Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  We walked back outside hoping to find a vantage point onto her bedroom window, but no ground was high enough.

  "Let's try the terrace at the back and see if we can't reach her window that way," Amanda said, and she dashed out onto the deck. By the time I caught up with her, she had one leg over the balustrade and announced she was going to shimmy her way around the house. It was a crazy idea: there were no toeholds, and the ground fell away as much as fifteen feet below us.

  I said, "Don't do anything stupid."

  Amanda realized it was a nonstarter, pulled her leg back, and gave me a kiss of endearment for talking her out of it.

  "Now what do we do?" she asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "Let me call my sister, Vanessa. She's in the carabinieri. She'll tell us."

  * * *

  My big sister is someone you don't mess with. Vanessa's not extraordinarily tall and is almost preternaturally slight, but she has the muscle tone of a professional athlete and a tongue so sharp you can cut yourself on it. She's seven years older than me and likes to think of herself as my protector. Honestly, there are times when her refusal to indulge other people's shortcomings, even for a moment, grates on my nerves. But she's also smart and passionate and unburdened by my tendency toward self-doubt and second-guessing. In a crisis, there's nobody better.

  Vanessa lived in Rome, where she had a desk job with the carabinieri, the Italian military police. It wasn't what she imagined when, in 2000, she became one of the first women to enter the Italian air force. She beat out everyone, men as well as women, for top place in her year's intake. As she would be the first to tell you, though, Vanessa is no diplomat and refuses to play the game the way Italians expect it to be played. She fell out with her air force superiors over a romantic liaison, joined the navy on the rebound, then mounted a legal battle against a reluctant Ministry of Defense when she wanted to change jobs once more and join the carabinieri. By the time she won that fight, she had spent two years on unpaid administrative leave and was viewed as a troublemaker who needed to be brought down a peg or two.

  Vanessa is almost absurdly accomplished: she is a champion show-jumping rider, a certified fighter pilot, and has three university degrees, in archaeology, political science, and international law. When she applied to the carabinieri, she imagined herself flying helicopters or working with a mounted division. Instead, she was assigned to logistics, where her days involved coordinating elevator repairs and making furniture inventories for the force's 375 barracks in the region around Rome.

  Since she was so comprehensively desk-bound, I had no difficulty in getting her on the phone right away. I had barely finished describing what we had found at the house when she responded with great urgency. "Leave! Leave right away," she said. "And don't touch anything. If there has been a burglary, you don't want any trace of yourself on the premises. I can't do anything for you from here, but go outside and call the local carabinieri. Let them handle everything—it's not your problem."

  I passed the message along to Amanda, and we did exactly as instructed.

  * * *

  We must have looked like two abandoned waifs as we sat facing the street on a concrete step just above the roadway. Amanda was not wearing nearly enough for the cold weather, just a thin sweater over her T-shirt, and she started to shiver as I dialed the emergency number for the carabinieri. On the first try, the dispatcher said he was busy and told me to call back. Not exactly the response I wanted to hear. When I called back a few minutes later, he was still noticeably impatient.

  When I described the break-in and the bloodstains, and he became fixated on the idea that the intruder had cut himself on the glass on the way through Filomena's window. I didn't quite know how to respond to that, and when I hesitated, he growled at me to make sure I was still there.

  "So it's a home burglary?" he asked.

  "No, nothing's been taken." I didn't know that for sure, of course, and I should have been more careful about my choice of words. At the time, though, I thought I was just performing my civic duty by passing the information along. The only reason I was on the line was because Amanda's Italian was not good enough for her to make the call herself.

  "You say there's a locked door," the dispatcher said. "What door is that?"

  "One of the tenants', and we don't know where she is. We've tried to call but she's not picking up."

  "Okay," he said at length. "I'll send a squad car and we'll look into it."

  * * *

  Minutes later, too soon—I thought—for anyone to have responded to my call, an imposing man in his late thirties strolled toward us with a sense of purpose that made me nervous. He was in casual clothes and Adidas sneakers. I wasn't sure if he was a member of the carabinieri, inexplicably out of uniform, or someone we needed to steer clear of. I jumped up as he approached, very much on the defensive.

  He flashed a badge—I didn't look at it closely—and asked if we were acquainted with a Filomena Romanelli.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "It's for us to know why," he replied sourly. As I learned later, this was Michele Battistelli, chief investigator for the Polizia Postale, and he was here to trace the abandoned cell phones. His deputy, who had been parking their car, joined him moments later.

  I didn't understand at first why they were asking for Filomena, but I did tell them about the mess inside and invited them to take a look. They agreed it was strange that no valuables had been taken. In fact Battistelli, a telecommunications specialist with little experience of burglaries, much less murder, was already formulating a theory that the break-in was staged. No doubt he was thinking of insurance fraud, but the theory would carry over into the murder investigation and prove disastrous for us.

