Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir

by Amanda Knox

  I was both ecstatic and furious. Thrilled to know I could reclaim my life. Furious that they would have imprisoned me knowing full well that there was evidence that exonerated me. “How could they have done this?” I asked my lawyers. “Please, please explain that to me.”

  Carlo, who’d never sugarcoated my situation, said, “These are small-town detectives. They chase after local drug dealers and foreigners without visas. They don’t know how to conduct a murder investigation correctly. Plus, they’re bullies. To admit fault is to admit that they’re not good at their jobs. They suspected you because you behaved differently than the others. They stuck with it because they couldn’t afford to be wrong.”

  And for Mignini, appearing to be right superseded everything else. As I found out that summer, the determined prosecutor had a bizarre past, was being tried for abuse of office, and had a history of coming up with peculiar stories to prove his cases. His own case is currently pending on appeal.

  In 2002, on the advice of a psychic, he reopened a decades-old cold case. The Monster of Florence was a serial killer who attacked courting couples in the 1970s and ’80s. After murdering them he would take the women’s body parts with him. Mignini exhumed the body of Dr. Francesco Narducci after the psychic told him that Narducci, who died in 1985, was the Monster and that he hadn’t committed suicide, as had been supposed. Instead, Mignini believed that Narducci had been murdered by members of a satanic sect, who feared the Monster would expose them. He charged twenty people, including government officials, with being members of the same secret sect as the Monster.

  Mignini had a habit of taking revenge on anyone who disagreed with him, including politicians, journalists, and officials. His usual tactic was to tap their telephones and sue or jail them. The most famous instance was the arrest of Italian journalist Mario Spezi, and the interrogation of Spezi’s American associate Douglas Preston, a writer looking into the Narducci case, who subsequently fled Italy.

  In the hour we had each week to discuss my case, my lawyers had never thought there was a reason for us to talk about Mignini’s outlandish history. Carlo and Luciano told me only when it became apparent that, for Mignini, winning his case against Raffaele and me was a Hail Mary to save his career and reputation.

  “The whole story is insane!” I said. I couldn’t take it in. It struck me that I was being tried by a madman who valued his career more than my freedom or the truth about Meredith’s murder!

  I felt calmer when we returned to the courtroom in mid-September. I imagine Raffaele did, too. The prosecution’s forensic documents had answered our lawyers’ questions.

  Standing confidently in front of the judge, Raffaele’s lawyer Giulia Bongiorno made a speech that gave me even more cause for optimism. Keeping the raw data from us until July 30 had violated our rights as defendants. If we’d had it earlier—when we first requested it—it would have altered the trial from the beginning. “The question for the court,” Bongiorno said, “is the DNA evidence decisive or not? If you believe it’s not, then there hasn’t been an injury to the rights of the defense. But if the DNA is decisive, you have to ask yourselves: Did the defense have the possibility to examine the data to be able to counter the conclusions? Did the defense have the diagrams, the electropheragrams, the quantity of DNA, the procedures? You have the answer.

  “If you maintain that the missing documents are decisive for the defense, you must nullify the order to stand trial.”

  Carlo picked up where Bongiorno stopped. “It’s evident that the rights of the defense were not fulfilled,” he said in a firm manner that presumed the judge and jury would agree. “If I’d had this data, I would have laid out a different defensive strategy from the beginning.”

  Our lawyers’ arguments stirred up all my outrage. The prosecution had kept Raffaele and me in jail for twenty-one months for no reason. If the judges and jury were fair, they’d see that the prosecution had tried to thwart us.

  After Carlo and Bongiorno petitioned to end the trial, the prosecution and civil lawyers fired back. They assured the judges and jury that the forensic evidence had been collected and interpreted 100 percent correctly, adding that there was a “mountain of evidence” proving our guilt.

  Carlo had cautioned me that Judge Massei would almost certainly not abort the trial. Too much media attention and controversy surrounded it. “That’s okay,” Carlo said. “Our motion puts the court on notice. They now know that we can and will refute each of the prosecution’s arguments.”

