The Murder of Meredith Kercher (9 page)

I
t was not long after his release from jail that Patrick Lumumba decided to talk publicly about his ordeal regarding the murder of Meredith Kercher. What he had to say seemed to shed light on why he believed an attempt was made to frame him for the crime… and it appeared to lead right back to Amanda Knox.

He told a reporter for
The Mail on Sunday
that he had hired Amanda as a barmaid for Le Chic, his
three-storied
club that was popular with students for dancing and its specialty rum drinks that they queued eagerly for nightly. Amanda began working – or, rather, showing up for work – at the club about a month before Meredith’s death. He thought she would be good for business, and he recalled meeting Amanda and Meredith in late September or early October. He had just opened the club, and one of his friends told him that he knew an American girl who needed a job.
As a result he asked Amanda, through his friend, to come into the bar so they could meet and talk about working there (a seemingly harmless and innocent event, but it set the wheels of fate in motion). She, of course, agreed.

When she showed up, she was dressed in ‘flimsy trousers’ and was ‘full of bravado’. He knew almost immediately that she was exactly the sort of person he wanted to hire.

‘She was open and bubbly, and said she’d bring in more customers because she knew everyone,’ Lumumba said of that first meeting. ‘I didn’t find her attractive, but she was confident about the way she looked. It was almost as if she didn’t need to wear revealing clothes – she thought she was sexy enough as she was.’

It was that same evening that Amanda introduced Meredith to Patrick. ‘Meredith was a natural charmer, a beautiful girl who made friends easily, and received attention wherever she went,’ Lumumba said.

He explained that Meredith’s Italian was not very good, but she had no problem communicating – many of the residents spoke English anyway and, once comfortable with you, did not mind speaking in English. He told of how she had pointed out an alternative way to make a
mojito
.

‘She smiled and commented on the special make of vodka I kept behind the bar,’ he explained. ‘She said she’d used it herself instead of rum when she was a barmaid making
mojitos
back in Britain.’

He noted that her skin seemed unusually dark to be English, and she told him about her Indian ancestry on her mother’s side of the family. When he observed Amanda, Meredith, and the group of girls they were hanging out with that night, Lumumba recalled thinking how close-knit all of them seemed. It had been Latin and Reggae Night at Le Chic, and the girls danced and caught the attention of a number of young men. The next day he told Amanda that she was hired, and that it would be her job, at least at first, to pick up empty or spent glasses at the tables. In his mind it had been a trial arrangement in which she would work two shifts a week, from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.

Soon after starting the job, Lumumba noticed that Amanda was always flirting with the men who came into the bar, and before long he felt that she had taken the job to ‘hit’ on the male customers, not to perform actual work. He said that she would regularly place her mouth close enough to the mouths of the men she was talking to that it sometimes looked like they were kissing. She also frequently came in to work late and would just as frequently ask to leave early.

‘I’d tell her off, she’d smile sweetly and apologize and be back at it within five minutes,’ he said. ‘Sometimes when I tried to get her back to work, the men would become rowdy. Someone once told me to mind my own business and “butt out of Amanda’s”.’

Realizing that Amanda had brought significant business into the bar, he also had the foresight to know
that if he did let her go, much of the new business would probably fall off, too, due to negative word-
of-mouth
publicity. As a result, he decided to tolerate Amanda – for awhile.

Amanda had been employed at the bar for a couple of weeks before Lumumba met Raffaele Sollecito. He came in one evening with a couple of friends, and they began drinking rum and pear juice. After they’d had a few rounds, Lumumba said he observed Amanda flirting with Raffaele in her usual manner. Knowing that Amanda had a boyfriend back home in the U.S., Lumumba had thought at first that all the flirting had been harmless. It was not until he had learned that Amanda and Raffaele had begun dating that Lumumba realized she was two-timing her American boyfriend.

As time went on, Amanda became even lazier when she was supposed to be doing her job at Le Chic. Quite often, when the dance floor was packed and patrons were lining up to get drinks, Amanda was occupied flirting with any man who would give her the time of day – especially those that she liked and found good-looking. During those moments, which comprised the majority of the time supposedly working at the bar, Amanda seemed either unaware that she had work to do or that she could not care less. She must have reasoned that her presence was bringing a good deal of the business into the bar anyway. It had been during one of those moments,
around midnight one evening when business was very brisk and about a week before Meredith’s death, that Lumumba had decided that he’d had enough of Amanda Knox and decided to fire her.

‘She was angry and wanted revenge,’ Lumumba said. ‘By the end, she hated me.’

