‘These two are crazy,’ Napoleoni thought. She considered telling them off but thought better of it; she didn’t want to make things worse for Meredith’s English friends who looked in such a bad way.
Napoleoni was irritated to learn that of all the people who had been brought in for questioning, Amanda and Raffaele were the only ones to complain they were tired and hungry. Napoleoni herself, like many of her detectives, got no sleep for several days that followed – she would rush home just to have a shower and change her clothes, then rush back to the police station.
‘After what I’d seen at the cottage, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether we had everything covered, let alone sleep,’ Napoleoni said later. From then on, she often talked of the victim as ‘la povera Meredith’ – poor Meredith.
From Amanda’s diary:
And so I’m at the police station now, after a long day spent telling how I was the first person to arrive home and find my compagna [companion] dead. The strange thing is that all I want to do now is write a song about this. It would be the first song I’ve ever written, and it would talk about someone who died in a horrible way and for no motive. How morbid is all this?
I’m dying of hunger. And I would so much like to say that I could kill for a pizza, but it’s just that it doesn’t seem right.
Laura and Filomena are pretty shocked. Raffaele too. I’m angry. At first I was scared, then sad, then confused, then pissed off, and now … I don’t know. I really can’t concentrate with my brain. I didn’t see her body and I didn’t see her blood, so it’s almost as if it didn’t happen. But it happened, right in the room next to mine.
The Homicide Squad kept Meredith’s friends at the police station late into the night. As they talked about the murder, Meredith’s English friends heard Amanda say that Meredith had been alone in the cottage for the first time the previous night, and that the killer ‘must have watched the house from outside to make sure Meredith was alone’.
Amanda and Amy talked briefly about the days ahead. ‘What do you think you’re going to do? Are you going to stay in Perugia?’ Amy asked Amanda.
Amanda had no intention of leaving. ‘This kind of thing happens everywhere, murders happen everywhere,’ she said.
Amanda then turned to her flatmates Filomena and Laura. ‘What shall we do about the house? Will we find another house to go and live in?’
Amy thought to herself: ‘How can she think about another house at a time like this?’
It was gone midnight when the police told Meredith’s English friends they could go. An officer drove Sophie, Amy, Robyn and Natalie to Amy and Robyn’s flat. The four decided to stick together that night; they were all badly shaken, and very scared. They had no idea who had killed Meredith and, whoever the killer was, he was still at large. They were afraid he could seek them out too.
Amy and Robyn started packing their suitcases as soon as they got into their flat – they’d decided to fly back to London in the morning. Sophie would have liked to go with them, but her parents had already told her they’d booked a flight to come to Perugia and fetch her later that day.
Natalie insisted they all eat something and she quickly prepared some spaghetti bolognese. As the friends ate, they discussed what Amanda had said about the discovery of Meredith’s body; they all agreed her behaviour at the police station had been inappropriate, insensitive and annoying. They couldn’t understand how she could act like that.
Shortly after the meal, they were alarmed to hear shouting and banging on the front door to their house. The four were so on edge they rang the police and asked them to come over, but the street soon went quiet again; it was only a couple of drunks.
None of the four could face spending the night on their own, so they carried some quilts into Robyn’s room, spread them on the floor and tried to get some sleep. Sophie managed to doze off for an hour or so before the realisation that Meredith had been murdered yanked her awake at about 4 a.m. She lay awake for hours, thinking. She wondered if the murder had been a random one, but didn’t know what to think.
Amanda and Raffaele spent the whole night at the police station. They took turns resting; Amanda stretched out on several chairs and Raffaele caressed her throat.
At about 4 or 5 a.m., as dawn was about to break, Fabio D’Astolto, an officer who spoke English, saw Amanda pacing nervously up and down a corridor, beating her head with the palms of her hands. She was so agitated that D’Astolto asked himself: ‘God, what if she hits her head against the wall and hurts herself?’
D’Astolto called out to Amanda: ‘Would you like some water? Would you like a coffee?’
