The Murder of Meredith Kercher (5 page)

Although Amanda’s mother was not allowed to see her daughter until Saturday, visiting day, she was provided with an apartment to use by the Perugia council – an unusual kindness. ‘The council has provided her with an apartment for the time that she is in the city,’ Paolo Occhiuto said. ‘We feel that it is only fair and civilized to offer her some hospitality while she is in Perugia – it is the human thing to do.’ Interestingly, Perugia is twinned with Seattle, Washington – Amanda Knox’s hometown.

Before the week was out the police publicly announced that they were examining a ‘flick knife’
with an 8.5 centimetre blade which they considered ‘compatible’ with the wounds to Meredith’s throat. They said that they had found the knife in Raffaele’s possession. Investigators also submitted documents to a judge that read, in part, that Amanda Knox ‘has shown an unscrupulous tendency to lie repeatedly to investigators involving the young Sollecito in such a serious affair’.

Amanda, Raffaele, and Lumumba were kept in isolation throughout much of that first week of the investigation, and were not allowed to see family or friends.

‘Ms Knox crumbled under questioning,’ said Arturo De Felice, Perugia’s police chief. ‘The three are now in jail with a chance to reflect on the inconsistencies in their accounts.’

Although Judge Claudia Matteini said that she was postponing her decision on whether there was sufficient evidence to hold the three murder suspects for 24 hours pending further investigation, the police, including De Felice, considered the case closed.

B
y Thursday, November 8, 2007, a number of people back home in the U.S. had begun questioning whether Amanda Knox, characterized, among other things, as a ‘fresh-faced girl’, had the capacity to commit, or even be involved in, a crime as heinous as the one that took Meredith Kercher’s young life, or whether she was in fact a good person who had become swept up in something of which she was not fully cognizant. Most of the people who knew her did not believe that she would have participated in such a crime, yet much of what was being made public painted a picture of a young woman who many people believe may have been leading a double life.

Accusations in the media were inflammatory, to say the least, with screaming headlines such as
The wild raunchy past of Foxy Knoxy, or Inside the twisted world of flatmate suspected of Meredith’s murder.
Some publications stated that police believed that Meredith had actually been held down by Amanda as she was killed in a sex attack that allegedly involved Patrick Lumumba, and one newspaper in particular stated that Amanda had ‘left an imprint of her fingers’ on Meredith’s skin, as stated earlier. Still others speculated that Amanda’s affinity for rock climbing had given her strong hands, sufficient strength to hold Meredith down, or worse. Others even suggested, and later charged, that Raffaele had held her down and that it had been Amanda who had wielded the knife.

If what was being stated in the media was accurate, many wondered how the various media sources had obtained the information. Were reporters embellishing the facts to sell newspapers or scoop the headlines on the evening news? Or was the information in fact being leaked to media sources in conspiratorial fashion to help the police paint an unflattering picture of the young couple, to aid them in moving their case along?

At one point the papers somehow obtained extracts from a letter that Raffaele Sollecito had written to his father – Dr Francesco Sollecito, a prominent urologist – from jail, in which he had expressed his thoughts about Amanda.

‘I thought she was out of this world,’ Raffaele had written. ‘She lived her life like a dream; she was detached from reality… The Amanda I know is an Amanda who lives a carefree life. Her only thought is the pursuit of pleasure at all times.’

The pursuit of pleasure at all times?
What exactly did that mean, or entail? Again, people wondered whether this thought of pursuing pleasure had clouded her judgment the night Meredith was killed.

As the investigation continued, detectives
interviewed
Sophie Purton, 20, a friend of Meredith’s and a fellow student, who told them that Meredith had shared with her information indicating that Amanda had brought a number of men back to the villa. Purton was just one of several student friends of Meredith’s that detectives would interview over the course of the investigation.

‘Meredith told me that Amanda brought men back to their house,’ Purton said. ‘I don’t know how many. Meredith told me in particular about one man who lives in an internet café. Meredith thought this man was very strange.’

In just about any investigation conducted in near fever-pitch intensity, such as this one, detectives would have been all over the lead about the man who lives in an internet café. They would want to know his name, his background, whether he was connected to the victim or the suspects (or both), whether he had an alibi for the night of the murder, and so forth. But the lead, although duly noted, seemed to go by the wayside as investigators seemed certain that they already had in custody those they believed responsible for Meredith’s death. After all, most of the police – including Perugia’s chief of police – already considered the case closed.

