Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (31 page)

This introduced the most surreal moment of my nightmarish trial: a 3-D computer-generated animation with avatars representing me, Raffaele, Rudy Guede, and Meredith.

Carlo and Luciano were apoplectic. They shouted their objections, insisting that the film was unnecessary and inflammatory.

Judge Massei allowed it. I didn’t watch it, but my lawyers said the avatar of me was dressed in a striped shirt like one I often wore to court. Raffaele, Guede, and I were depicted sneering. Meredith’s avatar had an expression of horror and pain. The cartoon used real crime scene photos to show the blood splatters in Meredith’s room.

The animation dramatized the prosecution’s hypothesis, showing Raffaele and me leaving his apartment and sitting at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana, me arguing with Meredith at the house, the three of us attacking her.

I kept my head down, my eyes on the table. My stomach was churning. The courtroom was suddenly hot. I was boiling with anger and near tears.
How are they allowed to make up what happened?
I tried to block out Comodi’s voice as she narrated the imagined event.

The cartoon couldn’t be entered as evidence, so no one outside the courtroom saw it. But the prosecution had achieved their goal. They’d planted an image in the minds of the judges and jury.

When the lights came up, Comodi closed with a straightforward request: Give Amanda and Raffaele life imprisonment.

After Comodi came Patrick’s civil attorney, Carlo Pacelli. Unlike Patrick, whose testimony had been fair, Pacelli trashed me mercilessly.

“Who is Amanda Knox? The Knox who is unscrupulous in lying, in slandering; beautiful, intelligent, cunning, and crafty is above all how she appears before you, and how she appeared before you during more than forty hearings: very feminine, cute, enchanting, a white face, blue eyes, simple, sweet, naïve, fresh-faced, with a family at her back and parents who, even if separated, are loving and affectionate.

“Is Amanda Knox the daughter who everyone would want? The friend who everyone would like to meet? Yes. Great. The defense counselor says that Amanda is exactly as you see her today, in this courtroom, as she appears. She’s exactly this. But the defendant that you see, Your Honors, is a student transformed by a long prison detention . . . And so the question that arises . . . who was Amanda Knox on the first of November?”

Then he descended on me as if I were a witch on trial in the Middle Ages.

“So who is Amanda Knox? In my opinion, within her resides a double soul—the angelic and compassionate, gentle and naïve one, of Saint Maria Goretti, and the satanic, diabolic Luciferina, who was brought to engage in extreme, borderline acts and to adopt dissolute behavior. This last was the Amanda of November 1, 2007 . . . It must be spelled out clearly: Amanda was a girl who was clean on the outside because she was dirty within, spirit and soul . . .”

Thank God Italy doesn’t believe in burning people at the stake anymore! Pacelli is piggybacking off the prosecution’s baseless accusations! How can he live with himself? How can any of them?

The Kerchers’ civil attorney, Francesco Maresca, emphasized the horror that had been inflicted on Meredith—by a group. He knew this because had it been only one attacker, there’s no doubt that Meredith, who knew karate, would have defended herself.

How can any girl defend herself against a guy armed with a knife?

“It’s a very long list of lesions: to the face, neck, hands, forearms, thighs. Try to understand the terror, the fear, the pain this girl suffered in the last seconds of her life in the face of the multiple aggression, an aggression brought about by more than one person.”

Maresca didn’t mention that the prosecution’s own coroner—the only person who’d analyzed Meredith’s body—had said it was impossible to determine whether one or more people attacked Meredith.

Maresca, like Mignini, criticized any media that had questioned his work. But what most enraged me was the false contrast he set up between the Kerchers and my family.

“You’ll remember Meredith’s family for their absolute composure. They taught the world the elegance of silence. We’ve never heard them on the television . . . in the newspapers. They’ve never given an interview. There’s an abysmal difference between them and what has been defined as the Knox Clan and the Sollecito Clan, which give interviews on national television and in magazines every day.”

Thank God for my “clan,”
I thought.
They’re the only ones on my side.

