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

by Follain, John

  As the last wound was inflicted and Meredith screamed for the last time, the three ripped the shoulder straps of her bra and cut the cloth next to the bra clasp. Raffaele’s DNA trace on the clasp, according to the prosecutor, was a decisive piece of evidence as it not only nailed him to the crime scene but also showed he had had violent contact with the victim: the trace was believed to be from his skin and the hooks on the clasp were twisted. After the fatal blow, Meredith had been dragged, or had dragged herself, roughly a yard towards the bed, where she lay on her back.

  After shifting the body and grabbing the two mobile phones and at least 300 euros, the killers fled – it was, according to Mignini, between 11.10 p.m. and shortly after midnight. Rudy went home where he washed himself before going to a nightclub, the Domus. But Amanda and Raffaele returned to the cottage to destroy the evidence. Mignini argued that the couple must have cleaned up in the cottage because only one fingerprint of Amanda’s was found there, on a glass in the kitchen sink – something he said was implausible given that she lived there.

  The quilt thrown over Meredith’s body was a vital, psychological clue, the prosecutor said. ‘It indicates a form of pietas [pity], of respect for the victim and a need to deny to oneself such a serious crime,’ Mignini said. That meant killer and victim were acquaintances, or friends, and the killer was not a habitual murderer. An intruder who had entered the house to steal would have been used, perhaps, to committing violent acts and would have felt no need to cover the body. The quilt pointed to Amanda’s involvement more than to that of Raffaele or Rudy ‘because she, as a woman, couldn’t bear that naked, mangled female corpse.’

  The ‘burglary’ was no such thing; it had been staged by the only two people alive in the cottage on the morning of 2 November – Amanda and Raffaele. It would serve to ‘justify’ the call to the carabinieri, but the pair were caught by surprise by the earlier arrival of the postal police. Also that morning, Amanda and Raffaele had bought bleach – Raffaele’s cleaner had never seen bleach in his flat before but police found several bottles there – to clean the blood off various objects including the kitchen knife.

  Amanda – who according to her flatmates was by no means keen on housework – herself had told police that she brought a mop to his flat on the morning after the murder, saying at first this was to clean his bedroom and, in later questioning, saying it was to clean up after water had leaked from under a sink. Confirming that the two had indeed cleaned up, their DNA was found on sponges in a bucket at Raffaele’s flat.

  Mignini highlighted the couple’s strange behaviour after Meredith’s body was discovered. They displayed a ‘morbid affection’ for each other, embracing and kissing in the garden of the cottage and then at the police station – a warmth of feeling that contrasted with the ‘ice-cold indifference’ they had displayed over Meredith’s death. As for Rudy, he had invented his account of sexual foreplay with Meredith; she never did kiss him in a nightclub or agree to meet him, and his story was baseless given her reserve, her serious character and her fidelity to her new boyfriend Giacomo.

  What struck Mignini the most about Meredith’s murder, he concluded before the court, was that, partly because of the violence shown on TV, in films or in comics like the Japanese ones Raffaele read, ferocious crimes once only committed by hardened criminals could today be committed by youngsters everyone thought of as ‘the boy and girl next door’ – as Amanda and Raffaele had been labelled in the media.

  With his colleague Comodi, the prosecutor demanded a life sentence for Rudy, and that Amanda and Raffaele be sent to trial.

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  28 October 2008

  After deliberating for almost twelve hours at the end of Rudy’s fast-track trial, Judge Micheli found Rudy guilty of sexually assaulting and murdering Meredith, and sentenced him to thirty years in jail. He acquitted Rudy of theft, but ordered him to pay legal costs and damages of £1.8 million to each of Meredith’s parents, and £ 1.3 million to each of her brothers and to her sister.

