Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (30 page)

At the next hearing Manuela Comodi, the co-prosecutor in charge of forensics for the trial, swept into the courtroom triumphantly carrying a flat cardboard box, a little smaller than the ones used for carryout pizza. After opening it, Comodi paraded it in front of the court, as though she were displaying the queen’s jewels. Her pride showed on her face as the jurors and experts stood up, straining in her direction to get a good look at what was inside—the knife that had been confiscated from Raffaele’s apartment was wrapped in a baggie. Only Comodi was allowed to touch it, to pick it up and hold its plastic-shrouded blade up to the light.

Her theatrics were exasperating. The prosecution continued to say that it was Meredith’s DNA that had lodged in a small scratch on the knife blade. The prosecution still claimed this as incontrovertible proof that I had used the knife to kill Meredith. I knew it to be a regular kitchen knife that had last been used to prepare a salad.

After everyone had had a good look, Comodi gingerly closed the box and left the courtroom.

A
DNA reading is a series of peaks that looks like an EKG. By analyzing the size of the peak in thirteen or more locations, scientists can be almost certain they have a DNA profile unique to one person—or that person’s identical twin. Done correctly, the reading is more accurate than a fingerprint.

During the pretrial, Stefanoni testified that she had tested enough DNA from the knife to get an accurate reading. But now, a year later, Dr. Gino had seen the raw data, including the amount of DNA that was tested. If there was any DNA there at all, it was too little to determine using the lab’s sensitive instruments, Gino said. Stefanoni had met none of the internationally accepted methods for identifying DNA. When the test results are too low to be read clearly, the protocol is to run a second test. This was impossible to do, because all the genetic material had been used up in the first test. Moreover, there was an extremely high likelihood of contamination in the lab, where billions of Meredith’s DNA strands were present.

The prosecution said Stefanoni’s methods were perfectly acceptable, because in proving that the knife was the murder weapon, she’d “struck gold.” But an unbiased analyst would have thrown out the results.

What I couldn’t understand was why this infinitesimal, unconfirmed sample found on a random knife that didn’t correspond with Meredith’s wounds or the bloodstain on the bedsheet—the murderer’s signature— held any sway. Copious amounts of Rudy Guede’s genetic material had been found in Meredith’s bedroom, on her body, in her purse, and in the toilet.

Perhaps most telling, when the knife was tested for blood, not even a diluted trace was found, evidence that should have convinced the prosecution’s scientists that any DNA that might have been found there had come from contamination—not from a cut.

But the prosecution didn’t admit they had tested for blood until our experts found out for themselves.

The situation was similar to the prosecution’s claim throughout the investigation, the pretrial, and now the trial that my feet were “dripping with Meredith’s blood.” My lawyers and I had spent hours trying to figure out why they thought this. We knew that investigators had uncovered otherwise invisible prints with luminol. Familiar to watchers of
CSI
, the spray glows blue when exposed to hemoglobin. But blood is not the only substance that sets off a luminol reaction. Cleaning agents, bleach, human waste, urine stains, and even rust do the same. Forensic scientists therefore use a separate “confirmatory” test that detects only human blood, to be sure a stain contains blood. Had the Polizia Scientifica done this follow-up test?

Under cross-examination during the pretrial, Stefanoni was emphatic. “No,” she responded.

It wasn’t until Dr. Gino read the documents Judge Massei had ordered the prosecution to share with us that she, and then the rest of my defense team, began seeing a pattern. As with the knife, it turned out that Stefanoni’s forensics team had done the TMB test and it came out negative. There were footprints. But they could have come from anything—and at any time, not necessarily after the murder. What matters is that there was no blood.

On the stand, Stefanoni declared that the negative blood test was irrelevant. We knew we were looking at blood, she explained, because the luminol glowed more brightly.

“Is it true that luminol glows more when sprayed on blood?” Carlo asked Dr. Gino.

“No.”

The prosecution had an answer for everything, even when it meant lying to cover up other lies.

