Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir

by Amanda Knox

  I hope people are hearing Mignini saying, “it’s probable” and “it’s a hypothesis.” You can’t convict someone based on a hypothesis that the evidence doesn’t support!

  As for my interrogation at the questura, Mignini described the interpreter—the woman who had called me “a stupid liar” and had told me to “stop lying”—as “very sweet.” “I remember that evening how she behaved toward Amanda,” he said.

  Then he recalled from earlier in the trial, when Judge Massei questioned me about my interrogation. “Your Honor asked, ‘But a suggestion in what sense? Did they tell you, ‘Say that it was Lumumba?’ Because a suggestion is just that . . . And Amanda said, ‘No. They didn’t tell me that it was him.’ And so what suggestion is it?

  “Amanda said, ‘But they told me, Ah, but we know that you were with him, that you met with him.’ The police were doing their job . . . they were trying to make this person talk . . . These are the pressures, then. Completely normal and necessary investigative activity. There were no suggestions because a suggestion is: Say it was Lumumba.”

  Mignini knew how my interrogation had gone. The police were yelling that I knew who the murderer was, that I had to remember, that I’d gone out to meet Patrick that night. They made me believe I had trauma-induced amnesia. They threatened me if I didn’t name the murderer—even though I said I didn’t know who the murderer was! How is that not suggestion? How is that not coercion?

  Mignini’s rant lasted one day, from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. When I went back to Capanne that afternoon, I felt as though I’d been beaten with a hammer. But I had survived. I repeated the childhood adage my mom used to recite: “Words can never hurt me.” I wished that were true.

  The co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, spoke the next day. She talked about the forensic evidence as if each element were a neatly laid brick and they all fit together. She had built a brick house that she contended proved we were guilty. We heard for the umpteenth time that Stefanoni was right and our forensic experts were biased. Then she introduced a new motive—a nonmotive, actually—a one-size-fits-all, everybody’s-doing-it explanation for anyone who questioned Mignini’s revolving motives. Squaring her shoulders, she told the jury, “We live at a time where violence is purposeless.”

  Echoing Mignini, Comodi said it was reasonable to assume that Raffaele had brought along a pocketknife, which he used to poke Meredith in the neck to scare her.

  Then the prosecution turned off the lights.

  “I’d like to show the court a visual prop we’ve constructed to demonstrate our theory of the murder,” Comodi said.

  This introduced the most surreal moment of my nightmarish trial: a 3-D computer-generated animation with avatars representing me, Raffaele, Rudy Guede, and Meredith.

  Carlo and Luciano were apoplectic. They shouted their objections, insisting that the film was unnecessary and inflammatory.

  Judge Massei allowed it. I didn’t watch it, but my lawyers said the avatar of me was dressed in a striped shirt like one I often wore to court. Raffaele, Guede, and I were depicted sneering. Meredith’s avatar had an expression of horror and pain. The cartoon used real crime scene photos to show the blood splatters in Meredith’s room.

  The animation dramatized the prosecution’s hypothesis, showing Raffaele and me leaving his apartment and sitting at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana, me arguing with Meredith at the house, the three of us attacking her.

  I kept my head down, my eyes on the table. My stomach was churning. The courtroom was suddenly hot. I was boiling with anger and near tears. How are they allowed to make up what happened? I tried to block out Comodi’s voice as she narrated the imagined event.

  The cartoon couldn’t be entered as evidence, so no one outside the courtroom saw it. But the prosecution had achieved their goal. They’d planted an image in the minds of the judges and jury.

  When the lights came up, Comodi closed with a straightforward request: Give Amanda and Raffaele life imprisonment.

  After Comodi came Patrick’s civil attorney, Carlo Pacelli. Unlike Patrick, whose testimony had been fair, Pacelli trashed me mercilessly.

  “Who is Amanda Knox? The Knox who is unscrupulous in lying, in slandering; beautiful, intelligent, cunning, and crafty is above all how she appears before you, and how she appeared before you during more than forty hearings: very feminine, cute, enchanting, a white face, blue eyes, simple, sweet, naïve, fresh-faced, with a family at her back and parents who, even if separated, are loving and affectionate.

