The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Guede, who had fled to Germany, was extradited. But by that time Amanda Knox had become such a focus of the media’s attention, and the putative sex games by an angel-faced killer such a cornerstone of the story, that the prosecutors, even after releasing Patrick Lumumba, were not about to abandon their group murder theory.

  To maintain his theory, chief prosecutor Giuliano Mignini posited a conspiracy by teaming up the two insiders, Knox and Sollecito, with the outside burglar, Guede. Mignini had previously achieved considerable notoriety in Italy in the 2001 “Monster of Florence” case when he unsuccessfully attempted to attribute the suicide of a Perugian doctor to a secret satanic cult. Now, he proposed a similar satanic scenario in which Guede, Sollecito, and Knox went to the cottage together and then attempted to force Kercher to have sex with them. When she refused, Guede and Sollecito took turns molesting her. Knox, who he described as a “she-devil,” then stabbed her to death.

  One stumbling block was the total absence of evidence that Guede was with either Knox or Sollecito, or that he ever had ever met Sollecito. While two witnesses had seen Guede run away, no one had seen Knox or Sollecito with him at the cottage. Nor did Guede claim that either Knox or Sollecito were with him. His story was that Kercher herself had invited him to the cottage at about 9:00 p.m. They then had consensual sexual contact, but, lacking a condom, he left the room and went to the bathroom. When he emerged, he saw an unknown man run out of the cottage, and he found Meredith bleeding. So he ran away. In light of the abundance of evidence against Guede, he was convicted of murder in a separate “fast track” trial. The investigation had trouble even placing Sollecito in the cottage. The police failed to find a single print in the room that was Sollecito’s or, for that matter, Knox’s. Since Guede’s prints were found in the room, it was difficult to explain he had washed them away. In addition, the speculation that the bloody footprint came from Sollecito’s Nike proved wrong. It was from Guede’s Nike sneaker. So up until mid-December 2007, the police and prosecutors could not place either Knox or Sollecito at the murder scene. This gap was bridged by a belated DNA analysis of Kercher’s bra clasp (which had accidently remained at the crime scene for forty-six days). DNA on it matched Sollecito’s.

  DNA analysis also identified both Knox’s and Kercher’s DNA on a kitchen knife in a cutlery drawer in Sollecito’s home. No blood was found on it, and, it later developed, the blade was too long to be the murder weapon (which was never found). Even so, Knox said she never removed the knife from Sollecito’s home, nor did Kercher ever visit Sollecito’s home. So the presence of her DNA on it suggested that Sollecito took it to the cottage on the night of the murder.

  In the trial, which began January 16, 2009, the prosecutor painted a gory picture of a “she-devil” who tortured her roommate with a knife while Sollecito and Guede sexually abused her, and who, when the orgy ended, slashed her throat and staged a burglary to dupe the police. This story was based largely on the DNA evidence of Sollecito’s presence at the scene. Both Knox and Sollecito were convicted of both murder and sexual violence. In December 2009, Knox was sentenced to twenty-six years’ imprisonment, and Sollecito to twenty-five years’ imprisonment.

  The case was then appealed, and an independent panel of forensic experts was appointed to review the crucial DNA evidence. It found in its 145-page report that the collection of the DNA evidence linking Sollecito to the crime scene had been egregiously flawed. Not only was the DNA testimony not consistent with the actual lab reports, but a video showed that the key items were picked up with a dirty glove that might have transferred DNA samples from the suspects to them. So cross-contamination was possible. That left no credible evidence, and on October 3, 2011, the court threw out the murder and sexual violence convictions of Sollecito and Knox. Both were immediately released from prison, and, in a happy ending, Knox flew back to America and got a book contract.

  There are still three theories about the murder. First, the inside-job theory advocated by the prosecutors, who are appealing the acquittal. Second, the lone-burglar theory that holds that Rudy Guede broke into the cottage and encountered and killed Kercher. Third, the two-burglar theory, based on an alleged jailhouse confession that Guede made to a fellow prisoner (who testified at the appeals hearing).

  My assessment is that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are both innocent of the murder. The police investigation was wedded from the outset to the wrong narrative. It assumed that the crime scene had been staged to look like a burglary and so focused on the only available insider, Knox. In doing so, the police neglected eyewitness sightings of a possible black burglar running from the direction of the house at the approximate time of the crime. If they had investigated that obvious lead, it would have quickly led them to Rudy Guede, who the other residents in the house could identify. His fingerprints, palm prints, sneaker print, and DNA would have established him beyond a doubt as a person at the bloody scene, and he likely would have been arrested before he had a chance to flee to Germany.

  Guede had the opportunity, means, and motive to commit the crime alone. He had been to the cottage earlier that week to watch a sports event, so he could have cased it for a later burglary when its residents went on holiday over the long November 1 weekend. He was experienced in such jobs, since he had broken into three other places that fall. There were a number of ways that he could have entered the cottage. It is possible that, with the help of a box, he climbed through the broken window. He could also have easily scaled the grate in the rear of the cottage and entered through the empty basement apartment (where Kercher had agreed to water the Cannabis plants). Alternatively, he could have gone in through a lower window. Afterward, he might have smashed the window from the inside to create an expedient means of exit, especially if he was in a panic. His DNA was found in Kercher’s pocketbook and credit cards and 300 euros were missing, which he likely took. And, with a small pocketknife, he had the means to force Kercher to the floor and stab her. In short, there was no evidence at the murder scene to show that this was not the work of a single home invader.

