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

by Follain, John

  As he scrutinised the body, Lalli fielded questions on his mobile phone from Marco Chiacchiera, the deputy head of the Flying Squad, calling him from the cottage. Chiacchiera’s questions were blunt, as he knew the autopsy would take a long time and he was anxious for any clues as to what to look for. Lalli’s replies were cautious, as was to be expected from a pathologist just starting work.

  ‘Was she killed with one knife or more than one knife?’ Chiacchiera asked.

  ‘It’s possible a small knife was used to inflict the smaller wounds but I don’t know whether the same knife could have been used for the biggest wound.’

  ‘Was she sexually assaulted?’

  ‘There are signs of dilatation, both vaginal and anal.’

  ‘Was she attacked from in front or behind?’

  ‘If you want my opinion, someone held the girl from behind with his hands under her jawbone and she was then stabbed by someone standing in front of her.’

  Mignini was convinced that the positions of the injuries on the body showed without doubt there had been more than one attacker. He pointed to the wounds on the front, left and right of Meredith’s neck and asked Lalli: ‘Look here, surely these were caused by two different knives?’

  ‘Well, my guess is that they were caused by the same knife,’ Lalli replied, pointing with his index finger to show how he believed each of the three wounds had been inflicted.

  The autopsy lasted eight hours, during which Lalli removed portions of the neck, genital area and stomach, which he preserved in formalin. After the autopsy, he concluded that Meredith had died from cardio-respiratory failure due to asphyxiation caused by an attempt to strangle or suffocate her, and to a subsequent haemorrhage from the biggest wound to the neck, ‘caused by a pointed and cutting weapon’. The wound hadn’t touched her carotid artery, which meant it had taken Meredith several minutes to die.

  In the early afternoon, while Lalli was still at work and as Mignini and the Homicide Squad were becoming increasingly worried that their investigation was making little progress and risked becoming stalled, detectives summoned Meredith’s flatmates back to the police station in the early afternoon for another round of questioning.

  Napoleoni had been questioning Amanda about her friends and about Meredith’s friends for half an hour when a colleague walked in to tell her that Raffaele was downstairs – Raffaele was insistent, he said, that he should be allowed in to talk to his girlfriend. Napoleoni thought it odd that Raffaele should stick to Amanda so much – they’d only known each other nine days. ‘Maybe he’s obsessed,’ she thought. Or perhaps what Amanda told the police mattered to him – but if so, why? Napoleoni decided to let him, but only because she wanted to make the couple wait together in an office she had bugged.

  At 4.30 p.m., Amanda and Raffaele were shown into the room; the microphone lay hidden in an open cardboard box on top of a cupboard. The microphone however picked up only part of their conversation – they often dropped their voices and noise from a nearby fairground made it difficult to make out what they said.

  Amanda talked to Raffaele about a friend she called ‘Shaky’ who had been ‘sweet’ in finding her work, then added that he was terrifying and crazy when he had to end a relationship with a girl. He harassed women and had once kept her in a room against her will.

  Speaking to someone on her mobile, Amanda complained: ‘I was the only one who was with her so they want to squeeze my brain to make me say things … They asked me to remember who came to the house, who met her. They asked me about her sex life and I said: “What? I don’t know that.” … I’m feeling sick. They yelled at me. I slept only two hours last night … I saw the body [the word is unclear] … under the sheet.’

  She added: ‘It’s only the police who are stressing me out … If they ask me to stay until Christmas, I’ll ask someone for help … I have my studies here … On Monday I’ve got my classes … I can’t be at their disposal all the time.’

  After Raffaele left the police station to go and buy some pizzas, Napoleoni escorted Amanda, Filomena and Laura to the cottage. The investigators wanted the flatmates to check on the knives in the kitchen. They met Mignini at the cottage just as night had fallen. They all put on gloves and shoe covers, then went through the knives; they said there was no knife missing.

