My father, who reacts every time he senses even a hint of negativity from his daughter, was incensed and unleashed a volley of insults at her. What reasons? In his mind, there couldn't possibly be any.
* * *
That first night in prison, unable to sleep, I wavered between great waves of indignation and a nagging sense of guilt. I knew I had nothing to do with Meredith's murder, but I was furious with myself for having such a foggy memory and I knew it was in part because of the joint I'd smoked on the afternoon of November 1. How many times had my father told me not to smoke? I vowed there and then I would never touch the stuff again.
That said, my poor memory seemed a ridiculous reason to throw me into an isolation cell and accuse me of involvement in the crime. If the problem was with Amanda and the things she might or might not have done outside the house—assuming she left at all why not focus the investigation on her? I didn't believe for an instant she was capable of murder, but I did have doubts about the crowd she ran in. Maybe she knew something. Maybe there was something she hadn't told me. But please, I thought, leave me out of it.
* * *
As soon as my father arrived in Perugia with my uncle and Tedeschi, they were told they could not see me. To their astonishment, I had been denied access to legal counsel. They were given a copy of my arrest warrant, but they had no way of discussing it with me, or of comparing my statements with Amanda's or Patrick Lumumba's, which they were not allowed to see.
Italian law allows prosecutors to bar defendants from speaking to their lawyers only in exceptional circumstances, usually in cases involving terrorism or major Mafia crimes. Even then, the prosecutor is required to petition the court in writing to justify such a draconian measure.
A more aggressive lawyer could have raised holy hell to see such a petition without waiting for the first court hearing and then, assuming it was produced, moved immediately to challenge it.
But Tedeschi seemed out of his depth. He was more used to dealing with petty criminals and low-level street thugs in a small provincial town back home. I don't think he'd ever been denied access to a client before, much less dealt with television cameras and front-page headlines. So there was no hell-raising. And I stumbled, unwittingly, into the next trap being laid for me.
* * *
The main evidence Mignini had to take into the preliminary hearing was my Nikes, and he did everything he could to make them as incriminating as possible. Hours after my interrogators ordered me to take the shoes off, they were examined by a forensic team from Foligno. But the Foligno police were relatively cautious: in the official report they produced that same day, they said they could make no more than a partial comparison with the clearest of the prints left in blood in Meredith's room and could comment only on the rough size and shape of the shoe, nothing more. Still, they concluded that my shoes "could have" created the footprints found at the crime scene.
Mignini was not satisfied, no doubt because the finding was couched in all sorts of caveats; the Foligno police stressed that the match was a theoretical possibility only. So the next day Mignini went to the Polizia Scientifica in Rome for a second opinion. They had even less information to go on than the Foligno team because they had only photographs of my shoes, not the shoes themselves. Somehow, though, they came to the much more definitive conclusion that my Nikes were the same make, model, and shoe size as the print on Meredith's floor. No question about it.
They were flat wrong, for reasons that should have been apparent immediately and would become obvious over time. But we weren't shown the report and had no quick way to contradict it. A precedent was also set: this was far from the last time that
Mignini would rely on the Polizia Scientifica to dig up incriminating evidence against me at a crucial legal juncture.
* * *
I was told about the preliminary hearing an hour before it began. The guards brought me to the prison's makeshift courtroom in the early afternoon of November 8, and I was relieved to see Tedeschi, even if we had only a few seconds to confer before the judge brought us all to order. His was the first friendly face I'd seen in almost three days.
Tedeschi said it would be best if I said nothing, but I had other ideas. I wasn't happy about the statement the police had made me sign in the Questura, and I knew that the evidence about the shoes had to be wrong because I hadn't worn my Nikes on the day of the murder, or the day after. I was also aware of Amanda's signed statements because a summary of them was included in my arrest warrant. I could not believe what I read. Someone, I felt, needed to be informed she had gone plumb crazy.
So I told Tedeschi I wanted to talk. I had nothing to hide. And he did nothing to persuade me otherwise.
As I learned much later, I was in trouble from the moment I gave my name. I would have been better advised to refuse to recognize the legality of the proceedings; my lawyer could then have insisted on receiving a complete document file and time to prepare before I uttered a sound. As soon as I engaged with Judge Claudia Matteini and confirmed my identity, I was implicitly recognizing the jurisdiction of her court and the procedural validity of everything that went on there.
Tedeschi did challenge Mignini to produce the petition denying me access to counsel, but not until the proceeding was well under way. The prosecutor had no coherent explanation of where the petition was—after several false starts, he said only that he "remembered imparting it"—and the judge herself acknowledged she had not seen it. (To this day, no evidence has emerged of its existence.) But Matteini was remarkably untroubled by this, striking down our challenge without even pausing to consider it. She and Mignini were in lockstep from that point forward, and Tedeschi did nothing to stop them rolling right over me.