  In line with the prosecutors’ conclusions, Judge Micheli found that ‘several’ attackers had first agreed on a plan to ‘satisfy [their] sexual instincts’, threatened Meredith with a knife, and then murdered her in a spiral of escalating and then uncontrolled violence. The attackers had failed in their sexual intent only because of her desperate and extremely loud scream – which they cut off by stabbing her to death.

  In Judge Micheli’s reconstruction, Meredith was wounded in the neck while she stood near the desk and was then pushed to the ground, where she lay on her back. Rudy had then started sexually abusing her, part of a ‘sex game’, which involved the others as well. Rudy didn’t deliver the fatal blow, the judge said, but he actively participated in the attack – the judge didn’t speculate as to who did deliver it. When the attack became murderous, none of the attackers fled, tried to stop the others or called for help.

  Rudy had told ‘an almost endless series of lies’ and believing him would require ‘a superhuman leap of faith’, Judge Micheli wrote in his ruling. Rudy had contradicted himself on where he was supposed to have kissed Meredith on the night before the murder, and his statement that he had heard Amanda ring the doorbell of the flat made no sense, as she had the keys to it. Nor was there any truth in Rudy’s claim that Meredith had let him into the flat – the person who let him in ‘could only be Amanda’, the judge wrote. The three killers fled after the murder, and one or more of them returned later to stage a fake burglary.

  When Amanda heard the judge announce that she would have to stand trial, she burst into tears. ‘This is only the beginning, we have to keep fighting,’ Ghirga told her and she quickly stopped crying. Raffaele turned to his lawyers and asked them: ‘So can I go home now, when will I be free?’ Rudy remained impassive; his lawyers announced they would appeal.

  The verdict gave Meredith’s family some relief. ‘We’re here because our sister was murdered, so “pleased” isn’t an appropriate word. “Satisfied” is probably the best we can say,’ Meredith’s brother Lyle said.

  15 November 2008

  Just over a year after Meredith’s murder, Antioco Fois of the Giornale dell’Umbria newspaper brought yet another witness to Mignini. Marco Quintavalle, a burly but quiet-spoken grocer whose supermarket was next to the journalist’s home by the university, had confided to Fois that he’d seen Amanda in his supermarket early on the morning of 2 November – contradicting Amanda’s statement that she was at Raffaele’s flat at the time. He’d noticed how pale she looked and that she glanced around ‘as if she was trying to hide’.

  Was he sure, 100 per cent sure, it was Amanda? Fois asked.

  ‘Not 100 per cent, no. I’d be sure only if I could see her in front of me,’ Quintavalle replied.

  At lunchtime on a Saturday – a time chosen to ensure as few people as possible would see them – Fois and his editor Castellini escorted the grocer to the prosecutors’ office. Castellini was convinced the new witness nailed Amanda. ‘This one’s a bombshell! ’ he’d exclaimed when Fois first briefed him.

  In Mignini’s office, Quintavalle described how one evening a couple of weeks before the murder, he’d been surprised to see Raffaele walk into the supermarket with a girl he later found out was Amanda. Raffaele was a regular customer and was bizarre – ‘always rigid, always wearing a scarf, he never laughed and he didn’t chat to anyone,’ Quintavalle said – and the grocer had never seen him with a girl before. He was so surprised he took a good look at Amanda’s face.

  On the morning of 2 November, the day after the murder, Quintavalle was pressing the switch to raise his shop’s roll-up shutter when he saw a girl waiting to come in. She had blue eyes, he said; she wasn’t tall and was wearing jeans, a grey jacket, a scarf and a hat. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and went to the back of the shop where tins and detergents, including bleach, were kept.

  ‘It seemed strange to me because it’s very rare that youngsters come into the shop so early, especially on a
day which was almost a holiday,’ Quintavalle said.

  The prosecutor asked about the girl’s behaviour.

  ‘Her manner was cautious, as if she didn’t want to be recognised, ’ Quintavalle replied.