Stefanoni assumed that because both Meredith’s and my DNA were found in the hall outside the bathroom, I was connected to the murder. It was a startling mistake for a forensic scientist to make.

Human beings shed thousands of skin cells every hour and nearly a million a day. We all leave DNA wherever we go—when we rest an arm on a counter, eat a spoonful of ice cream, grab a steering wheel, or walk barefoot, as I did when I came home for a shower on the morning of November 2. Of course my DNA would be mingled with Meredith’s in the common hallway between our bedrooms—we’d lived in the same house and walked on the same floor tiles for six weeks.

The prosecution had no evidence against us, and worse yet, they’d withheld information likely to prove our innocence.

More infuriating was that Stefanoni continued to argue the prosecution’s inaccurate points during cross-examination.

Some things could not be proven or disproven. DNA doesn’t show its age. Science has no way of knowing when I left footprints in the hallway or what time I was in the bathroom. Or how long Raffaele’s DNA had been on Meredith’s bra clasp—the only evidence that tied Raffaele to Meredith’s bedroom. It meant that both Raffaele and I were in the same excruciatingly frustrating position.

When the white-suited Polizia Scientifica first swept the crime scene on November 2 and 3, the little strip of fabric with the bra fastener lay under the bloody cushion beneath Meredith’s body, cut from the rest of the bra. The forensics team put a placard beside it, assigning it the letter
Y
. But when they bagged the evidence in Meredith’s bedroom and sent it to the forensics lab where Stefanoni worked in Rome, sample
Y
was overlooked and left behind.

Six weeks later, when the Polizia Scientifica returned to No. 7, Via della Pergola, they spotted the bra clasp again. Only this time, it was a yard from where it started, lying beneath a rolled-up carpet and a sock. Between the forensics team’s two trips, other police units had ransacked the villa. Unlike the Polizia Scientifica, those units had made no pretense of keeping the crime scene safe from contamination.

Replaying the video of this second trip into the villa, Raffaele’s forensics expert pointed out, “The clasp goes from one scientist to another, and we don’t see gloves being changed. We then see it being put on the floor and picked up again. These procedures are all wrong . . . By not changing gloves and by touching other objects, cross-contamination of DNA is highly possible.”

When Stefanoni was asked how the bra clasp got from one spot to another without being contaminated, she responded, “
È traslato
”—“It moved”—the same phrase Italians use when they’re talking about religious miracles.

“It didn’t get contaminated in that process?” Raffaele’s DNA expert asked her.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because DNA doesn’t fly,” she snapped.

“It was trampled and dragged across the floor and you’re saying there’s no possibility it was contaminated?”

Had Raffaele been in the room, his DNA would have been as abundant as Guede’s. It would be illogical to suggest that it was left on a single small hook on Meredith’s bra and nowhere else. Furthermore, one of Raffaele’s defense experts pointed out that the genetic profile was incomplete, and could have matched hundreds of people in Perugia’s small population. But the main point is that this piece of cloth and metal had been underfoot and moved around by the dozens of people who went through the house in the six weeks since it had first been photographed. The contents of the room had been moved, and many items piled in heaps. The cloth fragment had clearly been moved around the floor, and who knows where else.

The prosecution worked hard to convince the judges and jury that their forensic findings made sense.

One morning, Manuela Comodi, the co-prosecutor, told the court that to show her dedication to the case, she had brought in her own bra.

She was carrying a white cotton underwire bra, the closest match in her drawer to what Meredith had been wearing, although, she said, chuckling, it was larger than Meredith’s. Comodi hung the bra on a hanger to mimic a person wearing it. Using her index finger, she showed the mesmerized court how Raffaele could have hooked his finger to pull the back strap of Meredith’s bra (somehow leaving DNA on the clasp but not the cloth) and then sliced off the fastener section with a knife.

Jury members tittered. The explanation and demonstration were absurd, but no one looked skeptical.
Are people actually buying this?

