What would you say if your teenaged daughter, studying abroad, called you one day to say that she had suddenly taken it upon herself to stage a satanic-themed orgy, and when her roommate refused to go along, she stabbed her to death?
If you have, or are close to, a teenaged girl, your response would be, “Absurd!”
If I then asked you why it was absurd, your response would be, “Because she would never do anything like that!”
When I asked you how you knew that about her, you would reply, “Because she’s never done anything like that.”
You would undoubtedly be right, and you would have just participated in some basic profiling. And the same exercise would be valid for a son like Raffaele.
Past behavior predicts future behavior. It is one of the elemental tenets of what we do. Just as we could tell a lot about what John and Patsy Ramsey were capable of by evaluating their past behavior and treatment of their children, we can tell a lot about what Amanda and Raffaele are capable of by looking into how they’ve acted in the past. Nothing in Amanda’s neo–flower child background or behavior suggested that out of nowhere, she would suddenly become homicidally violent, especially to someone she lived with and was close to.
Don’t people without a past history of violence ever commit murder? Yes, they do. But not without a motive.
So what supposedly gave Amanda the idea to kill her friend brutally that night? Giuliano Mignini had an answer for that, too. Raffaele was a fan of Japanese manga comic books, particularly those featuring violent themes and sexual domination of women. They found one in his possession they thought fit the bill, Blood: The Last Vampire . They also found a short story online that Amanda had written the year before that involved a rape.
If Mark and I were prosecuted for what we’ve written about, we’d be in jail for the rest of our lives.
Under questioning, Amanda and Raffaele admitted smoking hashish that night, and it was not the first time for either one of them. While certain substances—alcohol being prime among them—do lower inhibitions, they do not make you a different person or prone to committing violent acts that you wouldn’t do while sober or straight.
True, a person who commits vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence would likely not have done so if he had not been drinking. But that is a question of diminished capability, not altered intent. This individual simply couldn’t drive as well. The crime had nothing to do with transforming his character or choices.
That’s one aspect of profiling. Now let’s look at another as it applies here. What elements of the crime, the forensic evidence, the statements of the witnesses or anything else led Giuliano Mignini to conclude this murder was satanic or orgiastic in nature, or that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito had anything to do with it? Where are the clues? Where are the behavioral indicators? I’ve studied this case quite closely and I just don’t see any.
Aside from the fact, as we’ve noted, that satanically motivated murders by sane people are essentially nonexistent, the kind of group cause homicide Mignini had conceived was almost as unlikely. Gangbang-style rapes are not uncommon, though they seldom involve another woman. This had all the hallmarks of a break-in/ robbery/sexual assault/murder scenario, which is also unfortunately not uncommon. But sadistic or power-excitation rapists don’t welcome watchers; it spoils the sense of control, and it is just too easy to be ratted out afterward. Unless DNA or other strong forensic evidence turned up to the contrary, there was nothing about this scene to indicate more than one assailant.
By this point, both the Italian and British media had picked up the story. The once-venerable London Times ran the headline: MEREDITH KILLED AFTER REFUSING ORGY, and that was one of the tamer ones.
The beautiful, mercurial Amanda was a defendant almost too good to be true. This was a classic archetypal morality play: Virtue against evil; the good girl against the bad girl. What could have possessed this sultry temptress to kill her equally lovely friend, enlisting the help of her sexy Italian boyfriend and black African boss, even though Patrick had a young, beautiful wife at home? Oh, the powers of seduction this American must have!
Reporters had already picked up on her Foxy Knoxy moniker, presumably through her Facebook page or similar source. What they didn’t mention was that Amanda had picked up the nickname years before as a preteen for her elusive moves on the soccer field. But it fit in so well with the seduction narrative and balanced so perfectly with the well-scrubbed, all-American “girl next door” image (Which is she?!) that it seemed like another gift from the gods of media. As with Ramsey, the tale they wove was simply a better story than the one that made sense. And as with Ramsey, the mainstream media shamefully took to parroting the sensationalistic tabloids, giving their lurid accounts validity.
The clue to the real Amanda actually lay in her voluminous diaries. As Nina Burleigh stated in her book The Fatal Gift of Beauty: For most of her life, Amanda explained herself to herself in her scribbled pages. She didn’t spend much time looking for answers in front of the mirror. By that we mean her introspection was based on her mind and what she was pondering, rather than trading on her looks or appearance.
As far as the press and local observers were concerned, though, she couldn’t do anything right. A couple of days after the murder and shortly before she and Raffaele were arrested on November 6, she was observed in a local clothing store called Bubble sorting through a table display of panties with him. Raffaele was reported to have said to her, “We go home and have hot sex.” (“Hot” in Italian had the connotation of wild, rough or kinky.) Let us stress reported because the salesman who sold the anecdote to a British tabloid did not speak English, so in reality had no idea what they actually said to each other.
Whatever their intentions for the afternoon, the fact was, she had not been allowed back into the house and had run out of clean underwear. She paid for the purchase herself; and instead of jumping into bed, they ate lunch and then met with Amanda’s two Italian flatmates. But prosecutors were so taken with this lingerie outing that they had the Bubble manager testify at the trial.
