Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  A few days after the Ricciarelli court ruling, my sister stepped away from her desk into a corridor and bumped into her boss, along with the head of the medical section and the colonel in overall charge of logistics for the entire carabinieri force. The three of them pretended the encounter was spontaneous, but she understood right away it was anything but. The medical section was on a different floor, and the colonel had traveled from the other side of Rome. Funnily enough, she was the very person they wanted to talk to.

  All three offered sympathy for the fact that I was languishing in prison and said they were concerned for Vanessa's well-being. "Why don't you take some time off so you can be with your family?" her boss suggested. The head of the medical section said he could issue a note saying she was under mental stress; that way, she could stay out for weeks, or even months.

  Vanessa's guard went up right away. In the carabinieri, psychological problems are automatic grounds to be fired. The force doesn't want mentally unstable people walking around with firearms and powers of arrest. If she agreed to the proposal, she realized her superiors would have a document enabling them to get rid of her whenever they wanted. And she wasn't going to to allow that to happen.

  "Thank you for the offer," she replied, "but if I want to be with my family, do it on my own time. The best way for me to over come stress is to keep working."

  The three men looked at each other, then back at her, and walked away. Vanessa worried that the thing her anti-Mafia investigator friend had warned her about was now starting in earnest.

  * * *

  Mignini questioned Amanda again on December 17, and she, unlike me, agreed to answer his questions in the presence of her lawyers. She was more composed now and gave him nothing new to work with. She couldn't have been present at the murder, she insisted, because she'd spent all night with me. When Mignini hammered about the reasons she had mentioned Patrick's name during her all-night interrogation, she talked about the pressure she'd been under and eventually burst into tears. At that point, her lawyers instructed her to say no more.

  One detail Amanda offered was nevertheless used against us. She said that while she and I were lounging about my apartment on the night of the murder, she had read some Harry Potter story. Soon after, the newspapers claimed this had to be a lie. They printed pictures of a Harry Potter book in her bedroom at Via della Pergola and suggested she had inadvertently given away her real wherabouts when Meredith was killed.

  This was yet another smear job, which the authorities either encouraged or did nothing to contradict. She had copies of Harry Potter at both houses, one in German and the other in English, as the police photographs of my apartment and of Amanda's room at Via della Pergola made abundantly clear.

  * * *

  Amanda and I had had no contact since our arrests, which was becoming an ever greater hardship for me. I would have loved to compare notes on our awful night in the Questura and let her know that, from now on, I had her back. I have no doubt, knowing what I know now, that she would have delivered a similar message to me.

  Clearly, though, it was dangerous for us to attempt any communication, much less talk about the case. My lawyers told me that writing to her was out of the question, at least until the investigation was formally over.

  It pained me, but I knew they were right. I thought of her, I prayed for her, and I winced when I saw the distorted image of her depicted on television and in the newspapers. Beyond that I could do nothing.

  * * *

  My father scoured the shops in Perugia without success. Where on earth could Guede have found those shoes? Then, one day, Papa received an excited phone call from his brother, Giuseppe, who was in a branch of the French chain Auchan in Adelfia, in the Bari suburbs.

  Giuseppe had found the matching pair of Nikes in a sales rack. They were an old model, which was why they had been so hard to find. It made sense, of course; new Nikes like my Air Force ls would be too expensive for Guede. His were Outbreak 2s.

  "So, should I buy them?" Giuseppe asked.

  "Caspita! What are you talking about?" My father all but exploded on the other end of the line. "Yes, of course!"

  "But they're not exactly the right size. They're forty-four and a half, and Rudy's are forty-five. They don't have any others."

  "Buy them anyway!" my father yelled.

  So Giuseppe did.

  The question now was what to do with them. Papa decided it was time to go public and pitched his story to one of Italy's most prominent news-show hosts, Enrico Mentana. I was all in favor. I couldn't stand the thought of staying in prison a moment longer and was willing to try anything to bring my ordeal to an early end. Why shouldn't the world know that the strongest evidence against me was entirely without foundation?

  The rest of the family was more skeptical. "You need to wait until the investigation is officially over," Vanessa said. "Don't say it on TV—keep it for the courtroom so you can surprise them. If you put this out, there's no knowing what they'll do in response. It could be something even worse."

  Many times during my imprisonment, Vanessa was the family's answer to Cassandra, the visionary of doom during the Trojan War whose fate was to be routinely disbelieved by those around her. On this occasion Giuseppe agreed with Vanessa, and so did Luca Maori. But my father went ahead with the broadcast regardless. He, like me, could not bear to sit on the information while I languished indefinitely in solitary confinement. He had his technical expert, Francesco Vinci, give Mentana the scientific explanations, and Pap took it upon himself to explain why the case against me was based on erroneous suppositions and outdated information that the prosecutor's office was refusing to discard.

  The show, which aired on January 11, 2008, made for great television. But within hours disaster struck, yet again, just as Vanessa had predicted it would.

