Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (21 page)

Bartolozzi was substantiating what the courts had previously only guessed at, so his testimony was potentially dangerous. He said he was a stickler for precision and was sure of the time he sent the patrol because he always checked the clock on his computer. Luckily, he crumbled as soon as Bongiorno began her cross-examination. If he was such a stickler for precision, she wondered, why had he written in a contemporaneous police report that he dispatched Battistelli and his colleague only after learning about the
second
cell phone?

“Yes, yes, fine,” he acknowledged after scrambling about for an answer, “but the only reason I put the discovery of the two cell phones together and mentioned the patrol being dispatched afterward was to make the narrative smoother.”

Bongiorno shot back, “But it hardly
makes the narrative smoother
to say that you sent the men out on patrol after the second cell phone was found, if in fact you sent them out after the first one.”

Bartolozzi had no answer for that. One prosecution witness down, eighty-seven more to go.

*  *  *

As that first day of testimony progressed, Mignini and his deputy Manuela Comodi continued with the same theme, insinuating that the arrival of the Polizia Postale had taken me by surprise and that I had gone back inside the house to make a surreptitious call to the carabinieri following their arrival.

The whole notion seemed so absurd that I did something Italian court protocol permits defendants to do more or less at any time: I approached the bench and made an unscheduled statement in my own defense. I pointed out that Battistelli had entered the house at my express invitation, because Amanda and I were alarmed by what we had seen there. He didn’t ask to come in and had no authority to do so on his own. “If I’d had something to hide or had been caught unawares, I would never have let him enter,” I argued. “I would have given him the information he wanted outside the house.”

I also reminded the court that I had made an initial attempt of my own to kick down Meredith’s door. Why would I have done that if I was one of the murderers who had locked the door in the first place?

When I had finished, Bongiorno leaned over to commend me for my remarks, which we had planned together. But the hearing continued, without comment from the judge or rebuttal from the prosecution. It was, I later reflected, as if I’d said nothing at all.

This was not a unique occurrence; it was a frustration
throughout the trial, for both Amanda and me. No matter how much we demanded to be heard, no matter how much we sought to refute the grotesque cartoon images of ourselves and give calm, reasoned presentations of the truth, we never escaped the feeling that our words were tolerated rather than listened to; that the court was fundamentally uninterested in what we had to say.

*  *  *

A week later, Meredith’s English friends took the stand and testified with such uniform consistency it was hard to think of them as distinct individuals. Robyn Butterworth, Amy Frost, and Sophie Purton all said that Meredith had been unhappy with Amanda’s standards of hygiene, particularly her forgetfulness about flushing the toilet. It sounded almost as if they were reading from a prepared script. Meredith, they agreed, had found Amanda a little too forward for keeping her condoms and what looked like a vibrator in their shared bathroom. And, they said, Amanda had acted weirdly in the Questura.

That was it. They mentioned nothing positive about the relationship. No word on Meredith and Amanda’s socializing together, or attending Perugia’s annual chocolate festival, or going to the concert on the night Amanda and I met. If either Meredith’s or Amanda’s computer had survived the police examination, there might have been photographs, e-mails, and other evidence to point to a more meaningful interaction. Instead, the girls’ testimony only served to drive them apart.

Butterworth said that, in the Questura, Amanda had “shown no emotion.” Frost testified that she never saw Amanda cry. Purton said, “As soon as I saw her, I approached her for a hug. But I seem to remember she didn’t respond. She seemed rather cold.” All
three remembered Amanda saying she’d seen Meredith’s body in the closet, a line Mignini milked to suggest some sort of dishonesty. At no time was it suggested Amanda had misunderstood something she had overheard in Italian—not even when, in a delicious irony, her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, felt compelled to correct the court interpreter’s translations of the girls’ English.

The next day—we actually had back-to-back hearings for once—Amanda arrived in court wearing a T-shirt with the words
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
emblazoned in huge pink letters, to mark Valentine’s Day. It seemed she wanted to find a way to defuse the English girls’ ill will toward her, but it didn’t work. Not only was her dress widely deemed to be frivolous and inappropriate, she was criticized further for her housecleaning habits by Laura and Filomena.