  Even with Carlo’s warning that I should not expect a quick end, I let my hopes rise. I’d already spent two frigid winters and two stifling summers behind bars. I’d missed two Christmases and two of my birthdays at home, two years of what should have been carefree college days. I’d missed out on my younger sisters’ girlhoods. My mind spun with hopeful possibilities. What if they lose—today? What if the court accepts our petition to abort the trial? Could this be it? Maybe I’ll walk out of Capanne this afternoon!

  That daydream lasted ten minutes. Everyone in the Hall of Frescoes stood for the second time that day. The judge and jury returned to their places. My heart was banging so hard I could hear it pound. Please, please. Say the trial is over!

  Adjusting his glasses, Judge Massei droned in his unassuming voice, “There will be no annulment. We’ll hear both sides discuss the forensic evidence.”

  I swallowed hard and closed my eyes, willing my tears back in their ducts.

  “We’re hearing Dr. Gino first today, is it?” Judge Massei asked.

  Going or not going to these hearings was the single choice I was allowed to make. I chose to go. I took my seat and started listening.

  No one was contesting the brutality of Meredith’s death—only how it had happened and who was responsible.

  Everyone believed that Rudy Guede had been there and that he had killed Meredith. He was already serving a thirty-year sentence for her sexual assault and murder.

  The goal of the prosecution was to prove that I had been there, too.

  During the testimony phase, from January to July, witnesses discussed everything from my housekeeping habits to my character and sexual activity. It was intensely personal, and sometimes mortifying.

  Picking up after the summer break, the forensics phase lasted only three and a half weeks, but it was still interminable: hour after hour of examination and cross-examination. Witnesses were called to talk about the knife, the bra clasp, my “bloody” footprints, how my DNA could have mixed with Meredith’s blood in the bathroom, and our alleged cleanup of the villa. Each expert explained how the evidence was found and documented, how results were calculated and interpreted. They were dissecting a crime I hadn’t committed, blaming me using terminology I didn’t know. I felt like an observer at someone else’s trial. The experts would say things like “Amanda’s DNA was on the knife handle,” and I would think, Who is this Amanda?

  I’d rest my chin in my hand, trying to look contemplative—a skill I’d developed during boring college lectures. But no matter how hard I tried to focus, my attention would wander, my head would bob, and the agente standing behind me would awaken me to the nightmare. More than feeling embarrassed, I was terrified that my inattention would be interpreted as my not caring and become another mark against me—even though some of the jurors also habitually dozed off.

  When testimony wasn’t dull, it was disturbing. I couldn’t stand thinking about Meredith in the starkly clinical terms the scientists were using to describe her. Did her bruises indicate sexual violence or restraint? What did the wounds to her hands and neck suggest about the dynamics of the aggression? What did the blood splatter and smears on the floor and armoire prove about her position in relation to her attacker or attackers?

  The hearings were tedious, gruesome, and enormously upsetting. But we were no longer at the crippling disadvantage we’d been at for two years. Now that the prosecution had been made to show their notes, testing, and some of the raw data, we finally had facts
. And the facts supported what I had always known: Raffaele and I had had nothing to do with Meredith’s murder. Meredith had never come into contact with Raffaele’s kitchen knife. I hadn’t walked in her blood.

  I wanted to cross-examine the prosecution. I wanted to ask how the story presented with such authority could be so at odds with the truth. Thank God we had Dr. Sarah Gino and Dr. Carlo Torre, both forensics professors at the University of Turin, in addition to Dr. Walter Patumi, out of Perugia. They took the stand and, one by one, began demolishing each of the prosecution’s claims.

  On the witness stand, Marco Chiacchiera of the Squadra Mobile had explained that “investigative intuition” had led him to the knife. That flimsy explanation did not help me understand how the police could pull a random knife from Raffaele’s kitchen drawer and decide that it was, without the smallest doubt, the murder weapon. Or why they never analyzed knives from the villa or Rudy Guede’s apartment.

