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

by Follain, John

  She continued: ‘This vibrator does exist. It’s a joke, it’s a present a girlfriend gave me before I came to Italy. It’s a small pink rabbit about this size …’ she made a gesture to indicate it was about four inches long. ‘Excuse me if … well, so, that’s it. I also wanted to say I’m innocent and that I’m confident that everything will come out, everything will sort itself out, thank you. OK.’

  She said ‘OK’ in a chirpy tone that sounded out of place in the courtroom. Amanda smiled as she finished, then sat down again with her head bowed, blowing air out through puffed cheeks, apparently to release tension.

  Several lawyers looked at each other in disbelief – of all the things Amanda could have talked about, they wondered, why on earth had she focused on a toy vibrator?

  The longer Sophie had to wait, the more tense she became. She felt worse when Amy was called in after Robyn, meaning she would have to wait even longer. While she and several of the other students were waiting, a police officer chatted to them in English, talking at length about the case. The officer boasted about how detectives had bugged a conversation between Amanda and her mother in prison. ‘We put cameras in, we sat in the room next to them and listened to their conversation,’ the officer said.

  Sophie was called shortly after 3 p.m. She had waited more than five hours. By now, as she confessed later, she had gone to pieces. She had worried she would be frightened of Amanda but instead, when she walked into the court, she concentrated on getting to the raised platform and didn’t think of Amanda, let alone look at her. Her voice hesitant and husky with tension, she found even saying her name and address a struggle.

  ‘Did you know Meredith Kercher?’ Mignini asked her – his very first question brought tears to Sophie’s eyes again.

  The prosecutor went on to ask about the tensions between Meredith and Amanda. One reason, Sophie said, was the way Amanda chatted about her sex life. ‘Amanda was pretty open about her sex life and she left a beauty-case in the bathroom with a vibrator and some condoms,’ Sophie said.

  From time to time, Sophie would close her eyes as she remembered aloud Amanda’s coldness when she hugged her at the police station, or Amanda telling her Meredith had died. She was vaguely aware of Amanda, sitting behind her and to her left, staring at her as she testified. But Sophie never turned to look at her.

  As Mignini asked Sophie about the clothes Meredith was wearing the last time she saw her, he gave a clerk a photograph to show Sophie. ‘Can you tell me if this sweatshirt corresponds to the one Meredith was wearing?’ the prosecutor asked.

  The photograph was in colour, and Sophie couldn’t help seeing there was blood all over the light blue sweatshirt. The shock of seeing the blood – she had never seen that photograph before – made her cry. She could barely manage a nod in answer to Mignini.

  Judge Massei asked Sophie if she wanted a break. ‘No, I’m fine,’ she replied.

  Later, as Amanda’s lawyer Dalla Vedova talked Sophie through the hours at the police station after Meredith’s body was discovered, he asked: ‘Do you remember if, among the young people who were there with you, there was someone who was particularly shocked, or who was crying? Was someone crying?’

  ‘Everybody was crying except for Amanda,’ Sophie replied. It wasn’t the kind of thing Sophie had meant to say, because she hadn’t wanted to sound as if she was accusing Amanda. But it was the first thing that had come to her mind.

  ‘So Raffaele too?’ Dalla Vedova asked.

  ‘No, Raffaele wasn’t crying,’ Sophie said.

  Dalla Vedova fired back: ‘Neither was the police. It seems to me there are …’

  Judge Massei cut short the lawyer to point out: ‘We’re talking about the group of young people.’

  Sophie said nothing, but she was angry with Dalla Vedova. She felt he’d made her look stupid.

  That afternoon, Sophie’s friends told her what Amanda had said about the vibrator. Amanda was missing the point, Sophie thought. If it really was a joke one, why was it on show? Amanda must have put the vibrator, and the condoms, on display to show off. For Sophie, owning a vibrator didn’t mean Amanda had killed Meredith, but showing off with it had struck Meredith as weird.

  That day, none of Meredith’s English friends looked at Amanda when they testified. The mother of one of them confided: ‘The trial dragging out for so long makes it tough for the girls. For them it’s as if everything keeps coming back to Meredith, all the time.’

