Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  She called Meredith’s British mobile phone, but she got no answer. Then she called her Italian mobile, which was registered in Filomena’s name. Still, she got no answer. A few minutes later, Filomena called to say she was very worried because she had also been trying to reach Meredith.

  Taking Raffaele with her, Amanda went back to the cottage and took him first to the larger bathroom. Then they checked out Filomena’s room, which was a mess. It looked as if someone had rummaged through everything and left clothing strewn about the floor. Most alarming, there was a rock near her desk, and one of the bedroom windows was broken.

  Even though Filomena’s computer was sitting on the desk, Amanda was convinced the house had been burglarized and went to look in Laura’s room. Nothing had been touched. This wasn’t adding up. She knocked on Meredith’s door again; still, no answer.

  When Filomena called again, Amanda told her about the broken window. A few minutes later, at 12:47 P.M., the now-panicked Amanda called her mother, Edda Mellas, in Seattle, where it was 4:47 A.M., and told her what had happened. Edda told her to call the police. Since Amanda’s Italian was only barely passable, Raffaele called his older sister, Vanessa, who worked in Rome for the Carabinieri, the national quasi-military police. Like Edda had, she told him to call the Carabinieri immediately, which he did on the emergency 112 number.

  Meanwhile, the Polizia Postale—the Postal Police—arrived on the scene. They had been contacted by a woman about a half mile up the road who had found Meredith’s mobile phones in her garden. Telephone regulation in Italy is under the jurisdiction of the post office, and they had traced ownership of both phones to Via della Pergola. The two plainclothes officers—Michele Battistelli and Fabio Marzi—found Amanda and Raffaele outside, saying they were waiting for the Carabinieri. They brought the officers into the house and Amanda showed them around. She didn’t understand the distinction in police services and thought these were the officers Raffaele had called.

  Downstairs flatmate Marco Marzan showed up with a friend, Luca Altieri. He explained that Filomena had asked him to come after Amanda’s worried call. Shortly afterward, Filomena arrived with her best friend Paola Grande, who was also Luca’s girlfriend. Filomena examined her room and discovered that nothing was taken, not even cash or jewelry.

  All focus was now on Meredith and her locked door, but the Postal Police were reluctant to take any action until the Carabinieri arrived. Finally, around 1:15 P.M., Filomena asked Luca to break down the door. He kept kicking it until it broke from its hinges and flew open.

  The room was covered in blood. Meredith’s beige duvet was on the floor. Filomena saw a bare foot sticking out from underneath.

  Amanda rushed in the direction of Filomena’s screams, but Raffaele intercepted her and pulled her away. Inspector Battistelli ordered everyone out of the house, then called police headquarters.

  It was All Saints’ Day, also known to many Christians as All Souls’ Day or the Day of the Dead.

  I didn’t know much about the Meredith Kercher murder case until Mark Olshaker brought it to me with the comment that it seemed to have remarkable echoes to the West Memphis Three. He had become convinced that like Damien, Jason and Jessie in West Memphis, Seattle college student Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had been railroaded into a conviction for the murder of Amanda’s housemate. Several lengthy phone conversations with Amanda’s stepfather, Chris Mellas, had further convinced Mark that her family firmly believed in her innocence. I didn’t want to draw any conclusions of my own unless I could fully examine the record and evidence.

  When I delved into the case, I was struck by both the similarities and the differences between this case and WM3. In some sense, Knox is a photo negative of WM3, with the same ultimate effect.

  Both involved horrific, gory murders of low-risk, innocent young people who had the promise of their whole lives to look forward to.

  One took place in a scruffy southern city on the edge of the interstate, a place many kids considered “West Nowheresville” and yearned to flee as soon as they were old enough. The other happened in a historic Umbrian hill town that attracted adventurous students from around the world.

  One involved defendants who were marginal outsiders from poor and broken families whom the rest of the world considered losers. The other involved a beautiful young woman and a handsome young man, both solidly middle-class with promising futures ahead of them.

