Waiting to Be Heard

by Amanda Knox

  We stopped in front of a single-­story building in the center of the complex, where an empty squad car sat. Raffaele’s car? At a wave from our driver, we entered the building, Ficarra ahead of me, the other officer behind, each gripping one of my arms. Once inside, they let go. “This is where we leave you,” they said. One of them leaned in to give me a quick, awkward hug. “Everything’s going to be okay. The police will take care of you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I gave her a last, beseeching look, hoping this meant that finally they knew we were on the same side.

  It didn’t.

  I spent the next 1,427 nights in prison for a crime I did not commit.

  Chapter 12

  Evening, November 6, 2007, Day Five

  One guard was trying to flex the thick sole of my hiking boot. The other was shaking her head no.

  Of all the things they took from me in my first few minutes as an inmate at Capanne Prison, this loss hit me the hardest. On my nineteenth birthday my stepdad, Chris, had given me his old GPS and taught me how to use it by driving me on a scavenger hunt. We ended up at an outdoor gear store, where I got to pick out my present: the boots I’d coveted for more than a year. I wore them hiking and mountain climbing and paired them with a skirt or dress when I wanted to make an offbeat fashion statement. The boots made me feel invincible—­not dangerous, as the guards were implying. Did they think I’d kick someone with the hard, boxy toe? Or try to hang myself with the flimsy laces?

  “Do you have other shoes?” the tall, sturdy guard asked me. She had a chiseled jaw and hair that had been dyed reddish purple, like a plum. Her name was Lupa, but prisoners weren’t allowed to call guards anything but agente or assistente.

  “No, the police took my sneakers,” I said. “But they went to my house to get these. Why would they give them to me just to take them away three hours later?”

  The other guard, a short, fleshy blonde, continued pawing through my purse/book bag. I later learned the prisoners had nicknamed her Cinema because she spoke in slow motion. “You won’t be able to take any of this in with you,” she declared flatly.

  Everything I needed was in that bag: my wallet, my passport, my journal.

  “What about my textbooks?” I asked, pleading. “I have school. I’ll be back in class in a few days. I don’t want to fall behind.”

  “When you leave you can request them from the storeroom,” Agente Lupa said.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. The police told me they would keep me safe, and then they’d just dropped me off here and left. Why would they have done that? They had already confiscated my cell phone and sneakers, and now the prison guards were taking the things that I always kept with me, the things that identified me. Without money, a credit card, my driver’s license, my passport, I felt completely vulnerable.

  The next orders left me feeling even more defenseless. “Jacket, pants, shirt, socks,” Cinema demanded, holding out her hand.

  I turned my face away as I took off each piece of borrowed clothing. I handed over Raffaele’s sweatpants, his shirt and jacket, his white tube socks.

  The cold traveled up from the concrete floor and through my bare feet. I hugged myself for warmth, waiting—­for what? What’s coming next? Surely they wouldn’t give me a uniform, since I was a special case. It wouldn’t make sense, since I’d be in prison so briefly.

  “Your panties and bra, please,” Lupa said. She was polite, even gentle, but it was still an order.

  I stood naked in front of strangers for the second time that day. Completely disgraced, I hunched over, shielding my breasts with one arm. I had no dignity left. My eyes filled with tears. Cinema ran her fingers around the elastic of the period-­stained red underwear I’d bought with Raffaele at Bubble, when I thought it’d be only a ­couple of days before I’d buy more with my mom.

  Mom must be frantic. Is she still waiting at the train station? Wandering around Perugia looking for me? Has she called the police to help find me? Does she know I’m here?

  “Squat,” Lupa said.

  I gave her a puzzled look.

  She smiled encouragingly and bent her knees to show me. “You see?” she asked.

  I squatted, and the women stared at me. Unlike at the questura, these guards were at least kind. They seemed almost like two distant aunts, looking at me with sympathy and speaking to me softly, knowing that what they were asking was excruciatingly humiliating.

