What about scaling the wall itself? Delfo Berretti, from Luca Maori's office, decided he would have a go, removing only his work jacket before hitching himself up onto the iron grate covering one of the boys' bedroom windows directly below Filomena's. As photos taken that day show, Berretti had no trouble maneuvering himself into a position where he could have reached into Filomena's broken window, opened it, and swung himself up to climb in. An iron nail was in the brick wall halfway between the two windows—the prosecution would later make a big deal of this—but Berretti didn't even need it to pull himself up.
Again, I was struck by how capricious the courts had been. Judge Ricciarelli was so sure the wall was unscalable he used it as a reason to keep me in solitary confinement, when a little elementary checking would have told him his assumption was wrong. I low many months or years of my life would his nonchalance end up costing?
My father hired a telecommunications expert to help resolve a few other mysteries from the night of the murder. The prosecution had given no adequate explanation for a series of calls registered on Meredith's English cell phone after she'd returned from her friends' house around 9:00 p.m., and many of them seemed baffling, assuming they were made—as the prosecution argued—by Meredith herself. We believed Meredith was dead by the time of the last two) calls, and our expert Bruno Pellero intended to help us prove that.
Meridith's last confirmed call was to her family in England at 8:56 p.m. Nobody answered. Since she was in close contact with her ailing mother, she might ordinarily have been expected to try again, but she never did. Almost exactly an hour later, someone started calling Meredith's voice-mail service but did not stay on the line long enough to get through. Two minutes after that, another call was made to the first number in Meredith's contacts list, her bank in England, but the caller did not include the international dialing code.
These abortive calls seemed to be the handiwork of someone, most likely Meredith's attacker, messing around with her phone. How could we establish that for sure? Pellero, an effortlessly brilliant telecommunications expert from Genoa, figured it out by matching up the phone records with the cell transmission towers where the signal for the calls had been picked up. He made his way from the house on Via della Pergola to the spot where it seemed most likely that the phones were tossed into Elisabetta Lana's garden, stopping every few seconds and testing to see which transmission tower area he was in. He discovered that the odd calls around 10:00 p.m. were almost certainly not made at the murder house, but rather in the Parco San Angelo, an open area right across the street from Lana's garden wall. Pellero talked to Elisabetta Lana and conducted a thorough inspection of her garden to try to pinpoint the exact spot from which the phones had been thrown.
To his surprise, she told him the Squadra Mobile had done exactly the same thing in the first few weeks after the murder. They had even tossed oranges from the street to try to simulate the trajectory of the discarded phones. It was quite likely, in other words, that they too understood that the cell transmission tower for the 10:00 p.m. phone calls did not match the house on Via della Pergola.
This aspect of the Squadra Mobile's work was not in the case records. If they had found what Pellero and my family thought they had, it would have contradicted Mignini's evolving theory of the crime. But their work, if it existed, simply vanished.
* * *
My neighbor in the protected section was, like me, a headline maker. His name was Roberto Spaccino, and he'd been all over the news papers following the murder of his pregnant wife, Barbara, about five months before Meredith died. According to his prosecutors, Spaccino had beaten Barbara for years and cheated on her right and left with the female customers of a small chain of Laundromats he operated. Spaccino, however, claimed an alibi. He said heed paid a late-night visit to one of his Laundromats, only to find the house turned upside down on his return and his wife bludgeoned to death. Their two sons were still peacefully asleep in their beds.
I didn't know what to make of the story, but Spaccino could not have been friendlier. We commiserated about our cases and the fact that both of our prosecution teams were convinced we had staged break-ins to cover our tracks.
Over time, I found the details of his story to be less than believable, but I kept that strictly to myself. He took a protective interest in me and kept me away from some of the crazier pedophiles and rapists. Compared to the rest of the block, Spaccino was almost normal.
* * *
The pretrial hearings that began in mid-September gave my legal team its first look at the woman who posed the greatest obstacle to my exoneration, Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni of the Polizia Scientifica's crime lab in Rome. She was the one who appeared to be holding out on handing over the DNA evidence. And the pretrial judge, Paolo Micheli, initially supported her position.
When we pointed out that we could hardly prepare for a cross-examination without seeing the documents on which Stefanoni's work was based, Judge Micheli relented, if only a little. We received her conclusions, but not the data demonstrating how she got there.
It was becoming obvious the prosecution had something to hide, and while we were troubled by the refusal to hand over the most important evidence in the case, we had to presume that sooner or later we'd get hold of it. Even in her initial questioning by the judge, Dr. Stefanoni was forced to admit that her sample sizes were alarmingly small, that her results could not all be reproduced (something even she said was a standard scientific requirement), that there was some vagueness about where exactly on the kitchen knife she'd found Meredith's DNA, and that she'd found traces of several people's DNA on the bra clasp, not just mine. She also acknowledged that a contaminated or improperly analyzed DNA sample could, in theory, lead to an incorrect identification.
