‘OK, Mom, I will. I’ll be fine!’ Amanda replied breezily.
But Edda was still worried. ‘I hoped she would learn a bit of fear before she left. I didn’t want her to go through life afraid, but I wanted her to have a little fear as far as self-preservation goes,’ Edda said later.
3
A month after celebrating her twentieth birthday, Amanda left Seattle in mid-August with her sister Deanna, stopping on the way in Hamburg in Germany to stay with an uncle and aunt. ‘She drove me nuts,’ Deanna recalled. Amanda was in such a hurry to get to Perugia she kept asking her: ‘Can we go to Italy now?’ Deanna just told her: ‘Amanda, you’ve got to wait.’
The sisters also stopped in Austria on their way south, and went to a museum in Graz full of soldiers’ uniforms and military exhibits. Deanna photographed Amanda crouching behind a nineteenth-century Gatling gun and pretending to fire it. She burst out laughing when she saw what Deanna was doing. Amanda wrote ‘The Nazi’ on the back of the photograph.
‘We were just goofing around. Here we are, of German descent, sitting behind this gun. We’re proud of our German heritage, we were just goofing off,’ Deanna was to explain. She also filmed Amanda in their hotel room.
‘Amanda, are you anxious about where you’re going?’ Deanna asks her sister.
‘Yeah, I’m really anxious to find out where I’m going to live.’
From Graz they travelled on to Munich, flew to Milan and then took a train to Florence. On the train, they met Federico, a young Italian who spoke no English but made friends all the same and the three went all the way to Florence together where they spent the night in the same hotel. Federico took the sisters out to dinner and after Deanna had gone off to bed – as Amanda wrote on her My Space page – ‘we smoked up together, my first time in Italy …’ In her diary she was more explicit, writing that she had sex with him.
The sisters finally reached Perugia in late August. On their first day there, they walked around for two hours, getting lost repeatedly as they looked for their hotel before, tired and sweaty, they hitched a lift to reach it outside the city centre. The driver, who was in his forties, pestered them to go out with him but the sisters turned him down. He wasn’t the first man who tried to flirt with the sisters since their arrival in Italy, and Deanna noticed that her previously tomboyish sister was now very much aware when men showed interest in her. Amanda thought the way Italian men stared at women was ‘very abrupt’ and as the guidebook had warned, the girls were whistled at twice, which irritated them both.
The next day, Deanna would have liked to go shopping but Amanda wanted to go to the university. As they walked through Perugia, Amanda chatted excitedly about the beauty of the old buildings they passed. When they reached the university, Amanda went inside to ask about her course while Deanna sat outside enjoying the warm sun on her skin, facing the tree-lined Piazza Grimana, which had a basketball court in the middle of it. She noticed a skinny young woman putting up a notice near the entrance of the university; Deanna couldn’t speak Italian but when she saw the word ‘appartamento’, exclaimed, ‘Hey, one minute!’ to the woman and then raced inside to fetch Amanda.
Laura Mezzetti told them in English about the room she had to let in the cottage where she lived on Via della Pergola, very near the university. ‘Would you like to see it now?’ Laura asked. Amanda accepted immediately, and Laura led them to the cottage.
Amanda fell in love with the cottage, the garden and the wonderful view from the moment she walked into the drive. Amanda and Deanna met Filomena, who picked two ripe figs and offered them to the sisters, neither of whom had ever eaten one before.
Deanna was nervous about tasting it. ‘I don’t know if I should eat this.’
‘Go on, eat it.’ Amanda had already stuffed hers in her mouth.
Inside the flat, Amanda kept exclaiming: ‘Fantastica! Fantastica!’ She didn’t mind that the bedroom she was shown was tiny, that the ceiling was low or that the window looked out onto the drive and the road above it. When she stepped out onto the terrace, she was bowled over. ‘Oh my gosh!’ she cried. She gazed out over the hills, her mouth open in wonder. ‘I love it; I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Amanda added: ‘It’s perfect, it’s perfect. I’ll take it.’
The four of them sat down on the terrace to talk about the details of the rental contract. Amanda sat on the floor – as Deanna explained, it was one of her eccentricities, she preferred the floor to a chair. Amanda told her new flatmates that she had to leave Perugia the next day as she was going to see some relatives in Germany but she would be back in September and could move in then.