  Both hinged on a questionable confession after many hours of police interrogation without a lawyer present—one by a scared and confused seventeen-year-old boy; the other by a girl just out of her teens who barely spoke the language being shouted at her.

  Both were rushes to judgment, prosecuted as satanic ritual murders on the basis of fear and superstition rather than solid evidence and analysis.

  Both became passionate, controversial, international causes whose balance was finally tipped by the lack of a match between the defendants and DNA found at the crime scenes.

  Knox also had the kind of sensational elements that had captured world imagination with the Ramsey case: a beautiful girl and a vicious, senseless murder in the house where she lived. But in this case, the beautiful girl was all grown up, and there were actually two girls: one a victim, the other a suspect.

  Through Mark’s exchanges with Amanda’s family, I was contacted by Steve Moore, a retired FBI agent currently working as deputy director of public safety at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California—not a bad job if you like the beach and warm weather as much as I do. Steve had been in my behavioral science classes during new agent training at Quantico. Though we knew and had worked with a lot of the same people, I didn’t remember meeting him. He had never met Amanda, but he had become so moved by her case that he decided to conduct his own investigation, with the family’s cooperation but independent of them.

  I have not been universally praising of all my FBI colleagues over the years, but when I looked up Steve Moore, he turned out to be the real deal. He had spent his entire FBI career dealing with violent crime; and as his last assignment, he ran the FBI’s Los Angeles–based “Extra-Territorial Squad,” which was tasked with responding to any acts of terrorism against the United States in Asia and Pakistan. He agreed to organize and supply me with all of the relevant case materials, including records, photographs, videos and various transcripts. He told me he respected my work and me too much to try to influence me in any way and genuinely wanted to know if I felt he was on the right track in interpreting the evidence.

  Before the case was resolved, Steve would admit to me, “When you told me about the grief you took after the Ramsey case, I didn’t really understand how petty and mean people can get. In my whole life, I have never been vilified by people like I have since I got involved in the Knox case.”

  I reviewed all of the material presented to me and read everything I could, both positive and negative. All of the evidence pointed squarely in one direction: Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were innocent.

  Clearly, Italian criminal justice authorities did not want my help. What I could do, Steve, Mark and I concluded, was to speak out as much as possible and try to educate people as to what this case was really about rather than the salacious tale of sexual obsession with which the media had so fallen in love.

  As it turned out, Amanda and Raffaele did not suffer quite so long as the West Memphis Three, but they still spent four years in prison—the first without being formally charged. They were convicted in October 2008 and released by an appeals judge in October 2011. Nearly everything about their case demonstrates the same systemic weaknesses and personal failings as the Arkansas case. The only other difference, ironically, is that in Perugia, they had the real killer in custody almost right away. Yet that didn’t stop the persecution of the other two defendants.

  The overwhelming initial public impression in this highly publicized case was that the beautiful, seductive “Foxy Knoxy” was guilty of brutally murdering he
r roommate in a frenzy of satanic lust. Books have been published asserting her guilt, and even today, world opinion is wildly mixed on whether she should have been let out of prison. Let’s go through this case and see why it quickly became a travesty of justice and why Italian authorities should have been able to determine that right from the beginning.

  CHAPTER 29

  THE FACTS OF THE CASE

  Let’s start with the crime scene. Meredith Kercher had been stabbed multiple times, including three deep wounds in her neck.

  When Luca Altieri and Filomena Romanelli and then Raffaele Sollecito and the police first saw her blood-soaked body, eyes open and naked but for a T-shirt pulled up over her breasts, she was on the floor with a pillow beneath her hips and the bloody duvet pulled up over her chest. In the trial, prosecutors Giuliano Mignini and Manuela Comodi would claim this was evidence that a woman had committed the crime and that covering the body was a sign of compassion or pity.

  I disagree. For sheer depravity, this murder was absolutely horrific. As soon as I looked at the crime scene photographs, there was no question in my mind that the killer had not an ounce of compassion for Meredith. There was no question in my mind that the killer had no compassion for anyone or anything that could pass for a conscience.

