Such smears not only turned public opinion against us, they also entered our case files and influenced the judges in their rulings. It would take years to set the record straight.
* * *
Even the police realized they were missing a big part of the picture. For all their efforts to pin evidence on Amanda and me, they knew that a lot of the crime-scene forensics did not match. Patrick, meanwhile, was drawing a big blank. Someone else had clearly been in the room when Meredith died, and soon news stories circulated about a "fourth man" still at large. Even before the papers named him, investigators knew exactly who that fourth man was: Rudy Guede.
From the beginning, the police had been intrigued by Stefano Bonassi, one of Amanda's downstairs neighbors, who told them he found his toilet unflushed and full of excrement the night Cue& slept over in early October. About a week after our arrest, one of Guede's friends cane forward and reported a weird IM exchange in which Guede hinted at a dark secret he could not reveal. The Squadra Mobile had access to Guede's fingerprints because of his arrest in Milan and checked them against a handprint made in blood on Meredith's pillowcase.
They matched.
On November 19, the police broke into Rudy's flat—just a few steps away from mine—and took a DNA sample from his toothbrush. That resulted in multiple further crime-scene matches. They also visited a friend of Guede's named Giacomo Benedetti and sat in on a three-hour Skype chat with Guede that Benedetti set up. Benedetti's instructions were simple: he was to do everything he could to induce his friend to confess. Benedetti did as he was told and asked Guede every question the police fed to him.
Guede had read news reports about the fingerprint match and was clearly scared. He admitted being in the house when the murder took place but said he'd been on the toilet when he heard screaming coming from Meredith's room. He could describe the attacker only as an Italian man—no specifics—and said he had rushed to Meredith's aid as soon as the man left. That, he said, would account for any traces of him the police might have found in Meredith's room.
Interestingly, Guede said he had cuts on his right hand—which one would expect if he had been holding a knife and Meredith tried to fight him off. He put the time of the murder between 9:00 and 9:20 p.m., which my defense team came to believe was accurate. He said Amanda and Patrick had nothing to do with it. And he acknowledged never having met me in his life.
It was explosive stuff, too explosive to ignore, and the Squadra Mobile discussed how they might send an arrest team to Germany and try to run Guede to ground.
In the end, they didn't have to. Hours after the Skype chat with Benedetti, German police caught Guede riding a train near Mainz without a ticket. Once they realized who he was, they threw hi in jail and began making plans for his extradition.
* * *
I remember watching the news of Guede's arrest on the small-screen TV in my cell and seeing the Perugia police all puffed up with pride about catching him. If anything, I felt happier than they did, be cause Guede was a complete stranger to me. The relief was palpable. All along I had worried the murderer would turn out to be someone I knew and that I'd be dragged into the plot by association. Now 1 had one less thing to worry about. Not that I wasn't still wary: so much invented nonsense had been laid at my door I was still hall= expecting the authorities to produce more.
And they did. Mignini released Patrick Lumumba and simply replaced him in the official story line with Guede. Now it was Guede whom Amanda and I had supposedly met by the basketball court, Guede whom we had helped carry out the evil deed. Mignini, and Lumumba himself, accused Amanda of substituting one black African man for another in the account she gave in the Questura, all the better to shield Guede from prosecution and make life hell for Patrick. But this was turning reality on its head. The substitution came from the prosecutor's office, not from Amanda.
It was remarkable how closely Mignini and Lumumba agreed on the new story line. Amanda had inserted Patrick into her narrative, they said, because she was about to be fired from her jot) at 11e Chic and wanted revenge, pure and simple. Patrick said he was red up with her flaunting her sexuality in front of the customers instead of doing her job, and he had reached the end of his patience. " By the end, she hated me," Lumumba told the British newspaper the Daily Mail. "She's the ultimate actress, able to switch her emotions on and off in an instant. 1 don't believe a word she says. Everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie."
Lumumba had every right to be angry; he had spent two weeks in lockup for no reason. He had been able to prove that Le Chic stayed open throughout the evening of November 1, producing an eyewitness, a Swiss university professor, who vouched for his presence that night. One would expect his anger to be directed as much toward Mignini, who threw him in prison without checking the facts, as it was toward Amanda. But Lumumba and his strikingly aggressive lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, could find only vicious things to say about Amanda from the moment he got out of jail—even though he had not, in fact, fired her and remained friendly with her for several days after the murder.
By contrast, he never said a single word against Mignini.
* * *
My family was quietly optimistic, in the wake of Patrick's release, that Mignini would soon run out of reasons to keep me behind bars. That optimism soared on November 21, when a lawyer from Luca Maori's office was invited to watch the police conduct another search of Rudy Guede's apartment. On the floor were numerous shoe prints with the same pattern of concentric circles as the ones at the crime scene. These did not, at first sight, appear to be made in blood so much as earth, as though the wearer had gone for a walk in the woods and dragged the dirt in behind him.
