Angel Face (8 page)

(“Hard A” is Seattle slang for hard alcohol and usually refers to a toxic cocktail of vodka, whiskey, and
schnapps. Amanda and her friends often partied with pot and hard A rather than beer for maximum inebriation.)

Whether or not Amanda meant to condone sexual violence, prosecutors took this story as proof that she had at least fantasized about it. It was there in her mind. Add drugs and alcohol, they reasoned, and it wouldn’t take long for such hidden thoughts to lead to action. And other MySpace entries, including this one, titled “The Model,” posted a few weeks before the murder, seemed to compound this picture of a young woman with a vivid, vaguely lurid imagination:

A picture was forming of Amanda as a vixen with dark impulses, and her family struggled to control the firestorm. They insisted that “Foxy Knoxy” was a nickname Amanda earned for her junior soccer moves, not her sexual magnetism. Time and again, they denied that she ever used the moniker as an adult, despite the fact that it was her MySpace ID. (Among the thirty-nine social networking friends on her stepfather Chris Mellas’s MySpace page was “Foxy Knoxy,” which linked to Amanda’s page.) The image wars proceeded with thrusts and parries: On morning TV shows, Edda would weep and show pictures of Amanda kicking a soccer ball; in the afternoon, the British tabloids would trumpet headlines about her jailhouse lesbian encounters (drawing inferences from entries in her prison diaries and letters to friends, where Amanda worried about becoming gay). Meanwhile, all sorts of people tried to make a buck off the murder. Amanda’s classmates in both Perugia and Seattle asked for cash or plane tickets in exchange for interviews. One of her teachers in Italy offered a TV producer a handwritten letter of Amanda’s—for 10,000 euros. Tidbits from the
legal dossier were shopped around. Coverage of the crime began to diverge on the two sides of the Atlantic. From the vantage point of Perugia, it seemed as though the Knox family’s American supporters were simply choosing to ignore the facts that were coming to light in Italy.

Raffaele had also supplied some troubling information on his social networking sites. He was a rich kid with ready cash to fund a drug habit, and in one Web entry, he bragged about spending “80 percent of his waking hours high.” The background image on his Web pages was a marijuana leaf print, and in almost every picture, he appeared bleary-eyed and tousled. (A police wiretap later heard his father say, “Raffaele, I’ve told you,
basta spinelli!
—Enough with the joints!” The most damaging picture he posted would be forever etched in the minds of anyone following this case: Wrapped in surgical bandages, Raffaele brandishes a meat cleaver and a jug of
alcool,
a pink, alcohol-based cleaning liquid.

These were the scraps of information that stoked a media frenzy in Italy. Even before Amanda and Raffaele were officially charged with murder, they were on the front page of every newspaper in the country, usually under headlines such as
“Amanda, Sangue e
Sorrisi—
Amanda, blood and smiles” and
“Uomini e Segreti, Amanda Racconta—
Men and secrets, Amanda tells all.” As Amanda’s and Raffaele’s popularity grew, so did the hunger for information about them. Amanda’s face graced the cover of Italy’s most popular grocery aisle glossies, and the murder was the subject of four quick books by Italian journalists. One of the books even came with an animation of the alleged crime on DVD.

 

 

THE AMERICAN PRESS HUNG BACK, at first objective and somewhat disbelieving that such a wholesome-seeming girl could have any connection to such a sordid foreign crime, and then, as the family stepped up its defense, increasingly divided between two camps that would become simply the
innocentisti
—those who believed she was blameless—and the
colpevolisti—
those who did not. In Perugia, these labels governed access. The prosecutors and defense lawyers all thought they knew exactly where each journalist stood, and those of us who were deemed American
colpevolisti
were few and far between. Of the handful of American journalists in Perugia in late 2007 and early 2008, none got access to the Knox family without certain guarantees
about positive coverage. Within months, the family decided to speak on the record primarily to the American TV networks, often in exchange for airfare and hotel bills. Most of the print press was shut out. And the TV producers learned to be very cautious about being seen with people like me, lest the Knox family should cut them off.

