by Amanda Knox
That doesn’t make sense. I must have read it wrong.
I made myself start over, slowly rereading the story, checking each word as I went. By the end I knew language wasn’t the barrier.
Argirò glared at me cruelly.
“Do you have anything to say?” he asked.
“It’s impossible!” I blurted. “I didn’t kill Meredith! I’m innocent! I don’t care what the article says! It’s wrong!”
“It’s proof,” Argirò said, smirking. “Your fingerprints. Her DNA.”
“I don’t know anything about a knife,” I said. “You can’t prove that I’m guilty when I’m innocent.”
The short conversation ended in a stalemate. I glowered at him.
“Why don’t you go back to your cell and think about what you want to say,” Argirò said.
I didn’t have any words for my anger—or fear. They were roiling inside me as the agente led me away.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked by the accusation about the knife. I’d been in jail for nine days, and I’d already been billed as a murderer.
My lawyers had to keep coming to Capanne to relay the ever-changing story of my supposed involvement and ask me if there was truth to the reports.
Investigators were claiming that I’d been responsible for holding Meredith down while either Patrick or Raffaele cut her throat, that I’d pressed so hard on Meredith’s face during the attack I’d left an imprint of my fingers on her chin. The police said that because the bruises were small, they’d come from a woman’s fingers, even though that’s not how it works. “It isn’t like a fingerprint,” Carlo explained. “You can’t tell the size of the hand by the size of the bruise. It depends on the circumstances and the pressure.”
This was another example of the prosecution misinterpreting evidence so it would put me at the murder scene and discounting the things that didn’t fit into their explanation. They had done the same thing a few days before, when they circulated the idea that only a woman would have covered Meredith’s ravaged body with a blanket. A few years later I learned that this is something first-time killers also often do. The detectives didn’t mention how improbable it is for a woman to commit a violent crime, especially against another woman. Nor did they acknowledge that I didn’t fit the profile of a violent woman. I’d never been in a gang; I had no history of violence.
The untruths kept coming—seemingly leaked from the prosecutor’s office.
In mid-November the press announced that the striped sweater I’d worn the night of the murder was missing, implying I’d gotten rid of it to hide bloodstains. In truth I’d left it on top of my bed when I came home to change on the morning of November 2. The investigators found it in January 2008—in the same spot where I’d taken it off. It was captured in photos taken of my room, which my lawyers saw among the official court documents deposited as the investigation progressed. The prosecution quietly dropped the “missing sweater” as an element in the investigation without correcting the information publicly. Convinced that arguing the case in the media would dilute our credibility in the courtroom, Carlo and Luciano let the original story stand.
Things that never happened were reported as fact.
The tabloids said I’d met a nonexistent Argentinian boyfriend in a Laundromat to wash my bloodstained clothes. False.
The Italian news channel reported that cameras, mounted on the parking garage across the street from the villa, captured a girl dressed in a colored skirt or blouse, presumed to be me, emerging from the garage at 8:43 P.M. the night of the murder. False.
The police leaked this to the local press, and it rippled out from there. If true, it would have contradicted my alibi: I hadn’t left Raffaele’s apartment that night. The local headlines in those days often read “Amanda Smentita”—“Amanda Found in a Lie.” It bolstered the prosecution’s characterization of me as a depraved, deceitful person capable of murder.
Later, investigators decided the video image wasn’t sharp enough to decipher, that it would be too easy for the defense to knock down. But the damage had already been done.
The press reported police claims that Raffaele and I had destroyed the hard drives on four computers—his, mine, Filomena’s, and Meredith’s. False.
Later, when a computer expert examined the computers, he discovered that the police had fried the hard drives. Whether it was on purpose or out of extraordinary incompetence, I never learned. But it’s hard to see how they could inadvertently have wiped out four computers, one after the other. My computer wouldn’t have given me an alibi. All investigators would have found was evidence of Meredith’s and my friendship—pictures from the Eurochocolate festival and of our hanging out at home.
Journalists reported that the police had confiscated “incriminating” receipts for bleach, supposedly from the morning of November 2. False.
The receipts were meant to show that Raffaele and I had bought bleach—what Americans call household cleaner—and spent the night of the murder cleaning up the crime scene.
Four of the receipts were dated months before I arrived in Perugia, and bleach wasn’t among the items purchased. The last one was from November 4, two days after Meredith’s body was found. And it wasn’t for bleach. It was for pizza. But no press corrected the story or reported the truth.
There seemed to be an endless chain of headlines, like new pieces of candy to wave in front of people. New evidence! Amanda said this! As soon as the police fed them a new tidbit of unfounded news, the earlier headline would be replaced. The media seemed less interested in investigating the claims than in just hanging them out there. And the tabloid sensationalism of one country was recycled to become legitimate news in another.
Still, none of the investigators’ claims was as unfathomable to me, as damning, as the reports about the knife.
When I read the article in Argirò’s office, it seemed as fake as a grocery store tabloid claiming “Martian Baby Born in 7-Eleven Has Three Heads.”
