I grew up as loved as any child could wish to be, but I was also in the shadow of two parents who bickered and fought until the day my father decided he could no longer stand it and left. I was eight years old. My mother had planned for nothing than to be a faithful wife and mother, and the divorce left her devastated. For the rest of her life, she showed no interest in other men and never took a job. With Vanessa almost out of the house, 1 became her biding preoccupation. She mothered. me to pieces, to the point where people wondered if I could ever go out into the world and survive without her.
At times, it was stilling. She and my lather continued to fight, even over the bills we had to pay. By the time I was eleven or twelve, my mother was afraid to confront Papa directly and used me instead as her messenger, her go-between. I hated playing the role and retreated ever further into a fantasy world of comic books and video games, because they seemed simpler and more comprehensible than the emotional chaos around me.
I was a diffident, socially awkward kid. My childhood passion was the Japanese comic strip Sailor Moon, about a shy, fourteen-year-old girl whose magical powers turn her into a benign avenger, a champion of justice who, with her talking cat, reliably defeats the forces of evil. Believe me, there were times in prison I wanted to invoke Sailor Moon and defeat a few evil forces of my own.
When I finished high school, I needed to get away, so I applied for university in Perugia, where I had the opportunity to live cheaply at a residential college set up specially for the children of doctors. My father, who understood why I wanted to leave, thought it would be a smoother transition than launching out on my own. My mother, on the other hand, was anxious for me to stay close to home and talked me into applying to the University of Bari. My mind, though, was made up: when Perugia accepted me, it was time to cut my old ties and try life in a different part of Italy.
I didn't regret the choice for an instant. The college had a midnight curfew but relatively few other rules. I made friends easily and enjoyed having a buffer from the perugini, the locals who tended to be reserved and a little cold, especially toward Southerners. My college roommates played pranks on each other. We dressed up in crazy costumes and had water-pistol fights; usual student stuff. Once, we heard a rumor that one of my fellow residents had a porn movie showing a woman having sex with a pig, so we watched it, just for laughs, and were mildly disappointed that the pig was merely cross-cut into the footage. The college's administrators issued a mild reprimand when they found out about this. (The prosecution later seized on it as evidence that 1 was some sort of porn addict.)
The reports of my drug addiction were similarly exaggerated. When I was seventeen or eighteen, I did experiment briefly with ecstasy, poppers, and, on one occasion, cocaine. But I was way too timid to push my luck with any of them, and I stopped almost as soon as I started. I knew they were dangerous and, as with alcohol, I had an instinctive aversion to feeling out of control.
I did, however, develop an occasional pot-smoking habit, as did many of my friends. I didn't dislike the relaxing feeling that washed over me when I smoked. It was another escape from the stresses of daily life. But it was hardly a regular thing. I was held back he by my own inhibitions and by constant admonitions from my father. I knew, even without his reminding me, that it was bad to lose that degree of sensory perception, even for a few hours.
The one time I was caught, by an undercover carabinieri in a nightclub, I wasn't even the one with marijuana. My friend. Gabrielle had it. I was worried he was over the legal limit for personal use, so I talked our other friend Gennaro into claiming joint responsibility with him. That way, the amount would be divided in three. The policeman realized what I was doing and wrote me up mostly because he was angry that I was making it harder to take punitive action against Gabriele.
By the time June 2005 rolled around, I was studying hard for my final exams and looking forward to my father's wedding to Mara. They'd been together for ten years so it was a much-postponed celebration. I knew my mother was taking it hard—that much the police got right—and I knew too that she was struggling to look after her own mother, who had. been diagnosed. with bone cancer. I didn't see her that often now that I was in Perugia, but we talked by phone several times a day, just as I later did with my father. She'd been complaining of not feeling herself, which I attributed to the situation, not her personal health. And she'd been particularly obsessive about calling, even though she knew I was busy with my exams; I felt she was monitoring my every move. She would call to ask if I'd drunk a glass of water, and I usually just had. An hour or so later, she'd call again to ask if I'd been to the bathroom. And I usually just had. It was uncanny how she always knew.
One morning, I received an alarming call from my godfather, Vito Barbone. "Come home," he said. "Come right away. Your mother's not at all well. She needs you." That was as much as he was prepared to say.
I knew right away it was ominous news, so I let my professors know I'd have to postpone my exams, ran around to borrow some cash, and drove like a maniac to Giovinazzo.
When I arrived at the house, notices with my mother's name were on the door—the custom in my part of Italy to mark someone's passing. I ran upstairs in a blind panic, demanding to see her. I found her body already lying in an open casket.
Beyond the shock, I was overcome with rage at my family for neglecting my mother to the point where she could die alone at the age of fifty-five. Wasn't anyone paying attention? Didn't anybody care? I said there and then I didn't want anybody with the last name Sollecito attending the funeral because the whole family had covered themselves in shame.
