Angel Face (13 page)

During the preliminary hearings, Bongiorno had clearly wanted to defend Raffaele without carrying Amanda as extra baggage. Amanda noted in her prison diary on November 23, 2007: “I’m waiting on Raffaele also apparantely,[sic] because he’s my alibi. His lawyers, however, are convinced that I’m evil and want to have him express this. However, Raffaele apparently has been trying to tell the truth.”

Bongiorno physically distanced herself from Knox’s lawyers at early press conferences and often back-handed Amanda, telling reporters that the evidence against Raffaele was minute in comparison with that against Amanda and Rudy. Raffaele’s father, too, rued the day his son met Amanda and told reporters privately that he thought Raffaele should have a separate
trial. After all, the only forensic evidence linking Raffaele to the crime was proving easy to discount. The knife from his apartment was already discredited before the trial began because of the single testing of the DNA. More troublesome was Raffaele’s DNA on the clasp of Meredith’s bloody bra. But the clasp had been kicked around her room for six weeks, so this match could be challenged, too. Moreover, Bongiorno surely knew that an Italian jury would have been more sympathetic to her client if he severed ties with Amanda—she could present him as the sexual naïf who was bewitched by this American siren and did whatever she told him—even lie. Because, of course, one of the biggest pitfalls for the defense was that Raf and Amanda had contradictory alibis. That is essentially why, although Raf gave several spontaneous statements, he never took the stand to face cross-examination.

But Bongiorno is a strategist, not a risk taker. She also knew that if she turned against Amanda, the scene could get very ugly very quickly, starting with revelations about Raffaele’s serious drug problems and his strange obsession with knives. Plus, no matter how tainted it might be, his DNA was in the room where the murder took place; Amanda’s was not. In the end, Bongiorno knew that in order to save Raffaele, she had
to also save Amanda—something Amanda’s lawyers were not exactly accomplishing on their own.

And so Bongiorno used her closing arguments on Raf’s behalf to give Amanda one of the biggest boosts of the trial, describing the pretty American as a simple young woman who could not possibly have master-minded such an attack. Referring back to the French art film
Amélie
that the two suspects supposedly watched at Raf’s apartment the night of the murder, Bongiorno described Amanda as extravagant and unusual. “She is a little bizarre and naïve,” Bongiorno told the court. “But she is not Amanda the ripper, she is the Amélie of Seattle.” It could have been a turning point in the trial—suddenly, someone other than her family was sticking up for Amanda. But it came too late.

Amanda’s own lawyers were less effective. Carlo Dalla Vedova, brought in by the family from Rome because he was fluent in English, had never tried a criminal case. His law practice serves Rome’s power brokers—the United Nations, the Saudis, various business entities—and he is often spotted in hotel lobbies along the via Veneto closing deals. Amanda’s other attorney was Luciano Ghirga, a former soccer star gone soft. Ghirga’s white hair and provincial charm make
him lovable. He is the typical country lawyer who knows the deepest secrets about everyone in Perugia. Ghirga had experience with criminal cases, and he knew that the most skeptical journalists were the ones he needed to court. The Knox family had the opposite view and directed him never to speak to the
colpe-volisti
reporters. But he brushed off the Knoxes with a shrug of the shoulder and bought us more wine and dinners than all the other lawyers combined. He was a charmer, with a formidable crush on Andrea Vogt, which we leveraged for inside details about the case. At times, Ghirga and Dalla Vedova weren’t even on speaking terms, and more than once, I walked into the Turreno café to find them in a heated debate. If Ghirga—a Perugia insider—had been the lead lawyer, the case may have gone differently. But he was sidelined by the flashier Dalla Vedova, whom the family trusted infinitely more, if only because they could actually speak with him. Yet at times it became apparent that Dalla Vedova exploited the language barrier to shield Amanda’s parents from troubling evidence.

“Carlo says there is no mixed blood evidence,” Edda once told me over a beer at the Joyce Pub.

“But there is,” I told her, explaining the five spots and where they were found.

“Carlo says that’s wrong, and that they won’t be accepted by the court,” she said, clinging to every false hope he had given her.

