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

by Follain, John

  What Sophie learned from news reports about Amanda’s role made sense to her – part of Amanda’s statements to investigators had been leaked immediately by the media. But she still didn’t understand how or why Meredith had died. Patrick’s arrest however did shock Sophie; she’d read about his girlfriend and his young son, and to her he didn’t seem to fit in.

  When the police finally told Sophie she could leave, she flew home with her parents. She had decided to cut short her year in Perugia; she simply couldn’t face staying on.

  22

  7 November 2007

  Woken in her cell in the Capanne prison at 7.30 a.m., Amanda ate only a little of her breakfast of bread and coffee. She spent much of her first full day in jail stretched out on her bed, thinking for hours at a time, sometimes in tears. She found some relief writing in a large notebook she had requested.

  On the first page, in black ink and tall, neat letters, Amanda wrote: ‘My PRISON DIARY’. She put down her home in Seattle – not the cottage, or the prison – as her address and wrote: I’m writing this because I want to remember.

  ‘Good morning, I’m Father Saulo. How are you?’ the meek-looking, grey-bearded priest Saulo Scarabattoli, the chaplain for the women’s section, greeted Amanda. He shook her hand awkwardly through the bars of the cell door.

  ‘OK thanks, how are you?’ Amanda replied.

  ‘Would you like to talk to a Catholic priest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Father Saulo thought she would probably have said ‘yes’ to anyone who offered to talk to her, she looked so desperate.

  A guard unlocked the cell door and escorted Amanda across the corridor to a room that was bare apart from a desk and two chairs and she sat down opposite the priest. The guard left the door ajar and stood nearby; the rule was that the door would be closed only when the priest was hearing confession.

  To Father Saulo, who was in his mid-sixties and invariably dressed in navy blue, the look in Amanda’s eyes was typical of the dozens of new arrivals he had met over the past twelve years he’d worked as prison chaplain – the lost look, as he described it, of someone who had been thrown into a pool of icy water and, struggling to remain afloat, was desperately seeking something to hold on to.

  As a priest, Father Saulo saw his role first and foremost as a mission – that of trying to bring hope to the prisoners. He liked to quote St Paul to them: ‘And we know that all things work together for the good of those that love God.’ But beyond his faith, he couldn’t help feeling sympathy for each and every one of them, whatever the crime they were accused of; he offered them a helping hand and did them favours when he could, like calling a relative for them.

  Usually Father Saulo knew nothing about new prisoners when they arrived at the jail; he always skipped the crime stories in the local paper. He never asked a prisoner what she’d done; he asked her instead what she was accused of. He compared his task to that of a doctor; his job was to heal people who’d had an accident, not to find out how the accident happened. But like everyone else in Perugia, he’d heard about the Kercher case; he’d glanced at the newspaper placards, and people chatted about it when he stopped for coffee in a bar.

  As he talked to Amanda, Father Saulo was careful not to mention Meredith’s murder. Amanda didn’t mention it either. He asked Amanda about herself and her family, and she asked if she could go to Mass in prison; he said yes, of course. Father Saulo found it impossible to imagine Amanda murdering Meredith. She looked like a babe in arms to him; her manner and the way she spoke strongly marked her out from the other prisoners, most of whom were from deprived backgrounds.

  Early that morning, after first walking his dog, a still-exhausted Mignini walked along the main Corso Vannucci as he did every morning, and took the escalators that lead down through the dungeon-like foundations of the Rocca Paolina, a sixteenth-century fortress built by Pope Paul III, to reach his office in an austere, grey stone building downhill from the centre of Perugia. As usual, before going in to work, the prosecutor had dropped in on his elderly mother who lived close by.

  On the walls near his desk, which was cluttered with leaning piles of case files, he’d hung a small crucifix, a copy of the Renaissance Madonna delle Grazie from Perugia’s cathedral and a photograph of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two Sicilian anti-mafia prosecutors who were assassinated in 1992. Near his desk was a small stack of CDs – when alone, he liked to work while playing Wagner’s thunderous opera The Valkyrie. As a boy, he’d stand in front of a mirror, two paintbrushes in his hands, and conduct an imaginary orchestra while Wagner’s music resounded through his home.

