Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (22 page)

Then came the final hurdle, the
colloquio attitudinale,
a discussion with her superiors about the way she approached her work. She was ushered into a room where two captains grilled her intensely, notably about me. She said it felt like an inquisition.

When they asked about my murder case, she got right to the point. “If you’ve decided to get rid of me,” she said, “at least spare me the questions.”

They denied they had any such intent but did not appreciate the tone. “You’re doing your job,” they acknowledged, “but not with a state of mind worthy of the carabinieri.”

A number of times, Vanessa had been singled out for special assignments, for example on security details for visiting foreign dignitaries, and had often received praise for her contributions. She argued that she would not get picked for such jobs if something was wrong with either her performance or her attitude.

But the captains persisted. “A carabinieri officer should never let anything in his or her personal life affect his mood.” Ever since my arrest, they noted, her relationship with her superiors had not been good.

Vanessa was indignant. How could her brother’s imprisonment not affect her? Was she not human? How was she supposed to foster good relations with her superiors when they were systemically freezing her out?

She was right to think that the argument was futile. Within an hour of the conversation, she was handed a letter informing her that she was being dismissed from the force because her attitude was not commensurate with her position. There was no further explanation. Later, Vanessa obtained her performance appraisals and saw that in the last two she had been marked “below average,” again without
supporting documentation. She tried to appeal her dismissal to the Ministry of Defense, but she could not even get her letter delivered to the appropriate office.

The morning after she was fired, in despair, Vanessa slipped in her bathroom and bruised her tailbone badly enough to warrant a visit to the doctor. The doctor sent her to a military hospital for X-rays and other tests, and she was given a note excusing her from work for thirty days. She had only five more days in the office, so that was more than enough to ensure she wouldn’t have to face her superiors again.

The carabinieri were not content to let matters rest there. Five months later, she was notified that she was under criminal investigation for faking an injury and defrauding the carabinieri by continuing to draw a salary without doing the work expected of her. The notification even cited one of the phone calls intercepted by the Perugia police a year earlier, in which my sister had—incautiously, for sure—fantasized about breaking a finger so she could get out of uniform, switch to a civilian desk job, and throw herself into my defense without restriction.

This new investigation went nowhere because the first judge who heard the case declared the alleged crime to be “impossible”—in the sense that Vanessa had already been fired, so there was nothing and nobody to defraud, even leaving aside the fact that more than one doctor had confirmed and documented her bathroom injuries.

The accusation alone had a chilling effect on me, however, because Vanessa understood she could only get into worse trouble if she started making public statements on my behalf. So she continued to stay away from my trial and kept entirely silent.

*  *  *

That spring, I struck up an unlikely friendship with a former member of the Naples underworld named Luciano Aviello. Like a lot of the mafiosi in the protected section, Aviello was an informant who needed to be kept away from the general prison population and, especially, from former associates who might want to kill him for cooperating with the police. He was in solitary confinement, but I was authorized to visit him—for reasons I did not entirely understand at first. I agreed because I had nothing better to do with my time, and because I was too naive to see I was being set up.

I realized it soon enough, though, when the subject turned to my trial. “You should tell them you’ve been protecting Amanda,” Aviello suggested. “If you do that, I’m sure you’ll get a reduced sentence.”

I responded that I wasn’t protecting anyone, and if they wanted to keep me in prison for life because I was not willing to say otherwise, then so be it.

Aviello believed me and respected me for refusing to bend. He wasn’t a friend in the ordinary sense of the word; he would be sweet at times and then fly into theatrical fits of rage. But he did stick by me. After a while, he admitted that he’d been in touch with the Squadra Mobile in Perugia, and they had asked him to get me to say something incriminating. When he told them he’d had no luck, they asked him to sign a statement saying that I had talked about protecting Amanda anyway. He refused.

I can’t be sure if the police did pressure him as he described, because I have only his account to go on. But I do know he did one interesting thing seemingly designed to get the Squadra Mobile off his back once and for all: he came out with a manifestly ridiculous story that his brother Antonio had come home one night covered in blood and admitted he had killed Meredith Kercher.

