‘Did Meredith ever go to Raffaele’s house?’
‘No.’
‘She never went. Did you ever bring kitchen objects from Via della Pergola to Raffaele’s house?’
‘No.’
‘When you turned your mobile off [on the evening of Meredith’s death], did you tell Raffaele you were switching it off?’
Again and again, Amanda replied ‘I can’t remember’ to Judge Massei’s questions. She couldn’t remember whether she had told Raffaele she was switching her mobile off. She couldn’t remember whether she’d heard Raffaele’s mobile or house phone ring afterwards. She couldn’t remember whether she’d seen Raffaele use his mobile that evening.
She didn’t know whether Raffaele had used his computer after they’d watched Amélie and had dinner. She couldn’t remember whether she’d switched her mobile back on when she woke up the next morning. She couldn’t remember when Raffaele had used his mobile for the first time that morning.
Judge Massei then asked Amanda about an aspect no one had ever raised with her before. ‘What kind of heating was there in Via della Pergola?’
The question surprised Amanda. ‘Heating?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a lot, I remember that in my room it was often cold, so I had a carpet on the floor. Honestly I never switched on any kind of heating in my—’
‘When you arrived at ten, you didn’t switch on any kind of heating?’
‘I never—’
‘So the heating is turned off that morning?’
‘I didn’t look at any kind of heating.’
‘Was the house warm when you walked in?’
‘No, no, there was—’
‘It was cold.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘The front door was wide open, it was cold.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was there heating in the bathroom?’
Again, Amanda repeated Judge Massei’s question: ‘In the bathroom?’
‘Yes.’
‘I never used heating in the bathroom, so …’
‘So the bathroom was cold.’
‘Yes, pretty much.’
‘Raffaele’s home was warm? What was the bathroom like, was it heated?’
‘Yes.’
With his sharp, no-nonsense style, Judge Massei had planted in the minds of the jurors an idea which made Amanda’s account of her return to the cottage yet more odd: if she was to be believed, she had chosen to take a shower in a cold flat rather than in Raffaele’s heated bathroom.
Amanda appeared to lose some of her self-assurance as Judge Massei pressed on; she occasionally lowered her gaze and her face looked flushed.
He asked Amanda about the bloodstained light switch in the bathroom. ‘Did you use the light switch in the bathroom? Did you press it once, or twice? Did you turn the light on in the bathroom?’
Again, Judge Massei surprised Amanda. ‘Ah, the light?’ she repeated.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t remember if I put the light on or not.’
‘You don’t remember,’ Judge Massei noted aloud before going on. ‘Excuse me, I also wanted to ask you, when you called [Filomena] Romanelli, it’s the second of November, the first time, where were you?’
‘OK, the first time …’
‘Romanelli says that this phone call was at about 12.10 p.m.’
‘OK, I think that the first time I called her I was at Raffaele’s flat, I asked him what he wanted to do and he said I should call my flatmates. So I called her when I was in Raffaele’s flat. But afterwards I think she called me again when we were walking to my house.’
‘So you called Romanelli while you were at Raffaele’s flat?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘You make your first phone call from Raffaele’s flat.’
‘Raffaele’s, yes.’
‘I point out to you that, at least according to Romanelli’s testimony, the circumstances were different.’
‘OK.’
Judge Massei read aloud Filomena’s account of Amanda’s call: ‘She told me she’d had a shower, that she thought there was blood and that she was going to Raffaele’s.’
‘Ah, OK, so it was when I was walking to Raffaele’s.’
‘So you weren’t at Raffaele’s.’
When after five hours in the witness box, Judge Massei told Amanda her testimony was over, she smiled brightly in relief. She stood and, head bowed, was led back to prison.
‘Amanda’s lawyers managed to make Mignini furious so he wasn’t as hard-hitting as he could have been,’ an investigator commented afterwards. ‘But Judge Massei was relentless and no one stopped him. Amanda did very well – her lawyers coached her very well, and I’m sure they told her not to cry whatever happened. But she hasn’t cleared up any of the doubts in her story.’
If the questions put by Judge Massei on behalf of the court were any guide to their thinking on the case, the investigator wasn’t the only person to have doubts about Amanda’s story.
50
19 June 2009
A week after Amanda took the witness box, it was her mother Edda’s turn. Speaking through an interpreter, Edda was questioned gently by both of Amanda’s lawyers.
Asked by Ghirga what Amanda had told her about Meredith and her two other flatmates, Edda replied in a soft, unemotional voice: ‘She really liked all three of them.’ Amanda had never talked about any problems with Meredith over the running of the flat; ‘She said they got along great.’
Ghirga soon sat down again and his colleague Dalla Vedova quizzed Edda to paint a sketchy portrait of Amanda’s life in Seattle. While Amanda doodled on a notepad, he asked Edda about her job as a schoolteacher and about Amanda’s father, Curt – ‘Amanda’s father lives with his wife and two other daughters.’ ‘They live in Seattle?’ Dalla Vedova asked.
‘Yes, they live near us.’