Another day, the prosecution said that finding my DNA in the bathroom was proof I’d been involved in the murder. They didn’t consider that I had lived in the villa and used that bathroom every day for weeks. Even rookie forensic scientists know that roommates leave DNA in bathrooms, but the prosecution insisted it was incriminating evidence. They claimed that the only way my DNA could have been collected with the samples of Meredith’s blood was if I’d been washing her blood off my hands.

The prosecution said they were certain the murder had been a group attack. Why, then, was none of my DNA or Raffaele’s DNA in Meredith’s bedroom? Their answer: because Raffaele and I had scrubbed the crime scene clean of our DNA, leaving only Guede’s.

That theory gave me super powers. DNA is not something you can cherry-pick; it’s invisible. Even if I could somehow magically see DNA, there is no way I could tell one person’s DNA from another’s just by looking—no one can.

The prosecution contended that, as representatives of the state, they were the impartial party and maintained that their conclusions were legitimate. Our experts, they said, couldn’t be trusted because they were being paid to defend us. And our critiques, objections, and conclusions were just smoke screens created to confuse the judges and jury.

The divide between experts for the defense and the prosecution grew wide and bitter. The two sides had reached a stalemate. Both defense teams decided that an independent review of the evidence was essential.

I’m sure some people thought we were grandstanding when Carlo asked the judge to order such a review. I didn’t want to extend my time in the courtroom, or to make the Kerchers sit there an extra minute. It distressed me that Meredith’s family thought I was guilty, but I always had huge empathy for them. No matter the verdict, they would leave Perugia without their daughter and sister. I knew their pain would stay fresh, casting sadness over everything good. But I also knew I had to ask for an independent review. What was at stake for me was how I would be allowed to live my life. No one else’s future depended on this trial except Raffaele’s and mine.

The court’s deliberation over whether to grant an independent review was unnervingly quick. I sat between my lawyers for just fifteen minutes. “What do you think they’ll decide?” I asked Carlo and Luciano. “It’s hard to see why they wouldn’t grant it. It’s the only fair thing to do.”

“We made a legitimate argument,” Carlo answered, “but it’s hard to tell with this judge.”

“It’s not the end for us if the request isn’t accepted,” Luciano said. “It doesn’t mean we’ve lost.
Coraggio
—courage—Amanda.”

When the court came back in, I squeezed Luciano’s hand under the table and waited, barely able to breathe.

With zero fanfare—the way he did everything—Judge Massei stood at the microphone and announced, “There will be no independent review. The court has heard enough expert opinion to make a decision in the case.”

This was by far the biggest blow yet. Carlo and Luciano looked weary and disappointed, and neither met my eyes that afternoon.

But I was still so blinded by hope, and my faith in my own innocence, that I actually read this news as positive. I could be accused, but they couldn’t possibly convict me of something I hadn’t done. There was only one honest outcome. I couldn’t imagine that the jurors would side with the police without question. They couldn’t ignore everything that our defense had put forth. “They must think we don’t need the review because there’s already enough reasonable doubt,” I said to Luciano.

He patted me on the arm but didn’t answer.

I was convinced that my perspective was right.
If the two sides are saying completely different things, that
has
to mean reasonable doubt. I’ll take reasonable doubt. That’s good enough for me.
I really did feel that turn meant that my freedom was near.

After so many witnesses, and so many words over so many months, there were no more questions to be asked or answered. The judge announced that the court would adjourn until November 20, to allow the prosecution and defense lawyers to prepare their closing arguments. I couldn’t believe I had to wait six weeks! Barring an emergency, with the finality of a curtain drop, the court would render a verdict on Friday, December 4.

Chapter 28

October 10–December 4, 2009

I
n the weeks leading up to the closing arguments, I put our chances of winning at 95 percent
.

Carlo gave us fifty-fifty. “Judge Massei challenges the defense a lot more than he does the prosecution,” he said. “And the judges and jury nod whenever the prosecution or the Kerchers’ lawyer talks, but look bored when it’s our turn.”

Still, I held tight to optimism.

