“It was a woman’s scream, so blood curdling it made my skin crawl,” she would later testify. Then she heard what sounded to her like three or four people running up the metal steps to the top of the parking garage. She was upset all night. The next day, Capezzali saw police cars in the yard at 7 via della Pergola and heard the news of Meredith’s murder.
3
“I Kicked the Door in, and Then I Heard a Scream”
N
OVEMBER 2, 2007, was a frigid morning in Perugia. Fog had settled on the Umbrian hills, and the damp air was bone-chilling. Around 11 A.M., the sun started to peek through the haze, and Elisabetta Lana went out to her garden on via Sperandio to check her roses. She heard a strange ringing sound under one of the bushes and decided to call her son Alessandro. The night before, a prankster had phoned to warn that there was a bomb in her toilet, and the elderly Signora Lana was quick to worry. Alessandro called the postal police, who came by Elisabetta’s just before noon. The two mobile phones they found under the roses were easily traceable. One had a foreign SIM card purchased in Leeds, England. The other belonged to
Filomena Romanelli at number 7 via della Pergola nearby.
At 12:35 P.M. the postal police pulled into the yard at 7 via della Pergola looking for Filomena. Instead, they found Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito standing outside the house. Raffaele was wearing a jacket; Amanda was not. A mop and bucket stood propped against the tiny porch at the front of the house, and Amanda told the police that she was taking these to Raffaele’s apartment to clean up a leak under his kitchen sink. The police, accustomed to dealing with foreign students and their imperfect command of Italian, were sympathetic to Amanda. With no idea that they had stumbled onto a serious crime scene, the police were at first not particularly puzzled to find the pair standing in the yard, looking bleary and slightly ill at ease. Later, they would testify that the couple acted “startled and nervous.”
Raffaele immediately told the police that something seemed to be wrong in the house. Amanda had seen blood in the bathroom and later found a broken window in Filomena’s room, so they suspected a burglary. When the police asked if he had dialed the emergency number, 112, Raffaele said yes, although phone records would later show that this was a lie—instead,
he had called his sister, a police officer in Puglia. If Raf had in fact called 112, the switchboard would certainly have forwarded the call to the Carabinieri (military police) and the investigation into Meredith’s murder might have gone very differently under the auspices of their crime scene unit, the RIS (Reparti Investigazioni Scientifiche). Instead, the postal police called the Polizia (state police), who called in their own crime scene experts, known as the ERT (Esperti Ricerca Tracce). The RIS and ERT are fierce competitors. The more sophisticated RIS tends to investigate Italy’s most violent crimes and Mafia hits. The ERT generally handles domestic violence cases, but is eager to prove that it is every bit as good as the RIS.
While they waited for the state police to show up, Amanda called her Italian roommate Filomena and urged her to get home quickly. Raffaele made a late call to 112 in which he described the suspected break-in in whispered tones—that tape would later be played at trial. But by then, the state police were already on their way to via della Pergola. And the state police were far more constrained than the Carabinieri in what they could do without a warrant. They were also quick to trust Amanda and Raffaele and allowed them to lead investigators through the house. Carabinieri
officials later said they would have made them wait outside.
Amanda told police that she had returned home from Raf’s apartment at midmorning and noticed blood in the bathroom, where she proceeded to shower. Raffaele showed police the broken window in Filomena’s room and explained that they had tried to open Meredith’s door, but it was locked from the inside. By then, Filomena had returned home with another friend, Paola Grande, along with their boyfriends. With Meredith missing and her two phones now on the kitchen table, Paola’s boyfriend, Luca Altieri, argued that they should not wait for a warrant. The police suggested that because they were on private property, the young men could break down Meredith’s door without repercussions.
“With the police, we decided to break into the room,” Luca later testified. The police stood back, and Filomena and the others huddled behind him as Luca attacked the door. “I kicked the door in, and then I heard a scream. At that moment I saw a pool of blood with streaks coming away from it.”
