‘Yes, I thought someone had gone to throw the rubbish out,’ Amanda replied. She said she had knocked on the front door of the semi-basement flat, but no one had answered.
As she quizzed Amanda, Napoleoni couldn’t help thinking that she was hiding something from her – but she had no idea what. She checked on the rubbish bins and saw they were just outside the gate – so Amanda was bound to have seen anyone carrying rubbish out as she came in. Napoleoni learnt that the four students who lived in the downstairs flat had all gone away for a long weekend with their families, and that Amanda and Meredith had been alone in the cottage.
Later, after sheltering from the cold with Amanda in Luca’s car, Raffaele got out to speak to Napoleoni. ‘My girlfriend has just remembered that when she went into the big bathroom on her own this morning there was excrement. When we went back to the flat it wasn’t there anymore,’ Raffaele said. The toilet had been flushed in their absence, he added.
Napoleoni went back into the cottage and to the big bathroom that Filomena and Laura shared, and saw that contrary to what Raffaele had told her, the excrement was still there. She was puzzled and guessed that for some reason or other, Amanda and Raffaele wanted to make sure that she would notice it.
12
Giuliano Mignini, a respected public prosecutor in his late fifties, was packing his cherrywood pipe before taking his dog Argos, a cross between a hunting dog and an Alaskan sled dog, for an early afternoon walk – Mignini was banned from smoking at home by his wife and three teenage daughters – when the detective Chiacchiera called him from the cottage. The prosecutor was on call that week, twenty-four hours a day.
‘We’ve found a girl’s body. She was definitely murdered,’ Chiacchiera told Mignini, a tall, well-built figure in his late fifties with a bald patch and short, curly grey hair streaked with silver.
‘Who is she?’ Mignini asked.
‘We don’t know yet.’
They agreed the officer would pick up Mignini and drive him to the scene. Perugia’s prosecutors often caught rides off the Flying Squad; the twelve prosecutors had only one office car between them, a small Fiat. The squad had many more, some of them confiscated from criminals.
Mignini’s wife Cristina, whom he’d met in the choir of the cathedral where he used to sing as a bass baritone, guessed instantly from her husband’s quiet but forceful tone that there had been a murder; that meant she wouldn’t be seeing much of him over the next few days.
‘That’s the last thing we need,’ Cristina said after he put the phone down.
‘Well …’ Mignini shrugged, anxious to get started.
Moments later, his wife wished him good luck as he walked out of their home, a two-century-old house built on top of the ancient Etruscan wall that circles Perugia.
Unlike his British or American counterparts, Mignini dealt with dozens of cases at the same time, from routine expulsions of illegal immigrants to Mafiosi gangsters trying to settle in Umbria and Muslim preachers supporting terrorism. Placid and courteous – even when flustered in court he rarely raised his voice – he was a determined investigator. ‘He’s tenacious like a bulldog; when he bites he doesn’t let go,’ one local crime reporter said.
When Mignini was a small boy, his father – a teacher of shorthand – had predicted that he might become a judge. Mignini never found out why his father thought that – the boy was four when a car crashed into his thirty-three-year-old father as he rode his Lambretta motorcycle. An officer from the barracks of the carabinieri police, seeing the boy baffled by his mother’s tears, took him in his arms and played with him for a long while. The officer’s kindness is one of Mignini’s most vivid memories and may be one reason why he later wanted to become an officer himself; he chose the air force. But he was rejected because of imperfect vision and became first a lawyer, then a judge, then a prosecutor.
He much preferred the task of discovering the truth behind a crime to playing the judge’s role of arbiter. His fascination was rooted in the tales of Sherlock Holmes and the French fictional detective Jules Maigret which he had read as a teenager. Mignini admired Sherlock Holmes as ‘a philosopher’, making extraordinary deductions from his armchair. He admired Maigret for his honesty and his humanity; he got results because he liked to watch people and work out what made them tick.
