Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (23 page)

I went to the window and cried—not out of sadness, but from a place of deep, black anger. It was one thing to have people saying things about me on TV and another to be overpowered.

The unwanted attempt to kiss me happened five days before my birthday.
So this is the gift the prison has to offer me
, I thought cynically.
A reminder of my helplessness.

My mom and Deanna came to visit me on July 9, the day I turned twenty-one. They sang “Happy Birthday,” but bringing in cake was not allowed. “Don’t worry, Amanda,” Mom said, putting her best spin on it. “We’re not celebrating anything until you get home. And I’m sure that will be soon.”

I erupted into sobs when I hugged my mom and sister good-bye. Back in my cell, I’d barely pulled myself back together when I was called down to the ground floor again. Raffaele had sent me a huge bouquet of white lilies. The guards were shaking their heads and chuckling about it, as though they’d never seen anything so absurd. When I reached for the vase, the guard said, “Prisoners aren’t allowed to have flowers.”

I guess that was another hiding place for drugs.

Nothing eased my pain that day. Ever since I was a little girl, I’d always dreamed of being older, counting off the years until I’d be a teenager and then again to the day I’d finally be grown up. The previous year, when I turned twenty—not long before I left for Italy—everyone in my family had said, “Next year’s birthday is going to be the real party.”

Instead, here I was now, literally sweating out my twenty-first birthday in a sweltering Italian prison. I learned strategies from the other women for how to stay cool. We took frequent cold showers, wetting our hair over and over. We drenched our sheets and tied them to the bars of the windows in a vain attempt to cool any whisper of a hot, dry breeze that might pass through.

All this happened while Luciano and Carlo were preparing the defense for my pretrial. They didn’t have everything they needed to break down the case completely—Meredith’s DNA on the knife and my “bloody” footprints were going unanswered.

Two days before the pretrial started, we got news that was both heartening and unnerving. Police investigators revealed that they’d found an imprint of the murder weapon in blood on Meredith’s bedsheets, making it clear the weapon wasn’t in fact the knife with the six-and-a-half-inch blade the prosecution was claiming. The imprint was too short to have been made by Raffaele’s kitchen knife.

I’d thought that being charged marked the true end of the investigation. Now I felt catapulted back to the spot I’d been for the past several months—back to wondering what the prosecution was going to spring on us next.

At the same time, we had evidence that Carlo called “the murderer’s signature.”

I reminded myself that we also had common sense on our side. There was no motive. I had no history of violence. I’d barely met Rudy Guede. Raffaele had not met him at all.

Luciano and Carlo came to see me the day before the pretrial started. “We’ll be as strong and forceful as we can,” Luciano promised.

Carlo, the pessimist, said, “Don’t get your hopes up, Amanda. I’m not sure we’ll win. There’s been too much attention on your case, too much pressure on the Italian legal system to think that you won’t be sent to trial.”

Chapter 23

September 18–October 28, 2008

T
he
agente
slid the cage door closed and turned the lock. Terrified and claustrophobic, I was alone inside a cramped, cold metal box barely large enough to sit in. I put my mouth up to the honeycomb panel and sucked in air. I heard the van’s double doors slam and felt the vehicle lurch as we pulled away from Capanne. The four blue-uniformed guards could see the countryside; I could not. I knew we were twisting and turning our way to the courthouse in downtown Perugia for the pretrial that would decide if the prosecution had enough evidence against Rudy Guede, Raffaele, and me to send us to trial.

The excursion made me feel more trapped than I felt in jail. I was like a package on a FedEx truck—on board but untended. The guards’ job was to deliver me. Nothing more.

I longed to look out the window. I’d been outside the prison only once since my arrest, and that was only because I needed to see an eye doctor. Being in prison where the vistas are all broken by bars had made my eyes nearsighted. During that earlier trip, I heard children playing, and I started sobbing. It made me think of my family and of all I’d lost.

The pretrial was a far more jarring experience.

As the van rolled down the ramp and into the courthouse’s underground garage, one
agente
said, “The journalists are waiting for you, Kuh-nox.”

“You’re going to be a good girl so we don’t have to handcuff you, right?” another guard said. I had always been so polite and docile that a guard had once said to me, “If all the inmates were like you, we wouldn’t need prisons.”

I’d thought to myself,
Because I shouldn’t be a prisoner.

Between leaving the van and entering the double doors of the courthouse, I had a few moments in the open air but not free rein. A guard held my arm, using it to steer me into the building and, from there, into the antechambers used to confine prisoners. Later, in the courtroom, one guard stood behind me. Another was stationed a few steps to the side.

Walking down the hall, I was sandwiched between two guards, with a third
agente
ahead of us. “Remember. Do not say anything to the press. Don’t even look at them,” one cautioned.

As we rounded a corner, cameras flashed. Media people were yelling questions in Italian and English—“Are you guilty?” “Are you innocent?” “Why did you do it?” “Did you do it?” “What happened to Meredith?” “What do you have to say?”

The journalists and photographers were barricaded behind a rope. I didn’t notice their faces, only huge black camera lenses and blindingly bright explosions of light. I felt so self-conscious that I instinctively ducked to hide my face.

