Angel Face (7 page)

“I went home on my own. Amanda said she was going to Le Chic because she wanted to see some friends. That’s when we said good-bye. I went home, smoked a joint and had dinner but I can’t remember what I ate.” He also couldn’t remember Amanda being around, although she had told police, days earlier, that when Patrick Lumumba sent her a text message telling her not to come to work, she went straight over to Raffaele’s and spent the entire evening there. In Raffaele’s version, he was home alone around 11 P.M. when his
father called on the mobile phone, as he did every night. But the police already knew from phone logs that neither this call, nor one his father made at 8:40 P.M. to the land line, had been answered.

“I remember that Amanda hadn’t come back yet. I surfed the net for another two hours after
babbo
called and only stopped when Amanda got back, at about 1 A.M.”

Raffaele didn’t offer up any of the details that Amanda had given police about their evening—that they had watched
Amélie,
made dinner, smoked a few joints, and had sex. That was the break the police were looking for. Raffaele had not corroborated Amanda’s alibi. And Amanda had not corroborated his. One or both were lying. The police asked Raffaele to remove his shoes, which they checked against a bloody footprint found in Meredith’s bedroom. The print appeared to match and, unbeknownst to Amanda, who was still in the waiting room, Raffaele was arrested and taken into custody.

 

 

BY NOW IT WAS AFTER 1 A.M., but with Raffaele sitting in a jail cell, Monica Napoleoni decided there was no time to waste in bringing Amanda back for questioning.
Detective Napoleoni, forty-six, the head of the Perugia homicide squad, would make the perfect sex-flick dominatrix. She is a thin woman with long, jet-black hair that she wears in a sharp fringe just above her eyes, perfectly framing her oval face. Her perma-tan décolletage and heavy eye makeup are familiar sites in Perugia. In the winter, she tucks her tight blue jeans into black stiletto boots. During the summer, she wears white jeans, baby-doll blouses, and sandals, her toenails painted the same crimson red as her manicured nails. As her officers were booking Raffaele, Napoleoni went out to the vending machine in the hallway, worried that Amanda might hear Raffaele protesting his arrest and decide to leave.

“Who on earth could have killed her?” Napoleoni asked Amanda, her arms crossed as she leaned against the vending machine.

Amanda said that she didn’t know—that she had wracked her brain and come up with nothing. The two went back to an interrogation room, where Napoleoni and several other officers asked Amanda to check through her cell phone for names and ideas. Because Amanda was not then an official suspect or person of interest, her questioning was not taped. At 1:45 A.M., Napoleoni called in a translator and wrote in her
police log that Amanda was also being questioned. At that point, she was an official suspect in Napoleoni’s eyes and the police should have started taping the interrogation and allowed Amanda to call a lawyer, but they didn’t. The interrogators asked Amanda to read the names and text messages on her phone. When she got to the message that she had written to Patrick Lumumba on November 1, she was asked to explain what it meant. She had written in Italian: “
Ci vediamo più tardi. Buona serata.
” In English, the phrase
ci vediamo
means “see you later” and is nothing more than a friendly “see you around.” But in Italian, the same phrase generally suggests a fixed appointment. The interrogators would not let it go; they pressed Amanda to explain when she met Patrick and what they did together.

Amanda says that the police yelled at her and called her “a stupid liar.” She says they hit her on the back of the head twice and told her that she was protecting someone. Amanda says they threatened her with thirty years in jail and told her she would never see her family again. So, she says, she came up with a story. She told the interrogators that, yes, she had met Patrick that night at the basketball courts. She said that the two of them went back to via della Pergola to find
Meredith because Patrick liked her and wanted to start something with her.

“Patrick and Meredith were in Meredith’s bedroom while I must have stayed in the kitchen,” she told the interrogators, who at 3:30 A.M. called prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, fifty-seven. Amanda repeated her story to him. “I can’t remember how long they were together in the bedroom, but the only thing I can say is that at a certain point I heard Meredith screaming. I was scared and put my hands over my ears. I can’t remember anything else. I’m so confused.”

As Amanda described the scene once more, Mignini took notes. Later he was told that she had cried and hit her head over and over again the first time she told the story. Despite what would be reported later, Mignini was only in the room for the last ninety minutes of the four-hour interrogation. He did not conduct the questioning and was not the one who browbeat her into confessing her presence at the crime scene. During the time Mignini was present, he says, Amanda admitted to being drunk and passing out. He says she covered her ears when she described the screams. Then she said, “This has upset me, and I’m very frightened of Patrick.” Mignini says he was sympathetic to Amanda at that moment. It made sense to him that she was afraid of her
boss and might be protecting him. The police immediately went out to arrest Lumumba, who was awake, preparing a bottle for his young son; they marched him out of the house as his son and his Polish wife looked on. Amanda also told the investigators that she did not remember if Raffaele was there that night, but she says she remembered waking up at his place the next day with no idea of how she had gotten there.

Detective Napoleoni agrees with Amanda about what was said that night, but she denies the police ever hit her. She says that while the interrogation was tough, there was no physical contact. When Amanda took the stand in June, the young woman repeated the accusation that she was hit. When the judge asked her to identify who hit her, she looked around the room and said she didn’t know, even though Napoleoni and all the officers present at her questioning were in the courtroom. Amanda maintains that the police badgered her until she confessed. The officers say they were firm but polite, and even offered her chamomile tea and sweets from the vending machine. Amanda and her parents would later be sued for slander for accusing the police of brutality.

