A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case

by Follain, John

  ‘Try 911 or ask Raffaele,’ Chris said.

  ‘OK. He’s going to do that now,’ Amanda said, adding that he was just finishing talking to his sister who was a lieutenant in the carabinieri.

  At 12.51 p.m., Raffaele called the emergency hotline for the carabinieri.

  ‘Carabinieri,’ said Lance Corporal Daniele Ceppitelli, who was manning the switchboard. The call was recorded automatically.

  Raffaele, in a feeble, almost sleepy voice: ‘Hello, good morning. Listen, someone has entered the house by smashing the window and has made a big mess, the door’s closed, the street is … What’s the street?’ he asked Amanda.

  ‘Via della Pergola,’ Amanda said.

  ‘Via della Pergola, number 7, in Perugia,’ Raffaele repeated.

  ‘Does anyone live there? The name?’

  ‘Um, Amanda Knox. A group of students live here – one’s Amanda Knox.’ Raffaele spelt out the surname, asked Amanda her mobile number, and gave it to the officer.

  ‘This is a burglary?’

  ‘No, there hasn’t been a burglary, they broke the glass, they made a mess …’

  Ceppitelli, sounding baffled: ‘So look, you’re saying someone got in and then broke a window? How do you know anyone got in anyway?’

  ‘You can see they have from the traces they left, there are bloodstains in the bathroom.’

  Ceppitelli, sounding more baffled: ‘They went in and … Why? Did they cut themselves when they broke the window?’

  ‘Um …’ There followed a sound as if the mobile phone was being handled.

  Ceppitelli: ‘Hello?’

  The line went dead.

  Raffaele called again at 12.54 p.m.

  Ceppitelli took the call: ‘Carabinieri, Perugia.’

  Raffaele, sounding slightly more awake: ‘Yes hello, I called two seconds ago.’

  ‘Someone’s been in the house and broke the window?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then they went into the bathroom.’

  ‘I don’t know, if you come here perhaps …’

  ‘What did they take?’

  ‘They didn’t take anything, the problem is one of the doors is closed, there are bloodstains.’

  ‘A door’s closed? Which door’s closed?’

  ‘The door of one of the flatmates who isn’t here. We don’t know where she is.’

  ‘And this girl, do you have her mobile number?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we tried to call her but she’s not answering.’

  ‘OK, I’ll send you a patrol car now and we’ll check the situation out.’

  ‘OK.’

  The cold tramontana wind was still blowing when Chief Detective Inspector Michele Battistelli from the postal police and a colleague arrived at the cottage a little after 12.30 p.m., according to their later testimony. (The prosecution was to insist that they arrived at the cottage before Raffaele called the carabinieri.) A wiry figure with an army-style crew cut, Battistelli went up to speak to Amanda and Raffaele, who were sitting necking and embracing each other in the sunshine near the front door. Battistelli introduced himself and asked if they lived in the cottage. Was this where Filomena Romanelli lived?

  ‘Ah, but you’re not from the carabinieri police?’ Raffaele asked.

  ‘No, we’re from the postal police,’ Battistelli replied.

  ‘We’re waiting for the carabinieri, because when we came back here this morning we found the door open and the window broken,’ Raffaele said. He said he thought there must have been a burglary.

  To Battistelli, Amanda and Raffaele looked surprised and embarrassed by his arrival; both spoke in a low voice. They took him to Filomena’s room where he noticed pieces of broken glass lying on top of a pile of clothes that had apparently been dumped on the floor. There was a laptop by a desk and under the broken window lay an eight-inch-long stone which looked as if it weighed between four and five kilos.

  ‘I don’t think this is a robbery, it looks more like a put-up job to me,’ Battistelli said.

  Amanda and Raffaele said nothing.

  Battistelli asked Amanda for Filomena’s mobile number but he recognised the number she gave him as identical to that of one of the two mobiles that had been found that morning. He asked Amanda for another number, and she went to her room to fetch it and wrote it down for him. Battistelli tried it, without success.