‘So Amanda sees her father regularly?
‘Yes, he lives very near us,’ Edda repeated.
Asked why Amanda had chosen Perugia for her studies abroad, Edda replied: ‘She wanted to go to an Italian city that wasn’t too touristy, because she wanted to learn about Italian people and their culture.’ She’d worked hard to earn the money to pay for her trip.
Like Ghirga, Dalla Vedova also asked Edda about her daughter’s relations with Meredith.
‘She told me about the fun things she and Meredith did,’ Edda said.
20 June 2009
Challenging the prosecution’s reconstruction of Meredith’s murder, Raffaele’s lawyers called as a witness Francesco Introna, a professor of forensic medicine from the University of Bari, not far from Raffaele’s hometown.
Introna, in his mid-fifties, told the court he’d become involved in the case at a late stage and had based his report on the results of the autopsy – which he hadn’t attended – and had also consulted photographs and films of the crime scene.
Introna first challenged the prosecutors’ estimate that Meredith had died between 11.10 p.m. and shortly after midnight. He maintained that she had died between 9.30 and 10.30 p.m. because, he argued, the stress of the attack she suffered had within that time range interrupted the emptying of her stomach following her dinner.
Introna’s reconstruction of Meredith’s last moments was also completely at odds with the prosecution’s. The kitchen knife seized at Raffaele’s flat simply couldn’t be the murder weapon, he argued, brandishing a similar one together with a tape measure in court. Dissecting the size, depth and bruising around each of the three wounds as the images were projected on the giant screen – Judge Massei had previously ordered the public and the press out of the courtroom – he said it was impossible that such a knife, with a blade six-and-a-half inches long, could have caused any of them. Instead, a knife with a blade three to three-and-a-half inches long had been used.
When he screened images of the autopsy, commenting on them as he di
d so, a woman juror blanched and looked as if she was about to faint. Judge Massei interrupted the hearing to give her time to recover.
Introna went on to give his detailed interpretation of how Meredith had been attacked. Her bedroom was too small for three attackers to have killed her, he insisted – and there was only one murderer. With the court’s permission, he asked two female lawyers to act out the scene, telling them how they should move as he described it.
The attacker, he began, had entered her room, holding a knife in his right hand, when Meredith was undressing – she was naked from the waist down – intending to sexually abuse her. Standing behind Meredith, he had grabbed her by the neck, clamped a hand over her mouth and nose to stop her screaming, and pressed the blade of a knife against her cheek to make her stop moving. Still threatening her with the knife, he sexually assaulted her. Meredith tried to break free and screamed. The killer cut her face and pushed her to the ground. She was on her hands and knees when the killer immobilised her with his legs and, raising the back of her bra with his left hand, cut it with the knife he was still holding in his right hand. He then stabbed her in the neck several times.
6 July 2009
Like the consultant Introna hired by Raffaele, the forensic pathologist Carlo Torre, called by Amanda’s lawyers, also argued that the kitchen knife could not have caused Meredith’s wounds and that Meredith had been killed by only one attacker.
Torre, a professor of forensic medicine at Turin University with more than thirty years’ experience of studying high-profile cases – including murders by the terrorist Red Brigades in the 1970s – also agreed with Introna that a smaller knife with a blade just over three inches long had caused the wounds. The largest, fatal injury had been caused by the attacker stabbing Meredith a first time and then moving it back and forth in the wound.
But Torre’s reconstruction differed from Introna’s. Unlike his colleague, he believed the attacker had faced Meredith – not stood behind her – and that she had been lying on her back when she was stabbed, not crouching on her hands and knees.
14 September 2009
As the last witnesses and expert consultants gave evidence after a summer recess of almost two months – Amanda had put on weight since the last hearing and looked more drawn, Raffaele was as pale as ever – the two defence teams challenged the scientific evidence again and again. Adriano Tagliabracci, a professor of forensic medicine from Ancona on the Adriatic Coast hired by Raffaele, criticised Stefanoni’s work as she sat between the two prosecutors. She had failed to document her work properly, he said, and had written ‘too low’ four times alongside an entry for the samples taken from the kitchen knife.
‘It could have been contamination in the laboratory. It could have been anything. “Too low” means it shouldn’t have been used for analysis,’ Tagliabracci said.
The results of the tests on the bra clasp were also too low to say that Raffaele’s DNA was on it, he continued. But he added that the clasp could have been contaminated with Raffaele’s DNA.
Stefanoni shook her head repeatedly as she listened to Tagliabracci. She spoke quietly to Comodi, who interrupted him several times and accused him of insulting the biologist.
19 September 2009
Two forensic police officers gingerly brought the kitchen knife taken from Raffaele’s flat into the courtroom. Wrapped in plastic and lying in a white box, it was shown to the court and then to expert witnesses – the experts put on latex gloves and masks to cover their mouths and noses before approaching it.
The forensic pathologist Mariano Cingolani, one of three experts who’d been appointed by a judge shortly after the murder, doubted that it had caused the smallest of the wounds to Meredith’s neck.
