Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir

by Amanda Knox

  Since Gregora and Mina were in the nursery ward, I saw them during passeggio. A high wall of bars was all that divided our outside areas. Gregora would slip me pen and paper, and I’d dedicate the first half hour of our afternoon outdoor time to her. I’d pause to talk to Mina, who always played by herself. She toddled around in what seemed to be self-imposed silence, gesturing to communicate. Having spent most of her life in prison, Mina never stepped through a doorway without permission, turning her hand to signify a key in a lock. Serious and suspicious of strangers, she seemed to have an ancient soul—weary, alert, and wise. Sometimes she’d bring over a timeworn doll and cradle it for me, nodding her head and meeting my eyes, as though I could pour out my heart to her and she’d understand.

  Mothers and their children were also allowed to attend Don Saulo’s group activity time. Mina sat on my lap during movies, let me carry her around the room, and chose me as her dance partner when Don Saulo played religious music. She liked to switch shoes with me. She’d hang her own tiny, red plastic ones on my toes and clomp around in mine.

  One afternoon Gregora ran up to the bars outside, calling, “Amanda! Amanda!”

  I came over, expecting Gregora to hand me the latest letter from her husband, a prisoner on the men’s side. Instead she whispered, “Listen!”

  I looked around to see Mina playing by herself in the middle of the yard.

  “It’s the song you sing in church!” Gregora cried.

  “Ave-sha-om-ahem . . .”

  I could hear a tinny, high-pitched voice squeaking out a melody.

  “Hevenu shalom alechem”—“May peace be with you.” It was one of the prisoners’ favorite songs during Mass, which I accompanied on guitar.

  It can’t be Mina! I’d always imagined that if she ever talked, or sang, her voice would be husky and deep, like an old woman’s. That’s how she carried herself. Hearing her peep out a song in a tiny baby voice clutched at my heart.

  I kept my promise to myself. After my conviction, I got the first appointment I could with the volunteer hairdresser. “Cut it off,” I said.

  The woman next to me, her hair wrapped in tin foil, gasped, “You’re crazy.” The hairdresser met my eyes worriedly in the mirror.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes, just do it,” I said more forcefully than I’d meant to.

  I ended up with a crude, boyish cap of a cut. I’d fallen into magical thinking, believing that short hair would transform me, that this protest in a teacup would somehow make me feel better about my conviction or turn me into someone else.

  What it did was earn me a trip to the psychiatrist’s office. “You know, people make drastic alterations only when they’re asking for attention,” she chided.

  “That’s not true for me,” I responded, irritated. “I just want to be left alone. What I do with my hair is my business.”

  “Have you thought any more about taking an antidepressant?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said curtly.

  “When you eventually get out of here, you’re going to need a lot of help—psychologists at the very least,” she said.

  I hated people lecturing me as if they had a clue about how I felt now and would feel in the future. No one can understand what I think. Even the people who love me best can’t completely identify with me.

  But talking to them was holding me together. I lived for prison visits and my once-a-week Saturday-night-at-seven phone call to friends and family in Seattle. For those who couldn’t visit me in Perugia, it was my only connection to their voices. On Saturdays I’d count down in my head, and at exactly ten minutes before seven o’clock, I’d shout, “Agente, phone call!” One night I yelled and no one came. My call would be connected at seven on the dot. “Agente! Phone call!” No answer. “Agente, phone call!” No answer.

  I crumpled onto the floor and rolled into a ball, weeping and screaming. I felt like a dog in a kennel, behind bars, howling for help. I was crying out for someone, and no one came. My family was waiting on the line, and the phone was only a few paces away. It was as close as I have ever come to a breakdown.

  I was still screaming when the guard came at 7:30.

  “I was downstairs,” the agente said. “Sorry.”

  I didn’t know then that the prison budget had been cut and that guards who used to cover one floor now had to cover two. I was so angry I doubt I would have cared. I didn’t get my hopes up for anything in prison. I didn’t expect anyone to do anything nice for me. But I counted on my phone call. I stayed out of trouble. I helped wherever I could. And now fourteen days would have passed before I could talk to my family in Seattle again. I couldn’t count on justice, and I couldn’t count on people.

  Looking back, I thought how stupid I was in November 2007 when I’d first been arrested. I thought I was a special case and would be kept in prison for only a few hours—a few days at most—for my “protection.” When the investigation started, I thought it was just a matter of time until the prosecution realized I’d been wrongly accused. When I was being tried, I was sure I wouldn’t be convicted. But I had reached the end of the line. This was now my life. I was not special. In the eyes of the law, I was a murderer.

  As Lupa said, my lawyers would obviously appeal my conviction. But I couldn’t count on the Court of Appeals to free me. My case, tried daily in the media, was too big and too notorious. It was awful to hear that strangers believed I had killed my friend. That feeling was compounded when, about three weeks after Raffaele and I were convicted, the appeals court cut Rudy Guede’s sentence nearly in half, from thirty years to sixteen. Meredith’s murderer was now serving less time than I was—by ten years! How can they do this?! I raged to myself. It doesn’t make sense! The unfairness of it burned in my throat.

