Amanda Knox

DanielS · February 5, 2009

I wonder when the film version of this story will come out? The more you hear and read the weirder it gets.

Was there a plot to murder Meredith?

With Amanda Knox about to go on trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, John Hooper examines the six key questions that must be answered

Nara Capezzali had gone to bed early that night, at 9.30. After a while - she has no idea how long - she got up to go to the lavatory. It was then she heard a "bloodcurdling scream". Capezzali lives about 70 metres from the flat at Via della Pergola 7 that Meredith Kercher, a British student at Perugia university, shared with Amanda Knox and two others. It seems highly likely that what the woman heard was Kercher's dying scream, for the next day - 2 November 2007 - the Leeds University student was found dead in her bedroom, almost naked and with her throat slashed.

The discovery marked the start of what soon developed into an outlandishly lurid mystery. Some of the earliest images to emerge were of Kercher at a Halloween party on the night before she died, dressed as a vampire and with fake blood trickling from her mouth. After police began questioning Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, reporters found a tabloid treasure trove on the web. Writing as "Foxy Knoxy", the young American had posted a short story about rape to her MySpace pages, while Sollecito had decorated his blog site with a picture of himself in fancy dress wielding a meat cleaver.

Tomorrow, two judges and six jurors (technically, lay judges) will have to set aside the sensational publicity surrounding the case when they begin hearing the evidence at the trial of Knox and Sollecito for Kercher's murder. Not the least extraordinary aspect of the proceedings is that someone has already been convicted of the crime.

Last October, a judge found Rudy Guede, a young drifter from Ivory Coast, guilty of the murder and sentenced him to 30 years. The judge dismissed as fabrication the Afro-Italian's story that he had gone to the house for a tryst with Kercher and that, while he was in the bathroom, she was murdered by someone else.

Guede's role only came to light after a fingerprint on a cushion under the victim was identified as his. By then, prosecutors had already ordered the arrest of Sollecito, Knox and a Congolese bar owner, Patrick Lumumba, who employed the American as a part-time waitress. Lacking an obvious motive,

they suggested that the trio had killed Kercher because she refused to join them in a drug-fuelled orgy.

The defence has argued all along that the prosecutors should have ditched this extraordinary scenario and accepted that Guede simply broke into the house and murdered the British student in a sex attack. He fled to Germany but was arrested and returned to Italy. At the same time, a witness came forward with an alibi for Lumumba, who was released.

Ultimately, what the judges and jurors have to decide is whether there is sufficient evidence for the prosecutors' theory - whether the truth behind the mystery of Via della Pergola is bizarre or just banal. On their way to a verdict, they will need to address six key questions.

Was there more than one killer?

Capezzali testified at the pre-trial hearing that, after the scream, she heard the sounds of at least two people running in different directions. The judge, Paolo Micheli, found her a "particularly credible" witness. But Capezzali's house has double glazing.

Even if she was right, there is no reason any of the people running away that night should have been Knox or Sollecito - except that the prosecution is expected to call one Antonio Curatolo, a homeless man who claims he saw the couple enter a nearby square at between 11 and 11.30pm. But on which night? Dates do not matter greatly to a homeless person. Curatolo told investigators it must have been the night of the murder because the following day there were Carabinieri, Italy's paramilitary police, stopping passers-by in the hope of finding witnesses. Unfortunately for the prosecution, in his original statement Curatolo spoke of other people in the square wearing masks, which points strongly to date being Halloween, 31 October.

Was there anything suspicious in the defendants' behaviour after - and before - the crime?

Knox and her boyfriend were at the house when the state police arrived. Sollecito said he had already rung the Carabinieri. Subsequent investigation showed he had indeed called them, but the prosecution will seek to show that it was after - not before - the police arrived.

It was on Knox, however, that the investigators initially focused their attention because, in the words of Judge Micheli, her account was "felt to be objectively implausible".

Her original story, to which she has since returned, is that she spent the night with her boyfriend and returned to her flat at around 10.30am. According to a support web site (friendsofamanda.org), "Amanda took a shower in the small bathroom she shared with Meredith and noticed a few droplets of blood ... She returned to Raffaele's apartment and told him about her concern. Then she called one of her Italian roommates, and she tried to call Meredith. Cellular records show that Amanda made these calls a few minutes after noon on 2 November. After having breakfast, she returned to the cottages with Raffaele, where they made a closer inspection."

To the police, this may have sounded all too leisurely. Their forensic experts counted no less than 13 traces of blood in the bathroom where Knox showered, ranging from droplets to a 10in streak on the door. The tap of the wash basin, according to their report, was "notably stained".

In the early hours of 6 November, investigators obtained a "confession" from Knox - that she had been in the house and, while Lumumba killed her flatmate, had covered her ears to block out Meredith's screams.

This statement is perhaps the most damning single piece of evidence against the young American. Yet it ought not to form any part of her trial. She was a suspect when she signed it, yet had no access to a lawyer or even a professional translator. She had arrived in Italy less than two months earlier. It was signed at 5.45am after 14 hours without food, and with no lawyer. In a note written from jail, she said that "I was also hit in the head when I didn't remember a fact correctly". Her supporters say that Knox fell into a classic interrogator's trap: she was told that there was unshakable evidence linking her to the scene of the crime and then asked to imagine a way in which she might have been there.

Her lawyers appealed to Italy's highest court, which ruled that the statement could not be used at her trial for murder. Yet the jurors will hear it. In Italy, a civil suit arising from a criminal prosecution is usually addressed as part of the resulting trial. In this instance, Knox's statement cannot be admitted in her murder trial, but it is central to a slander suit Lumumba has brought against her for identifying him in the statement as a murderer.