  That night, the Italian news agencies ran a story that the police had found traces of my DNA on a metal clasp sliced away from Meredith's bra. A few weeks earlier, a forensic team had gone back to the house on Via della Pergola to conduct a new search and recovered a piece of bra that had eluded them the first time around. The small swatch of white cotton had two clasps attached, and it yielded something the police had not been able to establish before: proof positive, or so they said, of my presence at the scene of the crime.

  I was suspicious about the timing—it would later transpire the DNA analysis had been done in late December and saved for public airing until this opportune moment—but I also recognized how dangerous this new development was. I knew I had never touched Meredith's bras or gone into her room and had no idea how the Polizia Scientifica had come up with their information. But I also realized that explaining it away would be no easy task. Unlike the kitchen knife, which raised all sorts of questions of plausibility and did not have direct implications for my involvement in the crime, the DNA on the bra clasp suggested I had been in direct, intimate contact with Meredith at the time of her murder, just as the prosecution had been alleging for weeks.

  My lawyers offered no comment when the news broke, saying only that they needed to see the evidence. My father would have done better to follow their example. Instead, he tried to control the damage and talked to every reporter who called him. "The most plausible explanation," he said to most of them, "is that the bra had been worn by Amanda as well, and Raffaele touched it when she was wearing it."

  There were two problems with this statement. First, it was so speculative and far-fetched it did nothing to diminish the perception that I was guilty. And, second, it showed that my father my dear, straight-arrow, ever-optimistic, overtrusting father— still couldn't stop assuming that if the police or the prosecutor's office was saying something, it must be so.

  The prosecutor's office had no similar inclination to give our family the benefit of the doubt. The Mentana broadcast may have been a strategic error on our part, but it certainly demonstrated that we had the means and the determination to fight back against the barrage of accusations again
st me. Mignini's office appears to have understood this, and decided never to be caught off guard by us again. Within weeks of the broadcast, my entire family's phones--home, cell, and office—were being tapped around the clock.

  * * *

  It was open season against us. Two weeks after the bra-clasp bombshell, the newspapers announced the emergence of a supertestimone, a "superwitness," deemed reliable by the prosecutor's office, who claimed to have seen Rudy, Amanda, and me together outside the house on Via della Pergola on the evening before the murder.

  The witness, described as an Albanian immigrant, was reported to have stopped his car to throw some trash into a garbage bin only to spot Amanda and me arguing. Amanda pulled a large knife out of her handbag, causing the witness to take fright and head back to his car. Before he could take off, he said, Guede stepped out of the shadows and alarmed him even more. He got a good enough look at all of us to recognize our Pictures when they appeared in the news paper weeks later.

  We wouldn't find out who this person was for months. We knew right away he was spouting nonsense, not least because he hall admitted it himself: "I realize that after more than two months, my testimony might appear less than credible," he was quoted saying in one newspaper interview. (The story he gave to Mignini was even more fantastic than the newspaper accounts. He said—and later repeated under oath in court—that he'd stopped not to throw out his trash, but because he saw a big black bag in the middle of the road which, on closer inspection, turned out to be Amanda and me.) Such absurdities did not, unfortunately, prevent him from doing the two of us great harm.

  A pattern was emerging. Time and again the newspapers, not the prosecutor's office, would announce apparent breaks in the case, all of them negative for us. In some cases, witnesses would be interviewed by journalists before they were formally heard by the prosecution. Even if they later proved unreliable, as many of them did, they played a role in hardening public opinion against us.

  Along with the Albanian, we had to contend with a seventy-six-year-old woman by the name of Nara Capezzali, who claimed she had heard a bloodcurdling scream coming from Meredith's house at about 11:00 p.m. on the night of the murder, followed by sounds of people running through the streets.

  She too was embraced by the prosecutor's office, even though she was hard of hearing, had a history of mental problems, and lived behind double glazing so thick it was physically impossible for her to have heard the things she said she heard. We dealt with her all the way to the bitter end.

  Just once, in the early months of 2008, the authorities let something slip in our favor. Luca Lalli, the coroner, gave a media interview expressing his doubts that Meredith had been raped, thus contradicting the prosecution's contention that we were guilty of sexual violence as well as murder. Lalli said he could now confirm that Guede's fingers had been in the area around Meredith's vagina. But he saw no evidence of penetration, consensual or otherwise, at Id certainly nothing to suggest that Amanda or I had molested her in any way.

  The day Lalli's comments went public, Mignini had him fired. Lalli, Mignini said, had violated the confidentiality of the investigation; it didn't matter what he'd discussed so much as the fact that he'd discussed it at all. Given the way the prosecutor's office was leaking like a sieve when it came to stories casting us in a negative light, this did not strike us as an especially convincing explanation.

