Waiting to Be Heard

by Amanda Knox

  The press wrote that I had to be the center of attention. In reality, prison had taught me I was nothing. Nothing revolved around me. Nothing I said mattered. I had no power. I was just occupying space. I wanted to disappear. I didn’t want to be me anymore.

  The hearing days were often exhausting—­as were our off days.

  For the first few months of the trial, I was still an infame, with no one among the prisoners but Fanta, whom I’d since moved in with, to talk to. Then, early one morning, without warning, Cera was told that she had a half hour to gather her things. She was being transferred to a prison in Rome. By the time the prison day started, she had already left. I felt sorry for her—­she had made a sort of home for herself at Capanne.

  I was also sorry that we had never managed to make up, to be on good terms, even talking terms, with each other again. She had taught me a lot about prison, and had ultimately seemed more damaged than bad.

  Later that same morning, at nine, when I went outside for the first passeggio, everyone I passed as I walked my laps said, “Good morning.”

  Just like that! The silent treatment ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  One prisoner who had been at Capanne for months but whom I’d never met came up to me and introduced herself. “I’m Dura,” she said. “I always knew you weren’t as bad as Cera said you were. But what could I do about it?”

  It helped me that the tension I’d been living under dissipated somewhat, but not much besides that changed for me. I had found I liked my own company, and I went on keeping to myself.

  What didn’t get easier was room sharing. In part this was because of turnover. The prison population had doubled in the months since I’d been at Capanne. They couldn’t add rooms, so they added beds. Mona arrived soon after a fifth bed had been jammed atop one of the beds as a bunk in our four-­person cell. She was a heavyset, butch woman from Naples with scars from cuts on her arms and several missing teeth. Mona was in her thirties and totally unpredictable—­as happy and well behaved as a child on Christmas Eve or as blindly furious as a rampaging bull. Always heavily medicated, she slept a lot and was disoriented when awake.

  The four of us were unhappy about taking on a fifth roommate, and the fifth was furious that she’d been transferred. Before settling in, she hurled a stool across the room, screaming for the agente.

  During socialità she hooked up with a more feminine-looking prisoner named Gaetana, but their affair was short-­lived. Gaetana dumped Mona for another masculine woman from Southern Italy, and the new ­couple often sat together on a bench outside, hands pressed on each other’s knees.

  One day, during passeggio, I walked in front of Gaetana’s bench. Mona charged at the ­couple. In the way, I jumped to the side seconds before Mona fell on Gaetana and her girlfriend, punching both in the face. The attack escalated into a full-­scale brawl before the other prisoners managed to pull Mona off. I sat cringing in a corner of the courtyard, too shaken to stand up. I still hadn’t gotten used to the fact that violence could erupt anywhere, anytime.

  Once, after I’d straightened up our cell, Mona stormed up to me. “Amanda, where’s my tobacco?”

  Her anger made me skittish. “I didn’t see it while I was cleaning,” I said.

  “I had it by my bed, and now it’s gone. Don’t play games with me,” she hissed, balling her fists.

  “I swear I didn’t see it,” I said.

  “I found it!” Fanta called from the bathroom. She walked into the main room carrying a wadded scrap of paper. Mona grabbed it, opening it to reveal loose tobacco. “Amanda must have accidentally thrown it away thinking it was trash,” Fanta said.

  Mona spun around, facing me. “Are you trying to make a fool out of me?” she thundered. “You lied to me!”

  “I didn’t realize! I’m sorry!” I cried, inching backward.

  “Mona! Mona! It’s okay. It was a mistake!” Fanta said, stepping between us.

  I don’t know what would have happened if Fanta hadn’t been there.

  The next cellmate was Ossa; she moved in when Mona moved out. A wiry, young Roma a year older than me, she was strictly religious and as sulky as a teenager.

