The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single) (6 page)

He had a noticeable cut on his hand.

When confronted with the conclusive evidence against him, Guede offered an alternate scenario that placed him at the crime scene but absolved him of guilt for the murder. He asserted that Meredith Kercher admitted him to the house and that they were engaged in consensual sex when he needed to use the bathroom. He was on the toilet when he heard commotion, rose, only partially secured his trousers, and rushed toward
the sounds. In the hallway, he said, he passed a dark-haired white male who cut Guede’shand with a knife as he raced past him. He claimed that he then hurried into the bedroom to find Kercher bloody and near death. He said he tried to stop her bleeding but became scared that the police would arrive and believe he had been the attacker.

He made no attempt to call the police or emergency help.

The elapsed time he described is inconsistent with forensic findings.

At that point, we would consider the crime solved and ready for prosecution.

CHAPTER THREE: THE INVESTIGATION

by Steve Moore

If my first looks into the Kercher murder case in Italy were anything but unbiased, any bias I had would have to be credited in favor of law enforcement. I am the son of an FBI agent, and I spent 25 years as an FBI special agent and supervisory special agent. I have a cousin and brother-in-law who are police officers. My niece and nephews are currently in law school studying to be prosecutors and/or FBI agents. In short, the benefits of my doubts go in favor of law enforcement.

So it should not be surprising that when I first heard that there were doubts about the validity of the investigation into the murder of Meredith Kercher, I initially sided with the authorities. Certainly, if everything I had heard in the press was true about the case, they had solved it with speed and skill.

But in trying to defend their honor, I quickly learned that what I had heard in the press
wasn’t
true, and there was precious little honor left to defend.

As I began to delve into the case, I learned to my dismay that the investigation was botched at a level I have rarely seen outside of totalitarian or Third World countries. The forensics, “interrogation,” and conclusions of the detectives were at best completely and nightmarishly wrong, and at worst, intentionally corrupted. As a result, several innocent people had been caught up in the investigation like dolphins in a tuna net.

I believe that I am well qualified to critique criminal investigations—even foreign police investigations—and especially murders. Within two years of graduating from the FBI Academy, I had been involved in the murder investigations of literally dozens of people. I was the official FBI representative at approximately 30 autopsies in those first two years, fingerprinting corpses and assisting with dental and other identification of badly decomposed victims. I was a new agent back in the days before Evidence Response Teams existed. We lifted prints and recovered blood samples ourselves.

Throughout the rest of my career, I spent years investigating violent crimes, from individual murders to mass school shootings. Following the attacks of 9/11, I was promoted to supervisor of Al Qaeda investigations for the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). In this position, I led a task force of FBI agents, LAPD detectives, Secret Service agents, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department detectives, and various other
law-enforcement-agency representatives. I also ran the Los Angeles Extra-Territorial Investigations squad (“Fly Team”) responsible for the investigation of all acts of terrorism against the United States that occurred in Asia bordered by Pakistan and Guam.

In those positions, I supervised the investigations of agents throughout the world and provided quality control for approximately 250 ongoing investigations at any one time. My responsibility was to follow the investigations closely, evaluate evidence, and ensure that each investigation was effective, efficient, and going in the right direction. I became quite adept at being able to read an investigative file and make determinations on the quality of that investigation. I also supervised the forensic investigations of the crime scenes. In Al Qaeda cases, our crime scenes were frequently car-bomb attacks and therefore sometimes acres in size. Rather than one victim, we almost always had to deal with victims in the double figures. Yet we were allowed no more evidentiary leeway in prosecuting a crime than we would have if it had been a single-room murder case. In these overseas cases, I became very familiar with foreign police procedures and skills.

Because of all this, I feel that I say authoritatively that what passed for an investigation, interrogation, and forensics in Perugia was nothing more than going through the motions to make people believe that the police, forensic investigators, and prosecutors knew what they were doing.

The conclusions and prosecutions in the Kercher murder investigation were based solely on (flawed) intuition, profound ignorance about the science of investigation, social and religious bias, superstition, corruption, and self-preservation.

THE INVESTIGATION

Target Fixation

“Target fixation” is a term first coined by the military to explain crashes of ground-attack planes that could not be attributed to enemy fire. Investigators found that pilots could fixate so completely on their target that they ceased to take in outside data, which would tell them important things like, “You’re about to hit the ground.” In their zeal to make a perfect “drop,” it is not uncommon for pilots who are suffering from target fixation to fly their airplanes directly into the target before dropping their bombs, or to pull out so low that they have no chance to avoid hitting the ground.

Target fixation is exactly what afflicted the investigation in Perugia, and with such ferocity that the detectives and the prosecutors continued on that fatal course, to the destruction of their case, their credibility, and, likely, their careers.

Junk Profiling

For reasons steeped in flawed intuition, differing cultural norms, and superstition, detectives in Perugia almost immediately focused on Amanda Knox as the target of their investigation. It was this “junk profiling” that caused them to believe that because she didn’t weep for the victim in public, she didn’t weep in private. This lack of public display of grief caused them to falsely believe she killed her friend. The fact that different cultures, and even different people within those cultures, deal with shock and grief in different ways apparently did not occur to them.

That Raffaele kissed his girlfriend while holding and comforting her after she learned that her friend and roommate had been slaughtered and sexually assaulted was incomprehensibly misinterpreted by Perugian investigators as lascivious behavior.

Ultimately, a matrix of misinterpretations and simple ignorance convinced the detectives that Amanda Knox was a killer and rapist, not Rudy Guede. And nothing was going to deter their fatal dive on the target. Five days after the murder—and before the first forensic-evidence results had come back from the lab—Amanda Knox was arrested for the murder and sexual assault of her female roommate.