This story came as a total surprise to me; Aviello and I never discussed it. I would have loved to thank him in person for the way he threw the police effort into confusion, but our relationship ended rather abruptly. I stopped visiting him as soon as I knew he had been in touch with the Squadra Mobile, because I understood that our continuing relationship was dangerous—to both of us. Soon after, he was transferred out of Terni; I can only assume this was because his presence there no longer served any useful purpose to the authorities. Much later, I sent him a present, an embroidered handkerchief, to express my gratitude.

*  *  *

On May 8, the prosecution hit a technical glitch. Manuela Comodi, Mignini’s deputy, could not get her computer to play a video of the forensics team finding the bra clasp. The judge suggested a ten-minute break so Comodi could get things working, but she kept flailing. I stepped in. I was, after all, a computer expert, and it seemed only natural to take the DVD and format it correctly on one of my defense team’s computers.

I’d been looking forward to this day in court for some time because I was outraged by the way the clasp had been recovered a month and a half after the murder, and outraged too that Monica Napoleoni was in the room when the Polizia Scientifica made their discovery. She had no place being there; the only logical explanation, I felt, was that she knew about the clasp in advance and was directing traffic to make sure it was found.

My thinking was, let them play the tape. And if it’s thanks to me, it will bolster the impression that I’m unafraid of the evidence.

Unfortunately, nobody else felt that way. Bongiorno was astounded that the prosecution had come to me for help at all; the
whole thing struck her as inappropriate from start to finish. In the media, I was ridiculed for what was deemed to be extraordinary naïveté, and I earned no credit whatsoever with the prosecution or the judge.

*  *  *

Two weeks later, my lawyers had another crack at Dr. Stefanoni and pried a lot more information out of her. Over two days of testimony, she acknowledged that the laboratory where she worked was not certified to do DNA analysis, although she claimed this made no difference to the quality of her results. She admitted that the amount of DNA recovered from both the bra clasp and the tip of the kitchen knife was extremely small—so small that she could not do a complete reading of my DNA. What she obtained is known in technical parlance as a “low copy number,” a warning from the machine that the result may not be reliable.

Stefanoni further acknowledged that the DNA she claimed to be picking up could not be associated with a specific time period, so there was no way of knowing for sure if my DNA—assuming it was there at all—became attached to the bra clasp on the night of the murder, or weeks later as a result of evidence gatherers moving back and forth in the apartment.

Stefanoni was at a loss to explain how the bra clasp, which had been photographed on the floor near Meredith’s body on November 2, could have found its way under a rug near Meredith’s desk on December 18 without being contaminated more or less by definition. The phrase she came out with was
“È traslato.”
It made its way over there. But the words in Italian also carry the connotation of miracles and religious apparitions. When the Catholic Church talks
about saints appearing in two places at once, or the house of the Virgin Mary flying from the Holy Land across the Adriatic, it uses the same term.

One other strange thing: Amanda and I were on trial for sexual assault, yet Stefanoni confirmed that a stain on Meredith’s pillowcase that looked a lot like semen was never tested in her lab. She made all sorts of excuses about how testing it might compromise the lab’s ability to use the pillowcase for other things. The semen might well be old, she added, the result of Meredith’s consensual sexual relations with Giacomo Silenzi.

This seemed extraordinary to my defense team, so much so that we asked for—and obtained—permission to inspect the pillowcase ourselves and soon discovered signs of semen on one of Guede’s shoe prints. How could the prosecution have missed this? If the semen was fresh when Guede stepped on it, that meant it
must
have been produced on the night of the murder. We thought long and hard about demanding a full analysis, but we did not trust the Polizia Scientifica as far as we could spit and were deathly afraid they might choose to construe that the semen was mine. So we held back.

