Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir

by Amanda Knox

  I replied to the message telling him that we’d see each other right away. Then I left the house, saying to my boyfriend that I had to go to work. Given that during the afternoon with Raffaele I had smoked a joint, I felt confused because I do not make frequent use of drugs that strong.

  I met Patrick immediately at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana and we went to the house together. I do not remember if Meredith was there or came shortly afterward. I have a hard time remembering those moments but Patrick had sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I cannot remember clearly whether he threatened Meredith first. I remember confusedly that he killed her.

  As soon as I signed it, they whooped and high-fived each other.

  Then, a few minutes later, they demanded my sneakers. As soon as I took them off, someone left the room with them.

  Eventually they told me the pubblico ministero would be coming in. I didn’t know this translated as prosecutor, or that this was the magistrate that Rita Ficarra had been referring to a few days earlier when she said they’d have to wait to see what he said, to see if I could go to Germany. I thought the “public minister” was the mayor or someone in a similarly high “public” position in the town and that somehow he would help me.

  They said, “You need to talk to the pubblico ministero about what you remember.”

  I told them, “I don’t feel like this is remembering. I’m really confused right now.” I even told them, “I don’t remember this. I can imagine this happening, and I’m not sure if it’s a memory or if I’m making this up, but this is what’s coming to mind and I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  They said, “Your memories will come back. It’s the truth. Just wait and your memories will come back.”

  The pubblico ministero came in.

  Before he started questioning me, I said, “Look, I’m really confused, and I don’t know what I’m remembering, and it doesn’t seem right.”

  One of the other police officers said, “We’ll work through it.”

  Despite the emotional sieve I’d just been squeezed through, it occurred to me that I was a witness and this was official testimony, that maybe I should have a lawyer. “Do I need a lawyer?” I asked.

  He said, “No, no, that will only make it worse. It will make it seem like you don’t want to help us.”

  It was a much more solemn, official affair than my earlier questioning had been, though the pubblico ministero was asking me the same questions as before: “What happened? What did you see?”

  I said, “I didn’t see anything.”

  “What do you mean you didn’t see anything? When did you meet him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “I think by the basketball court.” I had imagined the basketball court in Piazza Grimana, just across the street from the University for Foreigners.

  “I have an image of the basketball court in Piazza Grimana near my house.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he wearing a jacket?”

  “I think so.”

  “What color was it?”

  “I think it was brown.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I’m confused!”

  “Are you scared of him?”

  “I guess.”

  I felt as if I were almost in a trance. The pubblico ministero led me through the scenario, and I meekly agreed to his suggestions.

  “This is what happened, right? You met him?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “I don’t know. I guess at the basketball court.”

  “You went to the house?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Was Meredith in the house?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did Patrick go in there?”

  “I don’t know, I guess so.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess in the kitchen.”

  “Did you hear Meredith screaming?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not hear Meredith screaming?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I covered my ears. I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m just imagining this. I’m trying to remember, and you’re telling me I need to remember, but I don’t know. This doesn’t feel right.”

  He said, “No, remember. Remember what happened.”

  “I don’t know.”

  At that moment, with the pubblico ministero raining questions down on me, I covered my ears so I could drown him out.

  He said, “Did you hear her scream?”

  I said, “I think so.”

  My account was written up in Italian and he said, “This is what we wrote down. Sign it.”

  I want to voluntarily report what happened because I’m deeply disturbed and very frightened of Patrick, the African owner of the pub called “Le Chic” on Alessi Street where I work occasionally. I met him on November 1 at night after I sent a reply to his message with the words “see you later.” We soon met about 9 pm at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana. We went to my house on Via della Pergola No. 7. I cannot remember exactly if my friend Meredith was already in the house or if she came after, but I can say that she disappeared into her bedroom with Patrick while I think I stayed in the kitchen. I can’t remember how long they were in her bedroom but at one point I heard Meredith screaming and I was scared and covered my ears. I do not remember anything after that. I have a lot of confusion in my head. I do not remember if Meredith screamed or if I heard any thuds because I was in shock, but I could imagine what was going on.

  After I signed it, everyone mercifully stopped questioning me, but my mind wouldn’t rest. Something didn’t feel right. It didn’t seem as though I had actually remembered what I said I had. It seemed made up.

  In my dull state I thought everything would eventually be okay. I thought I could communicate with people on the outside. My mother was coming that day, and she’d help me figure things out.

  I had no more than a shred of memory, but it seemed to hold the truth. I was so afraid of the police, so afraid of sending them in the wrong direction for the wrong person. What if I’ve told them wrong? What if I don’t have amnesia?

  And what about the “spontaneous declarations,” as the police called what I’d signed? These documents didn’t take into account that I kept yelling, “I don’t know.” They didn’t say that the police threatened me and yelled at me. None of that is there.

  The declarations were in the detectives’ words. But now their words were mine, and this shaped everything that followed.