  Naked and crouching, cringing with shame, I held on to the knowledge that I would be released as soon as I could clear up the misunderstanding with the police. A few hours or maybe a day or two. No more than three—­and for sure in a special holding cell, not in the real prison. I saw myself striding out of the gate in my hiking boots, book bag over my shoulder, Mom walking beside me, holding my hand.

  “Now cough,” Lupa said.

  “What?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Cough.” She faked a cough. I imitated her.

  “Good,” Lupa said. “Here you go.”

  She handed me back my clothes, and I got dressed. But I was still shoeless. “Che taglia di scarpe porti?” she asked, pointing at my feet—­“What size do you wear?”

  “Porto una trenta-­nove,” I said softly—­“I wear a thirty-­nine.”

  “Go and look in the nuns’ closet for something,” Lupa told Cinema.

  The female ward at Capanne had a chaplain and five nuns, who ministered to the inmates six days a week, filling in where the Italian government fell short—­which included clothing us, since it turned out there weren’t uniforms. The nuns kept a cabinet of donated apparel that they gave prisoners as needed—­most of it worn out and poorly fitting.

  Lupa pulled a lumpy, black plastic garbage bag out of a large bin and dropped it in front of me. It clanged against the floor. I dug down beneath the coarse, gray wool blanket folded on top and found a metal bowl and plate, a spoon and a fork, a plastic cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a plastic bag of gigantic feminine hygiene pads, a single roll of rough, brown toilet paper, and two sponges—­one for scrubbing myself in the shower and the other for dishes. “Your provisions,” Lupa said.

  I choked at the back of my throat. I was holding a sack of the only things the government thought were essential to my life. I was in prison, and alone.

  At that point, I gave myself as strong a pep talk as I could muster. This is temporary—­a stupid bureaucratic system that can’t be bent. Like a roller-­coaster ride that I’ve accidentally gotten on and can’t get off until it’s looped completely around. This is my own fault. I caused the confusion. Now I have to try to straighten it out.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks.

  “Whoa! No, no. Be brave. You’re okay,” Lupa said.

  Cinema came back carrying a worn pair of rust-­colored cloth slippers, which I squeezed on over my socks.

  “Those work okay,” Lupa said, nodding approvingly. She held my upper arm, I gripped the garbage bag, and Cinema opened the door to the main hall. I walked out in a stranger’s discarded house shoes.

  Vice-­Comandante Argirò, whom I’d met just before my strip search, was waiting. He was a thin man, probably in his fifties, with a large hooked nose that took up most of his droopy face and a hunchback that jutted out between his shoulder blades. He spoke his name loudly and slowly. “Ar-­gi-­rò,” he’d said. “Capi-­sci l’i-­taliano?” Did I understand Italian? I nodded. “Bene,” he said, picking up speed. “Sono vice-­comandante. Capisci?”

  “Sì,” I said. Yes, I understood that he was a vice-­commander and guessed that meant he was the second-­highest person in charge of the prison.

  When I’d first been brought inside from the squad car, I’d seen Raffaele through a barred glass window, locked in a hallway near the prison entrance. He was wearing his gray faux fur–lined jacket and was pacing back and forth, his head down. It was the firs
t time since we’d been separated that I’d seen more than his feet. He didn’t look at me. I’d wondered if he hated me.

  Raffaele and I hadn’t been together long, but I’d believed I knew him well. Now I felt I didn’t know him at all.

  I wondered why he was being kept here, what the police thought he knew, what the bureaucratic reasons were for his presence at the prison. I didn’t know what was going on in Raffaele’s head, but I imagined that he was as scared as I was. I couldn’t imagine why he had betrayed me, but I wondered if he had been just as confused as I had been under interrogation, had lost faith in his own memories as well. Now I wonder if he realized then, unlike me, how serious our situation was.

  I couldn’t catch his eye before I was led away.