  He said he didn’t remember whether the girl had bought anything, but he saw her turn right out of the shop towards Piazza Grimana. When Amanda was arrested a few days later and her photograph was printed in the papers, he had the impression that the girl he’d seen early in the morning was Amanda, but he couldn’t be certain because of the scarf and hat.

  After Quintavalle had finished, Castellini switched his mobile phone off – he didn’t want anyone calling to ask him about the new witness if word leaked out – and worked on the story that he would run the next day.

  16 November 2008

  ‘SUPER-WITNESS GETS AMANDA INTO TROUBLE’ ran the front-page headline in the Giornale dell’Umbria under yet another ‘exclusive’ label. At Quintavalle’s request, the paper didn’t identify him, saying only that the witness had seen Amanda ‘in a shop in the neighbourhood’. As they chased the story, journalists pestered shopkeepers throughout the area; several of them approached Quintavalle, but he told them politely he knew nothing. The last thing he wanted was to become a local celebrity.

  The Homicide Squad was irritated that a potentially key witness had yet again emerged only thanks to the local paper, but it kept quiet. Two detectives had in fact shown photographs of Amanda and Raffaele to Quintavalle in his supermarket in the weeks after the murder, and the grocer had recognised them both. But he’d made no mention of what he’d seen on the morning after the murder.

  Mignini thought the grocer’s slowness in coming forward was typical of his fellow Perugians and their proverbial reserve. ‘I hate to criticise my own people, but they’ve got a tendency to mind their own business when they should be helping the cause of justice. You’ve no idea how hard it can be to make people talk,’ the prosecutor confided. ‘Witnesses tell me, “But I didn’t see them kill Meredith,” and I have to explain that even so, what they’ve seen is important.’

  The trial which was to decide the fate of both Amanda and Raffaele was to begin in the New Year. As Amanda waited for it to begin, she appeared calm and confident to those who saw her in prison. She told the chaplain Father Saulo repeatedly that she was confident she would prove her innocence at the trial. She began to play a more active part in prison life, attending aerobics and guitar lessons. Together with eleven other women, she acted in a show staged in the hall of the women’s wing, called The Last City and described by its director as a ‘fantasy journey’ through the jail.

  In a video of the show, Amanda looks straight at the camera and recites the soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

  To be, or not to be – that is the question;

  Whether ’ tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

  And by opposing end them …

  Alessandro Riccini Ricci, the head of a Perugian film festival and one of the few people to see the film before it was withdrawn from circulation by the authorities, praised Amanda as ‘a magnetic actress’. She had ‘a personality which makes her stand out from the others, together with a strong stage presence.’

  Soon, it would be the turn of a court to scrutinise not only the case against her but also her personality – and her ‘stage presence’ – before deciding her future.

  Part 3

  Trials

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  15 January 2009

  The strain of preparing for the trial weighed heavily on Mignini, the long hours spent combing through the files of the investigation day and night leaving him with heavy bags under his eyes. The day before it was due to begin, the prosecutor’s voice became hoarse and he worried it might abandon him in court just as the proceedings got under way.

  In his spare time – he had none now – Mignini loved reading history books, especially tales of great battles ranging from those in ancient times to the Second World War, and in some ways he saw what awaited him in court as a battle. At stake, for him, was justice for Meredith and her family. His weapons were the evidence he would submit to the court, and the witnesses he would bring before it. He would never go so far as to describe Amanda and Raffaele as his enemies – he believed they had killed Meredith, but to call them his enemies was too personal. But he knew their lawyers would challenge him at every turn, just as he would challenge any witnesses or experts whom they summoned.

  Mignini worried that his case against Amanda and Raffaele had an Achilles heel – the fact that the members of the jury, like the ordinary man in the street, were used to being presented with a motive in every crime they saw on TV or read about in the newspapers. He had a theory that this reassured them. A wife finds her husband with a lover and kills him in a fit of passion; a Mafioso kills a rival for control of a clan. The jury would expect a rational explanation for Meredith’s murder, but Mignini knew from experience that crime often had no motive. The prosecutor had described the motives behind the sexual attack on Meredith and her murder as ‘futile’, but he worried this might be a stumbling block for a jury demanding to know not only what had happened, but also why.