Our lawyer, Delfo Berretti, took pictures, and my father showed these to two technical experts. The prints, they said, were an exact match for the ones at Via della Pergola. Now we had concrete evidence to show that the Polizia Scientifica's report had been wrong.
Among other things: Rudy Guede wore a size 45 shoe (size 11 1/2 in the United States), and I'm a 42 1/2.
Still, we had a problem. Under Italian law, the defense is not allowed access to the prosecution files until the investigation is formally declared to be over. So, while 1 could be confident the shoe prints at Via della Pergola were not from my Nikes, I couldn't prove that to a judge using official documents, unless the prosecution willing to share what it had.
And the prosecution, as we'd come to expect by this point, was not budging an inch.
* * *
The reality of prison life was catching up to me. Regardless of how quickly things were developing in the case, the grim reality was that I was stuck spending almost every hour of every day alone, unable to see or hear anybody else. For long stretches, I would feel a crushing loneliness, a sense that nobody knew I was there and nobody cared. I would stare at the dust and the cockroaches on the floor, up to the single ray of light coming through the window, then back to the floor again, my mind spinning furiously around the events I was having such a hard time bringing into focus.
For the first few days, I yearned only for home, my family, t he comfort of a warm bed, my car, my computer. I thought if' I had a Play Station it might even be bearable to wait in my cell while my lather worked on getting me released. If only.
Then I started noticing the filth around me and could think only of scrubbing it clean. My family developed a routine to take away my dirty clothes, sheets, and blankets and bring them back freshly laundered on the next visit. Slowly, I recovered an acceptable level of personal hygiene and, with it, some modicum of self-esteem.
After some initial hostility, the staff at the prison treated me decently. One guard talked about the nightmare existences that many prisoners had endured on the outside before they were locked up; she said prison came to some of them almost as a relief. It made me realize just how privileged and cosseted my life had been. After Patrick was released, one of the orderlies who brought my food shouted, "Hey, haven't they let you out of here yet?" Some pe
ople, at least, recognized I was innocent.
I received regular visits from a doctor, a psychiatrist, and an educator who asked so many questions I felt sure she had been instructed to extract new indiscretions from me. I smiled and played along, but told her nothing. For two hours a day, I was allowed to leave my cell for a slightly bigger space with a grate in the ceiling opening directly to the sky. This was the exercise room, a ridiculous name for an empty dungeon barely big enough to run around, but I had to make the best of it. I made a point of running every day—until my knees started aching from the hard contact with the concrete floor and I felt obliged to stop before I did myself permanent damage. I also did stretching exercises that I'd learned from kickboxing. One way or another, I was determined to keep working out. It was essential to preserving my sanity.
I also turned to religion. I've never been super-devout, but I do take solace from the Scriptures and spent some time pondering my favorite passages from the Gospels. Wasn't there a line in the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus blesses the oppressed and those who fall victim to the judgment of others? I would have to ask my cousin Annamaria, who knows the Bible forward and backward.
Over time, 1 developed a personal, extended prayer I recited every morning. This was a version of a prayer I'd been saying every day since my mother's death, modified to take account of the new horrors unfolding in my life. I took solace in the ritual, which brought me back to my early experience of the Catholic catechism. It became a way for me to feel safe within a deep and private part of myself.
It began with an Ave Maria. Then I would remember all the people in my life who seemed most important: my family, those in difficulty, Amanda and her family, poor Meredith and all those who loved and mourned her. Finally, I prayed for the prosecutors and the judges; I prayed that Jesus would open their minds and roll back the clouds preventing them from seeing the truth. I knew that wasn't likely to happen on its own. Why not pray for a miracle and hope the Lord would somehow intervene?
It wasn't always easy to keep my doubt and anger at bay. Sometimes I would look to Jesus as a source of strength, a higher power beyond the ephemera of each day's battles and anxieties. Other times I found Him as ridiculous as everything else. "You were crucified because you did a lot more for others than you should have," I fumed in my journal one day. "You know what I think? You would have done better to give a little less and live longer. . . . I know you saved us from our sins and all that, but sometimes I wonder if it was worth your while."
Clearly, when I wrote that, I was having a bad day.
The prosecution's tactics grew nastier, never more so than when Amanda was taken to the prison infirmary the day after Patrick's release and told she had tested positive for HIV.
She was devastated. She wrote in her diary, "I don't want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to create something good. I want to get old. I want my time. I want my life. Why why why? I can't believe this."
For a week she was tormented with the idea that she would contract AIDS in prison, serving time for a crime she did not commit. But the whole thing was a ruse, designed to frighten her into admitting how many men she had slept with. When asked, she provided a list of her sexual partners, and the contraceptive method she had used with each. Only then was she told the test was a false positive.
