Trial by Innuendo

On November 2, 2007, the Associated Press ran a 127-word news bulletin about the murder of a young British study-abroad student at her home in Perugia, Italy.

The woman’s throat had been slashed and her phone had been found in a nearby garden. A window had been broken but “computers and gold objects in the house had been left untouched.” A spokesperson for the British embassy identified the woman as 21-year-old Meredith Kercher of London.

Ms. Kercher “shared the house with three other women,” the Guardian reported that same day, “an American and two Italians,” but “for various reasons none of her flatmates had slept at the house” on the night of the murder. The Italians were older, in their late twenties, and worked as legal apprentices in Perugia. The American, Amanda Knox, a junior at the University of Washington, was two years younger. Knox and Kercher had both moved to Italy in September 2007, within two weeks of each other.

Knox had moved to Italy to pursue a year-long immersive language program at the University for Foreigners of Perugia. She had earned the money for her trip by working odd jobs as a barista and, later, a receptionist at an art gallery in Seattle. Knox’s friends described her as “daydreamy,” “bubbly,” “optimistic.” One would later tell a reporter: “She is a bit trusting and overly optimistic. It’s sort of like why shouldn’t I trust this person? I haven’t done anything to them. Why shouldn’t I be okay with them?”

Meredith Kercher was murdered on the night of November 1, 2007 — All Saints’ Day in Italy. Amanda Knox told police she had last seen Kercher that afternoon, at the cottage they shared on the northern edge of the city.

By 5 p.m. Knox would leave her cottage to spend the night at a friend’s apartment. She had met her friend, Raffaele Sollecito, a 23-year-old computer science student at the University of Perugia, one week earlier at a classical music concert. Knox had been scheduled to work that night — she had recently found a job as a waitress at a local pub—but after finishing dinner at Sollecito’s apartment, Knox had received a text message from her boss, Patrick Lumumba, telling her that because of the holiday, business would be slow, and she wouldn’t have to come in that night.

“Okay,” Knox texted back. “Ci vediamo più tardi buona serata!” (“See you later have a good evening!”)

So she and Sollecito stayed in. They made dinner. They watched a movie. They smoked pot. They had sex and fell asleep. “We were together,” Knox recounted to Diane Sawyer in a television interview in 2013. “We just hung out together. We talked. He talked to me about his mom.” Looking down at her lap: “We made faces at each other.” Knox returned to her cottage—a five-minute walk from Sollecito’s apartment—the following morning to take a shower and change into new clothes.

It was Saturday, November 2, 2007.

“I would like to get it all out and not have to repeat myself a hundred times like I’ve been having to do at the police station,” Knox wrote in an email to her family and friends on November 4, 2007, two days after Kercher’s body was found. “It’s like I’m trying to remember what I was doing before all this happened. I still need to figure out who I need to talk to and what I need to do to continue studying in Perugia, because it is what I want to do.

“I woke up around 10:30 and after grabbing my few things I left Raffale’s [sic] apartment and walked the five minute walk back to my house to once again take a shower and grab a change of clothes. I also needed to grab a mop because after dinner [the night before] Raffale [sic] had spilled a lot of water on the floor of his kitchen by accident and didn’t have a mop to clean it up.

“So I arrived home and the first abnormal thing I noticed was the door was wide open. Here’s the thing about the door to our house: its [sic] broken, in such a way that you have to use the keys to keep it closed. If we don’t have the door locked, it is really easy for the wind to blow the door open, and so, my roommates and I always have the door locked unless we are running really quickly to bring the garbage out or to get something from the neighbors who live below us.

“So the door was wide open. Strange, yes, but not so strange that I really thought anything about it. I assumed someone in the house was doing exactly what I just said, taking out the trash or talking really quickly to the neighbors downstairs. So I closed the door behind me but I didn’t lock it, assuming that the person who left the door open would like to come back in. When I entered I called out if anyone was there, but no one responded and I assumed that if anyone was there, they were still asleep. Laura’s door was open which meant she wasn’t home, and Filomena’s door was also closed. My door was open like always and Meredith door was closed, which to me ment [sic] she was sleeping.

“I undressed in my room and took a quick shower in one of the two bathrooms in my house.… It was after I stepped out of the shower and onto the mat that I noticed the blood in the bathroom. It was on the mat I was using to dry my feet and there were drops of blood in the sink. At first I thought the blood might have come from my ears which I had pierced extensively not too long ago, but then immediately I know it wasn’t mine because the stains on the mat were too big for just droplets form my ear, and when I touched the blood in the sink it was caked on already.

“I started feeling a little uncomfortable and so I grabbed the mop from out closet and left the house, closing and locking the door that no one had come back through while I was in the shower, and I returned to Raffale’s [sic] place. After we had used the mop to clean up the kitchen I told Raffale [sic] about what I had seen in the house over breakfast.

