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

by Follain, John

  Looking at each of the judges and jurors in turn, Mignini urged them: ‘At this moment, the most serious mistake you could make would be to look only at the accused and forget what they are accused of and the victim of the crime. Instead you must remember her, now more than ever.’

  The court had to pronounce itself, he said, on ‘a murder committed together with sexual violence, carried out for futile motives, of a twenty-two-year-old girl who was due to go back to London in a few days’ time for the birthday of her mother, to whom she was particularly close.’

  ‘She would have gone home to hug her sister Stephanie, her father and her two brothers. Mez – that’s how we call her now – will never go home again to hug her loved ones. She was killed in a horrifying way and now her relatives can only go to the cemetery, and stand quietly in front of her grave.

  ‘Meredith Kercher has been literally eliminated for ever.’

  With his love of history, Mignini couldn’t resist quoting in Latin the politician and jurist Ulpian, of Ancient Rome: ‘Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due. To live honourably, to harm no one, to give to each his own.’

  ‘You must give them what they deserve. A life sentence.’ Because of the gravity of their crimes, the prosecutor said, Amanda should spend the first nine months of her sentence in solitary confinement during the day, and Raffaele the first two months.

  Amanda, her loose hair falling untidily over her face, clasped and unclasped her hands. Two tears ran down her cheeks – ‘tears of impotence’ her lawyer Dalla Vedova called them later.

  As he made his request, Mignini felt he was doing his duty. According to the penal code the maximum punishment for murder aggravated by a sexual attack was a life sentence. Amanda and Raffaele were also accused of other crimes – theft, carrying a knife, faking a burglary and, in Amanda’s case, falsely accusing Patrick of murder – and he couldn’t see any room for granting them a reduced sentence, particularly given their behaviour after the murder. Mignini also had to take into account the sentence imposed on Rudy; he had been condemned to thirty years in prison, but if his hadn’t been a fast-track trial, it would have been life.

  And yet Mignini also felt sadness, and compassion, at what awaited Amanda and Raffaele if the sentence he requested was passed by the court. He thought of his own teenage daughters, and of Amanda’s parents and what a life sentence imposed on their girl would mean for them.

  Soon afterwards, a friend told Mignini: ‘I imagine the seven and a half hours of your closing argument were the worst hours of your life.’

  Mignini replied: ‘Actually, the worst was the minute in which I asked for the life sentences.’

  Amanda had felt too overwhelmed the previous day to stand up and speak, but that afternoon she finally found enough strength to do so. She began confidently enough, but her voice soon quivered.

  ‘I wanted first of all to say sorry because yesterday I wanted to say a couple of things, but I was very moved and I didn’t manage it. Today I’m more level-headed. I wanted to say that Meredith was my friend and I didn’t hate her,’ Amanda said, fighting back tears.

  ‘The fact that I could have killed her is absurd; the idea that I wanted to seek revenge on a person who was nice to me is absurd. I repeat that I didn’t have any relations with Rudy … Mamma mia …’ – the latter said almost in a scornful tone, as if the very idea of her having anything to do with Rudy was offensive.

  She concluded: ‘And everything that I’ve heard about myself in the past few days is pure fantasy, it has nothing to do with reality. I just wanted to say this. Thank you.’

  27 November 2009

  Mignini had accused Amanda of murder and demanded she be jailed for life, but his wasn’t the most virulent attack against her at the trial. That was made by Patrick’s lawyer Carlo Pacelli, who precisely nine months earlier had with old-fashioned courtesy addressed her as ‘Signorina Amanda’ when he questioned her.

  Today, he lashed out at her, often raising his voice. Amanda was ‘diabolic’, ‘perfidious and cunning’; she had a dual personality and was ‘unclean on the outside because she was dirty on the inside’. The lawyer compared her to Judas for embracing Patrick one day and sending him to jail the next.

  ‘Who is the real Amanda Knox?’ Pacelli asked. ‘Is she the angelic person we see here? Or is she really a diabolical she-devil, an explosive concentrate of sex, drugs and alcohol? She is both. But the latter is the Amanda we saw on 1 November, 2007.’

