Angel Face (2 page)

This is the scene that greets the study-abroad crowd when they enroll at Perugia’s universities for foreigners. It comes as a shock to some and an irresistible circus to others, and it was the backdrop for tragedy in the case of two young women, Amanda Marie Knox, then twenty, and Meredith Susana Cara Kercher, twenty-two, who arrived in the fall of 2007 and enthusiastically joined the party. Less than two months later, Meredith was dead, and Amanda was in prison, accused of her murder.

These young women were not exactly innocents abroad. They had both done their share of college partying before they arrived in Italy. But that was hardly preparation for the nonstop bacchanalia that has made Perugia infamous on the international student circuit. Tina Rocchio is the Italy coordinator of Arcadia University, which facilitates many study-abroad trips. “When they want to go to Perugia, my first question is always, ‘How much self-discipline do they have?’ before I can recommend it,” she says. “Perugia is not for the weak. The students who go there are of two veins—either they party or they study, and Perugia usually means a party.”

In the 1920s, Benito Mussolini established universities for foreigners in Perugia and nearby Siena, aiming
to spread Italy’s “superior culture” around the world by recruiting foreigners to study cheaply in these lovely, walled cities. The Siena school remains relatively small. But the school in Perugia, in tandem with the city’s Università degli Studi, which also caters to foreigners but has a larger contingent of Italians, spawned dozens of smaller satellite campuses. There are so many that the town’s student population is now roughly 40,000, around a quarter of the city’s total population of 163,000. Perugia is popular among foreign students looking for something cheaper and cozier than Paris, Barcelona, or Florence, these last three cities being the top choices for well-heeled Americans. The academic offerings are wide-ranging, and the professors have a reputation for being forgiving. Sometimes, the college credits transfer back home as a simple pass-fail mark, when they should actually be given a grade-point score. All this attracts an eclectic mix of young people from around the globe. Most of the Italian kids come from wealthy families; in Italy, university students usually live at home, and it is a rare privilege to go away to school. The foreign students—the universities are accredited in Asia, Europe, and North America—are more likely to be scraping by on scholarships and second jobs. With very few dorm
rooms available, the students usually live in the historic center in flophouses and apartments that have been partitioned into tiny rooms to accommodate multiple renters. The town is full of discos, clubs, and cheap restaurants that cater to a student clientele.

No surprise, Perugia is also a drug dealer’s paradise; the mostly North African merchants do a lively trade in everything from genetically modified hashish to cocaine and acid. It is very easy to get high in Perugia, and the police generally turn a blind eye. Perugia has a very low crime rate compared with the rest of Italy. Despite its reputation, drug arrests are rare, and the police are routinely lenient with the student population. The narrow, cobbled streets, some of which are built in steps, discourage car use, so the students stagger around the city center on foot, and the drunk driving offenses that usually dominate college-town crime dockets are not a problem. Murders are extremely rare—with one notable exception. The year before Meredith was killed, another young woman, Sonia Marra, who was studying medicine at the Università degli Studi, disappeared without a trace. The body has never been found, and it was only recently that her former boyfriend was arrested in connection with her murder—amid suspicions that the investigation into
her death was neglected during the two-year circus following Meredith’s murder.

Perugia was home to the famous artist Pietro Vannucci, who went on to teach Renaissance great Raphael. It is also famous for the Perugina chocolate factory, now owned by Nestlé. But without the universities, Perugia would be just another postcard-perfect Umbrian hill town competing for the tourist dollar with Siena, Assisi, and St. Gimagnano. The local community looks askance at the wild student culture, but also knows better than to interfere much with the town’s economic mainstay. As one Perugian prosecutor told a reporter, with long-suffering tolerance, “This kind of intoxicating freedom gets into these kids so far away from home, this total lack of control, this hunger for experience rules these kids.” The universities and administrators of study-abroad programs contribute immensely to Perugia, and they expect the local community to be forgiving. They insist, too, that the party scene is no worse here than any other college town.

Meredith Kercher came to Perugia from the University of Leeds. Established in 1904 by King Edward VII as an alternative to elitist Oxford and Cambridge, Leeds promised access to all. Today, there are roughly thirty thousand students on the campus, where buildings
from the 1960s are interlaced with glass walkways and structures more modern. The academic program is serious, far-reaching, and international-minded. In her two years there, studying European politics, Meredith proved herself an exceptional student with a quick grasp of languages, and she was accepted into the prestigious European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students. Known as ERASMUS, the program was established by the European Commission in 1994 to facilitate international study; its goal is to have three million students and teachers in active exchange programs in thirty-two countries by 2012. But the ERASMUS program also has a reputation for fun. At any of the participating universities, the ERASMUS parties are reputed to be the most multicultural and exciting.

Meredith was a slender woman with pretty features that reflected her mixed heritage; her father is British, her mother an Indian born in Lahore when Pakistan was still considered part of confederated India. The young woman’s background, according to her hometown newspaper in Croydon, South London, was “solid, very proper middle-upper class.” She was a typical British girl who had her fair share of romances and who was not particularly embarrassed about being
sloppy drunk in public—she had been stopped once for public intoxication with friends in Leeds. She had three boyfriends in her two years at Leeds. Her latest beau was the most serious, but the two decided amicably to calm things down before she went to study in Perugia and he in Australia.

Meredith’s father, John Kercher, then sixty-four, worked for the British tabloids as a sort of print paparazzo. In the 1980s, he followed celebs around town and hobnobbed backstage at concerts. At the height of his career, twenty years ago, he wrote pop culture annuals for the teen set on Michael Jackson, Madonna, Culture Club, A-Ha, and Wham. He also wrote snap biographies of Warren Beatty and Joan Collins. John worked hard, and the Kercher family lived well. Meredith and her three siblings attended an expensive and prestigious high school called Croydon Old Palace School, where Meredith was treasured for her upbeat personality. “She would come downstairs in the morning and start dancing in front of everyone and it made us all laugh,” her sister later told reporters. “She was so much fun and had a wicked sense of humor.”

