The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single) (8 page)

This reads like a narration of the interrogation of Amanda Knox.

The fact that there were twelve detectives in the police station overnight is an indictment in and of itself. If you are going to have twelve detectives available all night for an interrogation, you need to let them know well in advance. You need to schedule them, to change their days off, etc. You have to pay them overtime. In the real world, twelve detectives all night is something that has to be signed off on by higher-ups. What does this tell us? It tells us the interrogation was planned well in advance and
intentionally
overnight.

The reason they interrogated Amanda all night was to break her. Not get the truth, not get answers, not make Perugia safer, but to break her so that she would say what they wanted her to say.

Amanda Knox was interrogated for eight hours. Overnight. She was denied food and water. She was denied the use of a bathroom. In a police station. In a foreign country. In a foreign language. By a dozen different officers. Without being allowed a lawyer.

The inquisition Amanda Knox endured in Perugia was no more legally or morally defensible than the Salem Witch Trials. No rational person should believe that the results of what she went through are reliable evidence. If you gave me the same amount of time with Knox’s prosecutor, I could have made him confess to the crime.

From the same CIA document on brainwashing:

There is a major difference between preparation for elicitation and for brainwashing. Prisoners exploited through elicitation must retain sufficient
clarity of thought to be able to give coherent, factual accounts. In brainwashing, on the other hand, the first thing attacked is clarity of thought.

What do you think the police were attempting to do that night? Determine the truth? Or force a scared American college girl to create a case for them?

Amanda was given nothing to eat or drink during the interrogation. No coffee. Nothing until she signed the statement they wanted her to sign. The entire interrogation was in Italian, which she did not functionally speak at the time. She was threatened with never seeing her parents again, with a 30-year prison sentence, and repeatedly called “stupid.” Does any reasonable person really doubt that she was also slapped in the head when the interrogators didn’t like what she said? When she asked for a lawyer, she was told that a lawyer would only “make it worse” for her.

Why Did It End When It Did?

There are two reasons an interrogator stops an interrogation:

1.
   
He/she gets what he/she wants, or

2.
   
He/she gives up.

If the interrogator gives up, there is no written statement by the suspect. Therefore, if the interrogation ends with a signed statement, you know the interrogator got what he/she wanted and can easily determine what that was. And what did Amanda say that satisfied her inquisitors? “I confusedly remember seeing Patrick come out of Meredith’s room.” So what did they want? They wanted to implicate Patrick Lumumba.

Amanda did not bring up the name Patrick Lumumba. The police did. And they repeatedly told her to “imagine” Patrick and herself being at the cottage that night.

Amanda did not give in to the brainwashing. But the police achieved enough with her to obtain a statement that let them do what they had intended to do all along: arrest Patrick Lumumba.

But a follow-up note Amanda wrote to police the next day indicates that the techniques they used were effective nonetheless. The same CIA document describes the techniques used to brainwash a person, as well as the desired results. If you compare Amanda’s note to the police just hours after her interrogation with the techniques and goals of brainwashing, the results speak for themselves. (The excerpt from Amanda’s note follows the CIA excerpt below, in italics):

         
The most important aspect of the brainwashing process is the interrogation. The other pressures are designed primarily to help the interrogator achieve his goals. The following states are created systematically within the individual. These may vary in order, but all are necessary to the brainwashing process:

         
A feeling of helplessness in attempting to deal with the impersonal machinery of control.

         
Please don’t yell at me because it only makes me more confused, which doesn’t help anyone. I understand how serious this situation is, and as such, I want to give you this information as soon and as clearly as possible.

         
Honestly, I understand because this is a very scary situation. I also know that the police don’t believe things of me that I know I can explain.

         
I have a clearer mind than I’ve had before, but I’m still missing parts, which I know is bad for me.

         
In regards to this “confession” that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly.

What the inquisitors did not achieve, however, speaks volumes of Amanda’s character and innocence. No matter how hard they tried, and how manipulative and coercive they were, Amanda repeatedly denied
any
involvement in the murder, and the police could develop no feelings of guilt in her. This is not sociopathy; this is innocence. Note that in her letter, she expresses empathy for the officers who had just subjected her to this abomination.

Never once did she question her own innocence. And never did she experience any sense of identification with the accusations of the police. This is an innocent college girl subjected to the most aggressive and heinous interrogation techniques the police could utilize (yet not leave marks). She became confused, she empathized with her captors, she doubted herself in some ways, but in the end, her strength of character and her unshakable knowledge of her innocence carried her through.

How Could This Happen?

It is either inexperience combined with poor training or corruption—or both. I have had rookie FBI agents come out to the field and conduct vastly superior investigations to what happened in Perugia in this case. I do not think that the Italian
system is inferior. In fact, if I thought so, I would not be criticizing these detectives in this manner.

Every country has prosecutors and investigators who make mistakes. Every country experiences the shame of corruption. No country should be judged on whether these things exist; it should be judged on how it deals with them.

CHAPTER FOUR: COURT FINDINGS

by Judge Michael Heavey and Jim Lovering

Six years ago, the murder of Meredith Kercher spawned a grotesque and unwieldy controversy that continues to this day. What really happened is not in doubt, and it will not change. Rudy Guede committed the murder during a botched robbery, after which he fled the country.

Unfortunately, this became clear only after facts had been pieced together and Guede had been identified from traces he left at the crime scene. It took a number of days. By then, the investigation had already veered out of control.