  Amanda didn’t even bother to glance at him. Once again, she resorted to writing a note and then showing it to her lawyers: ‘In prison, you don’t become a better person; you become worse if you don’t have an inner light that guides you.’ Away from the courtroom when guards escorted her to the bathroom during a break, she burst into tears.

  Speaking after Pacelli, the Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca spoke in a much more measured tone. He highlighted the Kercher family’s support for the investigators, thanking the latter for their work.

  ‘It’s absolutely devastating to think that kids so young committed such a serious crime but the evidence that’s been accumulated says just that,’ Maresca said. He asked for damages of £22 million to be paid – ‘a symbolic sum, because the life of a young girl has no price.’ In Italy requests for such amounts were common, and a way of underscoring the seriousness of the crime.

  Maresca ended with the words: ‘To he who has caused suffering, suffering must be imposed … Mez cannot have her life back. For the others [Amanda and Raffaele], the only path is that of repentance, of faith.’

  That evening, as Edda and Curt sat in Ghirga’s office shortly after their arrival from Seattle for the last week of the trial, carabinieri officers served them with a notice that they were under investigation on suspicion of slandering the Homicide Squad – a crime with a potential prison sentence of up to three years.

  The investigation had been launched at the request of Napoleoni and the entire Homicide Squad, who had filed a suit in September 2008. They accused Amanda’s parents of slandering them in the interview they gave the author for The Sunday Times Magazine in saying that Amanda had been ‘abused physically and verbally’, hit on the back of the head by a police officer, and given no food or water for nine hours.

  ‘The timing is very curious, with this coming five days before a high-profile case is going to come to a close, for an article written eighteen months ago,’ Curt told a journalist. ‘We just answered a reporter’s questions about what Amanda had told us,’ Edda added.

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  30 November 2009

  Of all the defence lawyers’ final pleas, Bongiorno’s was the most awaited. Raffaele’s lawyer was the most heavyweight lawyer in the courtroom and she didn’t disappoint with a sharp, well-researched summing-up delivered with only occasional glances at her notes.

  She began by directly addressing the court and quoting Plato: ‘I ask you to have the same frame of mind as the wise man, as the Socrates described by Plato; the one who, whatever he is considering at the time, says to himself: “I know that I don’t know.” ’

  What was beyond doubt, she argued, was that Raffaele and Rudy didn’t know each other at the time of the murder. ‘Rudy and Raffaele met each other in a courtroom during the preliminary hearings. The only link between them is the charge sheet,’ she said.

  She poured scorn on the witnesses who said they’d seen Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy together before the murder: ‘One contradicted himself fifty-three times, the other remembers only things which are of use to the prosecution, but nothing which can prove his story.’

  There was no motive for Raffaele killing Meredith. ‘I’m waiting to find out why Raffaele, who was about to graduate and who was in love, should have taken part in the murder of Meredith whom he hardly knew. I want to know why he did it,’ Bongiorno said.

  She tipped coloured sticks of the Mikado game out onto the desk. ‘The aim of the game is to pick up as many sticks as you can without moving
the other ones. If Raffaele was in Via della Pergola on the night of the crime, he’s a Mikado world champion.’

  She went on: ‘There are no prints belonging to Amanda or Raffaele in Meredith’s room; only super-champions of this game could have managed that. People will say they cleaned up; but then they cleaned up only their traces, because that room is dripping with Rudy’s prints. And because Alberto Intini, the head of the forensic police, says that “only a dragonfly in flight” can enter the room without leaving any traces, well then the two youngsters are innocent because they’re not dragonflies, that’s for sure.’

  Bongiorno attacked Mignini’s latest reconstruction of the murder: ‘There used to be just one murder weapon, and now there are two. And in any case the big knife chosen by the prosecution, pulled out at random like a lottery number from a drawer where there were another hundred, is even for court-appointed experts compatible only with the will to threaten, not to kill. What shall we do? Change the charge sheet?’