Despite his belief that Amanda implicated him in Meredith’s murder as revenge for him firing her, Lumumba does not believe that she was evil. He said that a person has to have a soul to be evil, but that Amanda was soulless.

‘She’s empty, dead inside,’ he said. ‘She is the ultimate actress, able to switch her emotions on and off in an instant. I don’t believe a word she says. Everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie. But those lies have stained me forever… she tried to play the race card. She thought that by pointing the finger at a black person she’d distract attention from herself. She used me as a scapegoat. I’ve never had so much as a fine for not paying a bus ticket before. But now I’ve been branded a cold-blooded murderer.’

He went on to describe how charming Meredith was, amiable without even trying. On the other hand, Amanda tried to be charming, too, but ended up being less popular than Meredith. Although he had not realized it at the time, in retrospect he believed that Amanda had been jealous of Meredith.

‘She always wanted to be the queen bee,’ Lumumba said. ‘As the weeks passed, it became clear that she
wasn’t. She hated anyone stealing her limelight, including Meredith.’

Sometime in October, perhaps towards the middle of the month and about a week before he had fired Amanda, Lumumba threw a party at the bar for the staff. He said that Meredith had shown up, and she made her special vodka
mojitos
for everyone, which they enjoyed. He described her as ‘sparkly and cheery’ and said that she had ‘lifted everyone’s spirits.’ He said he had met Meredith by chance in town soon after the party, and he asked her if she would like to work behind the bar the next time he had a DJ, on a ladies’ night.

‘She jumped at the chance,’ he said, ‘although she had stopped coming into Le Chic. And I heard that she wasn’t hanging around with Amanda much, either. I wasn’t surprised. The two couldn’t have been more different.’

By then, he said, Amanda had become more erratic and even more unreliable, if that was possible. Her mood swings became more obvious as they changed from simply being ‘docile and lazy to hyperactive and flighty’. He said that he knew she was smoking pot, and it soon became impossible to foresee which mood she would be in on any given day. He said that he had told her that he had asked Meredith to come and work for him at the bar.

‘Her face dropped and there was a big silence,’ he said. ‘Then she said, “Fine,” and stormed off. I knew
then that she was extremely jealous of Meredith. She obviously thought Meredith was invading her territory.’

After reflecting a bit, Lumumba said that the situation between him and Amanda had come to a head on Tuesday, October 30, the day he recalled as having fired her. When he told her that he could no longer use her in the bar but said that she could continue handing out flyers for Le Chic, she looked at him impassively and walked away. He said that he did not see her again that evening.

Lumumba recalled that she returned to the bar the following night, Halloween, to attend the party being held there. She drank a lot of free red wine, and ‘was all over two American boys.’ Lumumba said he had not seen Raffaele at the party that evening, and he had not noticed when Amanda left. He said he locked up Le Chic at 3 a.m. and went to another club where he encountered Meredith.

‘I mentioned the idea of her working for me again,’ he said. ‘She smiled sweetly and said she couldn’t wait, and she’d bring all her friends back to the club for me.’

Lumumba said that had been the last time that he had seen Meredith.

The next time he heard anything about Meredith had been at approximately 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 3, when two of his friends came into the bar and asked him if he had heard that ‘Amanda’s English friend had been murdered.’ When he looked at
them quizzically, as if to ask them who they were referring to, his friends told him that they were talking about ‘the dark-skinned girl’.

‘My heart stopped,’ Lumumba said.

He called Amanda, who confirmed that Meredith was indeed dead and that she had been murdered. He said that he had expected Amanda to be ‘distraught, hysterical and sobbing,’ but she was not. Instead, he said she had sounded ‘weird,’ the tone of her voice ‘completely flat.’ She had seemed ‘calm and unaffected’ as well, not at all the way one would expect someone whose roommate had been murdered to be.

‘She said she was talking to the police and hung up,’ Lumumba said. ‘I was shaken and sick with sadness. Things like this just didn’t happen in Perugia.’

M
ore than two weeks after Meredith had been murdered, the majority of Perugia’s 162,000 residents were still talking about the horrible affair. It seemed like much of the city had become tense and suspicious of those they came into contact with, and a number of people had become increasingly upset over the treatment Lumumba had received from the police. In fact, after he had told his story to
The Mail on Sunday
, the story of how his arrest had come about was on the minds of many people and it had become one of the most talked about aspects of the case over drinks in Perugia’s many bars.

The story was told best, of course, by Lumumba himself. He was at home in his fourth-floor flat with his girlfriend and their son at 6.30 a.m. on Tuesday, November 6, when someone began buzzing his
doorbell repeatedly. As he walked towards the door, a woman’s voice on the other side was demanding that he open it, by order of the police. As soon as he opened the door, the woman, accompanied by as many as 15 to 20 other people, entered. None of them wore uniforms, but they were carrying guns. With no idea why they were at his flat, Lumumba did not at first realise that they were the police, so their presence and actions frightened him and his family.

