They trawled the neighbourhood asking if anyone had seen anything suspicious; and collected videos made by all the CCTV cameras belonging to the municipal police. One from a camera placed inside the car park opposite the cottage showed for just one second someone walking on the cottage side of the street, near the gate, at 8.41 p.m. on 1 November. The figure was just a shadowy blur dressed in light-coloured clothes, impossible to identify even as male or female. More officers went from hospital to hospital to see if anyone had been treated for cuts that could be traced to the murder; all they found was a football fan who had hurt himself while cutting some salami for a snack after a match.
At times of stress, Mignini usually liked to walk his dog – he did much of his thinking about cases then – or go to the shooting range where he found firing the two pistols he owned, an Italian Beretta and a Swiss SIG Sauer, deeply relaxing. But now he couldn’t afford to do either; he felt the clock ticking and knew that if he didn’t get any results in the first week, it would be much, much harder to solve the case as time dragged on. He knew from bitter experience that things easily got bogged down if there was no break early on; investigators would become more and more anxious, and less and less lucid. He dropped all his other cases in order to concentrate exclusively on Meredith’s murder.
The pathologist Lalli gave Mignini his first estimate of the time of death – about 11 p.m. on the night of 1 November, or anytime between 10 p.m. and midnight. He based his conclusions on Meredith having had her dinner at 9 p.m. and on her weighing fifty-five kilograms; he also took into account the fact that the quilt covering the body had slowed its cooling. But her English friends had told the Homicide Squad that she had eaten earlier, so the estimate would have to be revised.
It was vital for Mignini to establish whether Meredith had been sexually attacked or not, so at midday Lalli examined the body with a gynaecologist – the day before he was due to carry out the autopsy – in the morgue on the ground floor of the Monteluce general hospital outside Perugia, a former convent. He found no unequivocal signs of sexual violence, which he pointed out didn’t rule out the possibility that Meredith had been forced into a sexual relationship because an attacker could have threatened her and obtained what he wanted without leaving signs of sexual violence on her body.
He did however find purple bruise-like marks in the vagina, and concluded that they indicated sex had taken place and that it had been hurried, before lubrication could take place – possibly against Meredith’s will. There was also more, minute purple bruising around the anus and some dilatation, which could be compatible with constipation, he commented.
That morning Kate Mansey, a 26-year old journalist who had flown in from London, abandoned the crowd of Italian and British colleagues massed by the cottage. Too many hacks, she thought – she would never get a good story there. Mansey, from the Sunday Mirror, decided to look for a friend of Meredith’s – ideally a boyfriend or a flatmate. She set off towards Piazza Grimana, asking anyone who looked like a student whether they knew her.
Carrying her laptop in a rucksack on her back, and a thick bunch of newspapers under an arm, she went up to complete strangers and asked, in rather shaky Italian: ‘Sono giornalista d’Inghilterra. Conoscere Meredith Kercher? (I am journalist from England. Know Meredith Kercher?)’ She had studied Italian in her first year at Leeds University – where Meredith had been studying.
Several of those she went up to replied in English. One gave Mansey a number for an American called ‘Amanda’. She tried the number but without success. By about 1 p.m., she was almost ready to give up. She had talked to a dozen groups of students and had nothing to show for it, she’d done a lot of walking, the laptop and newspapers felt heavier and heavier, and her hands were freezing.
As she walked up Corso Garibaldi – nothing in particular had led her there – she spotted a young man with glasses and a floppy fringe who looked a bit scruffy; his duffel coat hung off his shoulders. Mansey put her question once more.
She had stumbled across Raffaele. ‘Yes. I knew her. I found her body,’ he replied in broken English.
Mansey quickly overcame her surprise to say: ‘Can I talk to you? Would you like a coffee?’
Raffaele again surprised Mansey by agreeing to talk to her. They walked into a bar and Raffaele asked for an espresso. Mansey invited him to sit down but he stayed standing, shifting his weight from foot to foot, while she sat down. He sat down a few minutes later.