  Chapter 11

  Morning, November 6, 2007, Day Five

  I signed my second “spontaneous declaration” at 5:45 A.M., just as the darkness was beginning to soften outside the small window on the far side of the interrogation room. That was also true on the inside. As soon as I finished crossing the x in “Knox,” the agonizing torment ended.

  The room emptied in a rush. Except for Rita Ficarra, who sat at the wooden desk where she’d been all night, I was alone in the predawn hush.

  Just a few more hours and I’ll see Mom, I thought. We’ll spend the night in a hotel.

  I asked permission to push two metal folding chairs together, balled myself into the fetal position, and passed out, spent. I probably didn’t sleep longer than an hour before doubt pricked me awake. Oh my God, what if I sent the police in the wrong direction? They’ll be looking for the wrong person while the real killer escapes. I sat up crying, straining to remember what had happened on the night of Meredith’s murder. Had I really met Patrick? Had I even been at the villa? Did I make all that up? I was too exhausted, too rattled, to think clearly. I was gripped by uncertainty about what I’d said to the police and the pubblico ministero. I tried to get Ficarra’s attenti
on. “Um, scusi,” I murmured tentatively. “I’m not sure what I told you is right.”

  “The memories will come back with time,” Ficarra answered mechanically, barely raising her eyes to look at me. “You have to think hard.”

  It seemed impossible that I could forget seeing a murder. Still, without feeling sure, I thought I should believe her.

  I tried to weave the images that had flashed in my mind the night before into a coherent sequence. But my memories—of Patrick, the villa, Meredith’s screams—were disjointed, like pieces of different jigsaw puzzles that had ended up in the same box by mistake. They weren’t ever meant to fit together. I’d walked by the basketball court near the villa every day. I’d said, “It was Patrick,” because I saw his face. I imagined him in his brown jacket because that’s what he usually wore. The more I realized how fragmented these images were, the closer I came to understanding that they weren’t actual memories.

  Suddenly my cell phone, which had been lying on the desk since it was waved in my face, lit up and started ringing. Ficarra ignored this. “Can I please answer it?” I begged. “I’m sure it’s my mom; I’m supposed to meet her at the train station. She’ll freak out if I don’t answer.”

  “No,” Ficarra said. “You cannot have your phone back. Your phone is evidence.”

  This moment exemplified how the line between Before and After was marked. I’d stopped being in charge of my life.

  For the next half hour my phone rang every few minutes, stopping only while the calls were sent to voice mail. The noise ripped at me, and I began to panic, my body shook. Mom would be sick with worry, wondering what had happened to me, where I was, why I wasn’t answering. As a teenager, if I was late checking in, she’d keep trying me until I’d finally pick up, almost always to hear her crying on the other end of the line. I couldn’t stand that I was putting her through that now. And now, more than ever, I needed her.

  Still, it was a huge relief to know that later, if I had to come back to the questura, my mom would come with me. If they didn’t need me, I planned to introduce her to Laura and Filomena—and maybe to Meredith’s parents, when they arrived.

  Finally my phone went silent. I slumped down in the folding chair, as mute as my cell phone.

  I was waiting for the police to tell me what they wanted from me next. That had been the pattern at the questura for the past four days. There would be a lull, and then they would either question me again or send me home. I willed it to be the latter. I couldn’t bear for them to yell at me again.

  Around 2 P.M. on Tuesday—it was still the same day, although it felt as if it should be two weeks later—Ficarra took me to the cafeteria. I was starving. After the interrogation was over they brought me a cup of tea, but this was the first food or drink I’d been offered since Raffaele and I had arrived at the questura around 10:30 P.M. Monday. With my sneakers confiscated, I trailed her down the stairs wearing only my socks. She turned and said, “Sorry I hit you. I was just trying to help you remember the truth.”

  I was still too confused to know what the truth was.

  I tried to say, “I hope that once this gets sorted out you’ll see I’m on your side.” But the way my Italian came out was “I hope you can see I’m your friend.”

  I was desperate for a sign that everything was okay between us, to be reassured that they still trusted me. I told myself they’d bullied me because they were so stressed, determined to figure out who’d killed Meredith. I had the same feelings. But in rethinking the night, I decided that the police thought I’d been hiding facts from them, that I’d lied. That’s why they were angry with me.

  I didn’t want them to think I was a bad person. I wanted them to see me as I was—as Amanda Knox, who loved her parents, who did well in school, who respected authority, and whose only brush with the law had been a ticket for violating a noise ordinance during a college party I’d thrown with my housemates in Seattle. I wanted to help the police track down the person who’d murdered my friend.

  What I did not know was that the police and I had very different ideas about where I stood. I saw myself as being helpful, someone who, having lived with Meredith, could answer the detectives’ questions. I would do that as long as they wanted. But the police saw me as a killer without a conscience. It would be a long time before I figured out that our presumptions were exactly the opposite of each other’s.