  For investigators, she said, finding the kitchen knife in Raffaele’s flat served to give him a role in the murder; they saw him as just an appendix to Amanda, ‘a drone’. But the kitchen knife wasn’t the murder weapon.

  ‘It’s been excluded that the DNA found on the blade was blood. What’s more, it’s only at the end of the trial that we were told the genetic substance which was analysed was too low to be attributed to anyone,’ she argued.

  Nor was Meredith’s bra clasp, on which the DNA of Raffaele, Rudy and Meredith was found, a valid piece of evidence. ‘It was spotted by the police on 2 November 2007 close to Mez’s body and was rediscovered forty-six days later under a rug which had at first been rolled up beside the desk … It’s not genuine evidence. Either the prosecution explains to us how it came to be moved, or it should have the courage to throw it away.’

  Bongiorno surprised many in court by making an impassioned defence of Amanda; she clearly believed that to save her client Raffaele, she also had to save his ex-girlfriend. Tackling Amanda’s ‘confession’ that she was at the cottage at the time of the murder and heard Patrick kill her, Bongiorno said that on the night she made that statement to police, ‘Amanda was denied her right to silence’; at the time, she added, Amanda spoke only a little Italian and she didn’t know the country’s laws.

  Again staring straight at the judges and jurors, Bongiorno asked: ‘Do you think it’s so very strange that she became desperate, that she said things that weren’t true, and that she didn’t have the courage to correct what she had said afterwards? To understand that, you have to decipher Amanda.’

  The prosecution, Bongiorno said, had described Amanda as ‘a ripper’ – as in ‘Jack the Ripper’. She added: ‘The truth is that Amanda is a fragile and weak girl and not a ripper. The ripper would have defended herself, she wouldn’t have let herself be duped by the police’ – a reference to the night on which she made her ‘confession’.

  The clue to Amanda’s nature was in the memorandum she wrote five days after the murder in which she said her friends thought she was like Amélie – the faux-naïve heroine of the film she and Raffaele said they watched on the night of the murder – ‘because I’m a bit of a weirdo, in that I like random little things, like birds singing, and these little things make me happy.’

  Amanda was ‘the Amélie of Seattle’ for Bongiorno. ‘She looks at the world with the eyes of a little girl, like Amélie: a naïve, slightly extravagant, spontaneous young girl who is 60% imagination and 40% reality,’ Bongiorno said.

  Amanda and Raffaele were not murderers but adolescents who had been discovering love. ‘The two would have committed such a savage murder after having watched such a romantic comedy? Does that seem logical?’ Bongiorno asked.

  Bongiorno appealed to the court one last time: ‘I began by quoting Plato and urging you to doubt. When you deliberate, don’t be afraid of having doubts, of verifying, of contradicting each other. The role that you are performing is something I’ve never wanted to have because I don’t feel capable. Only you and God have the power to sit in judgement.’

  1 December 2009

  With the court due to start deliberating their verdict in three days’ time, Amanda took up pen and paper yet again. A note she left behind on her desk after a hearing was headed: ‘What I want to say at the end.’

  She wrote that she planned to thank the court and added: ‘I’m afraid of losing myself because I’m afraid of being convicted for something I’m not, which I didn’t do.’

  In court, Amanda adopted a more sombre look. Gone were the Beatles T-shirt and sweatshirt; her hair gathered in a neat plait that started on the crown of her head, she dressed elegantly in a black polo-neck sweater and cream trousers.

  2 December 2009

  A stickler for routine, Amanda’s lawyer Ghirga started his day as usual on a high metal stool outside the Caffè Turreno before striding down to the law courts. But today, the day he was to make his closing argument on Amanda’s behalf, he brought his daughter Giulia into the courtroom with him and sat her down just a few feet from Amanda and himself, near the big steel cage; Ghirga wanted his daughter, who was almost the same age as Amanda, to be close to him as he spoke.

  ‘Good luck!’ a friend greeted Ghirga as he arranged a dozen piles of handwritten notes and case files all over his desk.

  ‘It’s out of my hands,’ Ghirga, his white hair immaculately combed, shot back – as if he had already resigned himself to a guilty sentence.