  The prosecutor showed Meredith’s father John into his office. John looked crushed, and Mignini couldn’t help thinking of his own daughters.

  ‘When did you last see your daughter?’ the prosecutor began, questioning John as a witness.

  ‘I think in late September or early October, when Meredith came to us to get her winter clothes,’ John replied.

  ‘Did you talk often with your daughter?’

  ‘I spoke to her every evening, or at the most every two days.’

  ‘Did your daughter ever mention to you being worried about something, or that she’d had any unpleasant encounters?’

  ‘No. My daughter has always been untroubled and happy and she never talked to me about having problems with other people.’

  ‘Did she ever talk about the friends who lived with her?’

  ‘Meredith once spoke to me about Amanda in a joking way, as a girl who was very sure of herself and a bit eccentric. Amanda boasted about being a great singer, she said that if she’d had a guitar she’d have shown Meredith her talent.’

  ‘Did she ever talk to you about Amanda’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito?’

  ‘All that Meredith said was that Amanda had been there just a week and she already had a boyfriend.’

  ‘Tell me about the last evening you spoke to Meredith.’

  ‘It was on 1 November at 2 p.m. [3 p.m. in Italy] and we were on the phone for about two minutes. She called me at 2 p.m. that day; we didn’t talk long so as not to make her spend too much. When we talked, Meredith would tell me what she’d done that day, including the time she spent with her friends. Meredith always called me in the evening, partly because it cost a bit less.’

  ‘That day, did you try to call her again?’

  ‘No, not as far as I can remember. I called her only on Friday … when I found out about the death of an English girl in Perugia, but at first the number couldn’t be reached, then it rang but there was no answer. I repeat, Meredith was a sunny, cheerful girl, and she never had any problems with anyone and she loved her family very much, especially her mother also because of her illness.’

  After he’d heard John, Mignini also questioned his ex-wife Arline and Meredith’s sister Stephanie. Stephanie told the prosecutor that Meredith had never talked to her of the men she had met in Perugia, and had never mentioned either Patrick or Raffaele. ‘I can only say that my sister had a lot of common sense, she was careful,’ Stephanie said.

  In his meetings with Meredith’s family, Mignini got the impression that what mattered to them above all – more even than finding the murderer or murderers, and more than seeing them punished – was to find out the truth about her murder. They seemed to feel no hatred for whoever had killed her.

  Later, as he briefed the Kerchers’ lawyer, Maresca, about the investigation, Mignini told him: ‘This murder is typically Perugian.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Maresca asked.

  ‘It’s a feeling I’ve got about the way the killers fled the cottage. It’s as if this murder could only have happened in Perugia because the city is so small – the killers moved quickly from one part of the city to another, they probably got to their homes in just a few minutes. And no one saw them. That couldn’t have happened in a big city like Rome,’ Mignini said.

  Maresca kept in close touch with Mignini so that he could keep the Kerchers informed abou
t the investigation; the lawyer briefed the family – mainly Stephanie and her brother Lyle – every day, by phone or by email. The more time passed, the more the family wanted to know why everything was so slow. They wanted Meredith to be flown home as soon as possible, but Maresca told them they must wait for a judge to decide whether or not another autopsy was needed to establish the cause and time of death. The wait was hard on the Kerchers. They emailed Maresca, the bluntness of the message surprising him: ‘When do you think we can have the body?’

  While Meredith’s family was talking to the prosecutor, Amanda’s mother, Edda, was with the lawyer, Ghirga, at his office behind the cathedral. Edda was so upset she started crying as soon as she sat down opposite him at his large, rustic wooden desk. Through her tears, and with a friend of Ghirga’s acting as an interpreter, Edda repeated again and again: ‘Amanda is innocent, Amanda is innocent.’

  Edda told Ghirga about Amanda’s phone calls and her long email, and said she was completely convinced that her daughter was telling her the truth.

