Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (13 page)

Over time, I developed a personal, extended prayer I recited every morning. This was a version of a prayer I’d been saying every day since my mother’s death, modified to take account of the new horrors unfolding in my life. I took solace in the ritual, which brought me back to my early experience of the Catholic catechism. It became a way for me to feel safe within a deep and private part of myself.

It began with an Ave Maria. Then I would remember all the people in my life who seemed most important: my family, those in difficulty, Amanda and her family, poor Meredith and all those who loved and mourned her. Finally, I prayed for the prosecutors and the judges; I prayed that Jesus would open their minds and roll back the clouds preventing them from seeing the truth. I knew that wasn’t likely to happen on its own. Why not pray for a miracle and hope the Lord would somehow intervene?

It wasn’t always easy to keep my doubt and anger at bay. Sometimes I would look to Jesus as a source of strength, a higher power beyond the ephemera of each day’s battles and anxieties. Other times I found Him as ridiculous as everything else. “You were crucified because you did a lot more for others than you should have,” I fumed in my journal one day. “You know what I think? You would have done better to give a little less and live longer. . . . I know you saved us from our sins and all that, but sometimes I wonder if it was worth your while.”

Clearly, when I wrote that, I was having a bad day.

*  *  *

The prosecution’s tactics grew nastier, never more so than when Amanda was taken to the prison infirmary the day after Patrick’s release and told she had tested positive for HIV.

She was devastated. She wrote in her diary, “I don’t want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to create something good. I want to get old. I want my time. I want my life. Why why why? I can’t believe this.”

For a week she was tormented with the idea that she would contract AIDS in prison, serving time for a crime she did not commit. But the whole thing was a ruse, designed to frighten her into admitting how many men she had slept with. When asked, she provided a list of her sexual partners, and the contraceptive method she had used with each. Only then was she told the test was a false positive.

To the prosecution, the information must have been a disappointment: seven partners in all, of whom four were boyfriends she had never made a secret of, and three she qualified as one-night stands. Rudy Guede was not on the list, and neither was anyone else who might prove useful in the case. She hadn’t been handing herself around like candy at Le Chic, as Patrick now alleged. She’d fooled around with two guys soon after arriving in Italy, neither of them at Patrick’s bar, and then she had been with me. Okay, so she was no Mother Teresa. But neither was she the whore of Babylon.

To compound the nastiness, the list was eventually leaked to the media, with the erroneous twist that the seven partners on the list were just the men she’d had since arriving in Perugia. Whatever one thought of Amanda and her free-spirited American attitude toward sex, this callous disregard for her privacy and her feelings was the behavior of savages.

*  *  *

My sister, Vanessa, had struggled with my plight from the beginning. She was the policewoman in the family; this was her area of expertise. As the days turned into weeks, she began to berate herself
for not jumping in the car and driving to Perugia right away. “If I had shown up in uniform,” she told herself, and later repeated to me, “my brother probably would not have ended up in prison at all.”

She was in a tricky position. She wanted to help, but she did not want to give the impression she was interfering, because it might cause the Perugia authorities to dig in their heels further. Her immediate boss offered to make a call on her behalf; she urged him not to.

As it became apparent I might not be released before trial, her colleagues slowly changed their behavior around her. She was no longer just a fellow officer with a brother in trouble; she was now the sister of a leading defendant in the biggest murder case in the country. Nobody said a word, at first, but she noticed people beginning to keep their distance. They acted a little more formally and joked a little less. These were little things, and if she’d challenged people, they would no doubt have said her imagination was playing tricks. But she found them disturbing all the same.

In late November, she arranged to meet a friend who worked as a top anti-Mafia investigator. The friend did not want to be seen with her anywhere near her carabinieri barracks in Piazza del Popolo, in the heart of Rome, so they met at a bar across the river in a suitably anonymous residential neighborhood.

