In front of prison guards, however, Amanda was a closed book. One of them confided: ‘Amanda’s always smiling, always cheerful. Every time I ask her how she is, she just says: “OK, fine.” She’s never opened up. I’ve seen her cry, but only for little things like the cellmate who made her clean all the time. She’s never cried over her fate. It’s as if she doesn’t seem to realise what’s happened to her.’
27 March 2009
It was cold in the courtroom and the elderly widow Nara Capezzali kept her white anorak on as, her hair perfectly permed and clutching the handbag which rested in her lap, she described in a homely, slightly husky voice the scream she said she’d heard on the night of Meredith’s murder from her flat opposite the cottage. The court sat as if spellbound by her words.
‘I’ve got gooseflesh. I can almost … hear it again,’ Capezzali said, her hands quivering at the recollection of how she’d heard what she described as a woman’s scream after getting up to go to the bathroom.
The judges and jury stared fixedly at her, stern-faced. Amanda sat rock still, while Ghirga next to her shook his head from side to side.
‘A scream,’ Capezzali went on. She tried to make the noise again, her voice rising: ‘Aaaaaahhh …’ As she made the sound, she let go of the strap of her handbag to raise her right hand and make a long drawn-out sweeping gesture.
Mignini’s questioning of Capezzali was however suddenly thrown off course when she mentioned that at about 11 a.m. the next day, she had gone to buy some bread and had read the newspaper placards on Piazza Grimana with news of Meredith’s murder and exclaimed to a couple of friends: ‘Oh God, I heard it, so it was this girl!’
Mignini struggled to put her back on the right track. She had always said in the past – to the journalist Fois, to Mignini himself and to other journalists who had interviewed her – that she’d heard the scream on the night of the murder. But the murder wasn’t in the newspapers until the morning of 3 November, two days later. The prosecutor was convinced that the elderly widow was simply getting confused because of the stress of appearing in court.
‘Are you sure you saw those newspaper placards that morning, or did you see them on a later occasion?’ Mignini asked.
Raffaele’s lawyer Bongiorno intervened, appealing to the judge in an attempt to have his question ruled out of order – she didn’t want Mignini to give the witness a chance to correct herself: ‘Your Honour, this is a typical question to try to—’
Judge Massei turned to Capezzali and attempted to clear things up himself: ‘Excuse me, you say you saw the newspaper placards; what did you see as you walked past this newspaper kiosk?’
‘I didn’t see the newspaper placards, maybe it was the day after, because I go shopping every day, it’s not as if I can remember …’ Capezzali replied, now sounding thoroughly confused. Capezzali remained vague, and flustered, throughout the rest of her questioning, to Mignini’s visible frustration.
After two hours of continuous questioning by Mignini and defence lawyers, she again had the court spellbound. Asking Capezzali about a TV interview she’d given, Amanda’s lawyer Dalla Vedova asked whether her interviewer was a man or a woman. She replied first that it was a man, then that it might have been a woman. Apparently seeking to underline her confusion, Dalla Vedova screened the interview to show the journalist was a woman.
The interview, and Capezzali’s reaction to it, chilled the court. On screen, she sobbed as she talked of ‘a scream that was almost inhuman’. On the witness box, Capezzali herself sat with her eyes closed and her head down, looking on the verge of tears; moments later, she wiped tears from her eyes.
One woman juror also cried, dabbing her eyes and nose with a paper handkerchief. Another juror sat with his hands clasped in front of his forehead, as if what was happening was too distressing for him.
Mignini stood up to request that what he called Capezzali’s ‘silent crying’ be entered into the court records. Judge Massei agreed to his demand.
Amanda, who had sat immobile as usual, turned to look at Ghirga; he shrugged.
When Judge Massei suspended the hearing for a break shortly afterwards, Ghirga stood up, looking sombre, while Amanda leant forward and stayed hunched over her desk, cheeks resting on her clenched fists, for several long seconds.