Sitting in his cold office, staring at the printout, I could think of only two ways the knife news had come to be. Choice one was that the website had fabricated it. As dishonest and unprofessional as the media had been, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t go this far. Choice two was that the investigators had made a mistake.
I went over what I knew, step by step.
A knife from Raffaele’s kitchen with DNA from both Meredith and me wasn’t possible. In the week I’d known him, I’d used Raffaele’s chef’s knives to cook with, but we had never taken them out of his kitchen.
Meredith had never been to his apartment.
But I could present my argument only to myself and to Argirò.
I could tell that Argirò didn’t believe me. I knew the knife could not be the one used by Meredith’s killer. My heart felt as if it were being squeezed.
Back in my cell, I was quiet and withdrawn, spending the rest of the night venting to my prison diary. (That would end up being a mistake.) I told Gufa I was too tired to talk. I couldn’t sleep.
Luciano and Carlo arrived the next morning. “Are the police really claiming they found a knife in Raffaele’s apartment with my DNA on the handle and Meredith’s DNA on the blade?” I asked, desperate for them to say no.
“The police are saying that the knife is the murder weapon,” Carlo said. “Their forensic experts believe that it was capable of inflicting each wound on Meredith’s body. They’ve given up the idea that it was Raffaele’s pocketknife. Amanda, they’re saying you’re the one who stabbed Meredith. Is there something you need to tell us?”
Both men looked at me intently, gauging my reaction.
I couldn’t believe what they were asking me. “No! It’s impossible!” I shrieked, my body starting to shake. “The police have made a mistake. I never left Raffaele’s that night, I never took a knife from his apartment, and Meredith never visited me there. I didn’t have any reason to be angry with Meredith. And even if we’d had a fight I would have talked to her, not killed
her!”
“We believe you, Amanda,” Carlo said immediately. “Don’t worry.”
Investigators apparently had confiscated the knife—a chef’s knife with a black plastic handle and a six-and-a-half-inch blade—when they searched Raffaele’s apartment after our arrest. It was the only knife they considered out of every location they’d impounded, the top knife in a stack of other knives in a drawer that housed the carrot peeler and the salad tongs. I’d probably used it to slice tomatoes when Raffaele and I made dinner the night Meredith was killed.
The officer who confiscated the knife claimed that he’d been drawn to it by “investigative intuition.” It had struck him as suspiciously clean, as though we’d scrubbed it. When he chose it, he didn’t even know the dimensions of Meredith’s stab wounds.
The knife was a game changer for my lawyers, who now feared that the prosecution was mishandling evidence and building an unsubstantiated case against me. Carlo and Luciano went from saying that the lack of evidence would prove my innocence to warning me that the prosecution was out to get me, and steeling me for a fight. “There’s no counting on them anymore,” Carlo said. “We’re up against a witch hunt. But it’s going to be okay.”
They were confident that once our forensic consultants could show how wrong the prosecution was, we would ultimately win. But I also think their promises were meant to keep me from spinning into crisis, especially since I only saw them once a week.
I was choked with fear. The knife was my first inkling that the investigation was not going as I’d expected. I didn’t accept the possibility that the police were biased against me. I believed that the prosecution would eventually figure out that it wasn’t the murder weapon and that I wasn’t the murderer. In retrospect I understand that the police were determined to make the evidence fit their theory of the crime, rather than the other way around, and that theory hinged on my involvement. But something in me refused to see this then.
Soon after the knife news came out, the police came to the prison to confiscate my purse/book bag. I was called down to la piano terra—“the ground floor”—to witness the seizure from storage and once again sign a document. They took what was left of the bag’s contents after the interrogation—my textbooks and notebooks for school, my wallet, a book of poems I’d been reading, my journal.
My journal must have been what they were looking for, because Meredith’s British girlfriends testified after my arrest that I’d been writing in it in the waiting room at the questura. I had done so to calm myself, but soon the contents were leaked to the press. In it, they found, among other things, my comments about wanting to compose a song in tribute to Meredith. (Ironically, I would later get a bill for the translation of the journal into Italian.)
The police officer who retrieved my things that day was the same one who usually came to the prison when the prosecution wanted to confiscate my belongings or have me sign a document about forensic analysis—an unshaven, overweight man with a crew cut. He was the cop who, during the interrogation, thought I’d told him, “Fuck you!” and who yelled it back at me.
He asked if I’d seen the news about the murder weapon.
I glared at him. “It’s a mistake,” I said. “I wasn’t anywhere near Meredith when she was murdered and neither was Raffaele’s knife.”
The officer shook his head and laughed derisively. “Another story? Another lie?” he scoffed. He looked at me as if I were the most vile, worthless thing he’d ever laid eyes on. No one had ever stared at me with so much hatred. To him, I was a lying, remorseless murderer. I heaved back great waves of anger but waited to get back to my cell before I broke down at the ugliness of it all—my friend being dead, my being in prison, the police following a cold and irrational trail because they had nothing better.
Chapter 18
November 2007
During my first few days in prison, I would have loved any distraction, but the TV was covered up and declared off-limits. When I moved in with Gufa, I went from no news to a barrage. The TV blared practically 24/7.
