Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  "I answered [Patrick's] message saying we would meet up right away, so I left and told my boyfriend I had to go to work. . . . Immediately after, I met Patrik [sic] at the basketball court on Piazza Grimana and we went to my house together. I don't remember Meredith was there or if she arrived later. I'm having trouble remembering but Patrik had sex with Meredith—he had a thing for her—but I don't remember too clearly if Meredith was threatened first. I remember confusedly that he was the one who killed her."

  Once the police had this spectacular document in hand, they came back to squeeze me and insisted that I sign my own statement. Looking now at the sequence of events, I can see how they used each of us to undermine the other. Once my signature was attached to a document stating that Amanda had gone out for several hours on the night of November 1, they went back and told her I was no longer vouching for her. That, evidently, sent her into a tailspin of fear and confusion—fear of what the police might do to her, fear of what I was saying and what it said about me, and also fear for her own sanity.

  As Amanda's questioning continued, Prosecutor Mignini himself decided to take charge. He arrived at the Questura in the dead of night, apparently after being informed that Amanda had "broken," and pressed her for a full confession. Again, Amanda was in floods of tears. Again, she was gesticulating with her hands and bringing them to her head—a detail that seemed particularly fascinating to Mignini, perhaps because hitting oneself in the head is sometimes associated with Masonic initiation rites.

  At 5:45 a.m., Amanda signed a second statement detailing what were characterized as "spontaneous" pronouncements of hers. "I am very afraid of Patrik," the statement began—an assertion apparently undermined by the fact that she had gone to see

  Patrick for a social call just the day before. Again, the narrative had Amanda going with Patrick to her house; again it described Patrick and Meredith having sex.

  "At some point," it went on, "I heard Meredith screaming and I was so afraid I blocked my ears. Then I remember nothing more. My head is full of confusion. I don't remember if Meredith screamed or if I heard any banging, but I could imagine what might have gone on."

  Unfortunately, the statement also left open the possibility that I was involved. "Not sure if Raffaele was there that night," it said. Amanda, according to the statement, was certain of only one thing: that she woke up with me the next morning in my bed. The rest was one big question mark.

  * * *

  When I first found out what Amanda had signed her name to, I was furious. Okay, she was under a lot of pressure, as I had been, but how could she just invent stuff out of nowhere? Why would she drag me into something I had no part of? It soon transpired, of course, that she felt similarly about me. "What I don't understand," she wrote, as soon as she began to retract her statements, "is why Raffaele, who has always been so caring and gentle with me, would lie. . . . What does he have to hide?"

  It took us both a long time to understand how we had been manipulated and played against each other. It took me even longer to appreciate that the circumstances of our interrogations were designed expressly to extract statements we would otherwise never have made, and that I shouldn't blame Amanda for going crazy and spouting dangerous nonsense.

  Our interrogators resorted to time-honored pressure techniques practiced by less-than-scrupulous law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world. They brought us in at night, presented us with threats and promises, scared us half senseless, then offered us a way out with a few quick strokes of a pen. The CIA once produced a document about such techniques and essentially itemized all the emotional stages we traveled through that night—confusion, fear, guilt, an irrational dependence on our interrogators, and a sense that the whole world had gone topsy-turvy. As my friend and supporter, Steve Moore, a twenty-five-year FBI veteran, described it from the police perspective: "If you're trying to determine facts and truth, you want your suspect clear, lucid, and awake. If you want to coerce your suspect into saying what you want them to say, you want them disoriented, groggy, and confused."

  Even before dawn broke on November 6, the authorities had us where they wanted us. True, neither of us had confessed to murder. But what they had—a web of contradictions, witnesses pitted against each other, and a third suspect on whom to pin the crime—was an acceptable second best.

  For me, the night was not yet over. While Amanda endured her face-to-face encounter with Mignini, I was taken to another room and showered with threats and insults.

  "You don't know what you've done!" someone said. "Your family will be destroyed. You'll spend the next thirty years in prison."

  Or again: "Your poor father, who knows how he will take this. What did he do to deserve a son like you? You need to tell us what happened!"

  In retrospect, I'm not sure they were pressing me to confess to a crime. Their more immediate interest was in having me produce more incriminating testimony against Amanda.

  "She went out. When did she go out?" I remember being asked. "I'm not sure she went out," I replied at one point. "I remember something totally different."

  "If you can't remember, then it's going to be bad for you. You are creating a lot of problems for yourself."

  "I don't know what you're talking about. I never went into Meredith's room. I never even saw the body. So I don't know what you are trying to suggest."

  And so it went, around and around and around.

  When it became apparent they would get nothing more out of me, I was arrested and handcuffed.

  I asked to talk to my family again. I said I needed at least to inform my thesis director where I was. "Where you're going, a degree's not going to do you any good," came the answer.