  14 February 2009

  Although they quickly recovered their composure, neither the two judges nor the jury could hide their surprise at the T-shirt Amanda wore for St Valentine’s Day – white, far too big for her slight figure, it had fat, red lettering all down her front: ‘ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE’.

  Some lawyers smiled at Amanda’s tribute to The Beatles, her favourite band, but others shook their heads. Journalists in the press gallery forgot all about the Kercher case for a while and furiously debated the T-shirt’s significance.

  ‘She’s behaving like a teenager – she’s facing a life sentence but she wears a T-shirt like that as if she was going to a party!’ one reporter said.

  ‘No, she simply wants to be seen as a warm, loving personality. It’s a cry for love – she’s in prison and on trial, and she wants to be loved,’ said another.

  The court got a clear look at the T-shirt when Amanda got up to speak after witnesses including her former flatmate Laura, and the students from the semi-basement flat, had testified about her character and her relations with Meredith.

  She spoke briefly, in Italian, as she had the previous day: ‘Thank you to everyone, Signor Judge. I just wanted to say that hearing over the past few days all this testimony from witnesses including my ex-flatmates, I’m really and sincerely annoyed that after all this time some things are exaggerated, like about the cleaning.

  ‘This has been extremely exaggerated,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t … Yes, I talked to the girls, but it wasn’t ever a cause of conflict, ever, in fact there were always good relations with these people. This is because I’m really annoyed, because really … It wasn’t like that, so … Thank you.’

  Once more, Amanda surprised many in the courtroom by singling out an issue that was to all appearances unimportant.

  But what dominated the media in its reporting of that day’s proceedings was Amanda, or rather her T-shirt – photographs of her wearing it appeared in newspapers from Rome to London to Seattle.

  The sight dismayed the prosecutors. ‘I wouldn’t want it to be a message to Raffaele, in the sense of “let’s stick together through this in the name of love”,’ one of them confided. ‘What’s for sure is that it points to Amanda as the driving force in all this, as a narcissist, as an actress and as someone who is unable to share the suffering of others. She thinks only of herself.’

  The Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca could hardly contain his anger. ‘Amanda’s gone too far. It’s fine to declare yourself innocent all your life but there are limits. I can’t stand this frivolous attitude, it’s offensive to the court and it’s especially offensive to Meredith’s family. Let’s remember we’re talking about a girl who was stabbed to death,’ Maresca stormed.

  He was sure it would all backfire. ‘I’m sure the judges and jury find it all offensive too. If I was Amanda’s lawyer, I’d try to keep her in check,’ he said.

  Back at home in England, the sight of Amanda wearing the T-shirt made Sophie feel sick. It was so typical of Amanda, she thought. Surely if Amanda was innocent, she’d want to be taken seriously by the court and dress appropriately to help persuade it of her innocence. Sophie herself had thought a lot about what she should wear, and she’d been only a witness. How could Amanda think that wearing that T-shirt was the right thing to do?

  ‘It’s ridiculous. Amanda’s crazy,’ Sophie thought to herself. It was almost as if the trial was a joke to her.

  When he next saw Amanda in prison, her stepfather Chris ticked her off gently for wearing the T-shirt, a prese
nt from a friend. ‘You know, I don’t think your lawyers are too happy about it,’ he told her.

  ‘I didn’t think it would have such an impact,’ Amanda replied. The T-shirt was one of her favourites, and she had thought it would be ‘appropriate, a good thing’ to wear on St Valentine’s Day.

  ‘Well, think of it next time,’ Chris said. He didn’t feel like rowing with her, what with all she was going through.

  ‘Amanda’s a goofball when it comes to that kind of thing,’ Chris said later.

