“He didn’t understand anything,” says Mignini, who believes that Preston was duped by Spezi. Mignini describes this conversation in gentle terms. He says Preston was nervous and did not understand Italian.
Mignini told him that perhaps he needed a lawyer, but denies ever asking him to leave the country. But Preston tells a very different story. He says Mignini browbeat him for two hours, accusing him of a crime he did not commit and threatening him with jail. Preston was terrified to the point of having to excuse himself to use the toilet during the interrogation. After Amanda Knox was arrested, Preston quickly stepped forward to corroborate her claim of being abusively interrogated, recounting his own experience with Mignini to an American press eager to embrace the narrative of a corrupt, rogue prosecutor “railroading” an innocent American—even though Mignini was barely present at Amanda’s interrogation.
MIGNINI LOOKS LIKE a balding teddy bear and favors shabby chic cotton trousers and a faded jacket. I have spent hours and hours with him, in his office and in more casual settings. I also sat in the Florentine courtroom where he was being tried for abuse of power, which became part of the brief against him in the Knox coverage. The main charge in the abuse case was that Mignini and a former Florentine policeman-turned-crime-writer ordered a forensic analysis on the
state’s budget rather than the police budget—which did not necessarily affect the outcome of the testing, but did anger the powerful Florentine judges who thought the Perugian prosecutor was trying to interfere with a local investigation. On January 22, 2010, Mignini was acquitted of the primary charge of improperly ordering up the forensic analysis, but convicted of abuse of office for lesser charges, namely, wiretapping journalists and other police officials close to the case. He was given a sixteen-month prison sentence, but in Italy sentences of less than two years are not required to be served, and at the judge’s discretion, Mignini’s sentence was suspended. Prosecutors in Italy are often accused of corruption, and in the Italian legal system, even the most banal charges must be investigated, which clogs the court dockets with relatively inconsequential cases. Moreover, these minor convictions are rarely grounds for stripping a prosecutor of his or her responsibilities.
None of the charges against Mignini were directly related to the Knox case, nor were they that unusual; wiretapping journalists is a national pastime in Italy, and most of us assume we are frequently intercepted. But the fact that Mignini was being prosecuted for misconduct—even if it happened more than ten years
ago—was a great boon to the Friends of Amanda. The Knox camp issued press releases depicting him as a judicial rogue and exaggerated the gravity of the charges against him. They also used the fact that Mignini was on trial for wiretapping journalists as a veiled threat to anyone who might try to cultivate the prosecutor as a source. His conviction, however, posed a new dilemma: How could Knox’s supporters argue that the Italian justice system was hopelessly corrupt when it appeared to work just fine against Mignini?
Mignini is not the evil figure described by Preston. Nor is he the deeply religious, humble truth seeker he claims to be. He is somewhere in the middle. He is not prone to mistakes and wild theories, as Preston contends. But he is not beyond them, either. Among other things, he is quick to suspect Satanism in some of the more grisly crimes he investigates. In the early days of his involvement in the Monster of Florence case, Mignini called in a Roman sorceress named Gabriella Carlizzi to advise him personally on Satanic signs and symbols. But he subsequently fell out with Carlizzi, a familiar figure around Rome and Perugia who channels her dead priest, and even had her arrested on a number of occasions. When Mignini first heard of the ghoulish paraphernalia in the house on via della
Pergola, he was not thinking about Halloween, but instead thought he had stumbled on another Satanic rite. But that theory never made it past the preliminary hearings, though Mignini tried to reintroduce it in the closing arguments.
At the same time that the Knox family was painting Mignini as a vindictive lunatic, it was flooding the Web with pictures of “honor student” Amanda playing soccer and holding babies. Unfortunately, those images were undermined by Amanda’s behavior in Capanne prison outside Perugia. In the weeks after her arrest, she wrote a diary that would provide even more fodder for the hungry press. Certain favorable pages of the diary were leaked by Amanda’s defense lawyers, but that simply tipped reporters to its existence, and the entire thing was part of the official 10,000-page case dossier—the holy grail that every journalist wanted on his or her hard drive. Documents became the trading currency in covering the Knox case, and they were used as bargaining chips by the prosecutor, lawyers, and journalists.