As with Meredith, the beauty of the view had drawn Amanda to the cottage.
Meredith moved into the cottage in early September, and quickly began making the most of her year in Perugia. She left the cottage every morning just before 8 a.m. for the intensive, month-long Italian course at the university. She came back just after 1 p.m., had lunch and then settled down to study in the afternoon. She bought an Italian newspaper every day to help her learn the language, and asked Filomena how to pronounce a new word, writing it down in her notebook. Filomena was impressed by how meticulous she was.
Meredith soon made new friends through her course, especially with a group of half a dozen English women in their early twenties; her closest friends were Sophie, Amy and another fellow student from Leeds University, Robyn Butterworth. They often went out to bars and pizzerias popular with foreign students in Perugia; on Mondays they went to see films in English at a cinema on Corso Vannucci – an elegant pedestrian street lined with caffè terraces where Perugians like to take their traditional passeggiata (stroll). Meredith always arrived late but her friends were so fond of her they just pulled her leg about it; Sophie didn’t mind at all, because she was usually only a little less late than Meredith. Their favourite spot was the Merlin Pub, a rustic-looking bar and pizzeria painted red and orange in an old vault near the cathedral. The first evening that Meredith went there, she met the friendly owner Pasquale Alessi, known to all as ‘Pisco’.
A former engineering student, he too had studied in Leeds. ‘I hope Perugia isn’t as cold and rainy as Leeds,’ Meredith said to him after ordering a pizza with Nutella spread – she loved chocolate.
She tried a few words of Italian with him but they chatted mainly in English. She was full of enthusiasm for her new life in Perugia. ‘It’s an adventure for me, I love it. I’m so happy to have chosen Perugia, it’s beautiful – I know I did the right thing!’ Meredith said with a big grin, her eyes shining. She told Pisco she loved the fact that Perugia was both a city and ‘a little town’ – wherever you went, you met people you knew. She was looking forward not only to her year in Perugia but also to travelling across Italy. ‘I’m going to be here for a long time!’ Meredith said with another smile.
She told her family she loved everything about Italy. Concerned about her mother Arline’s health, Meredith always kept her English mobile phone in a pocket of her jeans, and called her every day, sometimes several times a day. Arline constantly tried to reassure her daughter, and would tell her to take care of herself – so much so that Meredith once burst out: ‘Why are you telling me to take care? You’re the one who should be taking care of yourself!’ Meredith used a mobile with an Italian number that Filomena had given her to make calls in Italy because it was cheaper than using her English one.
Meredith often emailed and texted her sister Stephanie. ‘Mez was very excited. She talked of her nervousness because it was the first time she’d gone abroad,’ Stephanie said later. She loved the cottage because it had ‘a big terrace with a spectacular panorama.’ Meredith’s Italian was getting better, partly thanks to Filomena and Laura. ‘That’s what she wanted – to improve her Italian. Mez was a really conscientious, very intelligent person and she wanted to make the most of her year in Italy,’ Stephanie said.
Only one thing about Perugia worried Meredith: drugs. One night Meredith, Sophie and Amy walked
down a steep, narrow street from the cathedral towards Sophie’s home on Via del Lupo. As they reached the front door, they saw two men smoking heroin; the men were openly heating the powder on a piece of aluminium foil.
Meredith told her friends that drugs scared her. She said she had been very shocked to find a used syringe lying in the grass in the garden of the cottage. She discovered that the area around Piazza Grimana in front of the university was home not only to students who gathered there to chat between lectures or play basketball but also to drug pushers who skulked in the doorways of ancient houses flanking narrow, poorly-lit alleyways.
Meredith mentioned Perugia’s drugs problem only briefly to Stephanie: she said she had seen drugs in the city, but didn’t specify where. Stephanie thought little of it: she knew that Meredith wasn’t into drugs and didn’t even smoke cigarettes. It’s likely that Meredith didn’t want to alarm Stephanie by telling her what she’d seen.