  “Is Amanda Knox the daughter who everyone would want? The friend who everyone would like to meet? Yes. Great. The defense counselor says that Amanda is exactly as you see her today, in this courtroom, as she appears. She’s exactly this. But the defendant that you see, Your Honors, is a student transformed by a long prison detention . . . And so the question that arises . . . who was Amanda Knox on the first of November?”

  Then he descended on me as if I were a witch on trial in the Middle Ages.

  “So who is Amanda Knox? In my opinion, within her resides a double soul—the angelic and compassionate, gentle and naïve one, of Saint Maria Goretti, and the satanic, diabolic Luciferina, who was brought to engage in extreme, borderline acts and to adopt dissolute behavior. This last was the Amanda of November 1, 2007 . . . It must be spelled out clearly: Amanda was a girl who was clean on the outside because she was dirty within, spirit and soul . . .”

  Thank God Italy doesn’t believe in burning people at the stake anymore! Pacelli is piggybacking off the prosecution’s baseless accusations! How can he live with himself? How can any of them?

  The Kerchers’ civil attorney, Francesco Maresca, emphasized the horror that had been inflicted on Meredith—by a group. He knew this because had it been only one attacker, there’s no doubt that Meredith, who knew karate, would have defended herself.

  How can any girl defend herself against a guy armed with a knife?

  “It’s a very long list of lesions: to the face, neck, hands, forearms, thighs. Try to understand the terror, the fear, the pain this girl suffered in the last seconds of her life in the face of the multiple aggression, an aggression brought about by more than one person.”

  Maresca didn’t mention that the prosecution’s own coroner—the only person who’d analyzed Meredith’s body—had said it was impossible to determine whether one or more people attacked Meredith.

  Maresca, like Mignini, criticized any media that had questioned his work. But what most enraged me was the false contrast he set up between the Kerchers and my family.

  “You’ll remember Meredith’s family for their absolute composure. They taught the world the elegance of silence. We’ve never heard them on the television . . . in the newspapers. They’ve never given an interview. There’s an abysmal difference between them and what has been defined as the Knox Clan and the Sollecito Clan, which give interviews on national television and in magazines every day.”

  Thank God for my “clan,” I thought. They’re the only ones on my side.

  It was wrong of Maresca to compare my family to Meredith’s. I knew that the Kerchers were loving parents and good people because of the way Meredith had talked about them. She knew the same about mine. One of the things that connected us was that we were both close to our families. Meredith’s family is grieving, but my family knows that I’m not the cause of the Kerchers’ grief. Just as Meredith’s family came to Perugia to seek justice for their daughter, mine have come to seek justice for me. Both families are good. Both families are doing the best they can, the best way they know how.

  Finally it was our turn.

  Thank God we’ve arrived in friendly territory! I thought.

  I was fed up with being the target. Now I was bound by anxiety. The end was so close! Home was on the horizon.

  Raffaele’s lawyers, Luca Maori and Giulia Bongiorno, worked to put distance between their client and Guede.

  “Raffaele and Rudy Guede never met, went out together, or saw each other,�
� Maori said. “The two young men belonged to completely different worlds and cultures. Raffaele comes from a big and healthy family. Rudy rejected his family. Raffaele has always been a model student. Rudy was never interested in school or work. Raffaele is timid and reserved. Rudy is uninhibited, arrogant, extroverted.”

  “Accomplices who don’t know each other . . .” Bongiorno said, drawing out the words to emphasize the paradox that they couldn’t have been accomplices if they didn’t even know each other!

  Raffaele, she told the court, was “Mr. Nobody”—put in by the prosecution as an afterthought. “There was no evidence of him at the scene.” The prosecution had contradicted themselves. “He’s there, but he’s not. He has a knife, but he doesn’t. He’s passive, he’s active.”