Not without reason. Journalists told Mom and Dad they weren’t convinced by the prosecution’s arguments. Even the Italian media, uniformly negative since the beginning, seemed to be turning around. A show I saw on the second anniversary of Meredith’s death replayed Rudy Guede’s first recorded conversation, in which he said that I wasn’t at the villa.
If the press can see the truth, surely the judge and jury can, too.

I got daily mail from strangers who had faith in me. And now that the forensic information was public, two renowned DNA scientists, Dr. Elizabeth Johnson of California and Dr. Greg Hampikian, a professor and head of the Idaho Innocence Project, had written a letter of concern signed by seven other experts from around the United States. “No credible scientific evidence has been presented to associate this kitchen knife with the murder of Meredith Kercher,” the report read. The problem with the bra clasp, it said, was contamination. The scientists concluded that the DNA evidence on the knife and the bra clasp “could have been obtained if no crime had occurred.”

The science would win the day. I would be acquitted, if not outright, then for reasonable doubt. The prosecution’s talk was just that—talk. It wasn’t enough for an intelligent jury to convict me.

But sometimes my confidence flagged, and I felt a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. In high school I’d learned that 95 percent of criminal cases in the United States end in conviction, and I couldn’t get that statistic out of my head. I was too afraid to ask if it was the same in Italy.

The prosecution had undermined my credibility in every way possible. Mignini had called my family “a clan”—intending a Mafia connotation—that falsely proclaimed my innocence. He and his co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, had argued that my lawyers’ pitch for reasonable doubt was a technique to create confusion and prolong the Kerchers’ grief.

A public opinion poll on TV said that more than 60 percent of Italians thought I was guilty. The people who only watched television reports most likely sided with the prosecution. That realization spawned a deep-down fear that I’d be convicted, my innocence be damned.

Prisoners gossiped about my case all the time, behind my back and to me. “Come on, Amanda. You can tell
me
.”

Over the many months of the trial, I grew more and more numb, too afraid to feel lest my emotions overwhelm me. But the closer we got to a verdict, the more my anxiety spiked. I started losing my hair. Each time I washed it, a huge clump would come out in my hands. I cried suddenly over nothing. Panic attacks left me gasping for air. My energy was so low that just walking made me stiff and dizzy. Desperate to shut everything out, I climbed into bed each night at seven or eight, earplugs in, covers over my head.

Guards often sent me to see Don Saulo. He was the only person who calmed me. I’d sit quietly on his couch holding his hand. One of the few comments he made was “I hope you will go home. As far as I know, you are innocent, and you don’t belong in prison.”

That meant the world to me.

Another day, Don Saulo suggested I try praying. “You can just say, ‘God, if you exist, I really need your help right now.’ ”

So I did pray. It made me feel ridiculous, since I don’t believe in God. But I was also relieved. I thought,
I’m covering my bases, just in case.
My conversations with God were always the same: “Look, I know innocent people suffer—Meredith didn’t deserve to die. But I don’t think I can handle this. Please let it be part of your plan not to have me go through this, because I don’t know how.”

Deep down, I didn’t believe a bad outcome was possible. My confidence always overrode the worst-case scenario. My mind
could not
go there.

Instead, I daydreamed about home.

I thought,
In my new life,
I want to be healthy and productive and musical.

I cut out décor ideas I liked from magazines and sent them to Madison, my friend from college, for our new apartment in Seattle. I worried about finding a job. I didn’t want to have to rely on my parents. I’d already cost them way too much time and money and caused too much emotional upheaval.

When they visited me at Capanne, my family would ask, “What’s the first thing you want to do when you get home? What if we escape to Arizona together”—where Chris is from—“to go rock climbing? We can go where no one would find you.”

My wants were simpler. I imagined being surrounded in the doorway of my mom’s house in West Seattle by everyone who meant something to me—my family; friends like Madison, DJ, James, Andrew, and Brett; my soccer team girlfriends; teachers. All the people who gathered there for the once-a-week, middle-of-the-night ten-minute phone call I’d been allowed to make home for the past two years.