Whenever Stefanoni was put on the spot, she would either take off on flights of extraordinary wordiness or else resort to monosyllables. We also noticed she had a habit of twirling her finger through the ends of her long, black hair. She was a nervous witness, which was good for us.
For the mass media, the pretrial hearings had little to do with the evidence; they were an opportunity to photograph Amanda and me for the first time since our arrests. I chose not to show up at all the first day, partly because I didn't want to be hounded by photographers, and partly because I was still afraid that Amanda would do or say something stupid. I'd be brought up to Perugia from Terni in a maddeningly tight cage in the back of a van and was feeling vulnerable because I was back in solitary for the duration of the hearings.
Not that the newspapers cared. They were interested mostly in Amanda, her demure white blouse, her minimalist makeup, and her natural good looks. Never mind whether we were guilty or innocent, present or absent; the story line insisted we were belli e dannati, the beautiful and the damned. When I smiled at her and blew her kisses at the second hearing, the newspapers were full of it, and it did us only harm.
The hearings stretched out over more than a month and gave us a few reasons to be hopeful. The Albanian superwitness, a man named Hekuran Kokomani, showed up in court wearing a baseball cap and a Hoodie concealing most of his face. When my lawyers cross-examined him, he fell apart in spectacular fashion. He couldn't remember what time or even what day he supposedly saw me with Amanda and Guede in Via della Pergola, and he said it had been stormy—an observation contradicted by weather data for both October 31 and November 1. He said Amanda had a gap between her front teeth, prompting great hilarity when, at the judge's request, she smiled to prove him wrong.
We also managed to obtain the parking lot video footage after proving to the court—from the prosecution's own documentation - that it existed and was in their possession. In the long run this would be helpful, but Mignini managed to use it against us by pointing out that the car carrying the Polizia Postale arrived at 12:35, according to the time stamp on the tape. This was fifteen minutes before I called the carabinieri; only later would we work out that the time stamp was wrong.
Judge Micheli i
ssued his ruling at the end of October. On the plus side, he found Guede guilty of murder and sentenced him to thirty years behind bars in an accelerated trial requested by Guede himself. Judge Micheli also accepted our evidence that it wouldn't have been that difficult to throw a rock through Filomena's window and climb the wall.
But, Spider-Man or no Spider-Man, he still didn't believe Guede got into the house that way. He argued that Filomena's window was too exposed and that any intruder would have run too great a risk of discovery by climbing through it. Therefore, he concluded, Amanda and I must have let him in. There seemed to be no shaking the authorities out of their conviction that the break-in was staged.
To our astonishment, Judge Micheli broadly accepted Dr. Stefanoni's testimony, despite the many doubts he'd raised in questioning her. (My father later laid much of the blame on our consultant, Vincenzo Pascali, who was upbraided by the judge for failing to follow court protocol and confusing what was already a complicated issue.) Micheli said he couldn't accept that both the kitchen knife and the bra clasp had been contaminated, because they had been collected in entirely different places. And that was that. The upshot: Amanda and I were ordered to stand trial, and to remain in custody until it was over.
Another judge, another crushing disappointment.
* * *
Despite prevailing, the prosecution couldn't help being stung by Kokomani's embarrassing performance, and they took one line in Judge Micheli's ruling particularly to heart. Without Kokomani's testimony, Micheli said, nothing indicated that Guede, Amanda, and I had known each other before the night of the murder. "'The assumption that there was a criminal conspiracy remains fatally unsupported by actual evidence," he wrote. With the clock ticking down to the start of our trial and the prosecution still wedded to the' idea that Meredith's murder had been some sort of ritual slaughter, the pressure was on to find some of that evidence.
On November 20, an unemployed university researcher named Fabio Gioffredi made a providential appearance in the prosecutor's office and provided what Mignini, was looking for. Two nights before the murder—which is to say, more than a year earlier—Gioffredi said he had seen Amanda, Meredith, Guede, and me outside the house on Via della Pergola. He had glimpsed us for just an instant. Still, the moment lodged in his mind because he had just had a minor car accident; he scraped another vehicle as he pulled out of a parking space down the street.
Oddly, Gioffredi had no memory of the details of the other car. There was no police report on the accident and no insurance claim. Gioffredi said he gave his phone number to the owner of the other car, but never heard from him and never paid any money for the damage. In other words, there was no independent record the incident. Still, he was sure he remembered Amanda, whom he did not know, wearing a long red coat with large buttons (which she did not possess). He said that the rest of us, whom he did not know either, were in dark clothing.
My family's reaction to Gioffredi was that he was just another pestamerda, an annoyance much like Kokomani, whom we could swat away with relative ease. It didn't take long for one of the computer consultants hired by my father to establish that, at the exact time Gioffredi said I was meeting Amanda and Meredith and Guede, I was in fact at home, on my computer, reading and taking notes on a complicated genetic-programming paper I was reading for my thesis.
Then something very strange happened. My father found it impossible to get through to Luca Maori's law office. Papa had been in almost daily contact because Maori's assistants, Donatella Donati and Marco Brusco, were cataloging and analyzing all the trial materials as they came in. Now Papa could not get them to return his calls.