44
28 March 2009
Suffering from a bad hernia, the tramp Antonio Curatolo was wheeled into the courtroom on an office chair by a clerk and an assistant of Mignini. They then lifted him, still in the chair, onto the witness box where he took his oath. He wore jeans and a blue denim jacket, a black and white hat, and a blue scarf tucked under his grey beard; his battered brown boots gaped open, laces undone.
Gently guided by Mignini, Curatolo testified in a strong, clear voice that on the evening of the murder, when he was sitting on a bench on Piazza Grimana reading a news magazine and smoking the odd cigarette, he’d noticed a boy and girl ‘who looked like they were boyfriend and girlfriend’ in a corner of the basketball court.
The pair talked animatedly to each other and every so often one of them would get up, walk over to a railing and look over towards the gate of the cottage. Curatolo had gone away just before midnight to spend the night in a nearby park. They’d disappeared shortly before that.
‘How were these youngsters dressed?’ Mignini asked.
‘Their clothes were a bit dark,’ Curatolo replied.
‘Can you describe them to us – what did they look like?’
‘They were a bit short. They looked nice, I thought.’
‘Dark hair, light hair? Excuse me Signor Curatolo, can you see them in this courtroom, these youngsters?’
Curatolo turned stiffly to his left and took a long, slow look at Raffaele and then at Amanda. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Judge Massei: ‘Can you point to them?’
Curatolo pointed with a bony finger. ‘It’s her and him. But I’d seen them before that evening too.’
Amanda, who was leaning forward over the desk in front of her, remained impassive. Raffaele swung his chair from side to side.
Curatolo added that the next day, in the early afternoon, he’d seen police and carabinieri officers at the cottage.
When Mignini sat down, Bongiorno started her questioning by making Curatolo repeat several times that he’d first seen the pair he believed were Amanda and Raffaele at 9.30 p.m.
‘Listen to that, the tramp is giving Amanda and Raffaele a new alibi!’ exclaimed a journalist in the public gallery.
Bongiorno’s insistence on the timing disconcerted Mignini. Until then, he’d assumed on the basis of Curatolo’s statement to him in February that the tramp had first seen the pair some two hours later. But in Curatolo’s statement – which the prosecutor read out in court – there was no mention of when he’d first seen the couple.
Pressed by Mignini, Curatolo said he hadn’t been watching the couple all the time. He’d read his magazine for a bit, then he’d smoked a cigarette and had a look round the square, and then read some more. In all, he’d seen the couple four or five times that evening.
Under questioning by Judge Massei, Curatolo said that ‘sometimes it looked as if they were joking together, and sometimes it looked as if they were quarrelling.’
Looking a little thrown by Curatolo’s testimony, Mignini called his next witness – Fabio Gioffredi, a lanky-haired university graduate in his mid-thirties.
Gioffredi described how two days before the murder on 30 October, he’d seen four youngsters walk out of the cottage at about 5 p.m. as he went to fetch his car, which was parked across the road. They were walking silently up the drive to the gate. At the time, Gioffredi recognised only Rudy – he was 99 per cent certain it was Rudy, because he’d already seen him before outside the university. A few days later, when he saw them on TV, he realised the three others were Meredith, Amanda and Raffaele.
Gioffredi was the only witness who said he’d seen the victim with all three accused of her murder. He re
called that Meredith was wearing jeans and army-type black boots with buckles, Raffaele a long dark jacket and Amanda a long, red ‘1960s-style’ coat. He didn’t see Rudy well enough to say how he was dressed because he was behind Raffaele. He was sure of the date because he’d bumped into someone else’s car in the car park and had quarrelled with the driver. Like Curatolo before him, he too recognised Amanda and Raffaele in court.
After Gioffredi had been dismissed, Raffaele stood up. In his thin, reedy voice, he said Gioffredi couldn’t have seen him with Rudy because he didn’t know Rudy. Second, he’d never seen Amanda wear a long red coat. ‘And third, that day I was elsewhere as my lawyers will demonstrate, with documents to prove it, later in this trial,’ Raffaele said, thanking the court before sitting down again.