  18 February 2009

  If Amanda’s Beatles T-shirt was a message for someone, it wasn’t for Raffaele. Replying to letters he’d sent her on Valentine’s Day and the following day – they were allowed to write to each other – Amanda dashed his hopes of the pair feeling for each other the way they did at first. She apologised for having ‘steered myself back to the love that I knew and that was reborn in myself for DJ [her Seattle boyfriend]; because it means I can’t give you what you want, I can’t give you my heart completely.’ From then on, she made a point of signing herself: ‘Your friend Amanda’.

  That day, Mignini returned to the cottage after police told him that intruders had broken in and ransacked Meredith and Amanda’s flat. The break-in had been discovered by a passing patrol car. The first thing the prosecutor noticed was that the intruders had broken in through the glass door that gave on to the terrace – which he had always argued was the easiest way in. He saw it as further confirmation that no one had broken in through Filomena’s window at the time of Meredith’s murder.

  Inside, the police had found a used candle and four big kitchen knives – one knife on a shelf near the front door, one on the kitchen floor on top of an empty police evidence bag, one on Meredith’s bed, and one in front of her bedroom doorway, with the blade pointing towards it.

  It might just be a stunt by some idiots, the prosecutor thought, but it might also be something more than that. He guessed it might be a coded message of some kind, but he had no idea what. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the detectives of the Flying Squad were due to testify at the trial in a few days’ time.

  27 February 2009

  For her turn as a witness, the detective Napoleoni swapped the jeans and casual clothes she always wore on duty for her navy-blue police uniform. She had spent many hours following the trial in court over the past month, and was anxious to testify. For her, this was a chance to stand up publicly for her and her colleagues’ work on the Kercher case after months of what she saw as mud-slinging by the defence lawyers who had virulently attacked the investigation.

  The charge that had most rankled with Napoleoni was Amanda’s allegation that police had beaten her at the station on the night she accused Patrick of murdering Meredith.

  Asked by Patrick’s lawyer Carlo Pacelli whether ‘Signorina Amanda’, as he quaintly called her, had been beaten, Napoleoni replied firmly: ‘No, absolutely not.’

  ‘Was she by chance treated badly or threatened or insulted?’ Pacelli asked.

  ‘No, she was treated well. Obviously she was treated firmly, because it wasn’t as if we were at the cinema or the circus, even if someone may have thought that’s where we were,’ Napoleoni said, in a clear dig at Amanda’s yoga exercises at the police station.

  Mignini’s fellow prosecutor Comodi took advantage of Napoleoni and other detectives taking the witness box to show to the court the big stone which had been found on the floor in the room of Meredith and Amanda’s flatmate Filomena, near the broken window. Several detectives had testified that it was too big and heavy to have been used in a ‘burglary’ – which they insisted had been staged after the murder.

  In a not too discreet attempt to forge a direct relationship with the jurors, Comodi walked up to them, stone in hand, and handed it to each of them – and the two judges – in turn. She wanted them to touch it with their hands, to feel its full weight (4.5 kilos) and to see for themselves how absurd it was to claim that a thief would throw this at a window.

  To her satisfaction, several of the jurors made comments along the lines of, ‘God, it’s so heavy.’

  One woman juror turned to her neighbour and said: ‘See, I told you it weighs four kilos.’

  Over the past hearings, Comodi had been watching the jurors closely. Although they were clearly making an effort not to betray their opinion on the case, she noticed the women jurors nodding a couple of times when she or Mignini argued a point – something they never did when the defence lawyers spoke.

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  21 March 2009

  More than two months into the trial, snow fell again on Perugia, prettily dusting the statues of griffins in its squares as the first of the witnesses found by the local Giornale dell’Umbria newspaper took his turn in court. The grocer Marco Quintavalle, who had said he’d seen Amanda in his supermarket early on the morning after the murder – when she claimed she was in Raffaele’s flat – spoke slowly and precisely.

  But what Quintavalle clearly considered an ordeal unsettled him; his left eyebrow often twitched some half a dozen times in quick succession. Under questioning by Mignini, he described Raffaele as a ‘very serious, very well-brought-up young man’ who came to the shop as often as twice a day but never stopped for a chat.

  What struck him about the young woman he had seen walk past him, only a couple of feet away from him, into his shop at 7.45 a.m. on the morning after the murder was how pale she looked – and her blue eyes.