  Guede’s fast-track conviction for murder and rape in collaboration with others had earned him the maximum. The appeals court had also found him guilty on the same count. But the prosecution’s new view—and the reason for the reduced sentence—was that Guede had not had the knife in his hand, and therefore had played only a supporting role, more responsible for Meredith’s rape than for her murder.

  Two weeks into the new year, I was called to the first floor to sign a document. I assumed it would confirm my conviction. I thought, I’m already living this god-awful reality every day. I don’t need a piece of paper to make it official. But when the emotionless guard pushed the paper across the desk, I saw, to my astonishment, and outrage, that it was a new indictment—for slander. For telling the truth about what had happened to me during my interrogation on November 5–6, 2007.

  In June 2009, I testified that Rita Ficarra had hit me on the head to make me name Patrick.

  I also testified that the police interpreter hadn’t translated my claims of innocence and that she’d suggested that I didn’t remember assisting Patrick Lumumba when he sexually assaulted Meredith.

  According to Prosecutor Mignini, truth was slander.

  All told, the prosecution claimed that I’d slandered twelve police officers—everyone who was in the interrogation room with me that night—when I said they’d forced me to agree that Meredith had been raped and pushed me into saying Patrick’s name.

  It was my word against theirs, because that day the police apparently hadn’t seen fit to flip the switch of the recording device that had been secretly bugging me every day in the same office of the questura leading up to the interrogation.

  Making myself read to the end, I saw that the lawyer representing the police department was Francesco Maresca. He was also the Kercher family’s civil lawyer.

  Mignini and his co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, had signed the document. The judge’s signature was also familiar: Claudia Matteini, the same woman who’d rejected me for house arrest two years earlier because she said I’d flee Italy.

  I hadn’t expected this maneuver by the police and prosecution, but it now made sense. They couldn’t admit that one of their own had hit me or that the int
erpreter hadn’t done her job. Above all, they couldn’t admit that they’d manipulated me into a false admission of guilt. They had their reputations to uphold and their jobs to keep.

  I’d calculated that I could be released in twenty-one years for good behavior. Now this looked unlikely. If I were called to testify in the slander trial, I’d have to restate the truth: I had been pressured and hit. They’d say I was lying. If the judges and jury believed the police, that would wipe out my good behavior and add three years to my jail time.

  Could Mignini, Comodi, and the whole questura keep going after me again and again? Would I be persecuted forever?

  The indictment was a dark reminder of how completely vulnerable I was. Not only had the prosecution successfully had me convicted for something I hadn’t done, but also legally, my word meant nothing. I was trapped.

  And so angry. I’d never felt so consumed by raw, negative emotion as I did then. I had to turn my thoughts away from it. For the first time, I was afraid of the spiteful, miserable bitterness I felt.

  Incredibly, a month later, Prosecutor Mignini was convicted for abuse of office and sentenced to a sixteen-month suspended sentence for his part in the Monster of Florence case. He was accused of having used his authority to intimidate and manipulate people. By the time I was convicted, there was no question that he’d also manipulated me. That case is currently on appeal.

  My sense of doom was growing. With the prosecutor’s verdict coming so close to my own, it seemed that they’d waited to convict Mignini until he’d convicted me. Sitting in my barely heated prison cell on that frozen January day, I believed that the Italians had made a mockery of the word justice.

  As the months went by, I realized that I hadn’t just been convicted of murder—I’d been sentenced to a life apart from the people I loved.

  In a practical sense, my innocence didn’t matter anymore. Whether or not I belonged there, prison was suddenly my entire world.

  I’d always tried to fill my days there with mental and physical exercise—in the meantime, I told myself, until I go home. I’d taught myself Italian and I was healthy.

  After my conviction, my sense of purpose became my life raft. I clung to purposefulness. It was the only thing that allowed me to maintain my relationships, my humanity, my sanity. I was obsessed with making each day count. The one thing I couldn’t tolerate was wasting my life in jail.

  Prison officials started calling me to be an interpreter for anyone who didn’t speak Italian—even if that other language was Chinese and I had to point to words in the English-Chinese dictionary I happened to have.

  As I did for Mina’s mom, Gregora, I helped prisoners write letters, legal documents, grocery lists, and explain an ailment to the doctor. The Nigerian women treated me as an honored guest, setting me up at a table and offering tea and cake as they dictated to me. This was my way of being part of the prison community on my own terms, of trying to find a good balance between helping others and protecting myself. No matter how much I was hurting, I didn’t think it was right to ignore the fact that I could help other inmates with my ability to read and write in both Italian and English.

  At bedtime each night, I made a schedule for the next day, organized task by task, hour by hour. If I didn’t cross off each item, I felt I’d let myself down. I wrote as much as I could—journals, stories, poems. I could spend hours crafting a single letter to my family.

  I thought about what I wanted to say to whoever came to visit me that week, and the message I wanted to convey on my weekly phone call home.

  I became a purposeful reader. I already preferred Franz Kafka to Jackie Collins, but now I was drawn to books with characters who were isolated, lost, or grieving in a surreal, existential way—Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before.

