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Authors: Douglas Preston,John Douglas,Mark Olshaker,Steve Moore,Judge Michael Heavey,Jim Lovering,Thomas Lee Wright

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BOOK: The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single)
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Former FBI special agent
Steve Moore
entered the fray following news of Amanda’s wrongful conviction. He worked tirelessly speaking out on her behalf.
John Douglas
and
Mark Olshaker
came to the cause after investigating the case on their own and then contacted me before writing about it in their penetrating recent book
Law & Disorder
. Steve Moore had been in Douglas’ behavioral science classes during new-agent training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, nearly three decades ago and was delighted to have John join the investigation and the effort to spread the truth. The value of the extensive knowledge John, Mark, and Steve bring to the “Crime Scene” and “Investigation” chapters in this book is incalculable.

As a neighbor in West Seattle,
Judge Michael Heavey
has known Amanda’s divorced Knox and Mellas families for many years. His distinguished military record and years of selfless service in the Washington State legislature and as an exemplar of judicial reason make him a uniquely authoritative resource for the chapter on “Court Findings.” He was aided in the task of distilling, translating, and interpreting
a massive amount of legal material by
Jim Lovering,
whose uncanny memory and deft writing made him the ideal archivist for this case.

It should be noted that all of the authors who did not know Amanda personally—Preston, Moore, Lovering, Douglas, and Olshaker—originally assumed from the media coverage that she and Raffaele were indeed guilty. It was only after delving into the facts and the evidence that each came to the certain knowledge that a profound miscarriage of justice had taken place and felt a need to speak out against it.

In what we hope will truly be a closing chapter, we include here “My Declaration” by
Amanda Knox,
her letter to the Italian court. The outstanding personal qualities she exhibited and the values she embraced as a high-school student have served her well through all she has endured in her early 20s. Family and friends enjoy watching her embrace freedom once again. The successful publication of her memoir,
Waiting to Be Heard
, announces the arrival of a new literary voice and a fresh beginning.

Whenever justice is truly done, a bright and healing future awaits.

CHAPTER ONE: PRESUMED GUILTY

By Douglas Preston

On the morning of February 22, 2006, as I was strolling through the streets of Florence, my cell phone rang. A voice, speaking stern, officious Italian, said: “This is the police. Where are you? We are coming to get you.”

I was summoned to an interrogation in Perugia, before a prosecutor named Giuliano Mignini. For almost three hours, Mignini interrogated me in Italian, without the benefit of an interpreter or lawyer present. He accused me of various crimes, including having knowledge of a murder. He told me that if I did not confess, he would charge me with perjury. When I refused to confess to crimes I had not committed, he indicted me for various crimes and hinted that to avoid arrest, I should leave the country. The next day, I left with my family for America.

I had been targeted because I was writing, with the Italian journalist Mario Spezi, a book about the notorious serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Between 1974 and 1985, the Monster killed and ritualistically mutilated young people making love in parked cars in the Florentine Hills. He was a killer so
depraved that even Jack the Ripper pales by comparison. The Monster was never caught, and the case became one of the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Italian history.

Giuliano Mignini was the chief prosecutor in the Perugian branch of the Monster investigation. In our book, Mario and I criticized Mignini’s investigation. After my indictment, Mignini jailed Mario and charged him with being a member of a satanic cult that ordered the Monster’s murders. The subsequent international uproar over Mario’s unjust incarceration and the absurd charges against him embarrassed Italy, resulted in Mario’s swift release, and eventually led to the indictment of Mignini for abuse of office, illegal wiretapping, and other crimes related to his Monster investigation.

Twenty months later, this same prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, ordered the interrogation, arrest, and imprisonment of a young American student named Amanda Knox.

What do these two cases have in common? A great deal, it turns out. By the fall of 2007, things were not going well for Mignini. He had been removed from the Monster case, his reputation was in tatters, and his career was hanging by a thread. A Florentine prosecutor had publicly called him a man “in prey to a delirium.”