  In defending Raffaele, she also defended me. “If the court doesn’t mind, and Amanda doesn’t mind, the innocence of my client depends on Amanda Knox,” she said. “A lot of people think that she doesn’t make sense. But Amanda just sees things her way. She reacts differently. She’s not a classic Italian woman. She has a naïve perspective of life, or did when the events occurred. But just because she acted differently from other people doesn’t mean she killed someone. . . .

  “Amanda looked at the world with the eyes of Amélie” she said, referring to the quirky waif in the movie that Raffaele and I watched the night of Meredith’s murder.

  Amélie and I had traits in common, Bongiorno said. “The extravagant, bizarre personality, full of imagination. If there’s a personality who does cartwheels and who confesses something she imagined, it’s her. I believe that what happened is easy to guess. Amanda, being a little bizarre and naïve, when she went into the questura, was truly trying to help the police and she was told, ‘Amanda, imagine. Help us, Amanda. Amanda, reconstruct it. Amanda, find the solution. Amanda, try.’ She tried to do so, she tried to help, because she wanted to help the police, because Amanda is precisely the Amélie of Seattle.”

  Then, the moment that Luciano, Carlo, Maria Del Grosso (Carlo’s second), and I had been waiting for. Just as they’d been promising me for more than two years, they went over the entire case—the witnesses, the forensics, the illogic of the prosecution’s case—turning the clock back to the beginning and telling it from our perspective.

  “At lunch hour on November 2, 2007, a body was discovered,” Luciano began. “It was a disturbing fact that captured the hearts of everyone. Naturally there were those who investigated. Naturally there were testimonies. Naturally there was the initial investigative activity. Immediately, immediately, especially Amanda, but also Raffaele, were suspected, investigated, and heard for four days following the discovery of the body. There was demand for haste. There was demand for efficiency. There was demand.

  “Such demand and such haste led to the wrongful arrest of Patrick Lumumba—a grave mistake.”

  Carlo picked up the thread. “There is a responsible party for this and it’s not Amanda Knox. Lumumba’s arrest was not executed by Amanda Knox. She gave information, false information. Now we know. But you couldn’t give credit to what Amanda said in that way, in that moment and in that way. A general principle for operating under such circumstances is maximum caution. In that awkward situation there was instead the maximum haste.”

  Having heard what they wanted to hear and without checking further, the investigators and Prosecutor Mignini arrested Patrick—bringing him in “like a sack of potatoes,” Luciano said.

  I was relieved to hear someone telling the truth. Seeing my lawyers in this theatrical mode, I relaxed the tiniest bit.

  Maria Del Grosso criticized Mignini for the fiction he’d invented. “What must be judged today is whether this girl committed murder by brutal means. To sustain this accusation you need very strong elements, and what element does the prosecution bring us? The flushing of the toilet. Amanda was an adulterer. I hope that not even Prosecutor Mignini believes in the improbable, unrealistic, imaginary contrast of the two figures of Amanda and Meredith.”

  Yes. Make them stop pitting Meredith and me against each other! We were never like that in real life!

  “In chambers you will have to apply the law, but remember: condemning two innocents will not restore justice to poor Meredith’s memory, nor to her family. There’s only one thing to do in this case: acquit.”

  During the rebuttals, on December 3, each lawyer was given a half hour to counter the closing arguments made over the past two weeks. Speaking for me, Maria criticized Mignini for portraying Meredith as a saint and me as a devil. In reality, she said, we lived similar lives. Meredith had casual sexual relationships. So did I. Meredith wanted to study seriously and be responsible. So did I.

  Mignini continued to insinuate that I had loose morals, going beyond the testimony to come up with his own examples. In an eleventh-hour swipe at my reputation, he said it was likely that I had met up with Rudy and made a date with him for the one hour Raffaele had planned to take his friend, Jovanna Popovic, to the bus station the night of November 1. I wanted to amuse myself with another boy—a “not unwelcome distraction.”