If the trial goes badly, I thought,
I’ll cut my hair
.

It was a superficial, stupid, melodramatic idea. But it was as far as I could go to wrap my mind around an ending that was too enormous and too terrifying to handle.

One day I got up the courage to ask Chris, who was in Perugia leading up to the closing arguments and verdict, “What would a conviction mean?”

So afraid to acknowledge that uncharted, dark place, I could only whisper.

“There would be an appeal, and if you didn’t get acquitted, then the Supreme Court would exonerate you. At the most, Amanda, it would take five years,” Chris explained.

“Five years?!”

That was way more than I wanted to know.

Chris jumped in to reassure me. “If that happened, Amanda, we’d find a way to save you! But don’t worry! It’s
not
going to happen! And if for some utterly bizarre reason it goes the wrong way, I’m moving to Italy.”

Chris was already doing his IT job from the cold, stark apartment my parents had rented on the outskirts of Perugia, but his promise sounded so drastic it underscored the absurdity of a conviction.

There was only one person who, while she cheered me on, also cautioned me against what she called my “Mickey Mouse view.” An inmate in her mid-fifties, Laura was my new ally in prison. She’d been transferred to Capanne over the summer. As the only two Americans there, we’d bonded immediately over how displaced we felt. Leading up to my verdict, she often said, “Amanda, you have the optimism of a Disney movie, but that’s not how the real world is. Things don’t always work out just because they should.”

A
nd then, just like that, the final act was upon us.

We’d been going to court, trying our case once or twice a week, for so long that it seemed we’d been living in a suspended state forever. But as we neared the end, it was like somebody had pushed the Fast Forward button. Hearings were now held nearly every day, one tumbling into the next, all leading toward the verdict, scheduled for the first Friday in December. My family bought me a plane ticket home to Seattle as soon as they found out when the verdict was due. “We’re going to get you out of here and back home,” they promised.

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini gave his closing argument first. Alternating between a calm, almost quiet recitation of the “facts” and the fiery rants of a preacher at a tent revival, Mignini summarized Raffaele’s and my part in the savagery that took Meredith’s life. He started with the idea that Filomena’s window was too high to be a credible entry point into the villa and ended with our tossing Meredith’s stolen British and Italian cell phones over the garden wall.

Raffaele and I had accused “this poor Rudy,” as Mignini called him, of “being the only one” to attack Meredith. “He has his own grave responsibility, but the responsibility is not only his own,” Mignini intoned.

I couldn’t believe what the prosecutor was saying. He, who was championing himself as the bearer of truth for Meredith’s family, was calling the murderer “Poor Rudy”? Evidence of Rudy’s crimes was everywhere, and his history of theft matched the burglary. Poor Rudy? Guede had stolen! He had killed Meredith! He had left a handprint in Meredith’s blood! He had fled! He had lied! Poor Rudy?

Mignini went on. “For Amanda, the moment had come to take revenge on that simpering girl, that’s how she thought, and in a crescendo of threats and violence, which grew and grew, the siege on Mez”—Meredith’s nickname—“began.”

Revenge for what?!

“By now it was an unstoppable game of violence and sex. The aggressors initially threatened her and demanded her submission to the hard-core sex game. It’s easy to imagine Amanda, angry at the British girl for her increasing criticism of Amanda’s sexual easiness, reproaching Mez for her reserve. Let’s try to imagine—she insulted her. Perhaps she said, ‘You were a little saint. Now we’ll show you. Now you have no choice but to have sex.’ ”

He’s perverse! How did he come up with such a twisted scenario? He’s portraying me as a psychopath! Is Mignini allowed to put words in my mouth, thoughts in my head? I would never force anyone to have sex. I would never threaten or ridicule anyone.

Mignini continued: “The British girl was still on her knees with her head turned toward the armoire. Rudy was to the left of Mez. Raffaele brought himself around behind her and tried to tear off the infamous bra clasp and there was the successful cutting of it. Amanda was in front of Mez with her back to the armoire, wielding the knife from below, pointing it upward toward Meredith’s neck.

