Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (7 page)

Paramedics, investigators, and white-suited forensic scientists arrived in waves. The police wouldn’t tell us anything, but Luca and Paola stayed close, trying to read lips and overhear. At one point, Luca told Raffaele what the police had said: “The victim’s throat has been slashed.”

I didn’t find out until the months leading up to my trial—and during the trial itself—how sadistic her killer had been. When the police lifted up the corner of Meredith’s beige duvet they found her lying on the floor, stripped naked from the waist down. Her arms and neck were bruised. She had struggled to remain alive. Her bra had been sliced off and left next to her body. Her cotton T-shirt, yanked up to expose her breasts, was saturated with blood. The worst report was that Meredith, stabbed multiple times in the neck, had choked to death on her own blood and was found lying in a pool of it, her head turned toward the window, eyes open.

In the first hours after the police came, standing outside the villa that had been the happy center of my life in Perugia—my refuge thousands of miles from home—I mercifully didn’t know any of this. I was slowly absorbing and rejecting the fractured news that Meredith was dead.

I felt as if I were underwater. Each movement—my own and everyone else’s—seemed thick, slow, surreal. I willed the police to be wrong. I wanted Meredith to walk down the driveway, to be alive. What if she’d spent the night with one of her British girlfriends? Or gotten up early to meet friends? I held the near-impossible idea that somehow the person in Meredith’s room was a stranger.

Nothing felt real except Raffaele’s arms, holding me, keeping me from collapsing. I clung to him. Unable to understand most of what was being said, I felt cast adrift. My grasp of Italian lessened under the extraordinary stress. Catching words and translating in my head felt like clawing through insulation.

I was flattened. I was in despair. I cried weakly on and off into Raffaele’s sweater. I never sobbed openly. I’d never cried publicly. Perhaps like my mom and my Oma, who had taught me to cry when I was alone, I bottled up my feelings. It was an unfortunate trait in a country where emotion is not just commonplace but expected.

Raffaele’s voice was calm and reassuring. “
Andrà tutto bene
”—“It’s going to be okay,” he said. He pulled me closer, stroked my hair, patted my arm. He looked at me and kissed me, and I kissed him back. These kisses were consoling. Raffaele let me know that I wasn’t alone. It reminded me of when I was young and had nightmares. My mom would hold me and smooth my hair and let me know that I was safe. Somehow Raffaele managed to do the same thing.

Later, people would say that our kisses were flirtatious—evidence of our guilt. They described the times I pressed my face to Raffaele’s chest as snuggling. Innocent people, the prosecutor and media said, would have been so devastated they’d have been unable to stop weeping.

Watching a clip of it now, my stomach seizes. I’m gripped by the same awful feelings I had that afternoon. I can only see myself as I was: young and scared, in need of comfort. I see Raffaele trying to cope with his own feelings while trying to help me.

We waited in the driveway for what seemed like forever. The police officers would come out, ask us questions, go in, come out, and ask more questions. I always told them the same thing: “I came home. I found the door open. Filomena’s room was ransacked, but nothing seems to have been stolen. Meredith’s door was locked.”

It seemed like the words came from somewhere else, not from my throat.

In the middle of my muddy thoughts I had one that was simple and clear: “We have to tell the police that the poop was in Filomena and Laura’s bathroom when I put the hair dryer away and was gone when we came back,” I told Raffaele. The poop must have belonged to the killer.
Was he there when I took my shower? Would he have killed me, too?

We walked up to a female officer with long black hair and long nails—Monica Napoleoni, head of homicide, I later found out. Raffaele described in Italian what I’d seen. She glared at me. “You know we’re going to check this out, right?” she said.

I said, “That’s why I’m telling you.”

She disappeared into the villa, only to return moments later. “The feces is still there. What are you talking about?” she spat.

This confused me, but I continued to tell her what happened anyway. I told her I’d taken the mop with me in the morning but had brought it back when Raffaele and I came to see if the house had been robbed.

“You know we’re going to check that for blood, too?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said. I was surprised by how abrupt she was.

The police explained that they couldn’t let us back into the house, that it would compromise the crime scene. Before we were told to go outside, Filomena had carefully gone through her room to see if anything had been stolen. Now, having calmed down momentarily, she came over and whispered that she couldn’t leave without her laptop, that she had to have it for work. She snuck back into her room—I have no idea how she got past the police standing sentry—and grabbed it, disturbing the scene for a second time. Marco stood in the driveway, looking lost. Paola and Luca had slipped off to the car, where it was warm.

Word was already spreading. I’m not sure how. A few people texted me, asking, “What’s going on?” I texted back that, yes, it was our villa. Yes, unbelievably, it was Meredith. I noticed that TV crews had set up in the parking lot above our house. But their presence in the distance barely registered with me.