It was wrong of Maresca to compare my family to Meredith’s. I knew that the Kerchers were loving parents and good people because of the way Meredith had talked about them. She knew the same about mine. One of the things that connected us was that we were both close to our families.
Meredith’s family is grieving, but my family knows that I’m not the cause of the Kerchers’ grief.
Just as Meredith’s family came to Perugia to seek justice for their daughter, mine have come to seek justice for me. Both families are good. Both families are doing the best they can, the best way they know how.

F
inally it was our turn.

Thank God we’ve arrived in friendly territory!
I thought.

I was fed up with being the target. Now I was bound by anxiety. The end was so close! Home was on the horizon.

Raffaele’s lawyers, Luca Maori and Giulia Bongiorno, worked to put distance between their client and Guede.

“Raffaele and Rudy Guede never met, went out together, or saw each other,” Maori said. “The two young men belonged to completely different worlds and cultures. Raffaele comes from a big and healthy family. Rudy rejected his family. Raffaele has always been a model student. Rudy was never interested in school or work. Raffaele is timid and reserved. Rudy is uninhibited, arrogant, extroverted.”

“Accomplices who don’t know each other . . .” Bongiorno said, drawing out the words to emphasize the paradox that they couldn’t have been accomplices if they didn’t even know each other!

Raffaele, she told the court, was “Mr. Nobody”—put in by the prosecution as an afterthought. “There was no evidence of him at the scene.” The prosecution had contradicted themselves. “He’s there, but he’s not. He has a knife, but he doesn’t. He’s passive, he’s active.”

In defending Raffaele, she also defended me. “If the court doesn’t mind, and Amanda doesn’t mind, the innocence of my client depends on Amanda Knox,” she said. “A lot of people think that she doesn’t make sense. But Amanda just sees things her way. She reacts differently. She’s not a classic Italian woman. She has a naïve perspective of life, or did when the events occurred. But just because she acted differently from other people doesn’t mean she killed someone. . . .

“Amanda looked at the world with the eyes of Amélie” she said, referring to the quirky waif in the movie that Raffaele and I watched the night of Meredith’s murder.

Amélie and I had traits in common, Bongiorno said. “The extravagant, bizarre personality, full of imagination. If there’s a personality who does cartwheels and who confesses something she imagined, it’s her. I believe that what happened is easy to guess. Amanda, being a little bizarre and naïve, when she went into the
questura
, was truly trying to help the police and she was told, ‘Amanda, imagine. Help us, Amanda. Amanda, reconstruct it. Amanda, find the solution. Amanda, try.’ She tried to do so, she tried to help, because she wanted to help the police, because Amanda is precisely the Amélie of Seattle.”

Then, the moment that Luciano, Carlo, Maria Del Grosso (Carlo’s second), and I had been waiting for. Just as they’d been promising me for more than two years, they went over the entire case—the witnesses, the forensics, the illogic of the prosecution’s case—turning the clock back to the beginning and telling it from our perspective.

“At lunch hour on November 2, 2007, a body was discovered,” Luciano began. “It was a disturbing fact that captured the hearts of everyone. Naturally there were those who investigated. Naturally there were testimonies. Naturally there was the initial investigative activity. Immediately, immediately, especially Amanda, but also Raffaele, were suspected, investigated, and heard for four days following the discovery of the body. There was demand for haste. There was demand for efficiency. There was demand.

“Such demand and such haste led to the wrongful arrest of Patrick Lumumba—a grave mistake.”

Carlo picked up the thread. “There is a responsible party for this and it’s not Amanda Knox. Lumumba’s arrest was not executed by Amanda Knox. She gave information, false information. Now we know. But you couldn’t give credit to what Amanda said in that way, in that moment and in that way. A general principle for operating under such circumstances is maximum caution. In that awkward situation there was instead the maximum haste.”

Having heard what they wanted to hear and without checking further, the investigators and Prosecutor Mignini arrested Patrick—bringing him in “like a sack of potatoes,” Luciano said.

I was relieved to hear someone telling the truth. Seeing my lawyers in this theatrical mode, I relaxed the tiniest bit.