  Then we heard the prosecution’s hired forensic experts describe the knife as “not incompatible” with Meredith’s wounds.

  I wasn’t the only person who was perplexed. The experts debated the meaning of this phrase as intensely as they did the physical evidence being presented.

  During cross-examination, Carlo demanded, “ ‘Not incompatible?’ What does that even mean? If the knife was compatible, wouldn’t you have written ‘compatible’? You wouldn’t have bent over backward, twisting words around to create this ambiguous meaning. ‘Not incompatible’? Am I to understand, perhaps, that the confiscated knife is ‘not incompatible’ if only because it’s a pointy knife with a single sharpened edge? Am I to understand that any pointed knife with a single sharpened edge—most knives—would equally qualify as ‘not incompatible’ with Meredith’s wounds? Yes?”

  “Yes,” the expert answered.

  During the afternoon hearing, it turned out that Raffaele’s knife was, in fact, not compatible. The blade was too wide to have inflicted Meredith’s two smaller wounds.

  The third and fatal wound was a gash to the throat. The pathologist said Meredith had been stabbed at least three times in the same spot. But the blade of Raffaele’s kitchen knife, at 6.89 inches, was longer than the wound was deep—by more than 3.5 inches. Under Carlo’s questioning, Professor Torre, a serious man in his sixties who favored lime-green glasses, explained that in a moment of homicidal frenzy, it would be highly unlikely for a killer to plunge a knife in only halfway, to 3.149 inches. And the odds would rise to impossible when you considered driving a knife in, to precisely the same depth, measurable to a thousandth of an inch, three times in a row. Torre brought in a foam bust and an exact copy of the knife to demonstrate how implausible this feat would be. I thought it was a good idea, but I couldn’t watch anyone stab anything—even a dummy. The notion that anyone thought I could have done that to a person—to my friend—made me not just heartsick but feeling like I might throw up. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  As he had done when the prosecution showed Meredith’s stomach contents, the judge cleared the press and public from the courtroom so photos of Meredith’s wounds could be projected on a pull-down screen. These were the same deeply disturbing autopsy photos Carlo had tried to show me seventeen months before. I knew then that I could never stand to look at them.

  It kept me from glancing up.

  But I couldn’t choose not to hear. Dr. Torre said there was a scratch at the top of the lethal wound. The pressure had been just enough to nick the skin, he said, adding that the scrape was made from the hilt. The only way this could have happened was if the full length of the blade penetrated Meredith’s neck. More proof that Raffaele’s knife could not be the murder weapon.

  At the next hearing Manuela Comodi, the co-prosecutor in charge of forensics for the trial, swept into the courtroom triumphantly carrying a flat cardboard box, a little smaller than the ones used for carryout pizza. After opening it, Comodi paraded it in front of the court, as though she were displaying the queen’s jewels. Her pride showed on her face as the jurors and experts stood up, straining in her direction to get a good look at what was inside—the knife that had been confiscated from Raffaele’s apartment was wrapped in a baggie. Only Comodi was allowed to touch it, to pick it up and hold its plastic-shrouded blade up to the light.

  Her theatrics were exasperating. The prosecution continued to say that it was Meredith’s DNA that had lodged in a small scratch on the knife blade. The prosecution still claimed this as incontrovertible proof that I had used the knife to kill Meredith. I knew it to be a regular kitchen knife that had last been used to prepare a salad.

  After everyone had had a good look, Comodi gingerly closed the box and left the courtroom.

  A DNA reading is a series of peaks that looks like an EKG. By analyzing the size of the peak in thirteen or more locations, scientists can be almost certain they have a DNA profile unique to one person—or that person’s identical twin. Done correctly, the reading is more accurate than a fingerprint.

  During the pretrial, Stefanoni testified that she had tested enough DNA from the knife to get an accurate reading. But now, a year later, Dr. Gino had seen the raw data, including the amount of DNA that was tested. If there was any DNA there at all, it was too little to determine using the lab’s sensitive instruments, Gino said. Stefanoni had met none of the internationally accepted methods for identifying DNA. When the test results are too low to be read clearly, the protocol is to run a second test. This was impossible to do, because all the genetic material had been used up in the first test. Moreover, there was an extremely high likelihood of contamination in the lab, where billions of Meredith’s DNA strands were present.