The scream was from Filomena, who had caught a glimpse of Meredith’s bare left foot. Amanda and Raffaele were also in the kitchen when the door came
down; they were the first to run out of the house when the group in front turned and bolted, screaming, from the kitchen. But from their position at the back of the crowd, there was no way that Amanda or Raffaele could have seen Meredith’s position inside the room. A few hours later, though, Amanda told the police and onlookers who had gathered outside the house that Meredith had been found in front of her closet.
That was not the case. Police investigators would later determine—according to the trajectory of blood when her throat was cut—that Meredith had been in front of the closet on her knees when she was stabbed. But then her body was dragged a few meters to the side of the bed, her long hair leaving on the floor a swirl of blood that is clearly visible in the crime scene video. That’s where she died of asphyxiation, literally suffocating on her own blood. A pile of Perugia postcards that Meredith had written to friends sat on her night-stand next to a paperback book and a glass of water. The bra that had been sliced from her body was crumpled at her feet. But most notable to detectives was that someone had covered Meredith with her duvet after the blood on her body dried. The only bloodstains on the duvet came from her neck wound, not from the small drops that had splattered over her torso when she
was stabbed. Criminologists agree overwhelmingly that covering the body is almost always the mark of a woman, especially if it is done after the murder. That simple detail and the fact that Amanda described Meredith’s body in front of the closet, where she was murdered—not by her bed, where she was found—would stick in the mind of the prosecutors throughout the investigation.
At 1:30 P.M., Italo Carmignani, a longtime journalist for the
Messaggero
newspaper in Perugia, received a cryptic text message from a trustworthy source close to the police: “
Ragazza morta via della Pergola, forse omicidio
—Dead girl via della Pergola, might be murder.” It was the first of hundreds of leaks to various journalists eager to understand this complicated crime. ERT experts arrived from Rome that afternoon, and two videographers and a still photographer documented their painstaking collection of evidence throughout the house. On the soundtrack to the video, investigators can be heard discussing the evidence and swapping hypotheses about the crime. Patrizia Stefanoni, a biologist with the ERT, personally collected many of the samples she would later test in her pristine lab in Rome. Dressed in a white jumpsuit, she picked up
Meredith’s bloodied bra from the floor by the tiny elastic band between the cups.
“This was cut right off her body,” Stefanoni said, shaking her head. “Imagine. And look, we’re missing a piece of the bra clasp.”
The police collected the lacy black underwear that was rolled up at Meredith’s feet and checked the button and zipper of her blue jeans, but failed to find any evidence that these had been forcibly stripped off her body. They then lifted the comforter to look at Meredith’s slender body, nude except for the blood-soaked long-sleeved white T-shirt that was pushed up over her small breasts. Her skin was purple and red with bruises, and her chest showed the outline in small droplets of blood where her bra had been. Meredith’s right leg was bent slightly, and her left leg was straight. She had recently had a Brazilian—her pubic hair completely waxed. There were more bruises on her hips, knees, and thighs. But her face was still beautiful, her lips slightly parted in a Mona Lisa smile.
An examination of her vagina revealed a hair that the police removed and put into a plastic bag. “It’s blonde,” Stefanoni said, directing the collection officer to note that the hair was not Meredith’s. Police also
noted the evidence of recent sexual contact, both vaginal and anal, but no blood or internal tears that would suggest rape—thus the theory of a sex game was formed. Multiple autopsies would later fail to prove sexual assault, while at least one autopsy suggested that the sexual assault took place postmortem.
On a pillow that had been shoved under Meredith’s hips, police found both a bloody shoe print and two spots that might have been dried semen. Testing for one would compromise the other, Stefanoni believed, so she would later have to decide which was potentially more important to the case. Concluding that the droplets seemed old and were probably those of Meredith’s new lover, Giacomo, Stefanoni decided to focus on the bloody footprint. In the end, she could not link the footprint to anyone beyond a reasonable doubt, because it was indistinct, smudged at both heel and toe. All she could establish with certainty was that the shoe’s size was smaller than that of any male suspects in the case and approximately the same size Amanda wore.