‘No, no, no, I don’t need anything,’ Amanda replied.
D’Astolto saw later that she went back to sit next to Raffaele and they started hugging, laughing and kissing again. At about 6 a.m., Filomena and her boyfriend Marco drove Amanda and Raffaele to Raffaele’s home.
That night, Amanda told a relative on the phone: ‘No, they’re not letting me go home, I can’t take that flight.’ Amanda’s family had suggested to her that she could fly home to Seattle.
Later, Edda confided: ‘The biggest mistake of my life was not putting that kid on a plane.’
15
At about 8 p.m. as the Homicide Squad continued to question Meredith’s friends at the police station, Patrizia Stefanoni from the Rome forensic police arrived at the cottage. Stefanoni was an attractive, no-nonsense biologist; thirty-eight years old, she had dealt with dozens of Italy’s most serious crimes in recent years and her team had a strong international reputation. She worked from gleaming modern offices on the outskirts of the Eternal City, situated between an ancient Roman aqueduct and the old Cinecittà studios – known as Hollywood-on-the-Tiber during the dolce vita (sweet life) heyday of Italian cinema in the 1950s and ’60s.
At the cottage, Stefanoni’s forensic police team began by photographing and filming the flat, the scene illuminated by lights the police had brought with them. A photographer used a digital Spheron SceneCam to take a full, high-resolution 360-degree image from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. Without touching the quilt or the body, Stefanoni’s team and their Perugian colleagues made a detailed survey of Meredith’s room, which measured eleven by nine and a half feet.
Black knickers and a white bra – the latter stained with blood, especially on the right strap and on the top outer part of the left cup – lay on the floor a few inches away from Meredith’s right foot. The left shoulder strap of the bra was severed and the cloth and metal clasp at the back had been cut off and was missing. A pair of blue Levi’s jeans lay partly under the quilt and was smeared with blood around the right back pocket. In a big pool of dried blood by Meredith’s head was a blue hot-water bottle and a pair of brown leather boots.
On the bloodstained undersheet of the single bed lay an ivory-coloured towel heavily soaked with blood, a beige fake leather handbag, a big notebook, and a bloodstained Italian history book. On the white desk to the right of the window lay an empty container of Vaseline, an Apple laptop, a notebook and another Italian history book.
Part of the door handle was broken and smeared with blood. To the right of the door, some beauty and hygiene products had fallen over on their wooden shelf. On the opposite side of the room, there were more than twenty bloodstains on the white door of the plywood cupboard. On the inside of the open left door of the cupboard, towards the bottom, was a bloody smear that seemed to have been left by someone’s fingers. There was another similar smear on a wall opposite the door of the room, four feet from the floor, and more bloodstains on the lower part of the desk.
From Meredith’s bedroom, Stefanoni would later take thirty objects and biological samples including the bra, the jeans, the quilt, three blood-soaked towels, samples from the blood on the floor, on the walls and on the door handle, bloodstained fragments she cut from the undersheet, and two blonde hairs – not Meredith’s – from her left hand and from her vagina.
In the small bathroom
next door which Meredith and Amanda had shared, the forensic police found several traces of blood: on the basin, on the tap over the basin, and on a box of cotton buds left on the basin. There was more on the blue mat under the basin, as well as on the bidet, the toilet lid, some floor tiles close to the toilet, the light switch and the door frame.
At the other end of the flat, the switch on the washing machine outside the big bathroom which Filomena and Laura shared was in the ‘on’ position; it had finished running and warm, damp clothes were still inside. Outside the cottage, nine small bloodstains were found on the staircase and on the concrete parapet that ran down to the semi-basement flat.
Stefanoni had the DNAs of her Rome colleagues on file but she took saliva swabs of the Perugia investigators, including Mignini who was smoking his pipe as he waited for her to finish her work. Stefanoni asked no questions about who might have killed Meredith. At crime scenes, she preferred to concentrate simply on the job at hand.