And then, on November 2, a spectacular case fell into Mignini’s lap—a case that, if swiftly solved, might rehabilitate his reputation and help him fight the abuse of office charges.

The previous night, a young English student named Meredith Kercher had been sexually assaulted and brutally murdered. Her body was discovered the next morning. Just four days later, on November 6, Mignini and the police announced they had solved the crime. One of those arrested was a 20-year-old American student from Seattle named Amanda Knox. Not only had Knox confessed to being at the scene of the crime, they said, but she had also implicated others. The evidence against her and her two accomplices was overwhelming.

Like everyone else in the United States who read the initial news reports, I assumed she was guilty.

A week later, I got a call from a man who identified himself as Tom Wright. He said he was a friend of the Knox family. He claimed that Amanda was being framed for murder—and he told me something that had not been reported in the American papers: that the chief prosecutor in the case was none other than Giuliano Mignini.

Wright laid out many startling facts about the case that had not gotten into the early press reports. He said Amanda was innocent and that the case against her was being concocted out of thin air. He asked for my help, since I had had my own run-in with Mignini and had written about him in
The Monster of Florence
.

I looked into the case to see if there was any truth to Wright’s assertions. I called Mario Spezi and my other contacts in Italy. I read about the case in the Italian papers. I spoke to a noted criminologist, Paul Ciolino, who had been sent to Italy by CBS News to analyze the case. I was deeply shocked by what I found. It was obvious
the case against Amanda and Raffaele was bogus. The
actual
evidence against her was not only weak—it was nonexistent. It indeed looked like the Perugian police and prosecutors were ginning up a case against her.

But why? What was going on? Why would Perugian prosecutors and police fabricate a case of murder against a young American student, her boyfriend, and a third man? On the surface it made no sense.

As I looked deeper into the case, the reasons started to become clear.

The investigation went off the rails immediately after the murder, when investigators were under enormous pressure to solve the crime quickly. Well before the crime scene had been analyzed, Mignini and the police had focused their suspicions on Amanda Knox because, as they explained later, her behavior following the murder seemed unusual. They conducted what they called a “behavioral-cognitive” investigation that suggested Amanda and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were psychopathic killers. A police officer claimed, for example, that Amanda did a cartwheel in the police station while waiting to be questioned, which they took to be a sign of guilt. The Perugian chief of police, Edgardo Giobbi, noted that as Amanda was putting on booties to enter the crime scene, he saw her swivel her hips in what he thought was a seductive fashion. He also observed her eating pizza a few days after the murder. He told CBS investigator Paul Ciolino that when he saw that, he “knew she was guilty,” as any normal person would have been “home in bed crying.”

And so they hauled Amanda and Raffaele in for an interrogation, hoping to break them down and get a confession.

And they succeeded. The next morning they produced a “confession” in which Amanda (in perfect police-jargon Italian) said she had a kind of confused vision of being present at the crime scene and hearing the screams. Later, it turned out this “confession” had been coerced during a vicious interrogation by more than two dozen cops and prosecutors, who screamed at her, threatened her, told her lies, and slapped her several times on the back of the head. Even though Italian law requires that all interrogations be taped—and every other interrogation in the investigation was taped—no tape or even partial transcript of Amanda’s interrogation has ever turned up. Mignini later explained that they forgot to make one.

And thus, on the morning of November 6, police and prosecutors in Perugia held a triumphant press conference in which they announced that they had solved the case and arrested three perpetrators, “
caso chiuso
” (case closed), they said. The third man was a bar owner named Patrick Lumumba, who Amanda had named as possibly being at the scene of the crime. (Later, it would turn out the interrogators repeatedly and insistently suggested his name to Amanda.)

The announcement generated headlines across Europe and the U.S. Mignini and the Perugian police were lauded for their swift resolution of the case.The crime scene had still not been analyzed, but that was unnecessary, as Police Chief Giobbi explained: “We were able to establish guilt by closely observing the suspects’
psychological and behavioral reactions during the interrogations. We don’t need to rely on other kinds of investigations, as this method has enabled us to get to the guilty parties in a very quick time.”