Edgardo Giobbi, lead investigator, all but confessed his ignorance with this statement to the press:
“We knew she was guilty of murder without physical evidence.”
This embarrassingly naïve statement apparently raised no alarms in Perugia. But skilled investigators who heard that comment shook their heads in disbelief. Imagine going to your doctor because of a suspicious pain in your gut. After hearing your symptoms and observing, he states: “You have cancer. Tomorrow we will operate. Then we’ll begin chemotherapy.”

You would likely ask what the tests say about your physical condition. If Giobbi were your doctor, he would say, “I know you have cancer—without medical tests.” You might want to get a second opinion at that point.

An Obvious Crime, Missed

When detectives first arrived at the house where Kercher was murdered, they were confronted by a grotesque, brutal crime scene which, despite its gruesome nature, told a very simple story to anyone who could listen:

A rock had been thrown through a window, and that window was now open. Clothes from that room had been thrown all over the floor, and drawers emptied. A young woman’s lifeless, nearly nude body lay on the floor in another room, next to her bed. Her throat had been slashed, and she had obviously been sexually assaulted. Her purse was on the bed, with bloody fingerprints on it. Her wallet, keys, and cell phones were gone. A trail of men’s-size bloody shoe prints led out of the house.

This crime scene wasn’t a curveball. This wasn’t a slider or an off-speed pitch. This was batting practice; a big fat easy-to-hit pitch thrown right down the middle. The detectives should have been able to drive this one out of the park. It was a burglary gone bad. And the police were already familiar with the M.O.; the rock thrown through the window was a tactic used by a local burglar they were aware of. This was open-and-shut. This crime scene didn’t whisper to the detective, it didn’t speak in low tones—this crime scene shouted. And this is what it said:

A burglar had been surprised by a resident coming home. The resident was an attractive young woman, and once she saw the burglar, he was sure to be identified and arrested—unless he silenced her. And as long as he was going to do that, he was going to sexually assault her.

It is repulsive, but sadly, it happens every day somewhere in the world.

But this team and this prosecutor came up with a bizarre criminal conspiracy involving satanic sex orgies and rituals. And this crime, according to the prosecutor, was perpetrated by people never before involved in Satanism or violence or group sex. Nor were any the kind to kill a friend because she refused sex to Rudy Guede a drifter, drug user, and perfect stranger.

The crime scene was in no way cleaned or minimized. Blood lay in the pattern where it spattered. Bloody footprints crisscrossed the house. Bloody palm and fingerprints were smeared on the walls. The victim lay on the ground with a pillow under her hips, obviously there to assist with the sexual assault. A duvet thrown from her bed covered her body. Grievous stab and slash wounds opened her throat.

Anyone who has ever tiptoed around blood in a crime scene could have read those tea leaves. Well, almost anyone, apparently. The milieu was one frequently described as the “disorganized” crime scene. This is a situation where the murder is a crime of opportunity, not a planned attack. The murderer uses a weapon he brought or one he finds almost within arm’s reach.

Prosecution Lies

I knew that the case was false when I realized that the evidence didn’t match the crime. I knew it was
intentionally
false when I listened to prosecutor Mignini’s pronouncements after Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were arrested.

Mignini claimed that the crime scene had been cleaned. But I saw the unedited videotape of the crime scene. I knew that there was no way it had been cleaned, nor had any cleaning been attempted. Mignini’s statement made no sense. It could not be a mistake. It was a lie.

The prosecutor also claimed that he had a receipt for bleach purchase by Amanda Knox the morning after the murder. Sure sounds convincing. Except that he didn’t have a bleach receipt, and none was ever produced in court. He was lying. Had he not been, the
receipt would have been entered into evidence. But then, he would have had to explain away the fact that bleach wasn’t used at the crime scene.

The prosecution produced a knife they said was the murder weapon. But it was found in a drawer at an apartment a five-to 10-minute walk from the murder scene. This crime was one of opportunity; it was disorganized and unplanned. Why would the perpetrator transport a knife to the crime scene from another location?

More disturbing to me was that I saw on video how the knife was collected. A detective opened a drawer of silverware in which maybe a half-dozen sharp, pointed knives sat. He chose one knife—the largest one—as the one and only knife to test. Eureka! It was the murder knife. Except, it wasn’t. As an investigator, you want to collect every sample you can. It’s like panning for gold: You want to sift through
everything
in your search. Leaving behind knives that could have been used in the murder made no sense even for a rookie investigator.

In short, it was not the action of somebody looking for truth; it was the action of somebody creating his own truth.

Then, in trial, the prosecution’s own pathologist stated with certainty that that knife could be absolutely ruled out for all but one of the wounds in the victim’s neck. It was the wrong size. It was too big. It wouldn’t even fit in the stab wounds. The one wound it couldn’t be ruled out for was the slash on Meredith’s neck, which was almost certainly made with the knife that made the other wounds in the struggle. No sharp object, even a shard of glass, can be ruled out as the object that created that wound. But it is almost a certainty that whatever knife caused the rest of the wounds caused the slash.
There was no reason to switch knives, even if one was at hand—or in an apartment five to 10 minutes away.

Even more disturbing, there was an imprint on the white sheet of the victim’s bed—of a knife that fit the wounds. The killer had placed it on the sheet, and it made a perfect imprint in blood. And it was not the same knife as “collected” from the drawer so far away.

Prosecution/Investigatory Misconduct

In my years of experience, I’ve learned that in every trial, there always seems to be two camps: the side that wants all the evidence entered into court and carefully examined, and the side that wants all the evidence suppressed, disregarded, and ignored. Evidence (correctly collected and interpreted) represents truth. The people on the side that wants the evidence suppressed usually knows that the truth does not favor them. In the Meredith Kercher murder trial, the prosecution tried to keep evidence out. Obviously, they knew that the truth did not favor their prosecution.