  We started out on good terms. When Ossa first arrived, my other cellmates didn’t like her because she slept almost all day. I argued that she had the right to sleep if she wanted—­she wasn’t in anyone’s way. She talked to me about God, speaking in tongues, how she was like Robin Hood—­stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

  One day Ossa told us she’d asked an inmate she’d become friends with—­a woman who’d been caught stealing from other prisoners—­to take a newly empty bed in our cell. Two of the four of us would have to sign off on the official request form for the ispettore to grant the move.

  We all said no.

  Ossa took out her resentment on me. She scoffed at me for reading and writing, and for turning the TV volume down. She was disdainful of the groceries I ordered—­and bought—­for everyone in the cell. She sarcastically called me “queen of the cell.” Whenever my case came on the news, she’d agree with the prosecution. “Everyone knows you’re guilty, Amanda—­and fake,” she said once. Fuming, I buried my face in my book, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, not wanting her to know she was getting to me.

  My indifference so infuriated her she threatened to flush my head in the toilet.

  One night, when I was sitting on the floor by the cell door trying to catch the light from the hallway in order to read, she leapt out of bed and lunged at me, screaming, “I hate you!” Her hands were raised to slap me when another cellmate, Tanya, jumped up and grabbed Ossa from behind, pinning her arms back. Immobilized by fear, I felt like a roach about to be squashed. While on trial, I couldn’t afford a mark on my record, especially not for fighting. Shaking, I stood with my arms up in surrender. “Even if you hit me,” I said softly, “I’m not going to hit you back.”

  The next day, Ossa watched while I wrote in my diary and then stepped up to my bed. “You’re writing horrible things about me in there!” she shouted, grabbing the notebook off my lap. Before I could react, she’d ripped out a huge chunk, tearing the pages to shreds.

  I felt completely helpless. If I try to grab it back, she’ll tear out my hair. This felt almost as invasive as when the police confiscated my journal soon after my arrest. The effect was the same: I had no choice but to stand by, paralyzed, as I lost something that was worthless to anyone but me, and was the possession I most cared about: my thoughts.

  A few days later, to my great relief, Ossa was freed. Gone from my life just like Cera.

  The weeks passed, and as the prosecution called a long line of witnesses, my optimism over a speedy acquittal was shrinking. Helpless sadness took over.

  I expected the prosecution to call police officers who’d been at the villa and those who were in the interrogation room, but initially I didn’t recognize Officer Monica Napoleoni. I’d never seen her dressed to suit her title—­head of the Division for Homicide Investigation. Usually she wore skin-­tight jeans, form-­fitting shirts, and flashy sunglasses. Wearing a dark blue jacket adorned with medals the size of silver dollars, she now looked so unlike herself that it seemed she was playing dress-­up to convince ­people of her authority. Everything she did and said—­her choice of words, the content, and the emphasis—­was to impress the judges and jury with her professionalism. She defended the shoddy work of her investigators. She was repellent. She was in control of herself, sitting in a court of law and lying without a second’s hesitation.

  When she answered Prosecutor Mignini’s questions, she was clear, straightforward, and self-­serving. She was smarter than her fellow officers. She knew the court was looking for police slipups. “We did our jobs perfectly, all the time,” she testified. “We didn’t hit Amanda.” “We’re the good guys.”

  When the defense questioned her, Na
poleoni’s manner switched from professional—­albeit dishonest—­to exasperated, incredulous, and condescending. For instance, when Raffaele’s lawyer Giulia Bongiorno asked if the gloves police used at the crime scene were sterilized or one-­use gloves, Napoleoni took a snarky tone, saying, “It’s the same thing.”

  “By one-­use gloves you mean that they are gloves that can be used only once, right?” Bongiorno asked.

  “Obviously, yes,” Napoleoni said haughtily.

  “Therefore it means that every time you touched an object you changed gloves?”

  “No, it means that I put them on when I enter before I touch objects, and that’s what I did.”

  “But therefore with the same gloves, without changing gloves, you touched the various objects in the room in the course of the search?” Bongiorno asked.

