The Murder of Meredith Kercher (15 page)

E
ven though Amanda’s lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, had commenced with a cutting attack against the prose cution’s case, he had broken down in tears during a sometimes poignant closing argument for the defence, as he pleaded for the court to reach a not guilty verdict – the right verdict in his mind – for his client. He had argued, in his own way, that the verdict, whatever it was, would be a reflection on his city, Perugia. In his efforts to sway the jury to his way of thinking, Ghirga had condemned the allegations centred on Amanda’s character, even though he had probably known in his heart that a guilty verdict had been headed their way.

‘You have the opportunity to make the right decision for our city of Perugia,’ he had said. He had also asserted: ‘The deductions made about Amanda outside of the courtroom – I don’t accept them.’

He had argued, to no avail, that female police officers had ‘had it in’ for Amanda, perhaps, he had said, ‘just because she had condoms and a vibrator in her beauty case’ and that his client ‘had suffered as a result of this antagonism.’

Co-defence counsel Carlo Della Vedova had said that he was ‘stunned’ by the attack the prosecution had launched against his client, whom he had characterized as ‘just a young girl awaiting justice and she has done so with great courage and determination’. He had also urged the jury to ‘not be afraid of errors’.

‘The night Amanda was arrested an error was made,’ Della Vedova had said. ‘You have to have a moral certainty – if you have any doubts then you must clear. Remember here the maximum penalty that was requested is life, with isolation – and we are talking of a young girl just 22 years old.’

Of course, things never turned out the way the defence had hoped, resulting in great disappointment for Amanda, Raffaele, and their families. The airline ticket home to Seattle, purchased for Amanda by her parents expecting her acquittal, would not be used. There had been talk of movies, book deals and media appearances for Amanda upon her return – plans that would no longer be carried out, at least not in the foreseeable future. Amanda’s future, as was Raffaele’s, was a return to prison, where they would remain pending the outcome of lengthy appeals that most
likely would not be heard until autumn 2010. There was also the problem of money, at least for Amanda’s appeal. Where would it come from?

Amanda’s family has shelled out a reported $1.2 million or more for her defence at trial. Her parents, who are divorced, have taken out additional mortgages on their respective homes, as has her grandmother, to scrape up enough for the trial defence. Her mother and father have stated publicly that they have maxed out their credit cards, and now will probably have to sell their homes in order to continue with Amanda’s appeal. With the recent financial crisis that has occurred in America, where homeowners have seen the value of their property plummet, selling their homes may not even be an option at the current time. Edda Mellas recently told reporters that she is seriously considering relocating to Italy, along with her current husband, because that would at least cut out the need for, and expense of, flying back and forth across the Atlantic as they have done for the past two years. But such an option raises the question of how she and her husband would earn money living in a foreign country, and even if they could establish residency and obtain permits to work, it would be questionable if they could earn enough to cover their own expenses
and
the expense of Amanda’s appeal. Even if they developed multiple streams of income from self-employment, it seems a daunting challenge awaiting them if they should opt for moving to Italy.

‘I’ll do whatever it takes for Amanda, however long it takes,’ Mellas said after the verdict and sentencing. ‘The good news is she will get out of this. The bad news is it could take several more years.’

Nonetheless, Edda Mellas and her family have never given up their belief that Amanda is innocent, nor can any of them even conceive of the possibility that she may have committed a murder, a particularly heinous one at that, despite the evidence, circumstantial that it may be. Mellas believes that Amanda has told the truth throughout the nightmarish ordeal, notwithstanding the fact that she has accused an innocent man of Meredith’s murder, which placed her at the crime scene, and later recanted. Would a person who is truly innocent do such a thing?