  Ghirga’s plea clearly came from the heart; he sounded sincere, impassioned, often patting Amanda’s shoulder when he mentioned her. Her arms folded, she sat staring fixedly up at him as he talked, her lips sealed tight. Taking the court through the investigation, the former sweeper for the Juventus team first tackled Napoleoni and her female colleagues of the Homicide Squad head-on.

  The squad, Ghirga said, had seen Amanda ‘snogging’ – ‘What a horrible word!’ he added – with Raffaele in the garden of the cottage, and had immediately started tapping her phone. ‘This is a clash between women, between Amanda and the women of the Flying Squad, which she has had to put up with from the very beginning,’ Ghirga said, making sweeping gestures with his hands and nearly shouting. ‘The vibrator, the condoms, the Vaseline pushed the investigation towards a sex crime. That’s how the image of a man-eater was born – the student who brought boys home.’

  A couple of journalists in the courtroom wondered why Ghirga had zeroed in on the women investigators – ‘Is he being sexist? Is he implying Napoleoni and the others suspected her out of female bitchiness?’ one journalist whispered. Whatever the reason, Ghirga had apparently chosen to ignore the fact that most of Napoleoni’s colleagues in the Homicide Squad were in fact men – the head of the Flying Squad was a man and so was the lead prosecutor who had more authority over the investigation than any of these women.

  Amanda was no man-eater, Ghirga continued: ‘She only brought one man home, on the night she went to the Red Zone [night club] with Mez. Amanda, who hadn’t met Raffaele yet, brought a Roman boy to her room. Meredith was in her room with [her neighbour] Giacomo.’

  Now turning himself into a referee, Ghirga sanctioned the prosecutor Mignini for failing to give Amanda a lawyer on the night she made her ‘confession’ and ‘leaving her defenceless for hours’. Ghirga raised his voice to a shout: ‘What Amanda suffered that night was a red-card foul. This is a very serious omission which we can’t tolerate.’

  Ghirga’s attack left Mignini visibly fuming, but the prosecutor said nothing.

  The only reason Amanda had made that ‘confession’, Ghirga went on, was that she had ‘freaked out completely after four days of stress … There was no deliberate intention, no will’ to trap Patrick, and so she should be acquitted of the charge of slander. She had simply started to say what the police wanted to hear.

  Ghirga again hit out at Mignini, denouncing his new reconstruction of how Meredith died. ‘Everything’s changed in the prosecution’s case – the position
of the victim, the weapons, the time of death. The sexual motive has fallen through, so here’s hatred; but the text messages between Amanda and Mez prove their friendship,’ Ghirga said.

  Going further than any other lawyer or expert consultant at the trial, Ghirga then ruled out the kitchen knife as the murder weapon, stating categorically: ‘There was an involuntary DNA contamination in the laboratory.’ But he gave no evidence for this.

  As he ended his plea, Ghirga urged the judges and jurors: ‘I ask you – or rather Amanda’s parents, two desperate parents,’ – Ghirga turned to point at Edda and Curt – ‘ask you to acquit her.’

  Ghirga again touched Amanda lightly on the shoulder. ‘Amanda asks you for her life. Give Amanda her life back,’ he said.

  The strain of the past two years, and his own emotional commitment to Amanda – of whom he’d confided ‘I’d love to have her as my own daughter’ – suddenly proved too much for Ghirga as he found himself choking back tears. He stopped, blinked several times and took a sip of water.

  ‘I’m a little moved. What you’ve seen isn’t an act, I want to do my utmost to persuade you,’ Ghirga said.

  He thanked the court, then affectionately pinched Amanda’s cheek before sitting down.

  Over lunch with Napoleoni and the Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca afterwards, Mignini fretted about whether any of Ghirga’s arguments had persuaded the court.

  ‘Ghirga threw a lot of mud, and mud sticks,’ Mignini worried.

  Back at the Caffè Turreno later that day, Ghirga confided: ‘I bumped into a couple of the jurors on my way out of court. One said “Bravo” to me, and another said I’d moved him.’