Angel Face (15 page)

By now it is nearly noon. Amanda, feeling shaky and paranoid, calls the person she trusts most in the world—her mom—at 4 A.M. Seattle time. She says that something strange has happened in the house. Then Raf goes to dump the empty liquor bottles and cleaning bottles and bloody clothes and rags in one of the silver dumpsters in town. When he returns, Amanda has just walked out into the yard to empty the mop bucket that they generally dumped on the driveway gravel rather than down the sink. That’s why she doesn’t have a jacket on and Raf does when the postal police arrive with Meredith’s phones.

The hazy, disjointed statements about that night Amanda later makes to police suggest a genuine blackout; a purposeful lie would certainly be more coherent. Despite immense pressure, neither Amanda nor Raf has ever broken and told the “real story,” because they truly don’t remember it. Rudy, on the other hand, remembers enough to tell the appeals judge he “sees
red” every time he closes his eyes. But whether he was less stoned than Amanda and Raf, an instigator of Meredith’s torture, or someone who went along, only Rudy can say.

9

“Deep Down, Curt Knows. He Knows the Truth”

A
MANDA KNOX’S FAMILY has been heroic in support of their daughter. If sheer effort and blind faith were sufficient to overturn a murder charge, she would surely be a free woman by now. Her parents have driven themselves into bankruptcy to fund her legal and public relations teams. Family members camped in Perugia in shifts, staying at an inexpensive
agriturismo
near the prison outside town, driving a cheap Fiat, and bringing in canned soups and packaged meals from the United States to eat cheaply when they weren’t being wined and dined by the American networks. But in their disregard for appearances and local mores, they sometimes hurt Amanda’s case while trying to help her.

Edda Mellas, an elementary-school math teacher, was the most popular of Amanda’s four parents and stepparents. Her husband, Chris Mellas, an Internet consultant for a Schnitzer development company in Seattle, was the least. He spent each hearing on his BlackBerry, reading news stories and firing off vile, unsigned hate mail to journalists and bloggers. Chris rarely looked at Amanda, even when she spoke—and, unlike the other family members, he didn’t go back to the dungeon to hug her at the end of each session.

“That
patrigno,
” Guiliano Mignini said to me during a courtroom break, nodding toward Chris. “
Qualcosa non va—
Something not right about him.” Mignini liked to talk about Amanda’s family. He had analyzed their phone intercepts and their body language in the courtroom. He thought Amanda’s father, Curt Knox, who was a vice president for finance at Macy’s until he was laid off in 2009, was “the smart one.”

“He is different from the rest,” Mignini often said. “Deep down, Curt knows. He knows the truth.”

A father of three daughters himself, Mignini understood why Curt wanted to believe in Amanda. But the lawyer also saw something in Curt that only those who spent a lot of time in the courtroom had noticed. Curt was angry, his face often red as he stifled his tears. But
he knew how he was expected to act. In the waning days of the trial, Curt’s wife Cassandra slipped in her high-heeled boots and fell to the ground in front of Mignini. As Mignini helped her up, Curt stammered a
grazie
to the man who was trying to convict his daughter of murder.

Curt may have the brains, but Edda carried the family. She wasn’t a celebrity like her daughter, but a mother’s love is not something taken lightly in Italy. She cried constantly, painfully, honestly. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her puffy face permanently blotchy. She is the martyr of this saga; she is also a good person. Even when she knows she should, she simply cannot hate people, though she was well-versed in the family’s enemies list. On one sticky July afternoon, she and her cousin Dorothy Craft Najir, who lives in Hamburg, approached the gaggle of reporters “de-Knoxing” amiably at the outdoor tables of the Brufani Hotel bar. Stories filed, video transmitted, most of us were bent over a BlackBerry or cell phone, texting husbands, wives, lovers, and editors after a long day in court. The main topic of conversation was how to nab press tickets to James Taylor’s Umbrian jazz concert the next night.