Lumumba was handcuffed and whisked outside to one of seven police cars and was swiftly driven to police headquarters where he was placed inside an interrogation room.

Making matters worse, Lumumba did not even know at that point what it was that he was supposed to have done. Frightened and humiliated like he had never been before, about two hours into what turned into a 10-hour interrogation one of the inquisitors suggested that one of his colleagues show him a photo of ‘the dead girl’ in an attempt to get him ‘to confess’.

‘It might sound naïve,’ he said, ‘but it was only then that I made the connection between Meredith’s death and my arrest. Stunned, I said, “You think I killed Meredith?”’

Lumumba’s questioners finally showed him the evidence they had against him. By then it was about 5.30 p.m., and the bulk of what they had shown him was Amanda’s statement in which she had told the police that he had persuaded her to take him to the
cottage she shared with Meredith and how she had accused him of raping Meredith before killing her in her room while Amanda sat in the kitchen. He had difficulty believing that Amanda had told the police that the alleged rape and murder was a result of Lumumba’s revenge after Meredith had rejected him.

‘It was only then that I realized just how mad she was,’ he said. ‘I had no sexual feelings towards Meredith, and have never cheated on [my girlfriend]… what Amanda was saying was insane. I have seven sisters and there’s no way I could even imagine hurting a woman.’

Despite the fact that he was filled with anger, Lumumba also knew that he needed to remain calm while in the presence of the police, even though he knew that their evidence was flawed and that they could not possibly have any evidence against him that could stand up in court. He knew that once investigators had compared the blood sample and fingerprints taken from him upon his arrival at Capanne prison where he was held, it would be all over and that they would have little choice but to release him.

During the two weeks that the police held him, he watched the details of the case as they unfolded each day on the TV in his cell. He was shocked and appalled by the sordid details of Amanda’s and Raffaele’s lifestyle.

‘That kind of life was foreign to me, and it made me sick that people would think I was involved in some
kind of threesome. I knew students slept around, but to hear rumours of sex games with knives shocked me to the core. As far as I am concerned, anyone involved in such things needs psychiatric help.’

Lumumba knew that he had never been to their house, that it ‘was a mistake’ and that he would eventually be released when the police realized that Amanda had lied about him. After hearing his side of the story about Amanda and Meredith, the police now had to consider Amanda’s jealousy of Meredith as a motive, albeit a slim one, for the murder. Although he acknowledged that his reputation had been permanently damaged by the ordeal, Lumumba, being a parent himself, had difficulty imagining what Meredith’s parents were going through.

‘I hope they get some peace when the killer is caught,’ he said. ‘I don’t always think Amanda did it, but I think she knows who did it, and whoever killed Meredith should stay in prison forever.’

The last time he saw Amanda was outside the university’s library, on the Monday after the murder and prior to the arrests. ‘Despite all my misgivings of her, I wanted to give her comfort and support,’ he said. ‘I told her I was so sorry about Meredith. She seemed completely normal. But she had a nasty look in her eyes and simply said I had no idea what it was like to be probed by police for hours on end. Well, thanks to her, I know exactly what she’s going through now, and I’ll never forgive her.’

Meanwhile, the case fast-forwarded to Wednesday, December 6, 2007, the day Rudy Guede was extradited to Italy. During his initial statements to Italian police, Guede made no mention of Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito, but he did provide what seemed like a highly implausible account of what happened in the cottage the evening Meredith was killed, and insisted that the sex between him and Meredith had been consensual after investigators told him that they had found strands of hair in one of Meredith’s hands that forensics experts had matched to him.

According to his version of events that evening, Guede said that he had bumped into Meredith and that she had asked him to her flat for a drink. He said that they had arrived at the cottage at approximately 8.30 p.m. The timeline of his account, however, seemed flawed, as it did not match the timings provided by Meredith’s friends, Sophie Purton and Robyn Butterworth, both of whom had watched
The
Notebook
with her and said that she had not left Purton’s flat until about 9 p.m.

He was now telling the police that when he left Meredith’s room that evening to go to the bathroom, he had put on his iPod headphones. Perhaps surprisingly, he had been able to hear Meredith scream, despite wearing the headphones. He repeated his story of having seen an unknown assailant who, he claimed, had entered the cottage and had killed Meredith.

‘He was an Italian lad with chestnut hair,’ Guede said. ‘We knocked into each other. I was also injured, but I cannot remember clearly the face of that man. Then I ran away. I was scared. I am not the one who killed her.’