They also made a great to-do and feigned prudish shock over the vibrator Amanda supposedly kept in plain view in the bathroom she shared with Meredith. Obviously, this girl was sexually insatiable. What they did not say was that it was two inches long and in the shape of a pink bunny. It had been given to her as a going-away joke by her best friend, Brett Lither, and was kept, unused, in a container with the rest of her toiletries.
Throughout the ordeal, Patrick Lumumba maintained his alibi that he had been at Le Chic the entire evening; and because it wasn’t busy, he had been talking to a visiting Swiss professor there for several hours. On November 11, a teacher from Zurich confirmed the story. It looked as if the police case was falling apart.
But then they caught a break. Actually, it was the first real break of the case.
On November 16, forensic police in Rome scored a match on fingerprints lifted in Meredith’s bedroom. They belonged to Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old Ivory Coast native who had been living in Perugia since he was five. His father, Roger, a construction worker, abruptly decided to move back to the Ivory Coast when Rudy was sixteen. But Rudy got lucky. A wealthy local businessman named Paolo Caporali, who had met him playing basketball on a court the family had built, took him in and informally adopted him. Paolo had tried to give him every advantage and a stake in life, finding him jobs, introducing him to the right people, and encouraging him to study and better himself. When Rudy dropped out of hotel management school, Paolo found him another job. When he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep it, Paolo finally threw up his hands. All Rudy wanted to do was hang out at bars, play basketball and video games, and chase girls.
What cracked the case was that all immigrants in Italy were fingerprinted, so Rudy’s prints were available.
Rudy, on the other hand, was not. He was a known habitué of Perugia’s bars, disco and club scene; so when friends stopped seeing him, they wo
ndered. He lived in a room near Via della Pergola and had met the women who lived in the house through the men downstairs, with whom he was friendly and with whom he dealt in illicit substances. But he had left or, probably more accurately, fled the city soon after the murder. On November 20, he was arrested for riding without a ticket on a train near Mainz, Germany. Once German police figured out who he was, and what he was wanted for, they extradited him back to Italy.
Authorities took DNA samples from the toothbrush in his room, which they were able to match up with samples in Meredith’s body and on toilet paper in the larger bathroom.
That made it extremely awkward for Rudy to deny he’d been at the crime scene. His story was that he was in the house on the fateful night. He had run into Meredith at a Halloween party the night before; they’d flirted and arranged to meet the next night. He came to the house as planned and they began engaging in consensual sex play. But before the activity reached climax, Rudy suddenly felt the urgent call of nature as a result of kabobs he had eaten earlier in the evening. While he was sitting on the toilet in the larger bathroom and listening to his iPod, a stranger must have broken into the house and attacked Meredith. When he heard the commotion, he got up and rushed to help her. This accounted for the unflushed toilet.
He grappled with a white male stranger, but since he hadn’t had time to pull his trousers all the way up, he stumbled and the intruder rushed off. When he saw Meredith covered with blood, he tried to help and comfort her, which explained the bloody towels and why his DNA was all over the scene, as well as a shoeprint matching his Nikes. He panicked when he heard a sound downstairs and ran out. He realized that if authorities found him there, they might think he had attacked Meredith. He blamed himself for not having the presence of mind to call an ambulance, but he was in total shock.
Apparently the shock had worn off sufficiently by 2:00 A.M., when he was seen by several witnesses dancing in a local nightclub.
Nowhere in his account did he mention Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito.
One of the most common defenses in rape cases is that it was not forced, that the victim was actually a partner and only changed her story later. If this victim is dead, however, this complicates the defense. What are you going to say—that after consensual sex, he killed her? So you have to add a third individual to actually perform the murder. For Rudy Guede’s story to carry any weight, he would have had to call for help as soon as he saw Meredith’s condition.
Given the matchup of fingerprints and DNA samples and the absence of any evidence to support a ritualized or group cause homicide, had I been advising the police I would have said, “Looks like you’ve got your killer. He had the means, motive and opportunity. How can I help you with his prosecution?”
Of course, that’s not the way it actually went down. The day before Rudy’s arrest, Giuliano Mignini bowed to the inevitable and signed an order for Patrick Lumumba’s release. Amanda was thrilled because he was now cleared and she thought it would mean that she and Raffaele would soon be cleared as well. Not only did this not happen, but it signaled the end of her friendship with Patrick. Eventually he filed a defamation suit against her for naming him as a killer.
Mignini didn’t let Patrick’s release damage his theory of the case. He merely plugged in Rudy to fill Patrick’s place. He even played basketball on the same court where Amanda was supposed to have met up with Patrick. The equation still worked: Amanda Knox plus Raffaele Sollecito plus one black African.
But looked at another way—the correct way, in my professional judgment—the like-for-like swap of Rudy for Patrick is one of the most compelling pieces of behavioral evidence for Amanda’s innocence.
If the police were right and Rudy was part of a murderous trio, why wouldn’t Amanda have named him to begin with? She had an important and friendly relationship with Patrick, who was also helping her support herself. She had no relationship with Rudy and barely knew who he was. Why would she have defamed Patrick to protect Rudy? Another way of posing the question is: If her confession was true and it finally came out when it did because she was just so worn-out that she no longer had the energy or wits to lie, why did she mention Patrick rather than Rudy?