One night, a couple of days before Amanda was due in Perugia, Meredith and Sophie came across a big group of American students who had just arrived in the city. They were clearly drinking heavily and so boisterous that the two friends commented on how loud and overpowering they were.
‘What’s Amanda going to be like?’ Sophie asked.
Meredith laughed.
Meredith, like Filomena and Laura, gave Amanda a warm welcome when she arrived at the cottage in late September. Amanda had been supposed to do an internship at the parliament in Berlin – a job she’d obtained through her relatives – but she found the work non-existent and got so bored with spending most of the day reading Harry Potter books in German that she walked out on the job after just two days, to her family’s dismay.
As Filomena described it later, Meredith and Amanda got on well at first. The two had much in common – they were about the same age (Meredith was a year and a half older than Amanda), they spoke the same language, both were a long way from home and would only be in Perugia for a year. Meredith had arrived in Perugia before Amanda and had already made friends, so she took Amanda under her wing, showing her around local food shops. ‘Come on, you’ve got to meet people too. Come on, let’s go out. I’ll introduce you to my friends,’ Meredith urged her. After dinner on Amanda’s very first day in Perugia, Meredith took her out for a drink at the Merlin Pub with Sophie. Exhausted after her trip, Amanda was quiet but friendly. She made a good impression on Sophie, who thought she seemed very laid-back. As they sipped cocktails, Sophie asked her whether she had a boyfriend.
‘I’ve got an open relationship with my boyfriend DJ; he’s in China. We’re together but because we’re so far apart we can meet other people; we’re OK with that,’ Amanda explained.
‘What if you meet someone and it becomes serious?’ Sophie asked.
‘I can tell him, he’ll be happy for me. And he can tell me if he meets someone; I’m not going to be jealous. I understand that’s a possibility,’ Amanda said.
‘Cool,’ Sophie thought to herself; it sounded to her like an open, honest arrangement.
Amanda was so tired she left the pub after an hour or so to get some sleep. When she had gone, Sophie turned to Meredith. ‘Are you happy?’ Sophie asked.
‘Yeah, I’m happy. She’s really nice,’ Meredith replied.
‘It’s good, it’s going to be OK,’ Sophie said.
‘Yes, it’s going to be OK,’ Meredith agreed.
The next evening, Meredith again invited Amanda out for a drink with Sophie, this time at the Tana dell’Orso, a short walk uphill from the University for Foreigners. As they walked into the bar, Amanda said to Sophie: ‘Oh, you’re really popular with the guys.’
At first, Sophie couldn’t work out what Amanda meant; they’d only met once the previous evening. Then, Sophie guessed Amanda was talking about Pisco, the owner of the Merlin Pub who was fond of her and had given them a round of free drinks. Sophie thought Amanda’s comment had a hint of jealousy about it.
Amanda started chatting animatedly with the barman, who was American; they talked about Seattle and rock climbing. The three students then sat down and Sophie asked Amanda: ‘What was your first day like?’
Amanda said she’d got up at six o’clock, had done some yoga, painted a picture, and played the guitar among many other things. Amanda’s answer took Sophie aback; she was surprised by how active Amanda appeared to be. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly why, but that evening Sophie felt less friendly towards her.
Sophie cooled even further towards Amanda the following evening – the third in a row that Meredith took Amanda out with her. Meredith’s other friends Amy and Robyn joined them. Over dinner in the pizzeria Il Bacio off Corso Vannucci, Amanda sat silently for a while, talking to no one. Then, she suddenly started singing in a loud voice, throwing her head back as she stared up at the ceiling.
That same evening, Amanda launched into something that was more of a monologue than a conversation – she talked ‘in your face’, Sophie thought, and exclusively about herself. Amanda talked loudly about her passion for exotic teas – ‘I could talk about it all day,’ she said – and then about her open relationship with her boyfriend DJ. When DJ had told her that he’d met a Chinese girl and would surely meet her again, she’d replied: ‘Oh great, what’s she like? Describe her.’
‘Weird,’ Amy thought. ‘If my boyfriend had met another girl I wouldn’t be pleased.’