He gave it to her straight: “They will do everything they can to get rid of you. It won’t happen suddenly. It’ll be a gradual thing, like a tap dripping.
Goccia a goccia,
drop by drop.”

He told her to write down everything she did and everything she witnessed. She should record important conversations. Vanessa would not only have to act by the book at all times, she should be prepared to prove it. Like Caesar’s wife, as the Romans like to say: beyond reproach.

Vanessa took the advice to heart and was soon glad she did.

*  *  *

My last best chance of getting out of prison quickly lay with three judges whose job was to go back over Judge Matteini’s ruling and make sure it still held up in the light of everything that had transpired since. They were due to convene at the end of November. My father hired consultants to report on my computer activity on the night of the murder, other consultants to look at the shoe-print evidence, and yet more consultants to go through the coroner’s report and assess the likelihood that any of my knives could have produced the fatal wounds.

Papà was spinning like a dervish to clear my name, but not everyone he hired was as helpful as he hoped. One consultant whom he asked to monitor the Polizia Scientifica demanded eight thousand euros up front, only to prove reluctant to make overt criticisms of the police’s work, the very thing for which he’d been hired. A forensic expert who also seemed a little too close to the police charged four thousand euros for his retainer with the boast, “I’m expensive, but I’m good.” He wasn’t. A computer expert recommended by Luca Maori didn’t know anything about Macs, only PCs.

And so it went. Later in the case, another disappointing consultant bragged to Papà, “If you give me fifty thousand euros, I’ll get your son out of prison.” My father couldn’t afford to make mistakes, and he quickly learned not to trust what the consultants promised, only what they delivered. At the same time, mistakes were inevitable; he’d never done anything remotely like this in his life, time was pressing, and we weren’t getting nearly as much information out of the prosecutor’s office as we would have liked. Papà would later blame at least some of the confusion on Maori because his recommendations were often disappointing, and because he seemed
altogether too interested in offering himself up for media interviews when, to us, discretion seemed the wiser course.

Still, my father and Maori came up with two solid ideas before the new court hearing. The first was to search the underbrush around the house at Via della Pergola for signs of the murder weapon. The prosecutor’s office granted permission for the search, and a team of gardeners from Maori’s country estate spent several hours picking through the steep upper stretch of the ravine with the help of thick ropes they used as a dragnet. They came up empty, but the request itself made an important point in my favor: it suggested I was confident about my innocence and wanted only to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The second idea was to ask to see video footage from two security cameras on the route from my house to Amanda’s. The first camera was outside a military barracks on Corso Garibaldi, halfway between my front door and Piazza Grimana. The second was a city-operated camera on the corner of Piazza Grimana itself. If Amanda or I had gone to Via della Pergola on the night of November 1, we argued, the cameras would have picked up our trace—possibly in both directions.

Again, the request was as much about appearing innocent as it was about clearing my name. This time, though, we were turned down without explanation.

*  *  *

In his own preparations for the new court hearing, Mignini came up with what might be termed the Great Mushroom Conspiracy theory. It stemmed from something the coroner found in Meredith’s esophagus: a largely undigested piece of food, which one of
his assistants said looked like a mushroom. Mignini knew that when Meredith was with her English friends in the early evening of November 1, she ate pizza, ice cream, and apple crumble, but no mushrooms. So where could this extra piece of food, assuming that’s what it was, have come from?

Mignini’s answer, as he wrote in a brief for the three-judge review panel, was that Meredith and Amanda must have helped themselves to some mushrooms after Meredith returned home. Mignini had learned that both girls were fond of button mushrooms. The police even found some in my refrigerator, which in Mignini’s retelling seemed to cast more suspicion on me.

