The Annals of Unsolved Crime (34 page)

Meanwhile, on November 15, the prints in Kercher’s room were identified. They belonged to Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old unemployed gardener from Ivory Coast. His palm print was clearly visible on the bloodstained pillow under Kercher’s hips. His DNA was found on her clothes and inside her vagina. He also wore Nike Outbreak 2 sneakers that were consistent with the bloody footprint on the floor. In addition, he also fit the description of the man seen running down the street at 10:30 p.m. He also had knowledge of the cottage. He had met the Italian men living downstairs in the cottage in mid-October while playing basketball, and in the week of the murder he went to the apartment to watch an auto race and smoke hash with them. On that occasion, he met both Kercher and Knox.

This hard evidence unambiguously established that Guede
was in Kercher’s room, had sexual contact with her, and left the room after her blood was spilled. According to witnesses, he also had been involved in other recent breakins in Perugia and Milan. In September 2007, a witness said that Guede had broken into his home in Perugia (through a window) at 6:00 a.m. on the morning after the murder, brandished a knife, and stole his credit cards. On October 13, he apparently broke into a lawyer’s office in Perugia through a second-story window and took a laptop and cell phone (which were later found in his backpack). Less than one week before the murder, he had been briefly detained by police in Milan for breaking into a nursery and stealing an eleven-inch kitchen knife.

Guede, who had fled to Germany, was extradited. But by that time Amanda Knox had become such a focus of the media’s attention, and the putative sex games by an angel-faced killer such a cornerstone of the story, that the prosecutors, even after releasing Patrick Lumumba, were not about to abandon their group murder theory.

To maintain his theory, chief prosecutor Giuliano Mignini posited a conspiracy by teaming up the two insiders, Knox and Sollecito, with the outside burglar, Guede. Mignini had previously achieved considerable notoriety in Italy in the 2001 “Monster of Florence” case when he unsuccessfully attempted to attribute the suicide of a Perugian doctor to a secret satanic cult. Now, he proposed a similar satanic scenario in which Guede, Sollecito, and Knox went to the cottage together and then attempted to force Kercher to have sex with them. When she refused, Guede and Sollecito took turns molesting her. Knox, who he described as a “she-devil,” then stabbed her to death.

One stumbling block was the total absence of evidence that Guede was with either Knox or Sollecito, or that he ever had ever met Sollecito. While two witnesses had seen Guede run away, no one had seen Knox or Sollecito with him at the cottage. Nor did Guede claim that either Knox or Sollecito were
with him. His story was that Kercher herself had invited him to the cottage at about 9:00 p.m. They then had consensual sexual contact, but, lacking a condom, he left the room and went to the bathroom. When he emerged, he saw an unknown man run out of the cottage, and he found Meredith bleeding. So he ran away. In light of the abundance of evidence against Guede, he was convicted of murder in a separate “fast track” trial. The investigation had trouble even placing Sollecito in the cottage. The police failed to find a single print in the room that was Sollecito’s or, for that matter, Knox’s. Since Guede’s prints were found in the room, it was difficult to explain he had washed them away. In addition, the speculation that the bloody footprint came from Sollecito’s Nike proved wrong. It was from Guede’s Nike sneaker. So up until mid-December 2007, the police and prosecutors could not place either Knox or Sollecito at the murder scene. This gap was bridged by a belated DNA analysis of Kercher’s bra clasp (which had accidently remained at the crime scene for forty-six days). DNA on it matched Sollecito’s.

DNA analysis also identified both Knox’s and Kercher’s DNA on a kitchen knife in a cutlery drawer in Sollecito’s home. No blood was found on it, and, it later developed, the blade was too long to be the murder weapon (which was never found). Even so, Knox said she never removed the knife from Sollecito’s home, nor did Kercher ever visit Sollecito’s home. So the presence of her DNA on it suggested that Sollecito took it to the cottage on the night of the murder.

In the trial, which began January 16, 2009, the prosecutor painted a gory picture of a “she-devil” who tortured her roommate with a knife while Sollecito and Guede sexually abused her, and who, when the orgy ended, slashed her throat and staged a burglary to dupe the police. This story was based largely on the DNA evidence of Sollecito’s presence at the scene. Both Knox and Sollecito were convicted of both murder
and sexual violence. In December 2009, Knox was sentenced to twenty-six years’ imprisonment, and Sollecito to twenty-five years’ imprisonment.