Maria Del Grosso criticized Mignini for the fiction he’d invented. “What must be judged today is whether this girl committed murder by brutal means. To sustain this accusation you need very strong elements, and what element does the prosecution bring us? The flushing of the toilet. Amanda was an adulterer. I hope that not even Prosecutor Mignini believes in the improbable, unrealistic, imaginary contrast of the two figures of Amanda and Meredith.”

Yes. Make them stop pitting Meredith and me against each other! We were never like that in real life!

“In chambers you will have to apply the law, but remember: condemning two innocents will not restore justice to poor Meredith’s memory, nor to her family. There’s only one thing to do in this case: acquit.”

During the rebuttals, on December 3, each lawyer was given a half hour to counter the closing arguments made over the past two weeks. Speaking for me, Maria criticized Mignini for portraying Meredith as a saint and me as a devil. In reality, she said, we lived similar lives. Meredith had casual sexual relationships. So did I. Meredith wanted to study seriously and be responsible. So did I.

Mignini continued to insinuate that I had loose morals, going beyond the testimony to come up with his own examples. In an eleventh-hour swipe at my reputation, he said it was likely that I had met up with Rudy and made a date with him for the one hour Raffaele had planned to take his friend, Jovanna Popovic, to the bus station the night of November 1. I wanted to amuse myself with another boy—a “not unwelcome distraction.”

“She was a little, let’s say, very social, Amanda. Amanda was sick of the reproaches of Meredith, who also talked about needing to be faithful to one’s own boyfriend, no doubt! Meredith was precisely of an uncommon level of uprightness.”

Mignini knows neither Meredith nor me in the least.

“I’ve asked myself if we were listening to a prosecutor, a lawyer, or a moralist,” Maria said, standing up for women everywhere. “Who are you to make such a claim in the name of a woman that it’s so much like a woman to be at the throat of another woman?”

Then Raffaele and I made our final pleas. Raffaele talked about how he would never hurt anyone. That he had no reason to. That he wouldn’t have done something just because I’d told him to.

I’d spent hours sitting on my bed making notes about what I wanted to say, but as soon as I stood up, every word emptied from my brain. I had to go with what came to me, on the few notes I had prepared.

“People have asked me this question: how are you able to remain calm? First of all, I’m not calm. I’m scared to lose myself. I’m scared to be defined as what I am not and by acts that don’t belong to me. I’m afraid to have the mask of a murderer forced on my skin.

“I feel more connected to you, more vulnerable before you, but also trusting and sure in my conscience. For this I thank you . . . I thank the prosecution because they are trying to do their job, even if they don’t understand, even if they are not able to understand, because they are trying to bring justice to an act that tore a person from this world. So I thank them for what they do . . . It is up to you now. So I thank you.”

My words were so inadequate. But at least I remembered to thank the court again. Now I had to put my faith in what my lawyers and our experts and I had said month after month. I had to believe that it was good enough.

When I went back to prison that afternoon, I saw Don Saulo.

“I’m feeling hopeful,” I said. “I think everything is going to work out well. Things have turned around. It’s clear the evidence against me is unreliable. There are lots of people who support me. So why do I feel like I’m about to be executed?”

O
n the final morning, I was glad for the thirty-minute van trip from the prison to the downtown courthouse. It gave me something to do. And even though I’d be leaving prison as soon as the verdict was rendered, I was happy I could briefly be in the courtroom with my family before we had to wait out the verdict separately.

It took about a minute for Judge Massei to declare the trial formally over. The time had come for the judges and jury to decide whom they believed. They exited single file through the door to chambers in the front of the courtroom. I stared at the door after it closed, wishing I knew what was going on behind it.

Then the prison van took me back to Capanne. I felt completely helpless, pointlessly thinking about what I should have said in my plea.

Back in my cell, I paced, sat on my bed, paced, sat. I tried to talk with my cellmates, Fanta and Tanya, but I was unable to concentrate on anything they were saying.

They were prepping me on all the superstitions I had to remember when I came back with the good verdict—break my toothbrush in half and throw it away outside the prison, with my hairbrush and the shoes I wore most often. This meant I wasn’t coming back. “Just before you get in the car, remember to brush your right foot along the ground,” Fanta said. “It means you’re promising freedom to the next prisoner.”