Unknown to Stefanoni, her team had missed a single small object that was to prove a key piece of evidence – the clasp from Meredith’s bra. The Perugian forensic officers had placed a lettercard by the clasp, but Stefanoni’s team failed to see it when they took the bra. It was only several days later, back at their offices in Rome, that the team realised the clasp was missing.
Luca Lalli, the forensic pathologist, had never waited so long at a crime scene. On first arriving, he had been allowed into Meredith’s bedroom only just long enough to establish that rigor mortis was present in her ankles and toes. Since then he had been obliged to wait outside in the garden while the forensic police teams did their job.
Lalli found it hard to be patient: he couldn’t stop worrying about the effect the delay would have on his work. It was never possible to give a precise time of death – only pathologists in Hollywood films could do that – but the more time passed, the more data he would lose and the more vague his estimate would be. From time to time, he asked one of the investigators if he could begin working, but each time he was told to wait until the forensic team had finished.
As he waited, Lalli became first irritated and then exasperated at the failure of the police to drive the journalists, photographers and TV crews away from the garden railing that ran along the street just a few yards from the front door. How could the investigators do their job properly when they were constantly being watched, photographed and filmed from such close quarters? Making things worse, the journalists shouted out questions at Lalli and his assistant Giulia Ceccarelli, who was also his girlfriend: ‘Was the girl raped? How did she die? When did she die?’
‘How on earth are we supposed to know?’ Ceccarelli thought angrily to herself – she and Lalli had only spent a short time inside the cottage.
It was only at about 12.30 a.m. on 3 November, more than eleven hours after Meredith’s body was found, that the forensic police finally told the prosecutor Mignini that Lalli could examine the body.
In Meredith’s bedroom, as Mignini and Stefanoni watched, Lalli took a couple of steps to the edge of the quilt, bent down and, holding it between finger and thumb, lifted it – he noticed it was thick and heavy – to uncover Meredith’s face and breasts. He folded the top of the quilt to one side. Meredith lay on her back, her head turned to the left and slightly bent backwards, her left temple resting against a boot. Her eyes were open and her mouth closed. Her hair was soaked in blood, rivulets of blood streaked her face, and patches of blood covered part of her right cheek, the base of her nose and much of her neck. In the front of the neck was a wound less than an inch long, and on the right side of the neck another wound of the same size.
Lalli gently took hold of Meredith’s head and turned it to her right, revealing a gaping wound in the left side of her neck some three inches long. From the wound emerged what experts called a ‘foam-like mushroom’, a grey and red mix of air and blood which showed Meredith had breathed in her own blood. There were similar ‘mushrooms’ in the nostrils and in the mouth. The left cheek was covered in blood save for three small, roundish areas where the skin was bare. Lalli thought that the weapon that caused the three wounds might be a knife, or a piece of glass, perhaps from the broken window in Filomena’s room.
Mignini leant to one side to examine the wounds on Meredith’s neck and started, stunned by the size of the most serious wound; it was so deep – deeper than any he had ever seen. Mignini was well-accustomed to dealing with corpses, but this time he was moved by Meredith’s beauty and by what had been done to her.
Lalli lifted the quilt completely off Meredith. Her two cotton tops, one light-coloured with short sleeves and the other a long-sleeved beige one, had both been raised above her breasts; blood had splashed onto her chest and the tops were damp to the touch and smeared with blood. A cushion lay under her bottom. Her right arm was outstretched; the hand half-closed and slightly smeared with blood on the back, rested on the edge of the quilt. Her left arm was bent at the elbow. The left hand – stained with blood, especially on the index finger and around the nails – was half-closed and close to her head. Her legs were wide apart. The right leg was folded at the knee at a 100-degree angle and rested on the edge of the quilt. The left leg, which was stretched out, rested on the floor.
Lying on the floor by the body, and previously hidden by the quilt, were two towels, one green and the other ivory-coloured, both completely soaked with blood. There were bloodstains on the white sheet from the bed and on a light blue, zip-up sweatshirt lying by it.