Mansey was only three years older than Raffaele, but he seemed like a lost little boy to her. As they talked, in English, he kept pushing his glasses up his nose and fiddling with his mobile phone. He seemed nervous except for his face, which had a calm expression.
Mansey kept asking him if he was ok. ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ she repeated. She worried about him; he had been through a traumatic event but he wasn’t showing any emotion – he was quite blank, as she put it later. Perhaps he was in shock, she thought. The only time Raffaele did show emotion was when she checked small details with him – his age, or the spelling of ‘Sollecito’ and ‘Knox’ – which irritated him. He blew his cheeks out in frustration.
In a flat, emotionless voice, Raffaele described what Amanda had told him she’d seen when she first walked into the bathroom. ‘Spots of blood … The bathroom was speckled with blood,’ he said. He repeatedly flicked his fingers as if flicking the blood.
Amanda had then brought him to the cottage. ‘We went into the bedroom of Filomena and it had been ransacked, like someone had been looking for something.’ He continued: ‘It seems her killer came through the window because it was smashed and there was glass all over the place. It was so sinister because other parts of the house were just as normal.’
Mansey asked him about the discovery of the body.
‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,’ he said. ‘It was hard to tell it was Meredith at first but Amanda started crying and screaming. I dragged her away because I didn’t want her to see it, it was so horrible.’
Raffaele said he had followed the police into Meredith’s room. ‘There was blood everywhere and I couldn’t take it all in,’ he said. ‘My girlfriend was her flatmate and she was crying and screaming, “How could anyone do this?”
‘Tell me about what happened that night,’ Mansey said.
‘Meredith had been out at the Halloween party,’ Raffaele said.
Mansey corrected him, saying this had been the night before the murder. ‘So what was she doing on that night?’ she asked.
‘I was out with Amanda at a party and Meredith was at a Halloween party with her friends,’ Raffaele said.
Mansey corrected him once again. Raffaele looked irritated. ‘Amanda and I had been out to a party and we went back to my place,’ he said.
‘Who were you with?’ Mansey asked.
‘One of my friends,’ Raffaele replied.
‘You’re sure it wasn’t Halloween night?’
‘No, no, it was that Thursday night,’ Raffaele insisted – the night of the murder. Mansey thought he was probably confused.
‘What was Meredith like?’ Mansey asked.
‘Meredith was always smiling and happy. She was normal,’ he said. Pressed by Mansey, he added: ‘She was a really good person, she studied. She was really calm, she was so normal.’
Mansey noticed that Raffaele kept using the word ‘normal’. Raffaele and Amanda’s actions had been ‘normal’, it was ‘normal’ that the police should want to speak to him. Mansey was also struck by the interest Raffaele showed in her newspapers – he seemed desperate to see them. He asked to look at them and then thanked her over and over again before scanning the articles about the murder.
Mansey pointed to a sketch of a man and a woman standing over a body, which was sprawled out on a bed. ‘Is this right? Is this how you found her? And who is the girl with you in the picture?’ she asked.
‘It is right but it’s not if you know. It’s a cartoon but yes I was there with Amanda.’
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br /> Mansey said he could have the papers, and he thanked her. She asked whether he could call Amanda for her.
But Raffaele said he had to go. He had left the police station only half an hour earlier. ‘Amanda is still with them, she’s with the police. I know they wanted her to show them something, I don’t know what. I’m going to her soon.’
Mansey’s photographer took a picture of Raffaele out in the street. He was smiling as he posed for the picture.
‘You probably shouldn’t be smiling,’ Mansey told him. ‘Can we do a serious one?’
The two shook hands and Mansey wished him the best for the future. Later, she found out that Raffaele lived just a few yards further up the street.