Sometime around 3
P.M.
the police gathered us all in the driveway and told us to meet them at the station—the
questura
—a tall, generic, off-white modern building about ten minutes away, on the edge of town.

Raffaele and I rode with Luca and Paola. During the drive I was again overcome by the realization that the body had to be Meredith’s, that she was dead. I couldn’t push it away. I doubled over in the backseat and sobbed. Raffaele put his hand on my back, and Paola looked over and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay.

Chapter 7

Afternoon, November 2, 2007, Day One

A
t the police station, one question hung in the air: Who? Who could have done this?

As the police started trying to figure out the answer, it made sense that they started their questioning with me. I was the first person to come home that morning. I was anxious to explain everything I’d noticed, starting with the open front door and the droplets of blood in the sink.

They led me through the waiting room into a generic office—long and narrow, with a small window at the far end. For the first hour, I was questioned in Italian, but it was so hard for me to follow and explain that they brought in an English-speaking detective for hours two through six. Alone in the room, we sat on opposite sides of a plain wooden desk. I described everything I could think of. Some questions he asked were obvious. Others seemed irrelevant. “
Anything
might be a clue for the investigators,” he said. “Don’t hold back—even if it seems trivial. The smallest detail is important. You never know what the key will be to finding the person who did this.”

He asked, and I rushed to answer.

“How did you meet Meredith? How long have you been in Perugia? Who was Meredith dating? What do you know about the guys who live downstairs? Where did Meredith like to party? When was the last time you saw her? Where was she going? What time did Meredith leave home?”

“It was yesterday afternoon. I don’t know where she was heading,” I said. “She didn’t tell us.”

“What did you and Raffaele do yesterday afternoon and last night?” he asked.

“We hung out at my house and then at Raffaele’s apartment.”

He didn’t press me. He just listened.

It seemed like a straightforward debriefing. I was too naïve to imagine that the detectives suspected that the murder had been an inside job and that the burglary had been faked. I had no way of knowing that the Postal Police had thought Raffaele’s and my behavior suspicious. The detective didn’t say any of this. Nor did he allow that the homicide police had begun to watch us closely before we’d even driven out of the driveway.

Now I see that I was a mouse in a cat’s game. While I was trying to dredge up any small thing that could help them find Meredith’s killer and trying to get my head around the shock of her death, the police were deciding to bug Raffaele’s and my cell phones.

As I sat waiting to hear what else the police needed from me, I asked the detective if it was true that it was Meredith who had been murdered. I still couldn’t let go of the tiniest hope that the body in her room hadn’t been Meredith’s, that she was still alive.

The detective nodded and ran his finger in a cutting motion across his neck.

I covered my mouth with my hands and shook my head back and forth.
No.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said softly.

He nodded again, soberly, looking me in the eye.

After that I was sent to the waiting room. It was crowded with Meredith’s friends. Everyone was crying, talking, milling around the police station, trying to make sense of the senseless. Meredith’s British girlfriends, including Sophie, Amy, and Robyn, with whom I’d eaten dinner my first night in town, sat together. The owner of Merlin’s, Meredith’s favorite bar, was there. Laura had been called back from Rome. The guys from the downstairs apartment had been spending the holiday weekend a few hours away, in their hometown. They were taking the train back to Perugia when they got a call about Meredith and were told to come to the
questura
. Giacomo looked stricken.

Everyone had questions: “What did you see? What do you know?”

Trying to be helpful, I shared the information I had, much of which turned out to be wrong. I still thought Meredith’s body had been found stuffed into the armoire.

When I first saw Laura, she was dry-eyed. She came up and hugged me and said, “I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry. I know Meredith was your friend.” Then she sat me down and said, “Amanda, this is really serious. You need to remember: do not say anything to the police about us smoking marijuana in our house.”

I was thinking,
You can’t lie to the police
, but I considered this anxiously a moment and then said, “Okay, I haven’t yet. I won’t.”

I asked, “Do you think they’ll let us get our stuff out of the house?”

Laura said, “I hope so. Filomena and I are talking to our lawyers about that.”

It didn’t occur to me—or to my parents, who were now calling me nonstop—that perhaps I should call a lawyer, too.

Meredith’s British friends were huddled together. Sophie came up and gave me a one-sided hug. I was too wrung out at that moment to reciprocate. This was the first of many things I did, in just being myself, that didn’t play well for me in this stressed environment. Along with my lack of tears, this uncommon behavior was used to show that I had no feelings for Meredith. Sophie then explained to me that she had walked Meredith most of the way home the previous night and so was the last person to see her alive.

Around 3
A.M.
a police officer led the British girls and me downstairs to get fingerprinted. “We need to know which fingerprints to exclude when we go through the house,” he said.