As interest in the case grew, an odd assortment of American talking heads attached their reputations to Amanda’s innocence. An aggressive support group called Friends of Amanda formed in Seattle, headed by Anne Bremner, a media-savvy criminal lawyer who had cut her teeth as a tough prosecutor in Seattle’s King County Court. She then became a defense lawyer, taking on some of America’s most outrageous cases. (For example, she represented the Des Moines, Washington, police department when it was charged with failing to protect an underage student from sexual relations with schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who bore two of his children.) A youthful blonde, Bremner was already a network regular before anyone ever heard of Amanda Knox. The attorney had provided round-the-clock media commentary on the Michael Jackson pedophile case and the Scott Peterson murder trial. Bremner quickly embraced Amanda’s
cause pro bono, even though the family claimed they’d never met her. Bremner honestly believed that Amanda was being railroaded in Perugia, but she also wanted a piece of the media attention whirling around the case. She frequently spoke on the family’s behalf and might have served them well as the official spokesperson. But the family had other ideas. They hired David Marriott, a mustachioed ex-journalist-cum-public-relations-guru who specialized in crisis management for some of Seattle’s troubled politicos.

Very quickly, Marriott lost control of the situation. As he spoon-fed the Knox-approved message to American outlets that couldn’t afford to send correspondents to Italy, those of us on the ground in Perugia began passing his contradictory e-mails around as entertainment during the long days in the court. In one instance, Marriott confirmed to me that ABC News had paid for Amanda’s parents to fly to Perugia in exchange for exclusivity. When I confronted my friend Ann Wise, an ABC producer based in Italy, she quickly passed on the leak. ABC got a denial from him that he had ever told me this—despite the fact that I had an e-mail to prove it. Similarly, in the spring of 2008, he told me that the Knoxes would not give interviews, and then Rachel Donadio of the
New York
Times
had a sit-down with Amanda’s father, Curt Knox. Marriott told me that Rachel must have door-stepped Curt in Perugia; she confirmed that Marriott had set up the interview for her. What Marriott failed to realize was that the Italy-based press corps was a close-knit group that could not be played against each other.

Meanwhile, the networks started vying for the Knoxes’ attention with their own legal analysts. Among the first was Joe Tacopina, a sexy Italian American New York lawyer who keeps a media clip file of his high-profile cases. His famous clients included Jordan Van der Sloot, the Dutch student implicated in the murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, and Raffaello Follieri, Anne Hathaway’s rogue Italian con man. In the spring of 2008, Tacopina came to Perugia as a paid consultant for ABC News to investigate the real story behind the Kercher murder, and I interviewed him for
Newsweek
in Rome in March. He said he was acting as a consultant to the family, even though he was being paid by ABC, and he was the first to call foul on the missteps by Italian investigators. But he also told me that deep down, he wasn’t sure about Amanda’s story.

“Her best defense, I think, is probably going to be the truth. Am I saying she didn’t make mistakes? No.
And do I know for a fact that she’s innocent? Of course not.”

That was the end of Joe Tacopina’s involvement in the case and the beginning of more aggressive message control out of Seattle. Andrea Vogt, a Bologna-based freelancer stringing for the
Seattle Press-Intelligencer,
wrote her own story about Tacopina’s behavior in Perugia, and Marriott quickly tried to shut her down. Typically, Marriott denied that my interview had even taken place, and he told Andrea that “the reporter got it wrong.” Not convinced, Andrea called me. I gave her a transcript of the interview and a copy of the tape, and we began what would be a two-year battle against the Seattle message machine, incurring personal attacks and outright threats. Andrea and I became known on the pro-Amanda blogs as “Void and No Clue,” and I was often referred to as a “failed travel writer,” despite a career of thirteen-plus years covering Italy’s major news events for
Newsweek.