Murders are frequently, even typically, solved – at least in part – by determining the motive. Sometimes the motive remains a mystery. In this case, officials ranging from police to forensic pathologists had said they believe Meredith’s murder had been violently sexually motivated. Considering the circumstances surrounding her death, that seems to be a given. Based on the nature and number of the knife wounds to her neck, the case also looked like a torturous, violent sex game that had gone too far and had been played against the will of the victim, and that she had been allowed to die over a lengthy period, so that the identities of those who had attacked Meredith died with her. Indeed, some people close to the investigation speculated later that Meredith may very well have survived the attack had she obtained medical attention, but her killers, knowing that they could not allow Meredith to identify them, could not let that happen.

At various points as the investigation continued the team of detectives re-examined the crime scene video made on the day Meredith’s body was found. It began outdoors, showing the exterior of the hillside cottage that Amanda and Meredith shared with the two other girls. It included shots of Amanda and Raffaele standing nearby, both of them chewing gum and exchanging glances. At one point Amanda could be seen, standing several feet away from Raffaele, mouthing a message to her boyfriend, but it was not
immediately known what she was attempting to convey to him.

The video then moved into Meredith’s bedroom, where disturbing footage was captured of her bloodied face with her eyes open; another shot showed a foot protruding from a duvet on the bloodstained floor. The video also showed Meredith’s bra lying on the bedroom floor, and blood on the bedroom door handle. At one point the duvet was pulled back to reveal Meredith’s bruised and semi-naked body.

The footage also captured the blood in the adjoining bathroom, including blood on one of the tap handles. Forensic investigators were filmed as they examined bloody footprints and fingerprints, including a bloody handprint on the wall in Meredith’s bedroom and a handprint on her pillow. However, only one of Amanda’s fingerprints was found – on a kitchen glass – backing the police theory that the cottage had been cleaned after Meredith’s death.

The video also showed a large rock lying beneath a desk in Filomena Romanelli’s bedroom, which police believed was used to break the window in Meredith’s room in an attempt, they would say, to make the attack appear as if it had been carried out by a burglar.

By this point in the investigation another pathologist, Dr Mauro Bacci, concurred with earlier findings that Meredith’s killers had attempted to strangle her before stabbing her in the throat. There seemed to be some disparity of opinion, however,
regarding the size of the knife used in the slaying. The postmortem examination revealed that the fatal wound to her throat had possibly been caused by a penknife and that judging by the depth of the wound, was likely to have been made by a man.

Meanwhile, the flick knife taken from Raffaele, who admitted he was a knife collector, had been found inside a pocket of his jeans. He told detectives that he always carried the knife with him. Investigators early on had decided that the flick knife was probably not the murder weapon, but a second knife, the type and size of which was not described, was found outside, in the garden of Raffaele’s apartment. Yet another knife was recovered from Raffaele’s kitchen. Forensic testing, including examination for fingerprints and DNA, was carried out on all of the knives, and it was determined that both Meredith and Amanda’s DNA was found on the knife from Raffaele’s kitchen.

When questioned about how this could be possible, Raffaele reportedly said that he had accidentally cut Meredith with the knife when he, Amanda and Meredith had been cooking together at the cottage. When pressed for more information about the knives and why he carried such weapons with him, Raffaele repeated that he was a collector and had a longstanding fascination with knives and weaponry.

When police searched Raffaele’s apartment they had smelt bleach, leading them to believe that he had attempted to clean a knife or knives, as well as other
items. Police also claimed that someone had made a Google search for ‘bleach’ and ‘blood’ on Raffaele’s computer the morning after the murder, and under the circumstances had considered such a search highly suspicious. When combined with the earlier statement from store owner Marco Quintavalle, who had identified Amanda Knox as having come into his store to make purchases on the morning of November 2, and Raffaele’s supposed fascination with extreme sex and the explicit Japanese
manga
comics, the evidence, albeit circumstantial, was becoming more damning.

A footprint made in blood found earlier in Meredith’s bedroom was not helping Raffaele’s case, either. One of a pair of sneakers owned by Raffaele seemed to match the bloody imprint.

Despite the evidence that apparently pointed to Raffaele’s involvement in Meredith’s murder, the Italian and English media, however, seemed intent on focusing their attention on Amanda by insinuating, if not outright stating, that Raffaele was merely an unwitting dupe being unscrupulously ‘played’ by the attractive and manipulative Amanda. Amanda’s family, however, including her sister, Deanna, insisted that Amanda was getting a raw deal and was being unjustly and unfairly vilified. They stated forcibly that she was not at all like she was being portrayed in the media.