While they waited for a lab in Rome to deliver test results, local police questioned the people who were closest to the victim. In particular, they focused on the young woman who stumbled upon the crime scene. Something about her made them suspicious. They played a hunch, and they turned up the heat in a late-night interrogation until she was frightened out of her wits. They got her to sign two vaguely worded statements incriminating herself and the man she worked for, Patrick Lumumba.

This was all they thought they needed. They stopped asking questions. They thought they could guess the rest of the story. They hauled their suspects into custody and convened a press conference at which they made a dramatic announcement. The murder arose from a “sex game” that turned deadly, and it was all centered on Amanda Knox, the pretty American girl from Seattle.

Reporters loved it. The police handed them the script for a gripping narrative, which took shape in the tabloid media over the next several weeks: Knox was a reckless thrill seeker with a boundless sense of entitlement. She ruthlessly exploited her sex appeal to manipulate and control men, to the point where they would do anything to please her. Meredith Kercher, in contrast, was a virtuous British girl who had the bad luck to end up sharing quarters with Knox. The result was a spiral of tension that exploded into violence on the night of November 1, 2007.

None of this, aside from Meredith Kercher’s good character, was true. It was pure speculation. But reporters did not notice that, because it made for such a fine story. They did not ponder the implications when Lumumba turned up an ironclad alibi and was replaced by Guede. Nor did they seem concerned that a trail of physical evidence pointed to Guede and no one else. Guede’s involvement in the crime was taken for granted, but
nobody found him particularly interesting. Amanda Knox—“Foxy Knoxy”—was the suspect they cared about.

Knox was also who the authorities cared about. Over time, facts slowly gained precedence over rumor and speculation. Reporters began to see that the sex-game story, beguiling though it was, did not match what was found at the crime scene or what was known about the suspects. They finally asked the hard questions they should have posed from the start, and when they did, the official answers were far from convincing. By the time of the initial verdict, in 2009, the tone of the media coverage had become skeptical. The reputations of police and prosecutors hung in the balance. Their professional interests hinged on sustaining a case against Knox.

Court reports reflect the conflict between this priority and the facts of the murder. Judge Giancarlo Massei, who convicted Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, presided over a trial that lasted almost a year. He listened to a string of forensic experts who described the nature of Meredith Kercher’s injuries and what was found at the crime scene. This evidence pointed not to a sex game but to a single killer armed with a small knife. Massei watched as drug-addled prosecution witnesses imploded on the stand. He followed along as the prosecution advanced one hazy theory after another, struggling to explain why two young lovers would interrupt a quiet evening to help a small-time criminal commit murder. The ideas ranged from petty theft to a dispute over housekeeping. All of them centered on Knox and presumed her complete control over Guede as well as Sollecito. In his closing argument, the prosecutor took a final shot at the intractable problem of motive:

“Amanda nurtured her hate for Meredith, but that night, that hate could explode.
For Amanda, the moment had come to take revenge on that prissy girl. That is what she must have thought. And in a crescendo of threats and increasing violence, Meredith’s ordeal begins.”

After sitting through the long trial, Massei must have understood how ridiculous this sounded. The profile of Knox that emerged through witness testimony was much different from the character assassination in the media. Knox had been a good student with an orderly life. She was much loved by her family and friends, who described her gentle, sunny demeanor. The prosecution put on witnesses who barely knew her, who complained about her addled behavior in the days following the murder. But no one recalled anything she had said or done that might be construed as aggressive, much less violent. Nor did the facts point to any ill will between Knox and Kercher. The prosecutor formed his closing argument around a baseless caricature rather than evidence presented in court.

Massei also understood the most obvious interpretation of the facts revealed by the police investigation. In his report, he summarizes the litany of evidence against Guede:

The handprint found on a pillow in the room, on which the lifeless corpse of Meredith was placed, turned out to have been made by Rudy Guede; the vaginal swab of the victim contained the DNA of the victim and of Rudy Guede; the DNA of Rudy Guede was also discovered on the cuff of Meredith’s sweatshirt found in her room, and on a strap of the bra that she was wearing, which was cut off and stained with blood; the DNA of Rudy Guede was also found on Meredith’s purse, which was also in the room that she occupied. Further
biological traces of Rudy Guede were found on the toilet paper taken from the toilet of the larger bathroom. Finally, in the corridor leading to the exit from the house coming from Meredith’s room were found prints from a shoe stained with the blood of the victim. At first, these prints were held to be compatible with the shoes of Raffaele Sollecito. Later tests finally ruled out this compatibility, showing that they were in fact actually from shoes of the same brand, type and size as a pair of shoes that might have been contained in a shoebox found in the home of Rudy Guede in Via del Canerino.

From this, Massei draws the inevitable conclusion:

By their diversity and by the agreement of the results of all the tests performed on them, these elements and traces, as has been said, do not leave any doubt about the presence of Rudy Guede in the house and in Meredith’s room on the night of the homicide.

Further, wrote Massei: “Said elements indicate the paths he followed within the house.”

This final point is of critical importance. It is what distinguishes the irrefutable evidence against Guede from the muddled inferences used to frame Knox and Sollecito. The evidence against Guede shows what he did that night. It solves the mystery rather than deepening it. It is what led to his arrest in the first place. It was not contrived after the arrest, in a mad scramble to make good on a public accusation.

But Massei was part of a court system under siege. A series of local judges—
Massei’s colleagues—had moved the case forward to the point of a trial. Prosecutors had spent millions of euros and pulled out all the stops to win the case. With the world looking on, their credibility was in Massei’s hands. He therefore hatched his own, peculiar scenario to justify the inevitable conviction. It was a foray of speculation that established Guede as the instigator of the crime, but not its sole author.