Dalla Vedova was easily the most attractive lawyer in court—a tall, muscular tennis player with white spiked hair and playful eyes. But he was the butt of many jokes in the press room. His unorthodox tactics and bizarre questions during cross-examination often generated howls of laughter after hours, and even Ghirga rolled his eyes when asked about the star attorney from Rome. Dalla Vedova missed the final day of closing arguments for Amanda and moved on to a big-money deal with the Saudis while the jury was still out. He came back just in time for the verdict.

The unsung hero of Amanda’s defense team was Maria del Grosso, a striking young lawyer who took over from Dalla Vedova during the final rebuttal arguments. She gave the most heartfelt defense of the entire trial, and the jury clung to every word. The only woman on Amanda’s defense team, she was authoritative, especially when she talked about the theory that the murder resulted from a sex game gone wrong. “For sexual violence you need strong proof,” she declared. “The prosecution has not provided that to you, and for that reason you cannot convict her.”

Del Grosso was right. The evidence of rape was inconclusive—Rudy’s DNA was present, but no semen or tears or other signs of forced penetration were found. There was no proof beyond Amanda’s well-documented promiscuity that she was a sexual deviant. Amanda’s lawyers should have done more to deflate the hype around her louche habits. They sent out a dozen subpoenas for local character witnesses, but only her Greek friend Spyros Gatsios showed up. So Amanda’s character witnesses were all from Seattle, and translation inevitably lessens the emotional impact of heartfelt testimony. When her best friend, Madison Paxton, spoke about how honest and innocent Amanda really was, it came across as an emotionless staccato in Italian. Paxton’s feelings were, literally, lost in translation.

The other way to address the character issue was to control how Amanda behaved in court. Alessandra Batassa, a criminal lawyer in Rome, once told me: “The jury pays attention to much more than testimony. The lawyers should take control of the client’s complete image—including who attends court with her—not just the client’s personal behavior.” Batassa was shocked to see Amanda come to court in tight jeans and provocative T-shirts; the young woman should have worn conservative clothing, even a dark
suit. But Amanda’s lawyers left the defense of her character largely to her family, who made their case to American news networks—which, of course, the jury could not see. The jurors saw only Amanda’s daily demeanor, which was ill advised.

Amanda herself was probably too honest, confessing in her diaries, which were admissible in court, that she loved sex and enjoyed drugs. During the hearings, she giggled at certain questions. She made a mockery of the judge’s court. Smiling to the cameras, blushing, and passing chocolates to Raffaele did little to help her. Bongiorno seemed reluctant to defend Amanda’s character until the end of the trial, when the attorney dismissed the theory that the young lovers were looking for new sexual experiences; she called them “love birds in the infancy of their relationship, not some old tired couple looking for new thrills.”

The defense’s other biggest mistake, according to interviews with jurors after the trial, was doing nothing to refute the mixed-blood evidence beyond noting that it is common to find mingled DNA when two people live in the same house. The jurors needed more than that. “To have mixed blood, you have to both be bleeding,” one of them remarked to me after the verdict. “It was obvious that Meredith was bleeding, but why was
Amanda bleeding?” Amanda’s lawyers chose not to supply an explanation. Privately, her mother told me she was menstruating. Early in the investigation, her stepfather, Chris Mellas, told a group of reporters that she had an infected ear that had just been pierced. But neither theory was introduced in court.

The defense did a better job trying to prove that the break-in in Filomena Romanelli’s room was not staged but the work of an ill-intentioned intruder. The lawyers explained that broken glass might have ended up on top of the scattered clothes because Filomena was allowed to enter the room to check for missing items and may have disturbed things. Still, since Rudy was no stranger to the house, he would have surely known that there was a much easier way into the upper apartment via a back balcony; he didn’t have to throw a rock and scale a thirteen-foot wall.

 

 

THE PROSECUTION’S CASE might have been defeated had the defense lawyers been more unified. After all, there was no solid confession, no real murder weapon, no convincing motive, and not much evidence. But the lawyers rarely seemed to be on the same page. Bongiorno could not carry the team alone, although
she was able to knock down the crucial evidence of the knife through her expert cross-examination. In the last months of the trial, however, Bongiorno rarely even showed up, and when she did, she rarely stayed for the entire hearing. Her state-funded driver in his black Mercedes was always waiting outside the courthouse to whisk her back to the parliament hall in Rome. Meanwhile, Luca Maori, Raffaele’s other lawyer, was on trial himself for involuntary manslaughter because he accidentally killed a motorcyclist in a car crash.