And then it was over. The courtroom—closed to anyone who wasn’t involved in the case—was pin-drop quiet. My team’s table was on the far right. The table for Raffaele’s lawyers was next to mine. Rudy Guede was to sit with his lawyers behind Raffaele’s table. But on the first day, I was the only one of the three defendants there.

Relieved that the room wasn’t full of people, I sat down and waited for the judge. Then the double doors I’d come through opened again, and the Kercher family walked in.

My first thought wasn’t
They think I’m a murderer
. It was
Meredith’s parents? I finally get to meet them.

I asked Carlo if it would be okay to say hello. He checked with their lawyer, Francesco Maresca, and came back saying, “Maresca said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Now is not the time.”

Will there ever be a right time?

I knew I had to listen to my lawyers on this one, but I was still waiting for a moment when we could exchange glances so that I could convey my sympathy.

When I tried to catch their attention, they glared at me, and I felt as if I’d been slapped. I also felt completely humbled. Meredith’s mom’s expression was both hard and sorrowful.

I was devastated. I’d anticipated meeting them for a long time. I’d written and rewritten a sympathy letter in my head but had never managed to put it on paper. Now I felt stupid. How had I not anticipated their reaction?
Why are you so surprised? What do you think this has been about all along?
My grief for Meredith and my sadness for her family had kept me from thinking further.
Of course they hate you, Amanda. They believe you’re guilty. Everyone has been telling them that for months.

The first day of the pretrial was mostly procedural. Almost immediately Guede’s lawyers requested an abbreviated trial. I had no idea the Italian justice system offered this option. Carlo later told me that it saves the government money. With an abbreviated trial, the judge’s decision is based solely on evidence; no witnesses are called. The defendant benefits from this fast-track process because, if found guilty, he has his sentence cut by a third.

Guede’s lawyers must have realized that he was better off in a separate trial, since the prosecution was intent on pinning the murder on us. The evidence gathered during the investigation pointed toward his guilt. His DNA was all over Meredith’s room and her body, on her intimate clothing and her purse. He had left his handprint in her blood on her pillowcase. He had fled the country. The prosecution called Guede’s story of how he “happened” to be at the villa and yet had not participated in the murder “absurd”—though they readily believed his claims against Raffaele and me. One of the big hopes for us was that with so much evidence against Guede, the prosecution would have to realize Raffaele and I hadn’t been involved.

I felt the way about Guede that Meredith’s family felt about me. As soon as I saw him, in a subsequent hearing, I thought angrily,
You! You killed Meredith!

He didn’t look like a murderer. He was wearing jeans and a sweater. It was almost impossible to imagine that he had cut Meredith’s throat. But if he hadn’t, his DNA wouldn’t have been everywhere in Meredith’s room. And he wouldn’t have lied about Raffaele and me. The other thing I noticed: he wouldn’t look at me.

I was relieved when Raffaele appeared on the second day of the pretrial. He smiled as soon as he saw me, as though he couldn’t suppress it. After almost a year being apart from him, my second impression was the same as my first: he was honest and smart—and, even with shoulder-length hair, just as handsome as when I met him at the concert hall. It made me miserable to know that being my boyfriend had cost him so much. On the other hand, I felt grateful that he, out of all the people in Perugia, was the person I was going through this with. Getting his first letter had renewed my faith in him, and we now wrote each other regularly. I knew I could trust Raffaele with my life. And I was.

Mignini and his co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, were determined to establish a connection between Guede, Raffaele, and me.

Their theory seemed to be that I knew Guede from the time Meredith and I had met with the guys downstairs in front of the fountain in Piazza IV Novembre—the night Guede told the guys I was cute. He hadn’t made an impression on me at all then. The prosecution hypothesized that, after that night, he’d gotten in touch with me, perhaps about buying drugs. They stressed that we had a relationship, and although they allowed that it wasn’t necessarily romantic, they insisted that Guede, like Raffaele, was obsessed with me. They further decided—based on a blurb Raffaele had written on his Facebook page way before he met me—that we’d been bored on the night of November 1 and headed to Piazza Grimana. There, Mignini said, we ran into Guede at the basketball court. I purportedly said, “Hey, let’s go hang out at my place.”

The prosecution spun this assumption further. According to Mignini, we found Meredith at the villa and said, Hey, that stupid bitch. Let’s show Meredith. Let’s get her to play a sex game.

I was horrified.
Who thinks like that?

In their scenario, I hated Meredith because we’d argued about money. Hearing Mignini say that I told Guede to rape Meredith was upsetting. He added that I was the ringleader, telling Raffaele to hold her down. When he said that I threatened Meredith with a knife, I felt as if I’d been kicked. Even worse was hearing him say that when Meredith refused to have sex, I killed her.

When he initially said we were bored and went to the piazza, it sounded spontaneous, but now he said I’d tried to trap Meredith on Halloween—a holiday he saw as evil. Mignini based this on a text I’d sent Meredith asking her to hang out on Halloween. He emphasized Raffaele’s and my supposed immorality and inclination toward violent fantasy. His “proof”? Raffaele’s Japanese comic books about vampires and the one Marilyn Manson song he had downloaded. In closing arguments, Mignini said Meredith’s murder was premeditated and was a rite celebrated on the occasion of the night of Halloween—a sexual and sacrificial ritual that, in the intention of the conspirators, should have occurred twenty-four hours earlier.