The jury, however, despite the protestations that a travesty of justice was being committed by even putting her on trial, apparently did not buy the reasoning and excuses put forth by her family and other supporters. They had chosen instead to believe the prosecution’s case, the DNA evidence, and Mignini’s characterization of Amanda as being ‘narcissistic, aggressive, manipulative, transgressive, with a tendency to dominate’ and a ‘talented and calculating liar.’ Mignini was also known to refer to her as ‘Luciferina’, or the ‘She-Devil’, which naturally did not sit well with her supporters.

Suddenly, the seven-figure media deals everyone on Amanda’s team had hoped for were gone, vanished by
the simple word, ‘guilty’, as if they had never existed. And now Amanda was back in prison, separated from other prisoners for a time as she was being observed by guards at regular 15-minute intervals out of fear that she might decide to take her own life. Later, nine months of isolation or solitary confinement would come. But she was greeted with warm milk and good wishes by other inmates upon her return to Capanne prison after the verdict and sentence had been announced. Despite the
welcome back
, Amanda was said to have cried a lot after her return to the prison.

‘Amanda cried for a long time before she eventually got to sleep,’ said a source at the prison. ‘Sollecito is in the men’s section and he was a lot calmer and did not cry like Amanda.’

During his first interview since his conviction for murder, Raffaele Sollecito recently characterized Amanda as ‘sweet’, and not capable of killing anyone. His interview was published in
Il Messaggero
.

‘Amanda is a very dear person to me even if we were only together for a short while. She is also a living nightmare. We both find ourselves in a tremendous situation. I am not in love with Amanda, but I feel close to her as she is my companion in misadventure. Amanda is not capable of killing anyone. It’s impossible and absurd. She is such a sweet girl.’

No longer at Capanne prison, Raffaele is now housed in the sex offender’s wing at a prison 70 miles
north of Rome, where he spends a considerable amount of time praying.

‘My faith is what keeps me going,’ he said. ‘I pray all the time to Padre Pio. I have always been close to my faith, it’s not a revelation I have had in these last few terrible months. It’s something I have always had. If I didn’t have my faith, I would have ended it all.’

He claims he has no idea who murdered Meredith, but said recently that his attorneys have told him that Rudy Guede was the guilty party.

‘They showed that in court,’ he said. ‘I trust them and I can’t say anything else because I don’t know anything else.’

He said that throughout the ordeal, from the arrest through the prosecution, he had always believed he would be cleared.

‘I was certain that the verdict would mean the end of a nightmare, but instead it hasn’t been,’ he said. ‘When they read the sentence out, I didn’t understand what was going on. I still don’t know. It still seems impossible and I still don’t know how I was convicted. The hardest part was when I saw one witness say that he saw me with Rudy, Meredith and Amanda on October 30th.’

His attorney, Luca Maori, said that he is concerned about Raffaele’s wellbeing following his conviction and sentence.

‘He is suffering psychologically and I am looking at having him transferred somewhere on medical
grounds,’ Maori said. ‘He is innocent of the murder of poor Meredith and he does not understand why he is in jail. When I saw him the after the verdict he was in a state of confusion and kept asking, “Why am I still here?”’

Maori said that Raffaele was continuing with his studies via ‘virtual reality’ courses at the University of Verona, and that work on his appeal has already begun. Maori is confident that his appeal will be successful and that he will be cleared.

Based on what their lawyers have said, it is believed that both Amanda’s and Raffaele’s appeal will focus on several key issues, including questions over Amanda’s DNA that prosecutors say was found on the handle of the knife and Meredith’s DNA found near the blade’s tip. They will insist that Amanda’s DNA was transferred to the knife while she was cooking, as they have asserted all along, and that Meredith’s DNA was an inferior match. Lawyers will argue that the DNA matched to Meredith could belong to half the population of Italy.

