Waiting to Be Heard

by Amanda Knox

  The prosecution had undermined my credibility in every way possible. Mignini had called my family “a clan”—­intending a Mafia connotation—­that falsely proclaimed my innocence. He and his co-­prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, had argued that my lawyers’ pitch for reasonable doubt was a technique to create confusion and prolong the Kerchers’ grief.

  A public opinion poll on TV said that more than 60 percent of Italians thought I was guilty. The ­people who only watched television reports most likely sided with the prosecution. That realization spawned a deep-­down fear that I’d be convicted, my innocence be damned.

  Prisoners gossiped about my case all the time, behind my back and to me. “Come on, Amanda. You can tell me.”

  Over the many months of the trial, I grew more and more numb, too afraid to feel lest my emotions overwhelm me. But the closer we got to a verdict, the more my anxiety spiked. I started losing my hair. Each time I washed it, a huge clump would come out in my hands. I cried suddenly over nothing. Panic attacks left me gasping for air. My energy was so low that just walking made me stiff and dizzy. Desperate to shut everything out, I climbed into bed each night at seven or eight, earplugs in, covers over my head.

  Guards often sent me to see Don Saulo. He was the only person who calmed me. I’d sit quietly on his couch holding his hand. One of the few comments he made was “I hope you will go home. As far as I know, you are innocent, and you don’t belong in prison.”

  That meant the world to me.

  Another day, Don Saulo suggested I try praying. “You can just say, ‘God, if you exist, I really need your help right now.’ ”

  So I did pray. It made me feel ridiculous, since I don’t believe in God. But I was also relieved. I thought, I’m covering my bases, just in case. My conversations with God were always the same: “Look, I know innocent ­people suffer—­Meredith didn’t deserve to die. But I don’t think I can handle this. Please let it be part of your plan not to have me go through this, because I don’t know how.”

  Deep down, I didn’t believe a bad outcome was possible. My confidence always overrode the worst-­case scenario. My mind could not go there.

  Instead, I daydreamed about home.

  I thought, In my new life, I want to be healthy and productive and musical.

  I cut out décor ideas I liked from magazines and sent them to Madison, my friend from college, for our new apartment in Seattle. I worried about finding a job. I didn’t want to have to rely on my parents. I’d already cost them way too much time and money and caused too much emotional upheaval.

  When they visited me at Capanne, my family would ask, “What’s the first thing you want to do when you get home? What if we escape to Arizona together”—­where Chris is from—­“to go rock climbing? We can go where no one would find you.”

  My wants were simpler. I imagined being surrounded in the doorway of my mom’s house in West Seattle by everyone who meant something to me—­my family; friends like Madison, DJ, James, Andrew, and Brett; my soccer team girlfriends; teachers. All the ­people who gathered there for the once-­a-­week, middle-­of-­the-­night ten-­minute phone call I’d been allowed to make home for the past two years.

  If the trial goes badly, I thought, I’ll cut my hair.

  It was a superficial, stupid, melodramatic idea. But it was as far as I could go to wrap my mind around an ending that was too enormous and too terrifying to handle.

  One day I got up the courage to ask Chris, who was in Perugia leading up to the closing arguments and verdict, “What would a conviction mean?”

  So afraid to acknowledge that uncharted, dark place, I could only whisper.

  “There would be an appeal, and if you didn’t get acquitted, then the Supreme Court would exonerate you. At the most, Amanda, it would take five years,” Chris explained.

  “Five years?!”

  That was way more than I wanted to know.

  Chris jumped in to reassure me. “If that happened, Amanda, we’d find a way to save you! But don’t worry! It’s not going to happen! And if for some utterly bizarre reason it goes the wrong way, I’m moving to Italy.”

  Chris was already doing his IT job from the cold, stark apartment my parents had rented on the outskirts of Perugia, but his promise sounded so drastic it underscored the absurdity of a conviction.