The case was then appealed, and an independent panel of forensic experts was appointed to review the crucial DNA evidence. It found in its 145-page report that the collection of the DNA evidence linking Sollecito to the crime scene had been egregiously flawed. Not only was the DNA testimony not consistent with the actual lab reports, but a video showed that the key items were picked up with a dirty glove that might have transferred DNA samples from the suspects to them. So cross-contamination was possible. That left no credible evidence, and on October 3, 2011, the court threw out the murder and sexual violence convictions of Sollecito and Knox. Both were immediately released from prison, and, in a happy ending, Knox flew back to America and got a book contract.

There are still three theories about the murder. First, the inside-job theory advocated by the prosecutors, who are appealing the acquittal. Second, the lone-burglar theory that holds that Rudy Guede broke into the cottage and encountered and killed Kercher. Third, the two-burglar theory, based on an alleged jailhouse confession that Guede made to a fellow prisoner (who testified at the appeals hearing).

My assessment is that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are both innocent of the murder. The police investigation was wedded from the outset to the wrong narrative. It assumed that the crime scene had been staged to look like a burglary and so focused on the only available insider, Knox. In doing so, the police neglected eyewitness sightings of a possible black burglar running from the direction of the house at the approximate time of the crime. If they had investigated that obvious lead, it would have quickly led them to Rudy Guede, who the other residents in the house could identify. His fingerprints, palm prints, sneaker print, and DNA would have established him beyond
a doubt as a person at the bloody scene, and he likely would have been arrested before he had a chance to flee to Germany.

Guede had the opportunity, means, and motive to commit the crime alone. He had been to the cottage earlier that week to watch a sports event, so he could have cased it for a later burglary when its residents went on holiday over the long November 1 weekend. He was experienced in such jobs, since he had broken into three other places that fall. There were a number of ways that he could have entered the cottage. It is possible that, with the help of a box, he climbed through the broken window. He could also have easily scaled the grate in the rear of the cottage and entered through the empty basement apartment (where Kercher had agreed to water the Cannabis plants). Alternatively, he could have gone in through a lower window. Afterward, he might have smashed the window from the inside to create an expedient means of exit, especially if he was in a panic. His DNA was found in Kercher’s pocketbook and credit cards and 300 euros were missing, which he likely took. And, with a small pocketknife, he had the means to force Kercher to the floor and stab her. In short, there was no evidence at the murder scene to show that this was not the work of a single home invader.

The appeals court stated that the murder and sexual-violence charges against Knox and were “not corroborated by any objective element of evidence.” The lesson here is that denying a suspect a lawyer can result in egregious injustice. If Amanda Knox had been provided with a lawyer, she would not have been allowed to succumb to police pressure and give untrue statements that resulted in her arrest, as well as the arrest of two other innocent people. Meanwhile, forensic evidence would have unambiguously identified the perpetrator as Rudy Guede. There would then be no need for a prosecutor to conjure up an orgy out of thin air.

EPILOGUE
THE ENDURING MYSTERY
OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

The jigsaw puzzle surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has taken me more than four decades to understand. I began my effort in 1965 at a time when it was generally believed that the Warren Commission had left no stone unturned in arriving at its conclusion that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. Then one of the Commission’s lawyers, J. Wesley Liebeler, turned over to me two file cases of records, which included work logs and internal memoranda documenting the Commission’s work, as well as FBI reports furnished to the Commission, which demonstrated the Commission’s investigation was anything but exhaustive. In its rush to issue its report before the 1964 election, the commission left many areas not fully investigated, including Oswald’s possible involvement with foreign intelligence services—particularly those of Cuba and the Soviet Union.

In 1974 the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church, began releasing information about CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, which led me to investigate U.S. entanglements with the Cuban intelligence service shortly before JFK was assassinated. Further information was released through Freedom of Information requests, including ones that I had filed, and, finally, on June 23,
1998, the CIA released its own inspector general’s report on these assassination conspiracies. There were also defectors from Castro’s intelligence service, some of whom are interviewed in Wilfried Huismann and Gus Russo’s 2006 documentary
Rendezvous With Death
, who furnished another key piece of the puzzle. As a result, after nearly fifty years, we now know that there were two different assassins at work on November 22, 1963. This is the story of their deadly dance—and how it tragically ended.