  When we see actual evidence of a “soft kill,” such as manual strangulation with a handkerchief or towel, say, followed by a carefully covered or “comfortably” wrapped body, we think of parental or close-relationship murder. This scene had none of those indicators. A blanket thrown haphazardly over a body indicates nothing about a male or female UNSUB. If anything, it shows contempt for the victim, or, if the head is covered up, depersonalization. Or it may simply represent an offender’s discomfort with looking at a mutilated body while he carries out a burglary or whatever else he set out to do.

  If the placement of the pillow means anything at all, it could have been put there by an assailant to make sexual assault easier. The pulled-up T-shirt also fits the pattern of a sexually motivated crime. There was a bloody handprint on it, and streaks of blood on the wall, as if the UNSUB had tried to clean his hands.

  Two towels were under the body and a third lay on the bed, also soaked with blood. A shape that appeared to be a knife was imprinted in blood on the bed. Several bloody shoeprints on the tile floor led from the bed toward the front door. These were later identified as belonging to a Nike shoe. Finally there was a bloody print from a bare foot on the mat in the bathroom that Meredith and Amanda shared.

  Meredith’s handbag was on the bed. It appeared to have been gone through. In addition to her missing mobile phones, cash and credit cards were also gone. Though the scene showed clear signs of either a burglary or a staged burglary, prosecutors used this evidence against Amanda as well, claiming she stole from Meredith to pay her rent. Had they looked seriously into her background, they would have found that she worked part-time for several years to help pay for her studies in Italy. Given this past behavior, I would consider theft completely out of character, and as a motive for such a hideous murder out of the question.

  The Postal Police cleared the house and sealed it off. Around three in the afternoon, Public Minister (equivalent to a district attorney, magistrate and senior investigator) Giuliano Mignini arrived with Luca Lalli, the coroner and a professor of pathology at the University of Perugia. Mignini was a portly, balding tyrannical type in his mid-fifties. Lalli noted the three stab wounds on Meredith’s neck and determined that the cause of death was blood loss and suffocation.

  Already mistakes were starting to pile up. Lalli did not take Meredith’s temperature, which meant, as in the West Memphis case, there would be no subsequent method of establishing time of death.

  At this very point, the public case against Amanda Knox began. As she and Raffaele and the other flatmates waited outside, she was observed whispering to Raffaele, cuddling and kissing him. She later said she had been crying and he had been trying to comfort her, but the image of that lip-lock soon made news around the world. Her roommate had just been brutally murdered and she seemed intent on public displays of affection with her handsome Italian boyfriend. Monica Napoleoni, head of homicide for the police flying squad, the squadra mobile, or quick response team, spoke to the couple and decided they seemed unemotional and indifferent to the murder.

  The same phenomenon occurred in the Ramsey case, and I have seen it over and over. Once the media and the public establish a mental image of a suspect or even a potential suspect, that image is almost impossible to shake.

  When police and the crime scene team had finished, all of the flatmates and their friends acceded to police requests to go to the questura, the police station, for questioning. After the first round of questioning several hours later, some of Meredith’s English girlfriends happened to meet Amanda in the waiting room. They later said she had given them details about the killing. In trial, prosecutors charged these were facts only someone who had seen the body could know. Or perhaps someone who had been around a police station for hours while everyone was focused on the crime?

  Amanda didn’t leave the station until around six the next morning. There were conflicting reports that she “seemed calm, as if nothing had happened,” and “paced nervously.” From my experience, I cannot imagine a twenty-year-old woman who had never been in trouble with the law, and suddenly found herself in a foreign police station being questioned about the murder of her flatmate, not being nervous and frightened, whether she was innocent or guilty. Anyone in such a situation who appears calm, as John Ramsey appeared before JonBenét’s body was found, is merely suppressing outward emotion. I guarantee it.