  The appeals court stated that the murder and sexual-violence charges against Knox and were “not corroborated by any objective element of evidence.” The lesson here is that denying a suspect a lawyer can result in egregious injustice. If Amanda Knox had been provided with a lawyer, she would not have been allowed to succumb to police pressure and give untrue statements that resulted in her arrest, as well as the arrest of two other innocent people. Meanwhile, forensic evidence would have unambiguously identified the perpetrator as Rudy Guede. There would then be no need for a prosecutor to conjure up an orgy out of thin air.

  EPILOGUE

  THE ENDURING MYSTERY

  OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

  The jigsaw puzzle surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has taken me more than four decades to understand. I began my effort in 1965 at a time when it was generally believed that the Warren Commission had left no stone unturned in arriving at its conclusion that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. Then one of the Commission’s lawyers, J. Wesley Liebeler, turned over to me two file cases of records, which included work logs and internal memoranda documenting the Commission’s work, as well as FBI reports furnished to the Commission, which demonstrated the Commission’s investigation was anything but exhaustive. In its rush to issue its report before the 1964 election, the commission left many areas not fully investigated, including Oswald’s possible involvement with foreign intelligence services—particularly those of Cuba and the Soviet Union.

  In 1974 the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church, began releasing information about CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, which led me to investigate U.S. entanglements with the Cuban intelligence service shortly before JFK was assassinated. Further information was released through Freedom of Information requests, including ones that I had filed, and, finally, o
n June 23, 1998, the CIA released its own inspector general’s report on these assassination conspiracies. There were also defectors from Castro’s intelligence service, some of whom are interviewed in Wilfried Huismann and Gus Russo’s 2006 documentary Rendezvous With Death, who furnished another key piece of the puzzle. As a result, after nearly fifty years, we now know that there were two different assassins at work on November 22, 1963. This is the story of their deadly dance—and how it tragically ended.

  I. THE TARGETS

  Fidel Castro Ruz was born out of wedlock in rural Cuba on August 13, 1926, the son of a wealthy landowner. After attending a Jesuit-run college, he studied law at the University of Havana, where he became deeply involved in revolutionary movements. He organized revolutionary activists both in Cuba and abroad, and in the 1950s he participated himself in armed attacks on government forces in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. He was captured during his attempt to seize the Moncada Barracks outside of Havana in 1953 and served a year in prison. Then, in 1955, he went from Cuba to Mexico. There he, along with his younger brother Raul and Che Guevara, an Argentinian revolutionary, formed a group aimed at overthrowing the American-backed dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. It was called the “26 of July Movement.”

  On November 15, 1956, Castro and eighty-one of his followers armed with rifles, pistols, and three machine guns, sailed on a small yacht named Granma from Tuxplan, Mexico, to Playa Las Coloradas in eastern Cuba. They landed in a mangrove swamp, and most of his force was killed or captured by Batista’s army. But Castro, along with nineteen others, survived, escaping into the thickly forested Sierra Maestra mountains. Rebuilding his force, Castro waged a successful two-year guerrilla war, and on New Year’s Eve in 1958, Batista fled Cuba.

  Castro then proceeded to appoint avowed Marxists to key cabinet posts and made Che Guevara the governor of the Central Bank and then the minister of industries. Next, with help from the Soviet Union’s KGB, he organized a foreign-intelligence service, the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI, which his brother Raul staffed personally with his close confederates. Even though the Cold War was raging between the United States and the USSR, Castro agreed to provide the USSR with sugar in return for crude oil. He added insult to injury by ordering American companies in Cuba to refine the Soviet crude. When they refused, he nationalized them, and then most other U.S.-owned assets in Cuba. Not only did America retaliate with an embargo on trade with Cuba, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower secretly authorized the CIA to covertly overthrow Castro in 1960.

  Castro was now engaged in a life and death covert war with the United States. At stake was not only the survival of his regime in Cuba—but, as he came to realize, his own life.

  When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, he was only forty-three, and would shortly become America’s second-youngest president—only Theodore Roosevelt had been younger—and the first president born in the twentieth century. He brought with him to the White House a thirty-one-year-old wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, a socially prominent photographer known to the world as “Jackie,” as well as a three-year-old daughter, Caroline, and an infant son, John. JFK also brought to Washington so many men of distinction, including thought-provoking academics from his alma mater, Harvard, that journalists began describing his administration as “Camelot.”

