Sophie’s first reaction to the verdict was relief that Amanda and Raffaele had been found guilty. But a twenty-six-year sentence, she quickly realised, meant Amanda would be in her early forties, at the most, when she walked free. Sophie had wanted Amanda jailed for life, but she would still have a life ahead of her.
But Sophie hoped that after the verdict, Amanda and Raffaele would start to realise that they weren’t going to get away with what they’d done. Perhaps one of them, or Rudy, would confess.
55
22 December 2009
Two weeks after Amanda and Raffaele were convicted, an appeal court reduced Rudy’s sentence from thirty years to sixteen. The court had singled out his youth, his clean record, his difficult childhood, his decision to return to Italy to give himself up after fleeing to Germany, and his apology to the Kerchers, even if this was only for failing to save her.
But Rudy was anything but grateful for the verdict. ‘I’m not pleased because I’m innocent,’ he told journalists as he was led out of the courtroom. The Kerchers had their own reasons for being unhappy with the verdict and their lawyer Maresca fumed against the ‘drastic reduction’ in Rudy’s sentence.
The decision baffled Amanda. ‘I don’t understand why they reduced his sentence. He’s never told the truth. He keeps accusing me even though he knows I’ve got nothing to do with Meredith’s death,’ Amanda protested when her mother Edda visited her, bringing a cashmere sweater as a Christmas present.
Edda tried to explain the court’s reasoning. Her daughter listened attentively, then burst out: ‘Rudy’s got nothing to do with me. I saw him twice, briefly. I hope that one day he’ll say the truth at last and stop dragging me into this horrible thing. I’ve never pointed a finger at him, I’ve never accused him.’
As the two said goodbye – Edda had to go home to Seattle and wouldn’t be back in Perugia until the spring – Amanda told her mother not to worry about her. ‘I’ll be strong. Both of us must be strong,’ she said. ‘I’ve been told that appeal trials work in Italy – it’s rare that an innocent is left in jail.’ Then she added: ‘I’m so scared.’
Amanda showed Edda a big yellow envelope she kept in her cell. She’d written on the envelope: ‘Positive letters, to read when I’m home.’
Amanda explained: ‘Lots of people believe me. I receive hundreds of letters. People write to me from all over Italy, from the States, from Canada, from Ireland. Even from South Africa. Boys and girls, and parents who have children who are the same age as me. They tell me to be confident.’
Only two letters, from the UK, sneered at her. ‘Enjoy jail,’ one of them said.
Amanda handed the envelope to her mother. ‘I’ve put in here the letters from people who believe in my innocence. I’d like to reply to all of them but there are too many. Take them home with you. I’ll read them when I’m free.’
22 February 2010
A case that had dogged Mignini like no other came to a climax in a courtroom in Florence. This time he was not the prosecutor but the accused, charged with serious misconduct in his investigation of a suspicious death linked to the ‘Monster of Florence’, a serial killer who murdered couples in the 1960s and 1970s. The Florence prosecutor Luca Turco had portrayed Mignini as ‘driven by a crusader’s fervor’ in his work, for whom ‘everything that was critical of the investigation was an attack against it’.
Flanked by his lawyers, Mignini stood to hear the verdict. He was sure that the court would acquit him of all charges. His pregnant wife Cristina and one of their three daughters stood nearby, as did the Kerchers’ lawyer Maresca who had come to show support.
Mignini was stunned when the judge gave him a suspended prison sentence of one year and four months for abuse of office, ruling that he had illegally tapped the phones of three police officers and three journalists reporting on the ‘Monster’. Michele Giuttari, the former head of Florence’s Flying Squad, was given a suspended sentence of one year and six months for the same crime. Both Mignini and Giuttari were banned from holding public office, but this too was suspended. The death they’d investigated was that of a Perugia doctor, Francesco Narducci, in 1985; they believed it was a murder linked to the ‘Monster’.
