Late that night, around 1:00 a.m., Amanda called me from the fountain in Perugia's main piazza and asked me to accompany her back to my house. She'd been out drinking with a Greek friend, Spiros, whom I greeted cautiously as I took her by the arm. He ran an Internet cafe near the University for Foreigners and was a little too familiar with her for my liking.
We slept in the next morning, which was All Saints' Day, November 1, a national holiday. Many people were taking advantage of its being a Thursday to create a "bridge" to the weekend and take four days off. Because of the coincidence of All Saints' and All Souls' Day, they called it it ponte dei morti, the bridge of the dead. When Amanda headed back home midmorning to take a shower and change—she did not like the shower at my apartment, saying it was too cramped—she learned that Laura had already left for her hometown north of Rome, and Filomena was making plans to spend the weekend with her boyfriend at his place on the other side of Perugia. The boys in the downstairs apartment were all gone as well.
Amanda had to work that night, but otherwise we were looking forward to a long, lazy weekend with no plans in particular, except to drive to Gubbio, three-quarters of an hour northeast of Perugia, for a little sightseeing. By the time I showed up at her apartment for a late lunch around two, only Meredith was still in the house. Her chin still showed signs of the fake blood she had used for her Dracula costume the night before. We asked her to join us for lunch, but she had a shower instead, did some laundry, and left around 4:00 p.m. without saying where she was going.
It was the last time I ever saw her.
Amanda and I smoked a joint before leaving the house on Via della Pergola, wandered into town for some shopping before remembering we had enough for dinner already, and headed back to my place. Shortly before six, a Serbian friend of mine named Jovana Popovic rang the doorbell and asked if I'd mind driving her to the bus station at midnight to pick up a suitcase her mother was sending. I said that would be fine. When she left, Amanda and I sat down at tile computer to watch a favorite movie, Amélie.
We had to stop the film a few times as the evening wore on. First, Amanda got a text from Patrick telling her it was a slow night because of the holiday and he didn't need her to come in after all. It was like getting an unexpected snow day—we were thrilled. Amanda texted back: Certo ci vediamo pia tardi buona serata! Sure. See you later. Have a good evening.
Then my father called. He and Mara had just seen the Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happyness, and he told me how beautifully it portrayed the relationship between a father and his son. My father was always making phone calls like this. It was sweet that he wanted to share his experiences, but he also made everything he said sound vaguely like an order, as if laying out the parameters of how I should react to things before I'd had a chance to form my own opinion. But he never stayed on the line for long—he is too nervy and impatient—so I listened calmly and the call was over in less than four minutes.
In the meantime, Jovana dropped by again and told Amanda that I didn't need to drive her to the bus station after all. Now we didn't have to leave the apartment. The evening was ours, and we couldn't have been happier. We switched off our cell phones, finished watching Amélie, and discussed what to make for dinner.
* * *
Shortly before eight o'clock, a video surveillance camera in the parking structure across from Amanda's house captured a man walking briskly past the security barrier and onto Via della Pergola. Of course I had no idea of this at the time; this was material my family gathered during the investigation and the trials. I'm mentioning it here because it was one of many facts that the prosecution and the media chose to overlook, and because it helps make sense of what did and did not occur on that fateful evening.
The man in the video footage was wearing a black coat with high wing-tip lapels and sneakers with white trim. He had his back to the camera and his head was covered with a woolen cap, making him difficult to identify. But his height, gait, coat, and shoes were all a plausible match for Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old drifter of. Ivorian origin who often shot hoops at the basketball court next to the University for Foreigners and was acquainted with the boys who lived downstairs from Meredith and Amanda.
Guede had an extraordinary past: an abusive childhood; a mother who abandoned him as a baby and a father who abandoned him as a teenager; an improbably idyllic period under the protection of one of Perugia's richest families, who sent him to private school in a chauffeur-driven limousine; and, more recently, a budding career as a cat burglar. According to eyewitnesses and police reports, Guede liked to break into houses by smashing a window with a rock and using his considerable athletic skills to scale the wall and climb inside. Often, his victims said, he would help himself to food and drink from the kitchen before looting the electronics and hard cash.
The previous Saturday, the director of an English kindergarten in Milan had caught Rudy red-handed sitting at her office computer and making the place his own. When the police searched his backpack, they found a knife he had lifted from the kitchen, a woman's gold watch, and a laptop and cell phone later traced to a lawyer's office in Perugia that had been burgled two weeks earlier. Guede was taken to police headquarters and questioned for four hours.
All indications were that he was about to be arrested. That is, until a call was placed to the Perugia police and the interrogation stopped. Instead of facing charges, Guede was put on a train back to Perugia, no more questions asked. To many independent observers in law enforcement, the only explanation for this was that Guede was working as a police informant; the Perugia authorities were apparently more interested in continuing his services than in prosecuting him for just a few hundred euros' worth of stolen items. It's a supposition officials in Perugia have never confirmed but it goes a long way to explain their behavior in the weeks and months to come.