Both Mignini and his colleague Comodi had hesitated before putting the next witness down on their list – the Albanian farmhand Hekuran Kokomani. His testimony had been bluntly dismissed as ‘irrelevant ravings’ by Judge Micheli, who’d convicted Rudy and sent Amanda and Raffaele to trial. To make matters worse, the police had arrested Kokomani and accused him of drug-dealing in mid-February after finding eight grammes of cocaine in his flat; Kokomani had protested he was innocent and denied it was his.
But the prosecutors felt that he was a credible witness and decided to summon him. Armed guards took Kokomani’s handcuffs off before he entered the courtroom but he walked in, head bowed, with a guard on either side of him. As with Amanda and Raffaele, the two guards then stood behind him while he gave evidence.
A thickset figure with a heavy butcher’s face and a military-style haircut, dressed in a blue and white tracksuit, Kokomani looked nervous and gave his name in a whisper. Almost as soon as he started giving evidence, Judge Massei asked him to speak slowly and clearly. The judge was to make the same request again and again, to little effect.
Mignini kept insisting that Kokomani should speak in his native Albanian as he had a woman interpreter sitting next to him, but Kokomani kept answering in very poor Italian. His replies were often bewildering, prompting the usually unflappable Judge Massei to look lost for the first time since the trial had begun, his cheeks buried in the palms of his hands, and one juror to scratch his head in bafflement.
On the night before the murder or on the night of the murder itself – Kokomani wasn’t sure which – he’d been driving past the cottage after dinner when he saw what looked like a black bag in the middle of the road; he braked but touched it with his bumper. He realised the ‘bag’ was in fact two youngsters when they stood up.
‘These two kids here,’ he added, indicating Amanda and Raffaele – the third witness to identify them in court that day.
As far as he could tell, the two had rowed with each other for a few seconds then Raffaele walked up to Kokomani, who was still sitting in his car, and punched him. Kokomani punched Raffaele back, sending his glasses flying.
Startling the guards standing behind him, Kokomani suddenly raised his hands above his head and mimed clutching a knife horizontally in both hands.
‘The girl pulled out a knife with both hands and she said: “Come here and I’ll show you!” ’ Kokomani said, adding the knife was between twelve and sixteen inches long. Raffaele then said to Kokomani: ‘Forget it, she’s a girl; she can’t do anything to you.’
After more requests from Judge Massei for him to speak up and to articulate, Kokomani ploughed on with his story: ‘After the girl held the knife up, I threw a handful of olives in her face.’
Judge Massei, looking stunned: ‘You threw a handful of olives?’
‘Yes, at the girl.’
‘And where were the olives?’
‘I had them in a bucket in front of the seat.’
Kokomani’s story – which often amazed his audience – was by no means finished. A black boy near the cottage whom Kokomani recognised as Rudy – Kokomani said he’d seen Rudy before at a bed and breakfast where he used to work as a waiter – had started shouting at him, and then demanded the loan of his car. Kokomani refused, and asked Rudy: ‘What’s that girl doing with a knife?’
‘It’s a party, we’re cutting the cake,’ Rudy replied.
At this point, Kokomani heard what sounded like a young woman in the cottage shouting for help or quarrelling – he didn’t know in what language but it wasn’t Italian – but Rudy told him it was just some music. Kokomani finally drove away and as he did so he saw that Raffaele was now holding a knife, which looked shorter than the one Amanda had.
When her turn came, Bongiorno lost no time in seeking to ridicule Kokomani. She zeroed in on his claim to have seen Amanda and Raffaele not only in November but also a couple of months earlier, in late August or early September. According to Kokomani, the couple was in a bar with a man in his sixties whose hair was ‘a bit white and a bit red’ and ‘who said he was Amanda’s uncle – maybe he was her lover, I didn’t ask him for his ID papers!’
Bongiorno pointed out that Amanda and Raffaele had met only in late October, but Kokomani insisted he’d seen them together the previous summer.
When Bongiorno made Kokomani describe again how he’d thrown olives at Amanda, two jurors grinned broadly as he talked. Amanda turned to glance at Ghirga, who tapped his skull three times to mean the witness was mad.