  The next step was getting my mug shot taken. I was told to sit in a chair bolted to the wall and to look straight ahead into a big, black metal box, like the camera they use at the Washington Department of Motor Vehicles. In the second before they made the picture, it dawned on me that I wasn’t supposed to smile for the camera. Later I was struck by how lost, how frazzled I appeared. My hair was wild. My skin was ghostly pale. My eyes were blank with exhaustion.

  Argirò stared at the hickey on my neck, but said nothing. “Follow me, miss,” he said finally.

  Agente Lupa took my upper arm again and guided me forward. Argirò fit the large, gold key in his hand into the lock of a bulletproof glass door reinforced with a row of metal bars on either side. All the doors looked the same—­and they were all impenetrable without a key. He went in ahead of us, holding the door open until we’d gone through, then closing and locking it behind us.

  We walked through a series of dingy cream-­colored hallways. Argirò unlocked each barred door as we went. Even in my daze, I noticed that none of the doors had knobs. The vice-­comandante used his keys as handles.

  I was inside the women’s ward. Incredibly, as I went deeper and deeper into the cage, I didn’t have the urge to escape.

  Argirò led us up a narrow stairwell to il primo piano—­“the second floor” (what we call the first floor is known in Europe as the ground floor)—­and tapped the key he was holding against the barred door. On the other side, a female guard used her own gold key to unlock the door and usher us into the infirmary. With a patient’s table in the middle of the floor, it was the first vaguely familiar-­looking room I’d been in since walking into the prison. The doctor, an older man in a lab coat, his hair dyed dark, was sitting behind his desk. He looked down at the folder in front of him and up at me. “Name?” he asked.

  “Amanda Knox. K-­n-­o-­x.”

  “Do you have allergies, illnesses, diseases?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Well, we’ll need to do blood work anyway,” he said. Just then I felt a sharp pinch from the back of my head. The nurse had snuck around me and plucked a hair from my scalp. I started to turn and glare at her, but instead asked the doctor, “Blood work? For what?”

  “For diseases,” he said. “Sign this. For the tests.” He pushed a document and a pen in front of me, and I signed it. “How do you feel?”

  “Worried,” I said. “Worried and confused.”

  I shrank down in my seat.

  “Confused?” he asked.

  “I feel terrible about what happened at the police office. No one was listening to me,” I said. Tears sprang to my eyes again.

  “Hold up there, now,” Argirò said.

  “Wouldn’t listen to you?” the doctor asked.

  “I was hit on the head, twice,” I said.

  The doctor gestured to the nurse, who parted my hair and looked at my scalp.

  “Not hard,” I said. “It just startled me. And scared me.”

  “I’ve heard similar things about the police from other prisoners,” the guard standing in the background said.

  Their sympathy gave me the wrongheaded idea that the prison officials were distinct and distant from the police.

  “Do you need anything to sleep?” the doctor asked.

  I didn’t know what he meant, because the idea of taking a sleeping pill was as foreign to me as being handcuffed. “No,” I said. “I’m really tired already.”

  The doctor nodded to Argirò and the guards, and Lupa gently grabbed my upper arm, helping me to stand up. “Thank you,” I said to the doctor.

  I bristled at Lupa’s touch, filled with resentment over being held on to like this. Did they think I might spontaneously do something horrible? But I forced myself to relax in her grip—­I didn’t want my anger and anxiety to be misread. From the start I tried to make it clear that their clasping my arm was unnecessary. The whole time I was at Capanne, I always spoke calmly and moved slowly, deliberately. When an agente grasped my arm, I imagined my arm shrinking until her fingers could encircle it without coming into contact with my skin. The assumption that I needed to be restrained like this made me furious. I didn’t belong in a place where it was necessary to restrict ­people’s movement by holding their biceps or handcuffing them because they might attack without warning. I didn’t belong in prison.

  Argirò led our procession up to il secondo piano—­the third floor. “You’re not to speak to anyone except the guards,” he said. “No one but the guards.” I guess he said it twice to make sure I got it. But who else could I have spoken to? There was no one else around. A tall, thin, red-­haired female guard opened the next locked door. This hallway was lined with closed metal doors. I could hear the sounds of TVs and women’s voices as we walked down the hall, but I saw no one until we came to the end. A pair of eyes peered out from the viewing window in the last door on the right.