On the time-stamped surveillance tape, Guede—or his doppelganger—vanished into the night just moments after he appeared. But the camera picked up a pair of similar shoes crossing the street toward Meredith and Amanda's house about half an hour later. My defense team would later conclude he must have spent the intervening time formulating a plan to break into the house and making sure he was unseen.
It was a propitious moment to strike. First, Guede could reasonably assume that the occupants of the house were either out for the night or away for the long weekend. Second, he had previously stayed over in the boys' apartment downstairs—he fell asleep on the toilet one night in early October and ended up sprawled on the couch—so he knew the lay of the land. He had even met Meredith and Amanda briefly. And, third, since it was the first of the month, chances were good that the accumulated rent money for November was sitting in a pile somewhere in the house.
In the upstairs apartment, Filomena took responsibility for gathering everyone's cash and handing it over to the landlady. And it was Filomena's bedroom window that Would soon he smashed with a large rock—most likely a few minutes alter those white-rimmed sneakers were captured loping across the street around eight thirty.
Meredith, meanwhile, was finishing up an evening with her British friends, Amy Frost, Robyn Butterworth, and Sophie Purton. They had met early, tucked into a pizza at Amy and Robyn's house, watched a movie, and snacked on ice cream and apple crumble. Meredith announced that she was tired from the previous night's partying. She asked to borrow a history book and headed home.
Just moments before nine o'clock, the video surveillance camera at the parking lot captured a trace of someone walking across the street toward the house on Via della Pergola—exactly the hour that, the prosecution and defense would later agree, Meredith crossed her threshold for the last time.
When Amélie ended, I went into the kitchen to take care of some dishes left over from breakfast before we started making dinner. I soon realized that water was leaking out of the pipe under the sink, and 1 cursed under my breath. I'd had a plumber come and fix the sink just a week earlier, and he had made me buy all sorts of replac
ement parts that clearly were not put together properly. I suspected he had left them loose on purpose to force me to pay for another visit. As Amanda and I threw kitchen towels onto the puddle on the tile floor, I decided I was going to let my landlady deal with it from now on.
"Don't you have a mop?" Amanda asked. I did not. She offered to pick one up from Via della Pergola the next morning and bring it round.
We cooked a fish dinner, did our best to wash the dishes again, and tumbled gratefully into bed in each other's arms. Only later, when I lay in the dark, unable to sleep, did it dawn on me that Papa had broken his usual habit of calling to wish me good night.
It turned out he did so out of consideration. He had been about to pick up the phone when my stepmother talked him out of it. "Stop bothering him," Mara said, as they got ready for bed around eleven o'clock. "He's with Amanda, and they want to be alone. Why don't you send a text instead?"
My father took her advice, but because my cell phone was turned off, I didn't receive the message until six the next morning.
It was a desperately unlucky combination of circumstances. If my father had tried my cell and then called me on the home line—which he would have done, because he's persistent that way—I would have had incontrovertible proof from the phone records that I was home that night. And the nightmare that was about to engulf me might never have begun.
* * *
My father called my landline a little before nine thirty the next morning to make sure we would be ready for our day trip to Gubbio. I was too groggy to talk. I'd been up several times in the night—listening to music, answering e-mail, making love—and wanted only to go back to sleep. Amanda got out of bed and said she was going home to shower and change her clothes, so I walked her to the front door, gave her a kiss, and crawled back under the covers.
By the time she returned, I was up and in the kitchen making coffee. I could tell something was bothering her, but she didn't say what it was. She'd brought the mop, so I spent some time wiping up while she poured our coffee. Men we sat down to breakfast.
Only when we were close to finishing our cereal did she finally tell me what was on her mind. "I saw some strange things over at the house."
"Strange how?" I asked.
"Well, the front door was open when I arrived, but nobody seemed to be home. At first, I just assumed someone had taken out the garbage or gone to the corner store."
Amanda looked increasingly worried as she began detailing the things she'd found out of place. The open front door was concerning, but not alarming—the latch was broken and the only way to keep it shut was to lock it. But Amanda also found Meredith's door closed, which was unusual. She knocked, but nobody answered. Was she asleep? Or away? Amanda didn't quite know what to think.
Amanda went ahead with her shower, only to notice a small bloodstain on one of the washbasin taps. It looked like menstrual blood. Was Meredith, who shared the bathroom with her, having some sort of problem? It was unlike her to leave things less than immaculate. Maybe she'd run out to a pharmacy. Then again, it was just one small stain; perhaps she missed it.