  There was only one person who, while she cheered me on, also cautioned me against what she called my “Mickey Mouse view.” An inmate in her mid-­fifties, Laura was my new ally in prison. She’d been transferred to Capanne over the summer. As the only two Americans there, we’d bonded immediately over how displaced we felt. Leading up to my verdict, she often said, “Amanda, you have the optimism of a Disney movie, but that’s not how the real world is. Things don’t always work out just because they should.”

  And then, just like that, the final act was upon us.

  We’d been going to court, trying our case once or twice a week, for so long that it seemed we’d been living in a suspended state forever. But as we neared the end, it was like somebody had pushed the Fast Forward button. Hearings were now held nearly every day, one tumbling into the next, all leading toward the verdict, scheduled for the first Friday in December. My family bought me a plane ticket home to Seattle as soon as they found out when the verdict was due. “We’re going to get you out of here and back home,” they promised.

  Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini gave his closing argument first. Alternating between a calm, almost quiet recitation of the “facts” and the fiery rants of a preacher at a tent revival, Mignini summarized Raffaele’s and my part in the savagery that took Meredith’s life. He started with the idea that Filomena’s window was too high to be a credible entry point into the villa and ended with our tossing Meredith’s stolen British and Italian cell phones over the garden wall.

  Raffaele and I had accused “this poor Rudy,” as Mignini called him, of “being the only one” to attack Meredith. “He has his own grave responsibility, but the responsibility is not only his own,” Mignini intoned.

  I couldn’t believe what the prosecutor was saying. He, who was championing himself as the bearer of truth for Meredith’s family, was calling the murderer “Poor Rudy”? Evidence of Rudy’s crimes was everywhere, and his history of theft matched the burglary. Poor Rudy? Guede had stolen! He had killed Meredith! He had left a handprint in Meredith’s blood! He had fled! He had lied! Poor Rudy?

  Mignini went on. “For Amanda, the moment had come to take revenge on that simpering girl, that’s how she thought, and in a crescendo of threats and violence, which grew and grew, the siege on Mez”—­Meredith’s nickname—­“began.”

  Revenge for what?!

  “By now it was an unstoppable game of violence and sex. The aggressors initially threatened her and demanded her submission to the hard-­core sex game. It’s easy to imagine Amanda, angry at the British girl for her increasing criticism of Amanda’s sexual easiness, reproaching Mez for her reserve. Let’s try to imagine—­she insulted her. Perhaps she said, ‘You were a little saint. Now we’ll show you. Now you have no choice but to have sex.’ ”

  He’s perverse! How did he come up with such a twisted scenario? He’s portraying me as a psychopath! Is Mignini allowed to put words in my mouth, thoughts in my head? I would never force anyone to have sex. I would never threaten or ridicule anyone.

  Mignini continued: “The British girl was still on her knees with her head turned toward the armoire. Rudy was to the left of Mez. Raffaele brought himself around behind her and tried to tear off the infamous bra clasp and there was the successful cutting of it. Amanda was in front of Mez with her back to the armoire, wielding the knife from below, pointing it upward toward Meredith’s neck.

  “Raffaele also took out his knife,” Mignini said. “And used it to threaten and wound Mez from the right.”

  I went from seething to stunned. For the entire eleven-­m
onth trial there was only one knife discussed. Having heard the evidence proving that the kitchen knife was not the murder weapon, Mignini had now invented a second knife—­a knife that has never been found or even mentioned. In fact, the police had confiscated Raffaele’s entire pocketknife collection. None had shown any trace of blood or of Meredith’s DNA, and the double-­edged blades couldn’t have made Meredith’s wounds. But suddenly Mignini was saying that Raffaele had used another knife he’d somehow stashed away. I knew why. Not only did Mignini’s fantastic scenario explain away the bloody imprint on Meredith’s bedsheet and the wounds that couldn’t have been made with the kitchen knife, but it also allowed the prosecutor to put a knife in Raffaele’s hands. Otherwise, Raffaele had no role in the murder.

