The Murder of Meredith Kercher (6 page)

In the meantime, lawyers for the three suspects continued to insist that each was innocent. Raffaele’s lawyer said that Raffaele was at home when Meredith was killed, despite the allegations being made by the police that he and Amanda had broken a window at the cottage and ransacked the rooms to stage a break-in.

Luciano Ghirga, Amanda’s lawyer, defined the case as ‘strange and dramatic,’ and said prior to Matteini’s ruling to continue holding the suspects that ‘we have applied for our client to be released on the grounds that she has nothing to do with this.’

Similarly, Carlo Pacelli, Lumumba’s lawyer, said that ‘Patrick was not involved in this at any time.’ Pacelli said that Lumumba never ‘entered the house of horrors
because he was at his place of work.’ He said that receipts from Le Chic’s till would back up the fact that Lumumba was at work when the murder occurred.

By this time, barely a week into the investigation of Meredith’s murder, it was difficult to tell who was lying outright or who was covering up for whom. The case seemed destined to be built around lies and deceit, confusion, and sensational reporting in nearly every media source. Many began to wonder if the true facts of the case would ever be revealed.

B
y the following day, Friday, November 9, 2007, details of a report about the case by Judge Claudia Matteini – described as a meticulous woman in her mid-40s with a reputation for scrupulous attention to detail – began to emerge. Her report stated, in part, that with the door to Meredith’s room open after investigators knocked it down ‘there was a chilling scene in so far as the room was found in disorder with bloodstains everywhere, on the ground and on the walls, and also under the duvet of the bed a foot could be seen.’ The report stated how police, in an effort to avoid contamination of the crime scene, had ‘stopped everyone from entering the room.’

The report was part of her ruling in which she had decided that the police could hold the three suspects for up to a year while the investigation continued, because there were ‘serious indications of guilt’ that
warranted such a decision. She also expressed concern that any or all of the suspects might flee the area or the country in an effort to avoid the investigation and subsequent prosecution, or that they might repeat the crime with another victim, and cited her concern as reasons for keeping the suspects in custody.

Matteini’s report described how a ‘girl, found dead with a blow to her neck with a sharp weapon, was identified as Meredith Kercher,’ and that Dr Luca Lalli, the pathologist who conducted the first postmortem examination of the body, had ‘established that the death occurred at 11 p.m. at the earliest and at the latest one hour after the… scope of a time-frame between 10 p.m. and midnight’ on November 1, 2007. Also included was Lalli’s professional opinion that Meredith had died due to a ‘haemorrhage from a neck wound’ following the ‘blow of a sharp and pointed weapon.’

Lalli’s notes also stated that ‘bruises and lesions found on the neck suggest that Meredith was held by the neck leaving bruising compatible with the pressure of fingers,’ and that she had been ‘subsequently threatened with a knife held to her throat sufficient to leave other small wounds beyond those which determined death.’ Lalli’s report also showed that Meredith’s death was likely to have been agonizingly slow because her carotid artery had not been cut, leaving her to bleed out at a much slower rate than if it had been severed.

‘The fact that Meredith was a victim of violence is
evident from the state in which her body was found,’ Matteini’s report stated. ‘There were bruises, particularly as mentioned in Dr Lalli’s report where there is evidence of bruising with dark areas on the lips, and also on the gums of the left cheek and chin.’

Matteini also revealed information indicating that Meredith had a boyfriend, Giacomo Silenzi, 22, who resided with three other young men on the ground floor of the cottage where she lived. Investigators had ruled them out as possible suspects because they provided alibis for their whereabouts at the time of Meredith’s murder. The young men, as well as Amanda and Meredith’s two roommates, had left on the eve of
Il Giorno dei Morti
, the
Day of the Dead
, a national Italian holiday in which families throughout Italy visit the graves of their relatives. As a result, no one was in the cottage to hear Meredith’s screams or her cries for help, except for Meredith and her killer or killers.

Silenzi, police learned, had met Meredith through Amanda Knox two months earlier and they had begun dating. A guitar player in a punk rock band, Silenzi said that he had fallen in love with Meredith. Silenzi said that he was friends with both Lumumba and Raffaele, and that Amanda often came to visit him at his flat where they listened to music and played the guitar. He said that Amanda was a Beatles fan, and she had expressed interest in wanting to ‘learn to play (the guitar) properly.’ After giving her a few lessons, Silenzi said that Amanda began bringing Meredith along with her.