Later, Meredith and her friends talked about Amanda’s behaviour. A few days earlier, Meredith had said her flatmate was ‘sweet and nice’. But now she told them: ‘The things she does, they’re a bit weird.’ Meredith thought it odd that Amanda had brought a suitcaseful of several kinds of teas, complete with a teapot, all the way from Seattle.
And when Amanda first arrived at the cottage, Meredith said, she’d put a beauty case in the bathroom, with a vibrator and some condoms clearly visible. ‘How’s it possible, you arrive and … I can’t believe it, she left it on display. It’s a transparent beauty case and it’s there for all to see!’ Meredith said with a laugh.
Soon after Amanda’s arrival, Meredith flew off to London for a long weekend to see her family and buy some warmer clothes for the winter.
During her visit to London, Meredith arranged to meet her father John at an Italian restaurant. She kept him waiting for a full hour, but as he said later, ‘when I saw her, wreathed in that famous smile, my annoyance instantly evaporated.’ She delightedly showed him some boots she had bought. It was the last time John ever saw his daughter.
When Meredith got back from London, Sophie gave her a T-shirt and a certificate marking the end of their Italian course which she’d picked up for her in her absence. It had a prancing griffin – the mythical creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion which is Perugia’s symbol – and the name of the university stamped on the front.
For Sophie, the T-shirt was just that: a T-shirt. But Meredith was delighted with this souvenir of her first weeks in the city. Sophie understood – she herself felt that her stay in Perugia was turning out to be the happiest time of her life.
A few days later, Meredith went out for a night’s dancing with Sophie and Robyn at the Gradisca nightclub not far from Perugia. When they left, a young Moroccan man they’d just met offered them a lift home; they nicknamed him ‘Shaky’ because of the way he danced but his real name was Hicham Khiri. During the drive, Hicham told them he had three jobs: he worked mainly as a chef in a pizzeria but he also worked in a nightclub and in a clothes shop.
Meredith and her friends saw Hicham again some time later at the Domus nightclub in Perugia. Meredith asked him to dance but moments later, Robyn heard Meredith shouting that he’d pulled his trousers down and was showing her his pants. The friends just laughed it off.
4
Amanda, who had given her room a personal touch by decorating it with perfumed candles, spent her first days in Perugia just walking around the city. On her first Sunday, as the shops were closed, she stayed home and did e
leven pages of language exercises in her diary, which she also used as a notebook. A few days later, copying Laura, she had eight piercings done in one ear, and three in the other. She noted with satisfaction in her diary that the woman who did the piercings must have admired her for having so many done in one go: she had kept repeating ‘strong woman, strong woman’. If she had done that in Seattle, Amanda knew, Edda would have seen red and Chris would have called her pigheaded or ‘Terminator’.
The speed with which Amanda had copied Laura’s piercings surprised Meredith.
‘Amanda’s a bit obsessed with Laura. She got herself exactly the same piercings Laura had, and they’ve only just met!’ Meredith told her friend Sophie.
Soon after moving into the cottage, Amanda started teaching Laura yoga and asked to borrow her guitar – Amanda had just started learning to play – to practise with Giacomo Silenzi, a quietly spoken, awkward student of international relations who lived in the semi-basement flat. Giacomo was a bass player with a rock and punk band and played Amanda’s favourite music – The Beatles – with her. At the end of September, when Giacomo celebrated his birthday at the cottage, his flatmates told Amanda that he fancied her.
Amanda emailed Edda during the first two weeks of her language course that she was having ‘the time of her life’ – she loved her flatmates and her studies. She also emailed and talked to Chris on Google Talk. ‘She said everything was great, amazing, she was really happy to be there,’ Chris recalled later. ‘It was all right up her alley. She was living life completely, without any strings attached.’ She loved the Italian lifestyle: ‘everything shuts down in the middle of the day so everyone can have a three-hour lunch break.’ In an email to Deanna, Amanda said her third flatmate was a girl called Meredith – she was from England, she was ‘beautiful, nice and fun and caring’. As Amanda recalled later, she took pictures of Meredith at her request, posing in front of the view from her bedroom window. The two sunbathed together on the terrace – Meredith reading a thriller, Amanda playing the guitar. And when Amanda made a list of friends and relatives she wanted to buy presents for, Meredith’s name was on the list.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 3