  Mignini kept going: “By now, seeing the resistance of the victim and the growing rage of the aggressors, who realized the British girl wouldn’t give in, she wouldn’t submit herself to rape, the game had to end. Amanda provoked the wound on the right side of Mez’s neck and tried to strangle her friend . . . It is a plausible reconstruction. Obviously it is a hypothesis . . . At this point it’s probable that Mez, realizing that the violence was unstoppable, made that terrible and desperate scream . . . Amanda provoked the deepest wound, the one on the left . . . Mez collapsed onto her right side. One of the aggressors looked for the girl’s cell phones, probably Raffaele, and he set down one of the knives on the bedsheet.”

  I hope ­people are hearing Mignini saying, “it’s probable” and “it’s a hypothesis.” You can’t convict someone based on a hypothesis that the evidence doesn’t support!

  As for my interrogation at the questura, Mignini described the interpreter—­the woman who had called me “a stupid liar” and had told me to “stop lying”—­as “very sweet.” “I remember that evening how she behaved toward Amanda,” he said.

  Then he recalled from earlier in the trial, when Judge Massei questioned me about my interrogation. “Your Honor asked, ‘But a suggestion in what sense? Did they tell you, ‘Say that it was Lumumba?’ Because a suggestion is just that . . . And Amanda said, ‘No. They didn’t tell me that it was him.’ And so what suggestion is it?

  “Amanda said, ‘But they told me, Ah, but we know that you were with him, that you met with him.’ The police were doing their job . . . they were trying to make this person talk . . . These are the pressures, then. Completely normal and necessary investigative activity. There were no suggestions because a suggestion is: Say it was Lumumba.”

  Mignini knew how my interrogation had gone. The police were yelling that I knew who the murderer was, that I had to remember, that I’d gone out to meet Patrick that night. They made me believe I had trauma-­induced amnesia. They threatened me if I didn’t name the murderer—­even though I said I didn’t know who the murderer was! How is that not suggestion? How is that not coercion?

  Mignini’s rant lasted one day, from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. When I went back to Capanne that afternoon, I felt as though I’d been beaten with a hammer. But I had survived. I repeated the childhood adage my mom used to recite: “Words can never hurt me.” I wished that were true.

  The co-­prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, spoke the next day. She talked about the forensic evidence as if each element were a neatly laid brick and they all fit together. She had built a brick house that she contended proved we were guilty. We heard for the umpteenth time that Stefanoni was right and our forensic experts were biased. Then she introduced a new motive—­a nonmotive, actually—­a one-­size-­fits-­all, everybody’s-­doing-­it explanation for anyone who questioned Mignini’s revolving motives. Squaring her shoulders, she told the jury, “We live at a time where violence is purposeless.”

  Echoing Mignini, Comodi said it was reasonable to assume that Raffaele had brought along a pocketknife, which he used to poke Meredith in the neck to scare her.

  Then the prosecution turned off the lights.

  “I’d like to show the court a visual prop we’ve constructed to demonstrate our theory of the murder,” Comodi said.

  This introduced the most surreal moment of my nightmarish trial: a 3-­D computer-­generated animation with avatars representing me, Raffaele, Rudy Guede, and Meredith.

  Carlo and Luciano were apoplectic. They shouted their objections, insisting that the film was unnecessary and inflammatory.

  Judge Massei allowed it. I didn’t watch it, but my lawyers said the avatar of me was dressed in a striped shirt like one I often wore to court. Raffaele, Guede, and I were depicted sneering. Meredith’s avatar had an expression of horror and pain. The cartoon used real crime scene photos to show the blood splatters in Meredith’s room.

  The animation dramatized the prosecution’s hypothesis, showing Raffaele and me leaving his apartment and sitting at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana, me arguing with Meredith at the house, the three of us attacking her.

  I kept my head down, my eyes on the table. My stomach was churning. The courtroom was suddenly hot. I was boiling with anger and near tears. How are they allowed to make up what happened? I tried to block out Comodi’s voice as she narrated the imagined event.

  The cartoon couldn’t be entered as evidence, so no one outside the courtroom saw it. But the prosecution had achieved their goal. They’d planted an image in the minds of the judges and jury.

  When the lights came up, Comodi closed with a straightforward request: Give Amanda and Raffaele life imprisonment.