  * * *

  As the prospects for my release dimmed, I decided to finish my undergraduate thesis. I was going crazy with the uncertainty of waiting for something to happen, and graduation, unlike my freedom, was an attainable goal, as well as a reliable validation of who 1 was. My lawyers brought me books and a computer, which I used to type even though I could not hook up to the Internet from my cell. When I finished, my father lodged a special request with Judge Matteini for my family and professors to come to the prison for my oral presentation and graduation ceremony.

  Matteini said yes, but with some strict qualifications.Polizia Postale would take charge of the computer equipment to make sure it was not misused. There were to be no photographs, and the only family member authorized to attend was my father. My stepmother, Mara, and my sister, Vanessa, were expressly not invited.

  Still, it was an emotional day. I was overjoyed to see the five pro Lessors on my thesis committee; they were a connection to the real world I had lost almost completely after three months in solitary confinement. My father brought me a new suit and tie and wore a matching outfit himself. I negotiated with the prison authorities to provide soft drinks and little cakes, which everyone downed in a hurry because we were given no time to dawdle.

  We met in one of the public rooms used for family visits and interrogations. I used a blackboard there as a projector screen. The police and prison staff were no doubt baffled by my presentation; my thesis was on genetic programming, a way of using computers to mimic the generational changes of Darwinian natural selection and process mountains of data to solve complex problems. Just one of my professors, Alfredo Milani, asked a question; the others seemed unsure if they were allowed to speak.

  The professors awarded me top marks for my presentation, and then had to leave immediately. I was not authorized to talk to any of them. My father just had time to give me a hug and tell me how proud he was. "You were brilliant," he said, "even if I didn't understand a word."

  Later, he sent all five committee members an anthurium plant, in memory of my mother, who loved the anthurium's flaming red and pink flowers. It was an appropriate symbol of the occasion: an important rite of passage, marked by an abiding grief.

  Within hours, I was unexpectedly transferred to a prison in Terni, fifty miles south of Perugia. In theory, I was being moved to end my time in solitary confinement. Amanda had been out of isolation for some time, and the authorities were finding it increasing difficult to justify keeping me there.

  When I arrived, though, I was told no spaces were available in the shared cells; I would be staying in solitary after all. I low long for? Nobody could say.

  This left me feeling only more bitter. After packing up my things and enduring a bumpy journey inside a cage barely wider than 1 was, the only noticeable change in my new surroundings was the new roster of guards I needed to get to know. The food was still bland and stirred no appetite in me whatsoever. The exercise regimen was as restricted and uninspiring as it had been at Capanne.

  This was a tough period, and it forced me to dig deep just to hold myself together. As my time alone stretched out into weeks and then months, I had to let go of everything that was happening and hold on to other, more permanent, more consoling thoughts: my family and friends, the memory of my mother, the simple pleasures I'd enjoyed with Amanda, the peace that came from knowing that neither of us had done anything wrong.

  If they want to kill me this way, I remember thinking, let them go ahead. I'm happy to have lived lift as I did, and to have made the choices I made.

  My thoughts turned frequently to another dark place, perhaps the darkest I have ever seen: the Dachau concentration camp, which I visited during my year abroad in Germany. What struck me was not just the scale of the cruelty perpetrated by the Nazis, but also its jarring incongruities: how prisoners were forced to sing happy songs as they came through the gates for the first time, how workers in the crematorium would not only clear out the bodies but would sometimes see friends hanging by their thumbs from hooks in the ceiling rafters. I was moved, too, by the Jewish memorial erected on the site, an underground tomb encased in stone that was illuminated by a single shaft of light from a hole in the roof.

  My experience, of course, was not on the same order of magnitude as the concentration camp inmates. The torture I went through was strictly psychological. Still, in the darkness of my own cell, I was haunted by memories of my visit. When I took one of my miserably cold showers, I thought of the showers in the concentration camp. When I attended mass, an option at Terni I did not have at Capanne, I thought of the Jewish memorial with
its ray of hope beaming down from the heavens. I thought about the forced marches and the hymns of joy the prisoners were made to sing. I thought about the mass slaughter, all those people killed for no reason just as Meredith had been killed for no reason. And I wept for the extraordinary suffering that had preceded mine.

  * * *

  At the end of February, the prosecutor's office released video footage of the Polizia Scientifica going over the house at Via della Pergola, first on November 2-3 and again on December 18, and we knew we had strong grounds on which to challenge their findings.

  The forensic teams wore white Tyvek moon suits, with latex gloves and masks over their mouths and noses. But they often failed to change their gloves after they had touched bloodstains or other important evidence, raising immediate questions about contamination. They crowded into small spaces, bumped into each other, and did not take samples so much as wipe entire surfaces clean. Independent experts we consulted expressed alarm. The police had broken virtually every protocol, they said, and failed to ensure that their results could be verified through replication. We had no opportunity to go in and reanalyze the Polizia Scientifica's findings, because many of the most important spots—including bloodstains on door handles, in the bathroom, on the refrigerator, and so on—had been removed completely.