After she came out of the shower, Amanda went to the other bathroom, the one shared by Filomena and Laura, to use the hair dryer and noticed that somebody had defecated in the toilet and neglected to flush. The bowl was stuffed with toilet paper. Amanda knew Filomena and Laura were scrupulously clean; neither of them would have left that kind of mess. What was going on? Nobody could accuse Amanda of being overanxious, but even she was starting to freak out. Why had the person who left the front door open not come back? Where was Meredith? Amanda decided she didn't want to stay in the house a moment longer. So she grabbed the mop from the closet and left, taking care to lock the door properly on her way out.
* * *
Of all the things Amanda did that day, none attracted more criticism than her failure to raise the alarm as soon as she saw so many things out of place. It wasn't just the police who attacked her. Many Italians, including most of my family, could not fathom how she could go ahead with her shower after finding blood on the tap, much less put her wet feet on the bath mat, which was also stained, and drag it across the floor. When Filomena found out, she called Amanda cretina, an idiot.
All I can say is, I was as distracted as she was that morning and might have done the same in her position. I'm not a worrier by nature and just did not think through what Amanda was telling me. After she had finished her story, I shrugged it off, saying there had to be a simple explanation. I was so unconcerned I even asked if she was ready to leave for Gubbio. A stupid question, of course, which Amanda found a little jarring as well.
"Perhaps we should drop the mop off at the house and take another look," she suggested. "It won't take more than a few minutes."
I agreed and suggested she call her housemates to see if they had any idea what was going on.
On the walk over, Amanda reached Filomena at a holiday fair on the outskirts of Perugia. They muddled through the conversation in a combination of Amanda's bad Italian and Filomena's sketchy English. The upshot, though, was clear. Filomena was alarmed and urged Amanda to go back to the house as quickly as possible. "Do a check!" she said more than once. She promised to get there as soon as she could, probably within the hour.
Amanda also tried the two cell phones that Meredith was careful to keep close at all times: the British one she used to call her family, and an Italian one Filomena had given her for local calls.
There was no answer on either.
A few minutes' walk from Amanda's house, Elisabetta Lana and her family were increasingly bewildered by what they feared was an attempt to break into their three-story villa overlooking the Fosso del Bulagaio, the same ravine that extended behind the house on Via della Pergola. The previous night, Elisabetta had received a jarring phone call announcing a bomb in one of her toilets. She had called the Polizia Postale, the postal police, who scoured every inch of the house and grounds and turned up nothing. Still, she asked her son Alessandro to come over and spend the night in the house. They had been burgled a number of times before.
Shortly after breakfast on November 2, Alessandro stepped outside to talk to his girlfriend on the phone and noticed a Motorola flip phone lying face down on the lawn about sixty feet from the wall separating the property from the street. The phone was switched off. He and his mother assumed, at first, that it must belong to one of the police officers who had visited the night before, and they decided to bring it in. They needed to make an official statement about the threatening call anyway. After Elisabetta completed the paperwork, the police asked her to wait while they extracted the phone's S I M card and traced the owner. Twenty minutes later, they had a name: Filomena Romanelli.
Elisabetta had never heard of her. She called home and nobody, not even the maid, knew who she was either. A few minutes later, while Elisabetta was still out shopping, she received a call from her son announcing that a second cell phone had just been found in the garden. Elisabetta's daughter, Fiammetta, and the maid heard it ringing in the underbrush about twenty feet from the property line. By the time they retrieved it, the ringing had stopped.
It was a Sony Ericsson, Meredith's British phone. They brought it into the house, and a couple of minutes later, it rang again. Alessandro looked at the display, which flashed up the name Amanda.
* * *
Amanda and I decided to go through her house room by room. Filomena called and said she had spoken to Laura at her family's house near Rome, so only Meredith remained unaccounted for. Her bedroom door was still locked.
I agreed with Amanda, the kitchen and living room looked normal. So did Laura's room; a couple of drawers were pulled open, but that didn't strike me as out of the ordinary. Amanda's room was apparently untouched; she had left the previous night's clothes strewn over her bed, and her other things were less than tidy, but nothing seemed to be missing. Then I pushed open Filomena's door, which had been left slightly ajar, and saw that the place was trashed. Cloth
es and belongings were strewn everywhere. The window had a large, roundish hole, and broken glass was spread all over the floor.
Okay, we thought, so there's been a break-in. What we couldn't understand was why Filomena's laptop was still propped upright in its case on the floor, or why her digital camera was still sitting out in the kitchen. As far as we could tell, nothing of value was missing anywhere.
Amanda went into the Italian women's bathroom alone, only to run back out and grab on to me as though she had seen a ghost. "The shit's not in the toilet anymore!" she said. "What if the intruder's still here and he's locked himself in Meredith's room?"
We didn't know what to do about Meredith's room. Filomena had called back a couple of times and made us appropriately concerned that Meredith had vanished without a trace. So Amanda knocked at the door, gently at first, then ever louder, until she was banging on it for a response. I made a halfhearted attempt to kick it open but wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. We peered through the keyhole, but all we could see was Meredith's brown leather purse sitting on the unmade bed.
Honor Bound: Page 3