The court acquitted Mignini of the more serious charge of aiding and abetting Giuttari. They also acquitted him of abuse of office in his conduct of another investigation into a taped conversation between Giuttari and a Florence prosecutor, in which the latter accused his superiors of blocking the investigation into the ‘Monster’. Giuttari was also acquitted of other charges.
Mignini couldn’t understand why he had been found guilty of ordering illegal phone taps. No prosecutor had the power to tap phones without first obtaining permission from a judge. And yet no accusation was made against the judge who’d given him permission.
‘My conscience is clear, I did nothing wrong,’ Mignini told journalists just after the verdict, announcing that he would appeal. He was the victim of a Florentine power struggle, he said. The trial should never have been held in Florence, because other Florence prosecutors were involved in the case.
Asked whether the ruling might throw any shadows on his handling of the Kercher investigation, Mignini replied: ‘Judges and jurors have ruled on the Meredith case. Today’s verdict, instead, involves only me.’
But from Philadelphia a new lawyer appointed by Amanda’s family, Theodore Simon, immediately seized on Mignini’s conviction. In America, he said, a prosecutor would never have been allowed to continue working on a case while facing an indictment himself; the Italian system meant that the fairness of the trial and the integrity of the verdict could be called into question.
4 March 2010
Three months after sentencing Amanda and Raffaele, Judges Massei and Cristiani released their review of the evidence – a massive, 427-page report in which they painstakingly dissected all the key elements presented in court before offering their own reconstruction of Meredith’s last moments.
The review focused at length on contradictions and inconsistencies in Amanda’s accounts. Amanda had variously said that on the night of the murder she and Raffaele had dinner at about 9.30, 10.30 or 11 p.m. But when Raffaele’s father called at 8.42 p.m., Raffaele told him that he was with Amanda and that ‘while he was washing the dishes he had realised there was a leak’ in the kitchen – so the couple had dinner much earlier than Amanda claimed. She had lied to create an alibi for the couple.
Amanda also claimed that she slept through the night and awoke in Raffaele’s arms at 10 – 10.30 a.m. on 2 November. But she never made any mention of the fact that Raffaele’s computer was turned on at 5.32 a.m. to play music for a half hour, nor that he switched on his mobile phone at 6 a.m., nor that he spoke to his father at 9.30 a.m.
That morning, Amanda said, she took a shower and washed her hair at her cottage. This was hard to believe, as she had already done so at Raffaele’s flat the previous evening. Moreover, the judges couldn’t understand why Amanda should have gone to the cottage for a shower, given that the couple planned to leave that morning for a day trip to the medieval town of Gubbio.
The first call Amanda made on 2 November was to her flatmate Filomena, according to Amanda’s testimony. But in fact her first call was to Meredith’s English mobile phone, at 12.07 p.m. The judges held that she made the call because she wanted to check that no one had found Meredith’s two phones, before calling Filomena to tell her about the ‘burglary’ at the cottage. If Amanda really had wanted to find out where Meredith was, as she claimed, why then didn’t she also call her Italian phone? The truth was that Amanda and Raffaele knew perfectly well that Meredith couldn’t answer.
In the email she sent to her family and friends in Seattle on 4 November, Amanda said she had panicked after Meredith failed to answer her when she banged on her door and shouted her flatmate’s name. Raffaele had then tried to knock the door down but failed, and that was when they had decided to call the police.
Amanda said Meredith’s d
oor was normally closed, and yet Raffaele tried to force it open. His attempt was only a ‘timid’ one, the judges said – he had stopped trying after only one kick. And when the police arrived at the cottage, there was no sign of the panic Amanda mentioned. Amanda and Raffaele drew the police’s attention not to the closed bedroom door but to the broken window and the mess in Filomena’s room, the open front door, and the bloodstains in the bathroom. It was Filomena who alerted the police to Meredith’s closed door, the judges pointed out.
The review defended the work of the police detectives, the forensic police and their DNA analysis, and the two prosecutors, who had painted ‘a comprehensive and coherent picture, with no omissions and no inconsistencies.’ And yet the judges dismissed as worthless the testimony of the farmhand Kokomani – who said he saw Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy together – as well as that of the graduate Gioffredi – who said he saw all three with Meredith.