Amanda Knox, too, was both a dedicated scholar and, like most American coeds, an accomplished party
girl. Back in Seattle, she was a linguist who dreamed of being a writer. She had an insatiable appetite for reading, often simultaneously devouring the same books in multiple languages. She was reading
Harry Potter
in German at the time of her arrest, and her parents say she had considered becoming a journalist. She defined herself on her social networking pages as a “peaceful partier,” and her only brush with the law was a disturbing-the-peace arrest for a house party she threw. Seattle is not so different from Leeds. It is a liberal U.S. city, with a diverse demographic. The Seattle area hosts some big hitters such as Boeing, which was founded there, and Microsoft in nearby Redmond, but the area is equally well known for spawning grunge music and Starbucks coffee. The youth population prides itself on being avant-garde, but the prevailing culture is wholesome, outdoorsy, free.

Amanda’s parents, Curt Knox, forty-nine, and Edda Mellas, forty-seven, split up when she was just a few years old, and she spent her childhood shuffling between their homes. Edda raised her, but Curt was involved in her life even as he built a new family with his second wife, Cassandra, forty-six. Curt worked as a manager at Macy’s, and Edda was an elementary-school librarian who then switched to teaching math
to boost her income. Seattle is expensive and money was tight; Amanda was far from spoiled. She won a partial scholarship for the prestigious Seattle Preparatory School, a private Jesuit high school, where she excelled both academically and socially. Kent Hickey, president of Seattle Prep, never waivered in his support of her. “This is an extremely unusual situation,” Hickey told the
Seattle Times.
“A lot of people said ‘don’t get involved,’ but we can’t sit this out. This is really important and we can’t pick and choose the graduates we help.”

Amanda had an appetite for travel from a young age. After studying Japanese her freshman year in high school, she spent a few weeks with a Japanese family as part of a student exchange program. Upon graduating, she went on to the University of Washington, where she studied German, Italian, and creative writing. She worked her way through college slinging coffee and taking orders at a fine-arts frame shop and saved up seven thousand dollars to study abroad—which was barely enough to afford a semester in Perugia.

In the United States, the “angel face” that would grace dozens of Italian magazine covers was not such a standout. Amanda’s looks were close to the norm in Seattle, although her quirky personality and sense of
humor quickly endeared her to friends. In Italy, her blue eyes and even features were slightly exotic, and she soon highlighted her dishwater blond hair to match her Italian roommates’ and pierced her ears a few more times to fit into the Perugia scene. She hadn’t had many boyfriends in Seattle. Her true love was David Johnsrud, twenty-two, a student at the University of Washington known as DJ, with whom she rock-climbed and partied, but she often complained to friends that he stopped short of having sex with her. When lurid speculation about sex games began to swirl around Meredith’s murder, DJ told a British documentary filmmaker that “speaking personally and speaking to many of the other friends, we’ve never heard Amanda express any interest in that sort of group orgy thing.”

Unlike Meredith, who enrolled in the Università degli Studi to complete a rigorous European studies program, Amanda did not come to Perugia as part of a structured exchange program. She devised her own independent study plan and enrolled in a hodgepodge of courses in German, Italian, and creative writing at the Università per Stranieri. Her semester abroad had no real supervision beyond an e-mail address for the University
of Washington’s office of International Programs and Exchanges. As a twenty-year-old, she was not even old enough to legally drink in the United States. In Perugia, no one cared what she did.

In August 2007, Amanda arrived in Europe with ambitious plans. First she and her younger sister Deanna Knox, then eighteen, flew from Seattle to Hamburg, to visit their aunt, Dorothy Craft Najir. Amanda’s mom had been born in Germany and moved to the United States at the age of six, so Amanda was curious to see where she and her
oma,
or grandmother, had lived. After a few days tooling around Germany and Austria with their aunt and uncle, the Knox sisters flew to Milan and then hopped a train down to Perugia by way of Florence. On her September 2, 2007, MySpace page, Amanda wrote,

She later wrote in a personal e-mail to a friend that she had sex with him in the bathroom of the train. She elaborated on the same September 2 MySpace entry:

In Perugia, the sisters searched the classifieds and message boards for an apartment. Amanda’s uncle had lined up a two-week internship at the Bundestag to kick-start her German studies, and she was planning to return to Perugia after she finished in Berlin. But she wanted to sew up her living arrangements in advance. She found the house on via della Pergola by pure chance:

Indeed, Filomena Romanelli, then twenty-eight, was hoping for someone just like Amanda to take one
of the back bedrooms in the apartment she and her friend Laura Mezzetti, then twenty-seven, were renting. The two Italian women worked as legal assistants at a nearby law firm. Both Filomena and Laura liked to smoke pot, and Filomena had a serious boyfriend. Laura, on the other hand, once confided to Amanda that she had bedded the washing machine repairman in desperation. “
Forza
Laura—you go girl!” Amanda wrote of the story on her MySpace pages. But not long after, Laura found a boyfriend with whom she spent most nights. The Italian women sublet rooms at the villa to make ends meet. Renting to foreign students was also a good way to practice their English, and the young tenants would never stay for long. It was a strange house, once an outbuilding in an old farm-stead, that seemed to hang off the side of the hill just below the city’s fortress wall. It felt remote, but it was actually just tucked out of sight. The busy street called via Sant’Antonio was parallel with the rooftop, yet the villa was impossible to see unless you knew it was there.