Lupa, the agente who helped me so much in my early time at Capanne, had cautioned me: “The media are saying horrible things about you. Don’t pay attention to it,” she advised. “It will just upset you.”
She was right.
My Italian was still elementary enough that if I wasn’t paying close attention, I couldn’t grasp much of what was being said. I embraced my new routine—do as many sit-ups as I could manage, write, read, repeat—as if ignoring the reports would make me immune to them, that they couldn’t hurt me. I convinced myself that whatever awful things the media were saying about me were irrelevant to the case. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. But in my heart I knew it did.
Mentally tuning out the TV helped, but it was impossible to drown out all the coverage—there was a television set bolted to the wall in every cell, and the set and I were locked in the same room twenty-three hours a day. The screen was flooded with my image. I felt as though I were looking at someone else. A picture of me talking to detectives outside the villa was a news channel staple. They replayed the footage again and again, often in slow motion, of Raffaele and me kissing in the villa’s front yard after Meredith’s body was found. They’re making it into something it wasn’t. The way they’re manipulating this, people will think Amanda just couldn’t keep her lips off Raffaele. They acted as though our affection showed such a flagrant disregard for Meredith that it was obvious Raffaele and I were hiding the truth. The commentators pointed to our consoling kisses as proof that we were capable of murder. Their remarks were so unfair, their expressions so smug. I wanted to scream, “Look into our faces! Do we really look ready to jump on each other and have sex in the driveway?” What I saw then—and see now—is a young girl and guy in shock.
I felt violated, indignant that journalists could say or imply anything they wanted, that they could use my photo as a symbol of evil. I now understood the belief in some tribal cultures that having your picture taken robs you of your soul.
Reporters also plundered my Myspace page, and this felt just as intrusive.
When I created my social networking profile in high school, borrowing the soccer moniker my teammates had given me when I was thirteen seemed safer than using my real name. Sure, I knew foxy meant “sexy” or “sassy,” but that was the irony of it—and the fun. My soccer girlfriends had ironic and sassy nicknames, too. Martinez was Martini; Miller was Miller Light; Trisha was Trash. By college, when I graduated to Facebook, I seldom looked at Myspace. I could never have dreamed that something so harmless could later have such damning results, that the prosecution would focus on my nickname’s other meanings—“wily” or “tricky.”
Overnight my old nickname became my new persona. I was now known to the world as Foxy Knoxy or, in Italian, Volpe Cattiva—literally, “Wicked Fox.”
“Foxy Knoxy” was necessary to the prosecution’s case. A regular, friendly, quirky schoolgirl couldn’t have committed these crimes. A wicked fox would be easier to convict.
They were convinced that Meredith had been raped—they’d found her lying on the floor half undressed, a pillow beneath her hips—and that the sexual violence had escalated to homicidal violence.
They theorized that the break-in was faked.
To make me someone whom a jury would see as capable of orchestrating the rape and murder of my friend, they had to portray me as a sexually deviant, volatile, hate-filled, amoral, psychopathic killer. So they called me Foxy Knoxy. That innocent nickname summed up all their ideas about me.
“Foxy Knoxy” also helped sell newspapers. The tabloids mined my Myspace profile and drew the most salacious conclusions. I resented that they took my posts and pictures out of context, emphasizing only the negative. A photo of me dressed in black and reclining provocatively on a piano bench, a shot my sister Deanna had taken for a high school photography class, circulated. They published parts of a short story I’d written for a UW creative writing class, about an older br
other angrily confronting his younger brother for raping a woman. The media read a lot into that. There were pictures of me at parties and in the company of male friends, and a video showing me drunk. These were snippets of my teenage and college years. Not shown were the pictures of me riding my bike, opening Christmas presents, playing soccer, performing onstage in my high school’s production of The Sound of Music. Looked at together, these latter images would have portrayed a typical American girl, not as tame as some, not as experimental as many, but typical among my age group—a group that had the bad judgment to put our lives online. Now, at twenty, all I could think was, Who’s writing these articles? Is no one being fair?
“Foxy Knoxy, the Girl Who Had to Compete with Her Own Mother for Men” ran in England’s Daily Mail. The writer speculated that my mom’s marriage to Chris, a man they described as “young enough to be [my] own brother,” intensified my feelings of rejection that “culminated” in Meredith’s death. They conveniently overlooked the part of my Myspace page that read, “Foxy Knoxy’s heroes.” My answer was: “My mom.”
My supposedly obsessive promiscuity generated countless articles in three countries, much of it based on information the police fed to the press. It seemed that the prosecutor’s office released whatever they could to bolster their theory of a sex game gone wrong. They provided descriptions of Raffaele’s and my public displays of affection at the questura and witness statements that portrayed me as a girl who brought home strange men. Whatever the sources, the details made for a juicy story: attractive college students, sex, violence, mystery.
I became the embodiment of everyone’s worst fears of, or fantasies about, a sexually aggressive woman. I could’t deny that I’d hooked up with a couple of guys in Perugia whom I hadn’t known well. But I hadn’t sought out men because I was obsessed with sex. I was experimenting with my sexuality. My reaction to being characterized as a femme fatale was Me? Really? Of all people!