As it was, Stefanoni’s testimony was an unmitigated disaster for the prosecution, in this and every other respect. We could now make a compelling case for access to the data underlying her DNA results, because the results themselves raised so many questions. Over the next month, my consultants and lawyers prepared a brief to present to the court, knowing that Judge Massei’s response could determine the outcome of the entire trial. If the DNA evidence collapsed, the court would have nothing else to tie me to the crime scene.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, we had to worry about Amanda taking the stand. Her lawyers decided that the best way to refute the stories about her wayward personality was to have the court take a good, hard look at her up close. But my lawyers were deeply concerned she would put her foot in her mouth, in ways that might prove enduringly harmful to both of us. If she deviated even one iota from the version of events we now broadly agreed on, it could mean a life sentence for both of us.

In fact, she performed magnificently. Judge Massei let Patrick’s bulldog lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, have at her first, and Pacelli was so aggressive that Amanda’s lawyers complained he was grilling her like the Inquisition. Pacelli wasted no time in raising the coerced statements Amanda had made during her long night in the Questura—statements the prosecution was barred from using, but he, as a civil lawyer suing for damages, was authorized to bring up.

It could have been a bloodbath, but Amanda pushed back, explaining calmly how she had been pressured both verbally and physically during her interrogation, repeatedly told she was a “stupid liar” and given respite only after she tentatively agreed, at the police officers’ suggestion, that Patrick could have been responsible for the murder.

“Under pressure,” she said, “I imagined lots of different things . . . including the suggestion that she [Meredith] had been raped.”

“Was it the police who suggested that you say this?” Pacelli asked.

“Yes.”

“And to make you say these things, they beat you?”

“Yes.”

Amanda proved equally tenacious with Mignini and Comodi, and they responded by filing a new charge against her—slandering the police—based on her own sworn testimony. This characteristically nasty maneuver demonstrated, to me, that she’d given them nothing else to work with.

I was proud of her. She was soberly dressed, with her hair in a ponytail, spoke clearly and simply (mostly through an interpreter), and held her ground despite being obviously tense and exhausted, with black rings around her eyes. Even the newspapers gave her credit for her assured, unflappable tone.

A fair court, I felt, couldn’t help believing her. But we didn’t know, yet, how fair Judge Massei intended to be.

*  *  *

I lived through the trial in constant anxiety. Soon after it began, I developed such acute digestive problems it was difficult to keep anything down. I lost weight steadily until I was positively skeletal. The doctors prescribed all sorts of things—simethicone (usually given to colicky infants), laxatives, antiflatulence pills—but nothing worked until I hit upon another baby product, soluble barley. It was the only thing that reliably agreed with me.

My life in prison had no consistency because of the constant transports to and from Perugia. When I got there, I would often find excrement and old scraps of food embedded in the cell floor, which required hours to remove. I tried to study, but the second round of exams I took in Verona was simply beyond me and I failed them all. If I couldn’t find a professor to help me, I could not continue.

I also tried to stay focused on the trial itself. But I found myself lapsing into depression, anger, and sheer consternation at my
situation. How much longer would all this go on? It became ever harder to see it ending at all.

“O Almighty God,” I scribbled in my journal one day, “thank You for putting me to the test every day and, as proof of Your omnipotence, sending me idiots who don’t know what they are doing or what they are saying, to remind me I am just a miserable human being compared with You. Sooner or later they will pay for their misdeeds and for the suffering they have caused. May Your name be praised. Amen.”

For several months from the end of 2008 to the spring of 2009, those of us in the protected section enjoyed several hours of relative freedom each day—“office hours,” as they were called—when our cell doors were left open and we could roam the corridors at will. That privilege came to an abrupt end after a fight broke out between Ahmed, the Lebanese who didn’t like me, and a Southern Italian wife-beater named Beppe Fontanelli. There were rumors that Beppe had been talking to the prison authorities—presumably about the rest of us—in a bid to get his sentence reduced. When Ahmed found out, he stormed into Beppe’s cell and lashed out. They’d both been drinking the section’s homemade hooch, which they called “vodka.”