  The guard stepped forward and unlocked the last door on the left. Argirò went in first. He pointed at the TV, sitting on top of a gray metal box, opposite two beds. The TV was wrapped in brown paper and taped up, like a package waiting to be mailed. “Don’t touch this,” he said. “Don’t you even try.”

  He must have been used to ­people who were much less compliant than I was. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to disobey him. I felt oddly small, like Alice in Wonderland, when everything around her was so much bigger.

  The bed looked as uninviting as you’d expect in a prison, with its yellow foam mattress on an orange metal frame pocked with black spots where the paint had chipped off. Two ugly burnt-­orange metal cabinets were bolted into the wall—­to hold clothes, I guessed.

  “Take everything out of the garbage bag,” the female guard said. “If you need anything call, ‘Agente.’ ”

  “Am I allowed to make a phone call?” In movies, prisoners are allowed one phone call.

  Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. I needed to hear Mom’s voice more than I’d ever needed anything in my whole life.

  The guard looked at me like I’d asked for caviar and Prosecco.

  I spread the thin blanket on the sheetless bed and lay down on the rough wool. I curled in on myself as the door clunked shut. “Stay here,” the guard said, as if I had an option, and left.

  With that, there was nothing left for me to do. I’d been at the beck and call of the police for five days and under their absolute control for nearly twenty-­four hours. Being left alone was all I’d wanted during my interrogation. Now that I was, I was helpless and angry and terrified.

  Now all I wanted was Mom. She had to be in Perugia by now, but I felt as far from her as I could ever be. I was sure she was freaking out about me, but there was nothing I could do. I wondered how she’d even find out where I was, what had happened to me. A horrible thought flitted through my mind: What if she thinks I’m dead? That I’ve been killed, too? Like Meredith.

  I began to weep. Alone, I didn’t even try to hold back.

  My cell had its own bathroom and kitchen—­two equal-­size spaces together measuring about eleven feet by four feet and separated by a thick glass door. Y
ou had to go through the kitchen, just a long aluminum sink with an aluminum counter, to get to the bathroom, where the standard European fixtures—­a sink, bidet, toilet, and shower—­were lined up in a row.

  Later, while I was sitting on the toilet, the redheaded guard came by and watched me through the peephole. So there was no privacy at all, then.

  When I returned to the main part of the cell, someone passed a plastic plate through the barred door’s single opening. Canned tuna, cut-­up raw fennel, and rice smothered in tomato sauce. I had no appetite. I picked at the rice, which tasted comfortingly like the Uncle Ben’s I was used to at home. I couldn’t eat anything else.

  I tucked myself back into the fetal position on top of the bed. A little while later, an agente walked by and closed the metal door over the bars. I thought, I’m being sealed into a tomb. Too claustrophobic and panicked to look in that direction, I rolled onto my other side to stare out the barred window into the dark.

  Then I sobbed until I finally fell into a fitful sleep.

  Chapter 13

  November 7, 2007

  I’m not religious. I don’t believe in miracles. I’m not sure what I think about God.

  But the nun who visited me on my first full day in prison had an extraordinary effect on me. She was about eighty and wore a full habit, pale gray from head to toe.

  She stuck both her hands through the bars of my cell and, grasping mine, told me, “Dio sa tutto. Ti aiuterà a trovare la risposta.”

  Even though she uttered words I’d probably never have said in any language, I understood: “God knows everything. He will help you find the answer.”

  I had been alone in my cell, bent over a piece of white paper, a pen in hand, trying desperately to sort out the scraps of scrambled memories from the night of Meredith’s murder, when the nun arrived. I had to remember exactly what I’d done the night of November 1. Could the police be right? Did I have amnesia? As the sister was leaving, she wished me buona fortuna—­good luck. She smiled.