  Once Battistelli and his colleague Fabio Marzi started looking around, Filomena's boyfriend, Marco, arrived with his friend, Luca. I didn't know either of them. Minutes after that, while we were all looking at the mess in Filomena's room, Filomena herself showed up with her friend Paola, who was Luca's girlfriend. Filomena confirmed that nothing valuable was gone from her room. Her jewelry was still in the nightstand. After rummaging around—and disturbing the crime scene—she retrieved her cash and designer sunglasses. She later removed her laptop too.

  As soon as the police disclosed that Meredith's two cell phones had been thrown over Elisabetta Lana's wall, Filomena felt enough was enough: someone had to open Meredith's door immediately. Battistelli slowed her down just enough to ask if it was normal to find the door locked. Filomena told him no, absolutely not, unless Meredith was away in England. I didn't hear her say this because I was busy repeating the question in English for Amanda.. And, unfortunately, I misunderstood Amanda's answer. I thought Amanda said that, yes, Meredith sometimes kept the door closed, even when she was in town. But that was not right; Amanda said exactly the same thing as Filomena. Because of this translation error, Amanda would later be accused of telling lies to throw off the investigation.

  Battistelli didn't want to take responsibility for the door. Filomena said that if he wouldn't authorize breaking it, she wanted him to bring in someone who would. "Okay, calm down, there's no need to call anyone," Battistelli shot back. "It's not like we're going to find a body under the couch."

  It was not a line he would later care to remember.

  Filomena glared at Battistelli and asked Marco and Luca if they'd break down the door instead. Luca needed no further prompting and began shoving and kicking.

  The door flew open. I was several people back in the narrow corridor at this point, so I saw nothing. Amanda was farther back still, toward the kitchen, talking to her mother in Seattle. But I certainly registered the horror etched on everyone's face.

  Paola screamed. "Blood!" she and the others shouted. "Blood everywhere!" And then: 'A foot! A foot!"

  I saw Filomena holding her hands up in front of her face and breaking out in great sobs. Marco pulled her back as abruptly as he could. Amanda told her mother about the foot and got off the line.
I took her by the arm and escorted her out of the house. The others quickly followed.

  Only Luca stayed a few seconds more and later testified he saw Inspector Battistelli venture into the room and lift the blood-soaked duvet that was covering Meredith's body on the floor. Battistelli himself denied doing any such thing, insisting that he knew better than to contaminate a murder scene. Yet, somehow, he felt confident enough on the phone to emergency services to confirm that Meredith was already dead.

  The six of us hovered outside while Battistelli and Marzi made their calls. Amanda was in tears, too stunned and fearful to say a word. She and I just held each other in silence. I was too shell-shocked to know what to think; my only impulse was to look out for Amanda, so I concentrated on that. It was better than wondering what had happened to poor Meredith; whatever it was seemed too awful to contemplate. One of the others mentioned seeing blood on the wall and a body laid out in front of an open closet. Amanda picked up only part of this and later said she thought that Meredith had been found inside the closet—another misunderstanding later characterized as a deliberate evasion.

  Only after the medical emergency team arrived did we learn what we had scarcely allowed ourselves to imagine. Meredith's throat was slashed, a paramedic told Luca, and she had been left to die in a pool of her own blood.

  * * *

  The carabinieri, like the Polizia Postale before them, got lost on the way to Via della Pergola and had to call Amanda's cell phone for directions. It wasn't an easy place to find because the street signs suggested that Via della Pergola had, at this point, turned into Viale Sant'Angelo, and the one-way traffic system meant there was no going back. The delay had a huge impact in determining our fate because the case was turned over instead to the Perugia city police, who had far less experience than the carabinieri in conducting high-profile criminal investigations and were less likely to assert their independence from the prosecutor's office.

  As things spiraled out of control over the next several days, a senior investigator with the carabinieri in Perugia took it upon himself to call my sister and apologize, colleague to colleague. "If we had arrived ten minutes earlier," he told Vanessa, "the case would have been ours. And things would have gone very differently."

  * * *

  Instead of the carabinieri, we got the Squadra Mobile, the flying squad of the Perugia police, who sent a forensic team fitted out in white protective suits (but no hoods), as well as a handful of detectives, all in plainclothes. At first, I helped Amanda sit down on the same step where we had waited before. She was pale and almost doubled over with anguish. Then we got up so I could give her my green-gray jacket, and we walked toward the crisscross-wooden fence overlooking the ravine. I noticed that a tightly wound woman with jet-black hair—whom I later knew as Monica Napoleoni, the head of the Squadra Mobile's homicide division—was staring at us, her eyes bulging. I couldn't understand what she wanted. At various moments she turned her body away and said something to her colleagues, covering her mouth with her hand so we couldn't read her lips. She shot glances at us while she was talking.

  Amanda and I stayed close to comfort each other and to shield ourselves as best we could from the cold. I was so focused I had no idea that television crews were setting up across the street and training their cameras on us. I caressed Amanda's arms and leaned in for a kiss. She was my girlfriend—at least, we were together for the moment—and I desperately wanted to comfort her. The world's media—cajoled by the police and uninterested in the context—would soon play up that kiss, a simple act of human sympathy in a moment of grief and shock, as evidence of the uncontrolled sexual urges of two stone-cold killers.

