"The investigation was of an exclusively psychological nature," Giobbi said, "because what enabled us to identify the culprits was, most of all, our observation of their psychological and behavioral reactions while they were being questioned. We didn't rely on any other kind of investigation, but this is what allowed us to finger the culprits in such a short time."
Well, this was at least frank. And staggering too. They arrested us because they didn't like us. Period. Not only did they have no physical evidence, they saw no need for any.
Of course, something was required to justify slamming us behind bars. Even in Italy, people don't get arrested for swiveling their hips or kissing outside a house where a murder has just taken place. As November 4 turned into November 5, the police were still scratching around. The bugged room at the Questura wasn't giving them much. (We know this because, if we had given them anything, they would have used it.) The taps on our phones were proving equally frustrating. Some of the investigators, I imagine, thought they would overhear a confession, or some indication of fear or panic. But of course we gave them nothing like that because we had nothing to confess.
What the police did learn from the wiretaps was that Amanda's mother, Edda, was flying in from Seattle and would arrive on Tuesday, November 6. They also heard Amanda talking to her relatives in Germany, who were advising her to take refuge in the American embassy. In short, they could count on her to be vulnerable and alone for just one more day. After that, she might be out of reach, or out of the country. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that if we were to be arrested, it had to happen in the next twenty-four hours.
One real clue, one element of reasonable suspicion, was all they needed to pounce.
And I, inadvertently, gave it to them.
* * *
As November 5 began, we allowed ourselves to wonder if things weren't slowly getting back to normal—the proverbial calm before the storm. There was no call from the Questura. Amanda went to class and wandered over to Le Chic to talk to Patrick. I stayed at home and worked on my thesis.
Then my father called and asked about my pocketknife. Carrying a small knife had been a habit of mine since I was a teenager—not for self-defense, mind you, just as an ornamental thing. I'd use one occasionally to peel apples or carve my name on tree trunks, but mostly I carried them around for the sake of it. Having a knife on me had become automatic, like carrying my wallet or my keys. The one in my pocket that day had been a present from my father.
"You should really leave it at home," Papa advised. "You don't want to get into trouble over it."
I hadn't given the knife a second thought. Now that he mentioned it, I still couldn't see the harm. The blade was barely three inches long and hadn't been opened in weeks. Besides, what kind of idiot killer would bring the murder weapon to the police station?
"Don't worry," I told my father. "I've had my knife on me every day and they haven't even noticed it."
Whoever was listening at the Questura pricked up their ears; I certainly had their attention now.
I got the call at about ten o'clock that night. I was at my friend Riccardo's house for dinner, along with Riccardo's sister and Amanda. The police said they wanted to talk to me. Not Amanda, just me. "I'm having dinner and I can't come right now," I said.
That annoyed whoever was on the other end of the line. I wasn't taking the request seriously enough. "You need to come in right away," he said.
I told him I would finish eating first. I didn't care how urgent it was; I couldn't be at their beck and call twenty-four hours a day.
* * *
My father called at eleven to wish me good night. By then I'd arrived at the Questura, with Amanda joining me for the ride. After all the times I'd supported her during her interrogations, she felt the least she could do was be there for me.
My father was alarmed. "Are you sure everything is all right? Why are you there yet again?"
"I can't talk now, Papa, but don't worry. Everything's fine."
My words in Italian—stai tranquillo were the last my father would hear from me as a free man.
* * *
The police's tone was aggressive from the start. They wanted to know why Amanda was with me. I said she was my girlfriend and had nowhere else to go. They told her to wait while they took me into an interrogation room.
The questioning was led by two men, a tall, thin policeman I later knew as Marco Chiacchiera, the head of the Squadra Mobile's organized-crime team, and a blond investigator from Edgardo Giobbi's squad in Rome named Daniele Moscatelli. Monica Napoleoni, the Perugia police's top homicide investigator, came and went as the interrogation progressed, as did other officers whose names I learned only much later from the legal files.
"You need to tell us what happened that night," they began.
"Which night?" I asked wearily. I was getting tired of the endless questioning. I don't think they appreciated my attitude.
"The night of November first."
It had been a long week and now it was late. I couldn't focus on which night they were talking about, or what I might have been doing. Hadn't I already told them everything I knew?
"We need you to go over it all again and compare what you have to say with your previous statements. There may be something we've missed."
"I don't remember too well."
"It doesn't matter. Tell us what you can."
I'm recounting this now at a distance of almost four and a half years and I certainly don't claim to remember every word in the order that was spoken. The exchange, as I'm reproducing it here, is based on my memory. I can vividly recall the overall shape and tone and mood of the interrogation, because it scared me half to death and had a catastrophic impact. Some of it is confirmed by the documents the police themselves produced that night and by witness testimony in our trials; some of it has been contested and may well be contested again.