‘From the beginning we were very close, and we quickly decided to go out,’ Silenzi said. ‘We went to a disco where we kissed for the first time and then we went to my place and slept with each other. Our relationship grew stronger and stronger every day.’

It was established that Silenzi was out of town with family members the day that Meredith was killed, and he was subsequently cleared of any involvement in her death.

The report also stated that during interviews with the police, Filomena Romanelli, one of Meredith’s flatmates, said that Meredith and Amanda appeared to be close and had spent a lot of time together – they typically accompanied each other to the university, and hung out within the same circle of friends. Filomena was insistent in her statements to the police that Meredith never allowed any male visitors into her bedroom except for her boyfriend.

The report pointed out inconsistencies in statements made by Amanda and Raffaele, and indicated that the couple was the primary focus of the investigation. The police discovered, for example, that Amanda had not called the police to investigate a break-in at the cottage, as she had stated to the postal police, who had already arrived to return the mobile phones found in the neighbour’s garden, but had called the Carabinieri only
after
the Postal Police had arrived. As a result of the alleged deception, investigators now believed that Amanda and Raffaele had ‘wished it to be thought they
had been surprised outside the building where the murder was carried out.’

Another inconsistency pointed out by Matteini concerned the toilet in one of the bathrooms, which Amanda had said contained faeces. Raffaele, when interviewed by the police, had confirmed Amanda’s account of the day’s events except ‘that he found the water in the toilet clean,’ without faeces.

‘However, when the military police [Carabinieri] arrived, the water [in the toilet] was found to be still dirty with faeces,’ stated the report. Why was there a difference in their stories? Had Raffaele forgotten what Amanda had said about the faeces? Or had he not known about her statement?

When Matteini’s report addressed Lumumba’s alleged involvement in the murder: it said that he had claimed to have opened Le Chic at ‘around 5 or 6 p.m.’, and that his statement did not match information and evidence obtained by the police; it stated that Lumumba had changed his mobile telephone immediately the day after the murder; it contained information of how the police believed that Amanda had arranged a meeting between Meredith and Lumumba; it also laid out a theory about Raffaele’s involvement on the night of the murder.

‘Raffaele Sollecito,’ the report stated, ‘bored with the same old evenings, and desiring to try out strong sensations, went out with Amanda and met Lumumba at Piazza Grimana at 9 p.m. It was roughly at this
same time that Sollecito and Knox both switched off their mobile phones until the following morning.

‘A short while later Meredith returned – or she could have already been there – [and] went into her bedroom with Patrick after which something went wrong, in a sense that Sollecito with every probability also intervened and the two began to make advances which the girl refused. She was then threatened with a knife, the knife which Sollecito generally carried with him and which was used to strike Meredith in the neck. The three, realizing what had happened, quickly left the house, creating a mess with the intention of simulating a break-in, spreading blood everywhere and in an attempt to clean up, left drops of blood in the bath, on the ground and in the sink.’

Matteini said that it was not clear yet who may have inflicted the fatal stab wound, but indicated that it was not looking good for any of them – especially Raffaele, whose footprints investigators claimed were found inside Meredith’s bedroom, and the fact that investigators believed the murder weapon was a knife with an 8.5 cm blade. According to forensics experts, ‘three shoe imprints were found under the duvet that covered Meredith’s body,’ but only one of them was clear enough to yield useful results as it turned out to be ‘compatible in shape and size with the sole of shoes confiscated from Raffaele Sollecito.’

Furthermore, Amanda, in her meetings with prosecutors, had outright accused Lumumba of killing
Meredith despite having ‘confused memories’, having smoked hashish with Raffaele in the afternoon. Nonetheless, a portion of Matteini’s 19-page ruling/report claimed that Amanda had told prosecutors that Patrick had ‘slipped off with Meredith… on whom he had a crush… in the bedroom, where they had sex… she added that she could not remember if Meredith had been previously threatened but that it was Patrick who killed her. She made clear that in those moments… she heard Meredith scream so much that she, being scared, covered her ears.’

When reporters began questioning the fact that Amanda had provided differing accounts of what had occurred the night Meredith was killed, and questioned the validity of her accusations against Lumumba, her lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, said that he had warned Amanda against making unfounded accusations. Regarding her inconsistent accounts of the events, he said that ‘it is difficult to evaluate which one is true.’