At a certain point Amanda hit her limit and burst into tears. And then she addressed the court. “Listening to all these witnesses . . . I am truly and sincerely sorry to hear so much exaggeration after all this time about the cleaning,” she said. “Yes, I talked to the girls, but it was never a source of conflict. On the contrary, I always got along well with them.”

Her words, once again, seemed to tumble into a void.

*  *  *

Amanda’s family came to court one day with a large number of wristbands on which they had printed the slogan free amanda and raffaele. They also produced an Italian version (marred, unfortunately, by a grammatical error) that said
LIBERO AMANDA E RAFFAELE
, and a handful more, for those members of my family uncomfortable about our fates being too closely intertwined, saying
LIBERO RAFFAELE
.

I gratefully put one of the English ones on my wrist as a
proclamation of my innocence and a symbol of defiance. I wore it back to my cell at night and left it on when I slept. I would touch it for comfort, or when I grew anxious. I played with it and pulled at it and spun it around my wrist until it was frayed and discolored and dirty. But I did not take it off again for almost three years.

*  *  *

We encountered another unexpected obstacle at the end of February, when a police officer named Stefano Gubbiotti cast more confusion on the question of when the Polizia Postale arrived at Via della Pergola. He had reviewed the surveillance footage from the parking lot and noticed the car arriving at 12:36, according to the video time stamp in the corner of the tape. However, he added, the clock on the camera was running ten minutes fast, so the car really arrived at 12:26—almost half an hour before I called the carabinieri.

On the spur of the moment, my lawyers did not know how to respond. Over time, they realized Gubbiotti had the timing exactly reversed. The clock on the camera was ten minutes
slow,
so Battistelli and Marzi did not show up until l2:45. Even then, the parking lot footage showed their car hesitating, starting to move into the lot and then pulling back out. What appears to have happened is that they found parking somewhere else, and Battistelli got out of the car to approach the house on foot, which is when Amanda and I saw him. According to this chronology, he couldn’t have shown up at the house much before 1:00 p.m., just as we’d remembered it.

How did we know the clock was slow and not fast? Watching more of the videotape, we saw that the time stamp marking the arrival of the carabinieri was 1:22 p.m. But the carabinieri cannot have arrived then, because at 1:29 p.m., according to the phone records, they called Amanda to ask for directions. They must have
arrived somewhere around 1:32 or slightly later—meaning that the clock was lagging about ten or twelve minutes.

Unfortunately, we lost the chance to challenge Gubbiotti on this directly, and the suspicion that Amanda and I had lied about our contact with the carabinieri lingered all the way to the end of the trial.

*  *  *

One of the reasons our hearings were so spread out was that Mignini was fighting his own, separate legal battle to fend off criminal charges of prosecutorial misconduct. He and a police inspector working on the Monster of Florence case stood accused of intimidating public officials and journalists by opening legal proceedings against them and tapping their phones without proper justification.

To Mignini, the case smacked of professional jealousy because the prosecutors in Florence resented his intrusion on a murder mystery they had struggled for so long to resolve. But Mignini’s behavior had already attracted international condemnation, never more so than when he threw the journalist most indefatigably devoted to following the Monster case, Mario Spezi, into jail for three weeks. Spezi had ridiculed Mignini’s theories about Francesco Narducci, the Perugian doctor whom Mignini suspected of being part of a satanic cult connected to the killings. In response, Mignini accused Spezi himself of involvement in Narducci’s murder—even though the death had been ruled a suicide. It was a staggering power play, and the international Committee to Protect Journalists was soon on the case. Spezi was not initially told why he was being arrested and, like me, was denied access to a lawyer for days. Even Mignini, though, could not press murder charges without proving first that a murder had taken place, and Spezi was eventually let out.