 

 

THE PUSH-BACK FROM SEATTLE was ferocious, but the message discipline was imperfect. When Bremner told CNN that Amanda needed the U.S. State Department to rescue her, Marriott would simply quip, “Anne
doesn’t speak for the family” or “I don’t keep up with what Anne is doing.” Moreover, Amanda’s Seattle supporters began to compromise the work of her legal team in Perugia. On August 12, 2008, Seattle judge Michael Heavey wrote a letter titled “Request to transfer the trial against Amanda Knox out of Perugia,” using Superior Court of the State of Washington letterhead. The headlines in Italy incorrectly interpreted this as “American Judge Wants Trial Transferred to America,” which infuriated Knox’s local counsel. By the time Heavey retracted his letter a few months later, with an apology to the Italian Justice department, the damage had been done. The Perugia judge who denied Amanda’s request for house arrest said that one of the reasons was flight risk and that “the American judge who would have to sign her extradition back to Italy” would not cooperate. Knox’s attorney, Luciano Ghirga, told reporters outside the courthouse in Perugia, “The American lawyers do not represent anyone here.”

Meanwhile, the blogosphere began to crackle with acrimonious exchanges between those who believed that Amanda was innocent and those who did not. The first blog dedicated to the crime, Perugia Shock, was set up on November 2, 2007, the day Meredith’s body
was discovered. The blogger, Frank Sfarzo, a skeletal man with a waxed crew cut, ran a student flophouse in town and believes that he missed a call from Meredith while she was looking for lodging. When I later asked him in an e-mail why he started the blog, he explained the missed connection and described how Meredith had looked at the coroner’s: “Seriously, she was so beautiful and sweet, she seemed to be alive, with her eyes open, with the mascara on her eylashes [sic], just like ready to go out.”

Sfarzo hid behind the handle “Frank the blogger,” and he would never confirm whether he actually saw Meredith on the autopsy table or simply saw the coroner’s photos. He ingratiated himself with several clerks and cops around town and, curiously, often had a document no one else could get or a scoop that beat out the rest of the press. He started out as an objective observer, slightly sympathetic to Meredith, but became a rabid proponent of Amanda’s innocence. He was the quintessential blogger—a smart, cryptic insomniac. Even the chief prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, read his posts.

 

 

MIGNINI ALWAYS BELIEVED that Frank’s blog was intellectually inspired and financially subsidized by Mario
Spezi, the Italian journalist who covered the Monster of Florence serial killer for
La Nazione.
During the 1970s and 1980s, several couples were murdered as they made love in their cars in the foothills around Florence. Spezi followed the investigation for years and pinned his reputation on a theory of the case that Mignini disputed. Eventually, Mignini had Spezi jailed for obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence.

Enter best-selling author Douglas Preston, who went to Florence in 1999 to follow a dream and write a thriller based in the fifteenth century and centered on a lost painting by Masaccio. He stumbled into the Monster of Florence case when he discovered that one of the murders had occurred near the villa he had rented for the summer. He soon met Spezi, and the two forged an intense friendship and working relationship that produced the best-selling book
Monster of Florence.
That nonfiction book makes Spezi’s case that the Monster was part of a conspiracy that started in Sardinia. Mignini maintains that the killer was Francesco Narducci, a local doctor with strange sexual tendencies. Because Narducci’s body was found floating in Lake Trasimeno near Perugia in 1985, the investigation into his death was under Mignini’s
jurisdiction, which allowed the prosecutor to reopen the moribund Monster of Florence case. In doing so, he says, he offended prominent Florentine judges who didn’t want the small-time Perugian prosecutor nosing around.

Mignini believed that Spezi and Preston were concerned that the Narducci theory might undercut their story line or imperil their movie deal with Tom Cruise, and he suspected they might go to extraordinary lengths to promote their version of the crime. So, as is often the case in Italy, Mignini ordered a wiretap on Spezi’s phone. (He also wiretapped several other journalists and police officials, for which he would later be convicted of abusing his office.) Andrea Vogt and I listened to those wiretapped conversations between Spezi and Preston on a hot summer day sitting in Mignini’s office in Perugia, and, as he alleges, they do seem to refer to steering the police to faked evidence. On the basis of those tapes, Spezi was arrested and sent to prison for a month. Preston was also called in to see Mignini.