  MEREDITH AND AMANDA’S COTTAGE

  Via della Pergola

  10

  Filomena and Paola arrived at the cottage a few minutes later, at about 1 p.m. Their boyfriends, Marco and Luca, were already there. Filomena saw Amanda and Raffaele, as well as a man who introduced himself as Battistelli from the postal police, who had come with another officer. Filomena assumed they were there because of the burglary.

  Her nerves on edge, Filomena went straight to her room and found it a mess of broken glass with clothes piled up on the floor. The left windowpane was broken and shards of glass lay on the windowsill with more on the floor below it, on a rug near her bed, and near her desk. Under the desk chair, a torn paper bag lay on the floor; she took a closer look and saw there was a large stone inside.

  The shock made her whole body begin to shake. Amanda and Raffaele looked on in silence.

  ‘Signorina, try to keep calm. It’s obvious someone’s been here so check if something is missing so you can report it,’ Battistelli said.

  Filomena made sure first of all that her box of gold jewellery was still in its drawer, then she opened all the other drawers and had a good look round the room.

  ‘Everything’s here, my jewellery, my computer,’ she told Paola. The Versace sunglasses were still there, and even the digital camera. Filomena breathed a sigh of relief.

  Filomena reached for her computer, and realised there were shards of glass on top of it. She looked around again and saw not only that the thief hadn’t stolen anything, but also that bits of broken glass from the window were scattered both underneath and on top of the pile of her things on the floor. Her beauty case was open; it was empty.

  ‘He’s a strange burglar, but that’s fine by me. The only thing he’s taken is my make-up!’ she told Battistelli.

  While Filomena rummaged through her things, Paola went into the narrow corridor – a clothes horse that had been opened out next to the plastic bookcase made it even more cramped than usual – and nearly bumped into Amanda and Raffaele. They shook hands and introduced themselves.

  ‘What about your room?’ Paola asked Amanda bluntly.

  ‘Everything’s fine in my room,’ Amanda replied.

  Paola pointed to a door at the end of the corridor, a few feet behind Amanda and Raffaele. She didn’t know whose it was.

  ‘Have you looked in there?’ Paola asked.

  ‘No, that room’s locked,’ Amanda said.

  ‘Why on earth is it locked?’ Paola asked.

  Amanda replied that the girl who lived there locked the door when she went out.

  Puzzled, Paola went back to Filomena and asked: ‘Filomena, does the other girl who lives here usually lock her door when she goes out?’

  ‘No, absolutely not. What makes you think that? She’s only ever locked it once and that was when she went home to London.’

  ‘Well then open that door! Try another key,’ Paola said.

  Paola went back into the corridor. Amanda and Raffaele were still standing there. They gave her a key: ‘See if this one works.’

  Paola tried the key but it was no good. She saw someone else had tried to force the door.

  ‘I’ve already tried to open it but I couldn’t manage it,’ Raffaele explained.

  An agitated Filomena went into the sitting room and said she wanted to call the lawyer she worked for; she was worried the landlady would make her pay for the broken window.

  ‘Let’s all keep calm,’ Battistelli tried to reassure her again. ‘It’s not as if we’ve found a body under the sofa.’

  It was only then that he told them that, following an anonymous
phone call, two mobile phones had been found in a nearby garden and one of them had been traced to Filomena. He showed her a note with two phone numbers.

  At first they meant nothing to Filomena; she didn’t know her own number by heart. But she checked on her own mobile and found out they were both Meredith’s; she explained that she had given one of her SIM cards to Meredith so that she could make cheaper calls to Italian numbers.

  ‘But where’s Meredith?’ Filomena asked.

  ‘The door’s closed,’ Amanda said.

  Filomena and Paola looked at each other, a sudden realisation dawning on them. ‘We’ve got to open her door. Knock on it – wake her up. Maybe she’s sleeping? But how can she be sleeping with all this racket going on?’ Filomena felt her panic rising again.

  But Battistelli was still fussing over how Meredith’s phones had been found that morning. ‘But did you make an anonymous phone call?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t do anything, but I’m worrying about this girl,’ Filomena answered.

  ‘Why’s that?’ Battistelli asked.

