Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (19 page)

His reassurance struck me as hollow, as if he were just trying to postpone my inevitable anguish. I thought my head would explode from anxiety. I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed, and now I might be infected with HIV?

Argirò was standing a foot behind me when I got the news. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you slept with lots of people,” he chided.

I spun around. “I didn’t have sex with anyone who had AIDS,” I snapped, though it was possible that one of the men I’d hooked up with, or even Raffaele, was HIV-positive.

“You should think about who you slept with and who you got it from.”

Maybe he was trying to comfort me or to make a joke, or maybe he saw an opening he thought he could use to his advantage. Whatever the reason, as we were walking back upstairs to my cell, Argirò said, “Don’t worry. I’d still have sex with you right now. Promise me you’ll have sex with me.”

I was too undone to react.

Sitting on my bed, I wondered if I would die in prison. I didn’t know then that people live with HIV for a long time due to improved meds.
Please, please, let it be a mistake. Please let it be wrong. I don’t want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to be able to grow old. I want my time. I want my life.

I didn’t know how to tell Mom or Dad. I desperately wanted to talk to them, but their next visit wasn’t for two more days. I miserably reasoned that I’d had such a fortunate life that all my bad luck was catching up to me now.

I was aware that there were consequences to being careless about sex. I thought I’d been careful enough. But what had I really known about my sexual partners? Why hadn’t I seriously considered the risk? I’d been trapped by prison; now I felt trapped by my own body, trapped by my stupidity, trapped because bad things happened to people for no reason, with no way of anticipating them. Thinking about the life I might have had instead of the one I was living made me understand for the first time how people in mourning tear their clothes or rip out handfuls of hair. I wanted to undo everything—to be out of my body, out of this prison, out of this life that had caved in on me. I buried my face in my pillow so no one could hear me and wailed.

So much had happened that I didn’t know how to handle emotionally or practically: Meredith’s death; my interrogation, arrest, and imprisonment; HIV. Any one of them would have been a hard burden for a twenty-year-old. To have them all at once was devastating. Every problem put before me was foreign, and the tools I had—stubbornness, optimism, the support of my family, and the certainty of my innocence—weren’t nearly enough for the situation.

Part of me couldn’t believe I really had HIV. Even though the media were portraying me as a whore, I knew I wasn’t one. It seemed too ironic, too overwhelming that all this was happening at once.
Just breathe. Write down that you’re freaking out and then stop. You’re not going to make anything better by going crazy over it. Relax. The doctor said they don’t know that you have it for sure.

I got out my diary to think this over rationally, imagining who could have infected me, replaying my sexual experiences in my mind to see where I could have slipped up. I wondered if a condom had broken, and if so, whose. If it had, did he know?

I’d had sex with seven guys—four in Seattle and three in Italy. I tried to be logical, writing down the name of each person I’d slept with and the protection we’d used.

Writing made me feel a little better. I knew I needed to get out of prison and get checked by someone I trusted before I started thinking and acting as if my life were over. I forced myself not to anticipate the worst.

That Saturday, I told my parents what the doctor had said. My mom started crying immediately. “But I haven’t had unprotected sex,” I said, trying to reassure her. “I’m sure it’s going to be fine.”

My dad was skeptical. He asked, “Do you even think they’re telling you the truth?”

That possibility hadn’t occurred to me. But when I told them, Luciano and Carlo seconded that idea. “It could be a ploy by the prosecution to scare you into an even more vulnerable emotional state so they can take advantage of you,” Carlo said. “You need to stay alert, Amanda, and don’t let anyone bully you.”

In the end, I don’t know if they made up the HIV diagnosis. It wasn’t the doctor who said I should think about whom I’d had sex with, but Argirò. It might have been that the test was faulty, or Argirò could have put the medical staff up to it so he could ask me questions and pass the answers along to the police.

It was nearly two months before the doctors let me know that the HIV test had come out negative. When they did, I thought,
Oh, thank God!
But I was still seeing the doctors twice a day, and it had been a long time since anyone had even brought it up. The possibility no longer scared me as much, and I’d begun to assume everything was okay.

A week after I got the original HIV news, a guard took me down to the offices on the main floor, where three police officers were waiting for me. “We have a warrant to search your cell,” they said. “We’ll give you a five-minute head start to destroy whatever you’d like, or you can let us go up immediately.”