Why could any of this possibly matter? It mattered because Mignini had a problem. The coroner, Luca Lalli, had been unable to ascertain the time of death with any accuracy because he was not granted access to the body until just before 1:00 a.m on November 3, almost twelve hours after it was discovered and more than twenty-four hours after Meredith’s murder. (Mignini would eventually concede that making Lalli wait had been a mistake.) Usually, medical examiners take temperature readings to calculate the hour of death, but by the time the Polizia Scientifica had finished going over the crime scene, Meredith’s corpse was cold. Lalli did make one significant discovery, however: none of the food that Meredith had eaten in the hours before the murder left her stomach for her upper intestine. That meant, based on normal digestion times, she must have died within two or three hours of her last meal.

This was a problem for the prosecution because Meredith’s English friends said they ordered pizza at about 6:00 p.m. That would put the murder at around 9:00 p.m., right around the time
Meredith returned home. But at 9:00 p.m. Amanda and I were still at my house watching
Amélie,
according to the police’s interpretation of the user logs on my MacBook Pro. How to get around this?

Mignini decided Meredith’s last meal had taken place later—the mushroom party—and used that as an argument to buy himself a couple of hours’ more time. His brief put the time of death at about 11:00 p.m. Lalli, following Mignini’s lead that Meredith’s last meal was at 9:00 p.m., later concurred (while at the same time expressing caution about how much was known about the timing of her food intake). The argument was scientifically untenable because what mattered was not the time Meredith
stopped
eating, but rather the time she started. No matter how many mushrooms she put in her mouth after she got home, the digestion of the pizza was already well under way. There were grounds to doubt she had eaten mushrooms at all, because the medical team found only the one fragment, which was never tested or even saved after the autopsy. Similar-looking fragments found in her stomach were clearly apples from the apple crumble; perhaps a piece of her dessert did not go all the way down before she died.

Those arguments, though, would only arise later. For now, the main purpose of the mushroom theory was to keep the court open to the idea that Amanda and I were present at the murder scene.

And it worked.

*  *  *

The day before the new hearing, I showed Luca Maori a prison diary I’d been keeping so he could assess whether any of it might be useful in court. I had used the diary to try to solidify my memory of the sequence of events. But I’d also jotted down more personal
reflections about my accusers, about the prison staff, and about my state of mind. Maori thought it was too risky to keep such a thing in my cell, and I agreed he should take it to his office for safekeeping.

We were still talking when prison guards swooped into the visiting room and ordered Maori to hand over the diary. Maori exploded, saying this was a blatant violation of attorney-client privilege and of my right to privacy. When the guards refused to back down and carried my handwritten pages away, Maori asked the guards to call Mignini’s office and demanded the prosecutor’s intervention. Mignini agreed and instructed the guards to return the diary. They did as they were told.

It appears, however, that while Maori was on the phone, someone put the diary through a photocopier because the text—minus the last few pages—was leaked to the Tuscan newspaper
La Nazione
and printed ten days later. I can’t begin to say how demoralizing and humiliating it was to have my private thoughts and feelings exposed to the world in this way.

And I was not the only target. Shortly after the guards descended on me, they entered Amanda’s cell and seized her diaries too. These also found their way into the media, but not for a few months.

The good news was, the authorities found nothing more in our writings that they could twist into incriminating evidence. But the message seemed clear: there was no length to which they would not go to try to make the accusations against us stick.

*  *  *

The three-judge panel not only ruled against us, they were shockingly dismissive of almost everything my lawyers and I had to say. They looked at photographs of the murder house and decided that Filomena’s window was too far off the ground (about thirteen feet)
for an intruder to hit reliably with a rock, and certainly too high to clamber up to. “It’s a feat even Spider-Man would have had trouble pulling off,” the lead judge, Massimo Ricciarelli, wrote with spectacular disdain as he formulated his justification for keeping Amanda and me behind bars.

It should have been obvious from the photographs that there were plentiful toeholds, including a metal grate on the window directly below Filomena’s. But Ricciarelli and his colleagues, no Spider-Men themselves, could not imagine anyone reaching the window without a ladder. Since a ladder had not been found, they concluded the murderer or murderers must have gone through the front door. Since the door showed no sign of a break-in, they argued, whoever went in there must have had a key.