Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  Again, the request was as much about appearing innocent as it was about clearing my name. This time, though, we were turned down without explanation.

  * * *

  In his own preparations for the new court hearing, Mignini came up with what might be termed the Great Mushroom Conspiracy theory. It stemmed from something the coroner found in Meredith's esophagus: a largely undigested piece of food, which one or his assistants said looked like a mushroom. Mignini knew that when Meredith was with. her. English friends in the early evening of November 1, she ate pizza, ice cream, and apple crumble, but no mushrooms. So where could this extra piece of food, assuming that's what it was, have come from?

  Mignini's answer, as he wrote in a brief for the three-judge review panel, was that Meredith and Amanda must have helped themselves to some mushrooms after Meredith returned home. Mignini had learned that both girls were fond of button mushrooms. The police even found some in my refrigerator, which in Mignini's retelling seemed to cast more suspicion on me.

  Why could any of this possibly matter? It mattered because Mignini had a problem. The coroner, Luca Lalli, had been unable to ascertain the time of death with any accuracy because he was not granted access to the body until just before 1:00 a.m on November 3, almost twelve hours after it was discovered and more than twenty-four hours after Meredith's murder. (Mignini would eventually concede that making Lalli wait had been a mistake.) Usually, medical examiners take temperature readings to calculate the hour of death, but by the time the Polizia Scientifica had finished going over the crime scene, Meredith's corpse was cold. Lalli did make one significant discovery, however: none of the food that Meredith had eaten in the hours before the murder left her stomach for her upper intestine. That meant, based on normal digestion times, she must have died within two or three hours of her last meal.

  This was a problem for the prosecution because Meredith's English friends said they ordered pizza at about 6:00 p.m. That would put the murder at around 9:00 p.m., right around the time Meredith returned home. But at 9:00 p.m. Amanda and I were still at my house watching Am lie, according to the police's interpretation of the user logs on my MacBook Pro. How to get around this?

  Mignini decided Meredith's last meal had taken place later-- the mushroom party—and used that as an argument to buy himself a couple of hours' more time. His brief put the time of death at about 11:00 p.m. Lalli, following Mignini's lead that Meredith's last meal was at 9:00 p.m., later concurred (while at the same time expressing caution about how much was known about the timing of her food intake). The argument was scientifically untenable because what mattered was not the time Meredith stopped eating, but rather the time she started. No matter how many mushrooms she put in her mouth after she got home, the digestion of the pizza was already well under way. There were grounds to doubt she had eaten mushrooms at all, because the medical team found only the one fragment, which was never tested or even saved after the autopsy. Similar-looking fragments found in her stomach were clearly apples from the apple crumble; perhaps a piece of her dessert did not go ail the way down before she died.

  Those arguments, though, would only arise later. For now, the main purpose of the mushroom theory was to keep the court open to the idea that Amanda and I were present at the murder scene.

  And it worked.

  * * *

  The day before the new hearing, I showed Luca Maori a prison diary I'd been keeping so he could assess whether any of it might be useful in court. I had used the diary to try to solidify my memory of the sequence of events. But I'd also jotted down more personal reflections about my accusers, about the prison staff, and about my state of mind. Maori thought it was too risky to keep such a thing in my cell, and I agreed he should take it to his office for safekeeping.

  We were still talking when prison guards swooped into the visiting room and ordered Maori to hand over the diary. Maori exploded, saying this was a blatant violation of attorney-client privilege and of my right to privacy. When the guards refused to back down and carried my handwritten pages away, Maori asked the guards to call Mignini's office and demanded the prosecutor's intervention. Mignini agreed and instructed the guards to return the diary. They did as they were told.

  It appears, however, that while Maori was on the phone, someone put the diary through a photocopier because the text—minus the last few pages—was leaked to the Tuscan newspaper La Nazione and printed ten days later. I can't begin to say how demoralizing and humiliating it was to have my private thoughts and feelings exposed to the world in this way.

  And I was not the only target. Shortly after the guards descended on me, they entered Amanda's cell and seized her diaries too. These also found their way into the media, but not for a few months.

  The good news was, the authorities found nothing more in our writings that they could twist into incriminating evidence. But the message seemed clear: there was no length to which they would not go to try to make the accusations against us stick.

  The three-judge panel not only ruled against us, they were shockingly dismissive of almost everything my lawyers and I had to say. They looked at photographs of the murder house and decided that Filomena's window was too far off the ground (about thirteen feet) for an intruder to hit reliably with a rock, and certainly too high to clamber up to. "It's a feat even Spider-Man would have had trouble pulling off," the lead judge, Massimo Ricciarelli, wrote with spectacular disdain as he formulated his justification for keeping Amanda and me behind bars.