To the prosecution, the information must have been a disappointment: seven partners in all, of whom four were boyfriends she had never made a secret of, and three she qualified as one-night stands. Rudy Guede was not on the list, and neither was anyone else who might prove useful in the case. She hadn't been handing herself around like candy at Le Chic, as Patrick now alleged. She'd fooled around with two guys soon after arriving in Italy, neither of them at Patrick's bar, and then she had been with me. Okay, so she was no Mother Teresa. But neither was she the whore of Babylon.
To compound the nastiness, the list was eventually leaked to the media, with the erroneous twist that the seven partners on the list were just the men she'd had since arriving in Perugia. Whatever one thought of Amanda and her free-spirited American attitude toward sex, this callous disregard for her privacy and her feelings was the behavior of savages.
My sister, Vanessa, had struggled with my plight from the beginning. She was the policewoman in the family; this was her area of expertise. As the days turned into weeks, she began to berate herself not jumping in the car and driving to Perugia right away. "II I had shown up in uniform," she told herself, and later repeated to me, "my brother probably would not have ended up in prison at all."
She was in a tricky position. She wanted to help, but she did not want to give the impression she was interfering, because it might cause the Perugia authorities to dig in their heels further. Her immediate boss offered to make a call on her behalf; she urged him not to.
As it became apparent I might not be released before trial, her colleagues slowly changed their behavior around her. She was no longer just a fellow officer with a brother in trouble; she was now the sister of a leading defendant in the biggest murder case in the country. Nobody said a word, at first, but she noticed people beginning to keep their distance. They acted a little more formally and joked a little less. These were little things, and if she'd challenged people, they would no doubt have said her imagination was playing tricks. But she found them disturbing all the same.
In late November, she arranged to meet a friend who worked as a top anti-Mafia investigator. The friend did not want to be seen with her anywhere near her carabinieri barracks in Piazza del Popolo, in the heart of Rome, so they met at a bar across the river in a suitably anonymous residential neighborhood.
He gave it to her straight: "They will do everything they can to get rid of you. It won't happen suddenly. It'll be a gradual thing, like a tap dripping. Goccia a goccia, drop by drop."
He told her to write down everything she did and everything she witnessed. She should record important conversations. Vanessa would not only have to act by the book at all times, she should be prepared to prove it. Like Caesar's wife, as the Romans like to say: beyond reproach.
Vanessa took the advice to heart and was soon glad she did.
* * *
My last best chance of getting out of prison quickly lay with three judges whose job was to go back over Judge Matteini's ruling and make sure it still held up in the light of everything that had transpired since. They were due to convene at the end of November. My father hired consultants to report on my computer activity on the night of the murder, other consultants to look at the shoe-print evidence, and yet more consultants to go through the coroner's report and assess the likelihood that any of my knives could have produced the fatal wounds.
Papa was spinning like a dervish to clear my name, but not everyone he hired was as helpful as he hoped. One consultant whom he asked to monitor the Polizia Scientifica demanded eight thousand euros up front, only to prove reluctant to make overt criticisms of the police's work, the very thing for which he'd been hired. A forensic expert who also seemed a little too close to the police charged four thousand euros for his retainer with the boast, "I'm expensive, but I'm good." He wasn't. A computer expert recommended by Luca Maori didn't know anything about Macs, only PCs.
And so it went. Later in the case, another disappointing consultant bragged to Papa, "If you give me fifty thousand euros, I'll get your son out of prison." My father couldn't afford to make mistakes, and he quickly learned not to trust what the consultants promised, only what they delivered. At the same time, mistakes were inevitable; he'd never done anything remotely like this in his life, time was pressing, and we weren't getting nearly as much information out of the prosecutor's office as we would have liked. Papa would later blame at least some of the confusion on Maori because his recommendations were often disappointing, and because he seemed altogether too interested in offering himself up for media interviews when, to us, discretion seemed the wiser course.
Still, my father and Maori came up with two so
lid ideas below the new court hearing. The first was to search the underbrush around the house at Via della Pergola for signs of the murder weapon. The prosecutor's office granted permission for the search, and a team of gardeners from Maori's country estate spent several hours picking through the steep upper stretch of the ravine with the help of. thick ropes they used as a dragnet. They came up empty, but the request itself made an important point in my favor: it suggested I was confident about my innocence and wanted only to get to the bottom of the mystery.
The second idea was to ask to see video footage from two security cameras on the route from my house to Amanda's. The first camera was outside a military barracks on Corso Garibaldi, hallway between my front door and Piazza Grimana. The second was a city-operated camera on the corner of Piazza Grimana itself. If Amanda or I had gone to Via della Pergola on the night of November 1, argued, the cameras would have picked up our trace—possibly in both directions.
Honor Bound: Page 10