In a smug tone of voice, Kokomani boasted about how the olives had struck home: ‘I hit her spot on … In the face, she started to yell.’
Many in the courtroom burst out laughing, and several jurors smiled.
Kokomani proved the most bewildering witness the trial had seen so far, contradicting himself repeatedly. In his previous statements, he’d first estimated that he’d seen Amanda and Raffaele in the middle of the road at about 6.30 p.m., then that it had been 8.40 p.m. In court, he told Bongiorno it was about 9 or 9.30 p.m., before telling Judge Massei it was 8.30 or 9.30 p.m.
After Kokomani had testified that he’d noticed a gap in the middle of Amanda’s front teeth when she shouted at him and brandished the knife, her lawyer Dalla Vedova asked him: ‘Can you see Amanda today? Can you describe the space between the teeth?’
Kokomani muttered something incomprehensible.
‘Perhaps if you look at her teeth …’ Dalla Vedova suggested.
Amanda bared her teeth as Kokomani looked at her. ‘Now she’s got them stuck together,’ he said, to more laughter in the courtroom.
Mignini put a brave face on a bad day. Kokomani, he insisted later, may have tried to ‘overdo things’ in court, and his refusal to use the interpreter was infuriating, but he’d seen Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy on the night before the murder. As for the tramp Curatolo, he’d seen Amanda and Raffaele on the night of the murder – which contradicted their alibi that they hadn’t moved from Raffaele’s flat that night.
45
3 April 2009
The pathologist Luca Lalli, who had carried out the autopsy on Meredith, was the first expert witness to testify at the trial. Behind closed doors – Judge Massei ordered the public and the media to leave out of respect for Meredith – Lalli described his findings on the time and cause of death. He had found no unequivocal signs of sexual violence on Meredith’s body, but he didn’t rule out the possibility that she had been forced into having sex.
Judge Massei asked Lalli about Meredith’s final moments: ‘If there was during this period a very loud scream, a horrifying one – one of the witnesses said she heard it – when would you situate it? When she was struck in the neck?’
‘I think it’s unlikely the scream was at the moment of the most serious stab to the neck, because it would have been diffi – cult to make the sound. It’s possible the scream was at any time before that wound was inflicted. So theoretically that could be the moment when the girl was struck on the right side of the neck, where the wound wouldn’t have made her incapable of screaming, ’ Lalli said.
‘And if that’s the case, the scream would have been one of pain or of fear? Or …’
‘That’s impossible,
impossible to say …’
‘An immediate reaction to pain?’
‘Well, given the nature of pain, it takes a bit of time for a wound to produce pain so it’s just as likely it was a scream of fear as of pain. We can’t distinguish the moment in which the girl screams because she sees the weapon approaching, from the moment she realises the weapon has struck her and at that point screams out of fear and pain.’
Lalli’s conclusions differed from those of his boss Professor Mauro Bacci, the head of Perugia’s forensic medicine institute, who with two more colleagues had been asked by Mignini to study the results of the autopsy. For Bacci and his two colleagues, there was ‘every probability’ that the sex Meredith had shortly before her death ‘could have had a violent connotation’. They pointed not only to the bruises in the genital area but also to bruises that indicated the killer or killers had tried to immobilise her.
The three experts found that the worst wound had provoked a haemorrhage and caused Meredith to inhale a great deal of blood. The kitchen knife seized at Raffaele’s flat, and on which Meredith and Amanda’s DNA had been found, was compatible with both the most serious wound and with one of the smaller ones, but then so were many other knives on the market. It was incompatible however with one of the two smaller wounds, because in order to enter the neck so deeply, its blade would have made a wider wound on her skin than the one Meredith suffered.
The experts gave a revised estimate for the time of death. Given that Meredith had eaten her dinner between 6 and 9 p.m. – and not at 9 p.m. as first thought when Lalli had estimated the time of death at 11 p.m. – and that she had left Amy and Robyn’s home at 8.45 p.m., they said Meredith had died between 9.30 p.m. and midnight.
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 28