But then, over the following weeks, the crime-scene reports began to come in. Despite a laborious search, not one speck of Amanda’s DNA could be found at the violent and bloody crime scene. Instead, multiple DNA traces of an unknown fourth person were discovered there. Not only was his DNA found on the victim, but it was also found inside her. His bloody palm print was on a pillow underneath her body. Feces in an unflushed toilet at the murder scene turned out to be his. He was quickly identified as a drifter and knife-wielding housebreaker named Rudy Guede, who had fled the country two days after the murder. He was extradited from Germany and charged with murder.

Under ordinary circumstances, Amanda and Raffaele would have been released. But that didn’t happen. Many powerful people, from the chief of police to the head of the celebrated Flying Squad of elite investigators that had come up from Rome—not to mention Mignini himself—had been behind the triumphant “case closed” announcement. These were important people with careers to protect. Mignini was especially vulnerable, as he was under indictment for abuse of office, his trial looming. What would happen to their careers if they admitted making an appalling mistake and were forced to release three innocents?

Mignini and the police continued to insist Amanda and Raffaele were killers. The authorities were forced to release Lumumba, as the bartender had a dozen alibi
witnesses who had seen him at his bar the night of the murder. But Amanda and Raffaele had no alibis except each other. Mignini simply substituted the new suspect, Rudy Guede, for the old suspect, Lumumba. Now the murder was a conspiracy between those three—even though Raffaele had never met Guede, and Amanda knew him only in passing.

When it came time to present the case in a preliminary court hearing, Mignini explained their motive: The three had perpetrated an occult, ritualistic, sexual killing that was originally planned for Halloween but which had been postponed a day, to November 1. (He would later propose other motives for the crime, after his occult theory was met with criticism from his fellow prosecutors and a judge.)

Amanda and Raffaele remained jailed in Capanne Prison awaiting their trial while police assiduously assembled the “evidence” against them, ignoring all other lines of investigation. Eight months passed before they were actually charged with murder: That was how long it took to develop the “evidence.” In the United States, suspects typically cannot be held more than 72 hours without being charged.

Mignini’s proposed motive—that the murder was an occult rite—may seem far-fetched to American readers, but it was no surprise to those who knew Mignini. That had also been his theory of motive in the Monster of Florence case. The Monster, Mignini maintained, was no lone psychopathic serial killer; it was a group, a satanic cult, perhaps dating back to the Middle Ages, of powerful men—doctors, pharmacists, and even noblemen—who needed female body parts to be used as the host in their black masses.

But there are other aspects to Mignini’s background that may shed light on his “occult Halloween ritual” theory of the murder. There is a notorious Italian Web site run by an extremist far-right organization known as the Legitimate Association of Throne and Altar. On its Web site, Throne and Altar promotes the infamous anti-Semitic forgery known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and explains how the Jewish plan for world domination gave rise to most of the evils of the modern age, including Darwinism, Marxism, and Zionism. This same organization calls for the restoration of the historic Papal States (i.e., much of central Italy) to the Catholic Church. Most tellingly, writings on the site decry the Anglo-American tradition of Halloween, claiming it is an “offensive launched by the Devil” to trap unwary people and “propagandize for magic and witchcraft.” While we don’t know Mignini’s precise connection to this group, his name appears on the Web site. The site thanks “the important minister of Perugia Giuliano Mignini” for his involvement in one of the organization’s signature events, which took place in Trieste, Italy, in 2009.

After the eight-month investigation, Amanda and Raffaele were put on trial and convicted a year later. Their appeal took two more years. (Trials in Italy are notoriously slow.) The court of appeals, in a full jury trial, found them innocent of murder in 2011 and severely criticized the evidence against them as being nonexistent, scientifically flawed, and erroneous. They were released after spending 1,427 days in prison, and Amanda flew home to America. But Italy has no double-jeopardy clause in its constitution, and prosecutors are allowed to appeal acquittals. Mignini appealed the verdict to the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. On March 26,
2013, the Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a new trial. That new trial took place in late 2013.

BOOK: The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single)
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