“He suggested I call one of my roommates, so I called Filomena. Filomena had been at a party the night before with her boyfriend Marco. She also told me that Laura wasn’t at home and hadn’t been because she was on business in Rome. Which meant the only one who had spent the night at our house last night was Meredith, and she was as of yet unaccounted for.

“Filomena seemed really worried, so I told her I would call Meredith and then call her back. I called both of Meredith’s phones, the English one first and last and the Italian one between [sic]. The first time I called the English phone. It rang and then sounded as of [sic] there was disturbance, but no one answered. I then called the Italian phone and it just kept ringing, no answer. I called her English phone again and this time an English voice told me her phone was out of service.

“Raffale [sic] and I gathered our things and went back to my house. I unlocked the door and I’m going to tell this really slowly to get everything right so just have patience with me.”

The email continues for fourteen more paragraphs before Knox signs off: “That’s the update, feeling okay, hope you all are well.”

On the evening of November 5, 2007, Raffaele Sollecito was asked to stop by the local police station to answer some questions.

Since Knox and Sollecito were the first two to return to the cottage the morning after Kercher’s murder, they had already made several visits to the police station to assist in the investigation. They did not know that paparazzi images of the young couple sharing a brief kiss shortly after Kercher’s body was discovered had sparked a flurry of innuendo in the small Italian town.

Knox spontaneously accompanied Sollecito to the police station.

She felt unsafe, she later wrote, being alone in the city after her roommate’s murder since the murderer had not yet been caught.

That night, during an overnight interrogation conducted in Italian that was never recorded, Knox’s story abruptly changed. (Knox had only been studying Italian at that point for two months.) In a statement written by the police in Italian and signed by Knox, a thoroughly bizarre account of Knox’s activities on the night of Kercher’s murder would emerge.

Knox, Sollecito, and Knox’s employer at the pub, Patrick Lumumba, would be arrested the next day.

For the next four years, Knox would maintain that the statement she had signed that night at the police station had been made under duress.

“The interrogation process was very long and difficult,” Knox is saying.

It is June 12, 2009.

Amanda Knox is speaking on the witness stand into a microphone as an interpreter next to her translates her testimony into Italian.

She has spent the last twenty months in an Italian prison.

“Arriving in the police office, I didn’t expect to be interrogated at all.… They began to ask me the same questions they had been asking me for days, all these days ever since it happened — for instance, who could I imagine could be the person who killed Meredith — and I said I still didn’t know.”

Eventually the police moved her into a smaller room.

“Once I was in there, they asked me to repeat everything that I had said before — for instance what I did that night. They asked me to see my phone, which I gave to them, and they were looking through my phone, which is when they found the message.”

The message was from her boss, Patrick Lumumba, telling her not to come in to work that night.

“When they found the message, they asked me if I had sent a message back, which I didn’t remember doing.”

Knox looks down at her lap.

“That’s when they started being very hard with me. They called me a stupid liar, and they said that I was trying to protect someone.”

She pauses, stares at the floor.

“They told me that I was trying to protect someone,” Knox continues. “But I wasn’t trying to protect anyone, and so I didn’t know how to respond to them. They said that I had left Raffaele’s house, which wasn’t true, which I denied, but they continued to call me a stupid liar. They were putting this telephone in front of my face going: ‘Look, look, your message, you were going to meet someone.’ And when I denied that, they continued to call me a stupid liar. And then, from that point on, I was very, very scared, because they were treating me so badly and I didn’t understand why.”

The message that the police was referring to was Knox’s response to Lumumba’s text message: “Ci vediamo più tardi buona serata!” (“See you later have a good evening!”)

In Italian, the phrase “see you later” implies an affirmative intent to meet later.

“While I was there,” Knox continues, “there was an interpreter who explained to me an experience of hers, where she had gone through a traumatic experience that she could not remember at all, and she suggested that I was traumatized, and that I couldn’t remember the truth.”

She shakes her head.

“This at first seemed ridiculous to me, because I remembered being at Raffaele’s house. For sure. I remembered doing things at Raffaele’s house. I checked my emails before, then we watched a movie. We had eaten dinner together. We had talked together. And during that time I hadn’t left his apartment.

“But they were insisting upon putting everything into hourly segments, and since I never look at the clock, I wasn’t able to tell them what time exactly I did everything.

“They insisted that I had left the apartment for a certain period of time to meet somebody, which for me I didn’t remember, but the interpreter said I probably had forgotten.”

Knox begins stammering.