“Raffaele also took out his knife,” Mignini said. “And used it to threaten and wound Mez from the right.”

I went from seething to stunned. For the entire eleven-month trial there was only one knife discussed. Having heard the evidence proving that the kitchen knife was not the murder weapon, Mignini had now invented a second knife—a knife that has never been found or even mentioned. In fact, the police had confiscated Raffaele’s entire pocketknife collection. None had shown any trace of blood or of Meredith’s DNA, and the double-edged blades couldn’t have made Meredith’s wounds. But suddenly Mignini was saying that Raffaele had used another knife he’d somehow stashed away. I knew why. Not only did Mignini’s fantastic scenario explain away the bloody imprint on Meredith’s bedsheet and the wounds that couldn’t have been made with the kitchen knife, but it also allowed the prosecutor to put a knife in Raffaele’s hands. Otherwise, Raffaele had no role in the murder.

Mignini kept going: “By now, seeing the resistance of the victim and the growing rage of the aggressors, who realized the British girl wouldn’t give in, she wouldn’t submit herself to rape, the game had to end. Amanda provoked the wound on the right side of Mez’s neck and tried to strangle her friend . . . It is a plausible reconstruction. Obviously it is a hypothesis . . . At this point it’s probable that Mez, realizing that the violence was unstoppable, made that terrible and desperate scream . . . Amanda provoked the deepest wound, the one on the left . . . Mez collapsed onto her right side. One of the aggressors looked for the girl’s cell phones, probably Raffaele, and he set down one of the knives on the bedsheet.”

I hope people are hearing Mignini saying, “it’s probable” and “it’s a hypothesis.” You can’t convict someone based on a hypothesis that the evidence doesn’t support!

As for my interrogation at the
questura
, Mignini described the interpreter—the woman who had called me “a stupid liar” and had told me to “stop lying”—as “very sweet.” “I remember that evening how she behaved toward Amanda,” he said.

Then he recalled from earlier in the trial, when Judge Massei questioned me about my interrogation. “Your Honor asked, ‘But a suggestion in what sense? Did they tell you, ‘Say that it was Lumumba?’ Because a suggestion is just that . . . And Amanda said, ‘No. They didn’t tell me that it was him.’ And so what suggestion is it?

“Amanda said, ‘But they told me, Ah, but we know that you were with him, that you met with him.’ The police were doing their job . . . they were trying to make this person talk . . . These are the pressures, then. Completely normal and necessary investigative activity. There were no suggestions because a suggestion is: Say it was Lumumba.”

Mignini knew how my interrogation had gone. The police were yelling that I knew who the murderer was, that I had to remember, that I’d gone out to meet Patrick that night. They made me believe I had trauma-induced amnesia. They threatened me if I didn’t name the murderer—even though I said I didn’t know who the murderer was!
How is that
not
suggestion? How is that
not
coercion?

Mignini’s rant lasted one day, from 9
A.M.
to 4
P.M
. When I went back to Capanne that afternoon, I felt as though I’d been beaten with a hammer. But I had survived. I repeated the childhood adage my mom used to recite: “Words can never hurt me.” I wished that were true.

The co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, spoke the next day. She talked about the forensic evidence as if each element were a neatly laid brick and they all fit together. She had built a brick house that she contended proved we were guilty. We heard for the umpteenth time that Stefanoni was right and our forensic experts were biased. Then she introduced a new motive—a nonmotive, actually—a one-size-fits-all, everybody’s-doing-it explanation for anyone who questioned Mignini’s revolving motives. Squaring her shoulders, she told the jury, “We live at a time where violence is purposeless.”

Echoing Mignini, Comodi said it was reasonable to assume that Raffaele had brought along a pocketknife, which he used to poke Meredith in the neck to scare her.

Then the prosecution turned off the lights.

“I’d like to show the court a visual prop we’ve constructed to demonstrate our theory of the murder,” Comodi said.