He was throwing motives against the wall to see which one stuck.

I wasn’t used to the court lingo and depended on the young American woman who’d been appointed as my interpreter to fill me in on what was said.

The pretrial judge, Paolo Micheli, allowed testimony from two witnesses. The first was DNA analyst Patrizia Stefanoni for the Polizia Scientifica.

Starting right after we were indicted, Raffaele’s and my lawyers had requested the raw data for all Stefanoni’s forensic tests. How were the samples collected? How many cotton pads had her team used to swab the bathroom sink and the bidet? How often had they changed gloves? What tests had they done—and when? Which machines had they used, at what times, and on which days? What were the original unedited results of the DNA tests?

Her response was “No. We can’t give you these documents you continue to ask for, because the ones you have will have to suffice.”

Then, during pretrial, the defense lawyers pressed again, and this time Judge Micheli granted the request. Stefanoni gave us some documents—but not enough to interpret the data. When we objected, the judge shrugged and said, “Well, I asked her and she said those files aren’t important for you.”

Our only option was to question Stefanoni face-to-face about her methods.

Stefanoni was an attractive woman in her late thirties. Meticulously groomed, she had long dark hair, manicured nails, and olive skin. She wore tight suits that showed off her figure. The prosecution’s questions were designed to let Stefanoni reassure the judge that all the testing had been done correctly.

Dr. Sarah Gino, our DNA expert, was a thin woman in her early thirties with short hair and thick glasses. Her convictions were absolute. She was insistent in her questioning of Stefanoni. Dr. Gino noted that Stefanoni hadn’t provided enough information about her investigation for our defense to be able to critique her conclusions. How much of Meredith’s DNA had she found on the knife blade? What was the evidence of the cleanup the prosecution was alleging?

Finally the judge granted Raffaele’s and my defense teams’ request for an independent review of Stefanoni’s results. The expert he appointed was the head of the Polizia Scientifica—Stefanoni’s boss.

Not surprisingly, this man rubber-stamped Stefanoni’s work. It was done perfectly, he said.

That was the end of it.

The other testimony came from a witness named Hekuran Kokomani, an Albanian man the prosecution called to prove that Raffaele and I both knew Rudy Guede. Our lawyers argued that Raffaele had never met Guede. I’d said “Hi” to him once when we hung out at the apartment downstairs. My other encounter with him was taking his drink order at Le Chic.

Kokomani said he’d seen the three of us together on Halloween, the day before the murder.

A massive lie.

Kokomani’s testimony made the pretrial seem like a farce. According to him, after dinner on Halloween, driving along Viale Sant’Antonio, the busy thoroughfare just above our house, he came upon a black garbage bag in the middle of the road. When he got out of his car, he realized the “bag” was two people: Raffaele and me. He told the court that Raffaele punched him, and I pulled out a huge knife the length of a saber, lifting it high over my head. “Raffaele said, ‘Don’t worry about her. She’s a girl,’ ” Kokomani testified. “Then I threw olives at her face.”

As if this weren’t nonsensical enough, next, Guede, whom Kokomani said he recognized from a bed-and-breakfast where he, Kokomani, worked, ambled up to the car. Kokomani said he asked Guede, “What’s with the knife?”

“Guede said, ‘Hey, brother, it’s a party. We’re just cutting some cake.’

“I know it was Amanda,” Kokomani continued, “because I once met her uncle. Raffaele and Amanda were walking down the street. It was August. He offered me a beer.” I wasn’t in Perugia in August. I didn’t know Raffaele yet. I don’t have an uncle in Italy.

I
was morbidly curious about Guede and simultaneously completely repulsed. Mostly I was disappointed. I had thought we’d have the chance to confront him. But he let his lawyers do all the talking.

Speaking for Guede, his lawyer, Walter Biscotti, claimed that his client was innocent. He said, essentially, “Rudy has told me his side of the story. What he says is not as outrageous as it seems. Rudy was at the villa because he and Meredith had agreed to meet and had fooled around before he went into the bathroom. He has indicated Knox and Sollecito are the actual perpetrators of the crime.

“Isn’t that possible?” Biscotti asked. “Isn’t that what the evidence shows? It shows him being there, and he’s admitted to that. He says he left because he was scared. Of course he was scared! He’s a young black man, living the best he could, abandoned by his parents. He stole sometimes, but out of necessity. I don’t think there’s enough evidence to say that he killed. The knife has Amanda’s DNA, and the bra clasp has Raffaele’s. Rudy admits that he was there, he tells what happened, and I believe him.”

No witnesses were called for Guede. His lawyers could only interpret the evidence the prosecution had provided. They argued that his DNA had been found at the crime scene because he was scrambling to help Meredith and that he left because he was afraid. I remember his lawyer saying Guede didn’t go to the disco to give himself an alibi but to let off steam. He escaped to Germany because he was worried that he’d be wrongly accused.