It is difficult for me to reread the transcript of that day's hearing without wincing at my performance. I was still working from the premise that the court would listen to me in good faith and that Judge Matteini, as I put it in my journal, had "a good heart." In fact, I only made a bad situation worse.
Even before Judge Matteini had finished reading the complaint against me, I blurted out that I didn't know Patrick Lumumba and that any prints from my shoes found at Via della Pergola could only have been made before November 1. Immediately I ran into trouble because I had in fact met Patrick at his bar, on the night Amanda and I first got together. And I had no idea that the shoe prints in question were made in blood. In no time, I was flailing and suggesting, in response to the judge's pointed questions, that maybe I picked up some of the blood on the floor when I walked around the house on November 2, the day the body was discovered. Even more unwisely, I speculated that someone might have stolen my shoes and committed the murder in them. It just did not occur to me that the shoe print evidence was wrong.
These were far from my only gaffes. Tedeschi complained early on that we were "stumbling around in the dark" because we didn't have access to the full evidence file. But he did nothing to stop me stumbling for close to two hours.
I kept insisting that my father had called at bedtime on November 1, as he did almost every night, when the prosecution knew from the phone records that he had not. Inadvertently, I made small changes in the time Amanda and I returned from our abortive shopping trip into town, and Mignini immediately seized on these, along with everything else, as evidence of "new inconsistencies" in my account.
I felt like a fool describing my extensive knife collection and even described myself as a testa di cazzo, a dickhead, for having so many. My judgment and my self-confidence were sinking fast.
Perhaps the worst moment came when I was asked, for the umpteenth time, if Amanda had gone out on the night of the murder. I still had no clarity on this and could not answer the judge's repeated questions without sounding evasive.
"I can't . . . I can't . . . I mumbled at one point.
"Yes, no—or I can't remember," she admonished. "Those are your three options."
"I can't remember exactly."
The judge was clearly annoyed.
"Listen, sometimes you remember things very well, and other times, when you are challenged, you say you don't remember. I would invite you to be more precise because you need to understand that, with all these contradictions in the face of objective facts like the prints near Meredith's bed, you're not in the best situation."
Not in the best situation? I was in the worst situation imaginable being falsely accused of murder. If I wasn't handling the questions well, it was because I was out of my depth in every way imaginable. As the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frank! once wrote, "An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is nor mal behavior." Amanda and I had been in a kind of lovers' cocoon all week, and our days and nights blended together in my mind. The shock of Meredith's murder didn't alter that, and may even have made it more difficult to sort everything out once our mundane daily routine was held up to the scrutiny of a criminal investigation. Had we had any prior knowledge of the murder, 1 imagine we would have had our stories straight and practiced responses at the ready. The judge, though, was not interested in understanding why I was having such a hard time, nor was she interested in cutting me any other kind of slack.
I could have been a lot smarter, of course, but the judge and the prosecution had all the tools to catch me out, and I was blindsided by their assertions of "objective fact" that were anything but. My game plan had been to dissociate myself from Amanda and thus deprive them of the argument that I was covering for her because I was in love with her. Accordingly, I told the court I never wanted to see her again. But they didn't let up on me, not for a mintue, and only exploited the wedge they had so successfully driven between the two of us.
In his court filings, Mignini described us as unscrupulous, cynical, cal, troubling characters who should not be allowed to walk free pending trial. Amanda, he said, had dragged me into a criminal conspiracy, while I was a person with "particularly sinister habits" who had very possibly supplied the knife that killed Meredith. This wasn't evidence-based prosecution; it was character assassination by any means.
Matteini's final questions were about a blog I had written after my Erasmus year in Germany in which I talked about the joys of experiencing new things abroad, and my sadness that the experience was now over. This seemed easy enough to tackle. She asked what I'd meant when I said, "You can only hope that you'll experience even stronger emotions in future to take you by surprise all over again."
I said I was referring to experiences that help a young person grow and mature, in contrast to "doing exactly the same things and spending time with the same people every day," which I said made life fiat and pointless.
What kinds of experiences did I have in mind? the judge persisted.
"Well, for example, being with a woman," I answered. "At the time I was in the Erasmus program I'd never experienced the pleasure of sex. That's one thing I meant when I wrote that."
I thought my answer was innocuous enough. Nobody could fault its honesty. Who could have guessed I was, in fact, providing Matteini with the one thing she felt she lacked: a motive for me to have murdered Meredith Kercher?