“The whole interrogation lasted so long, and the whole time I said I had nothing to do with all this and that I remembered being at Raffaele’s place. But they yelled at me for so long. The development of this state of confusion followed the fact that for hours and hours and hours, they called me a stupid liar. I don’t know what to call it, a state of confusion, because in the end I was just confused. I was confused for a little while, but I didn’t even know what to be confused about. It was very strange. I was under pressure — ”

“So you confirm that the police told you that Meredith screamed and that you covered your ears,” an attorney asks.

“They asked me if I had heard a scream,” Knox responds. “I said no. They said it couldn’t be possible, because if I was there, I must have heard her scream or something. How could I possibly not have?

“So, during the interrogation, people were standing all around me, in front of me, behind me, one person was screaming at me from here, another person was shouting, ‘No, no, no, maybe you just don’t remember’ from over there, other people were yelling other things, and a policewoman behind me did this to me.”

Knox makes two whacking sounds.

“Once, twice?” the attorney asks.

“Twice,” Knox responds.

The day after her interrogation, Knox had pleaded with the police to take back her statement.

“I was telling them: ‘Look, I am really confused. These things” — referring to her two signed declarations — “don’t seem like what I remember. I remember something else.’ And they said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. You just stay quiet. You will remember it all later. So just stay quiet and wait, wait, wait, because we have to check some things.’ And at that point I just didn’t understand anything.”

“I even lost my sense of the time,” Knox says.

In the revised account of her whereabouts on the night of her roommate’s murder, written by police and signed by Knox, Knox says she received a text from Lumumba telling her not to come in for work — but instead of planning for a night in with her new boyfriend, Knox responded to Lumumba’s message by making plans to meet Lumumba “right away.”

“For me,” Knox tells the court in her testimony months later, “the message meant, ‘Okay, fine, ciao.’ In English, very often, ‘ciao’ means ‘see you later.’ Literally this translates as ‘ci vediamo più tardi.’ But it’s just a way of saying ciao.”

According to this revised account, Knox lied to Sollecito, telling him she had to go to work, and then proceeded to meet Lumumba at a basketball court near her cottage in order to walk him back to her home.

In the signed declaration written in the early morning hours of November 6, 2007, by Italian police, who were by that time under tremendous international pressure to name a suspect in Kercher’s murder, Knox had “spontaneously” declared: “Given that during the afternoon with Raffaele I had smoked a joint, I felt confused because I do not make frequent use of drugs that strong. I met Patrick [Lumumba] immediately at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana and we went to the house together.”

“Did you meet Patrick Lumumba in the basketball court of Piazza Grimana on the evening of November 1?” an attorney asks at her trial.

“No,” Knox responds.

Knox’s “spontaneous declaration” continues: “I do not remember if Meredith was there or came shortly afterward. I have a hard time remembering those moments, but Patrick had sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I cannot remember clearly whether he threatened Meredith first.”

The declaration concludes: “I remember confusedly that he killed her.”

“The police repeated their questions and wanted, above all, for me to tell them who could have done this,” Knox tells the court, “but I didn’t know how to respond. I told them about all the people that I knew. The most intense pressure was in the questura between November 5 and 6, because I never lived through anything like that.”

The interrogation of Amanda Knox on the night of November 5, 2007, would continue for four more hours and would eventually produce a second “spontaneous declaration” — at 5:45 a.m. — once again written by the police in Italian and signed by Knox.

The second statement yielded even more extraordinary details.

“What I can say is that Patrick and Meredith went into Meredith’s room, while I think I stayed in the kitchen. I cannot remember how long they stayed together in the room but I can only say that at a certain point I heard Meredith screaming and as I was scared I plugged up my ears.

“Then I do not remember anything, I am very confused. I do not remember if Meredith was screaming and if I heard some thuds too because I was upset, but I imagined what could have happened.”

“I am not sure if Raffaele was there as well that night but I clearly remember that I woke up at my boyfriend’s home in his bed.”

The 5:45 a.m. declaration ends with this observation from police: “It is acknowledged that Knox repeatedly brings her hands on her head and shakes it.”

Two weeks after his arrest, Patrick Lumumba, who had been seen by dozens of patrons at his pub on the night of Kercher’s murder, was released from jail.

Around the same time, a person of interest named Rudy Guede would be arrested in Austria. Guede had told a friend earlier that week he had in fact visited Kercher’s cottage the night she was killed.

Knox, he had said to his friend, “was not there.”

And yet in the aftermath of his arrest and extradition to Italy, Guede’s story would abruptly change. Knox had been at the house that night, Guede now said. He had spotted her running away from the cottage in the dark, with her “back turned” to him.

In part on the strength of Guede’s testimony (“I’m not guilty,” Guede maintained at his own sentencing on December 22, 2009), Knox and Sollecito were found guilty of murder on December 4, 2009, and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively. In fact Rudy Guede’s DNA would be found all over the room in which Meredith Kercher’s body was discovered.

In that same room, not a single trace of DNA belonging to either Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito would ever be found.