the party. Rudy had once gotten so high that he fell asleep on the toilet. Giacomo’s roommate found him there with his pants around his ankles in the morning.
Giacomo and Meredith began sleeping together
about ten days before her death, and Giacomo admitted that they had gone as far as experimenting with anal sex, which Meredith didn’t like. Meredith’s friends remember that she was upset when Amanda confided that she liked Giacomo, too, but then said, “You can have him.” Giacomo later said he never liked Amanda, and he was one of the first witnesses to suggest, during police interviews, that Amanda was involved in the murder.
Meredith and Amanda were not the polar opposites later described by prosecutors. They were both smart, studious young women whose good grades came easily. They both loved to read and engage in deep, searching conversations. They were often described in the same way by their friends back home, who spoke of their beauty, sense of humor, wit, and charm. Moreover, both Amanda and Meredith liked to smoke the occasional joint, get drunk, and flirt. And both women were fully aware of their sexual power.
Their family backgrounds were also similar in some ways. The two women were children of divorce. Meredith had grown up in the heart of multicultural England, in Coulsdon, South London, and remained in contact with both parents. She and her sister Stephanie and two brothers, Lyle and John, formed a
close-knit family that was protective of their mother, Arline Kercher, who suffers from diabetes-related illnesses. When she came to Perugia, Meredith kept her British cell phone active so that her mother could always reach her in an emergency; Meredith borrowed a second phone, for local calls, from her new roommate Filomena. The English student had already bought her plane ticket to be home for her mother’s birthday on December 19 and stashed a gift of Perugina chocolates in her suitcase under the bed.
Amanda was also close to her mother and younger sister Deanna. The three even got matching tattoos of a yellow flower on the backs of their necks just before Amanda left for Europe. Amanda’s parents divorced when Amanda was two years old and Edda was pregnant with Deanna. Edda eventually married Chris Mellas, a tech consultant twelve years her junior, and Amanda grew up in the lower-middle-class White Center neighborhood in West Seattle, where the neighbors’ yards are littered with rusty cars. Her father, Curt, married his mistress, Cassandra, and lived in a nicer, middle-class district about half a mile away. Amanda was close to her two younger half-sisters, Ashley and Delaney, but somewhat jealous of them, too. She called them “the replacement children.”
Amanda’s relationship with her stepfather was strained, according to friends in Seattle, who say that Amanda and Chris competed for Edda’s love. Amanda was fourteen when her thirty-nine-year-old mother fell in love with Chris, then twenty-seven—that is, about equally close in age to mother and daughter. Eventually, friends say, Chris and Amanda became drinking partners, and they often argued. On August 21, 2007, at 2:38 A.M., Amanda sent a post from Perugia to Chris’s MySpace page, “hahaha alright, does that mean we’re getting along then? happy birthday loser.”
Chris’s own entry on MySpace read:
About my life: I am married, happily, and I have two kids by marriage, Amanda and Deanna. They are both shitheads and I love them anyways. Deanna is a senior now in HS and Amanda is on her second year in college. They are both cool. They, as we all do, have their fair share of quirks . . . but we would all be white bread boring as hell if we didn’t.
The crucial difference between the new roommates on via della Pergola was that Amanda was unusually bold about her sexuality, while Meredith retained a certain modesty. There was no clothes dryer in their
apartment, only a rack in the hallway, where Meredith was reluctant to hang her panties, and she was offended when Amanda left a clear plastic cosmetics case containing condoms and a vibrator in their shared bathroom. Not long after they moved in together, the two young women went out to the Red Zone discotheque, where they met up by chance with Giacomo and his friend Daniel de Luna, a twenty-two-year-old student from Rome who often came to Perugia to visit the guys downstairs. They all danced and flirted. Giacomo kissed Meredith for the first time on the dance floor, and she later confided to her British friends that this was romantic and “very Italian” and that she hoped it was the prelude to a more intimate relationship. Amanda and Daniel connected more quickly; he would later brag to friends that he ended up in her room that night having sex.