  One of my interrogators opened the door noisily at one point, walked over, and slapped me. "Your father is a fine upstanding person," he said. "He doesn't even deserve a son like you, someone who would stand by a whore like Amanda."

  People kept coming and going. Sometimes I was left alone. Sometimes I was shouted at.

  And then the morning came.

  I was taken to the medical section of the Questura and told to strip. "Take off everything," I was told, "even your underpants."

  I had already been shoeless most of the night, but this was a whole new level of humiliation. I was asked about a Japanese manga tattoo covering much of my left shoulder blade—a present I gave myself after passing a brutal programming exam in 2004—and was made to walk around in front of a female doctor.

  I felt so ashamed I didn't even look up at her. After a few minutes, she took a pair of scissors and snipped some hair from my head and another sample from my pubic hair. This was done to establish my DNA profile, they said. Of course, they could have swabbed my mouth. Or taken, a hair sample with my clothes still on.

  As I was escorted to another part of the Questura, I passed a holding cell and heard Amanda inside weeping like a little girl. I could not see her, but the sound carried well enough through a small opening in the door. I asked her quickly about the events of the night, but she was too hysterical to make sense.

  I was not taken to an isolation cell of my own—yet. Instead, I was shown into a waiting room and left on a couch for what seemed like a long time. I was alone at last and fell gratefully asleep.

  * * *

  At some point during my interrogation, I told the officers the best way to find out what I was doing on the night of the murder was to go to my house and check the activity log on my laptop computer. Now the police wanted to take me up on this. I could have insisted on their obtaining a search warrant, but somehow I still had faith that they would switch out of their misguided line of inquiry as soon as I showed them proof of their mistake.

  I was taken out to a patrol car, and we raced into central Perugia with sirens blaring. Accompanying me were Chiacchiera and a number of rank-and-file policemen. I was still shoeless, and still in handcuffs, when they made me get out and walk down Corso Garibaldi to my front door. I have no idea if anyone saw me;
I was beyond caring about appearances.

  As soon as we walked into my apartment, a policeman named Armando Finzi said loudly that the place stank of bleach. That wasn't correct. My cleaning lady had been through the day before and cleaned the tile floor with Lysoform, not bleach. Still, he insisted on mentioning the bleach a couple more times—the clear implication being that I'd needed something powerful to clean up a compromising mess.

  Then I watched them pull the place apart. In the kitchen, where I was standing, they went through the trash and sniffed through the cleaning products. When Finzi came across a drawer full of kitchen knives, he called Chiacchiera over immediately. He pulled out the first knife that came to hand, a large chopping knife with an eight-inch blade.

  "Will this knife do?" Finzi asked Chiacchiera.

  "Yes, yes, it's great," came the answer.

  Much later, in court, Finzi made no secret of the fact that this was simply a random pick. He had no reason to select such a knife. He hadn't been given any specifics on the murder weapon from the coroner's report, or anywhere else, and had nothing to go on other than what he called his "investigative intuition."

  Before I had time to ponder what the knife seizure meant, Chiacchiera pulled me into the bedroom, where I had a backpack full of books, including some of my beloved Japanese manga comics. Most of these were unremarkable: fantasy stories, futuristic thrillers, run-of-the-mill stuff. But Chiacchiera also found a four-volume set titled Urotsukidoji, a series of highly sexualized horror stories with lots of blood, and monsters copulating violently with humans.

  He flipped through a volume and demanded, "What is this revolting crap?" He didn't wait for the answer, which was that the series was a collector's item from the 1960s, a present from my friend. Gianluigi Ceraso, which I hadn't even taken out of its wrapping. Horror manga was not my thing.

  But Chiacchiera didn't want to know. Instead, he threw the book in my face. "You're a real piece of shit, aren't you? Well, we're going to take care of you."

  Only belatedly did the police show an interest in my computer. I suggested they turn it off and close the keyboard before carting it off, but they didn't listen. They pulled the plug out of the wall socket and carried it away still open. I'm convinced to this day that the computer could have exonerated me completely, and probably Amanda too, if it had been handled properly. But almost all of that evidence would soon be destroyed.

  * * *

  We traveled back to the Questura. 1 now had a pair of shoes on, some ASICS Onitsuka Tigers I grabbed from my closet while I had the chance. Somehow, I was optimistic things were about to get a whole lot better. As soon as word of my arrest hits the news, I thought, my father would hire a lawyer and I'd get out of here.

  Instead, I had to endure more waiting. At one point I was asked for my computer password. The Questura's computer analysis software only worked with PCs, I was told, not Macs like mine. That should have raised my suspicions, but I gave them the password as instructed. I was exhausted and incapable of thinking straight.

  A little later, I had to help the police with a second pocketknife they had found at my place, a Spyderco they had managed to open but could not now close. I showed them how.