  ‘Because I know her – forget about the Italian number. She often switches that one off but never her English one … Look, this girl always has that phone shoved into her jeans – always. Her mother’s ill and they talk to each other five, six or seven times a day. If Meredith hasn’t got that phone, she can’t possibly be all right. We’ve got to find her, you must open the door,’ Filomena said, adding that she hadn’t seen Meredith for a day now.

  ‘No, signorina, we can’t open the door,’ Battistelli said – his instructions were not to risk being accused of damaging private property if he could avoid it.

  ‘What?’ Filomena was appalled. She tried to make her voice sound as authoritative as possible. ‘You have my permission to break that door down.’

  ‘No, we can’t do it. If you want to break it down, you have to do it yourselves,’ Battistelli insisted.

  Filomena turned to Paola’s boyfriend: ‘All right then, Luca, break the door down.’

  ‘OK, you’re the lady of the house,’ Luca said.

  Luca and Marco, followed by Filomena and Paola, went up to Meredith’s door. Battistelli stood just next to them in the cramped corridor. Raffaele was at the other end of the corridor, near the sitting room, while Amanda was standing close to the front door.

  Luca bent down to look through the keyhole but all he could glimpse was part of a bed and a wall. He first tried ramming his shoulder against the door. He tried again, several times. It didn’t budge. He then started kicking it, aiming at the door handle, again and again, half a dozen kicks in all.

  The door swung open and Luca almost went sprawling into Meredith’s room but managed to get his balance back in time. The first thing he saw was a pool of blood in the far corner of the floor to his right. Then he saw there was a beige quilt on the floor and a bare foot poking out from underneath.

  ‘Oh my God, there’s a sea of blood!’ Luca shouted, raising his hands to his head.

  Filomena saw both Luca and Marco blanch, and followed their gaze. ‘Meredith! No!’ she screamed. She was convinced it could only be Meredith lying there.

  Marco shouted: ‘Everybody out! Via, via, via!’

  Filomena, Paola and their boyfriends turned to rush towards the front door out into the fresh air. As he turned away from Meredith’s room, Marco saw Amanda standing in the sitting room; she was staring down the corridor with a vaguely surprised, dazed expression that struck him as strange; he himself felt as if he was about to vomit. He said later that from where she stood, she couldn’t see inside Meredith’s room.

  Outside in the garden, Filomena was in shock, terrified; Paola was crying; Marco shook uncontrollably; Luca looked deathly pale.

  Amanda and Raffaele were dry-eyed; they moved away from the others and started hugging, caressing and kissing each other – to the bewilderment of the others.

  Battistelli emerged from the cottage saying he had to send for the emergency services and call his colleagues. The cottage was now sealed off, he said.

  In Seattle, Edda was sitting up in bed wide awake, waiting for more news from her daughter when Amanda called again more than half an hour after her first call. This time, she was much more agitated.

  ‘Oh my God! They’re screaming about a foot near the cupboard, the cops are screaming. I’m outside the house, I don’t know what’s going on. I gotta go,’ Amanda said before hanging up.

  Shortly afterwards Amanda called a third time, extremely upset. ‘It’s not a foot, there’s a body. They’ve found a body near the cupboard or in the cupboard, I can’t make out which,’ Amanda exclaimed.

  ‘Who is it?’ Edda asked. She could hear a lot of screaming in the background.

  ‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen but no one can get hold of Meredith. It’s Meredith’s room – it’s in the cupboard or next to the cupboard,’ Amanda repeated.

  Edda heard some more shouting. ‘I gotta go, the police want to talk to me,’ Amanda said and then hung up.

  11

  Detective Superintendent Monica Napoleoni had first dreamt of joining the police force when she was only seven years old, because her father was a respected, much-liked officer in the Flying Squad and she wanted to follow in his footsteps. Dedicating heart and soul to her work, Napoleoni learnt the nuts and bolts of policing with the patrol section she eventually commanded, spending long hours at night trying to persuade prostitutes to turn against their pimps, get off the streets and start a new life.

