The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single) (7 page)

Suppression of Evidence

               
•
     
Mignini fought having the handle of the “murder weapon” removed.

That would be
the first thing I would have asked to have done
as an investigating agent. Blood from a knife used in a murder will frequently find its way between the tang
and the handle of a knife, and if I suspect that the killer used this knife and then attempted to clean it, I know he can’t clean between the tang and the handle. Take it off!

Prosecutors didn’t want the handle off because it would prove that the knife wasn’t used in the murder.

And they were right. On October 31, 2013, one day short of six years since the day of the murder, yet another forensic test showed that the alleged murder knife had absolutely no trace of the victim on it. Only Amanda’s DNA was found, which is understandable given that she used the knife to prepare meals at her boyfriend’s house. And the presence of her DNA on the knife proves one other crucial thing: It wasn’t cleaned with bleach to remove DNA. Her DNA wouldn’t have survived a bleaching.

               
•
     
Refusal to test the semen stain on the pillow used to prop up the victim’s hips.

You have a sexually assaulted victim, and you find a semen stain on the pillow directly below her pelvic area. What do you do? You test. Obviously. You don’t need to have watched
CSI
to know that. But the Perugia police and prosecutor have so far successfully fought any testing of that stain. Why? Read on.

               
•
     
Failure to disclose the police relationship with suspect Rudy Guede.

All indications are that burglar/murderer Rudy Guede was a police informant.

He had been found culpable for several burglaries in Perugia with the exact same M.O. In fact, just days prior to the Kercher murder, Rudy had been arrested in Milan for breaking into a day care center, where he was found.

Inexplicably, the Perugian authorities requested that Milanese authorities release Rudy, drop charges, return his knife to him, and send him back to Perugia on the next train. Why? Usually, if a petty burglar and drug dealer from your town is caught in another town, it’s cause for celebration: “Now he’s
their
problem!” But not this time; Perugia needed him back. And why? The only possible reason you would need a burglar and a drug dealer back in the town you are responsible for protecting is if he is an informant.

As an FBI agent, I “ran” informants myself—dozens of them. And many got into petty criminal mischief. One even tried to stab someone over a drug deal. Each time I had them released after a petty offense, I knew that I “owned” whatever they did while they should have been serving a month in jail. These are things the cops would be thinking about when they surveyed the body of the slain woman and recognized the oh-too-familiar method of break in. I can imagine that they felt sickened by what they were seeing,as much by the gore and tragedy as they were by the realization of who was responsible for the crime.

               
•
     
The prosecution refused to give the defense (or anyone else) adequate access to alleged DNA test results—which seemingly “proved” that Knox and Sollecito were parties to the murder.

When the appeals court ordered the testing, the DNA allegations were proved false.

               
•
     
Perjury.

In open court, the prosecution characterized footprints suspected to be Knox’s as made in “the victim’s blood.” They said that they had not, however, tested the footprints to determine whether they were made in blood but strongly inferred that the footprints could be made with no other substance.

In discovery, though, it was determined that the footprints
were
tested and that they were found
not
to have been made in blood. Whoever made the footprints did so in bleach or a similar substance, and they have no relevance to who killed Meredith Kercher. Blatant perjury.

               
•
     
Wildly misleading and incriminating photos of Amanda Knox’s bathroom were given to the press.

In the photos, a chemical substance used in forensics made what appeared to be blood streaks all across the bathroom—which Knox had earlier said did not have obvious blood in it.

               
•
     
Italian law requires that all interrogations of murder suspects be videotaped or at least audiotaped.

In one of the biggest cases to ever hit Perugia, the interrogations were not videotaped. An oversight? Hardly.

Whether the tapes were made and then hidden or weren’t made at all, it is indicative of the prosecution’s belief that the tapes of Knox and Sollecito’s statements would not be helpful in their quest to prove them murderers.

               
•
     
Failure to test the broken glass from the break-in.

The prosecutors created a theory of a “staged break-in” to convict Knox and Sollecito and protect Guede. Their theory was that the rock used to break the window was thrown from the inside out. Despite being easily dispelled by physical evidence on scene, they held on tenaciously to their flawed story, even when simple testing could settle the matter.

Broken glass can be examined scientifically to determine the direction from which the breaking force came. It is well within the capabilities of forensic science. Yet, they did not attempt to prove their theory by having the glass tested. Why not? They knew that such testing would destroy the story of the “staged break-in.”

Forensics

The Italian forensic investigators, to their credit, created an approximate two-hour videotape of the crime-scene investigation. Although later, they likely wish they hadn’t.

There are certain occupations whose personnel look so impressive and professional in their gear and uniforms that they appear infallible, impressive, and larger
than life. A surgeon in scrubs, an airline pilot in his headset and microphone, and an astronaut climbing into his spacecraft come quickly to mind. Their very appearance inspires awe and trust. They calm and reassure us. Forensic investigators in their “bubble suits” with their exotic equipment are just such people. “They’ve got tweezers and fluorescent lights—they
must
know what they’re doing!” But in reality, astronauts make the occasional mistake. Pilots make errors, doctors lose patients who might have survived, and forensic “experts” sometimes simply aren’t.

After watching the video of the Perugian forensic investigators, I can tell you that they
looked
like they knew what they were doing, but to the knowledgeable, they could have been the Keystone Kops. It would serve very nicely as a cautionary training film on how not to process a crime scene. Maybe even a comedy.

During the two hours, I witnessed investigators stepping in wet blood, then walking around and out of the house. This is the very definition of cross-contamination. I watched in amazement as they handled multiple pieces of crucial evidence without changing gloves. Again, cross-contamination.