  Behind the Camelot aura that permeated the public’s perception lay a vexing problem: Castro had installed a Marxist government in Cuba. No sooner had JFK been inaugurated in January 1961 than he was briefed by his national security adviser on the urgent need to unseat the regime in Havana. In the assessment made by U.S. intelligence, with every day that passed Castro was moving closer to America’s Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, and it was only a matter of months before Castro gave it military and intelligence-gathering outposts ninety miles from Florida. The CIA had already been authorized by JFK’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to bring about regime change in Cuba. The plan involved using a 1,400-man force of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala for an invasion of a remote area of Cuba, which would be followed by air strikes by U.S. bombers. A CIA-backed “United Revolutionary Front” in Miami would then establish, in the territory held by Cuban exiles, a “government” that the U.S. immediately would recognize. The idea was that this government could call for U.S. help. JFK approved a modified version of the plan, and on April 17, 1961, a brigade of some 1,300 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on the island’s southern coast. But JFK decided against providing U.S. air support, which allowed Castro’s army to quickly encircle the brigade. Ninety exiles were killed and the other 1,200 surrendered and were held for ransom, requiring a humiliated Kennedy Administration to negotiate a deal for their release. Even though JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was able to persuade U.S. pharmaceutical companies to give Castro $53 million worth of medicine and baby food in exchange for the prisoners, the invasion was a clear defeat for JFK.

  Meanwhile, to deal with Castro on his own terms, JFK set up in the White House the “Special Group (Augmented),” headed by his brother Robert, to use covert tactics to dispose of Castro. Infuriated by this humiliating failure, Kennedy summoned the CIA’s director of clandestine operations, Richard Bissell, to the Cabinet Room and chided him for “sitting on my ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime,” as later Bissell testified.

  The name of the CIA unit responsible for covert actions against Cuba was changed from JM WAVE to the Special Affairs Section, or, as it was called in CIA memos, SAS. The CIA executive who became its head was Desmond FitzGerald, a trusted ally of Robert Kennedy. His rugged good looks and surname led many people in Washington to mistakenly believe he was a distant relative of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In February 1962, JFK approved “Operation Mongoose,” which covert warfare specialist general Edward Lansdale would run under the supervision of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

  As part of the Kennedy-led reorganization of the CIA, Bissell was replaced by Richard Helms, a career CIA officer, who described Operation Mongoose as a “no-holds-barred” enterprise. It included such “planning tasks” as using biological and chemical warfare against Cuban sugar workers; employing Cuban gangsters to kill Cuban police officials, Soviet bloc technicians, and other people; using infiltrators to sabotage mines; and, in what was called “Operation Bounty,” paying cash payments of up to $100,000 for the murder or abduction of government officials.

  Castro responded by allowing the Soviet Union to establish missile bases in Cuba. The first shipment of medium-range missiles armed with megaton nuclear warheads arrived on September 8, 1962, followed by a second shipment the next week. Then, on October 15, 1962, high-altitude photographs taken by the CIA’s U-2 planes revealed the presence of these missiles in Cuba, which nearly led to a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Threatened with nuclear war, the Soviet Union withdrew all forty-two missiles, and the United States agreed not to intervene in Cuban affairs.

  Although this deal ended the missile crisis and Operation Mongoose, JFK was still determined to eliminate Castro. The point man remained FitzGerald at the CIA’s SAS. Initially, FitzGerald assumed that the technological ingenuity of the CIA’s workshop would produce a means either to discredit or to kill Castro. Since Castro was an avid diver and seashell collector, it worked on a booby-trapped seashell. The idea was to place it where Castro frequently swam underwater in the hope that he would see it and attempt to bring it to the surface. If so, he would be blown up, and it would appear that he had been killed by a derelict mine. It would leave no witnesses, and unlike hitmen, no assassin that could be captured. And if Castro ignored it, nothing would be lost. The workshop, however, decided that the construction of such a lethal seashell was technically too difficult. Another idea out of the workshop was a killer gift for Castro, a wetsuit whose breathing apparatus was impregnated with tuberculosis bacilli. The concept was that the implanted bacilli, the only evidence of the as
sassination, would be destroyed by the seawater, and the Cubans would not be able to determine how Castro contracted tuberculosis. Again, this device would leave no witnesses. The problem was to find a means of delivering it. At the time, James Donovan, an American lawyer, was negotiating the release of the Cuban exiles captured in the Bay of Pigs disaster. The CIA’s idea was that somehow Donovan, who was not privy to its machinations, could be induced by the CIA to give the contaminated suit to Castro as a gift. But before it could be delivered, Donovan, acting on his own, coincidentally gave Castro a pristine wetsuit. The plan then had to be aborted.

  August of 1963 had been especially hot for the CIA. Richard Helms said he could feel “white heat” from Attorney General Robert Kennedy after yet another of the CIA’s coup d’état attempts against Castro failed to materialize. Helms recalled almost daily phone calls from the attorney general wanting to know if he was taking action to remove Castro from power. As the CIA inspector general’s report noted, “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime.” At the time, the CIA had one candidate who both showed a willingness to carry out an assassination and had direct access to Castro. The CIA had broken off contact with him a year earlier, in August 1962, because he had turned down a CIA request that he submit to “fluttering,” the CIA’s term for a polygraph or lie-detector examination, which was then a standard CIA procedure for protecting against a double agent. At the time, he seemed too great a risk. In September 1963, under relentless pressure from Robert Kennedy, Helms authorized his reactivation. Codenamed AMLASH, his real name was Rolando Cubela.