Meredith’s hands were smeared with both blood and hairs. Lalli made a note of the position of the body and, with Mignini’s approval, placed two transparent plastic covers over her hands to protect them and preserve any substances that might be under her fingernails. He couldn’t get a good look at the hands because this would have meant removing the blood on them. He would only do this when he did the autopsy.
Moving Meredith as little as possible, he felt her arms and legs and noted rigor mortis had spread widely. Down the back of the body were the wine-red marks typical of hypostasis, showing the accumulation of fluid or blood in parts of the body due to the lack of circulation after death. The marks paled when he pressed them with his finger, indicating the death had taken place less than forty-eight hours earlier. At 12.50 a.m., Lalli took the body temperature – 22°C – against a room temperature of 13°C. Finally, he took three vaginal swabs and three rectal swabs, which he handed to Stefanoni, and decided to stop there. He didn’t want to lose any vital biological traces he might need to study. He would continue his examination of the body at the morgue later that day.
Meredith’s body was removed from the cottage at about 1.30 a.m. As it was lifted from the floor in her bedroom, Lalli noticed the missing bra clasp under the cushion that had been placed under her bottom. He pointed it out to the forensic police officers who were also in the room.
He had been careful as ever to do his job as dispassionately as possible. Lecturing his university students, he always insisted that a pathologist should never allow himself to feel anything at the crime scene or during an autopsy; if he did, he would do a bad job. He made the point that in his profession, all corpses were equal; you should care as much about an ugly old woman who had died in her sleep as you would for a baby who had been murdered.
But as he walked out of the flat after an hour in Meredith’s room, Lalli turned to his assistant and said in a low voice: ‘Poor girl.’
16
3 November 2007
Just before 7 a.m., Sophie and Natalie walked Amy and Robyn down Corso Vannucci to the stop for the airport bus. Later that morning, Sophie went back to the police station. She realised she’d been wrong not to tell detectives about the marijuana plants, and this time told them all she knew. They also questioned her again about Hicham, the Moroccan chef.
Sophie had been counting on leaving Perugia to fly back home as soon as her parents arrived, but the police called to tell her they needed her to stay on; they would let her know when
she could leave. She couldn’t help wishing she’d left that morning with Amy and Robyn.
After going to bed at 3 a.m. to catch only a few hours’ sleep, Mignini spent the morning of 3 November at the offices of the Homicide Squad with Napoleoni and the other detectives. Meredith’s English friends and others had given accounts of her last days, and of her relationships with her flatmates and various acquaintances in Perugia. But so far Mignini and the police had precious little else to go on.
Mignini – who loved reading history books and saw his job as a bit like that of a historian, working backwards in time to reconstruct the past – couldn’t fathom who would commit such a crime, or why. Could it have been pre-meditated? Was the attack sexually motivated? And if so, was there also a motive for the murder? He ruled out the possibility that it was a ‘crime passionnel’, a fit of jealous rage and a sudden impulse to kill. One detective suggested that because Meredith’s throat had been slit, the killer might be a Muslim, maybe a North African immigrant.
Mignini persisted in thinking as he had at the outset that an insider must have betrayed Meredith, let their accomplice into the cottage and then helped to stage the fake burglary. He was inclined to rule out Filomena – she said she had been with her boyfriend that night – and Laura, who said she had been away visiting her family. That left Amanda and the students in the semi-basement flat; Mignini asked the Homicide Squad to keep a close watch on them. He ordered phone taps on mobiles belonging to Amanda, to Raffaele, to the students in the downstairs flat and to other people who had known Meredith.
Detectives checked her flatmates’ alibis, as well as those of Raffaele and the students in the downstairs flat. Other officers searched the garden of the cottage, using metal detectors in the hope of finding the murder weapon and Meredith’s keys to her room and the front door. All they found were big stones similar to the one in Filomena’s room.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 10
