Curt also accused the police of handling the crime scene in a ‘shoddy’ way. The police’s own videos showed that the clasp of Meredith’s bra was found in mid-December a few feet away from where it had first been filmed a month and a half earlier. The police had made such a mess of Meredith’s bedroom that there could have been cross-contamination.
As for Amanda and Meredith’s DNA traces on the kitchen knife, which investigators said could be the murder weapon – they simply didn’t mean anything according to a forensic expert hired by Edda and Curt.
‘Amanda cooks, so there’s nothing surprising about her trace on the handle. But the expert told us the trace of Meredith was on the side of the knife, not the blade, and it had a very small chance of belonging to Meredith – he said it could belong to half the population of Italy!’ Curt said.
Curt didn’t trust either Mignini or the police. ‘The approach has been to play the case out in the media rather than providing physical evidence. That blows me away. If this happened in the USA she would have been out months ago,’ Curt said.
‘It gets scary when you have the prosecutor accused of wrongdoing in another case,’ Edda added. This was a reference to Mignini being due to stand trial on charges of misconduct in investigating a death connected to the serial killer known as the ‘Monster of Florence’ who murdered couples in the Florentine hills from 1968 to 1975. For Mignini, he had simply been doing his job, and was the victim of a vendetta.
Curt made a further attack on Mignini: ‘The prosecutor’s reputation is at stake. You don’t make an international incident in the way this was done, the wild-sex-orgy-drugs scenario and then say, “Oops, I kept your daughter in jail for six months.” I don’t like it when people’s reputations are at stake and it’s them or a twenty-year-old kid.’
The family hesitated when asked if there was anything they would like to say to Meredith’s family. Edda broke the silence: ‘We’re in a sticky situation because of what people have written about Amanda. We’d like to reach out, but what will they think if we say to them: “Your daughter was my daughter’s housemate and we can only imagine your pain?” I can’t imagine what they’re having to live through.’
Over the weeks and months that followed, Edda and Curt’s media offensive gathered speed with the support of American lawyers, private investigators and the writer Douglas Preston, co-author with the Italian journalist Mario Spezi of an investigation into the ‘Monster of Florence’ killings. A website called the ‘Amanda Knox Defense Fund’ displayed tributes from family and friends and details of how to donate money to her cause.
From Perugia, Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga watched the publicity blitz with dismay; he was convinced that attacks in the media on Italian justice in general, and against Mignini and the police officers, weren’t helping her cause in the slightest. For one thing, Ghirga couldn’t accept the accusation that Amanda had been physically abused at the police station. He believed that attacking investigators in the media, as Edda and Curt were doing, would only antagonise all the people who really mattered: the police, the prosecutor, the judges and – if the case went to trial as he expected it to – the jurors who would decide Amanda’s future.
24 May 2008
Giornale dell’Umbria splashed across its front page what it clearly believed was a sensational scoop: a drug addict and dealer in his thirties, his hands and shoes dirty with blood, had been heard shouting on Piazza Grimana the morning after the murder: ‘I killed her! I killed her!’
The newspaper said it knew the addict’s name but didn’t print it, reporting that half a dozen people as well as paramedics passing through the area had seen him before Meredith’s body was discovered. The article quoted one witness who said that the man’s right hand was injured and that he washed it at a fountain. He then made a phone call from a public phone box, apparently talking to a woman and shouting, ‘I’ll kill you, you whore!’
Napoleoni checked the story. Maurizio Rosignoli, who owned the news stand on the square and was one of the sources for the article, told her that he saw a man go to a public phone box, and shout at someone he had called. What he said made no sense to Rosignoli except for the words: ‘You ugly slut, whore, I’ll kill you!’ – or perhaps, ‘In any case, I’ll kill you!’ Rosignoli said he had never said the man shouted, ‘I killed her!’ Nor had he said the man had blood on him.
Rosignoli’s girlfriend Alessia Ceccarelli, who ran the news stand with him, told detectives later that the addict whom she knew by sight first came to her to change some money, and Ceccarelli noticed he had blood on the back of his right hand. He then made the phone call, shouting at a woman she presumed he had called. She heard him yell: ‘I’ll kill you, you whore!’ She never heard him shout ‘I killed her!’
Eventually detectives managed to identify the addict, and ruled him out of the investigation.
28 May 2008
As the attacks from Amanda’s family, friends and supporters increased and Mignini prepared to request that the case go to trial, the prosecutor asked his boss for extra help; a second prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, was swiftly appointed to work alongside Mignini on the Kercher case from now on.
When she was asked to help take on Perugia’s most high-profile case in many years, Comodi’s first thought was a stunned ‘Mammamia!’ but she accepted immediately. The lively, smiling Comodi was notoriously independent-minded and let nothing stand in her way – not even the might of the Roman Catholic Church. Among her previous targets was a Naples cardinal she had accused of usury, placing hidden microphones in his residence – the cardinal was acquitted, but several other suspects were convicted.