‘Many other knives are more compatible with that kind of wound,’ he said, arguing that the cut would have been bigger if that knife had been used, given the wound’s depth. But he added there was no way of knowing for certain as both the position of Meredith’s neck at the time of the stabbing and the elasticity of her tissues were unknown.
Amanda, her face expressionless, looked at the knife for a few seconds and then glanced at Raffaele.
25 September 2009
Professor Carlo Caltagirone, a Roman neurologist hired by Amanda, gave the court the only specialist analysis of her personality – albeit a very limited one. His brief had been to assess whether the stress she was under during police questioning – which her lawyers said lasted forty-one hours over the six days from the discovery of the body to the day of her arrest – could have affected her memory. He based his evidence on the ‘two or three hours’ he’d spent with her in prison, and on the texts she’d written just after her arrest.
‘It’s possible that someone’s memory can be modified under stress. A situation combining pressure and prolonged tension can cause someone to remember something which never happened – a false memory,’ Caltagirone told the court.
‘Amanda is a person who is apparently serene and outgoing but in fact she bottles up stressful situations inside herself. Being questioned for a very long time in a foreign country, with someone telling her she may be guilty of something, and failing to grasp the gravity of her situation would have led to a lot of stress,’ he said.
He described Amanda’s ‘cognitive condition’ – the way she acquired knowledge through thought, experience and the senses – as ‘very good … typical of a young woman.’
9 October 2009
After the last of the witnesses had testified, Amanda and Raffaele’s lawyers made one final attack on the forensic evidence, demanding that the court appoint leading experts to carry out independent reviews.
Raffaele’s lawyer Bongiorno argued that given scientific evidence had taken on such importance in the trial, these reviews were ‘indispensible’; the ‘future of a fine young man’ was at stake.
Raffaele’s team requested reviews on the DNA traces found on the bra clasp and on the kitchen knife; the time of Meredith’s death; whether the knife was compatible with Meredith’s wounds; whether the wounds were inflicted by one or several killers; and on whether the widow Nara Capezzali could have heard the scream she believed she had heard on the night of the murder – Bongiorno wanted experts to establish how many decibels were needed for the scream to be heard in her flat across the road from the cottage.
On Amanda’s behalf, Ghirga also requested reviews on the DNA found on the kitchen knife as well as on the foot- and shoe prints found in Filomena’s room, in the corridor of the flat and on the cushion under Meredith’s body.
Neither the judges nor the jurors were impressed. After debating the requests for just under two hours, they rejected them all. Announcing the decision, Judge Massei said there was no need to acquire further evidence.
The ruling was a blow for Amanda and Raffaele. She raised her eyes to the ceiling then looked worriedly at her lawyers; Ghirga patted her on the back. Raffaele bowed his head and cried briefly.
Judge Massei consulted the prosecutors and lawyers, and announced that the final hearings would take place in six weeks’ time with each party in turn making their closing arguments.
Amanda and Raffaele were taken back to their cells. There was little they could do now to influence the court; they resigned themselves to a long wait.
23 October 2009
Christ Mbette, a twenty-two-year-old nursing student from the Congo, became the first person to sleep in Meredith’s room since her murder. The cottage’s owner had redecorated the flat – Meredith’s bedroom was given a fresh coat of paint and all the furniture replaced – and rented it out to Mbette and two female students from the Congo and Cameroon. The owner had yet to find someone to rent Amanda’s room.
One TV show had wanted to broadcast a live programme from the flat, but the owner turned the request down and made her new tenants promise not to film or take any photographs inside it.
Mbette told a journalist: ‘My friends are pulling my leg; they tell me to be careful and that soon
er or later I’ll see Meredith’s ghost. My girlfriend has told me to pray to God and that I mustn’t be scared. But I’m not afraid: even if I saw Meredith’s ghost tonight, it wouldn’t do me any harm, given the kind of person she was.’
31 October 2009
The eve of the second anniversary of Meredith’s murder was also the deadline for prisoners at the Capanne jail to submit their entries in a writing competition organised by a local charity. Among them was a short story entitled ‘My Love’, by Marie Pace. The name was a pseudonym, and the author was in fact Amanda – Marie was her second Christian name, and ‘pace’ means ‘peace’ in Italian.
A bizarre story, written in Italian, it takes the form of a letter written by a man to a girl ‘with blonde hair’.
In the letter he asks the blonde girl: ‘Do you remember that unexpectedly warm night in November?’ That night, the man and the girl he is now writing to had been sitting on the porch of his house, while inside a party with booming house music was under way.
Some time later that evening the girl disappeared and the narrator tells her in his letter how he searched for her. ‘I swam through the waves of warm bodies wet with sweat and drink … You weren’t in the kitchen.’
The letter continues: ‘I saw you lying on the floor, you were no longer wearing either your jacket or your sweater. In that moment I didn’t understand anything … I realised you’d lost consciousness. When I came back they’d already taken you to hospital but I want you to know that I didn’t mean to abandon you, but in that moment I didn’t understand anything.’
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 32