  “She was a little, let’s say, very social, Amanda. Amanda was sick of the reproaches of Meredith, who also talked about needing to be faithful to one’s own boyfriend, no doubt! Meredith was precisely of an uncommon level of uprightness.”

  Mignini knows neither Meredith nor me in the least.

  “I’ve asked myself if we were listening to a prosecutor, a lawyer, or a moralist,” Maria said, standing up for women everywhere. “Who are you to make such a claim in the name of a woman that it’s so much like a woman to be at the throat of another woman?”

  Then Raffaele and I made our final pleas. Raffaele talked about how he would never hurt anyone. That he had no reason to. That he wouldn’t have done something just because I’d told him to.

  I’d spent hours sitting on my bed making notes about what I wanted to say, but as soon as I stood up, every word emptied from my brain. I had to go with what came to me, on the few notes I had prepared.

  “People have asked me this question: how are you able to remain calm? First of all, I’m not calm. I’m scared to lose myself. I’m scared to be defined as what I am not and by acts that don’t belong to me. I’m afraid to have the mask of a murderer forced on my skin.

  “I feel more connected to you, more vulnerable before you, but also trusting and sure in my conscience. For this I thank you . . . I thank the prosecution because they are trying to do their job, even if they don’t understand, even if they are not able to understand, because they are trying to bring justice to an act that tore a person from this world. So I thank them for what they do . . . It is up to you now. So I thank you.”

  My words were so inadequate. But at least I remembered to thank the court again. Now I had to put my faith in what my lawyers and our experts and I had said month after month. I had to believe that it was good enough.

  When I went back to prison that afternoon, I saw Don Saulo.

  “I’m feeling hopeful,” I said. “I think everything is going to work out well. Things have turned around. It’s clear the evidence against me is unreliable. There are lots of people who support me. So why do I feel like I’m about to be executed?”

  On the final morning, I was glad for the thirty-minute van trip from the prison to the downtown courthouse. It gave me something to do. And even though I’d be leaving prison as soon as the verdict was rendered, I was happy I could briefly be in the courtroom with my family before we had to wait out the verdict separately.

  It took about a minute for Judge Massei to declare the trial formally over. The time had come for the judges and jury to decide whom they believed. They exited single file through the door to chambers in the front of the courtroom. I stared at the door after it closed, wishing I knew what was going on behind it.

  Then the prison van took me back to Capanne. I felt completely helpless, pointlessly thinking about what I should have said in my plea.

  Back in my cell,
I paced, sat on my bed, paced, sat. I tried to talk with my cellmates, Fanta and Tanya, but I was unable to concentrate on anything they were saying.

  They were prepping me on all the superstitions I had to remember when I came back with the good verdict—break my toothbrush in half and throw it away outside the prison, with my hairbrush and the shoes I wore most often. This meant I wasn’t coming back. “Just before you get in the car, remember to brush your right foot along the ground,” Fanta said. “It means you’re promising freedom to the next prisoner.”

  My head pounded as I shot from excitement to terror and back again—and again. My brain bounced between Please, please, please and Finally, finally, finally—THE END.

  Besides my cellmates, Laura was the only person I could stand to see. She came during socialità and made chicken with mushrooms for dinner. I ate one bite.

  I planned to give my pans, pots, and clothes to Fanta and Tanya.

  I told Laura, “I want you to have my bedsheets.”

  “That will be great, Amanda,” she said, “but don’t promise me anything until we know what’s going to happen.”

  “I’m going to write you, Laura,” I told her.

  “I hope so,” she said. “But let’s just wait and see.”

  After dinner Tanya turned on the TV. Every channel was talking about my case: The big day! The world is hanging on, waiting to see what the decision will be in the “Italian trial of the century.” Raffaele and Amanda have been charged with six counts. Meredith’s family will be there to hear the verdict. Amanda’s family is waiting in the hotel. The Americans believe there’s no case, but the prosecution insists that Meredith’s DNA is on the murder weapon and Raffaele’s DNA is on Meredith’s bra clasp. The prosecution has condemned the American media for taking an incorrect view of the case.