  As Mignini showed the young women the knives, Amanda suddenly started to sob. She broke down in tears, her body trembling. It was the first time either Mignini or Napoleoni had seen Amanda in tears. Napoleoni thought Amanda must be upset at being in the cottage for the first time since the day Meredith’s body was found. Amanda was helped to a sofa but she kept crying, so Napoleoni covered her with some jackets to hide her from the TV cameras waiting on the road by the cottage, and took her outside to sit in a car in the drive.

  Filomena was asked whether the clothes still in the washing machine were hers; she glanced inside and said they weren’t. Later, she and Laura said that most of the clothes were Meredith’s, and the rest Amanda’s.

  Back at the police station, Amanda and Raffaele were again left on their own in the bugged office.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Raffaele asked Amanda.

  ‘That I don’t want to be here,’ she replied.

  Raffaele told her funny stories of things that had happened to him at school, and the two laughed. They laughed again when Raffaele started translating Italian insults for Amanda, such as ‘Vaffanculo’ – Fuck off – and ‘Li mortacci tua’ – literally, to your lousy dead ancestors.

  The two became serious for a short while as Amanda described her visit to the cottage and how the police had asked her to check the knives. Then they again started joking and laughing together.

  18

  Once they had finished the autopsy, the pathologist Lalli and his assistant Ceccarelli painstakingly eliminated as far as possible any trace of their work as Meredith’s family, who had flown in earlier that day, were due to come to the morgue to see her. They carefully stitched together the edges of the cuts they had made, including to the neck, and then washed the body. They usually dressed the corpse but they had none of Meredith’s clothes, so they simply spread a white sheet over her, leaving her face uncovered and closed her eyes.

  The stitches and wounds on the neck were still very visible. Lalli and Ceccarelli tied a white handkerchief around Meredith’s neck but it only partly covered them. Then Ceccarelli combed Meredith’s hair, and arranged some pink roses sent by the mayor in vases on the floor next to her. She was moved by Meredith’s beauty, and her youth; it was odd, but her body seemed to have the same smell as the roses.

  When Meredith’s parents Arline and John and her sister Stephanie arrived at the morgue to formally identify the body, accompanied by Mignini and Moira MacFarlane, the British consul in Florence, Lalli was impressed by how dry-eyed and dignified Meredith’s family was. He was used to seeing what he called ‘Neapolitan melodramas’: relatives weeping, screaming and sometimes even berating the body of their loved one. Sometimes he had to hold screaming relatives back from the corpse.

  John himself was surprised to see that many of the people who greeted him at the morgue were close to tears. He decided not to go and see his daughter. ‘It would have put a full stop to my memory of her,’ he said later. He recalled the last time he’d seen her, when they’d met for coffee on her last trip to London and she’d showed him some boots she’d bought for the winter: ‘I want that to be the one memory of my daughter that I hold in my mind for ever.’

  Before taking Arline and Stephanie in, Lalli warned them that Meredith was naked under a sheet, explaining that he didn’t have any of her clothes. The relatives were then accompanied into the room where Meredith lay.

  ‘Can I go up to her?’ Arline asked Mignini.

  Mignini nodded, surprised that she had asked.

  Arline reached out as if to lift the sheet but Lalli gently advised her not to. The wounds were to the neck, he explained, and it might be better if she didn’t see them. Arli
ne nodded.

  ‘Can I kiss her?’ Arline asked Mignini.

  ‘Yes, of course, you can,’ the prosecutor said. Arline’s request moved him so much he made his excuses and went outside.

  Arline bent down over Meredith’s face and kissed her daughter on the forehead.

  Soon after her return to her home in Northampton, Meredith’s friend Robyn Butterworth was questioned again, this time by English police, and her statements were quickly sent on to the Homicide Squad in Perugia.

  From Robyn, Napoleoni learnt more about the man called ‘Shaky’ whom Amanda had described to Raffaele as terrifying and crazy in their bugged conversation at the police station. His real name was Hicham Khiri; a Moroccan, he worked as a chef and he was the one who’d once pulled his trousers down and shown Meredith his pants as they danced in a nightclub.