‘We told her that it would be worse than assassination to accuse an innocent person,’ Ghirga said. ‘We explained to her what slander means in Italy, so we’ll see.’

Ghirga also said that Amanda’s parents would be visiting her on Saturday, and he hoped that ‘they will impress upon her the importance of telling the truth and clearing up the facts.’

Luca Maori, one of Raffaele’s attorneys, said that
he would appeal the judge’s decision to keep his client in custody. Maori said that he hadn’t expected the ruling, and was ‘perplexed’ by the judge’s decision.

Lawyer Tiziano Tedeschi, also representing Raffaele, said that despite the fact that forensics experts had identified an 8.5 cm knife belonging to his client as being compatible with the murder weapon, there was nothing to link Raffaele’s knife with the wounds on Meredith’s body. Tedeschi said that the wounds could have been inflicted by a common knife such as that used in the garden or in the kitchen. The suspected murder weapon was the knife taken from Raffaele after his arrest.

‘If he killed Meredith,’ Tedeschi said, ‘he wouldn’t exactly have taken it [the knife] into the police station when he was questioned.’

Despite the judge’s decision to keep all three suspects locked up, it was revealed within the same time-frame of Matteini’s ruling that forensic reports had so far not provided any evidence that Lumumba was ever inside Meredith’s bedroom – in fact, at that point there was no evidence to show that he had ever been inside the cottage that was being dubbed the ‘House of Horrors’. Out of 120 fingerprints obtained from inside the cottage, 40 were matched to the residents and people known to visit the cottage regularly, and the remaining 80 prints were listed as belonging to ‘unknown individuals’. None of the fingerprints belonged to Lumumba, yet he remained in custody.

Before that Friday ended, a new bizarre and chilling twist was revealed as having occurred within the parameters of this already bizarre and chilling case. A shop assistant in Rome, Mauro Palmieri, came forward and told police that he had received an unusual text message on his mobile phone on the morning of October 31, the day before Meredith was killed. The text message had read: ‘As far as I’m concerned tomorrow or this evening Meredith dies.’

Although he had been somewhat taken aback by the unusual message, Palmieri said that he assumed that he had received it by mistake and had deleted it because it had not meant anything to him. However, he said that ‘it was quite a shock’ when he had heard about Meredith’s death a few days later. He said that he reported the message to the Carabinieri in Rome, who eventually passed the information to the police investigating Meredith’s murder in Perugia. When questioned, Palmieri said that he had no connection with any of the individuals involved in the case and stated that he had only been to Perugia once in his life – 25 years ago during a school outing.

Investigators indicated that they would try to retrieve the message by examining massive quantities of cell phone data in an effort to determine if the message had been sent by any of the three suspects, but it appeared doubtful that they would be successful.

Meanwhile, John and Arline Kercher, back home in the UK, were awaiting the return of Meredith’s body.
The necessary bureaucratic paperwork for the release of her body had been completed, signed by a judge, and arrangements had been made to fly it back that weekend, a little more than a week after her tragic and untimely death. The Kercher family could, perhaps, then take some solace from knowing that Meredith was coming home.

O
n Saturday, November 10, 2007, following a visit to see her daughter in Capanne prison, just
outside
Perugia, Amanda’s mother, Edda Mellas, at first had little to say about the reunion, issuing a curt ‘no comment’. Hours later, however, it was being reported in the news media that Amanda had changed her story yet again by allegedly telling her mother during their meeting that she was not, in fact, present in the cottage when Meredith was killed. After having first told the Italian police that she had spent the entire evening with Raffaele Sollecito that night, Amanda later told investigators that she had been at the cottage and implicated Patrick Lumumba in the murder. Now, it seemed, she had reverted back to her original story.

Which of Amanda’s accounts of that evening were true? Were any of her statements truthful?

‘What my client is saying is that she is sticking to her
first version of events, that she was never there,’ her lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, said. ‘She has told her mother that she was not there when Meredith was there and that she was not even at the house but at the home of her boyfriend. The mother said that Amanda had told her she had said some stupid things the last few days and that she had made some wrong declarations. She told her mother that she was not even in the house and that she spent the night in question elsewhere and that this will help prove her innocence.’

Mellas told reporters after her visit with Amanda that her daughter was ‘confident that she will be released soon.’