Investigators claimed that Sollecito also changed his story, giving police different accounts of when on the night of murder he was using his computer, when he was watching a film and, crucially, when Knox was absent from his flat. Some uncertainty could be explained by the fact that he had been smoking cannabis earlier. Sollecito even said he could not recall if he had sex with his girlfriend that night. "At the age of 20," Judge Micheli commented drily, "there are certain things you do not forget." Evidence from IT experts who have studied Sollecito's computer is likely to play a crucial role in the trial.

Under the heading of potentially suspicious behaviour, there are at least three other questions the judge and jury will want answered. First, did someone clean up the flat between the murder and the arrival of the police? Only one of Knox's fingerprints was found in the entire house. Secondly, why did both defendants turn off their mobile telephones at around 8.40pm on 1 November? Finally, and most crucially ...

Did they try to fake a break-in?

The biggest single objection to the prosecution's colourful theory was found on the floor of the bedroom occupied by one of the two young Italian women who also shared the flat, Filomena Romanelli. It was a rock, measuring approximately 8in by 6in by 6in, which had been used to smash her window. What is more, there was evidence of a burglary: Romanelli's possessions had been gone through, although nothing was missing except, perhaps, some makeup.

The defence case is that Guede broke in and had just started to ransack the flat when Meredith returned. He would not have been the first burglar to turn sex attacker when the opportunity presented itself.

But, as Judge Micheli objected in his indictment of Knox and Sollecito, why would he choose to come in through a window facing the road and exposed to passing traffic? Police forensic experts claim to have found traces of Kercher's DNA on the floor of Romanelli's bedroom, suggesting that someone stepped in her blood and then walked back through the Italian's room. Since the obvious way out was through the front door, and Knox told police that it was open when she arrived at 10.30am, that could mean the murderer returned after the killing to break the window. But the forensic evidence is contested by the defence, and a key aspect of the trial will be to establish its reliability.

Did either of the defendants have a motive?

Relations between Knox and her British flatmate seem to have become cooler after they moved in together. But nothing has so far emerged to explain why she, let alone Sollecito, would want to kill Kercher. In any case ...

How could a murder plot have been hatched?

One would expect a three-way pact to kill would require a fair degree of mutual trust. Yet, as far as is known, Guede knew Knox only superficially and Sollecito not at all. The young Ivorian, who grew up in Italy, said he first met the University of Washington student at Lumumba's bar and was on no more than nodding terms with her. He later spent an evening drinking at the flat below the one rented by Knox and Kercher, which was occupied by four young Italian men. One of them recalled that both the foreigners were present and that Guede took a fancy to Knox. But, until Guede changed his story and named Sollecito as the knife-wielding killer he had surprised in the flat, he denied ever having known Knox's boyfriend.

In fact, the only person who claims to have seen all three alleged killers together, probably on 31 October, is an Albanian called Hekuran Kokomani, whose evidence was described by Micheli as "ravings".

The judge went on to say that, even if there had been a conspiracy, the killing itself "would need to have been organised at the last moment". When precisely Kercher died is uncertain, but it is known that until 8.18pm, when she received a text message from Lumumba, Knox was expecting to have to work that evening and that until 8.40pm, when his own plans were changed, Sollecito was expecting to go with a friend to the station.

At this point, it is reasonable to ask why, in fact, the judge sent Knox and Sollecito for trial. His answer had about it something of Sherlock Holmes's observation that "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

The judge could not explain away the forensic evidence placing them at the scene of the crime. In his own words, "If it is accepted that Knox and Sollecito were in the house ... it is not essential to find the telephone call with which an appointment was fixed with Guede ... nor the witness who remembered or photographed their meeting." So ...

How reliable is the forensic evidence?

An allegedly damning trace of DNA was found on Kercher's bra fastener and is claimed by the prosecution to belong to Sollecito. This is fiercely contested by his lawyers, both on grounds of the tiny amounts of biological material involved and the possibility of contamination. The fastener was only found and bagged on 18 December 2007 - more than seven weeks after the murder. However, if it can be shown that the DNA really is Sollecito's, his lawyers will have to come up with some way in which it could have got on to the fastener during that period or earlier.

The room was sealed off by the police immediately after the discovery of the body and Sollecito is not known to have visited Meredith's room before.

One possibility is that a forensic technician who also examined Sollecito's flat might have carried the trace to Via della Pergola 7 when it was examined for a second time. But Judge Micheli checked the police records and found that none of the officers who worked at Sollecito's apartment subsequently visited the murder scene.

The only forensic evidence that places Knox nearby consists of traces of her DNA mixed with Meredith's in the bathroom. But, as a private detective hired by the US television network CBS to investigate the case noted, "Meredith is killed in the bedroom, not in the bathroom."

That makes it all the more important that the judge and jury reach a common view on the alleged murder weapon - a kitchen knife found in Sollecito's flat. According to the prosecution, it has Knox's DNA on the handle, which is perfectly explicable since she was often at her boyfriend's flat, but - more importantly - Kercher's blood on the blade. The fourth girl in the flat, Laura Mezzetti, has said that Meredith never visited Sollecito's flat.

For the defence, the riddle has a very simple answer - it is not Meredith's DNA. The forensic scientists were working with a microscopic trace and their findings are just not reliable.

All of which brings the affair full circle to the original question ...

Was there more than one killer?

The evidence left on Kercher's body in the form of scratches and bruises will be critical to the verdict. For the police, it demonstrates "an act of violent retention by several aggressors". But for experts hired by the defence, the wounds on poor Meredith Kercher's body were "fully compatible with a violent action carried out by one person".

muleskinner · February 5, 2009

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