Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (11 page)

I didn’t get to see Amanda, not even in Matteini’s courtroom, because our hearings were conducted one after the other. I became aware that Patrick was being held in the isolation cell next to mine, but I made no attempt to communicate with him. Avoiding any appearance of collusion between us seemed more important than exchanging notes on our experiences.

Very slowly, I was learning.

*  *  *

The confusion in my head brought back jarring memories of my first big scare about mind-altering substances. It happened during my Erasmus year in Munich, at a party I attended with two girls who were among my closest friends during my time in Germany.

I was drinking beer, but everyone else was ladling out cups of what looked like sangria from a big cocktail bowl. It’s funny, given all the media gossip about my being addicted to just about every intoxicating substance on the planet, but I’m not a big drinker at all. Like my father, I don’t like feeling out of control, so I usually have just a few sips of beer or wine and steer clear of spirits altogether. That night, my caution was my salvation.

From one moment to the next, the mood in the room changed abruptly. People started pawing and fondling each other, as though they had lost all inhibitions. It was freaky, not sexy at all, and I went looking for my friends to talk about it. But they were as out of it as the rest of the party. The two girls both turned and kissed me on the mouth, one after the other. They had glazed, vacant expressions in their eyes. Some people, I realize, might think this was a fantasy
come true. But these weren’t the girls I knew—warm, charming, funny, like sisters to each other, and to me. It was as if robots had overtaken their bodies and were now trying to overtake mine.

The next day, I asked the girls what had got into them, and they couldn’t say. They remembered nothing.

I have no idea what was in that cocktail, but the episode taught me how swiftly drinks or drugs can change our perceptions and our personalities. Or rather, it
should
have taught me. For some reason, I continued to indulge my occasional marijuana habit, perhaps because it did nothing more harmful than put me to sleep and scramble my short-term memory, which is usually pretty scrambled to begin with.

Now I knew I should have been smarter. I smoked no more than three joints with Amanda in the few days before the murder, but that was three joints too many.

*  *  *

Because our imprisonment had been officially sanctioned by a judge, we were at last granted a few meager privileges. I was still in solitary, but I was given a working television and allowed to read the newspapers. If I asked for extra blankets, I received them. The ban on contact with our lawyers was lifted, and we were told we could receive family visitors very soon.

Still, I was numbed and bewildered by my surroundings. I had nothing of my own in the cell except the increasingly dirty clothes on my back, and nothing to structure the days except the regular portions of bland, unidentifiable meat and overcooked pasta. I made friends with a young Romanian who seemed friendly enough when I talked to him through the cell walls; he helped me circumvent the interminable system of paying and waiting for basic
supplies like soap and garbage bags by giving me some from his own stash. Only later was I told that he was in prison for attempted armed robbery and running a prostitution ring. This was not my world; what was I doing here?

Once I turned on the TV, it didn’t take long to discover that the media coverage of the case was almost as mind-blowing as the case itself. Amanda was “Foxy Knoxy,” a nickname she had originally been given by her soccer coach when she was seven years old, now twisted into an underhanded commentary on her sexual prowess. In Italian this was rendered as
volpe cattiva,
wicked fox. They also called her
luciferina,
little she-devil, and reported breathlessly on a lifestyle supposedly centered around sex, drugs, alcohol, and outrageous lies. Her outstanding academic record and close-knit friends and family somehow went by the wayside.

Reporters mined the Internet for anything—Facebook entries, blogs, videos—that would bolster the predetermined conclusion that we were guilty. A short story about date rape that Amanda had submitted to a University of Washington creative-writing class was held up as evidence of her warped criminal mind. A Myspace video of her boasting about the number of shots she had downed at a party became an excuse to depict her as an alcohol-fueled harpy. I was described as “crazy,” based on a line I’d written in a blog entry, and held up to ridicule for a photograph, taken during a high-spirited moment of fun in my first year in Perugia, in which I was wrapped from head to foot in toilet paper, brandishing a machete in one hand and a bottle of pink alcohol in the other.

None of this was more than standard student nonsense. In the looking-glass world of the media, though, it was tantamount to a criminal indictment.