  “It’s obvious, yes.”

  I knew it was the police’s job to analyze the scene of a crime, gather clues, and determine who did it. But here in Perugia the police and the prosecutor seemed to be coming at Meredith’s murder from the opposite direction. The investigation was sospettocentrico—­“suspect-­oriented”: they decided almost instantly that Raffaele and I were guilty and then made the clues fit their theory. Instead of impartiality, the prosecution’s forensic experts were relentless in their drive to incriminate us. Their campaign was astonishing for its brashness and its singleness of purpose.

  Napoleoni built up her case against Raffaele and me by tearing us down. The police were suspicious of us from the start, she said, referring to the first time she saw us, in front of the villa on the day Meredith’s body was discovered. “Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito kept their distance from the others, kissing, caressing each other,” she said.

  Napoleoni added that, later, at the questura, we “were absolutely indifferent to everyone. They sprawled in the waiting room, sprawled on the seats, kissed each other, made faces at each other the entire time . . . They talked to each other under their breath. I noted their behavior because it seemed impossible that these two kids thought to kiss each other when the body of their friend had been found in those conditions.”

  My housemates and their friends reacted more appropriately, Napoleoni said. They “were all crying,” she told the court. “Some despaired.”

  To Napoleoni, Raffaele and I were self-­centered narcissists. We lacked basic compassion. And we were liars through and through.

  Even something as simple as a misunderstanding about the toilet in the villa fueled the police’s suspicions. Napoleoni explained that I’d said that morning that when I came to the villa to shower, I’d “noticed feces in the toilet.” But when I returned with Raffaele, I “didn’t find it there.”

  That was true.

  However, when Napoleoni checked, she said, “I saw that the waste was very evident. The smear started from the top of the bowl. I went out again and told them, ‘but no, it’s there,’ and they began to fall into contradiction. Something wasn’t right.”

  I was surprised but didn’t doubt her. Realizing that someone had broken in, I’d been afraid when I went back in the villa with Raffaele. I looked at the toilet from a distance and, not seeing anything in the bowl, assumed someone had flushed it. Clearly, I was wrong. Apparently the feces had slid down farther into the bowl. But Napoleoni acted as if, in discovering the unflushed toilet, she’d caught us in a lie and that we’d ineptly scrambled to come up with a cover.

  At the time, it seemed urgent to tell Napoleoni about the unflushed toilet. I thought it was important for the police to know that the killer might have been in the house when I came home the first time. Why would I make up a story about disappearing shit?

  Napoleoni went on, twisting each aspect of the case. “I immediately noted that the house couldn’t have been broken into from the outside. It seemed to have been done after the room was made a mess. I immediately noted that there was glass on the windowsill, and if a stone came from the outside, the glass should have fallen below.”

  She also said that when the Postal Police came to the villa with the phones Meredith had been using, “they asked Amanda if it was normal that Meredith locked her door. Amanda said Meredith always locked her door, even when taking a shower.”

  Filomena Romanelli disputed this, Napoleoni said.

  What I’d said—­that Meredith sometimes locked her door, including sometimes after she showered, while she was changing, and when she went out of town for the weekend—­had gotten garbled in translation. The mistake cost me credibility. Having caught me in what they took to be small lies, the cops saw me as someone incapable of telling the truth.

  The homicide chief added that by checking telephone activity tables, the police discovered that both my cell phone and Raffaele’s had been inactive the night before Meredith was found. “Amanda from 8:35 P.M. and Sollecito from 8:42 P.M.” That fact meant nothing, but Napoleoni presented it as if, in turning off our phones, we had had an ulterior motive. That we’d wanted to watch a movie without being interrupted did not come up.

  “We looked for contradictions,” Napoleoni told the court, “and the contradictions always came from Amanda and Raffaele, because the account they gave us was too strange. It was improbable.”