  If Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga worried about the trial, he didn’t show it. He stuck to his daily routine despite constant pestering by journalists, paying his three visits a day to the Caffè Turreno opposite the cathedral. As he savoured his midday aperitivo, perched as usual on one of the terrace’s high metal stools, on the day before the trial was due to begin, he briefly discussed the case with a couple of journalists. As he talked, he suddenly pointed a finger to simulate a knife and jabbed it an inch from the neck of one of the reporters.

  ‘There, the knife goes in this way, and the killer moves it back and forth two or three times; that’s how he makes that awful wound,’ Ghirga explained in his booming voice, startling the journalists.

  The caffè’s regulars knew him well and didn’t bat an eyelid.

  A few days earlier, on one of his visits to the Capanne prison, Amanda had asked him: ‘How come so many people who’ve read my case files don’t believe I’m innocent?’ It was as if the case against her, and the impending trial, seemed absurd to her – even though she had spent the past fourteen months in prison.

  Through her lawyers, she gave a rare and theatrical statement to the media: ‘Finally the hour of truth has arrived. I’m not afraid. In fact, I hope that the truth will come out once and for all because I’ve always been a friend of Meredith’s and I didn’t kill her.’

  Raffaele’s lawyers also proclaimed his innocence on the eve of the trial. They would boast the most heavyweight team in the courtroom, led by the Sicilian Giulia Bongiorno, whose previous clients included the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti. The Supreme Court found he had forged links with mafia bosses, but acquitted him on the grounds that because the offence had been committed so long ago, he was no longer legally answerable for it. Bongiorno, vivacious and bespectacled, was not only a high-profile lawyer but also a conservative member of parliament, and head of its justice commission.

  There was every reason to expect that Bongiorno would prove a formidable foe for Mignini, as she was tireless in picking any holes in a prosecution’s case. In parliament, she’d thought nothing of fighting to prevent Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, from banning the use of telephone taps in investigations into various crimes. Bongiorno proved such a thorn in his side that he told his aides: ‘Get her out of my sight!’

  16 January 2009

  The grandest courtroom in Perugia’s Renaissance law courts is known as the Hall of Frescoes, but only parts of a couple of frescoes of the Virgin Mary and Child survive today, near the arched entrance. Across the hall, behind the raised platform where the court sits, Christ is again represented by a crucifix hanging on the wall – a symbol of man’s violence to man.

  The stone-walled, vaulted hall lie
s in the bowels of the law courts, two floors below the main entrance not far from the cathedral. It has been redesigned for the needs of justice with a typical Italian flair for style. Facing the judge are rows of smart, light-coloured wooden desks and comfortable swivel chairs of padded black leather with armrests. Even the large steel cage used for particularly dangerous offenders boasts a row of elegant, arrow-shaped tips along the top. Sleek, powerful lights hang from a grey metal grid that stretches right across the hall, hiding the top of the vaulted ceiling from view. ‘The designer dungeon,’ as one journalist called the courtroom.

  At no time in living memory had Perugians seen so many journalists and TV crews descend on the law courts. Outside on a wet morning, a dozen TV vans waited to beam news over the ancient palaces lining the square. True to their parochial reputation, Perugians stayed away and only five mostly elderly locals bothered to turn up for the first day of the trial; for the citizens of Perugia, it was as if Meredith’s murder had never happened.

  In the narrow public gallery that ran the length of the courtroom below the frescoes, the tiny public audience was vastly outnumbered by reporters from across Europe and America. So many journalists massed inside the courtroom that police and carabinieri officers asked several to leave as there was no room for them. A dozen journalists promptly strode into the cage designed for the accused, and sat down there. The judge, Giancarlo Massei, had to be called in to dislodge them.