At length he went to Perugia to confront Maori directly. Nobody greeted him as he entered the office; he had the sense everyone was shrinking away from him. What was going on? He marched right up to Maori and demanded an explanation.
"It looks bad, very bad," Maori told him. "This Gioffredi is a credible guy and I don't know that we can counter him."
My father was incredulous. The man charged with taking on my defense was not only freezing him out; Maori plainly believed I might actually be guilty.
All of us knew from the beginning that Maori had doubts about taking on the case. We chalked it up to his uncertainty about Amanda, which my family understood and largely shared. To be fair, the issue was not just whether I was innocent. The longer the case went on and the more rulings went against me, the greater the risk to Maori's reputation and career in Perugia. Still, we had to wonder, if he had this little faith in me, why had he gotten involved at all?
Papa told him about the data from my computer, but still Maori was skeptical. "Why don't you let me see it?" he asked.
My father didn't have the data with him, but he said his brother, Giuseppe, could fax it over. The atmosphere in Maori's office was thick with mistrust and pent-up emotion as they waited for the fax to arrive. Five minutes, ten minutes passed. My father got on the phone with my brother; something seemed to be wrong with his fax machine. Then Maori's machine started acting up. Time continued to tick by, and Maori grew ever frostier.
Finally, the pages started to come through. Maori read them, nodded, and picked up the phone to speak to Donati and Brusco. Clearly he was telling them it was okay to talk to the Sollecitos again. Maori's coldness vanished in an instant, replaced by his habitual charm. He wanted my father to believe everything was back to normal, as though the entire episode had simply not occurred.
My father, though, was apoplectic. He said nothing, but he knew he could never fully trust Luca Maori again.
* * *
The prosecution, undeterred by its previous announcement that the investigation was over, spent much of November digging up other witnesses to testify against us, and leaking the most damaging parts to the newspapers. One witness we had already heard from in the pretrial hearings; he was a homeless heroin addict named Antonio Curatolo, who claimed to have seen Amanda and me lurking near Piazza Grimana on the night of the murder, looking as if we were waiting for someone. We didn't take him seriously at first because he also remembered seeing buses waiting to take people to discotheques, and on November 1 there had been no such bus set vice because it was a holiday. But Judge Micheli, for some reason, found him credible, and Mignini would later use him to substantiate the theory that the murder occurred closer to midnight than to 9:00 p.m.
Another enduringly troublesome witness was Marco Quintavalle, the owner of a convenience store a kw steps From my house, who had been interviewed by police several times in the immediate aftermath of the murder and asked if he remembered me buying bleach. He did not, describing me as a quiet, polite regular customer. Now, more than a year later, he suddenly remembered that he had seen Amanda come into his shop early in the morning of November 2 to purchase cleaning materials. At least, he thought it was Amanda. He was riddled with uncertainty, and his receipts from that morning showed no evidence of purchases, incriminating or otherwise. Still, the prosecution jumped all over him and later put him on the stand to bolster the argument that Amanda and I had spent that morning wiping the murder scene clean of our traces—but not, curiously, Guede's. It was one of their more dishonest, not to mention absurd, arguments, because any forensics expert could have told them such a thing was physically impossible. Still, it was all they had, and they single-mindedly stuck to it.
Investigators also delved into my past. Two members of the Squadra Mobile traveled to Giovinazzo and, according to several people they encountered, asked leading questions at my old school about a nonexistent episode in which I supposedly attacked a fellow student with a pair of scissors. They learned I had once been written up for possession of a tiny quantity of cannabis, an episode that was later blown up to suggest I was a drug pusher and maybe also an addict.
Most shockingly, they started making inquiries into my mother's death in an attempt to cast suspicion on my family history. My mother, Vincenza Palmiotto, died of a heart attack in June 2005, as the certificate issued by the
coroner's office and signed by her doctor made abundantly clear. Still, the two officers saw fit to speculate that she had fallen into a deep depression in the years following the divorce from my father. She was so despondent about Papa's up-coming marriage to Mara, they claimed, that she "could have been pushed to commit suicide.
The point of such an outrageous and unfounded inquiry WAS, presumably, to insinuate that mental instability ran in my family. Suicide, murder—what's the difference? How could they sink so low as to drag my beautiful mother into their smear campaign? Really, the Perugia police are lucky I'm as even-tempered as I am, because nothing moves a Southern Italian to murderous rage more quickly than insulting the name of his dead mother. I can be grateful, I suppose, that she did not live to see the sick, twisted lengths the police were prepared to go to pin Meredith's murder on me. 1 his blow was as low as they dared to stoop, and I will never forgive them for it.
* * *
I thought about my mother every day in prison. Sometimes I saw her as my protector. Sometimes I thought of her untimely death the same way I thought about my imprisonment, as an illustration of how unjust and cruel life can be.
Honor Bound: Page 15