That afternoon, Mignini and Napoleoni returned to the cottage and took Amanda with them, hoping she might be useful, even though they were still puzzling over her story. They asked her to accompany them on a visit to the semi-basement flat, where small traces of blood had been found the previous day. But Amanda was of no help there.
Back at the police station, detectives questioned her for the second day running, but learnt little that was new. She talked a little about her relations with the students in the downstairs flat, and denied ever smoking joints. She described her work at Le Chic, mentioning that a man known as ‘Shaky’ had flirted insistently with her.
In Seattle, Amanda’s mother Edda received a phone call from a cousin. ‘The police are talking to Amanda an awful lot. Are you sure they don’t think she’s a suspect?’ the cousin asked.
The idea was ridiculous to Edda. ‘Oh no, she’s been helping them and that’s why they’ve been talking to her,’ Edda replied.
But Edda thought it might be best for Amanda to come home for a bit; for one thing, she was now homeless in Perugia and her clothes were all in the cottage, which the police had sealed off. Edda called Amanda and asked her: ‘Don’t you want to come home?’
‘No, I’m helping the police. I want to be here to answer their questions and I want to finish school,’ Amanda replied.
Edda didn’t want to tell Amanda to come home; she didn’t order her daughters about. But she decided she would fly over herself; at the very least, she could take Amanda some clothes.
Sophie spent the day in her flat, thinking constantly of Meredith as she waited for her parents Terry and Sue to arrive from England. She didn’t feel up to going out so her friend Pisco, the owner of the Merlin Pub, met them in a square and brought them to the flat. It was the first time Sophie had been with both her parents since they’d divorced when she was six.
She told them how annoying she’d found Amanda’s coldness at the police station.
‘She knows. She’s involved,’ Terry said at once.
‘Dad, you can’t say things like that! Don’t be ridiculous,’ Sophie said.
At about 7 p.m., Carlo Scotto di Rinaldi, owner of the Babbol clothes shop off Perugia’s main square opposite the cathedral, noticed a young couple walking around his store, caressing, kissing and embracing each other in such a way that customers kept looking at them. The young woman chose a thong and a pullover and, as they neared the till to pay for them, the owner overheard the young man tell her in English: ‘Later you’ll put them on at home and we’ll have hot sex …’
A few days later, the shop-owner recognised the couple as Amanda and Raffaele. He called the police, thinking that what he’d seen might be of use, and handed over footage from the shop’s CCTV.
17
4 November 2007
On the Sunday following the discovery of Meredith’s body, Amanda sent a long, detailed email to her parents, sister, relatives and friends. In all, twenty-five people, chiefly in Seattle, received what she called ‘my account of how I found my roommate murdered.’ Amanda began with the morning of Meredith’s last day:
The last time I saw Meredith, English, beautiful, funny, was when I came home from spending the night at a friend’s house. It was the day after Halloween, Thursday. I got home and she was still asleep, but after I had taken a shower and was fumbling around the kitchen she emerged from her room with the blood of her costume (vampire) still dripping down her chin. We talked for a while in the kitchen, how the night went, what our plans were for the day. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Raffaele arrived to have lunch with Amanda.
As we were eating together, Meredith came out of the shower and grabbed some laundry or put some laundry in, one or the other and returned in her room after saying hi to Raffaele. After lunch I began to play guitar with Raffaele and Meredith came out of her room and went to the door. She said bye and left for the day. It was the last time I saw her alive.
Amanda played the guitar a little while longer. Then:
me and Raffaele went to his house to watch movies and after to eat dinner and generally spend the evening and night indoors. We didn’t go out. The next morning I woke up around 10.30 and after grabbing my few things I left Raffaele’s apartment and walked the five-minute walk back to my house to once again take a shower and grab a change of clothes. I also needed to grab a mop because after dinner Raffaele had spilled a lot of water on the floor of his kitchen and didn’t have a mop to clean it up.