“You can come now and look through whatever you want,” I said.

I wondered what they were hoping to find. Did they want to search my clothing for traces of Meredith’s blood? I felt almost smug, because I knew they wouldn’t find anything incriminating, and I hoped it might convince them that I truly had nothing to hide.

The cops spread out all my papers and documents on my bed. They confiscated anything with my handwriting on it—my grammar exercises, unfinished letters, notes, my prison diary—and left everything else. That’s when I understood. They wanted to see what I was thinking.

The physical chaos they left behind was nothing compared to the chaos in my head. They’d penetrated my innermost space, demonstrating to me that nothing was safe from them.

A few months after that, they released my prison journal to the media, where instead of reporting that I’d had seven lovers altogether, some newspapers wrote that Foxy Knoxy had slept with seven men in her six weeks in Perugia.

Chapter 19

November 18–29, 2007

I
was stunned one morning when I looked up at the TV and noticed a breaking news report. There was now a fourth suspect, and an international manhunt for him had been launched.

The police didn’t say who the suspect was or how this person fit into the murder scenario they’d imagined, only that they’d found a bloody handprint on Meredith’s pillowcase that wasn’t mine, Patrick’s, or Raffaele’s.

The news rattled me, but it also gave me hope. Maybe this meant the police hadn’t completely given up trying to find the truth. For the next twenty-four hours I was consumed by the question
Who is this unnamed person?

I, and everyone else watching TV, found out the next day. His name was Rudy Guede. The police had his fingerprints on file because he was an immigrant with a green card.

The name didn’t click until I saw his mug shot.

Oh my God, it’s him.

I thought back to November 5, when I was sitting in the hall at the
questura
, assuming I was just waiting for Raffaele, and talking to the silver-haired cop. As I’d been doing for days, I was trying to recall all the men who had ever visited our villa, when I suddenly remembered one of Giacomo and Marco’s friends. It had annoyed me that I couldn’t remember his name. “I think he’s South African,” I told the detective. “All I know is that he played basketball with the guys downstairs. They introduced him to Meredith and me in Piazza IV Novembre in mid-October. We all walked to the villa together, and then Meredith and I went to their apartment for a few minutes.”

I’d seen Guede just one time after that. He’d shown up at Le Chic, and I had taken his drink order. Those few words were the only ones we ever exchanged.

I
was still living in semi-isolation, meaning that I wasn’t allowed to participate in group activities or speak to other prisoners. But when I’d asked to be moved from Gufa’s cell, I’d really hoped that meant they would put me by myself again. Instead I’d been moved into a cell with three older women. And just as with Gufa, the TV in Cell No. 10 was on all the time.

The only difference was that with the announcement about Guede, now I couldn’t watch the news enough.

I learned that Guede was twenty and originally from Ivory Coast. He’d been abandoned by his parents and taken in by a rich Perugian family who treated him like a son. He was a talented basketball player who’d made a lot of friends on the court. But over time, he’d been more inclined to loaf than to work, and his surrogate family disowned him. He’d lost his job in the fall of 2007, before Meredith and I met him. Guede had been caught breaking into offices and homes and stealing electronics and cash.

Another report said that in mid-October he’d thrown a large rock through a window at a Perugian law office to get inside.
A broken window and a rock on the floor? Exactly what we’d found in Filomena’s
room
. He’d stolen a laptop and a cell phone from the firm.

I couldn’t believe that none of us had picked up on how shady Guede was. Just a few days before Meredith was killed, the director of a Milan kindergarten arrived in the morning and caught Guede coming out of her office. When the police got there, they found one of the kindergarten’s kitchen knives in his backpack, along with the laptop from the law office, a set of keys, a woman’s gold watch, and a small hammer he’d used to break glass. The police were on the verge of arresting him for that crime but released him without giving a reason. I couldn’t understand how they’d let Guede slip through their fingers. All I could think was that if he’d been put behind bars then, Meredith would still be alive.

It didn’t make sense to me that they had let him go but had leapt to arrest me.

I’d met but didn’t know Rudy Guede. I didn’t know if he was capable of murder. I couldn’t imagine why he might do something so brutal. But I believed that he was guilty, that the evidence could only be interpreted one way. Finally the police could stop using me as the scapegoat for some phantom killer whom no one could name—a phantom whose place I’d been filling.