  After Comodi came Patrick’s civil attorney, Carlo Pacelli. Unlike Patrick, whose testimony had been fair, Pacelli trashed me mercilessly.

  “Who is Amanda Knox? The Knox who is unscrupulous in lying, in slandering; beautiful, intelligent, cunning, and crafty is above all how she appears before you, and how she appeared before you during more than forty hearings: very feminine, cute, enchanting, a white face, blue eyes, simple, sweet, naïve, fresh-­faced, with a family at her back and parents who, even if separated, are loving and affectionate.

  “Is Amanda Knox the daughter who everyone would want? The friend who everyone would like to meet? Yes. Great. The defense counselor says that Amanda is exactly as you see her today, in this courtroom, as she appears. She’s exactly this. But the defendant that you see, Your Honors, is a student transformed by a long prison detention . . . And so the question that arises . . . who was Amanda Knox on the first of November?”

  Then he descended on me as if I were a witch on trial in the Middle Ages.

  “So who is Amanda Knox? In my opinion, within her resides a double soul—­the angelic and compassionate, gentle and naïve one, of Saint Maria Goretti, and the satanic, diabolic Luciferina, who was brought to engage in extreme, borderline acts and to adopt dissolute behavior. This last was the Amanda of November 1, 2007 . . . It must be spelled out clearly: Amanda was a girl who was clean on the outside because she was dirty within, spirit and soul . . .”

  Thank God Italy doesn’t believe in burning ­people at the stake anymore! Pacelli is piggybacking off the prosecution’s baseless accusations! How can he live with himself? How can any of them?

  The Kerchers’ civil attorney, Francesco Maresca, emphasized the horror that had been inflicted on Meredith—­by a group. He knew this because had it been only one attacker, there’s no doubt that Meredith, who knew karate, would have defended herself.

  How can any girl defend herself against a guy armed with a knife?

  “It’s a very long list of lesions: to the face, neck, hands, forearms, thighs. Try to understand the terror, the fear, the pain this girl suffered in the last seconds of her life in the face of the multiple aggression, an aggression brought about by more than one person.”

  Maresca didn’t mention that the prosecution’s own coroner—­the only person who’d analyzed Meredith’s body—­had said it was impossible to determine whether one or more ­people attacked Meredith.

  Maresca, like Mignini, criticized any media that had questio
ned his work. But what most enraged me was the false contrast he set up between the Kerchers and my family.

  “You’ll remember Meredith’s family for their absolute composure. They taught the world the elegance of silence. We’ve never heard them on the television . . . in the newspapers. They’ve never given an interview. There’s an abysmal difference between them and what has been defined as the Knox Clan and the Sollecito Clan, which give interviews on national television and in magazines every day.”

  Thank God for my “clan,” I thought. They’re the only ones on my side.

  It was wrong of Maresca to compare my family to Meredith’s. I knew that the Kerchers were loving parents and good ­people because of the way Meredith had talked about them. She knew the same about mine. One of the things that connected us was that we were both close to our families. Meredith’s family is grieving, but my family knows that I’m not the cause of the Kerchers’ grief. Just as Meredith’s family came to Perugia to seek justice for their daughter, mine have come to seek justice for me. Both families are good. Both families are doing the best they can, the best way they know how.

  Finally it was our turn.

  Thank God we’ve arrived in friendly territory! I thought.

  I was fed up with being the target. Now I was bound by anxiety. The end was so close! Home was on the horizon.

  Raffaele’s lawyers, Luca Maori and Giulia Bongiorno, worked to put distance between their client and Guede.

  “Raffaele and Rudy Guede never met, went out together, or saw each other,” Maori said. “The two young men belonged to completely different worlds and cultures. Raffaele comes from a big and healthy family. Rudy rejected his family. Raffaele has always been a model student. Rudy was never interested in school or work. Raffaele is timid and reserved. Rudy is uninhibited, arrogant, extroverted.”

  “Accomplices who don’t know each other . . .” Bongiorno said, drawing out the words to emphasize the paradox that they couldn’t have been accomplices if they didn’t even know each other!