Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (14 page)

This was ass-backward logic: they actually wrote,
because there was no sign of a break-in.
A window was broken and Filomena’s room was turned upside down, but, no, there was no sign of a break-in. No sign at all.

The rest of the judges’ arguments were equally worrisome. They imagined Meredith’s attackers engaging in “frenetic and rapid” sexual penetration, even though the coroner had found no evidence to support this. They said the blood on the bathroom tap was Amanda’s—not true; traces of Amanda’s DNA (in her own bathroom!) were found mixed with Meredith’s blood—and used that to argue for more than one attacker. They placed great significance on an assertion that the sweater Amanda wore on the night of the murder had not been found, when the police’s crime-scene photos—which we saw only later—showed she had left it in plain sight on her bed. The judges decided Amanda had indeed confessed to being present at the scene when she told her mother, “I was there.” And they said it was “completely irrelevant” what the video cameras on
Corso Garibaldi did or did not show at the time we were alleged to have walked to Via della Pergola to murder Meredith.

Strangely, they put the time of death not at 11:00 p.m., as Mignini had suggested, but at 10:00 p.m. They gave no reasoning for this conclusion.

Amanda and I came in for what was by now a familiar drubbing. The judges said my account of events was “unpardonably implausible.” Indeed, I had a “rather complex and worrying personality” prone to all sorts of impulses. Amanda, for her part, was not shy about having “multiple sex partners” and had a “multifaceted personality, detached from reality.” Over and above the flight risk if we were released from prison, the judges foresaw a significant danger that we would make up new fantastical scenarios to throw off the investigation. In Amanda’s case, they said she might take advantage of her liberty to kill again.

*  *  *

Because the court’s wilder, obviously absurd assertions were entered into the case record, my lawyers and I had to take time and trouble to refute them. The more of them there were, the more difficult and exhausting it became to keep the momentum going in our direction and we started sliding backward. It was like the old Greek myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned for all eternity to push a rock up a mountain but never able to reach the top before the rock tumbled back down again. Every time we thought we were almost there, we would be knocked flat by a new avalanche of judicial bullshit.

Perhaps the most damaging assertion made by the prosecution and upheld by Ricciarelli and his colleagues was that the Polizia Postale had arrived at Via della Pergola
before
I called the carabinieri, not after, and that my emergency call was thus a ruse to make
it look as if Amanda and I were raising the alarm when in fact we’d been caught red-handed. Michele Battistelli told investigators that he and Fabio Marzi arrived at 12:35, more than fifteen minutes before phone records showed me making my first emergency call. My lawyers told the review panel this sequence of events was not possible, because Elisabetta Lana was recorded beginning her official statement at police headquarters about the second cell phone at 12:46 and finishing it several minutes later. Battistelli told Filomena and the rest of us that the police had found two cell phones, not just one. Therefore, we argued, he and Marzi may not even have left for Via della Pergola before I’d spoken to the carabinieri.

To which the Ricciarelli court replied: Battistelli
could have
left for Via della Pergola on the basis of the first cell phone only. He
could have
found out about the other one while he was en route, or after he arrived.

The court made no apparent attempt to dig deeper, either through interviews with Battistelli’s superiors, or through Battistelli’s cell phone records, or by any other means. Had such an investigation taken place, we would have been vindicated. But because the judges decided it
could have
happened the way Battistelli claimed, Amanda and I were deemed too dangerous to set free.

*  *  *

The review panel cured me of any residual belief in the fair-mindedness of the prosecution or the judiciary. Before the hearing, my lawyers and I reached out to Mignini, whom I had never encountered one-on-one, and urged him to listen to my story away from the adversarial setting of the courtroom. But by the time Mignini came to see me, one day after Ricciarelli’s ruling was made public, I was no longer interested.

I could see now that Mignini was not open to changing his ideas midstream. He didn’t come for information, only for confirmation of what he already believed. I was becoming aware that, in the Italian criminal justice system, the preventive detention to which Amanda and I were being subjected is frequently used as a pressure tactic to extract confessions. I was now quite sure the authorities were keeping me in solitary confinement to get me to testify against Amanda, if not also against myself. Since I had no such testimony to offer, I did the Italian equivalent of taking the Fifth: I availed myself, as we say, of the right not to respond.