For nearly three weeks I’d been unable to think of anyone, however distant, who could have stabbed Meredith to death. Now there was a face and a name. It was awful, but it was a relief.

Still, I was surprised it was Guede who had been named, because the two times I’d met him were under such ordinary circumstances. There was nothing distinguishable about him. He’d seemed interchangeable with almost every guy I’d met in Perugia—confident, bordering on arrogant. Not threatening. Not like a down-and-out thief. Not even odd.

The next day the same police officer who’d mocked my reaction to the DNA evidence the prosecution claimed was found on the knife brought documents to Capanne for me to sign. This happened regularly during the investigation phase—they had to notify me whenever they confiscated anything from the villa, analyzed forensic evidence that pertained to me, or, unbelievably, were billing me for investigative expenses. I became used to the bureaucracy. But I was never prepared for the cop’s cruelty. He was talking so fast that I caught only one word: “Rudy.”

“Rudy?” I asked, repeating his name to make sure I’d heard correctly. “You mean the guy who police are calling ‘the fourth person’?”

“Yes, Rudy. You know him?”

“Vaguely,” I answered, shrugging.

“Vaguely, huh? We’ll see what he says about that,” the cop said.

I didn’t respond but tried to act confident so he wouldn’t think he was getting to me. I was thinking,
Guede won’t have anything to say about me
.
He doesn’t know me.

On November 20, German police found Guede in Germany, where he’d fled on November 3, the day after Meredith’s body was discovered. He was riding a train without a ticket when he was picked up and taken into custody as a murder suspect.

Within hours, I learned that, before his arrest, he told a friend over Skype, as Perugian detectives listened in, that he’d been at the villa the night of the murder. “I was in the bathroom when it happened,” he said. “I tried to intervene, but I wasn’t able. Amanda has nothing to do with this . . . I fought with a male, and she wasn’t there.” Neither was Patrick, he said. “The guy was Italian, because we insulted each other and he didn’t have a foreign accent.”

When his friend asked if it was Raffaele, “the one from TV,” Guede said, “I think so, but I’m not sure.”

After his arrest, Guede told German police that Meredith had invited him to meet her at the villa, and that they’d been fooling around when he felt sick from a kabob he’d eaten earlier. He said he was in the bathroom listening to his iPod when he heard Meredith scream. A brown-haired Italian man he couldn’t identify committed the murder. Guede had tried to help Meredith as she was dying, staunching the blood with towels, but fled when he realized there was nothing he could do. He said he was afraid that because he was black, he’d be condemned for a crime he hadn’t committed.

Guede apparently tried to establish an alibi by changing clothes and heading to a downtown dance club hours after the murder. His lawyers later said he’d been so frightened by the murder that he’d gone there to calm himself down. He went to Domus again the next night—attracting attention when he continued dancing during a moment of silence for Meredith. He left town the following day. Carlo and Luciano told me he probably got spooked by the media’s attention to the case and decided it was best to leave and take his bloody clothes and shoes with him. They guessed that Guede had probably been in the middle of robbing the villa when Meredith came home, and he had attacked her. As soon as they suggested this scenario, it made perfect sense to me. I hadn’t been able to put all those pieces together before. Meredith’s murder had been so horrific, and my arrest too absurd, it had been impossible for me to think logically about it.

I saw it as a momentary problem that Guede was fingering Raffaele, but this was huge! Guede had backed up my alibi: I hadn’t been at the villa. And since I hadn’t been there, since I’d been at Raffaele’s apartment, Raffaele would be cleared, too. We would both be freed.

Seeing how the prosecution treated Patrick in the two weeks since his arrest should have given me insight into how they worked. My lawyers told me it had been widely reported the week before that Patrick had cash register receipts and multiple witnesses vouching for his whereabouts on the night of November 1. A Swiss professor had testified that he’d been at Le Chic with Patrick that night from 8
P.M.
to 10
P.M.
But even though Patrick had an ironclad alibi and there was no evidence to prove that he’d been at the villa, much less in Meredith’s bedroom at the time of the murder, the police couldn’t bear to admit they were wrong.

Patrick went free the day Guede was arrested. Timing his release to coincide with Guede’s arrest, the prosecution diverted attention from their mistake. They let him go only when they had Guede to take his place.