  It should have been obvious from the photographs that there were plentiful toeholds, including a metal grate on the window directly below Filomena's. But Ricciarelli and his colleagues, no Spider-Men themselves, could not imagine anyone reaching the window without a ladder. Since a ladder had not been found, they concluded the murderer or murderers must have gone through the front door. Since the door showed no sign of a break-in, they argued, whoever went in there must have had a key.

  This was ass-backward logic: they actually wrote, because there was no sign of a break-in. A window was broken and Filomena's room was turned upside down, but, no, there was no sign of a break-in. No sign at all.

  The rest of the judges' arguments were equally worrisome. imagined Meredith's attackers engaging in "frenetic and rapid" sexual penetration, even though the coroner had found no evidence to support this. They said the blood on the bathroom tap was Amanda's not true; traces of Amanda's DNA (in her own bathroom!) were found mixed with Meredith's blood and used that to argue for more than one attacker. They placed great significance on an assertion that the sweater Amanda wore on the night of the murder had not been found, when the police's crime-scene photos which we saw only later—showed she had left it in plain sight on her bed. he judges decided. Amanda had indeed confessed to being present at the scene when she told her mother, "I was there." And they said it was "completely irrelevant" what the video cameras on Corso Garibaldi did or did not show at the time we were alleged to have walked to Via della Pergola to murder Meredith.

  Strangely, they put the time of death not at 11:00 p.m., as Mignini had suggested, but at 10:00 p.m. They gave no reasoning for this conclusion.

  Amanda and I came in for what was by now a familiar drubbing. The judges said my account of events was "unpardonably implausible." Indeed, I had a "rather complex and worrying personality" prone to all sorts of impulses. Amanda, for her part, was not shy about having "multiple sex partners" and had a "multifaceted personality, detached from reality." Over and above the flight risk if we were released from prison, the judges foresaw a significant danger that we would make up new fantastical scenarios to throw off the investigation. In Amanda's case, they said she might take advantage of her liberty to kill again.

  * * *

  Because the court's wilder, obviously absurd assertions were entered into the case record, my lawyers and I had to take time and trouble to refute them. The more of them there were, the more difficult and exhausting it became to keep the momentum going in our direction
and we started sliding backward. It was like the old Greek myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned for all eternity to push a rock up a mountain but never able to reach the top before the rock tumbled back down again. Every time we thought we were almost there, we would be knocked flat by a new avalanche of judicial bullshit.

  Perhaps the most damaging assertion made by the prosecution and upheld by Ricciarelli and his colleagues was that the Polizia Postale had arrived at Via della Pergola before I called the carabinieri, not after, and that my emergency call was thus a ruse to make it look as if Amanda and I were raising the alarm when in fact we'd been caught red-handed. Michele Battistelli told investigators that he and Fabio Marzi arrived at 12:35, more than fifteen minutes before phone records showed .me making my first emergency call. My lawyers told the review panel this sequence of events was not possible, because Elisabetta Lana was recorded beginning her official statement at police headquarters about the second cell phone at 12:46 and finishing it several minutes later. Battistelli told. Filomena and the rest of us that the police had found two cell phones, not just one. Therefore, we argued, he and Marzi may not even have left for Via della Pergola before I'd spoken to the carabinieri.

  To which the Ricciarelli court replied: Battistelli could have left for Via della Pergola on the basis of the first cell phone only. He could have found out about the other one while he was en route, or after he arrived.

  The court made no apparent attempt to dig deeper, either through interviews with Battistelli's superiors, or through Battistelli's cell phone records, or by any other means. Had such an investigation taken place, we would have been vindicated. But because the judges decided it could have happened the way Battistelli claimed, Amanda and I were deemed too dangerous to set free.

  The review panel cured me of any residual belief in the fair-mindedness of the prosecution or the judiciary. Before the hearing, my lawyers and I reached out to Mignini, whom I had never encountered one-on-one, and urged him to listen to my story away from the adversarial setting of the courtroom. But by the time Mignini came to see me, one day after Ricciarelli's ruling was made public, I was no longer interested.

  I could see now that Mignini was not open to changing his ideas midstream. He didn't come for information, only for confirmation of what he already believed. I was becoming aware that, in the Italian criminal justice system, the preventive detention to which Amanda and I were being subjected is frequently used as a pressure tactic to extract confessions. I was now quite sure the authorities were keeping me in solitary confinement to get me to testify against Amanda, if not also against myself. Since I had no such testimony to offer, I did the Italian equivalent of taking the Fifth: I availed myself, as we say, of the right not to respond.

  I found some satisfaction in that, but also frustration, because I had at last worked out why Amanda did not leave—could not have left—my house on the night of the murder. She didn't have her own key, so if she'd gone out alone, she would have had to ring the doorbell and ask me to buzz her back in. Even if I'd been stoned or asleep when she rang, I would have remembered that. And it didn't happen.

  Realizing this brought me enormous peace of mind because I no longer had to fumble around and curse the confusion in my head. Obviously, I wanted to shout the news to the world. But I also understood that telling Mignini now would have been a gift to him; it would only have bought him time to figure out a way around it.