Amanda’s lawyers maintain that the police either destroyed the tape of this questioning or seriously
erred in not making one. Mignini says that investigators don’t usually tape interrogations of witnesses unless they are sure they are going to get something. And, because Amanda had not been officially called in as a suspect, the room they took her to wasn’t equipped for such surveillance. But if the interrogation had been taped and played in court, it could have hurt both sides. If police were heard cuffing her, they could be charged with assault. But if the jury had heard Amanda describe being in the house and hearing terrible screams, it would have been even harder to believe her later story—that she had spent the entire evening at Raf’s.

 

 

AT 5:45 A.M. on November 6, Amanda signed a written statement, in Italian, and was arrested. Because she did not have a lawyer present, that statement was never admissible in the criminal case against her. But it was used in the civil case filed by Patrick Lumumba for defamation—a case that ran in tandem with the criminal trial. His lawyers translated it back into English:

Patrick sat in jail for two weeks while the police tried hard to find evidence against him. The only thing they could come up with was the presence of his cell phone in the area around via della Pergola the night of the murder. But that ping was later determined to be a technical anomaly. As the police eliminated evidence against Patrick, however, they became ever-more sure that another person was involved in the crime. The fingerprints in Meredith’s room did not belong to Patrick, Amanda, or Raffaele. They ran a cross-check and quickly matched them to Rudy Guede, who, like all immigrants in Italy, had been digitally fingerprinted as part of his legal alien residency status. After a further DNA match was made to Rudy, he was found and arrested in Germany, and Patrick was released from prison. The day’s headline read simply: “One Black for Another.”

AMANDA’S MOTHER, Edda Mellas, arrived in town November 6, the day of her daughter’s arrest. Edda had already made plans to come, at Amanda’s request, to help her resettle after the murder. By the time she arrived, Amanda was in prison, and Edda found herself scrambling to put together a legal team and battling the reporters who had gathered outside Capanne prison. It would be her first taste of the media circus, and she proved to be a producer’s dream; she slammed the car door and wept in plain view of the camera. The court had already assigned Amanda a local attorney, Luciano Ghirga, a grandfatherly man who was well known and respected in Perugia. A former soccer star and communist politician, Ghirga is friends with all the judges and prosecutors in town, which is certainly an advantage, but he doesn’t speak English. So Edda also asked the U.S. Embassy for recommendations and selected Carlo Dalla Vedova from its alphabetical list. Dalla Vedova is a well-known civil lawyer in Rome, whose clients include some of the big multinational firms and U.N. agencies, but he had never tried a criminal case.

Before the attorneys had a chance to meet each other or their new client, Amanda asked her prison guards for paper and a pen. Then she wrote a five-page
memorandum that would seal her fate by essentially confirming the statements in her late-night interrogation:

In this spontaneous statement, Amanda placed herself at the scene of the crime, and she was never able to convincingly remove herself in further testimony. Amanda had always been a prolific writer, and she
continued this habit in prison, rambling on, incoherently at times, in what she called “My Prison Diary—
Il mio diario del prigione.
” The police took every page and used it against her, painting a picture of a disturbed, sometimes delusional young woman. Among other things, Amanda wrote:

By November 7, Meredith’s parents had also arrived in Perugia, and they visited the makeshift shrine on the steps of the
duomo,
where the giant picture of their daughter still stood among the red votive candles. John
placed a red rose in front of the picture and wrote a note on a piece of paper he had in his pocket: “Love you forever Meredith. All my love, Dad XXXX.”

Meredith’s parents were not allowed to take their daughter home on this trip. Two further autopsies were ordered, and it would be six weeks before her body was released and laid to rest at the Croydon Parish Church in South London in a service attended by hundreds. A wreath of yellow chrysanthemums on her casket spelled out “Mez,” as she was known to her friends. Amanda’s family never offered any condolences to Meredith’s parents, who struggled to understand what had happened to their daughter. As headlines screamed the morbid details of her murder, Meredith’s parents became reclusive, refusing to talk to any press. Only Meredith’s sister Stephanie gave sporadic interviews, describing their faith in the Italian justice system. The Kerchers’ lawyers, Francesco Maresca and Serena Perna, drip-fed the worst details to the family in the most delicate way they could. The only thing Meredith’s family requested was that the nude photos of her battered body not be released to the press. It would take nearly two years to get any sort of answers about what had happened to Meredith that
night, and even then, the day after the verdict, they still did not know exactly how or why she had been killed. Three people had been convicted, yet her murder remained a mystery.

5

“The Worst Part Was I Still Couldn’t Remember Exactly What I Had Been Doing”

F
ROM THE MOMENT they were arrested, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were a circulation bonanza for the Italian media and a front-page staple of the British tabloids. The Italian press funneled leaks from the lawyers and prosecutors to embellish the crime story and quickly dubbed Knox “Angel Face,” fostering a cult of morbid fascination with this most unlikely killer. The tabloids in the United Kingdom, eager to defend the honor of a British victim, mined the saucy details Amanda had inadvertently provided on the Internet, beginning with her MySpace screen name:
“Foxy Knoxy.” Calls to teachers and friends in Seattle routinely produced descriptions of an all-American kid, studious, smart, and athletic. But the social networking sites told a somewhat different story. A YouTube video of Amanda drunk spawned the image of a party girl, although, in truth, nearly every coed in America has posted a similar clip. But other entries suggested a darker, more enigmatic personality. “Baby Brother,” a short story Amanda posted on MySpace, is not too unsettling overall, but it includes a rather cavalier reference to rape: