The Mammoth Book of New Csi (11 page)

Sollecito had lied, she said. She was with him on the night of the murder.

“On Thursday, 1 November, I saw Meredith the last time at my house when she left around three or four in the afternoon. Raffaele was with me at the time. We, Raffaele and I, stayed at my house for a little while longer and around five in the evening we left to watch the movie
Amélie
at his house. After the movie I received a message from Patrik [
sic
], for whom I work at the pub ‘Le Chic’. He told me in this message that it wasn’t necessary for me to come into work for the evening because there was no one at my work . . . I told Raffaele that I didn’t have to work and that I could remain at home for the evening. After that I believe we relaxed in his room together, perhaps I checked my email. Perhaps I read or studied or perhaps I made love to Raffaele. In fact, I think I did make love with him.

“However, I admit that this period of time is rather strange because I am not quite sure. I smoked marijuana with him and I might even have fallen asleep. These things I am not sure about and I know they are important to the case and to help myself, but in reality, I don’t think I did much. One thing I do remember is that I took a shower with Raffaele and this might explain how we passed the time. In truth, I do not remember exactly what day it was, but I do remember that we had a shower and we washed ourselves for a long time. He cleaned my ears, he dried and combed my hair.

“One of the things I am sure that definitely happened the night on which Meredith was murdered was that Raffaele and I ate fairly late, I think around eleven in the evening, although I can’t be sure because I didn’t look at the clock. After dinner I noticed there was blood on Raffaele’s hand, but I was under the impression that it was blood from the fish. After we ate Raffaele washed the dishes but the pipes under his sink broke and water flooded the floor. But because he didn’t have a mop I said we could clean it up tomorrow because we (Meredith, Laura, Filomena and I) have a mop at home. I remember it was quite late because we were both very tired (though I can’t say the time).

“The next thing I remember was waking up the morning of Friday, 2 November around 10 a.m. and I took a plastic bag to take back my dirty cloths [
sic
] to go back to my house. It was then that I arrived home alone that I found the door to my house was wide open and this all began . . .”

There was no lawyer present during Knox’s interrogation and no audio tape was produced. In court, the defence managed to get reports of her verbal confession thrown out as evidence. So her memorandum stands as her account of the events. One lawyer compared Knox to the film’s faux-naive heroine of the film
Amélie
, played by Audrey Tautou – had fish for dinner, smoked cannabis and made love.

Later, another piece of Knox’s writing came to the attention of the prosecution. It was a short story, entitled “Baby Brother”, that she had written for her creative writing class at the University of Washington in Seattle. It told of one young woman who had drugged and raped another young woman. One passage read: “She fell on the floor, she felt the blood on her mouth and swallowed it. She couldn’t move her jaw and felt as if someone was moving a razor on the left side of her face.” This could, perhaps, be dismissed as the product of an overactive imagination.

Patrick Lumumba was held for two weeks before being released due to lack of evidence. Witnesses testified that he was working at Le Chic on the night of the murder. Till receipts bore this out. Nevertheless, he lost Le Chic, which was closed as part of the investigation. It remained closed even after he was released and the business collapsed. For recompense he filed a $740,000 civil suit against Knox for defamation. Lumumba claimed that Knox had named him out of “revenge” because he had sacked her from his bar, where she worked on two evenings a week, for hitting on the customers. He said that he had offered the job to Meredith Kercher instead, and Knox had been jealous.

“She wanted to be the queen bee,” he said. “She hated anyone stealing her limelight.”

While it was true that there was some friction between Knox and Kercher over the sexual and hygienic habits of the American – symbolized by the “Rampant Rabbit” vibrator Knox kept in a transparent beauty case in their shared bathroom – witnesses said that the two girls got on. But Lumumba described Knox as irrational, vengeful and insanely jealous.

“I don’t think she’s evil,” he said. “To be evil, you have to have a soul. Amanda doesn’t. She’s empty; dead inside. She’s the ultimate actress, able to switch her emotions on and off in an instant.”

In the end he said he had to sack her for excessive flirting with the customers and replace her with Kercher who was, he said, a “natural charmer”. That is why Knox framed him.

“She was angry and wanted revenge,” he said. “By the end, she hated me.”

Others who knew Knox also said she was a “woman hater”, possibly as the result of her mother having a string of affairs while she was growing up.

Sollecito said that Knox had “an almost non-existent contact with reality”. In a letter from prison to his father, he wrote: “She lived life like a dream, reality didn’t enter. Her only goal was the search for pleasure at all times.”

He continues to deny any involvement in Kercher’s murder, and believes that Knox is innocent, too, writing that even the thought that his girlfriend could be involved is “impossible”.

Meanwhile, the police denied mistreating Knox.

“She was not hit or insulted at any point and . . . she was even taken for breakfast in the morning,” said Napoleone. “She was given water, chamomile tea and breakfast as well, she was given cakes from a vending machine and then taken to the canteen at the police station for something to eat.”

Knox has been charged with slandering the police in a case that will be tried separately.

However, blood and “organic substances” found on tissues recovered from Meredith’s bedroom and the street outside matched none of those already in custody. A fourth suspect was sought. This turned out to be Rudy Guede, a drug dealer from the Côte d’Ivoire. He was the only one who admitted being at the apartment with Meredith on the night of the murder. Guede said he had sex with Meredith but insisted that he was not her “real killer”. On the night of her murder he was seen in a local disco, then he fled and was eventually captured in Germany. Guede told the German police that he met Meredith shortly after 8.30 on the evening of the murder at her apartment and had consensual sex. An Italian man he did not know had followed them and killed her while he was in the bathroom.

Later he told his lawyers that he had not had sex with Meredith. His story was that they had met the night before at a Halloween party, but the people with her said they had not seen the pair talk. He maintained that they had arranged a “romantic” date. She had invited him around for a drink and he had come to the apartment to wait for her. When she turned up, she had “flirted” with him but said they could not have sex as he did not have a condom. Then he went to the bathroom because he had eaten a “spicy kebab” that had given him stomach pains.

He said he failed to hear an intruder come into the house because he had iPod earphones in his ears playing at full volume. He had listened to three songs while in the bathroom, which would have taken about twelve minutes. It was only at the end of the third song had he heard Meredith scream. He emerged from the bathroom to find a man “with brown hair and shorter than me” holding a knife. Her throat had been slashed “by an Italian lad with chestnut hair. We knocked into each other, I was also injured, but I cannot remember clearly the face of that man”.

They briefly fought, and Guede said he suffered a cut to the palm of his right hand while trying to “protect himself”. The assailant then uttered “racist” insults as he left, saying in Italian:
“Trovato negro, trovato colpevole; andiamò”
– “Found black man, found guilty; let’s go.” Guede also said the man was accompanied by a woman whose voice he heard but whose face he could not see.

“Then I ran away, I was scared,” he said. “I am not the one who killed her.”

Guede also claimed that his efforts to save Meredith failed, but he heard her dying words, which were either the initials “A. F.” or the sound “af”. This has been interpreted as an attempt to implicate Raffaele Sollecito. In court, he claimed that it was Knox’s voice he had heard arguing with Kercher in the bedroom over some money that had gone missing. He also said that when he glanced out of the window, he saw the silhouette of Knox leaving the house.

Guede was tried separately because he had agreed to a fast-track trial where he exchanged his right to test the evidence for a more lenient sentence if he was found guilty. Certainly the crime scene evidence was stacked up again him.

DNA matching Guede’s was found both on and in Meredith’s body, and on her tampon. More was found on her blouse and bra, and in sweat left on her handbag. Inside there were traces of blood adding to the theory that theft was the motive. Meredith had withdrawn h200 to pay her rent just days before the murder. The money has not been found. She had also checked her bank balance online via her mobile phone on the night she died.

“The theory we are working on is that the killer rifled through Meredith’s bag and took her rent money,” said the police.

A bloody handprint matching Guede’s was found on a pillow under the body and more DNA was found on a piece of toilet paper at the scene. His fingerprints were all over Kercher’s bedroom and there were even pieces of his hair clenched in the dead girl’s hands. The police said their tests showed that Meredith had not had “consensual sex” with Guede as he claimed, but had probably been held down. There was also evidence of an attempt to hide her body in a cupboard.

A witness has told police that a “coloured man” running from the direction of the house at about 10.30 p.m. barged so violently into her boyfriend that he nearly knocked him over. The police in Perugia painted Guede as a misfit who was “obsessed with foreign girls”. He was recently involved in a stabbing incident in Perugia’s main square, where students and local youngsters smoke cannabis and drink late at night.

The CSI evidence alone was enough to convict him for the sexual assault and murder of Meredith Kercher. He was sentenced to thirty years. The court of appeal upheld the verdict, but reduced his sentence to sixteen years as he was the only one of three people accused who offered their apologies to the Kercher family. A second appeal confirmed the verdict and the sentence.

The crime scene evidence in the prosecution of Knox and Sollecito was hotly disputed. Firstly, the experts who examined Meredith’s body maintained that she had been killed by more than one person due to the location and extent of her injuries. It was then said that she did not fight back as no skin or hair was found under her fingernails.

According to the lead prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, there was a deep hatred between Kercher and Knox because of Kercher’s criticism of Knox’s sexual promiscuity. Knox’s diary listed seven sexual partners, four of whom she had slept with since arriving in Italy – including one she had had sex with on the train to Perugia. A great deal was made of the fact that she called herself “Foxy Knoxy” on her MySpace page, though the nickname came from her prowess on the soccer field rather than her activities in the bedroom.

Kercher, who was reading politics and language at Leeds University, introduced Knox, a gifted, Jesuit-educated student from Seattle, to her English friends. She showed her where to shop and they visited a chocolate festival together. But the relationship soon turned sour. According to friends, Meredith grew more and more exasperated by Knox’s behaviour – she failed to flush the lavatory, kept strumming the same chord on her guitar and brought “strange men” to the apartment. According to the prosecution, it was Knox’s sex life that really drove a wedge between the women.

Using blood-splatter analysis and other forensic techniques, Mignini pieced together what happened on the night of the murder. According to his reconstruction, shortly after Kercher arrived home, Knox turned up with Sollecito and Guede, who was strongly attracted to Knox. Mignini believes that Knox and Kercher then started rowing – either because Kercher was looking for some missing money or was annoyed by Knox bringing Sollecito and Guede to the flat. The row soon escalated. Mignini contends that Knox, Sollecito and Guede, “under the influence of drugs and maybe of alcohol, decided in any case to involve Kercher in a heavy sex game”. The two young men took part “to please Knox, because they were competing to please her”.

Mignini said that Knox grabbed Kercher by the throat and flung her against the cupboard in her bedroom. She then threatened her with a kitchen knife, while Sollecito grabbed Kercher’s hair. Kercher fell between the bed and the cupboard and her jeans were pulled off. Forensic evidence indicated that Guede groped her and Mignini said that Sollecito produced a second knife and ripped off Kercher’s bra.

Realizing that the violence was unstoppable, Kercher gave a desperate scream – a cry that was heard by Nara Capezzali, an elderly neighbour. To shut her up, Knox then stabbed Kercher, inflicting the deepest of three wounds to her neck.

As Kercher lay dying in agony – the autopsy found that it took her several minutes to die as she drowned in her own blood – Knox and Sollecito fled. Guede stayed and tried to stop the blood coming out of Kercher’s neck with a couple of towels. He, too, then fled.

Professor Gianaristide Norelli testified that the multiple lesions on Meredith Kercher’s body were consistent with being held and attacked by more than one person, and interpreted her stab wounds as having been inflicted as threats during a struggle. The wounds, mostly on the side of her neck, were possibly inflicted by two different knives, he said, but noted that one of the stab wounds was compatible with the alleged murder weapon.

The most potentially damning piece of crime scene evidence was the kitchen knife with a 6½ in. blade (16.5 cm) found in Sollecito’s apartment. This was the so-called “double DNA knife”. Tests showed that it had Knox’s DNA on the handle, which could have been left there when she had used it to cook. However, according to Italian forensic police expert Patrizia Stefanoni, Kercher’s DNA was found in a groove on the blade. Witnesses for the defence conceded that the knife is compatible with at least one of the three wounds on Kercher’s neck, but it was too large to have produced the other two. What’s more, it did not match a knife print in blood that was left on Meredith’s white bedsheet. More troubling for the prosecution was that, while the DNA on the handle was inarguably Knox’s, the spot on the blade they attributed to Kercher was so small that Stefanoni could not double-test it as required by standard forensic protocols. She did not test it in front of the defence experts, although they had been offered the opportunity to attend. All the genetic material was used up in the test, so it cannot be repeated. Reviewing the evidence, two experts rejected the work of the police, saying “on that knife there was never enough to get biological material to get DNA profiles”.