  I read a lot! And I often felt more solidarity with the characters and the writers who created them than I did with the real people I knew.

  Since my arrest, the prison psychiatrist had often asked me if I harbored suicidal thoughts. Her question always struck me as strange—as did the suicide watch I was put on the night of my verdict. How could people kill themselves? There’s always hope. There’s always something to be gained in life. No matter what, my life meant something to me and to my friends and family. I could never consider such a thing.

  But I struggled with a way to come to terms with the fact that my life was encapsulated within these gray walls. And I started to understand how you could feel so locked inside your own life that you could be desperate to escape, even if it meant that you’d no longer exist.

  The ways other prisoners had tried to kill themselves were well known—and I imagined myself trying them all.

  There was poisoning, usually with bleach. Swallowing enough and holding it in long enough was painfully difficult. Usually the vomiting would attract the attention of the guards too soon, and then they’d pump your stomach. It seemed an agonizing way to go if success wasn’t guaranteed.

  There was swallowing shards of glass from a compact mirror or a broken plastic pen, hitting your head against the wall until you beat yourself to death, and hanging yourself.

  But the most common and fail-safe method of suicide in prison was suffocation by a garbage bag—two prisoners on the men’s side did this successfully while I was there. You could even buy the bags off the grocery list. You’d pull the bag over your head, stick an open gas canister meant for the camping stove inside, and tie the bag off around your neck. The gas would make you pass out almost instantaneously, and if someone didn’t untie the bag immediately, that was it.

  Less effective but, I thought, more dignified was bleeding yourself to death. I imagined it would be possible to get away with enough time in the shower. The running water would deter cellmates from invading your privacy, and the steam would fog up the guard’s viewing window. I imagined cutting both my wrists and sinking into oblivion in a calm, quiet, hot mist.

  I wondered which straw would need to break for me actually to do any of these. What would my family and friends think? How would the guards find my body?

  I imagined myself as a corpse. It made me feel sick, not relieved, but it was a fantasy I had many times—terrible, desperate recurring thoughts that I never shared with a soul.

  I also imagined what it would be like to live a life not inside prison. If all this hadn’t happened, where would I be? I pictured myself being a regular person—going to the grocery store, getting coffee at Starbucks, having lunch with my mom, rock climbing. I’d get lost in memories of when I was younger—walks with Oma and July Fourth fireworks with Dad; playing football with my friends or helping Madison develop photos; bicycling with DJ and taking long walks with my friend James.

  I thought about how much I wanted to get married and have kids. If I get released on good behavior when I’m forty-three, I can still adopt.

  Other prisoners would say, “You’re lucky you’re in prison while you’re young, because you’re going to get out and stand on your own two feet.”

  I thought, What the fuck are you talking about? How will I know how to live my life? I won’t have been given a chance to be an adult.

  I started having conversations with myself as if I were talking to a younger sister. I told her, Don’t rush, keep your eyes open, observe things, don’t be so insecure. You’re just fine.

  She’d tell me, Stop being so hard on yourself.

  It calmed me, but I started worrying that I was going crazy. Is this one of the steps people take on the way toward losing their mind?

  Optimism had been my way of life, and it still was for my mother, who continued to insist that I’d be freed. But optimism had not saved me. I could picture myself growing old in prison, losing everything I’d ever hoped for in life, and one day returning to the world a ghost of a person, without anyone capable of understanding me. I thought I’d look like a smaller version of
Laura with brown hair—maybe because she was close to the age I would be by then.

  My feelings of loss only made it worse for me the day Mina was taken away from Gregora and put in an orphanage. Although Gregora didn’t know when Mina was born, prison officials had decided that she must be three. From then on, a social worker would bring Mina to visit her mother for an hour a month. I couldn’t decide whether I identified more with the child I’d come to love or with her inconsolable mother. But I was sure of one thing: prison tore families apart, and they could never be stitched back together.

  My mom couldn’t accept my sadness. She wrote, and talked to me, many times about how scared she was for me. “You’re changing, Amanda,” she said. “You’re not sunny anymore. I hope when you get out you can go back to being the happy person you were.”

  “Mom,” I wrote back, “good things don’t always work out for good people. Sometimes shit happens for no reason, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  I had to consider the worst- and best-case scenarios to be able to maintain my emotional stability. I was no longer a tourist, waiting to be allowed to go home. I was a prisoner. I was trying to figure out how to be happy even if I weren’t freed. I was preparing for life in prison. The thing that scared my mom was that I wasn’t completely focused on getting out, which she saw as giving up.

  I wasn’t. I hadn’t lost hope, but I wasn’t banking on it, either.

  Mom couldn’t understand what I was trying to say: that it was important not to be optimistic all the time but to come to terms with reality, the good and the bad, and to create something positive from it. She took this to mean that I’d become a pessimist. It was hard for us to communicate with each other about this.

  My conviction and the ways I tried to deal with it created a divergent path that made me afraid I could lose my family. Not literally, but in my soul. Was I becoming someone different, someone they couldn’t reach?