He said that he had decided to flee Italy because he was afraid that he would be blamed for the murder which, he said, he did not commit. The police, however, challenged his account and said that forensic examination had shown that Meredith had not engaged in ‘consensual sex’ as Guede had claimed, but had most likely been held down during sex.

Before fleeing, however, he said he went home and changed clothes, and then went to the Domus disco where he danced and drank from about 2 a.m. until 4.30 a.m. on Friday, November 2. Although it was, of course, possible the events had occurred just as Guede had said, it just did not seem likely at that point. It also did not seem feasible that a person who had witnessed a supposed killer fleeing the scene of a crime would go out dancing and drinking – especially after holding a dying young woman in his arms before leaving.

According to the police, the picture of Guede that was emerging was one of a misfit who had an obsession for foreign girls. He was known to hang out in Perugia’s main square, where young people – including students –were known to smoke cannabis and drink late at night. Guede had been involved in a stabbing at the square earlier in the year. By the time
of their interviews with Guede, investigators believed more firmly than ever that Meredith had been murdered during or after a party in which sex and drugs had been involved. The chief prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, however, even though he strongly felt that there was a connection between Amanda, Raffaele and Guede, expressed doubts that the three suspects would make a concerted effort to protect each other. Nonetheless, Mignini pushed forward with his theory that all three had been at the scene of the murder that night and had even taken part in it.

To help reinforce Mignini’s theory, Judge Maurizio Bufali later wrote that the evidence to date strongly indicated that ‘a group participation in the heinous crime in which a passive role does not appear plausible for any of those present.’

Mignini, meanwhile, made it clear that he did not believe Guede’s version of what had occurred that evening, calling it a ‘rather improbable account’. Mignini repeated that the door to Meredith’s house had not been forced open and therefore had not shown signs of a break-in despite Guede’s claims that an ‘unknown Italian’ had killed Meredith. He also pointed out how the house had been cleaned up by someone after the murder.

As Guede was growing up, his adopted family sent him to the Vittorio Emanuele II school, one of the finest schools in Perugia. However, it appeared that he had not taken his studies seriously and he eventually
became involved in drugs and his character quickly took a turn for the worse.

‘I was trying to help Rudy build a future,’ Paolo Caporali said. ‘I thought I gave him a good opportunity. But he revealed himself to be a great liar. He would say he would go to lessons, and then skip them. His results were lousy.’

Caporali said that Guede preferred sitting in front of the TV, playing video games, to studying or going to school. He had little or no interest in work, either. ‘When I realized what was happening, I wanted to distance him from my family,’ Caporali said. ‘He went away.’

Caporali added that Guede eventually returned to Perugia, in January 2007, at which time Caporali offered him a second chance by helping him find work as a gardener. Caporali conceded that his efforts to help Guede had been another mistake when Guede disappeared again in August. He said the next time he heard anything about Rudy Guede was when detectives investigating Meredith’s murder knocked on his door.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, three weeks after the murder Meredith Kercher’s parents had been left in limbo over arranging a funeral and burying their daughter, despite the fact that her body had been flown home. The Italian authorities opposed a burial because of a request by attorneys for the defence after Lumumba’s legal counsel had initially asked for a
second autopsy in an effort to establish a more precise time of death. The request had more or less become a moot issue after Lumumba’s release, but in the interim Raffaele Sollecito’s lawyers had also asked for a second autopsy to establish whether the wounds on Meredith’s body were compatible with the knife seized at his home. The forensic pathologist, Luca Lalli, who had performed the original postmortem examination, told a judge who was to decide on whether Meredith’s funeral should go ahead or not, that he was adamant that a second autopsy was unnecessary because everything done during the original examination had been recorded.

The good news was that a judge had sided with Lalli in the decision to allow burial, bringing a certain amount of relief for Meredith’s grieving family.

‘It’s good news, very good news, and gives the family a tiny bit of closure,’ Meredith’s mother, Arline Kercher, said after hearing of the decision. ‘However, this is far from over. There is still a long way to go. Our family will not be able to rest fully until the person or people who killed Meredith are locked up in prison. This is some small consolation but ultimately we want justice for Meredith.’

She said that their family could still not believe that Meredith was gone. ‘It’s still raw and extremely shocking for us,’ she continued. ‘The last few weeks have been like a nightmare. It has been devastating, and tragic. At least now we might be able to start
planning her funeral… and hopefully now she will be laid to rest and have peace… I want to see her killers punished for what they have done. They have torn our family apart. Meredith has been taken away from us forever. We will never be able to have peace.’