The judges struck a cautious tone in reconstructing the murder, describing their scenario not as set in stone but as the most likely based on the evidence they had examined. Their reconstruction was as follows:
On the night of 1 November, Amanda and Raffaele finished their dinner at his flat at about 8.40 p.m., and walked to Piazza Grimana, the square opposite the University for Foreigners. The tramp Curatolo saw them there between 9.30 – 10 p.m. and about 11 p.m. Rudy saw the couple there too, and started talking to Amanda who introduced him to Raffaele. At about 11 p.m., the three walked to the cottage; Amanda let them in.
For the judges, it was impossible to establish why Rudy had gone to the cottage. Perhaps he wanted to stay the night there, or spend some time with Amanda and Raffaele and use the bathroom, or say hello to his friends in the semi-basement flat. Whatever the reason, it was likely that he had found out there was no one in the downstairs flat, and told Amanda and Raffaele.
The trio must have realised immediately that Meredith was home. Meredith, who almost always left her door open, was still dressed and awake in her room, reading the history book her friend Robyn had lent her earlier that day.
Shortly after arriving at the cottage, Rudy went to the bathroom while Amanda and Raffaele went to her bedroom ‘to be together, and to be intimate’ – Amanda testified she and Raffaele had sex that evening, but at his flat, after smoking hashish.
On leaving the bathroom, Rudy let himself be carried away by what he saw as a situation ‘heavy with sexual stimulus’ which went to his head – ‘two young lovers in their room and Meredith alone in the room next door.’ He approached Meredith’s room and walked in, wanting to have sex with her.
All Meredith wanted that evening was to be left in peace to study and go to bed early. She had a new boyfriend, she had no interest in Rudy and she rejected his advances. Amanda and Raffaele heard her repulsing him. They intervened – not to defend Meredith, but to help Rudy assault her.
Why did Amanda and Raffaele turn against Meredith? For the judges, the couple was probably drugged on hashish, and their motive was ‘erotic sexual violence’. Forcing Meredith to yield to Rudy was ‘a special thrill, which had to be tried out’.
The wounds which Meredith suffered, the DNA traces and the bare bloody footprints in the flat were proof of Amanda and Raffaele’s participation. Given Meredith’s character and physical strength – she had taken karate lessons – no lone attacker could have undressed her, sexually abused her, inflicted so many wounds and murdered her.
At some point during the assault, Amanda went to her bedroom to fetch the kitchen knife, its blade six-and-a-half inches long. Raffaele, they surmised, had probably persuaded her to keep it in the big handbag she always carried around with her, so that she could defend herself if attacked in the street at night.
At first, the judges continued, Amanda may have used the kitchen knife simply to threaten Meredith. But as Rudy and Raffaele struggled to undress a fiercely resistant Meredith, Raffaele took out another, smaller knife with a blade one-and-a-half inches long which he always carried on him. He cut the bra strap on her back. Immediately afterwards, as Rudy sexually assaulted Meredith with his fingers, Raffaele stabbed her in the neck with the same knife, inflicting a wound one-and-a-half inches deep – that knife was never found.
Meredith’s ‘scream of pain and terror’ – the scream heard by the widow Capezzali – prompted one of her attackers to clamp a hand over her mouth to silence her, while Amanda stabbed her in the throat with the kitchen knife, this time inflicting a wound three inches deep. Meredith tried to jerk her head away but as she struggled she was pushed back onto the knife. Embedded in her flesh it now cut through her epiglottis (the flap of cartilage behind the root of her tongue), in effect stabbing her yet again.
When Meredith died, which the judges estimated was shortly after 11.30 p.m., Rudy rushed out of the cottage. The widow Capezzali heard him climb the iron stairs leading up from the car park opposite the cottage.
Amanda and Raffaele stayed behind. They cleaned themselves up in the bathroom, leaving several traces of Amanda and Meredith’s blood, as well as one of Raffaele’s bare foot stained with Meredith’s blood.