  She had risen to head the Homicide Squad. Respected for her tenacity and encyclopaedic memory of what suspects or witnesses had said or done in the investigations she worked on, she did long hours of unpaid overtime and often caught only a few hours of sleep at night, sacrificing time with her fifteen-year-old daughter and four-year-old son. ‘What matters is the quality of the time I spend with my children, not the quantity,’ Napoleoni, who had two failed marriages behind her, would say.

  A passion for justice she inherited from her father kept her going through the pressures of the job. ‘I keep going for the victims’ sake, because I can’t stand injustice. My job’s about good against evil, and the strong against the weak. My dad taught me to always help the weakest and never the powerful, and never to betray your principles,’ she explained. When asked about her rather flamboyant looks – long black hair with a fringe just over her eyebrows, a tanned face, heavy mascara, tight blouses and black leather boots that reached just below the knee – she said cheerfully: ‘Maybe I don’t look soft on the outside, but you shouldn’t judge by appearances.’

  Shortly after Napoleoni arrived at the cottage at about 1.30 p.m., her boss Marco Chiacchiera joined her – the deputy head of the Flying Squad was in the cemetery with his mother, laying flowers on a family grave, when the operations room told him there was a ‘suspicious death’ at Via della Pergola. A patrol car sent by the carabinieri also arrived, but they left when they saw the rival, national police force had got there first.

  ‘You go inside to see what you can find out right away,’ Chiacchiera told Napoleoni.

  After a doctor from the emergency services had lifted and then lowered the quilt back over the body, Napoleoni gazed slowly around Meredith’s room. A small blue and silver container marked ‘Vaseline pocket-size lip therapy’ lay on the desk; it was empty. She walked out of the room and turned left into a small bathroom; she saw a big bloodstain on the tap above the sink, and a footprint that looked like a mix of blood and water on the blue bathmat. She also noticed bloodstains on the light switch – as if someone had switched the light on with a bloody finger.

  The key to Meredith’s bedroom was missing. What burglar, she wondered, would stop long enough to close and lock the door instead of simply running for it as fast as he could? Was he trying to delay the discovery of the body? That seemed the most obvious explanation. But why did he need to?

  Napoleoni walked outside. The young woman had to be identified as soon as possible and her
family told before the media could reach them. She asked a colleague to make this a priority.

  Napoleoni and Chiacchiera talked alone for a while, trying to make sense of a crime scene they found very confusing. First, there was no sign of the front door having been forced. Second, the green wooden shutters of Filomena’s window were ajar and undamaged despite the shattered window. And third, the window was almost a dozen feet from the ground, and the wall below it was quite smooth without any footholds for anyone wanting to climb up and reach the window.

  But oddest of all: in the bedroom lay an almost naked young woman, wounded several times in the neck, and covered by a quilt. A burglar wouldn’t cover his victim with a quilt. A burglar didn’t lock the door and get rid of the key. Nor would he steal two mobile phones only to throw them away in a neighbouring garden.

  Napoleoni asked the shocked Filomena a few questions about Meredith and about Amanda’s phone calls that morning, then went to speak to Amanda and Raffaele who were still standing some distance away from Filomena and her friends, giving each other little kisses and caressing each other. The couple seemed to her to be completely indifferent to Meredith’s death.

  ‘Buongiorno,’ she greeted them as she opened her wallet and showed them her police badge. ‘You must tell me everything you think could help us understand this girl’s last moments.’

  Napoleoni asked them about the last time they had seen Meredith, and why Amanda had gone into the cottage and taken a shower after finding the front door open and bloodstains in the bathroom.

  With Raffaele occasionally acting as an interpreter, Amanda said she had come back to the cottage at about 10 a.m., found the front door open and blood in the bathroom she shared with Meredith, had taken a shower there then gone into the bigger bathroom to dry her hair, where she found the excrement in the toilet.

  Amanda’s story didn’t make much sense to Napoleoni. ‘But excuse me, you find the front door’s open when you know it’s always kept closed but you don’t look in the bedrooms. You find blood in the bathroom but you have a shower, then you dry your hair and you find the excrement. Then after all that you go out calmly and you don’t call anyone?’ she asked Amanda.