WITHOUT QUESTION, Amanda’s prison writings—illustrated by stick figures with smiley faces, castles, and
evergreen trees—were disturbing. She obsessed about the murder, writing about what Meredith’s final moments must have been like and searching her foggy memory:
I lay quietly on my bed, thinking, crying, sleeping. I wasn’t hungry and when they told me to eat I got a stomach ache. And the worst part was, I still couldn’t remember exactly what I had been doing at my boyfriend’s apartment. This was my great mystery that I had to answer, and I couldn’t. And I knew if I couldn’t remember this it would be reason enough for the police to think to accuse me, which I learned later was exactly what they were doing.
At times, Amanda seemed to revel in her new notoriety and at one point even wrote about her fan mail:
I received 23 fan letters today that I think the guards have been saving up for me from at least the past couple of days. That makes the count up to 35 letters. Oh yeah, and I got a postcard from the post office saying I have a package too. Fun . . .
As for the letters themselves, they vary, and are all from guys ranging from 20-35 on average . . . Some ask
me to have faith in God. Others bash the Italian justice system. The majority comment on how beautiful I am. I’ve received blatant love letters from people who love me from first sight, a marriage proposal, and others wanting to get to know “the girl with the angel face” . . . I think the same thing about this as I did before. If I were ugly, would they be writing me wishing me encouragement? I don’t think so.
She was less certain about where she stood with Raf:
Something interesting that has come up is about Raffaele. Apparently he told newspapers (though who can trust them) that all I’ve done is made his life crazy and he wants nothing more to do with me. Ouch.
Raffaele also wrote a diary as he waited for the trial to begin, complaining, as befits his privileged upbringing, about having no slippers and no one to clean the toilet. He described the cold floors in his cell and the Moroccan inmates next door who beat their heads against the wall screaming for another dose of heroin. During the summer of 2008, Sollecito began writing to his hometown paper, effectively developing
his own column, which always began
“Cari Amici della Piazza
—dear friends in the square,” a familiar political cry in Italian villages. “I continue to serve my sentence in hell before being convicted of a crime,” he informed the folks back home in Puglia. “I hope someone will remember that I’m still here and that I’m innocent.” He supplied vivid details about living in isolation and befriending a family of cockroaches.
Every scrap of information about Amanda and Raffaele—every photo, every diary entry—was front-page news, avidly consumed throughout Italy and especially in and around Perugia. Most Italian trials are decided by a panel of judges, and only in rare circumstances do they include additional jurors who, in fact, are called “civilian judges.” Their names are drawn from a computerized list with no vetting about their opinions or their exposure to the case, and they are compensated for their time according to their level of education and current salary. The investigation of the Kercher murder dragged on for nearly a year, and for all that time, those who would eventually be called to sit in judgment on Amanda and Raf were bombarded by sensational journalism about them.
The Italian system does, however, allow for a quicker “fast-track” trial if a defendant agrees to fewer witnesses and limited evidence. And that’s what Rudy Guede, arrested November 20, 2007, fourteen days after Amanda and Raffaele, requested.
6
“I Am Not the One Who Took Her Life. But I Didn’t Save Her”
R
UDY GUEDE’S INVOLVEMENT in the death of Meredith Kercher, and how that relates to the prosecution of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, has been the most misreported aspect of this case. The Knoxfriendly American press usually told the story like this: Amanda, Raffaele, and Patrick Lumumba were all arrested in the early days of the investigation, and then the police found the real killer, Rudy Guede. The authorities soon released Lumumba, but in order to save face—so important in Italian culture!—they stuck with their original theory of multiple killers and refused to let the two nice white kids go free
even after Rudy was convicted of the murder!
This was the line
taken, for example, in this exchange with CNN’s legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, in June 2009:
JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, I just think—the thing that people don’t realize about this case is that someone has been convicted of killing this woman. There is the guy—
CAMPBELL BROWN: One of the guys, he’s already in jail.
