Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

I
LOVE AND DEATH

II
KAFKA ON THE TIBER

III
THE PROTECTED SECTION

IV
JUSTICE

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments

Photographs

About Raffaele Sollectio

This book is dedicated to the Italian state bureaucracy, and to those public servants who unwittingly put their own interests ahead of the lives of others.

It is dedicated to anyone ensnared in epic, backbreaking legal battles, and to those who desire true justice but lack the money and the support to bring the truth to light.

And it is dedicated to you, Papà, because you fought for me from the depths of your soul, with a determination and a single-mindedness few possess. I love you.

 PREFACE 

We don’t have the evidence, the hard facts; but by God the truth must be out there somewhere!

—Luigi Pirandello

T
his is the story of two ordinary people who stumbled upon an extraordinary circumstance, the brutal murder of a British student in Italy. Neither Amanda Knox nor I had anything to do with the crime, but we came perilously close to spending the rest of our lives in prison because the authorities found it easier, and more convenient, to take advantage of our youth and inexperience than to mount a proper investigation.

It’s that simple. And that absurd.

On November 1, 2007, Amanda and I were carefree students at the beginning of a cross-cultural love affair in a beautiful Umbrian hill town. Within days, we were thrown into solitary confinement in a filthy prison, without access to lawyers or loved ones, accused of acts so heinous and disturbing we may never be able to banish them from our thoughts, or our nightmares.

In the newspapers and on the nightly news, we were turned into monsters, grotesque distortions of our true selves. It did not matter how thin the evidence was, or how quickly it became apparent that the culprit was someone else entirely. Our guilt was presumed, and everything the prosecution did and fed to the media stemmed from that false premise. By the time we had dismantled the case and
demonstrated its breathtaking absurdity, we had spent four of what should have been the best years of our lives behind bars.

Amanda and I certainly made our share of mistakes. At the beginning we were too trusting, spoke too frivolously and too soon, and remained oblivious to the danger we were courting even after the judicial noose began to tighten. Amanda behaved in ways that were culturally baffling to many Italians and attracted a torrent of gossip and criticism. We were young and naive, unthinking and a little reckless. Of that much we were guilty.

But what we did not do—and could not have done, as the evidence clearly showed—was murder Meredith Kercher.

Meredith was Amanda’s friend, a fellow English speaker in the house they shared with two Italian women just outside Perugia’s ancient city walls. She was twenty-one years old, intelligent, and beautiful. She and Amanda knew each other for a little over three weeks, long enough to feel their way into their new surroundings and appreciate each other’s interests and temperaments. I never heard about a single tense moment between them. On the contrary, they toured the sights and went out for meals and music and dancing.

Meredith, of course, suffered infinitely worse luck than we did: she came home, alone, on an ordinary Thursday night and had her throat slit by an intruder hoping to steal the household rent money. But the roles could easily have been reversed. If Meredith’s Italian boyfriend had not gone away for the weekend and if Amanda had not started sleeping over at my house, she—not Meredith—might have been the one found in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor. That reality was quickly lost amid the hysteria of the media coverage. But it continued to hover over both of us—Amanda especially—as we sank into the legal quagmire and struggled in vain to overcome the public image of us as heartless killers.

This should not have been a complicated case. The intruder was quickly identified as Rudy Guede, an African immigrant living in Perugia with a history of break-ins and petty crimes. His DNA was found all over Meredith’s room, and footprints made in her blood were found to match his shoes. Everything at the crime scene pointed to a lone assailant, and a single weapon. Guede repeatedly broke into houses by throwing a rock through a window, as happened here, and he had been caught by the authorities in the past with a knife similar to the one that inflicted Meredith’s fatal wounds.

Guede did not call the police, as Amanda and I did, or volunteer information, or agree to hours of questioning whenever asked. Rather, he fled to Germany as soon as the investigation began and stayed there until his arrest two and a half weeks later.

Guede’s apprehension and eventual conviction on murder charges should have been the end of the story. But by the time Guede was identified, the police and the public prosecutor’s office had convinced themselves that the murder was, incredibly, the result of a sexual orgy gone wrong, in which Amanda and I had played leading roles. Their speculations ignited a media firestorm, inspiring sensationalist headlines across the world about the evil lurking behind our seemingly innocent faces.

The authorities had no shred of evidence to substantiate this story line, only erroneous suppositions and wild imaginings. We had an alibi for the most likely time of death, and none of the initial forensic evidence tied us to the scene of the crime. Nothing in our backgrounds gave any hint of a propensity for violence or criminality. We were both accomplished, hardworking students known to our friends and families for our gentleness and even tempers. Yet the authorities stuck to their guns. They fed the media a steady diet of sensationalist stories of how Amanda, the promiscuous
American she-devil, and I, her sex-and-drug-addled Italian helpmeet, had tried without success to drag Meredith into our depravity and punished her by plunging an outsize kitchen knife into her neck.