Meredith’s left arm was bent, and her blood-smeared hand was still suspended in the air near her face. The tip of her long, thin index finger was soaked in blood as if she had touched her neck. But Meredith’s
right hand showed not even a drop of blood except from tiny cuts on the palm of her hand—it had not been near her face or neck when she was stabbed, but the detectives determined that she had extended it in self defense. The twin bruises and identical pressure points on the insides of her elbows were consistent with her arms being held back.
“It’s blonde,” the scientific police officer said as he pulled a long hair from Meredith’s blood-soaked hand.
“She has long fingernails, doesn’t she?” asked Stefanoni, examining Meredith’s hand.
“She has medium long fingernails,” corrected the officer. He found no skin cells under the nails to show that she struggled for her life, but he put plastic bags over both hands to preserve the nails for further analysis. The police then lifted Meredith’s head to measure the knife wound in her neck.
“
Mamma mia,
” said Stefanoni.
“
E abbastanza profondo—
It’s pretty deep,” said the officer.
“Look, there are more wounds,” said Stefanoni as her assistant moved Meredith’s head. “Another cut on the other side of her neck. There must have been two knives.”
“
Penso di si—
it’s very likely,” said her assistant.
The police rolled Meredith’s body to its side and photographed and measured the many cuts and scrapes on her back. The top sheet from her single bed was crumpled in a ball near her body, soaked in blood. Investigators then used tiny metal scissors to cut out the bloodstained sections of Meredith’s fitted bottom sheet still on her bed. One section showed a handprint. The other was the perfect outline of a knife.
By the wardrobe, where Meredith was killed, the police identified marks on the floor from her knees. Above where her body had been, high on the wall, were three long, bloody fingerprints, as if someone had stumbled while trying to get up. Those prints were unidentifiable, though the defense would link them to Rudy Guede; another set inside the wardrobe door—where it looked as if someone had braced for leverage while moving Meredith’s body—were also too smeared to read. Although most of the fingerprints and DNA in the room would later be matched to Rudy, there were fourteen fingerprints and DNA traces that could not be identified, because they were too smeared or degraded.
After Meredith’s body was wrapped in plastic and placed in a gray metal coffin to be taken to the medical examiner, the videographer swept the room again,
this time focusing on the area under her bed, noting suitcases and a Zara shopping bag. He zoomed in on a black desk lamp that witnesses would later say did not belong in Meredith’s room. Why had the killers moved the lamp to the floor of her room? Police then identified the white clasp of Meredith’s bra but somehow failed to place it in a plastic bag. Eventually, testing revealed Raffaele’s DNA on the tiny metal hook of the fastener. But it would be six weeks before investigators finally collected the clasp—ample time for the defense to argue that it had been mishandled and contaminated.
The police might have done well to stop videotaping at this point, because as they proceeded to other rooms in the apartment, they made mistakes that would hobble the prosecution and hand the defense some potentially valuable loopholes on appeal. Stefanoni and her colleagues, increasingly agitated, began to make a series of grave errors on camera. When one of her colleagues collected bloodstains from the porcelain bidet in the bathroom that Amanda and Meredith shared, she failed to change cotton swabs before collecting additional samples. In another video segment that the defense team would become fond of showing in court, it appears from the position of Stefanoni’s tennis bracelet
that she failed to change her surgical gloves between one contact with evidence and the next. Publicly, the prosecutors lauded Stefanoni’s work on the case. But in private, they were more critical and confided to a small group of reporters that these lapses undermined what should have been an open-and-shut case.
Another mistake involved the bloody footprint from a sneaker found near Meredith’s body. A few days later, it would be falsely attributed to Raffaele after police asked him to remove his shoes during an interrogation to measure them against the print. A match in size and brand became the basis on which Raf was taken into custody. But investigators failed to notice the telltale pattern left by a tiny piece of glass wedged in the bottom of the shoe at the murder scene, which would later allow the print to be positively attributed to Guede. Except for that oversight, the police would never have been able to detain Raffaele while they built a case for filing charges against him, even though he and Amanda provided conflicting alibis. In Italy, flawed alibis don’t weigh as much as hard forensic evidence, and the police needed that shoe to remand Raf without a judge’s order.