Edda and Dorothy checked out the group. Two family favorites, Chapman Bell of NBC and Sabina
Castelfranco of CBS, were there, but they were sitting with the “axis of evil”—British tabloid reporter Nick Pisa and me. So Edda and Dorothy walked on. Later, over the usual network-paid dinner, Edda asked Chapman how she could possibly stand to be around us. This trial is Edda’s life, of course, not just another story, so she cannot fathom how we can all write and say such different things about her daughter, yet still be friends. What she didn’t understand is that the TV reporters’ honest views were not that different from those of the print press—but TV people had to toe the party line to get the family on camera. The TV producers would sometimes send text messages to find out where the unfriendlies were—so they could avoid us while they were with the family and know where to hook up later. It was a touchy situation that everyone understood. There can be no hard feelings when it comes to the politics of access.

Yet after the network meal, mellowed by wine, Edda, rather than return to the
agriturismo,
would sometimes choose to tag along with her dinner hosts to see what happened next. One night, early in the trial, she came with two TV reporters to the Joyce Pub, where the foreign press routinely gathered for night-caps and shop talk. We all sat at a back table littered
with shot glasses and beer bottles. Everyone had had too much to drink. Leaning over Nick Pisa, Edda held my hand and pleaded with us to believe in Amanda. “She is innocent,” she says, her eyes welling up.

A few months later, on a far more sober occasion, Edda and I sit together over lemon sodas on corso Vannucci. “My family would
kill
me if they knew I was meeting you,” she says, missing the irony of the threat. Then she tells me that I had been the worst, one of the very worst, to write “these lies and leaks” about Amanda.

“Like what?” I ask. “What did I write that wasn’t true?”

Her phone rings. It is Madison Paxton, Amanda’s best friend, who is spending the summer with her in Perugia. They talk for a few minutes and then hang up.

“Madison says I should spit on you,” Edda says, laughing apologetically. “She’s just young. She doesn’t understand this stuff.”

“So what have I written that is not true?” I ask again.

“I’ve never read your stories,” she says. “Chris just tells me that you are the worst.”

We talk about the sex scandal involving Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Italy is buzzing about the orgies at his summer home, and I use my
BlackBerry to send Edda the link to an
El País
newspaper story that shows the Czech prime minister, nude and sexually aroused, at Berlusconi’s Sardinian villa.

“I don’t understand how he can cheat on his wife like that,” she says about Berlusconi. “What’s wrong with this society where men think it is OK to have affairs?”

She frowns. Maybe she is thinking of Curt, who left her for Cassandra, when Edda was pregnant with Deanna. But she shrugs and happily goes back to gossiping about Berlusconi’s orgies. I dish more dirt, and we giggle like girlfriends. Then she remembers I’m the enemy.

 

 

OF ALL THE FAMILY, Edda spent the most time in Perugia, especially in the summer on her school vacation. During the hottest months, when the
aula
became stifling, she, Madison, and her daughter Deanna Knox would sometimes come upstairs to the small, crowded room assigned to the press, which had a video feed from the court, and sit making snide comments as the journalists tried to work.

But after Curt lost his job at Macy’s, he started to show up more. Even though they were divorced, Edda
and Curt did their best to present a unified front in supporting Amanda, but it was hard on their spouses to see the former couple together so often. Countless rumors circulated in Perugia about how Curt and Chris had to keep their wives apart when they were all in town for the verdict. When any of the four parents came to Perugia alone, they often brought a friend of Amanda’s. Chris Mellas came with Amanda’s Seattle boyfriend, DJ, and the two men spent most of their time chewing tobacco and drinking beer with Frank the blogger. Edda often brought Madison and Deanna. During the summer, she also brought one of Curt and Cassandra’s daughters, fourteen-year-old Ashley Knox. (Their youngest daughter, eleven-year-old Delaney, stayed in Seattle.) It was a hot summer, and the Seattle girls spent their time at the
agriturismo
swimming pool when they weren’t at hearings or visiting Amanda. They were courted by the local press, and at one point promised favorable coverage in an Italian weekly women’s magazine in exchange for access. Trusting the friendly gesture, the girls made a serious error in judgment: They posed around Perugia for a photo spread in
Gente,
the Italian version of
People
magazine. The most damning photo—of Deanna and Ashley in short-shorts, leaning on a metal fence
outside “the house of horrors”—was seen as a slap in the face to the Kerchers, and they were lambasted in the British press for treating the scene of Meredith’s murder as a tourist attraction.