  The waiting was designed, in part, to give the media time to assemble outside the Questura and capture the first images of us being hauled into police vans and driven off to Capanne prison, about ten miles southwest of town. It was the beginning of the media circus, deliberately orchestrated for maximum effect. I don't have much memory of this "perp walk," only that I was hustled out of the building with the hood of my gray jacket, the one I had lent to Amanda the day after the murder, thrust over my head. Amanda followed behind me, and behind her was Patrick Lumumba, who had been picked up at his house before first light that morning.

  After we left, Arturo De Felice, the Perugia police chief, held a triumphalist news conference in which the world was first told that Meredith died as a result of a sex orgy gone wrong. The press corps was so startled they barely asked about the evidence. De Felice alluded to the "sheer level of detail that came out of the investigation hour by hour, minute by minute." And he acknowledged, Once again, the pressure he had felt to solve the case quickly—which the men and women of the Perugia police had now done.

  Three culprits, three arrests: case closed.

  II

  KAFKA ON THE TIBER

  Any punishment not rooted in strict necessity is a form of tryanny.

  --Montesquieu, quoted by Italy's formost

  legal theorist, Cesar Beccaria

  Chapter II

  Kafka On The Tiber

  Arriving at Capanne prison was like landing on an alien planet.

  What did I have to do with such a place? I thought of Dante, whom I'd read at school, and his warning on the gates of hell: Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Like Dante, I was hoping to be just a fleeting visitor to this underworld. But already I was being treated like a hardened criminal.

  The guards made me empty my pockets and pull the laces out of my shoes. I handed over my wallet, my identity card, my bracelets, even my jacket, which went against regulations because it had metal fasteners. All vestiges of normal life, the life of a free citizen, were systematically taken away from me. I was not naked, as I had been in the Questura, but I felt that same helplessness, the same acute vulnerability.

  Then came another interminable wait in a holding cell. The guards would bang loudly and unexpectedly on the gates from time to time and shout, "What have you done?"

  I did not respond. Instead, I asked to talk to my father, or to a lawyer. They said I could speak to no one.

  It grew cold and I had nothing, not even my jacket, to keep me warm. I recognized nobody. Amanda was far away in the women's wing, and 1 bad no idea where Patrick was.

  At length I was shown to my cell: a dark, damp, dirty hole with one small window looking out on a vast expanse of reinforced concrete. The bed was a sponge mattress, the toilet caked in grime. I asked if someone was coming to clean; it was an absurd question.

  I was a long way from home.

  They had put me in solitary confinement. I would stay here until the first court hearing, which by law had to take place within seventy-two hours. After that was a big unknown. Italy has no such thing as bail for criminal defendants. Nor is there any requirement for prosecutors to charge people within a defined time. Often, defendants are set free while the investigation continues. Sometimes, though, they are kept in custodia cautelare, or preventive detention, which can mean months or even years behind bars as the investigation marches with painful slowness toward arraignment and trial.

  As the hours passed, I noticed spy holes in every corner. So I had no privacy, not even to sit on the toilet. The guards passed by regularly, banging on the bars and shouting as they had earlier. The one blanket I had was not thick enough to keep me from shivering, and the radiator was useless. I had a television, but it did not work. From the next cell, I would hear occasional knocking on the wall and chatter in a foreign language I did not recognize. I guessed it was Arabic.

  Looking through the window again, I noticed that the view extended to a guard tower rising up from the concrete. Beyond the tower, I could make out a tiny patch of hillside with a small house on it. 'Ilk. free world, still barely within view.

  stared and stared at that house and allowed myself the briefest of smiles.

  * * *

  The news of our arrests broke at about 9:30 a.m., about half an hour before we were escorted out of the Questura. By lunchtime, we were all over the news.

  My father refused to believe it at first. His older sister, Magda, called him in the late morning and said her husband had seen something on the Internet. "You've got to be joking," he told her. "If Raffaele had been arrested, he would have found a way to let me know."

  But of course I was muzzled. The authorities in Perugia eventually got around to calling my family, but they waited so long they might as well have not bothered. Hours earlie
r, my father's lawyer friend, Tiziano Tedeschi, had the news confirmed by a news reporter calling him for a reaction.

  Papa snapped into action right away. He canceled his appointments, called home to ask Mara to prepare a suitcase, and withdrew twenty-five hundred euros from the bank. He asked his younger brother, Giuseppe, who had a high-powered job with the European pharmaceutical giant Bayer, if he wanted to accompany him to Perugia. He did.

  By early afternoon the three of them—my father, my uncle, and Tedeschi—were on their way. My father never doubted for an instant that the police had made a mistake. He thought that once they got to Perugia, they would be able to talk it over, clear up the misunderstanding, and have me back at my studies in hours. Vanessa, who spoke to my father en route, agreed that it might work out that way. Often, she said, people got arrested in a sweep in the wake of a major crime, and most were out again within twenty-four hours.

  But Vanessa, ever cautious in the face of authority, added a caveat: "Let's just see what reasons they come up with for the arrest."