One by one they took us into a room and painted our fingertips with a black, tarlike syrup. When I came out, Sophie was sitting on a chair outside the door, sobbing. I tried to make up for my earlier lack of warmth, saying, “I’m so sorry about Meredith. If you need anything, here’s my number.”

And suddenly, I woke up from deep shock. I was struck with righteous fury against Meredith’s murderer. I started pacing the hallway. I was so outraged I was shaking and hitting my forehead with the heel of my palm, saying, “No, no, no,” over and over. It’s something I’ve always done when I can’t contain my anger.

The English-speaking detective who’d been overseeing the fingerprinting approached me and said, “Amanda, you need to calm down.”

I felt an overpowering need to help track down the murderer. I wanted to make sure he—I assumed it was a he—spent the rest of his life in prison. I wanted him to regret his wrongdoing every hour of every day. Forever.

I kept thinking,
How could this happen? How could it have been Meredith? She wasn’t a person who made enemies.
She’d been murdered in our house, in her own bedroom. She was at home, where she should have been safe. I felt sick. The body’s primal response to stress is to fight or flee, and at that moment I was all fight.

What if my natural response had been to leave? In the days that followed it didn’t occur to me that I actually could have returned home to recuperate and contribute to the investigation from afar, or that it could have been the right thing to do.

As I continued walking back and forth in the hallway, my mind kept looping back around itself, making quick, tight turns:
What happened? Who would leave poop in the toilet? Why hadn’t Laura’s and my rooms been touched? Why was Filomena’s computer still there? Did Meredith know her attacker? How could this have happened? How? How? How?

I tried to sit back down next to Sophie, but I couldn’t stay still. I said, “I can’t imagine who would do this. It just does not make any sense to me.”

The detective, who was still standing there, said, “We’re going to try to find out as fast as we can, and anything you can remember will help us.”

When we went back upstairs to the waiting room my family called me, one after another. I have a tendency to talk too loudly when I’m excited. That night, explaining to them what had happened, wasn’t an exception. But I didn’t notice this. I had to repeat my story for each caller—how I’d been the first one home and hadn’t realized there had been a break-in, how Raffaele and I had called the police.

My stepdad, Chris, said, “The killer might have been watching your house for days and saw that Meredith was alone. He might know where Raffaele lives. You need to be careful! Pay attention to what’s going on around you. Make sure you’re with someone all the time.”

My dad said, “I wish I could put my arms around you and protect you.” He asked to speak to Raffaele.

My dad doesn’t speak two words of Italian, but Raffaele understood and agreed when Dad said, “Raffaele, thank you for taking care of Amanda for me. Please make sure to keep her safe.”

When I wasn’t on the phone, I paced. I walked by one of Meredith’s British friends, Natalie Hayworth, who was saying, “I hope Meredith didn’t suffer.”

Still worked up, I turned around and gaped. “How could she not have suffered?” I said. “She got her fucking throat slit. Fucking bastards.”

I was angry and blunt. I couldn’t understand how the others remained so calm. No one else was pacing. No one else was muttering or swearing. Everyone else was so self-contained. First I showed not enough emotion; then I showed too much. It’s as if any goodwill others had toward me was seeping out like a slow leak from a tire, without my even realizing it.

I suspect that Raffaele thought I was having a breakdown. He sat me in his lap and bounced me gently. He kissed me, made faces at me, and told me jokes—all in an effort to soothe my agitation, babying me so I would stop storming around.

I cringe to say that treating me like an infant helped. Normally it would have repelled me. But at that time it worked.

Finally I took my journal from my purse and scribbled down a few stream-of-consciousness lines about how unreal all of this was and how I wished I could write a song about the heinous, tragic event—a personal tribute to Meredith. I thought that, like the act of writing itself, music might somehow help me feel better. Later, when the police confiscated my notebook and its contents were leaked to the press, people saw this as proof that I was trivializing Meredith’s death.

They found more evidence in my gallows humor. I wrote, “I’m starving. And I’d really like to say that I could kill for a pizza but it just doesn’t seem right.”

I had so many thoughts clamoring in my brain at once that I was writing whatever came into my head. I never meant to share these things, only to give myself some relief. The words in my journal were taken literally, and they damned me. It was a situation I would find myself in again and again.

It was early morning by the time I put my notebook away. The police weren’t stopping to sleep and didn’t seem to be allowing us to, either. Raffaele and I were part of the last group to leave the
questura
, along with Laura, Filomena, Giacomo, and the other guys from downstairs, at 5:30
A.M
.

The police gave Raffaele and me explicit instructions to be back at the
questura
a few hours later, at 11
A.M
. “Sharp,” they said.

I can’t recall who dropped us off at Raffaele’s apartment. But I do remember being acutely aware that I didn’t have anywhere else to go.