Overall, the defense was simply too disjointed. Forensic expert Vincenzo Pascali quit in May, leaving a big hole in the Sollecito team—and a 50,000-euro bill for services rendered. He had been hired to discredit the bra-clasp evidence. But when he started hinting that in his own findings, the sample also contained Knox’s DNA, Bongiorno objected. Introducing Amanda’s DNA on the specimen would only make things worse, tying both defendants to the crime scene. Instead, she wanted Pascali to focus on contamination, even though it was unlikely that the clasp could have been contaminated with Raffaele’s DNA just because it wasn’t collected in a timely manner. Unwilling to testify according to the lawyers’ script, Pascali walked off the case. He was replaced by Francesco
Introna, a close friend of Raffaele’s father and a brilliant Pugliese scholar who spoke English to the foreign press. During his testimony, Introna dramatically plunged a knife into the neck of a mannequin to prove his point to the jury. He testified that Meredith was killed by just one person, Rudy Guede, who grabbed her from behind and stabbed her in the neck. A month later, Amanda’s own forensic expert, Carlo Torre, told the court that, yes, Meredith had been killed by one person, Rudy Guede, but that she had been stabbed from the front. If the defense experts could not even agree on the details of the murder, what hope was there for the jury to take their side?

Torre is a well-known expert who has authored a string of criminal science textbooks and is a favorite on the international forensic science lecture circuit. With his Albert Einstein hair and frumpy jacket, he was expected to be the highlight of Amanda’s defense when he took the stand midway through the trial. But his testimony lacked impact, perhaps because he took such a detached, clinical approach to the evidence, addressing the jurors as if they were pupils who would be tested later.

“You see the wounds on the subject’s neck,” he said using a red laser pointer on giant autopsy photos of
Meredith. “The larger wound was made by the sawing motion of a smaller knife, not with Exhibit 36,” he explained, referring to the knife with Amanda’s DNA on the handle. He used a Styrofoam mannequin’s head and a knife the same size as Exhibit 36 to demonstrate that point.

“It would have come through the other side,” he said, coldly stabbing the mannequin so that the knife blade exited on the far side of her neck. “There is no mystery here. It is not just difficult but it is completely impossible that a knife like this would make these two wounds. The murder weapon is a survival knife, a Rambo knife, not this one,” he said, obviously unaware that he was describing most of the knives in Raffaele’s extensive collection of tactical knives and switchblades.

 

 

TOWARD THE END of the trial, the defense team members tried a make-or-break submission. They insisted that the discrepancies in DNA analysis obliged the judge to order a
superperizia,
or super analyst, to review all the DNA evidence.

“The jury has heard two different explanations for most of the DNA evidence presented,” declared Dalla
Vedova. “An independent review will be the final word.”

“Rehashing all the evidence will not change its outcome,” prosecutor Mignini said, opposing the request. Judge Massei, who always seemed to welcome opportunities to deliberate with his jurors, stood up and, without a word, smiled and led them into chambers. Two hours later, he emerged to say, “I am denying the defense request to have an independent analysis of all the DNA evidence.” He added, “The decision is not an indicator of guilt.”

But in fact it was. Raffaele sunk in his chair. He knew that the fact that the evidence would stand meant that even the judge believed the prosecution’s case. Amanda seemed unaware of the impact of this decision.

The prosecution concluded its final arguments with a video dramatization of the murder, complete with sexy avatars of Amanda, Meredith, Raffaele, and Rudy—the women with big breasts and tiny waists à la Lara Croft, the men with broad shoulders and bulging crotches. It was a bizarre film that superimposed these animated figures over real crime scene photos. Behind the scenes, the making of this video nearly broke the prosecution’s team apart.
Il Messaggero
’s Italo
Carmignani learned that Mignini and Comodi clashed over whether to include the sexual violence against Meredith. Mignini also wanted to reintroduce the theory of a Satanic ritual. Comodi blocked both impulses. But the video did prove effective. Rather than listening to defense experts hypothesize with mannequins and diagrams, jurors saw an exact enactment of what the prosecution thought had happened. It was compelling.