Edda also misread the intentions of a media suitor when the family granted blanket access to a documentary film crew from Britain’s Channel 4. The producer, Garfield Kennedy, and his crew became the family’s personal entourage, accompanying them to each prison meeting and press interview during the trial. At one point, the documentary was to be called
Making a Killing
—about how the press created the hype around Meredith’s murder—and Edda told me that Garfield was doing “a real nice documentary about us.” But when the one-hour show aired in January 2010, it confirmed what a strange young woman Amanda was. “She’s a very quirky person. She’s not normal,” her best friend Madison said on camera. “She is a little bit odd,” Amanda’s Seattle boyfriend, DJ, agreed. “She’s really not conventional at all,” he said. “She’s not tied down by social standards.” It also showed how media-hungry the family had become. In the opening segment, in the Mellas home in Seattle, the camera shows Edda directing Deanna to turn on the big-screen television. The mother’s eyes light up as
Deanna shouts from the TV room, “Amanda’s on GMA!”

The Knoxes are honest people who did what any parents would. But they couldn’t help getting caught up in their sudden fame; by the end of the trial, they were skilled at attaching their own mics, counting for the technicians in New York, and then speaking in sound bites. Edda was a guaranteed on-camera crier—always good TV. Chris was not allowed to give interviews, and the producers knew that even if he volunteered, he was not to be put on camera—strict orders from PR adviser David Marriott in Seattle. Curt, on the other hand, gave seamless answers, and he, too, could tear up on demand. Marriott brokered the on-camera appearances and tried desperately to control the message by meting out access according to which networks painted Amanda in the best light. To a large extent, he was successful; Knox was always referred to in TV reports as “honor student Amanda Knox” (true), and correspondents frequently mentioned that there was “no evidence linking her to the crime scene” (only true if you limit the crime scene to Meredith’s room and demand a 100 percent certain match for shoe prints and marks on the body). Marriott frequently demanded that written dispatches from
the courtroom be removed from the network Web sites if they were not completely Amanda-friendly. In one showdown with a network, he threatened to deny access to Edda unless an item was deleted, but the network did not back down and Edda was again on camera a few weeks later. After the verdict, Marriott told producers that the family would not appear on any program if I was also a guest, because I had declared on CNN’s
Anderson Cooper 360°
that I thought Amanda got a fair trial.

Unfortunately, no one paid that much attention to controlling the family’s untelevised appearances in Perugia—in front of the people who would decide Amanda’s fate. Deanna and Ashley also wore their short-shorts and tank tops to hearings. Curt in his Hawaiian shirts and Chris in his slick suits and military haircut might not have fit in with the stylish Italian men, but they did not offend the court. Edda and the girls were another story. Italy is a country where women dress seductively, but they rarely bare their thighs—shorts are for the beach. The court of justice is an esteemed institution. On more than one occasion, friendly members of the press whispered to Edda that her daughters would be well advised to cover up their bare shoulders and tuck in their bra straps or wear
more appropriate dresses. Edda always defended her daughters’ attire by pointing out that officials in the courtroom wore tight pants and low-cut sweaters. Detective Monica Napoleoni and Stefania the stenographer, whose short skirts and sequined tops were the talk of the press room, were hardly conservative dressers—but they weren’t in court to support someone on trial for murder. After the verdict, jurors said they thought the Knox family appeared arrogant in the courtroom. Edda and the others continued to “be themselves” when they should have tried harder to respect local customs in a country where image counts for so much. Edda once told a morning news program that her lawyers told them “to just be who we are.” Those same lawyers told me that they could not get the family to cooperate.

“They don’t understand,” Amanda’s assistant attorney Maria del Grosso once told me over breakfast at the Fortuna Hotel. “They can’t see beyond the immediate urgency of their situation. They can’t see the big picture.”

Nor, it seems, could David Marriott, who apparently did not anticipate how ill-advised American editorials based on his very partial and partisan information would play in Italy. A decade ago, many major
newspapers would have dispatched a correspondent to Perugia on a story like this, but with the economic pinch, the number of foreign correspondents on the ground in Italy has dwindled dramatically, and those few are often responsible for Spain, Greece, and North Africa as well. Even the Associated Press had a difficult time staffing all the hearings, because of budget constraints. So most U.S. papers covered the trial from afar, and it was much simpler to quote the family and pipe information from Marriott than to wade through volumes of Italian court documents.