The alleged murder weapon will again be called into question during the appeal. Although the prosecution has contended that the kitchen knife found at Raffaele’s flat was compatible with Meredith’s murder wounds, lawyers will argue – again – that the knife in question failed to match a knife-shaped bloodstain on Meredith’s bedclothes. They will also say that its blade did not match two out of the three wounds to her neck.
How the police obtained the knife will also probably be called into question, as it was selected from several found in Raffaele’s kitchen because it had looked particularly clean. Its cleanliness, and the fact that a strong smell of bleach was present in the flat, caused
police intuition
to kick in and officers seized the knife because they reasoned it might be of interest. Even though it had been tested for the presence of blood, none had been found on it. If Meredith’s DNA found on the knife had not originated from blood, several experts on DNA, including some from the U.S., insist that her DNA most likely came from
cross-contamination
in the laboratory.

‘There exists the real possibility that the low-level partial profile attributed to the knife blade is a result of unintended transfer in the laboratory during sample handling,’ one expert wrote.

Another likely point to be visited in the appeal process is the clasp from Meredith’s bra found at the scene which investigators said had Raffaele’s DNA on it. The rest of the garment had not shown any traces of his DNA even though the police believe that the clasp had been cut from Meredith’s bra during the attack. Furthermore, the bra clasp had turned out to be quite controversial, considering how it was collected as evidence.

For example, a police video shot by investigators on November 3, 2007, clearly shows the bra clasp on the floor of Meredith’s room, not far from where her body
had been found, yet it was not collected as evidence at that time. Instead, it would not be collected as evidence until 45 days later, when police returned to the cottage on December 18, 2007. It was only after it had been collected as evidence that it was tested for DNA, at which time trace amounts of Raffaele’s DNA had shown up on it – along with the DNA of three other unidentified people.

‘Handling and movement of this sample has compromised its probative value,’ said DNA experts in the U.S. ‘The laboratory result for this sample cannot reliably be interpreted to show that the DNA of Raffaele Sollecito was actually on the bra clasp at the time of Meredith Kercher’s murder, and it does not establish how or when this DNA was deposited or transferred.’

There is also the question of how many killers actually participated in Meredith’s murder that will be argued during the appeal process. The prosecution and its witnesses, including forensic pathologists and other forensic experts, contends that more than one person had participated in the murder. They had based their assertions on the size and location of Meredith’s injuries and the fact that there was little or no evidence – such as hair or skin found beneath her fingernails – that she had fought back. It is believed that the defence will argue that Amanda did not know Guede well, that perhaps he was only an acquaintance to her, and that Raffaele had not known him at all. Those facts, say the
defence, remove credibility from the prosecution premise that the three of them had conspired to kill Meredith. They will insist that only one person committed the murder – Guede, or an unknown person.

The so-called confession and the lies Amanda allegedly told about the night of the murder will also come into play. Why had she accused an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba, and placed herself at the crime scene, hearing Meredith’s screams as she was attacked, and later repeated those claims in writing? The defence has indicated that it is prepared to argue that Amanda had spent the night at Raffaele’s flat, as she had originally stated, and that her verbal
confession
had been made under duress and should have been inadmissible at trial because she did not have a lawyer present when she provided that version of the evening’s events to police.

Defence lawyers would also dispute the mixed DNA between Amanda and Meredith that forensic technicians had found inside the cottage by arguing that it is common to find mixed DNA from two individuals who live together inside the same house.

There are likely to be other points that will be included in the appeals, such as the telephone calls Raffaele purportedly made to the police in an effort to answer the question of whether he had called the police before or after the first officers had arrived at the cottage, and those related to Raffaele’s computer.

Amid all of the anger and disbelief expressed by
Amanda’s family and other supporters over the convictions and sentences, the arrogance that Americans are so well known for overseas came to a head when Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell came out and publicly called into question the integrity of the Italian justice system, going so far as to suggest that the convictions had been the result of anti-Americanism and vowing to raise her concerns to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

‘The prosecution did not present enough evidence for an impartial jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Miss Knox was guilty,’ Cantwell said. ‘Italian jurors were allowed to view highly negative news coverage about Miss Knox.’