Outside the cottage, Mignini looked at Filomena’s window, puzzling over it with Chiacchiera and Napoleoni. He agreed with them that it was an unlikely point of entry for a burglar to choose. The window was too high up for anyone to scale the wall; the wall was bare save for a small nail that would have bent under the weight of an intruder. Besides, the wall was in full view of anyone passing the cottage and even the stupidest burglar would have chosen an easier and more discreet way in, such as a ground-floor window. Alternatively, out of sight at the back of the cottage, a burglar could have easily scaled the metal grating outside the front door to the downstairs flat, climbed onto the terrace and used the table or one of the chairs left out on it to break the glass door leading into the corridor opposite Amanda and Meredith’s rooms.
Mignini slipped on protective gloves and shoe covers and, accompanied by Chiacchiera, walked slowly inside. The Perugia forensic police, dressed in white overalls, were already there and had begun their search for bloodstains, fingerprints and other traces, placing white cards printed with letters of the alphabet to flag anything they thought important. One officer told him that excrement had been found in the bigger of the two bathrooms, off the sitting room. Perhaps an outsider, Mignini thought – surely the four young women living in the flat always flushed the toilet.
He stared around the sitting room and kitchen area; he never took notes at crime scenes, preferring to just look, let his mind wander and absorb what he saw and heard. Through his half-moon glasses, he read some handwritten notices stuck to the fridge – they were bawdy, student-humour jokes. He then glanced at the DVDs on a shelf just above the fridge – Italian comedy classics and Shall We Dance with Richard Gere.
He looked into Filomena’s room and like Napoleoni before him, he noticed the shards of glass on top of the piles of clothes and the large stone on the floor; it was obvious to him too that it could never have come through the window without shattering the shutters. He thought immediately that the window must have been broken by someone standing inside the room.
‘There’s a traitor in this house, someone who participated in the crime or helped to cover it up or who did both,’ Mignini thought to himself. Perhaps the killer had entered through the front door, and staged a fake burglary to throw suspicion on an outsider, assisted by someone living in the cottage – in either of the two flats – who at the very least, acted as an accomplice to the murder.
Mignini walked down the corridor and stopped in the doorway to Meredith’s room. He didn’t go in because there was too much blood; besides, he didn’t want to risk touching anything. The foot that emerged from under the quilt looked pale, unnaturally so; the blood on the floor was the colour of dark chocolate and had apparently been there for some time. Mignini noticed the knickers, the bra and the pot of Vaseline on the desk and thought the motive for the murder might have been sexual. He stared at a trace of blood on the wall, which looked as if it had been made by the victim as she tried to steady herself.
He puzzled over the quilt covering the body. Why would a thief bother to delay his escape long enough to cover the body of his victim, he wondered. It had to be a mark of pity, which meant some form of relationship between the killer and the victim. Maybe there was a female hand in the murder, he speculated; a woman who knew the victim and felt pity for her naked, mangled body. Mignini thought of a popular French saying: ‘Cherchez la femme’ – look for the woman.
Mignini asked Luca Lalli, a bearded, heavily built forensic pathologist from the University of Perugia whom the Flying Squad had summoned, to go into the room but to touch the body as little as possible for now; he wanted the forensic police to do their job first. Lalli cro
uched down and established simply that rigor mortis – the stiffening of the joints and muscles that begins a few hours after death – had settled in the left ankle and toes. Lalli told Mignini that he needed to examine the body and above all to take its temperature to help estimate the time of death – the more time went by, the less data he would be able to gather – but the prosecutor was firm. Mignini insisted that he couldn’t risk modifying or contaminating the crime scene and losing any biological traces. He was adamant that both the local forensic police, and the elite forensic unit which was on its way from Rome, should do their work first.
The flat was crowded by now, what with the forensic police milling about and placing their letter cards, so Mignini went outside. A detective kicked the locked door of the semi-basement flat open, and Mignini and Napoleoni went in, the prosecutor worrying there might be another body there. They saw small traces of blood on a quilt, a bed, a pillowcase, a sofa and on the floor. Mignini had no idea what that blood meant; there was no indication that anyone had broken in. Did it mean one or more of the students living there had been involved in the murder in some way?