* * *
Matteini swallowed the prosecution's story whole. The break-in was staged after the fact, she asserted—just as Mignini had. The murderer or murderers must therefore have got into the house with a set of keys, and Amanda was the only keyholder without a solid alibi for the night in question. Patrick Lumumba had the hots for Meredith, Matteini theorized, and Amanda and I tagged along to experience something new and different. From my testimony at tile hearing, Matteini concluded I was "bored by the same old evenings" and wanted to experience some "strong emotions." (She moved my Hog entry from October 2006, the date marked on the document, to October 2007, just weeks before the murder, which bolstered the argument.) She didn't ascribe a specific motive to Amanda, assuming only that she must have felt the same way 1 did. Me bloody footprints "proved" I was present at the scene of the murder, and my three-inch flick knife was "compatible with the possible murder weapon." The house, she wrote, was "smeared with blood every where.),
Matteini's full-throated language guaranteed banner headlines, but it did not stand up to scrutiny. If the three of us had been in Meredith's room when she died, we would have left traces of ourselves all over the place—DNA, hair, skin, maybe blood. Such a crowded murder scene would have caused far more turmoil than was left in Meredith's room. My knife would have had blood traces on it, and the prosecution knew full well at this stage that it was clean. The description of "blood everywhere" can only have been a misinterpretation of crime-scene photos taken after the forensics teams had painted the house with cyanoacrylate, a chemical used to capture latent prints that makes everything glow pinkish red. In reality, except for the ghastly mess in Meredith's room, there were just a few small bloodstains that a reasonable person could easily have missed.
Even leaving aside the tortured logic of the staged break-in, Matteini had to twist herself into a pretzel to explain how, in her account, Patrick could tell Amanda he was closing his bar so they'd be free to meet, but was somehow seen at his bar later the same night. Presumably, she wrote, he opened back up after the murder to give himself a plausible alibi.
Naturally, Matteini dwelled on the most convenient phrase in Amanda's text message to Patrick, ci vediamo piu tardi—see you later—while omitting the buona serata, which would have made nonsense of her theory that they were arranging a rendezvous. Later in the story, she insisted that we had called the carabinieri only after the Polizia Postale showed up. It was, in other words, another piece of staging to look as if we were raising the alarm.
The biggest disaster was that Matteini ordered us kept behind bars for up to a year while the investigation continued. Under Italian law, there can be only three valid reasons to do such a thing: if there are grounds to fear that another crime may be committed, if evidence risks being compromised or contaminated, or if the defendants are deemed a flight risk. Even Matteini did not subscribe to Mignini's arguments on the first two. But, she said, Patrick and Amanda were foreigners and could easily leave the country. And I, as Amanda's boyfriend, might be motivated to run away with her. Apparently, it did not occur to her to confiscate our passports or put us under house arrest.
The ruling came down one day after the hearing. Tedeschi was no longer in town; he said he had business to attend to in Bari and drove back with Giuseppe. I, meanwhile, was back in solitary, staring at the walls and wondering how much longer this insanity would continue. I sat down and wrote a telegram to my father urging him, among other things, to recommend another lawyer. I hadn't talked to Papa in four days, and now I needed him desperately. In the telegram, I recovered much of the lucidity that had eluded me earlier, explaining succinctly that I couldn't remember some specifics about the night of the crime, and that my version and Amanda's differed on whether she had gone out, and for how long.
"The Squadra [Mobile] understands I'm innocent, but now 1 need to prove it to the magistrate," I wrote. (Clearly I still had some residual faith in the police, even if my experiences should have taught me otherwise.) "I'm in solitary confinement, I am scared and sad. . . . I don't know what to do, everything seems unreal. I'm so sorry, I love you."
My father didn't receive the telegram for days because I sent it to his home in Bisceglie, and he was in Perugia. I was right to think he was the person to lean on in my hour of need. I just had no idea when or how I might hear from him. And neither did he.
* * *
Amanda recovered her lucidity faster. than I did. The day we were arrested, she wrote a statement in English that all but retracted what she had signed the night before. "In regards to this 'confession,'" she wrote, "I want to make clear that I'm very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion." She was still conjuring up images of Patrick as the murderer, but she added, "These things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened or just dreams in
my head."
The next day, she wrote a second, more confident statement: "I DID NOT KILL MY FRIEND . . . But I'm very confused, because the police tell me that they know I was at my house when she was murdered, which I don't remember. They tell me a lot of things I don't remember." Then she gave a substantially more accurate account of the night of November 1 than I was coming up with at the time.
Amanda's statements were given to Mignini before the preliminary hearing, which might explain why Matteini went relatively easy on her and reserved the greatest venom for me.
I didn't get to see Amanda, not even in Matteini's courtroom, because our hearings were conducted one after the other. I became aware that Patrick was being held in the isolation cell next to mine, but I made no attempt to communicate with him. Avoiding any appearance of collusion between us seemed more important than exchanging notes on our experiences.
Very slowly, I was learning.
* * *
The confusion in my head brought back jarring memories of my first big scare about mind-altering substances. It happened during my Erasmus year in Munich, at a party I attended with two girls who were among my closest friends during my time in Germany.
Honor Bound: Page 8