The answer is: Because the police had already identified Patrick from the text exchange, so he was in her mind and she knew they were interested in him. In her fear and exhaustion, trying to do anything to get the police off her back, he was the only person she could come up with in any context. She didn’t know Rudy well enough to even think about using his name.
Any other scenario makes absolutely no sense, and Giuliano Mignini, Judge Claudia Matteini and the Perugia Police Department should have known that.
It got worse. Late in the evening of November 22, Amanda was taken to see a prison doctor she hadn’t met before, who told her he had the results of tests that had been taken in the police station and it looked like she was HIV positive. He told her it could be a mistake and they would conduct another test to be sure, but Amanda was terrified. She wrote in her journal that she was afraid of dying and missing out on marriage, children and her whole life.
They made her list everyone with whom she’d ever had sex and include the method of birth control, if any. Given the language gulf and her own relative inexperience, she wasn’t even sure what they meant by having sex, so she listed seven individuals with whom she’d had some degree of intimacy. When this information was inevitably leaked to the Italian press, they stated she had had seven lovers in the two months she’d been in Italy.
The next week, they told her the test had not been positive and she was healthy.
Even considering the rampant incompetence of the Italian forensic personnel in this case, it is nearly impossible to believe that this was a simple mistake. It was an obvious trick to get her to admit private and intimate information about herself that could be used to further the image of her as a sexually manipulative vixen. The sham medical report had nothing to do with Amanda’s health. It was a cold-blooded ploy to prejudice opinion against her.
It took weeks for Italian authorities to release Meredith Kercher’s body, and then more time for Arline and John to bring her back home to England. They buried her on December 14, 2007, after a funeral service at her parish church, St. John the Baptist, in Croydon. More than four hundred mourners attended.
CHAPTER 30
LEGAL LIMBO
Given that they were “flight risks,” as well as apparently highly dangerous individuals who might kill “again,” the court ruled Amanda and Raffaele had to remain in jail pending trial. Even a subsequent plea from Amanda’s mother, Edda, that Amanda be placed under house arrest in Perugia was denied because Amanda hadn’t shown any remorse for her crime. Sound familiar? They would have to remain imprisoned, in legal limbo, until the creaky wheels of Italian justice finally rolled around to trying them.
Forty-seven days after the murder, police went back to the crime scene to look again for evidence. How anything collected this long after the fact could even be considered evidence is beyond me. The bra clasp they retrieved was not in the same place on the floor that video of the original crime scene showed it to be. Remember, just as with the kitchen knife: The difference between evidence and garbage is chain of custody.
I think the reason for this strangely timed evidence hunt is clear. Once the Nike shoeprint was proven to belong to Rudy Guede, the prosecution had nothing to tie Raffaele Sollecito to the scene, and they needed it in a hurry, just as the WM3 prosecution needed the knife from the lake. Whatever the logic, they found a metal bra clasp, presumably Meredith’s, and brought it to the lab for processing. Subsequent analysis, they said, revealed a trace amount of Raffaele’s DNA.
It also revealed the DNA of three other unidentified individuals, but now the prosecution had the “scientific” evidence it was looking for.
Between Edda, her husband Chris Mellas, her ex-husband Curt and their daughter Deanna, Amanda’s family tried to make sure some member was always ther
e in Perugia for her. Her grandmother Liz Huff, Edda’s sister Christina Hagge and Christina’s husband Kevin, Edda’s brother Mick and his wife Janet also spent time in Italy emotionally supporting Amanda. So did Curt’s wife Janet and Amanda’s younger half-sisters Ashley and Delaney. And it wasn’t just family. Amanda’s close friend Madison Paxton spent considerable time in Perugia. The fact that they were allowed visits of only a few hours a week made their lives all the more torturous.
About half a dozen other friends came over to visit her in prison, including David Johnsrud, Jessica Nichols and Andrew Seliber.
Back in Seattle, an important ritual during Amanda’s imprisonment was the weekly telephone call. Each Saturday morning family and friends would gather at Edda and Chris’s house for the allotted ten-minute conversation during which they’d all try to lift each other’s spirits and make Amanda feel as if she still had some connection to back home. There were usually a bunch of people present and sometimes the modest kitchen where the speakerphone was located was packed to overflowing.
The ordeal was proving not only emotionally harrowing but also financially ruinous. The Knox and Mellas families were going through their collective savings and had mortgaged everything they had, but they were dedicated to bringing their girl home.
Several people stepped up to help in any way they could. Thomas Lee Wright is a former motion picture executive for such studios as Paramount and Disney who became a prominent film producer and writer. He and his wife had moved to Mercer Island, Washington because they didn’t want to raise their daughter and son amidst “all of the Hollywood craziness.” Their daughter Sara had been close to Amanda at Seattle Prep, sharing mutual passions for theater, writing and athletics. When Tom heard about the charges against Amanda in Italy, he was distressed but felt it must have been a misunderstanding that “would be cleared up in a matter of days.”
Law & Disorder Page 39