‘Amanda is the nicest person in the world,’ Deanna said. ‘She always puts others before herself, and I feel like I am involved with her drama… she was at the
wrong place at the wrong time.’ Deanna told reporters that she and her family had assisted Amanda in finding the cottage in Perugia.

‘When we went to see the place, Amanda fell in love with it right away,’ Deanna said. ‘She especially loved the garden. Everyone thinks Amanda is some kind of praying mantis, but she is not like that. She has the ability to light up a room with her smile. She has a great heart.’

However, there was another side to Amanda that was being explored. While attending the University of Washington, Amanda, the young honors student, had been fined the equivalent of approximately £135 for involvement in a ‘residential disturbance’, the details of which were not revealed. She also wrote on her MySpace page of her German ancestry on her mother’s side of the family in which she jokingly inferred that she was secretly a Nazi. The social networking site also showed a photo of Amanda holding an old machine gun during an apparent visit to Germany with a caption that read,
The Nazi on the inside
. Her friends, however, also stuck by her, insisting that she was not like the person being portrayed. One friend stated that she would be the last person anyone ‘would have thought would get involved in something like this. She wasn’t at all wild or promiscuous.’

Yet, by her own later admission in a diary she kept in jail but which was at one point leaked to the press, Amanda would purportedly mention in her
Spiderman 
2
notebook that she had a sexual history that involved five men. Two men, besides Raffaele, reportedly would tell authorities that they’d had sex with her during the short time that she had been in Italy, but it would be stated later in the London media that they admitted knowing Amanda but denied ever having sex with her. One of the two men, known as Juve, said that he had worked at Le Chic with Lumumba.

‘We were friends,’ Juve said. ‘We met because she also worked at Le Chic. We sometimes danced salsa, but I have a girlfriend and nothing ever happened. I walked her home sometimes at night, but I didn’t have sex with her.’

It was not clear whether the five men mentioned in her diary included the other two men that came forward with the information
and
Raffaele or whether they were
in addition
to the other two men and Raffaele.

Stefano Bonassi, a student who resided in the flat below Amanda and Meredith, told investigators that Amanda had sex with one of his friends. Aside from bolstering their theory regarding Amanda’s purported sexual promiscuity and how that aspect of her life could be related to the case, Bonassi’s statement did not seem to carry much weight with the detectives.

Had the combined fascination of sex between Amanda and Raffaele been the impetus that had propelled forward a sexually-motivated attack against Meredith? Many people, both from within and
without the judicial system, pondered that and a number of other questions needed to be answered.

Her diary also purportedly placed additional suspicion onto Raffaele. In her writings, she questioned whether Raffaele may have crept out during the night and gone to the cottage to rape and kill Meredith and, upon his return, brought the murder weapon into contact with Amanda while she was sleeping.

Another question needing an answer focused on why Amanda had brought Lumumba home to the cottage with her if he ‘scared’ her, as she had claimed. It just did not seem to add up. And if she had in fact been scared of Lumumba, why hadn’t others been? Nearly everyone who spoke to the police or the media portrayed him as a gentle person with a friendly personality. Had she merely made the claim to try to avert suspicion from her and Raffaele? And if so, how much of her statement implicating Lumumba could even be believed?

Later that same day, November 8, Judge Claudia Matteini, after reviewing the details of the case as they were so far known, ruled that there was ‘sufficient evidence’ to keep Amanda, Raffaele, and Patrick Lumumba in custody while the investigation continued. The judge’s decision was based, at least in part, on her being told that Amanda ‘has shown an unscrupulous tendency to lie constantly to investigators,’ and that the police ‘believe the attack
last Thursday night may have followed a session of drug taking.’ The prosecution also brought to the judge’s attention the fact that ‘toxicology tests are not yet complete but they [investigators] have found marijuana plants in the garden of the house.’

Matteini, in deciding which charges to level against the suspects, reportedly also considered the two differing accounts related to the police by Amanda, as well as the fact that police had been monitoring Amanda’s mobile phone. The night before their
pre-dawn
arrests, investigators purportedly heard Amanda telling Raffaele, ‘I cannot do it any more, I cannot bear it.’ It was becoming a question of who was actually at the scene of the murder, who did what afterwards, and now who was protecting whom?