I'd like to be able to give you the full transcript, word by excruciating word. But the police, who were recording absolutely everything else concerning Amanda and me in this period—phone calls, e-mails, private conversations in the Questura—somehow omitted to turn on a single recording device that night. Or so they said. When challenged on this point, Prosecutor Mignini suggested that the Questura was suffering a budget crunch and preferred not to record our interrogations because the transcription costs would have been too steep.
My lawyers, and Amanda's lawyers, subsequently argued that the entire episode was unconstitutional because we had clearly crossed over from "people informed of the facts" to criminal suspects and, under Italian law, needed to be formally notified and provided access to legal counsel. We were vindicated on this point in the Corte di Cassazione, Italy's high court, as I will explain in more detail later. Me fact that the night's events were not recorded only heightened the stench of illegality.
I now believe that the only reason they asked me to recount the events of the night of the murder yet again was to catch me out in whatever inconsistencies they could find. They were, quite literally, out to get me, and I didn't appreciate this until it was too late. I told them, again, about the afternoon at Via della Pergola, about smoking a joint—more than I should have volunteered, perhaps—and heading over to my place. I mentioned that Amanda and I gone out shopping, something I had apparently omitted in my previous statements. I couldn't see the importance of this detail, but my interrogators gave me the strangest of looks.
I told them that one day had blended into another in my mind. Perhaps we'd gone shopping the day before. What did I know?
"You need to remember what you did," one of them admonished.
They asked if Amanda had gone out that night, and on the spur of the moment, I couldn't say. Was November 1 a Tuesday or Thursday? I asked. Because I knew she worked at Le Chic on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I noticed a calendar in the room and asked if I could consult it. "Don't touch the calendar!" one of them said sharply. The suddenness of this startled me. Was Nove
mber 1 the day Amanda spent the evening out and 1 stayed home? (I was thinking of Halloween.) Or was it the night after that? Somehow I had the two muddled in my head and. couldn't sort them out. As the interrogation continued, I offered both scenarios.
"Watch out," they said, "you are getting yourself in trouble. You're telling us different things. You need to understand the seriousness of the situation."
I thought awhile before answering. "If it was a Thursday, she probably went to work."
"You don't know what she did, do you? Come on, tell us everything."
Napoleoni was in the room for this part of the conversation. Without warning, she turned on me with venom in her voice. "What did you do?" she demanded. "You need to tell us. You don't know what that cow, that whore, got up to!"
I couldn't believe what was coming out of her mouth. I was only dimly beginning to realize what she and the others were implying. Amanda, the murderer? It seemed too crazy to believe.
Amanda, meanwhile, was waiting for me. And waiting. She had brought some homework into the Questura but was having a hard time concentrating. She was stiff and achy from fatigue and thought she might feel better if she stretched a bit.
She was by an elevator, away from the main waiting area, but she was seen, of course. Ivan Raffo, a young policeman who had come up from Rome, remarked how flexible she was. And Amanda, allowing herself to be charmed in the worst of all circumstances, decided to show him what she could do.
It was a disastrous idea. When I first heard about what happened next, I understood that Amanda, being Amanda, was mostly interested in being open and friendly to the officer. But I also realized she had not been thinking smartly, to say the least. Later, in court, Chief Inspector Rita Ficarra described her shock at walking by and seeing Amanda doing cartwheels and splits. In a police station. In the context of a murder investigation. At least two other senior officers saw her too.
Shortly after, Ficarra and her colleague Lorena Zugarini told Amanda they needed to have a frank conversation. And so began her own long night of the soul.
* * *
As my interrogators ratcheted up the pressure, they asked me to empty my pockets. I knew immediately this was not a good development. I pulled out a handkerchief, my wallet, my cell phone, and at last, with all eyes on me, the pocketknife.
One of them picked it up with a piece of cloth and took it swiftly out of the room. I tried to explain that it was something I just carried around with me, but that wouldn't wash. Even I knew things were no longer all right.
"Don't I have the right to a lawyer?" I asked.
They said no.
"Can't I at least call my father?"
"You can't call anyone." They ordered me to put my cell phone on the desk.
People came in and out of the room in a great flurry of activity. At one point, I found myself alone with just one of the policemen. He leaned into me and hissed, "If you try to get up and leave, I'll beat you into a pulp and kill you. I'll leave you in a pool of blood."
The evening was described very differently by the police officers in court. They denied that I ever asked for a lawyer, or that I was put under duress of any kind. Daniele Moscatelli, the cop from Rome, said, "Whatever he wanted, water or whatever, was made fully available to him."