The prosecutor talked to Filomena, who told him that Amanda’s account of that morning made little sense to her. She also told him about Meredith and her sick mother – how Meredith always had her English mobile on her so she could talk to her mother, and about her planned trip to London to see her. Filomena’s words moved Mignini; he thought with sadness of what the news of her fate would do to her sick mother.
A detective pointed Meredith’s flatmates out to Mignini. ‘The girl Amanda’s saying a lot of strange things,’ the detective said.
‘Let’s try and make sense of what she says,’ Mignini said.
The prosecutor glanced at Amanda – she was pretty, a fresh-faced beauty. Mignini asked her a few questions and fascinated as always by body language, noticed that she occasionally put both hands up to press her temples and then shake her head. It was as if, he thought, she wanted to empty her mind of something.
That afternoon, as journalists who’d heard the news gathered in the road just above the cottage, a TV camera caught one of Amanda and Raffaele’s embraces. Amanda, her eyes closed, raised her slightly parted lips to Raffaele’s and they kissed three times in quick succession. Then they each gave the other a quick, light rub on the back.
Shortly after 3 p.m., Napoleoni asked Meredith’s flatmates and their boyfriends to go to the police station for questioning. She asked Luca to drive Amanda and Raffaele there.
As they skirted the city centre, Raffaele asked Luca bluntly: ‘Is she dead?’
‘Yes,’ Luca said. He was surprised that Raffaele hadn’t worked it out for himself. It seemed obvious to him given that the forensic police were there, that no ambulance had come to take anyone away.
‘How did the girl die?’ Raffaele then asked.
‘Well, from what I heard they cut her throat,’ Luca said.
‘But with a knife?’ Raffaele asked again.
Luca, irritated by the question, replied curtly: ‘Yes.’ Luca thought to himself: ‘What did Raffaele think? That Meredith’s throat had been cut with a piece of bread?’ It had to be a sharp weapon, a knife or a sword or something. He thought that perhaps Raffaele was in shock, and that was why he was asking stupid questions.
Amanda, head bowed, made a brief sound as if she was crying.
They drove the rest of the way in silence.
13
In the Flying Squad’s offices on the third floor of Perugia’s police station, Napoleoni briefed her colleagues on the little she knew ahead of the rounds of questioning they were about to begin. She argued that the first step should be to find as many friends or acquaintances of Meredith’s in Perugia as possible. The search should focus on a male attacker given the apparent sexual nature of the murder – most likely someone whom Meredith had either allowed into the house or someone she knew. The search was definitely not for a burglar, because Napoleoni was convinced the burglary had been staged. Over the next few hours, the number of Perugian police working on the case grew to over fifty, and several more arrived from the Central Operations Service in Rome, which works on high-profile and mafia cases.
As they sat on white plastic chairs in the waiting room outside the Flying Squad’s offices, Filomena asked Amanda about that morning. Amanda sometimes hesitated when replying. Filomena noticed how Raffaele jumped in to explain what Amanda wanted to say, effectively acting as her interpreter.
Amanda continued to make little sense to Filomena and she asked Raffaele: ‘How’s it possible that Amanda gets to the house, finds the door open, there’s blood in the bathroom and she has a shower? Surely you would run into the street and call for help first, or you call me first. But how on earth could you have a shower without checking the house?’
‘She’s irresponsible,’ Raffaele replied.
‘You’d have to be massively irresponsible,’ Filomena retorted.
Later, Filomena saw Amanda pull a big notebook out of her bag and, head bowed, write in it at length. She then showed it to Raffaele, pointing a section out with her pen. They did this several times in silence, Raffaele nodding or shaking his head. Filomena thought it was odd.