In her mid-forties, more than ten years Mignini’s junior, Comodi wasn’t completely new to the Kercher case. Her office was three doors down the corridor from his, they got on well and she’d often talked to him, as well as to Homicide Squad detectives, about the investigation. She’d been intrigued from the start by what she saw as glaring contradictions in the stories of Amanda and Raffaele, and by their behaviour after the body was discovered.
Guided by Napoleoni, Comodi went to see Meredith and Amanda’s flat early one afternoon. She wanted to see for herself what she had until then seen only in police photographs and films. Arriving at the cottage, she was struck by the beauty of the spot and the landscape, but also by its isolation; she thought to herself that she would never leave her two daughters – ten and twelve years old – alone in such a spot, even with a babysitter.
Inside, most of the shutters were closed and the electricity had been cut off so Napoleoni handed Comodi a torch and she walked slowly around, flashing the beam of light back and forth as she went in and out of the rooms and bathrooms – she wanted to understand the layout of the flat and how the rooms related to each other. Comodi did her best not to feel anything as she walked around; it was a form of self-defence for her, because she worried that if she did become upset in such situations her objectivity would go out the window.
The flat was dotted with pink and grey smudges especially around the door handles and light switches – the traces left by chemicals the forensic police had used to find fingerprints and other traces. What Comodi noticed was not so much the chaos in the flat – she was used to crime scenes that had been combed through by the police – as the atmosphere that still lingered of a typical, untidy students’ home with its cheap furniture and decorations. She thought for a moment of the lives the four flatmates had led here, and then of the day when her own daughters might travel abroad to study for a while, perhaps in America. She checked herself and concentrated once again on the flat.
Comodi looked closely at Filomena’s broken window, asking Napoleoni where precisely the stone had been found. Amanda’s room was so tiny it felt claustrophobic; there wasn’t even a light in the ceiling. The cottage looked spacious from outside, but inside it felt cramped – apparently the owner had wanted to cram in as many tenants as possible.
She stopped longest in Meredith’s room, staring first at
the bloodstains on the walls and then at the pool of dried-up blood on the floor. Napoleoni gestured across the stained floor to show her precisely where the body had been found. The defence lawyers had claimed the room was too small to contain four people, but this seemed absurd to Comodi. Students were used to cramped rooms, and the centre of the room was completely empty of any furniture. And in any case, a sex game with four people didn’t require a huge amount of space – quite the opposite, she thought wryly.
Still staring around the silent room, Comodi then made herself run through how the three killers may have held Meredith before stabbing her. Comodi tried to imagine her last moments – only a few feet from where she now stood – but her feelings suddenly got the better of her. She sometimes suffered from claustrophobia, and now felt a tightening in her throat, almost as if she was being suffocated, so she walked briskly out of the room and out of the flat, into the fresh air.
Outside, she lit a cigarette to help her relax, drawing comfort from the beauty of the view. She didn’t go back inside; she had seen enough.
39
19 June 2008
Seven months after Meredith’s murder, Mignini and his colleague Comodi signed the decree formally notifying Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy that they had finished their investigation as required by Italian law. The case files filled twelve volumes and 10,000 pages.
The two prosecutors accused Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy of both murdering and sexually attacking Meredith for ‘futile motives’. The accused had tried to force her to take part in a sex game and, when she refused, they killed her by strangling and stabbing her. The accused also stole 300 euros (£270), two credit cards and two mobiles phones from Meredith, the prosecutors charged. Amanda and Raffaele were also accused of staging a fake burglary, and of illegally carrying a weapon in taking the knife believed to be the murder weapon from his flat to the cottage. Finally, Amanda was accused of slandering Patrick to cover Rudy.
If convicted, the three faced very heavy jail sentences – including a life sentence for the charge of ‘voluntary murder with the aggravating circumstance of cruelty’, and up to twelve years for sexual assault. Slandering Patrick could mean up to twenty years in prison for Amanda.
Less than a month later, Mignini and Comodi demanded that Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy stand trial, repeating their accusations against the three. A judge would hold a series of hearings after the summer to decide on the prosecutors’ request.
That summer, Comodi took with her on holiday copies of several hundred pages from the investigation files. Under a beach umbrella on Italy’s south-west coast, she steadily read her way through them as her daughters played in the sea. The more she read, the more she became convinced the prosecution case was solid.
Comodi saw Amanda as a narcissist, aware of her beauty and keen to show herself to others as free and uninhibited. Like many narcissists who were also insecure, she loved herself a great deal but also needed confirmation that the world loved her too – and this she obtained through sexual conquest. For Comodi, Amanda’s one-night stands since her arrival in Italy were just more names on a list; she knew little about these men and cared even less.
Comodi tried again and again to reconstruct the sexual assault and the murder. Based on what she’d read of the characters of the accused and their relationships with each other, Comodi saw Amanda as the instigator. She was a charismatic figure, capable of influencing others, and she was the driving force who had drawn the group together, setting in motion the spiral of events with perhaps just a casual remark to Raffaele and Rudy: ‘Come on, let’s have some fun …’ Raffaele was so devoted to her he followed her blindly; Rudy was a drifter, was easily influenced and fancied Amanda so he followed her too.