‘Amanda is innocent of this and is devastated by the death of her friend,’ Mellas added. ‘She is completely distraught. We are not able to say anything else and are just letting the process follow its course… I saw my daughter for an hour, and I feel happier for having seen her.’

Despite the changes to her story in this latest instance in which she had essentially withdrawn her claim of having seen Lumumba enter Meredith’s room that night, Italian police were nonetheless adamant that Patrick Lumumba was somehow involved in the murder and refused to release him.

His lawyer, Giuseppe Sereni, had filed a challenge to a portion of Judge Matteini’s report in which Matteini had written that Meredith could have been killed as early as 9 p.m., shortly after returning home
from her visit with friend Sophie Purton. Lumumba, however, continued to insist that he had been at Le Chic that evening, and had produced a series of
time-stamped
receipts from the till that began at 10.29 p.m.

In spite of his claims,
La Stampa
reported that police had conducted traces of Lumumba’s mobile phone that placed him in an area of Perugia away from his bar at 8.38 p.m. The phone trace instead had placed him in an area of town that was in the vicinity of the cottage where Meredith lived.

Lumumba, meanwhile, insisted that there were witnesses who could place him at Le Chic during the time-frame in which Meredith was murdered, including a number of Belgian students who had been drinking there from 10.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m. Lumumba’s friends had begun spreading the word that anyone who had seen him at Le Chic that evening should come forward and tell the police.

Lumumba claimed that there had also been a visiting professor from Switzerland who had been at the bar from about 8.30 p.m. onwards. Hopeful that the Swiss professor could support Lumumba’s alibi, Sereni and his staff were making a diligent effort to locate him.

‘We think he is back in Zurich and we are searching,’ Sereni said.

One of the reasons why investigators did not believe Lumumba’s story was because he had said that he opened Le Chic between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. the
evening Meredith was killed, but a witness came forward claiming that he had seen that the bar was closed at 7 p.m. Based on the food content in Meredith’s stomach, noted during the autopsy, police were now saying that she had died between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. with the fatal wound inflicted about 30 minutes before she succumbed. With the phone trace placing Lumumba in the vicinity of the cottage at 8.38 p.m., investigators still believed that he could have killed Meredith and made it back to Le Chic by 10.29 p.m., in time to print out the first receipt he presented to support his alibi for the evening.

In yet another shocking aspect to the case, Lumumba’s legal team petitioned a judge to prevent Meredith’s body from being returned to Britain as her family waited for its arrival. The coffin that contained her body, already in a holding facility at an airport in Rome for the flight home, was prevented by the petition from being loaded onto a plane and was kept at the airport for several hours while a decision was being made. Lumumba’s attorney, Sereni, cited crucial discrepancies over the time of Meredith’s death as the primary reason for filing the petition. He also asked for a new autopsy.

‘We want a new examination of Kercher’s body because the original autopsy suggested her death could have been as late as midnight,’ Sereni said. ‘In the final report, the time of death is brought forward.’

Thankfully – for the sake of Meredith’s family –
Lumumba’s petition was denied in a reasonably short time and Meredith’s body was flown home the following day. Relieved that his daughter’s body had been returned, John Kercher told reporters: ‘Now at least we can make the appropriate arrangements and we hope to have a funeral in a couple of weeks. We have been shocked by the stories about how she died – it is difficult, and we just want to get through this. We are taking it one day at a time.’

Meanwhile, it transpired that Kercher had apparently informed Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini that Meredith had told him that Amanda was entertaining men within a week of her arrival in Italy, and that Meredith had characterized her as ‘eccentric’ and ‘sure of herself’. He told Mignini that his last conversation with Meredith had been only hours before her death, at about 3 p.m. on November 1. He related how they had only spent a couple of minutes talking because he did not want Meredith to spend a lot of money on phone charges.

‘When we spoke she would always tell me about her day, what she had done, and about her friends,’ Kercher said. ‘She would always call in the evening when it was cheaper… when I heard an English girl had been murdered in Perugia I tried to call her but I couldn’t get through at first. And then it just rang with no answer.’