  But that lead led nowhere. Napoleoni established that Hicham had nothing to do with the murder, and began to suspect that Amanda had perhaps been trying to throw suspicion on him.

  Detectives kept poring through the photographs taken on Halloween night and quizzed Meredith’s friend Sophie, who had stayed on in Perugia, about the men in the photographs and about Giacomo and other friends of Meredith’s including Pisco, the owner of the Merlin Pub. The detectives tracked down an American student pictured next to Meredith on Halloween dressed as Harry Potter. He said his costume was so popular that lots of women had their picture taken with him. He’d seen Meredith’s picture in the newspapers but he didn’t remember ever meeting her, or having his picture taken with her. His name was taken off the list of possible suspects.

  Napoleoni also eliminated as suspects Meredith’s boyfriend Giacomo and the three other students in the semi-basement flat. Their alibis – that they had been away visiting their families on the Adriatic Coast – all checked out. Detectives also established, with the help of their forensic colleagues, that the bloodstains on the staircase outside the cottage and in the semi-basement flat had been left by a black cat the students owned who had injured an ear.

  From Giacomo’s friends, Napoleoni learnt that he was with them on the train back to Perugia when Filomena called him on the afternoon the body was found to tell him Meredith was dead. Giacomo had blanched, thinking immediately that she had been killed in a car crash, but Filomena told him she had been murdered. He was too shocked to ask any questions. ‘I’m coming,’ was all he managed to say.

  While questioning Giacomo’s flatmate Stefano Bonassi together, Mignini and Napoleoni learnt that recent visitors to the cottage included a young man nicknamed ‘The Baron’, a ‘South African’ who had a gym-toned body and was strongly attracted to Amanda. Bonassi couldn’t remember his name, but he did remember seeing ‘The Baron’ with his flatmates at their home one night: he was very drunk, went to the toilet and fell asleep there without flushing it. Over the next few days Napoleoni tried to track down ‘The Baron’ – she remembered that someone had failed to flush the toilet in Meredith’s flat around the time she was killed. It was only much later that Napoleoni found out that ‘The Baron’ was Rudy.

  Anxious to resolve a host of practical matters after their home had been sealed off by police, Filomena and Laura arranged to meet Amanda at the flat where Laura was staying. She arrived with Raffaele. They discussed how they could recover their belongings from the cottage, whether they would have to pay the rent for that month, how to go about finding a new home, and how to deal with requests for interviews from the media – they all agreed to reject them.

  But Amanda’s flatmates were still puzzled by her account of the morning she had returned to the cottage and they asked her one question after another, with Raffaele helping to translate. How could she have had a shower, after finding the front door open and blood in the bathroom? Amanda gave a lengthy reply, which Raffaele summarised in a couple of sentences; he said that she had done it absentmindedly.

  Filomena and Laura were surprised to learn that detectives had asked Amanda about Meredith’s sex life.

  Raffaele claimed to know the reason: in an ice-cold tone, he said it was because Meredith’s body had been found completely covered in Vaseline.

  That evening, Raffaele drove Amanda to a flat where two of his friends were watching the Juventus – Inter Milan soccer match on TV. They asked Raffaele about the murder but he replied that he didn’t want to talk about it; he had been to the police station and he was stressed out.

  Amanda hadn’t met Raffaele’s friends before and didn’t speak to them, spending most of the time on her mobile; when she spoke to Raffaele, it was only in English. The two friends both noticed that the couple didn’t look upset by Meredith’s death; they kissed and caressed each other continuously.

  19

  5 November 2007

  Amanda began the week following Meredith’s murder by going to her 9 a.m. Italian class on Monday, as she had before the death. But this was to prove little relief, as at the beginning of the lesson the teacher mentioned the murder; Amanda, sitting at her desk, bent forward and rested her head on her arms. The teacher talked to Amanda after the lesson and she complained that police had sealed off the cottage and she couldn’t get to her clothes.

  She complained again at lunchtime when, outside the university, she bumped into Patrick, the owner of the Le Chic bar where she worked.