  If anything, it was surreal. I hadn’t expected to come home to a murder scene. I hadn’t known what to make of what I’d found. Yes, I’d come home and taken a shower. I didn’t investigate beyond Meredith’s closed door. And then one thing had led to another. I’d discovered droplets of blood, then an unflushed toilet, then a break-­in in Filomena’s room, and finally the police found Meredith’s body.

  Because Raffaele and I reacted differently from the others—­and, I assume, differently from how Napoleoni imagined she would have—­she and the prosecutor decided that Raffaele and I were the killers. Of course it’s natural for ­people to jump to conclusions, but not for a police officer to ignore facts and rely on superficial impressions. My stomach burned with resentment. I wanted to shout at her, “Who says there’s only one way to react? Who decided that being different equals being guilty?”

  When I first met Napoleoni, I thought she was mean. When I spent more time around her, I thought she was hateful. But looking at her on the stand, I thought, You were so stupid, Amanda. How could you not have realized that Napoleoni pegged you for guilty from the start?

  I remembered sitting in the back of the squad car on November 3, when the police were driving me to the house. Napoleoni was in the passenger seat in front. I said I was tired. She swiveled around to glare at me. “Do you think we’re not tired? We’re working 24/7 to solve this crime, and you need to stop complaining,” she reprimanded me sharply. “Do you just not care that someone murdered your friend?”

  I felt put upon that day. The police were guilt-­tripping me. They didn’t understand that my life had been shattered. They were used to the stress of their work, but I think they didn’t realize that regular ­people get tired, hungry, and overwhelmed.

  I was also frustrated with myself. I couldn’t seem to do anything right.

  In the Hall of Frescoes, the authorities made the same points as Napoleoni, one after another, often using the same words: I was strange, my behavior suspicious.

  You could tell their testimony had been rehearsed.

  On the stand, my chief interrogator, Rita Ficarra, seemed much smaller than she had at the police station. Middle-­aged, with dull, shoulder-­length brown hair, she came across as reasonable. Who would believe that she’d been ruthless, questioning me for hours, refusing to believe that I didn’t know who’d murdered Meredith? I wondered how this woman, who now struck me as average in every way, had instilled such fear in me.

  Like Napoleoni, Ficarra insisted, “No one hit her.” She was serene and straight-­faced as she testified.

  Ficarra elaborated. “Everyone treated her nicely. We gave her tea. I myself brought her down to get some
thing to eat in the morning,” she said, as if she were the host at a B&B. Then she added, “She was the one who came in and started acting weird, accusing ­people.”

  In her story, I was the crazy guest.

  When Raffaele was called to the questura on November 5, I went along because I was afraid to stay at his apartment alone. Ficarra’s take on this was not generous: “She just came in,” she said. “No one called her in.”

  She told the jury that when she had returned to the questura at around 11 P.M., she and her colleague came through the door and into the hall. “I found Amanda . . . My astonishment was that I found her demonstrating her gymnastic abilities. She did a cartwheel, a bridge, she did splits,” Ficarra said. “It honestly seemed out of place to me.”

  Ficarra didn’t mention that the silver-­haired police officer had asked me to show him how flexible I was. Now I can’t believe I acquiesced to his request, that it was normal to do yoga in such a setting.

  The longer Ficarra testified, the more she made it seem that the pressure the police exerted on me to confess was all in my head, that I’d blown the interrogation out of proportion. “In the end it was a calm dialogue, because I tried to make her understand that our intent was to seek collaboration,” she said.

  “At first she denied being at the villa the night of the murder, and then, when we called her on it, she started blaming someone else.”

  It was nearly unbearable to listen to her describe their behavior toward me as gentle and considerate. She defended everything without flinching. It was all I could do not to jump up and scream, “No! That’s not at all how it happened!” But my lawyers strongly advised me not to say anything—­that as I was someone who had already been accused of lying, no one would take my word, especially over the police’s.

  Judge Massei asked Ficarra if I spoke to her in English or Italian.