I knew a lot of the coverage of the case itself was flawed. It was
reported, for example, that the police had found bleach receipts at my house, strongly suggesting I had purchased materials to clean up the crime scene. But my cleaning lady didn’t use bleach, and the only receipts the police found from November 1 onward were for pizza. I wouldn’t have needed to buy bleach, anyway, because I had some left over from my previous cleaning lady. It had sat untouched for months.

Still, I was inclined to believe a lot of what was in the newspapers. Chalk it up to my overprotected childhood, or my naive belief that things, more often than not, are what they seem. In one article, I read with alarm that Amanda had not gone straight home to shower on the morning after the murder, but had met a secret Argentinean boyfriend and gone to a Laundromat to wash a pile of clothes including a pair of blue Nike sneakers. This played havoc with my mind because I had not yet let go of my anger over Amanda’s statements in the Questura, and I was beginning to wonder if I could trust her on anything, including her sexual fidelity. Not only did I mistakenly give this story credence, I even asked myself if she might have taken my pocketknife and given it to the son of a bitch who murdered Meredith.

It all seemed so far-fetched, yet I was still working on the premise that
something
had to be off for the police to act the way they did. I, like much of the reading public, simply could not believe that so much could be made out of nothing at all.

*  *  *

Even before my father received my telegram, he knew he needed to find a second lawyer to back up Tedeschi. If nothing else, we needed someone based in Perugia who could pick up official documents as they became available and develop a relationship with court
officials. My family was given a couple of names and decided to go with a recommendation from Vanessa’s contact in the local carabinieri, the one who had called her to apologize.

The lawyer’s name was Luca Maori, and he introduced himself to my father by pulling up to the piazza outside the public prosecutor’s office in a shiny four-wheel-drive BMW 330. He was self-assured, almost cocky, which impressed Papà at first. Maori’s father had been an extraordinarily successful lawyer before him, and Luca worked out of a vast, beautifully appointed office with antique furniture and fifteenth-century religious paintings by Mastro Giorgio di Gubbio.

Maori also had a vast country estate, to which he regularly invited my father and other members of my family. He was happy to take the case without payment—as indeed Tedeschi had been before him. In both cases, I came to believe you get what you pay for.

I saw Tedeschi first. He did his best to be reassuring, to sound in control. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll work it all out. On the shoe print we just need to get a proper analysis done.” I nodded and smiled, but really I had no faith in him. I had almost no faith in anybody at this point.

Then came Maori. He told me that he too carried pocketknives from time to time. But he didn’t seem too interested in connecting with me beyond such superficial niceties. I felt he didn’t entirely trust me. His game plan, which became clear over a series of meetings, was to dissociate me as much as possible from Amanda. And that was it. He did not have a clear strategy to undermine the prosecution’s evidence on the knife and the shoe print, because—as he indicated to me—he believed there might be something to it.

I didn’t feel any sort of progress until I was at last allowed to see my father and uncle and stepmother on November 10. It was an emotional reunion. I was exhausted and demoralized, I stank of piss and sweat and had several days’ growth of beard. Still, it felt wonderful to hug them.

They couldn’t believe what had happened to me and struggled to hold it together as we talked. “I’ll do everything in my power to get you out,” my father promised. Years later, I learned that as soon as the guards took me back to my cell, he banged his hands against a wall and wept.

All three of them, my father, Mara, and Giuseppe, were beside themselves with fury at the police—my father called them “animals” and “fucking bastards”—and also at Amanda. How could she say those things? Who was she, really? Did I have any idea? They had a bit of a go at me, saying I’d allowed myself to fall too easily under her spell and had been too unguarded in what I’d said to the police and in court.

I wasn’t sure, at that point, that I disagreed. I felt that my lack of caution at the Matteini hearing, the casual way I had said the first things that came into my head, had landed all three of us in prison—me, Amanda, and Patrick. I was having a hard time forgiving myself.