I firmly believe that our trial was, among other things, a grand diversion intended to keep media attention away from Mignini’s legal battle in Florence and to provide him with the high-profile court victory he desperately needed to restore his reputation. Already in the pretrial hearing, Mignini had shown signs of hypersensitivity about his critics, in particular the handful of English-speaking investigators and reporters who had questioned his case against us early on. He issued an explicit warning that anyone hoping he would back off the Meredith Kercher case or resign should think again. “Nobody has left their post, and nobody will,” he said. “Let that be clear, in Perugia and beyond.”

Just as he had in the Monster of Florence case, Mignini used every tool at his disposal against his critics and adversaries. He spied on my family and tapped their phones. He went after Amanda not just for murder, but also for defaming Patrick Lumumba—whom she had implicated under duress and at the police’s suggestion. He opened or threatened about a dozen other legal cases against his critics in Italy and beyond. He charged Amanda’s parents with criminal defamation for repeating the accusation that she had been hit in the head while in custody. And he sued or threatened to sue an assortment of reporters, writers, and newspapers, either because they said negative things about him or the police directly or because they quoted others saying such things.

Mignini’s volley of lawsuits had an unmistakable chilling effect, especially on the Italian press, and played a clear role in tipping public opinion against us. We weren’t the only ones mounting the fight of our lives in court, and it was difficult not to interpret this legal onslaught as part of Mignini’s campaign to beat back the abuse-of-office charges. His approach seemed singularly vindictive. Not only did we have to sit in prison while the murder trial dragged
on; it seemed he wanted to throw our friends and supporters—anyone who voiced a sympathetic opinion in public—into prison right alongside us.

*  *  *

In March 2009, in a break between court hearings, I traveled to Verona to sit the first exams of my master’s degree. It was an attempt to maintain some semblance of normality and to give myself something else to focus on. Preparing for the exams, though, was no easy task, and not just because I was studying by myself. The journey itself was a nightmare.

As on my trips to Perugia, I was cuffed and confined in a tiny holding cell in the back of a van with lousy suspension. A guard sat with me, blocking any view I might have out the window. For this longer trip, we took some extraordinarily circuitous route, picking up other prisoners along the way in cities I couldn’t name. Nobody told me what was going on.

The journey lasted eight hours, and when I arrived, I felt green from top to toe, as if I had been tossed through a spin dryer. Once in Verona, I was shown to a filthy isolation cell with cockroaches scuttling across the floor and pornographic pictures on the walls. This was my home for several days. The exams were over in a day, but I had to wait for the next transport to take me back down to Terni. I complained, about all of it, only to get into trouble for complaining.

Being back in solitary confinement messed with my head, and I grew increasingly insecure about my ability to carry the course load on my own. I passed this preliminary set of exams—a singular satisfaction—but had doubts about how much longer I could go on without professors to guide me or classes to attend. My studies,
which had always driven me and given me great pleasure, were turning into yet another object of dread.

*  *  *

My family rode the roller coaster of the trial with a characteristic mix of innate optimism and quiet foreboding. They were forever asking themselves if they could do more, investigate further, or reach out to more people. My aunt Sara was particularly adept at throwing great mountains of information together into slick, easy-to-use PowerPoint presentations. We nicknamed her
la signora hard disk.

Almost everyone came to court at every hearing, with one necessary exception: Vanessa, who had been advised not to deepen her troubles at work by making a public spectacle of herself at trial. As a uniformed police official, she had a professional obligation not to appear on television or express personal opinions in the media. Giuseppe thought she should have gone ahead anyway. If the television cameras picked up the fact that there was a carabinieri officer in the family, he argued, it might give television viewers a clue that law enforcement in Italy was not a monolith and that not everyone was siding with the Perugian police.

Certainly, staying away did nothing for Vanessa’s crumbling career, because in April 2009, three months into my trial, she was fired.

The final act of her humiliation began in January, when she was informed she would have to take a professional exam to maintain her place in the force—even though she already had tenure. Much of the testing was psychological. Vanessa trained for it by going through old MMPI tests, the ones most commonly used by the CIA and the US military, and passed with flying colors.