  * * *

  Inside the house, the police, later joined by a second forensic team from the Polizia Scientifica in Rome, were making their first assessments. We were privy to none of it. Only later did we learn about the knife wounds on both sides of Meredith's neck, the multiple signs of struggle, the blood-soaked towels under her body, the evidence that her attacker had stripped her almost naked but had not, apparently, attempted any sexual penetration, and the curious trail of shoe prints, all made with a left shoe, and the equally curious trail of footprints, all made with a right foot.

  The police asked. us questions, just routine stuff to establish our identities and our relationship to Meredith. Filomena had the wherewithal to call one of the lawyers from her office to seek advice on how much to say. Laura, who did not return to Perugia immediately, did the same. I called my family and told them what was going on, but it never occurred to me, or to them, to contact a lawyer. As I saw it, I was just a bystander, a translator for my girlfriend, happy to tell the police whatever they wanted to know.

  After some time—it was hard to tell how long—we were told we needed to go to the Questura, Perugia's police headquarters, for more detailed questioning. Amanda and I accepted a ride from Luca and Paola. As we climbed into their car, Paola—who had never met either of us before asked Amanda how she had reacted when she found the front door open that morning.

  Amanda didn't understand the question, so I answered for her, explaining that she'd taken a shower and then come back to my house.

  "Really, you took a shower?" Paola said. She was incredulous.

  Amanda was still doubled about the toilet that was unflushed one minute and flushed the next, so I mentioned it. Paola and Luca said it could be important and we needed to tell the police right away. So I got out of the car and discussed it with Monica Napoleoni. It was another ill-fated move because Amanda was mistaken—for what reason I do not know. The excrement in the toilet was still there, as the forensics team soon discovered. Maybe it had sunk a little in the bowl as the paper absorbed the water and grew heavier. Or maybe Amanda was just disturbed by the scene and hadn't been thinking clearly when she made that observation—who knows.

  As we finally drove off to the Questura, the atmosphere was frosty. Clearly, Amanda and I hadn't given a selves. To break the tension, I quizzed Luca on seemed better informed than anybody. But of my mouth felt clumsy and out of place.good account of our-what he knew, as he everything coming

  "So she's dead?" I asked.

  "Yes"

  "Murdered?"

  "Yes, someone cut her throat."

  "With a knife?"

  "No, with a loaf of bread," Luca snapped "What do you think?" Amanda, at this point, was crying again. We continued to the Perugia suburbs in silence.

  * * *

  Around 3:00 p.m., the man responsible for overseeing the investigation, public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini was given his first glimpse of the crime scene. The head of Perugia's vice squad collected Mignini from his house, where he had just enjoyed lunch with his wife and three teenage daughters, and briefed him on the police's best guesses so far: that Meredith had been sexually assaulted, that the break-in looked staged, that one of Meredith's housemates was saying odd things about the toilet.

  Mignini, who was fifty-seven and a life-long perugino, did not have a lot of experience with murder cases, with one striking exception. He had spent the previous five years reinvestigating the drowning of a well-connected local doctor, Francesco Narducci, who was fished out of Lake Trasimeno in 1985. Mignini's theory was that Narducci did not commit suicide, as had long been assumed, but was murdered by members of a satanic death cult. Mignini further theorized that Narducci's death, and the cult, were connected to a string of unsolved serial murders in Tuscany known as the Monster of Florence case—a hypothesis that brought him only ridicule from his Florentine colleagues, who had been trying to track down t he Monster for more than thirty years. The case was at least good for generating headlines: Mignini exhumed the corpse, speculated that it was not Narducci's but had been swapped before the funeral for murky reasons connected to a gang of loan sharks, and theorized that Narducci himself had been part of the satanic cult.

  By November 2007, Mignini was steeped in accounts of devil-worship rituals, secret Masonic sects, and symbolic portals leading from
this earth to the bowels of hell. So when he stepped into Meredith's room, he was alert to things other investigators might have overlooked.

  He saw Meredith's Dracula costume from Halloween, including fake teeth and a cape. He saw an open pot of Vaseline on her desk, which in his mind was immediately associated with anal sex. He saw her near-naked body, with her legs splayed open and spots of blood on her chest just above her naked breasts. And he saw the bloody prints with their curious left-shoe, right-foot pattern.

  Over time, he would wonder whether Meredith's murder was connected to the same Order of the Red Rose he suspected of being behind the Monster of Florence killings. He knew of a Masonic ritual that involved the removal of one shoe. He also knew about the ceremony of the Rose-Croix, which Masons perform on the Thursday before Easter to initiate new members, but which some Catholics view as a blasphemous imitation of the Passion of Christ. Did that ceremony's use of a Cubic Stone, symbolically mixing blood and water, have anything to do with the sodden, bloodstained bath mat? Was it significant that Meredith's murder took place on a Thursday? Or was it rather, as Mignini argued in a preliminary hearing a year later, that Meredith was destined to be part of a satanic sex sacrifice on Halloween but the ceremony was postponed for twenty-four hours because it clashed with a dinner party thrown by Filomena and Laura?