The shocking characteristics of this bizarre case, however, with all of its twists and turns that had
become somewhat confusing to many people attempting to follow the story, refused to end or go away. Shortly after the plane carrying Meredith’s body left Rome for London’s Heathrow airport, investigators had reportedly begun searching for a fourth suspect in Meredith’s murder. The report of a bloody fingerprint found in her bedroom that did not match any of those of the three suspects had prompted investigators to renew their interest in, and subsequent search for, a North African man seen hastily washing clothes and a pair of trainers in a launderette the day after the murder. In addition to the fingerprint, the Italian press began reporting that DNA traces of the so-called ‘fourth person’ had been found in the bathroom of the cottage.

Was the new information another leak to the press? Was it reliable information? Because a fingerprint and DNA was involved it seemed as if it should be reliable information, but there were already so many aspects of the case that had become questionable. A member of the investigating team reportedly denied the new information by saying that the only ‘mark’ found in blood in Meredith’s bedroom had been a footprint thought to be Raffaele’s. The investigator confirmed that the man seen using the launderette was being sought for questioning, but in connection with another case.

Was the investigator telling the whole story? Or was his information comprised of partial-truths as an
effort to protect any leads the investigating team might still be pursuing?

During this same time-frame, it was made known that Italian forensic experts had found strands of bloodied hair in Meredith’s left hand and that they were being tested. The examination was being conducted on the hypothesis that Meredith had struggled with her attackers and had fought back, and in so doing may have grabbed onto a few strands of hair – damning evidence if it could be linked to someone by DNA.

Meanwhile, according to Father Saulo Scarabottoli, Amanda appeared to be ‘shell-shocked’ and had been ‘writing page after page’ about her feelings since being taken into custody. Scarabottoli, a chaplain at Capanne prison, had visited her daily since her arrest after she had been denied a request to attend Mass.

‘Instead I visited her in her cell and explained to her the true sense of life and how values should be tied to moral behaviour,’ Scarabottoli said. ‘I told her that wild nights were a tragedy and she seemed to be listening very attentively to every word I said.’ It appeared to Scarabottoli that Amanda was writing a prison diary.

‘In the few moments I spent with her,’ Scarabottoli said, ‘it seemed she had a lot in her heart to think about, and I think she may be writing it down… she appeared to be a little overcome with her situation and seemed to be up and down. She didn’t make any form of confession to me.’

The priest’s comments seemed to confirm earlier reports that Amanda was keeping a diary. She reportedly had also told Franco Zaffini, an Italian politician who had visited Amanda, Raffaele and Lumumba, that she was ‘grieving’ over what had happened to Meredith, but insisted that she ‘was not involved’.

‘She said to me, “I am very sorry for what happened to my friend Meredith, but I had nothing to do with it,”’ Zaffini said, adding, as an apparent afterthought, that Amanda had not asked him about Raffaele during his visit with her.

The next day, in yet another somewhat surprising development, and ironically immediately after she had changed her story again by telling her mother that she had not been at the cottage the night Meredith was murdered, police announced that CCTV cameras had recorded Amanda as she entered the cottage at 8.43 p.m. on the night of the murder – only a few minutes before Meredith herself came home after watching the movie with her friend. The CCTV cameras overlook the cottage from a nearby car park, and the recorded footage showed Amanda’s face and light-coloured skirt and top. The footage clearly contradicted her latest claim that she was at Raffaele’s house.

A police source, as reported in the media, said that: ‘it will be interesting to see what she has to say when we show her the footage.’ According to reports in the
Corriere Della Sera
, the CCTV images were very sharp.

It also came to light that Amanda had written a
letter to her mother barely three days after Meredith’s murder asking her to take her shopping. Amanda apparently wrote the three-page letter after her Italian language course instructor asked the class to write something about their weekend. Among the things Amanda had written was that she was ‘on edge’ and could not ‘stop thinking about Meredith’s death’.

‘What I really want, Mom, is for you to take me shopping,’ she wrote. ‘I haven’t finished with Perugia, but I don’t think I can go back to sleep in that house.’

In the meantime, Amanda Knox’s statements and actions were believed to be helping the Patrick Lumumba defence team move a step closer to getting their client released from jail. Witnesses that placed him at work at Le Chic at the time of Meredith’s murder were also coming forward, and it was only a matter of time before the Swiss professor would be located so that he could confirm or refute Lumumba’s alibi. Helping his case even further was a statement from a porter who told police that he had gone to Le Chic to assist in repairing a drink dispenser – the porter said that he had seen Lumumba talking with a university professor on the night of the murder.

Things were not looking so good for Amanda and Raffaele, however.