  So I said nothing, and felt good about my silence.

  * * *

  One thing I felt compelled to do, even though my lawyers would have advised against it, was to reach out to Meredith's family. Even though I had barely known her, I'd been living with the horror of her murder for more than a month and could not begin to imagine what her mother, father, brothers, and sister were going through. Thinking about it helped me put my own predicament in some perspective; it made me grateful I was alive and still able to fight against those who were doing me harm.

  I knew the Kerchers had hired an Italian lawyer, Francesco Maresca, whom they picked off a short list provided by the British embassy. I addressed my letter to him, saying how sorry I was For everything that had happened and expressing a wish that the full truth would soon come out.

  I was naive enough to believe that Maresca would be sympathetic. I would understand only much later that his professional interest in Amanda and me was the money he could sue our families for. Entertaining the notion that we were innocent did not figure in this mind-set. And so my letter went unanswered.

  * * *

  My family could not believe how the courtroom defeats were piling up and decided something had to change in a hurry.

  Although Tiziano Tedeschi spent many evenings with my family discussing the case, my father complained that he never seemed consistently available. Often when they met, Papa said that Tedeschi would interrupt to take personal calls. My father rarely comments on other people's manners, but eventually he felt compelled to ask his friend to turn the phone off.

  Tedeschi, meanwhile, had a laundry list of complaints about Luca Maori. He wasn't following proper procedure, Tedeschi said. He was making himself too visible in the media and creating all sorts of legal headaches that could haunt us later.

  Tell him yourself," my father countered. "I can't play referee between my lawyers.

  "I have told him, but it makes no difference."

  "Well, you need to insist," my father said "Assert yourself."

  It's not clear Tedeschi ever did. He said he felt excluded from the growing relationship between my father and Maori and resentful of the way the family turned to him for solace without letting him run the case as he saw fit.

  My father saw things exactly the other way around. He became ever more disillusioned with Tedeschi's performance as a lawyer and interpreted this as a failure of his personal commitment to me and our entire family. Papa approached Tedeschi's brother, Enrico, at one point and asked how things might have worked out better.

  "If I had offered to pay him, would he have behaved the same way?" my father asked. "Is the issue that he doesn't have time for us, or that he needs a financial inducement to make the time?"

  Enrico, caught between his brother and one of his best friends, said nothing.

  My uncle Giuseppe and his wife, Sara, were fed up with both lawyers and inquired into possible replacements. Sara was active in the Alleanza Nazionale, the most conservative party in Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition, and had friends in high political circles, including a number of members of parliament. Those friends were unanimous in recommending Giulia Bongiorno, a lawyer and politician seen as a rising star in both arenas.

  Bongiorno had cut her legal teeth during Italy's most sensational trial of the 1990s. Giulio Andreotti, the grand old man of Italian politics, was brought up on the spectacular charge of collusion with the Sicilian Mafia during his many decades in ministerial office, and Bongiorno was part of the team assigned to defend him. Sure enough, he was acquitted. Not only could Bongiorno handle such a high-profile case, with all the attendant media scrutiny, she also had a reputation as someone able to cut through the verbiage of Italian jurisprudence to formulate coherent, rock solid arguments. And shy knew courtroom procedure better than most judges.

  My father was resistant. He felt a continuing kinship with Tedeschi, despite everything, and he couldn't help liking Maori, who was infectiously good company and invited Papa to lavish meals and evenings at the country estate.

  My father was not, however, going to sit back and let the professionals handle everything. He developed intense personal relationships with the consultants he hired and came to know the ins and outs of the case better than the lawyers. He was particularly aggrieved when the Ricciarelli court would not accept the evidence showing that the shoe prints at Via della Pergola were made by Rudy Guede. It was time, Papa decided, for the family to do their own detective work.

  They started with the Nikes. 'The shoe prints at Guede's apartment and at the murder scene had
eleven concentric circles on the sole, in contrast to the seven circles on mine. My father and his consultants also noticed a small, Y-shaped deformity clearly visible in a number of the shoe prints photographed by the Polizia Scientifica and concluded this was probably a piece of broken glass from Filomena window that Guede stepped on as he walked across her room.

  If they could substantiate that, it would be a big strike against the staged-break-in theory. If the shoe wearer murdered Meredith first and broke the window only subsequently, as Mignini and the judges had argued, that Y-shaped piece of glass would not have shown up in the bloody imprints around the body.

  Regrettably, Guede's shoes were not available, presumably because he ditched them; they were not at his apartment and they were not among his possessions when he was arrested in Germany. What my family could do, though, was look for the same size and model Nikes and use them to demonstrate why the shoe prints at Via della Pergola had nothing to do with me.

  My father started looking in every shoe shop he could find in Perugia, examining each pair of Nikes for the telltale pattern on the sole. My uncle Giuseppe did the same in and around Bari. The hunt was on.