  The prosecution said Stefanoni’s methods were perfectly acceptable, because in proving that the knife was the murder weapon, she’d “struck gold.” But an unbiased analyst would have thrown out the results.

  What I couldn’t understand was why this infinitesimal, unconfirmed sample found on a random knife that didn’t correspond with Meredith’s wounds or the bloodstain on the bedsheet—the murderer’s signature— held any sway. Copious amounts of Rudy Guede’s genetic material had been found in Meredith’s bedroom, on her body, in her purse, and in the toilet.

  Perhaps most telling, when the knife was tested for blood, not even a diluted trace was found, evidence that should have convinced the prosecution’s scientists that any DNA that might have been found there had come from contamination—not from a cut.

  But the prosecution didn’t admit they had tested for blood until our experts found out for themselves.

  The situation was similar to the prosecution’s claim throughout the investigation, the pretrial, and now the trial that my feet were “dripping with Meredith’s blood.” My lawyers and I had spent hours trying to figure out why they thought this. We knew that investigators had uncovered otherwise invisible prints with luminol. Familiar to watchers of CSI, the spray glows blue when exposed to hemoglobin. But blood is not the only substance that sets off a luminol reaction. Cleaning agents, bleach, human waste, urine stains, and even rust do the same. Forensic scientists therefore use a separate “confirmatory” test that detects only human blood, to be sure a stain contains blood. Had the Polizia Scientifica done this follow-up test?

  Under cross-examination during the pretrial, Stefanoni was emphatic. “No,” she responded.

  It wasn’t until Dr. Gino read the documents Judge Massei had ordered the prosecution to share with us that she, and then the rest of my defense team, began seeing a pattern. As with the knife, it turned out that Stefanoni’s forensics team had done the TMB test and it came out negative. There were footprints. But they could have come from anything—and at any time, not necessarily after the murder. What matters is that there was no blood.

  On the stand, Stefanoni declared that the negative blood test was irrelevant. We knew we were looking at blood, she explained, because the luminol glowed more brightly.

  “Is it true that luminol glows more when sprayed on blood
?” Carlo asked Dr. Gino.

  “No.”

  The prosecution had an answer for everything, even when it meant lying to cover up other lies.

  Stefanoni assumed that because both Meredith’s and my DNA were found in the hall outside the bathroom, I was connected to the murder. It was a startling mistake for a forensic scientist to make.

  Human beings shed thousands of skin cells every hour and nearly a million a day. We all leave DNA wherever we go—when we rest an arm on a counter, eat a spoonful of ice cream, grab a steering wheel, or walk barefoot, as I did when I came home for a shower on the morning of November 2. Of course my DNA would be mingled with Meredith’s in the common hallway between our bedrooms—we’d lived in the same house and walked on the same floor tiles for six weeks.

  The prosecution had no evidence against us, and worse yet, they’d withheld information likely to prove our innocence.

  More infuriating was that Stefanoni continued to argue the prosecution’s inaccurate points during cross-examination.

  Some things could not be proven or disproven. DNA doesn’t show its age. Science has no way of knowing when I left footprints in the hallway or what time I was in the bathroom. Or how long Raffaele’s DNA had been on Meredith’s bra clasp—the only evidence that tied Raffaele to Meredith’s bedroom. It meant that both Raffaele and I were in the same excruciatingly frustrating position.

  When the white-suited Polizia Scientifica first swept the crime scene on November 2 and 3, the little strip of fabric with the bra fastener lay under the bloody cushion beneath Meredith’s body, cut from the rest of the bra. The forensics team put a placard beside it, assigning it the letter Y. But when they bagged the evidence in Meredith’s bedroom and sent it to the forensics lab where Stefanoni worked in Rome, sample Y was overlooked and left behind.