  ‘How are you?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘We spent a long, long time with the police. It’s really very tiring. I’m tired,’ she said.

  The university had asked Patrick to help them find an English-speaking student willing to talk about life in Perugia, so he asked Amanda if she would do it.

  ‘Me and my flatmates, we’ve agreed not to talk to anyone,’ Amanda said. She gave Patrick a hug and added: ‘Patrick, you’re a good man, you’ve helped me a lot; you can call me anytime. I’ve got to go to my friend’s place, I’m tired.’ She then walked away.

  Ninety miles away in the heart of Florence, a short walk from the old jewellery shops squatting on top of the Ponte Vecchio over the river Arno, Meredith’s parents, Arline and John, and her sister Stephanie, walked into the office of Francesco Maresca, a lawyer who had been recommended to them by the deputy consul Jane Ireland.

  Ireland had advised Meredith’s family to get a lawyer because, under the Italian system, this would enable them to follow the investigation closely – a lawyer could have access to the files of the case, and could seek briefings from the prosecutor – and to play an active role in a trial if there ever was one, questioning witnesses in court.

  Maresca, who’d turned forty-seven the previous day, was the son of a carabiniere general and had himself served as a carabiniere during his military service and before deciding to become a lawyer. A keen sportsman and motocross enthusiast – he had once dreamt of becoming a professional surfer – Maresca was more used to defending alleged murderers than their victims or their families. His clients had included mafia gangsters – he’d been to meals in Sicilian restaurants at which each Mafioso placed a gun on the table by his plate – and a paedophile; the photographs in that police file were so awful that Maresca, married with a young daughter, had only been able to look at them once.

  Maresca sat the Kerchers down on the other side of his desk, facing him and his colleague, Serena Perna. Behind Maresca was a massive bookcase with a red and gold sign propped up on top of it which had once hung in a church and read: Plenary Indulgence. To the Kerchers’ left, framed by heavy red velvet curtains, the windows looked out on the imposing, fifteenth-century Palazzo Strozzi.

  Maresca briefly expressed his sympathy; the Kerchers just nodded. The lawyer was struck by how shattered Arline looked and by her gentle manner; it was almost as if she didn’t understand where she was or what was happening. Arline seemed to be struggling to find a reason for Meredith’s death. John also looked bewildered and was clearly trying to smile, making a couple of wry jokes as if wanting to lighten the atmosphere. Stephanie, who sat between her parents, was the most collected of the three and
she often helped them to understand what Maresca said.

  ‘What happened? What did they do to Mez?’ Arline asked Maresca.

  The question took Maresca by surprise. He’d read stories in the newspapers about the wounds inflicted on Meredith, the possibility that she had been sexually abused, and the speculation that friends of hers might be involved, but he knew little else. He told Arline what he did know, promising he would find out more from the investigators soon.

  Over coffee from the office espresso-maker, they asked Maresca what was going to happen in the coming weeks and months: what was the procedure for the investigation, and what if someone was arrested and there was a trial? Maresca gave them a brief explanation of the Italian system – if someone was accused of the murder, a preliminary hearing lasting maybe several weeks would decide whether he should go on trial. If the judge at the hearing decided there should be a trial, the trial itself might last a year or more.

  The Kerchers looked surprised; they were used to the British system in which trials were much swifter. The two Englishwomen became tearful as Arline said something to her daughter and Stephanie said quietly: ‘But we want to know the truth about what happened. Why would anyone want to hurt her? Did she suffer? Was she raped? How was she killed?’ Arline and Stephanie quickly wiped away their tears. The Kerchers found the system baffling, and kept asking for more explanations.

  As the meeting drew to an end, Maresca asked if the Kerchers wanted him to start working for them immediately or whether they wanted to think about it. The family appointed him and Perna there and then. After more cups of coffee, the lawyers promised to send them daily updates on the investigation, and the family then left to catch a flight back to London. Moved by their suffering and by their self-control, Perna kissed the three Kerchers on the cheek as they said goodbye.