  ‘I know my daughter. She would never do a thing like that, not even in a fit of madness. My daughter is innocent; please defend her,’ Edda said.

  The meeting was brief, because Edda was too distraught to talk about Amanda or her time in Perugia in any detail. Ghirga promised he would do the best he could, and took on his thirteenth murder case.

  In her cell, Amanda wrote over two pages her most detailed account so far of the night of Meredith’s murder. ‘Oh my God!’ she began, ‘I’m freaking out a bit now because I just talked to a sister (nun) and I finally remember. It can’t be a coincidence. I remember what I was doing with Raffaele at the time of the murder of my friend! We are both innocent! This is why.’

  Amanda and Raffaele had gone to his flat at about 5 p.m. She checked her email on his computer, read Harry Potter aloud to him in German, and watched Amélie. She told him her friends thought she was like Amélie ‘because I’m a bit of a weirdo, in that I like random little things, like birds singing, and these little things make me happy.’ She received the message from Patrick saying she didn’t have to work that evening. She replied: ‘Ci vediamo. Buona serata.’ (See you. Have a good evening.) After dinner, she gave Raffaele a back massage while he did the washing up. The pipes under the sink suddenly came loose and water flooded the kitchen floor. Raffaele was upset but she told him not to worry, they would clean it up the next day with a mop she would bring from the cottage.

  Raffaele rolled a joint to calm himself down, and Amanda watched him quietly as she lay in his bed. They had a heart-to-heart conversation, with Raffaele talking of the cocaine he had taken in the past and of his mother’s death, and Amanda reassuring him. ‘After our conversation I know we stayed in bed together for a long time. We had sex and then afterwards we played our game of looking at each other and making faces … We fell asleep and I didn’t wake up until Friday morning.’

  Then, for the first time, Amanda apologised for what she’d told the police: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t remember before and I’m sorry I said I could have been at the house when it happened. I said these things because I was confused and scared.’ She hadn’t lied when she said she thought Patrick was the killer: ‘I was very stressed at the time and I really did think he was the murderer. But now I remember I can’t know who was the murderer because I didn’t return back to the house.’

  Amanda handed the two pages to a guard, who gave them to the prison governor; they were then sent to Mignini.

  From Amanda’s prison diary:

  I was in my cell thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking, hoping I would remember … Perhaps a minute [after the sister left] I sat down again to write and try to remember and then it hit me. Everything came back to me like a flood, one detail after another until the moment my head hit my pillow and I was asleep the night Meredith was murdered. I cried I was so happy.

  23

  8 November 2007

  Mignini lost all hope of Amanda ever cooperating again with him as soon as he saw her in the Perugia law courts at a hearing held to decide whether or not she should stay in prison. Amanda avoided the prosecutor’s gaze and huddled with her lawyers, talking intensely to them. To all appearances, she was already building a close relationship with them. Her family had hired both Ghirga and the Rome lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova, who had worked with the US Embassy in the capital.

  Amanda hadn’t met her lawyers before the hearing and they had their first chance to talk to her when the judge, Claudia Matteini – nicknamed ‘the Iron Lady’ by one local newspaper for the rigorous way she applied the law in Perugia’s most serious criminal cases – suspended proceedings for an hour in order to give them time to photocopy and study what documents were available. Ghirga realised immediately that Amanda had no idea what the hearing was about, just as she had no idea what awaited her in the coming weeks or months as far as the Italian judicial system was concerned. To make things worse, Amanda’s Italian was fine for ordering a meal in a restaurant, but legal jargon was a complete mystery to her.

  When the hearing began again, Amanda simply declared she was innocent and refused to answer questions.

  Unlike Amanda, Raffaele agreed to answer questions when he appeared before Judge Matteini shortly after her. He began by turning against his former girlfriend. ‘I don’t want to see Amanda any more,’ Raffaele said when asked about their relationship.