TOOBIN: He’s already in jail and he’s been convicted based on DNA evidence, and seems like pretty good evidence of killing this woman with a knife. Why is this woman on trial now?
ANCHOR JAMIE FLOYD: Well, I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why she’s on trial. Because as in our country, certainly over there, the authorities went out in front of the story. They put themselves on the line, naming this young woman and her boyfriend and they don’t want to admit a mistake. It’s that simple. They don’t want to admit they made a mistake, nor does the media.
The reality is quite different. Most importantly, Rudy was convicted as one of three killers, with the judge in his fact-track trial voicing his conviction that Rudy acted in consort with Amanda Knox and Raffaele
Sollecito—in essence, laying the groundwork for their convictions. But because Rudy was appealing this ruling when Amanda’s and Raffaele’s trial got under way, he could not be compelled to give evidence in the trial of the two lovers, and the testimony from his original trial was not public—fast-track proceedings never are. Rudy, however, has also changed his story and left many questions unanswered about the events of that night.
Rudy was no stranger at via della Pergola. All of the guys downstairs knew him well, both as a friend and as a drug supplier. He had met Amanda and Meredith downstairs as well, and by Amanda’s own admission, he had chatted with her in the center of Perugia among a group of friends. Rudy had even asked one of the guys downstairs if Amanda was dating anyone. Born in the Ivory Coast, Rudy came to Italy with his family illegally by boat when he was five years old. His father left the family when Rudy was sixteen, and the teenager spent the next several years with a wealthy Perugian family who helped him legalize his status. He studied hotel management but lost interest in school and supported himself with odd jobs, working in gardens, on local farms, and at the student bars. He lived on the periphery of the university scene in Perugia and
could easily pass for a student. He was known to be a small-time drug dealer, and as a registered immigrant, he had fingerprints on file with local police. In his own instance of ill-considered social networking, he posted a YouTube video of himself as Dracula saying, “I want to suck your blood.” Rudy was a good basketball player who spent most afternoons on the Piazza Grimana courts near the via della Pergola. Although when Amanda-friendly sources described Rudy as “an African man,” they seemed to imply—accessing subliminal racism—that he was a big, powerful guy, the truth is that he has a slight build, with narrow shoulders and sunken eyes.
Police believed from the beginning that several people were involved in Kercher’s death. They felt relatively certain that Amanda and Raffaele had some role, but also suspected that these two were covering up for a third person. Amanda was pressed on that point in her late-night interrogation when, under intense questioning, she finally fingered a different black man, Patrick Lumumba, who was quickly arrested. But a Swiss professor named Roman Mero came forward to say he had been at Patrick’s bar the night of the murder, giving him an ironclad alibi, and the police eventually
let the bar owner go. But for months, they tormented Patrick, auditing his books and checking his financial and residential status. In an attempt to save face—and to avoid a false imprisonment suit—the police had hoped to charge Lumumba for something, but they never could. Yet they still had evidence of a third killer: feces in the toilet did not match any known person with access to the house, fingerprints in Meredith’s bedroom did not match either Amanda or Raf, and a black hair was consistent with someone of African descent but was not Patrick’s.
The fingerprints produced a sure match to Rudy, then twenty-one, who had left town. Police proceeded to take DNA samples from a hairbrush at his Perugia apartment and issued an international warrant for his arrest. Within a few days, his DNA was matched to the fecal matter at the villa. And after his name was released, a number of witnesses came forward to describe Rudy’s strange behavior the night of the murder, reporting that he had been at the Domus nightclub around 2:30 A.M. on November 2. No one recalled seeing blood on his clothing, but at least three people testified that he had “extremely bad” body odor.
BY THEN, Rudy was in Germany, staying in touch with some Perugia friends via the Internet. Police convinced his friend Giacomo Benedetti to start up a Skype conversation, which they monitored, and they then traced the IP address to Dusseldorf. Prompted by police, Giacomo asked Rudy about Amanda. Rudy said, “Amanda doesn’t enter into this,” and her supporters quickly seized on the fact that Rudy initially admitted that Amanda was not involved. But in the same conversation, he also said that he was not involved.