Amanda and Raffaele then looked out through her bedroom windows and through those in Filomena’s room to make sure no one had heard Meredith’s scream and was coming to investigate. As she did so, Amanda left bare footprints stained with her own blood together with that of Meredith in both rooms. The couple decided to break Filomena’s window to stage a burglary, which they did with a stone Raffaele brought in from the garden.
The couple walked back into Meredith’s room. Careful not to step in the pools of blood on the floor, they took her two mobile phones and covered her virtually naked body. Neither of them noticed when a small piece of glass from Filomena’s broken window fell on the floor. They left, locking the bedroom door behind them. The widow Capezzali heard them running down the cottage drive making a ‘scurrying’ sound, as she remembered it, on the stones and dry leaves in the drive.
Early the following morning, Amanda and Raffaele returned to the cottage and wiped away some but not all of their traces. They probably thought that the small bloodstains in the bathroom were insignificant. The judges found that Raffaele had, as he claimed, called the carabinieri before the postal police arrived at the cottage.
At the end of their report, the judges explained why the court had granted Amanda and Raffaele a reduced sentence. Until the murder they had been good students, their only ‘unseemly’ act that of taking drugs. Both Amanda and Raffaele were very young, inexperienced and immature, and this had been aggravated by the fact that they were far from home, their families and long-time friends.
A series of ‘casual contingencies’ lay behind the murder: Amanda and Raffaele suddenly finding themselves at a loose end that evening; the couple bumping into Rudy; the three of them present in the cottage at a time when Meredith was the only other person there. The murder had not been planned, nor was there ‘any animosity or spite’ towards the victim – a view which differed from the prosecution’s.
There was one final reason for granting Amanda and Raffaele a reduced sentence. Covering the body with the quilt indicated not only pity for Meredith, but also ‘a rejection of [the crime] that had been committed and therefore a kind of repentance.’
The same feelings also prompted Amanda and Raffaele to keep their distance from Meredith’s bedroom when the door was kicked down and her body discovered – ‘they didn’t want to see Meredith’s body, and the blood that had been spilt,’ the judges wrote.
56
1 April 2010
Amanda looked almost angelic as she recited the Lord’s Prayer. ‘ … And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,’ she intoned in a strong, steady voice, her blue eyes bright, her small hands turned palms upwards by her chest.
Attending an Easter Mass in the chapel of the women’s section at the Capanne prison, Amanda wore the red sweatshirt with a pic
ture of The Beatles on the back that she had often worn to court, with black leggings and grey and white trainers. A small brown pouch was slung across her shoulder and chest. She had cut her dark brown hair short, pageboy style, which made her look younger and somehow more frail than at her trial. She was more smartly turned out than the other prisoners, who were in baggy tracksuits – the pouch looked coquettish and her hair formed a neat curl in front of each ear. She sported silver nail varnish.
An Italian magazine had quoted Amanda as saying her new haircut was ‘80% for practical reasons, because I can dry it quickly and it feels cooler. And 20% to express a kind of rebellion, to show how this situation is devastating me.’ (Her parents said the magazine had spoken only to her mother Edda.)
Earlier that afternoon Amanda was the first prisoner the author, who had been granted permission to visit the prison, came across. Shadowed by a guard, she was pushing a trolley with a couple of box files on it. She smiled politely at another guard who made room for her and disappeared into an office.
‘Amanda’s working,’ Rita Rapponi, chief supervisor at the women’s wing, explained. ‘She goes round the cells to ask prisoners what they want to buy and then she takes the orders and their money books down to the guardroom.’ Orders included coffee, cigarettes, newspapers, magazines and strawberries. It was also Amanda’s job to distribute the purchases.
How was Amanda? ‘She’s pretty well,’ Rapponi replied. ‘Amanda’s confident that the future will bring freedom for her. She doesn’t break down in tears. It’s nothing like her night of tears after the verdict when we had to comfort her.’
A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Page 36