Samples were collected and stored improperly. Wet blood was stored in airtight vessels against all current forensic standards. Multiple samples were collected with the same pair of tweezers, creating more cross-contamination. Very likely, more evidence was destroyed by this team than was collected.

When Is a Crime Scene Not a Crime Scene?

Something ceases to be a crime scene when:

               
1.
     
All the potential evidence within it has been recovered, or

               
2.
     
It
no longer has any evidentiary value and no longer contains admissible or valid evidence.

               
3.
     
When the evidence tape goes down, and noninvestigators enter the site, it becomes a “former” crime scene. Nothing in that area can be considered admissible in a court of law anymore.

Yet Perugian police, six weeks after releasing the crime scene, returned to pick up items inexplicably uncollected by forensic “experts.” Things they failed to collect were mind-boggling: the victim’s purse with the killer’s handprints on it in blood. A scrap of the victim’s bra, apparently ripped off during the assault. That these were not collected during the first crime-scene processing is inconceivable and shakes one’s confidence in their basic skills.

The Interrogation That Never Was

When is an interrogation not an interrogation? When the “interrogator” is not really interested in obtaining information. This was the case when Amanda Knox’s final ordeal at the hands of the Perugian police began.

The word
interrogation,
ironically, comes from the Latin root word
interrogatus,
which means
to ask.
At no time in Amanda’s “interrogation” was she truly
asked
anything or was any
information
truly solicited. This interrogation was simply planned coercion to force her to say what the police needed her to say. No true interrogation took place. What took place bore more resemblance to the Inquisition than to an interrogation.

The 40-Hour Interrogation Week

How many hours do you work a week? If you’re like almost everybody, you work 40 hours in five days. In the five days after the murder of Meredith Kercher, detectives interrogated Amanda Knox for 43 hours. Think about that for a minute. That’s not a number in dispute. Forty-three hours of sitting at a table, being badgered by questions from detectives in five days. Eight hours a day for an entire workweek. In a foreign country. In a foreign language.

The All-Nighter

Of even greater ignominy are the last eight hours of the interrogation. They took place from approximately 10:30 p.m. until 6 a.m. All night. Ask yourself: Why would detectives schedule an interrogation overnight? Detectives are, for the most part, different from other policemen in that their regular schedule is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or something similar. Sure, they get called out in the middle of the night, but all things being equal, unless you are in a department like the NYPD or LAPD where a skeleton crew covers the evening shift, normal schedules for detectives are not overnight.

But on the final evening of Amanda’s interrogation, she was interrogated all night. Not by just one or two detectives, but by adozen—twelve—detectives. Again, the police not only do not dispute this; they have entered this evidence into court. Perugia has a population of approximately 165,000 people. I live in a town of 100,000, and there are less than a half-dozen detectives to cover the city, much less work an all-night shift. Perugia had to call in resources from Rome to help that night. It was not a spontaneous interrogation. It was preplanned, and preplanned to be an all-nighter.

Why interrogate all night? There are few legitimate reasons:

   
•
     
It’s a rapidly unfolding case in which lives are at risk, such as a bombing spree.

   
•
     
It’s the only time the suspect is available.

   
•
     
There is a deadline.

However, this was not a rapidly unfolding case. Rudy Guede, the real murderer, had left town. Amanda wasn’t leaving. Murders weren’t continuing. Amanda was available any time they needed her. She had proved that. There was no deadline except that posed by ego.

The purpose of interrogating at night has more to do with torture than law enforcement. What they were going to do was something I first encountered years ago, when my squad went to take custody of a terrorist suspect in a remote part of an obscure country.

When the agents arrived to pick up the suspect, they realized that he was in the middle of a process we came to call “tag-teaming.” It takes dozens of operatives/officers to make it work. Here’s how it works: Two officers are assigned to the suspect for approximately an hour at a time. Their prime responsibility is simply to keep the person awake and agitated. They do this for only an hour, because it takes a lot of energy out of the detectives. After an hour, a fresh pair of “interrogators” come in. Again, the questions they ask are secondary to their main task, which is keeping the person awake and afraid. By tag-teaming every hour, the interrogators remain fresh, energetic, and on-task. The suspect, meanwhile, becomes increasingly exhausted, confused by different questions from dozens of different interrogators, and prays for the interrogation to end. In extreme cases, people can become so disoriented that they forget where they are.

As evidence of the existence and effectiveness of this technique, I provide excerpts from a declassified CIA document published by Research Publications in Woodbridge, Conn. This document was provided to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by the CIA director in 1956 and describes brainwashing techniques used by Communists in North Korea. Several techniques are discussed, but No. 5 is of particular interest:

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

WASHINGTON 25, D. C.

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR 25 APR 1956

_________________________________

MEMORANDUM FOR: The Honorable J. Edgar Hoover

Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation

SUBJECT: Brainwashing

TECHNIQUES AND THEIR EFFECTS:

                   
5.
     
Induction of Fatigue. This is a well-known device for breaking will power and critical powers of judgment. Deprivation of sleep results in more intense psychological debilitation than does any other method of engendering fatigue. The communists vary their methods. “Conveyor belt” interrogation that last 50-60 hours will make almost any individual compromise, but there is danger that this will kill the victim. It is safer to conduct interrogations of 8-10 hours at night while forcing the prisoner to remain awake during the day. Additional interruptions in the remaining 2-3 hours of allotted sleep quickly reduce the most resilient individual.