But, I can assure you, I was scared out of my wits, and completely bewildered. I had been brought up to think the police were honest defenders of public safety. My sister was a member of the carabinieri, no less! Now it seemed to me they were behaving more like gangsters.
Then came a sound that chilled my bones: Amanda's voice, yowling for help in the next room. She was screaming in Italian, Aiuto! Aiuto!"
I asked what was going on, and Moscatelli told me there was nothing to worry about. But that was absurd. I could hear police officers yelling, and Amanda sobbing and crying out another three or four times.
What was this? When would it ever end?
* * *
Something was exciting the police more than my pocketknife, and that was the pattern they had detected on the bottom of my shoes. By sheer bad luck, I was wearing Nikes that night, and the pattern of concentric circles on the soles instantly reminded my interrogators of the bloody shoe prints at the scene of the crime, which were made by Nikes too.
I had no idea of any of this. All I knew was, the rest of the interrogation team piled back into the room and told me to take off my shoes.
"Why?" I asked.
"We need them," came the answer.
I did as I was told. "Socks too?"
"No, you can keep your socks on."
The rounds of questioning began all over again: "Tell us what happened! Did Amanda go out on the night of the murder? Why are you holding out on us? You've lost your head per una vacca—for a cow!"
They wanted me to sign a statement they had prepared. The first part was a big mash up of the events of October 31 and November 1, most of which, I have to admit, was the result of my own confusion. The account began with the lunch at Via della Pergola, Meredith going out, and the two of us leaving in the later afternoon. But then it described me going home alone and working at the computer while Amanda headed to the center of town.
The statement had my father calling around eleven o'clock, which is what he almost always did, and Amanda returning to my house at around one in the morning.
By the time I read what the police had prepared, it was deep into the night, I was exhausted and scared, and I could no longer think straight. Absurd as it sounds, the statement struck me as accurate enough up to this point. I simply missed the fact that I was—from the investigators' point of view—cutting Amanda loose for the entire evening and depriving her of the only alibi she had.
I objected to just one paragraph. It was a logical continuation of what the police already had me saying, but I missed the connection; I just knew this part was not right. It read, "In my last statement 1 told you a lot of crap because she [Amanda] talked me into her version of events, and I didn't think about the inconsistencies."
I told my interrogators this part needed to be changed, but they wouldn't back down. Instead, they unexpectedly became much friendlier and said I shouldn't worry about this paragraph. It was just something they needed and it wouldn't affect my position one way or the other. Essentially, they were asking me to trust them. Part of me still wanted to. I wanted to believe this was a world in which the police did their jobs responsibly. And part of me just couldn't wait for the hellish night to be over.
At three thirty, after five hours of relentless interrogation, I signed.
* * *
At this point, Amanda herself had already cracked. As she later told it, her interrogators insisted they had concrete proof she was at the house on Via della Pergola the night Meredith was killed. When she said she had no recollection of this, they threatened her with thirty years in prison and hit her repeatedly on the head. (The police denied threatening her in any way.)
They asked her over and over about the text message she had sent Patrick, her boss at Le Chic, and said it showed she had arranged to meet him even after he told her she didn't need to come into work that night. But this was clearly a distorted interpretation. Yes, she had written ci vediamo piu tardi—see you later—but in both Italian and English that can simply mean "see you around." The fact that Amanda had added the words buona serata—have a good evening—made it abundantly clear she expected no further contact with him that night. But the officers ignored these last two words of her text and later omitted them from the written statement they prepared for her to sign.
For at least an hour, Amanda was interrogated in Italian. The police officers said she seemed to understand the questions well enough, and the statement they produced described her Italian language skills as "adequate" not an assessment I or the Italian
tenants at Via della Pergola would have shared, and not what the police themselves seemed to think the first night we were brought in for questioning. Then, at some point after midnight, a
n interpreter arrived. Amanda's mood only worsened. She hadn't remembered texting Patrick at all, so she was in no position to parse over the contents of her message. When it was suggested to her she had not only written to him but arranged a meeting, her composure crumbled; she burst into uncontrollable tears, and held her hands up to her ears as if to say, I don't want to hear any more of this.
The interpreter, Anna Donnino, tried to calm Amanda and told her how she had once suffered a memory lapse after breaking her leg. Could it be, Donnino suggested, that something similar had happened to Amanda because of the trauma of Meredith's death? In the moment, Amanda appeared to accept this. The police officers kept asking about Patrick, kept insisting Amanda had been at the house. And, by the time she signed a statement at 1:45 a.m., this is what it said:
Honor Bound: Page 6