I meant what I said, and the Sollecitos abided by my wishes. Vanessa and I were the exceptions, of course; we accompanied the casket into the church. But everyone on my father's side of the family stayed out of the ceremony. My lather's wedding was postponed for several months.
When I thought back on all this from my prison cell, I realized that part of my anger came from guilt and embarrassment that 1 had not done more myself. I needed to blame someone for her std - den death, so I lashed out, forgetting my own part in it. I had lost a mother for no good reason, just as I had now lost my freedom for no good reason. It would require all my forbearance to come to terms with that, to work through my pain and loss and come out stronger.
At least my second loss was not as definitive. My freedom, unlike my mother, was something I could still hope to regain.
* * *
Once it became clear I was standing trial, even Vanessa's bosses stopped pretending there wasn't a problem. They felt sure 1 was guilty and said so openly in front of her.
"How do you know the prosecution isn't a sham?" she countered.
"That's not an attitude worthy of someone wearing the uniform of the carabinieri," they admonished.
Her other colleagues, the ones who had no professional need to speak to her, ceased communication altogether. When she went for coffee, she went alone. She started losing weight, shrinking down to 105 pounds from more than 125, until her uniform sagged visibly and she felt she was quite literally disappearing.
Vanessa liked to wear civilian clothes to work and change in a bathroom some distance from her office once she arrived. One morning, her superior called her cell phone and told her that, in future, she needed to clear this with him.
She felt she was being treated like a toddler. "Sir," she said, "I'll go to the bathroom when I want."
"You can't talk to me that way," he responded. "You must do as I say."
"All right, but I need to see a written order if I'm going to comply."
Her superior relented. Shortly before Christmas, though, he called Vanessa back into his office and ordered her to hand over her service pistol.
She was stunned. The only instances she knew of where officers surrendered their weapon was when they were recuperating from an illness or an injury for an extended period—or when they were fired. Vanessa was sure the request was illegal, but she did not know how to lodge a pr
otest, except to insist that she sign a form documenting what was happening. She knew already this would all have to be thrashed out in court.
Shortly afterward, Vanessa was transferred out of the logistics office altogether and sent across town to a department handling computer equipment and weapons inventories. For a while, this came as a relief. She was put in charge of organizing the Lazio region's entire armory, and there was plenty to do. But she noticed, after a few weeks, that the time sheets she submitted were being challenged and corrected in red pen. Even more bizarrely, the corrections were being made at her old office in Piazza del Popolo, even though she wasn't reporting there anymore. When she asked why she was being treated this way, she was told, "With you, it's different."
When my father heard about her troubles, he advised her to keep a low profile, to say the right things to her superiors, and to make more of an effort to be one of the boys.
Vanessa said that was impossible. "I'm not going to start going to work outings and licking asses. I've never done it before, so they'll realize it's just an act anyway."
Her defiance, she knew, was working against her. Rut if she was going down, she preferred to go down fighting, not bowing and scraping pathetically before the people who were ruining her Mr, She had too much dignity for that.
* * *
As my trial date neared, Giuseppe, Sara, and Vanessa argued that we should kick Maori off the defense team. Vanessa was particularly adamant because she'd approached Maori a few weeks earlier For ad vice on how to protect the inheritance she shared with me from our mother and make sure the court could not freeze or garnish our joint assets. As she recounted the episode, Maori had recommended signing over the assets to him, at which point she said a curt thank „you, turned around, and walked out. (Maori remembered the conversation differently, saying he had advised her to keep the assets as they were.)
My father did not share the others' outrage. He did not trust Maori any more than they did, but he had a longer game plan in mind. He knew he needed people in Perugia to do the legwork, and Donati and Brusco had been outstanding; starting from scratch with a different team seemed too daunting. Then there was the question of how we were perceived. Getting rid of one of my lead lawyers oil the eve of the trial would smack of desperation, as though I were frantically shuffling pieces around to conceal my underlying guilt. Bongiorno urged us not to do it. So Papa decided that we would just put up with Maori and hope for the best.
I was pushing for another sort of change, a single trial team to defend Amanda and me together. I was told right away that this was out of the question, but I don't think my logic was wrong. Me only way either of us would get out of this situation, I reasoned, was if we stuck together. If the prosecution drove a wedge between us, we would more than likely both be doomed.
Eventually, as each piece of the evidence weakened and crumbled, Bongiorno would come to agree with this assessment. But Amanda had her own team of high-powered lawyers—a prominent, multilingual Roman attorney specializing mostly in civil cases, Carlo Dalla Vedova, and a Perugian local counsel, Luciano Ghirga—who didn't want to take any chances on me, just as my lawyers didn't want to take any chances on her.
So our legal defenses remained separate, even as our fates remained closely intertwined.