I. THE TARGETS

Fidel Castro Ruz was born out of wedlock in rural Cuba on August 13, 1926, the son of a wealthy landowner. After attending a Jesuit-run college, he studied law at the University of Havana, where he became deeply involved in revolutionary movements. He organized revolutionary activists both in Cuba and abroad, and in the 1950s he participated himself in armed attacks on government forces in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. He was captured during his attempt to seize the Moncada Barracks outside of Havana in 1953 and served a year in prison. Then, in 1955, he went from Cuba to Mexico. There he, along with his younger brother Raul and Che Guevara, an Argentinian revolutionary, formed a group aimed at overthrowing the American-backed dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. It was called the “26 of July Movement.”

On November 15, 1956, Castro and eighty-one of his followers armed with rifles, pistols, and three machine guns, sailed on a small yacht named
Granma
from Tuxplan, Mexico, to Playa Las Coloradas in eastern Cuba. They landed in a mangrove swamp, and most of his force was killed or captured by Batista’s army. But Castro, along with nineteen others, survived, escaping into the thickly forested Sierra Maestra mountains.
Rebuilding his force, Castro waged a successful two-year guerrilla war, and on New Year’s Eve in 1958, Batista fled Cuba.

Castro then proceeded to appoint avowed Marxists to key cabinet posts and made Che Guevara the governor of the Central Bank and then the minister of industries. Next, with help from the Soviet Union’s KGB, he organized a foreign-intelligence service, the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI, which his brother Raul staffed personally with his close confederates. Even though the Cold War was raging between the United States and the USSR, Castro agreed to provide the USSR with sugar in return for crude oil. He added insult to injury by ordering American companies in Cuba to refine the Soviet crude. When they refused, he nationalized them, and then most other U.S.-owned assets in Cuba. Not only did America retaliate with an embargo on trade with Cuba, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower secretly authorized the CIA to covertly overthrow Castro in 1960.

Castro was now engaged in a life and death covert war with the United States. At stake was not only the survival of his regime in Cuba—but, as he came to realize, his own life.

When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, he was only forty-three, and would shortly become America’s second-youngest president—only Theodore Roosevelt had been younger—and the first president born in the twentieth century. He brought with him to the White House a thirty-one-year-old wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, a socially prominent photographer known to the world as “Jackie,” as well as a three-year-old daughter, Caroline, and an infant son, John. JFK also brought to Washington so many men of distinction, including thought-provoking academics from his alma mater, Harvard, that journalists began describing his administration as “Camelot.”

Behind the Camelot aura that permeated the public’s
perception lay a vexing problem: Castro had installed a Marxist government in Cuba. No sooner had JFK been inaugurated in January 1961 than he was briefed by his national security adviser on the urgent need to unseat the regime in Havana. In the assessment made by U.S. intelligence, with every day that passed Castro was moving closer to America’s Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, and it was only a matter of months before Castro gave it military and intelligence-gathering outposts ninety miles from Florida. The CIA had already been authorized by JFK’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to bring about regime change in Cuba. The plan involved using a 1,400-man force of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala for an invasion of a remote area of Cuba, which would be followed by air strikes by U.S. bombers. A CIA-backed “United Revolutionary Front” in Miami would then establish, in the territory held by Cuban exiles, a “government” that the U.S. immediately would recognize. The idea was that this government could call for U.S. help. JFK approved a modified version of the plan, and on April 17, 1961, a brigade of some 1,300 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on the island’s southern coast. But JFK decided against providing U.S. air support, which allowed Castro’s army to quickly encircle the brigade. Ninety exiles were killed and the other 1,200 surrendered and were held for ransom, requiring a humiliated Kennedy Administration to negotiate a deal for their release. Even though JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was able to persuade U.S. pharmaceutical companies to give Castro $53 million worth of medicine and baby food in exchange for the prisoners, the invasion was a clear defeat for JFK.