Filomena kept asking Amanda why she hadn’t called the police immediately – she couldn’t help thinking that if Amanda had called an ambulance, Meredith might still be alive.
Amanda was among the first to be questioned by detectives. She told them she had last seen Meredith at about 3 or 4 p.m. the previous day when Meredith had left the cottage; Amanda had no idea where she was going. Amanda was with Raffaele at the time, and they had stayed at the cottage until 5 p.m. when they went to his flat. They spent the whole night there, and at 11 a.m. the next morning she had gone back to the cottage. Earlier, she had told Napoleoni that she had got back home at about 10 a.m.
She then described the morning’s events as she had earlier; she’d discovered the broken window only after she’d gone to fetch Raffaele, and had decided to call the carabinieri after Raffaele phoned his sister for advice. Amanda said that Raffaele had told her that the body of a girl covered by a sheet had been found in the cupboard, and that the only thing that could be seen was a foot.
In his statement to police, Raffaele confirmed all that Amanda had said. The only variation he made was to point out that he had found the toilet clean, while Amanda had told him it hadn’t been flushed.
At her home in Surrey at about 5 p.m., Meredith’s mother Arline saw on the TV news that a British girl student had been found murdered in Perugia. She called John, her sixty-four-year-old ex-husband, and he tried to stay calm by focusing on the fact that there were thousands of British students in Perugia. He too tried calling Meredith on her mobile. John tried about a dozen times but all he got was the answering machine telling him to leave a message. He kept trying and at about 5.30 p.m., Meredith’s phone started ringing when he called it. John felt relieved, thinking she had switched the phone back on. But there was no answer although he kept trying for another half hour.
As he had worked for many years as a freelance journalist for the Daily Mirror, he called its foreign desk at about 6 p.m. But his colleagues had heard little and told him to call again in an hour’s time in case they managed to find out more. Meredith’s sister Stephanie also tried to contact her, sending several text messages after Arline told her about the news on TV. ‘Mez, call us as soon as you wake up. We’re worried, an English girl’s been killed,’ Stephanie texted her sister.
When John called the Daily Mirror again, a colleague had some news for him: the Italian police had found the girl’s phone and had contacted people in London. John again felt relieved: surely her family and the British police had been informed by now?
Half an hour later, a woman from the newspaper called him back. She told John they had heard a name. She hesitated, apparently reluctant to tell him more.
Then she said: ‘The name going around Italy is Meredith.’
John d
ropped the phone. At first he couldn’t believe it, he was sure someone had made a mistake. But he quickly realised it was probably true. Numb with shock, he couldn’t cry.
Meredith’s friend Sophie was still working on her chemistry lecture notes, in her pyjamas, when Cornelia, a friend from the university’s Erasmus student exchange office, called her at about 5 p.m.
‘Hello Sophie, how are you? How was Halloween?’ Cornelia asked.
Sophie told her what she’d been up to.
‘Do you have a friend called Meredith?’ Cornelia asked.
‘Yeah, she’s my friend. I was with her on Halloween,’ Sophie said, thinking that perhaps Cornelia knew Meredith too.
‘Does she have a boyfriend?’ Cornelia asked.
This is weird, Sophie thought. ‘Why, do you know Meredith?’
Cornelia went quiet for a bit. Then she said: ‘I’m really sorry but a girl called Meredith has been found murdered.’
Sophie was too stunned to take in what she’d just heard. Cornelia quickly asked: ‘What’s your friend’s surname?’
‘Kercher,’ Sophie said.
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s her then. Do you mind if I give your number to the police?’ Cornelia said.
‘No, OK,’ Sophie managed to say before they said goodbye to each other.
Sophie didn’t know what to think. As soon as Cornelia got off the phone, Sophie tried to ring Meredith. There was no reply.
Sophie then called Robyn. ‘Robyn, have you heard from Meredith yet?’ Sophie asked.
‘No, I haven’t,’ Robyn said.
‘Right, I’m coming round,’ Sophie said.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 8