It might have been funny if the consequences had not been so devastating. Listening to the tortured language of the prosecution—“one can hypothesize that . . . ,” “it is possible that . . . ,” “one can imagine that . . . ,” “this scenario is not incompatible with . . .”—it became clear that the authorities, like the media, were treating our case with the bizarre levity of an after-dinner game of Clue, or an Agatha Christie mystery. Everyone, even the judges in their black robes, had theories they were itching to air. It could have been Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the revolver; instead it was Amanda and Raffaele in the bedroom with the kitchen knife. How was it conceivable that a democratic country known for its style and beauty and effortless charm—the Italy of the Renaissance and
la dolce vita
—could allow two young people to be catapulted to international notoriety and convicted of a horrific crime
on the basis of nothing at all
?

The answer has something to do with the grim embrace that developed between the prosecutor’s office and the sensationalist media. Like addicts constantly looking for the next fix, each fed the other’s insatiable appetite for titillation and attention. The casual cruelty of “Foxy Knoxy” and her Italian lover became too good a story line to abandon, even when it became apparent it was overheated and unsustainable. Our suffering was the price to be paid for the world’s continuing entertainment.

The meandering complexities of the Italian legal system, where speculation and hearsay are allowed to run rampant and time invariably slows to a maddening trickle, did little to help our cause. For reasons deeply embedded in the country’s history, the concept of
proof beyond a reasonable doubt scarcely exists in Italy, and the very notion of undisputed fact is viewed with suspicion, if not outright aversion. Few in Italian society wield as much unfettered power as the robed members of the judiciary, whose independence makes them answerable to nobody but themselves. Many Italians retain a healthy skepticism about the reliability of their procedures and rulings. The courts—tainted by politics, clubbishness, pomposity, and excruciating delays—are the most reviled institution in the country.

Because the Italian legal system is almost completely blind to precedent and relies on a tangle of impenetrable codes and procedures, prosecutors and judges have almost boundless freedom to spin their cases into any shape they please and create legal justifications on the fly. Often, they are more interested in constructing compelling narratives than in building up the evidence piece by piece, a task considered too prosaic and painstaking to be really interesting. Prosecutors and judges are not independent of each other, as they are in Britain or the United States, but belong to the same professional body of magistrates. So a certain coziness between them is inevitable, especially in smaller jurisdictions like Perugia. Defendants unlucky enough to be held in pretrial detention are effectively condemned before any charges are brought and serve long terms regardless of the outcome because cases invariably grind on for years.

*  *  *

Even though Amanda and I shared the same unjust fate, the case was always about her. Amanda, Amanda, Amanda: to this day, nobody in Italy can utter that name without thinking reflexively about
that American.
In the popular imagination she was Amanda the temptress, the sinner, the whore of Perugia. She was Amanda the heartless
when she didn’t cry over Meredith’s death and Amanda the hysterical manipulator when she did. Whatever she did—practice yoga, play Beatles songs, buy underwear—it was held against her.

For the prosecutor’s office, Amanda was a bonanza they did everything to cash in on. It wasn’t just the thrill of the hunt, the kudos of nailing a fresh-faced, young American and seeing the story endlessly relayed across the world. She also represented a way out, a grand distraction for Giuliano Mignini, our lead prosecutor, who was facing a separate trial of his own on misconduct charges and was fighting for his career and his reputation.

What about me? By the end, I vanished so far from public view I thought of myself—or rather my
other
self, the one unaccountably on trial for killing a student I barely knew—as Mr. Nobody. In court, Mignini didn’t bother to ascribe a motive to me, dismissing me merely as Amanda’s
fidanzatino,
her “little boyfriend,” who would follow her anywhere and do whatever she wanted.

I don’t think the prosecution or police ever seriously thought of me as a murderer. They had one overriding reason to arrest me, throw me into solitary confinement, and threaten me with life imprisonment, and that was to pressure me into rolling over and testifying against Amanda. The police made that pretty clear on the night of my arrest. Stop protecting that
cow,
that
whore,
they said, or we will make your life a living hell. On this they proved true to their word.

I heard much of the same for the next four years. Why, people asked, would I defend Amanda when I had known her only a few days and could not be sure what she might have done? Did I not realize that by losing my head over her I was throwing my whole life away?

The police were not even the ones exerting the most pressure.
I was bombarded by my lawyers, my family, the people I spent the most time with and felt closest to in the world. I don’t know what would have happened if I had caved and concocted some half-truth I knew to be dishonest. Perhaps it would have been my ticket out of prison. Perhaps, to save face, the authorities would have continued to prosecute me anyway.

But I do know this: if I had changed my testimony, Amanda would have remained behind bars for the rest of her life, not just the twenty-six years to which she was originally sentenced. There would have been no saving her. And that was something my conscience could never permit. The only hope was for me to stick to the truth and pray that my family and my lawyers could demolish the prosecution’s case piece by piece until the courts had no option but to set both of us free.

It was a high-wire act, every step of the way. And this is how we did it.

 I 

 LOVE AND DEATH 

Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.

No greater pain than to remember happy times in a state of misery.