* * *
My lawyers and I went into court confident that we had at least done our homework, and that we had a coherent answer to every hypothesis we expected the prosecution to put forward. We knew the science favored a time of death close to 9:00 p.m., when Amanda and I were still watching Amélie, and we sensed the prosecution was weakest in its assertion that the murder must have happened later that night. Curatolo, the homeless witness, didn't seem much of a reason to place us in Piazza Grimana in the late evening. Likewise, Nara Capezzali, the old woman who claimed to have heard a scream through her double-glazed windows, seemed easy enough to refute.
We were relishing another gift that the videotape evidence from the parking lot had yielded: a car that broke down as it left the lot
at about ten thirty on the night of the murder and sat for almost an hour until a tow truck came and dragged it away. The three occupants of the car, plus the tow truck driver, could testily that no body came or went from die house on Via della Pergola for at least an hour, knocking Mignini's previous estimate of an eleven o'clock murder flat on its face.
Still, we had no certainty about the single most important part of the case, the evidence pointing to my DNA in Meredith's room. Stefanoni and Mignini were holding out on that information, and we needed to pry it from them quickly before more damage was done. The shots would ultimately be called by the judge, and we hadn't had a lot of luck with judges so far.
Giulia Bongiorno understood exactly what was at stake as we set to work. "We need to knock down the validity of that DNA trace on the bra clasp," she said. "Otherwise it's not going to end well for us."
* * *
On January 16, 2009, with photographers snapping our every move, we filed into the Sala degli Affreschi, the Hall of Frescoes, inside Perugia's fifteenth-century courthouse and waited for Judge Giancarlo Massei to take his place beneath a large, gaudy crucifix and formally open the proceedings. I couldn't help smiling at Amanda because I was pleased to see her. And she smiled back.
Italian trials operate quite unlike their counterparts in Britain or the United States because the judge holds an unusual amount of power over the outcome. There is no jury in any recognizable sense. Rather, cases are decided by the judge, his deputy, and six - "popular judges," self-selecting members of the public, chosen by lottery, who are invited to contradict the robed professionals if they dare but, in practice, rarely do. They are not sequestered, if only because Italian trials, punctuated by long breaks between hearings, can last a year or longer. Nor are they under any obligation to steer clear of media coverage, or other information they might obtain outside the courtroom; they are free to form opinions any way they choose.
In lower-court trials, popular judges need only have completed middle school, so they are not exactly picked for their critical-thinking skills. One popular judge in our case, a school secretary named Anna Maria Artegiani, made her presence felt mostly by falling asleep during the sessions. (She later wrote a book describing what an honor it was to have been part of the judicial process.) Of the other lay judges, only one, a professional lawyer, seemed to pay any discernible attention.
Another peculiarity of the Italian system is that criminal cases are heard at the same time as civil actions arising from them. So, in addition to the prosecutors, Amanda and I had to contend with lawyers for the Kerchers, Patrick Lumumba, and Rudy Guede, all of whom had a vested interest in our guilt. Francesco Maresca, representing the Kerchers, and Carlo Pacelli, representing Lumumba, were suing us for damages, while Valter Biscotti, representing Guede, was playing more of a zero-sum game: the guiltier we were, the easier it would be for him to argue that his client was a bit player, not the main antagonist, and so push for a reduction of Guede's sentence on appeal.
Not only did all this make the lawyers' bench lopsided in the prosecution's favor; it also meant that evidence deemed inadmissible in the criminal case could potentially be heard by the court anyway. One of Judge Massei's first decisions—an inauspicious indication of which way he was leaning—was to allow the civil lawyers to discuss the "confessions" Amanda and I had made in the Questura, even though the Corte di Cassazione had thrown them out in our criminal proceeding.
That first hearing was largely procedural and passed in a Nut of camera flashes. My strongest memory was of seeing the deputy judge, Beatrice Cristiani, with tears in her eyes as she looked at me shaking her head as if to say, What are you doing here? How could you have squandered your family's good name and your future for this?
* * *
The prosecution attempted to derail us with the very first witness. (I t was now February 6, three weeks after the opening hearing.) Filippo Bartolozzi was the commander of the Po
lizia Postale who took Elisabetta Lana's statements after she found Meredith's cell phones, and he came right out of the gate saying he had sent Inspector Battistelli to Via della Pergola after the discovery of the first cell phone, shortly before noon, not after the discovery of the second. The distinction was important because it lent credence to the prosecution's contention that I called the carabinieri only after the Polizia Postale arrived at the house, to cover my tracks.
Bartolozzi was substantiating what the courts had previously only guessed at, so his testimony was potentially dangerous. He said he was a stickler for precision and was sure of the time he sent the patrol because he always checked the clock on his computer. Luckily, he crumbled as soon as Bongiorno began her cross-examination.If he was such a stickler for precision, she wondered, wily had he written in a contemporaneous police report that he dispatched Rattistelli and his colleague only after learning about the second cell phone?
"Yes, yes, fine," he acknowledged after scrambling about for an answer, "but the only reason I put the discovery of the two cell phones together and mentioned the patrol being dispatched alter-ward was to make the narrative smoother."
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