She then repeated the story of finding the front door of her house open – she noticed Meredith’s bedroom door was closed ‘which to me meant she was sleeping’ – taking a shower and finding bloodstains in the bathroom.
At first I thought the blood might have come from my ears which I had pierced extensively not too long ago, but then immediately I knew it wasn’t mine because the stains on the mat were too big for just droplets from my ear, and when I touched the blood in the sink it was caked on already. There was also blood smeared on the faucet [tap]. Again, however, I thought it was strange, because my roommates and I are very clean and we wouldn’t leave blood in the bathroom, but I assumed that perhaps Meredith was having menstrual issues and hadn’t cleaned up yet. Ew, but nothing to worry about.
She went to dry her hair in the other bathroom.
It was after I was putting back the dryer that I noticed the shit that was left in the toilet, something that definitely no one in our house would do. I started feeling a little uncomfortable and so I grabbed the mop from our cupboard and left the house.
She went to Raffaele’s home, used the mop with him to clean up the kitchen and then had breakfast. While they ate, she told him about what she had seen and he said she should call one of her flatmates.
After breakfast, Raffaele walked back to the cottage with her, and they found what they later described as evidence of a break-in. Amanda knocked on Meredith’s door.
At first I thought she was asleep so I knocked gently, but when she didn’t respond I knocked louder and louder until I was really banging on her door and shouting her name. No response. Panicking, I ran out onto our terrace to see if maybe I could see over the ledge into her room from the window, but I couldn’t see in. Bad angle … Raffaele told me he wanted to see if he could break down Meredith’s door. He tried, and cracked the door, but we couldn’t open it. It was then that we decided to call the cops.
Her priority for now, she wrote, was to retrieve important papers of hers that were still in the cottage and find somewhere to live – ‘it kind of sucks that we have to pay the next month’s rent,’ she complained. She expected to continue her studies the next day:
I guess I’ll go back to class on Monday, although I’m not sure what I’m going to do about people asking me questions, because I really don’t want to talk again about what happened … I still need to figure out who I need to talk to and what I need to do to continue studying in Perugia, because it’s what I want to do.
One of the recipients of the email, the owner of a bar in Seattle where Amanda had worked, promptly sent it to the city’s police, who sent it on to Perugia’s Homicide Squad.
That morning in the morgue of the Monteluce hospital, Lalli and his assistant Ceccarelli began the autopsy, watched for a while by Mignini and four detective
s. Autopsies didn’t unsettle Mignini as they did several of his colleagues, and he didn’t bother to wear a mask. Lalli first made a detailed observation of Meredith’s body and took photographs. He then carefully cleaned the body, washing the blood away so that he could take more precise measurements of the wounds and bruises now that he could see them clearly, and made a revised list.
Lalli counted a total of twenty-three wounds on Meredith’s body. Seven were compatible with cuts caused by a knife; the rest were lesions caused by a bruising action. The most serious wound, on the left side of her neck, was just over three inches long, just as deep and a maximum of one-and-a-half inches wide. It was caused by a slightly upward thrust from front to back, going from Meredith’s left to her right.
Lalli found two slight cuts and several bruises on the palm of her right hand, and another cut on her left index finger. There were more bruises on her nose, inside her nostrils, on her mouth, on and below her jaw, and bite marks on the tip and sides of her tongue. Her left elbow was also bruised, as were the small of her back, her left thigh and the lower part of her right leg.
The autopsy revealed the complete severing of the superior right thyroid artery and the breaking of the hyoid bone at the base of the tongue and above the larynx. Lalli attributed the fractured hyoid bone to either an attempt to strangle Meredith, or to a blow from the blade of a knife. Lalli also discovered what he called ‘lakes of blood’ inside the lungs – Meredith had breathed in a great deal of her own blood, an indication that it had taken her several minutes to die. The bruises on her nose, inside her nostrils and inside her lips were compatible with an attacker clamping a hand over her mouth and nose, in an apparent attempt to suffocate her.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 11