Comodi ruled out Meredith taking part willingly in the sex game; her character and her habits, as well as the bruises on her body, excluded it. The friends Meredith went out with were her English girlfriends, and she had just started a relationship with Giacomo from the flat downstairs. But try as she might, Comodi couldn’t work out how the sexual assault had turned into murder. Her only certainty was that Amanda had held the knife, because of her DNA on the handle, and Meredith’s on the blade.
27 August 2008
On the eve of the hearings which would decide whether Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy would stand trial, Raffaele’s lawyers played a risky card. They wanted to prove that an intruder – they didn’t say who outright, but it was clear they meant Rudy – could have broken into the cottage through Filomena’s window and then murdered Meredith. To do so, the lawyers asked for permission to enter the garden of the cottage, which was granted.
Raffaele’s team chose for the experiment Delfo Berretti, a bearded, long-haired lawyer who had the significant advantage of being more than six feet tall. Watched by Mignini and detectives of the Homicide Squad, Berretti took just a few seconds to climb up the wall and get a hold on Filomena’s windowsill. But he could not pull himself up and hung there, stranded, and to avoid any further embarrassment a colleague called out hastily: ‘That’s enough, that’s fine.’ Berretti let himself fall back to the ground.
For Mignini, the experiment had backfired on Raffaele’s lawyers. Rudy, who was shorter than Berretti, would have been unable to even touch the windowsill, let alone get in through the window.
15 September 2008
The Kercher family returned to Perugia for the start of the hearings. They knew it meant more painful revelations but they welcomed this new stage in the search for the truth about Meredith’s death. At a press conference held in the hotel where Arline, John and Stephanie were staying, Stephanie read out a statement in the family’s name: ‘Each time we arrive in Perugia, we wish we were here for a different reason … Mez was such a significant part of so many lives. Mez was such a genuine person that when we think of her now and when we see her friends we don’t need to say anything, we just need to smile.’
16 September 2008
On the very first day of the preliminary hearings, Judge Paolo Micheli, an elegant figure with nineteen years’ experience who wrote songs in his spare time, accepted a request for a fast-track trial from Rudy’s lawyers, which meant he would be judged differently from Amanda and Raffaele. Judge Micheli would rule not only on whether Amanda and Raffaele should stand trial, but also on whether Rudy was guilty or not. Under Italian procedure, the fast-track trial for Rudy meant he could hope to have his sentence reduced by up to a third if found guilty.
At the hearings, which were held behind closed doors, the Kerchers came face-to-face for the first time with all three accused. Sitting only a few yards away from them for hours on end, the family betrayed no sign of ill will towards them. ‘Amazing. I’d have expected the Kerchers to say something rude to them at the very least,’ a lawyer commented.
Among the handful of witnesses the court heard was the Albanian farmhand Kokomani, who claimed he’d seen Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy outside the cottage either on the night of the murder or the previous night, and some friends of Rudy’s. After Stefanoni, the biologist from Rome’s forensic police, had given her evidence, the two prosecutors, Mignini and Comodi, discussed what sentence they should demand for Rudy.
They both felt there was no choice: they must demand a life sentence as in Italy this usually meant twenty years in prison after reductions for good behaviour. Both were aware that such a sentence potentially meant wrecking the life of a twenty-one-year-old like Rudy.
But any doubts the two prosecutors had were dispelled at the mere thought of what they believed the three accused had done to Meredith. By refusing to come clean and explain precisely how she had died, Rudy had, in their opinion, thrown away his chance to be treated with some mercy. Comodi was sure he would never talk: rejected by his mother, drifting from one family to another for years, Rudy had developed a formidable resistance to hardship and an ingrained mistrust of others. She was convinced that he simply didn’t believe that making a confession could help him in any way.
18 October 2008
In his final address ahead of the judge’s verdict, Mignini gave his most detailed reconstruction so far of Meredith’s last moments. The prosecutor had no doubt that Amanda and Raffaele – and very likely Rudy too – had been in a drugged state from late in the afternoon of 1 November.
Shortly after Meredith arrived home, Amanda let Raffaele and Rudy into the cottage. Meredith was tired, and she became angry with Amanda for bringing two men into the flat at a time when she just wanted to go to bed, and the two had a row.
Later that evening, Amanda asked Rudy, who was anxious to please her, to ‘soften up’ Meredith and prepare her for an erotic ‘game’ by sexually assaulting her, while Amanda ‘dedicated herself’ to Raffaele, Mignini suggested. Meredith refused to take part with such vigour that Rudy, Amanda and Raffaele became infuriated with her. All three threatened Meredith as she began to scream. They held her, cutting her several times, and at one point grabbed her by the neck and tried to strangle her – her neck was seized so violently that the hyoid bone snapped.
Meredith, the prosecutor continued, must have been kneeling in front of the cupboard in her room while Rudy holding her left arm by the wrist – his DNA had been found on the left sleeve of her sweatshirt – tried to rape her. Raffaele also tried to hold her still, seizing her right arm, while Amanda who was facing Meredith pricked her in the neck with the kitchen knife. Meredith tried to free herself and push away the blade with her right hand, but it cut her in the palm. Then, Mignini said: ‘The situation precipitated and Amanda plunged the blade into Meredith’s neck.’
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 24