  Raffaele described himself as ‘a worrier’. He added: ‘I smoke cannabis and I smoke every weekend or holiday and every time I feel I need to,’ Raffaele said. He couldn’t remember how many joints he’d smoked on 1 November, the day on which investigators believed Meredith was murdered, but ‘definitely one at Amanda’s house and at my place every time I felt like it.’

  He then changed the version of events he had given to Napoleoni at the police station three days earlier. He had told Napoleoni that he returned to his flat alone at about 9 p.m. after walking around town with Amanda on 1 November. But today, he said that he and Amanda went back to his flat together. Previously, he had also told Napoleoni that his father called him at about 11 p.m. on the flat’s phone; now he said he couldn’t remember whether the call was on that phone or on his mobile. Phone records showed his father had called him at 8.42 p.m. and then sent him a text message which read simply ‘Goodnight’ at 11.14 p.m.; Raffaele got the message only at 6.02 a.m. the next day.

  Raffaele said he had lied when questioned by Napoleoni. ‘I was under pressure and I was very upset; I was shocked and I was scared. I spent the night of 1 November with Amanda … I remember that Amanda must have come back home with me, I don’t remember if she went out that evening.’ He had worked at his computer until midnight, smoking joints.

  He denied the shoe print the forensic police had found in Meredith’s bedroom was his, because he wasn’t wearing shoes like that on the day she died. ‘I completely rule out having gone into the room where [Meredith] was found,’ he insisted.

  Asked about the knife the Flying Squad had found on him, Raffaele replied that he always had a knife on him; he liked to make cuts on trees. ‘I’ve got a collection of knives [back home] in Giovinazzo; I’ve also got unsharpened swords. Knives are a passion of mine. I’ve always had a knife in my pocket since I was thirteen,’ he said. He changed the knives he had on him according to the clothes he wore.

  After Raffaele, it was Patrick’s turn to go before Judge Matteini. He insisted that he had an alibi: he had been working at Le Chic the whole evening of 1 November. He arrived at the bar between 5.30 and 6 p.m. and because it looked like a quiet evening, he texted Amanda at about 8.30 p.m. telling her not to come. He served drinks to some sixteen customers that evening, including a Swiss professor – he couldn’t remember the professor’s name, but he did remember he was staying at the Hotel dei Priori in the centre of Perugia.

  Patrick didn’t see Amanda that evening. He closed the bar after midnight and went straight home. Asked why the first receipt from his till was timed 10.2
9 p.m., Patrick sat in silence for a few minutes. He then said that when there were few customers in the bar, he asked them to pay only when they were leaving.

  He had never quarrelled with Amanda, they had a good relationship. He had never told her that he was attracted to Meredith; he wasn’t, and had never flirted with her. ‘I didn’t go to Amanda’s house. I didn’t kill Meredith. I’m innocent and God knows it,’ Patrick said.

  Patrick, like Amanda and Raffaele, was escorted back to prison after the hearings. Patrick thought of his father, who had been politically active in Zaire and who had been seized when he was nine years old. His family had never had any news of him. Patrick feared he would never hug his baby son again.

  9 November 2007

  In her ruling, Judge Matteini picked through what she saw as contradictions in the accounts of the three accused, and attempted to reconstruct what they did on 1 November, and Meredith’s last moments.

  Amanda and Raffaele, the judge wrote, spent the entire afternoon smoking hashish together. At about 8.30 p.m., while she was at Raffaele’s flat, Amanda received Patrick’s text message. Amanda and Patrick had given contradictory accounts of the message. According to Amanda, Patrick told her the bar would stay closed that evening so she didn’t need to go to work. According to Patrick, he told Amanda he didn’t need her help because there were few customers.

  Rather than simply telling Amanda not to come to work, the message confirmed an appointment they had for that evening – the two had ‘evidently’ agreed earlier that Amanda would help him meet her friend Meredith. After Amanda’s reply – See you later – she and Raffaele left his flat together; Raffaele was bored with evenings that were all the same and he wanted to feel ‘big thrills’ as he’d written in a blog and as he’d confirmed to the judge herself.