Watching the footage of Patrick walking out of prison and standing with his wife and baby, I flashed back to the awful hours in the middle of the night on November 6 when I was being interrogated: I was weak and terrified that the police would carry out their threats to put me in prison for thirty years, so I broke down and spoke the words they convinced me to say. I said, “Patrick—it was Patrick.”

I dreamed about the interrogation almost every night during these early days in prison. I would be back in the crowded, close interrogation room, feeling the tension, hearing the officers yelling, reliving the primal panic. I’d wake up sweating, my heart banging. Nothing in my life up to then had compared to that experience. What had happened to me that night? How I could I ever have named Patrick?

As I watched his release, I felt an enormous emotional burden lift from my heart. Justice had been done. The police had cleared him of any wrongdoing. He would no longer have to suffer from my irrational mistake. I clapped my hands together almost gleefully.

Then I immediately felt embarrassed, self-conscious that, in one way or another, the few prisoners and guards who happened to see this would misread my actions as selfish. I didn’t know whether the guards were reporting directly to the prosecution, but I knew that everyone thought I was a liar and that anything I said and did would be viewed from that angle—that I was trying to make people think I was innocent by acting happy for Patrick. The police would almost certainly think this was one more instance of Amanda Knox behaving inappropriately—one more example of me as a manipulative, depraved person.

Even if my cellmates didn’t see my reaction as putting on an act, I didn’t want anyone to know what I was actually thinking and feeling. I was protective of myself in that environment. I felt vulnerable and scared, and I didn’t want anyone to see that, even if that’s how I really felt.

In truth, I did see Patrick’s release as my vindication. By writing my two postinterrogation statements—my
memoriali
—I had tried to convince the police that Patrick was not Meredith’s murderer. And now the prosecution knew that when I retracted my declarations from that night, I was telling the truth: Patrick
was
innocent. Raffaele and I
had
been together at his apartment the whole time.

O
bviously Mom, Dad, and I wouldn’t make it to Seattle for Thanksgiving—which was just two days away—but I did think I would get out of prison and be allowed to stay with my parents while the investigation continued. Christmas in Seattle seemed likely.

The prosecution would understand how, under pressure during my interrogation, I had pictured a scene that wasn’t true. I had faith that my lawyers could prove the knife with Meredith’s and my DNA was a mistake. My confidence was bolstered by Guede’s arrest. I didn’t know him. If he was Meredith’s murderer, I was sure people would see that Raffaele and I had had nothing to do with it.

Soon I’d be cleared as a suspect.

When Carlo and Luciano came for their next scheduled meeting I was happier than I’d been since before Meredith’s murder. We sat in the office where we met each week. Luciano held my hand while Carlo said, “The prosecution has no intention of releasing you, Amanda. They’re just subbing Guede in for Patrick.”

The prosecution could have redeemed themselves. Instead, they held on to Raffaele and me as their trophies.

I learned that when he signed the warrant for Patrick’s release, Giuliano Mignini said that I’d named Patrick to cover up for Guede. It was his way of saying that the police had been justified in their arrest of three people and that any confusion over
which
three people was my fault. I was made out to be a psychotic killer capable of manipulating the police until my lies, and the law, had caught up with me.

Patrick gave only one interview condemning the police for his unfounded arrest before his lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, advised him to side with the prosecution, who had taken him away in handcuffs, humiliating him in front of his family, in the intimate hours of the morning. After that, he announced that he would never forgive me for what I had done, that I’d ruined him financially and emotionally. He talked about my behavior in his bar, saying that he’d fired me for flirting with his customers. He called me “a lion,” “a liar,” and “a racist.”

The truth is that he had hired me not just to serve cocktails but to bring in customers. He had cut back on my days because I was a mediocre waitress and not enough of a flirt to add to his bottom line. Then, after Meredith’s murder, I quit because I was afraid to be out alone at night.

I absolutely understood why he was angry with me. I’d put his reputation, his livelihood, and possibly even his life at risk. I felt sick with guilt. I thought he deserved an explanation and an apology from me. When I asked my lawyers if it would be okay for me to write him, they shook their heads no. “I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that anymore,” Carlo explained. “Patrick’s lawyer will hand over anything you send Patrick to the press.”