  Later that day, police went with Amanda back to the house. The prosecution would describe her as having sobbed uncontrollably outside. Eventually her tears, or lack of them, became a major point of contention in the case. But there are enough eyewitnesses at various times to suggest that she cried quite a bit in the hours and days after the murder.

  Following the visit to the house, they took her back to the station for more questioning. Despite the intensive probing over several days, she was officially considered a witness at this point and was not asked if she wanted an attorney.

  Back in London, the Kercher family’s agony was nearly beyond description. Meredith’s mother, Arline, was chronically ill, and Meredith was in the habit of calling her daily. So when she and John didn’t hear from her and couldn’t reach her on her mobile phone, they were instantly worried. John, a journalist, had heard the rumors of an English student murdered in Italy; but it was not until about five-thirty in the afternoon, the day after the murder, that one of his press contacts was able to confirm for him that it was his beloved daughter.

  He went back home to Coulsdon to be with the other children, Stephanie, John Jr. and Lyle. Arline was in the hospital, but she had already spoken to someone in the British Foreign Office. As soon as she got out of the hospital, and she and John could make arrangements, they flew off with Stephanie to Perugia. Around the same time in Seattle, Amanda’s mother, Edda Mellas, made plans to journey to Perugia, soon to be joined by her former husband, Curt Knox.

  All of the flatmates were again questioned at the police station on November 4, then brought back with Giuliano Mignini to the house to see if any kitchen knives were missing. None seemed to be; but as they were examining the knives, Amanda again broke down uncontrollably.

  On the evening of November 5, police asked both Amanda and Raffaele to come to the station to discuss apparent inconsistencies in their accounts. And here occurred another incident that slammed the public relations lid on Amanda. While Raffaele was being questioned, Amanda sat in a waiting room. As the free-spirited, athletic Pacific Northwest girl she was, Amanda was into yoga. When she felt stiff or stressed, she would often resort to her routine of yoga stretches and poses.

  Late in the evening, a male police officer observed her stretching, admired her flexibility and asked if she could do a split. Whether out of fear, open
ness or pride in her body, she complied, much to the officer’s delight. But out of this incident developed the widely reported story that she was doing cartwheels in the police station as she awaited questioning on Meredith’s murder.

  Napoleoni and other homicide detectives questioned Raffaele for more than six hours, until after 3:00 A.M. During that time, according to the police, he began wavering on his story that Amanda had slept over with him and that they’d been together the entire night of the murder. Maybe she had gone out for a while—around 9:00 P.M. or so—and hadn’t come back until 1:30 A.M.; he wasn’t sure.

  What seems to have happened is that in his fear and fatigue, Raffaele eventually confused and transposed the nights of October 31 and November 1. On Halloween night, Amanda did go out around nine o’clock, dressed as a sexy cat with a nose and whiskers that Raffaele had painted on her face. Halloween celebrations were a much bigger deal to the foreign students than to the Italians, so Raffaele stayed home that night and waited for her. She returned around 1:00 A.M., just as he told police occurred the next night.

  This turned out to be the real beginning of the case against the two, and the parallels to Jessie Misskelley Jr. and so many others are almost uncanny. Amanda and Raffaele became suspects despite the fact that bugged rooms in the questura and tapped telephones that picked up numerous private conversations between them revealed not a hint of any secrets or conspiracy.

  When they got around to interviewing Amanda, it was well after midnight. They brought her into an interrogation room and told her that Raffaele had said that Amanda had left his flat about nine on the critical evening to go to Le Chic and hadn’t come back until after 1:00 A.M. They had checked the records of Amanda’s mobile phone. The last exchange was a text from Patrick Lumumba saying she didn’t have to come to work that night because business was slow and a texted reply from her: Ci vediamo piu tardi, buona serata, which translates as “See you later. Have a good evening.” After that point, both she and Raffaele had turned off their cell phones for the night, uncharacteristic for both. When asked about it, Amanda said she was afraid Patrick would change his mind.