  By the time Ficarra and I got to the cafeteria, lunch was nearly over. I asked for an espresso, and the barista scavenged a few slices of salami and a piece of bread from the slim sandwich makings that were left. When we went back upstairs, a police officer handed me my hiking boots. Someone at the questura had gone back to the villa to get them. I’m sure they’d used it as an opportunity to comb through my stuff. Still, I was a lot more worried about what was in my head than on my feet. What had come over me? Why was I so confused? Why had I made those statements, which now seemed less and less like the truth?

  I repeated to Ficarra the same things I’d said earlier. “What I described last night doesn’t seem like memories. I feel like I imagined the events.”

  “No, your memories will come back, you’ll see,” she insisted.

  “You don’t understand,” I protested. “The more I’m remembering, the more I think that what I told you was wrong.”

  I was sure she was dismissing me because I couldn’t explain myself well in Italian. I didn’t know that it was because she had other plans for me, that our discussion had ended.

  “We need to take you into custody,” she said. “Just for a couple of days—for bureaucratic reasons.”

  Custody? What does that mean? Are they taking me to a safe house? The silver-haired cop had told me during my interrogation that they would protect me if I cooperated, if I told them who the murderer was. Will my mom be there with me? Can I call her?

  What does “bureaucratic reasons” mean? Does it mean they’re just processing my paperwork, my spontaneous declarations?

  I had so many questions that I didn’t ask aloud. But my main thought was If I’m going into hiding, I need to make sure the police understand that I’m not sure about Patrick. I’d caved under the police’s questioning. It was my lack of resolve that had created this problem, and I had to fix it.

  I needed to say that I had doubts about what I’d signed, to let the police know they couldn’t rely on my declarations as the truth. I knew that undoing the cops’ work would almost surely mean they’d scream at me all over again. As paralyzing as that thought was, I had to risk it. In naming Patrick, I’d unintentionally misled them. What if they thought I did it on purpose? They’d wasted time on me when they could have been out pursuing the real killer.

  “Can I have a piece of paper?” I asked Ficarra. “I need to write down in English what I’m trying to tell you, because you apparently don’t understand me right now. You can bring the paper to someone who can tell you what it says in Italian. We can communicate better that way. You’re telling me that I’m going to remember when I’m telling you that I am remembering, and that I doubt what I said is true.”

  She handed me a few sheets of paper and a pen. “You’d better write fast,” she said. “We have to get going.”

  If I could make them understand, everything would be okay. I sat down and scrawled four pages that became known as my first memoriale:

  This is very strange, I know, but really what happened is as confusing to me as it is to everyone else. I have been told there is hard evidence saying that I was at the place of the murder of my friend when it happened. This, I want to confirm, is something that to me, if asked a few days ago, would be impossible.

  I know that Raffaele has placed evidence against me, saying that I was not with him on the night of Meredith’s murder, but let me tell you this. In my mind there are things I remember and things that are confused. My account of this story goes as follows, despite the evidence stacked against me:

  On Thursday November 1, I saw Meredith the last time at my
house when she left around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Raffaele was with me at the time. We, Raffaele and I, stayed at my house for a little while longer and around 5 in the evening we left to watch the movie Amelie at his house. After the movie I received a message from Patrik, for whom I work at the pub “Le Chic”. He told me in this message that it wasn’t necessary for me to come into work for the evening because there was no one at my work.

  Now I remember to have also replied with the message: “See you later. Have a good evening!” and this for me does not mean that I wanted to meet him immediately. In particular because I said: “Good evening!” What happened after I know does not match up with what Raffaele was saying, but this is what I remember. I told Raffaele that I didn’t have to work and that I could remain at home for the evening. After that I believe we relaxed in his room together, perhaps I checked my email. Perhaps I read or studied or perhaps I made love to Raffaele. In fact, I think I did make love with him.

  However, I admit that this period of time is rather strange because I am not quite sure. I smoked marijuana with him and I might even have fallen asleep. These things I am not sure about and I know they are important to the case and to help myself, but in reality, I don’t think I did much. One thing I do remember is that I took a shower with Raffaele and this might explain how we passed the time. In truth, I do not remember exactly what day it was, but I do remember that we had a shower and we washed ourselves for a long time. He cleaned my ears, he dried and combed my hair.

  One of the things I am sure that definitely happened the night on which Meredith was murdered was that Raffaele and I ate fairly late, I think around 11 in the evening, although I can’t be sure because I didn’t look at the clock. After dinner I noticed there was blood on Raffaele’s hand, but I was under the impression that it was blood from the fish. After we ate Raffaele washed the dishes but the pipes under his sink broke and water flooded the floor. But because he didn’t have a mop I said we could clean it up tomorrow because we (Meredith, Laura, Filomena and I) have a mop at home. I remember it was quite late because we were both very tired (though I can’t say the time).