But Papà also gave me some hard information to help structure my thoughts and pull me out from under the miasma. He told me, for instance, that he had texted instead of calling on the night of the murder, and he reminded me about the earlier Will Smith conversation. With his help, I began to separate out the events of October 31 and November 1. Then it occurred to me: Amanda had most probably spent the entire night at my house after all. It was a comforting
thought. If she never left, she couldn’t have passed my knife, or my shoes, off to someone else. She was just as innocent as me.

I even allowed myself a little optimism: my computer, I decided, would show if I was connected to the Internet that night and, if so, when, and how often. Unless Amanda and I had somehow made love all night long, pausing only to make ourselves dinner and nod off to sleep, the full proof of our innocence would soon be out in the open.

If only it could have been that simple. I did not yet know that the Polizia Postale—supposedly experts in handling technology issues—had seized two of my computers along with Amanda’s and Meredith’s and somehow wrecked three of the four hard disks while trying to decipher them. The police blamed the problem on an electrical surge, although they could not begin to account for it happening
three times in a row.
The bottom line was that the damaged disks were now deemed unreadable. That left just my MacBook Pro to provide an alibi for the night of the murder. According to the police, it showed no activity from the time we finished watching
Amélie
at 9:10 p.m. until 5:30 the next morning.

That sounded all wrong to me, and my defense team’s technical experts would later find reasons to doubt the reliability of this finding. But there would be no easy way out of the mess Amanda and I were now in.

*  *  *

The next bombshell dropped days later on the evening news. The murder weapon was no longer thought to be my pocketknife, which had tested negative for traces of blood, but rather the outsize stainless-steel kitchen knife Inspector Finzi had pulled out of my drawer so deliberately on the morning of my arrest. The police
claimed to have found Amanda’s DNA on the handle, and Meredith’s on the tip.

I wasn’t even capable of following the rest of the report. I was overcome with anxiety, felt my heart leaping out of my chest, keeled over, and passed out.

My first thought when I came to—not that I was thinking straight—was that everything had gone topsy-turvy all over again, that Amanda must have taken the knife from my house and either used it to kill Meredith or given it to the person who did.

Not until the next morning, when Tedeschi came to see me, did I understand that the evidence was nowhere near as damning as it sounded. Would they dare to convict me on the basis of a knife that I knew, and the police knew, was plucked at random because it was big, and shiny, and sitting on the top of the pile in my drawer? The coroner’s report, Tedeschi told me, made clear that the murder weapon could not have been anywhere near that big. The Polizia Scientifica had tested the blade for blood and found none.

The police’s contention was that Amanda and I had scrubbed the knife clean with bleach before throwing it back in the drawer. Not only did I know that to be false, but it seemed an unlikely scenario from any perspective. Why take the risk of carrying the murder weapon back through the streets of Perugia to my house, instead of just ditching it? Who cleans a murder weapon and puts it back where it belongs for the police to discover and analyze in microscopic detail?

Still, there was something I could not fathom. How did Meredith’s DNA end up on my knife when she’d never visited my house? I was feeling so panicky I imagined for a moment that I had used the knife to cook lunch at Via della Pergola and accidentally jabbed Meredith in the hand. Something like that had in fact happened in
the week before the murder. My hand slipped and the knife I was using made contact with her skin for the briefest of moments. Meredith was not hurt, I apologized, and that was that. But of course I wasn’t using my own knife at the time. There was no possible connection.

As I worked through all that in my head, I was close to panic. My stomach was burning and I felt ready to leap out of my skin. Somehow, I was still looking for reasons to blame myself, however small the oversight or misstep or omission. Did some part of me, despite everything I thought I knew and felt, resemble the
other
Raffaele Sollecito, the spoiled, mysterious, darkly perverted one on the TV? Chalk it up to Catholic guilt, or the deeply disorienting circumstances I found myself in, but whenever I watched the news, I felt I was being stripped away from my true self and flung into some grotesque Big Brother comedy-horror reality show. The normal me seemed to shrink down to nothing and give way instead to the sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde alter ego most people only ever confront in their nightmares. In this alternate reality, a nasty surprise always lurked around the next corner. And the punch line of every joke was reliably the same: me and my hands, soaked in Meredith’s blood.