  ‘I can still see it today, she had a very white face, with these blue eyes it was very striking,’ he said. ‘She looked really exhausted but that looked pretty normal to me, because students who’ve been out dancing or to a party stay up all night.’

  Some days later, one of the girls at the till who had been out for her coffee break came back and told him she’d heard that Raffaele had been arrested the previous day.

  ‘It’s not possible. Are you sure?’ Quintavalle said. He asked her to go and buy a newspaper and when he saw Amanda’s picture he immediately thought to himself: ‘But that’s the girl I saw the other morning.’

  He told the court: ‘I recognised the oval shape of her face, the nose which is very regular, this beautiful oval shape, with these very light-coloured eyes.’

  Judge Massei interrupted Mignini’s questioning. ‘Excuse me. Do you recognise the girl you saw on that occasion in this courtroom?’

  The courtroom went still; lawyers stopped tapping on their laptops.

  Quintavalle turned to take a long look behind his left shoulder at Amanda, the first time he had looked at her since entering the courtroom.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Amanda’s cheeks and ears suddenly flushed but she held his gaze, frowning slightly, apparently in both concentration and concern.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it her? Are you sure it’s the girl you saw?’ Judge Massei insisted.

  Quintavalle again turned to stare at Amanda. ‘I’m sure now, yes.’

  Later, when a TV interview with Quintavalle was shown on a giant screen, glimpses of Amanda’s life before her arrest unexpectedly unfolded before the court – Amanda smiling and laughing in family photographs; a tipsy Amanda wagging her finger at the camera at a party with her student friends; Amanda looking hunted in the garden of the cottage on the day Meredith’s body was discovered. Today’s Amanda stared at the images of herself, looking as if she was about to cry.

  When it was the turn of Raffaele’s lawyer Maori, he tried to undermine Quintavalle by pressing him on why he hadn’t called the police the moment he recognised Amanda in the newspaper. Why did he wait a whole year to come forward?

  Quintavalle replied he’d only come forward because the journalist Fois had persuaded him to. He simply didn’t think that what he’d seen was important. ‘And besides, I wasn’t all that keen to get involved, just as I’m not that keen today,’ Quintavalle said.

  But Maori wouldn’t let go. ‘But the question is why he
presented himself a year after. So—’

  Mignini interrupted him to jump to Quintavalle’s defence. ‘Objection, because the witness has to say the truth – when he testifies, or how he was found, is of no interest. What’s important is what the witness says. The fact that he comes forward after some time is sadly because of reasons we all know about.’

  Mignini continued: ‘Witnesses should come forward immediately, but many of them say: “Well, what I say doesn’t matter at all.” They don’t understand the importance of what they have to say.’

  But Judge Massei overruled Mignini; the issue of how Quintavalle had come to testify would help to assess his reliability, the judge said.

  Pressed once more, Quintavalle gave a curt answer. He had decided to testify when the journalist had told him he should. ‘That’s all there is to it,’ he said.

  As the weeks passed, with the prosecutors relentlessly working their way through dozens of witnesses, Amanda looked increasingly drawn in court. She no longer had a smile stamped on her face when she entered; she walked head bowed, with her shoulders hunched forwards, visibly shrinking from the touch of the guards who escorted her. But she still nodded and smiled at Judge Massei, who sometimes responded with a tight smile.

  She was now finding it hard to keep her mind busy with her language studies as she used to. The long succession of witnesses unsettled her. Shortly after Quintavalle’s testimony, she saw Ghirga in prison.

  ‘So what does it mean? I don’t have any hope?’ she asked him – ‘it’ meaning the array of witnesses at the trial.

  ‘There’s still hope, don’t worry,’ Ghirga said.

  But he worried that it would be difficult to save her. He noticed that Amanda never asked him outright whether she would be convicted or not; nor did she ever ask him how long a prison sentence could be. In court, when a witness said something that worried her particularly, she would take hold of Ghirga’s hand and squeeze it, seeking comfort.