I found some satisfaction in that, but also frustration, because I had at last worked out why Amanda did not leave—could not have left—my house on the night of the murder. She didn’t have her own key, so if she’d gone out alone, she would have had to ring the doorbell and ask me to buzz her back in. Even if I’d been stoned or asleep when she rang, I would have remembered that. And it didn’t happen.

Realizing this brought me enormous peace of mind because I no longer had to fumble around and curse the confusion in my head. Obviously, I wanted to shout the news to the world. But I also understood that telling Mignini now would have been a gift to him; it would only have bought him time to figure out a way around it.

So I said nothing, and felt good about my silence.

*  *  *

One thing I felt compelled to do, even though my lawyers would have advised against it, was to reach out to Meredith’s family. Even though I had barely known her, I’d been living with the horror of her murder for more than a month and could not begin to imagine what her mother, father, brothers, and sister were going through. Thinking about it helped me put my own predicament in some
perspective; it made me grateful I was alive and still able to fight against those who were doing me harm.

I knew the Kerchers had hired an Italian lawyer, Francesco Maresca, whom they picked off a short list provided by the British embassy. I addressed my letter to him, saying how sorry I was for everything that had happened and expressing a wish that the full truth would soon come out.

I was naive enough to believe that Maresca would be sympathetic. I would understand only much later that his professional interest in Amanda and me was the money he could sue our families for. Entertaining the notion that we were innocent did not figure in this mind-set. And so my letter went unanswered.

*  *  *

My family could not believe how the courtroom defeats were piling up and decided something had to change in a hurry.

Although Tiziano Tedeschi spent many evenings with my family discussing the case, my father complained that he never seemed consistently available. Often when they met, Papà said that Tedeschi would interrupt to take personal calls. My father rarely comments on other people’s manners, but eventually he felt compelled to ask his friend to turn the phone off.

Tedeschi, meanwhile, had a laundry list of complaints about Luca Maori. He wasn’t following proper procedure, Tedeschi said. He was making himself too visible in the media and creating all sorts of legal headaches that could haunt us later.

“Tell him yourself,” my father countered. “I can’t play referee between my lawyers.”

“I have told him, but it makes no difference.”

“Well, you need to insist,” my father said. “Assert yourself.”

It’s not clear Tedeschi ever did. He said he felt excluded from the growing relationship between my father and Maori and resentful of the way the family turned to him for solace without letting him run the case as he saw fit.

My father saw things exactly the other way around. He became ever more disillusioned with Tedeschi’s performance as a lawyer and interpreted this as a failure of his personal commitment to me and our entire family. Papà approached Tedeschi’s brother, Enrico, at one point and asked how things might have worked out better.

“If I had offered to pay him, would he have behaved the same way?” my father asked. “Is the issue that he doesn’t have time for us, or that he needs a financial inducement to make the time?”

Enrico, caught between his brother and one of his best friends, said nothing.

My uncle Giuseppe and his wife, Sara, were fed up with both lawyers and inquired into possible replacements. Sara was active in the Alleanza Nazionale, the most conservative party in Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition, and had friends in high political circles, including a number of members of parliament. Those friends were unanimous in recommending Giulia Bongiorno, a lawyer and politician seen as a rising star in both arenas.

Bongiorno had cut her legal teeth during Italy’s most sensational trial of the 1990s. Giulio Andreotti, the grand old man of Italian politics, was brought up on the spectacular charge of collusion with the Sicilian Mafia during his many decades in ministerial office, and Bongiorno was part of the team assigned to defend him. Sure enough, he was acquitted. Not only could Bongiorno handle such a high-profile case, with all the attendant media scrutiny, she also had a reputation as someone able to cut through the verbiage of Italian
jurisprudence to formulate coherent, rock-solid arguments. And she knew courtroom procedure better than most judges.

My father was resistant. He felt a continuing kinship with Tedeschi, despite everything, and he couldn’t help liking Maori, who was infectiously good company and invited Papà to lavish meals and evenings at the country estate.

My father was not, however, going to sit back and let the professionals handle everything. He developed intense personal relationships with the consultants he hired and came to know the ins and outs of the case better than the lawyers. He was particularly aggrieved when the Ricciarelli court would not accept the evidence showing that the shoe prints at Via della Pergola were made by Rudy Guede. It was time, Papà decided, for the family to do their own detective work.

They started with the Nikes. The shoe prints at Guede’s apartment and at the murder scene had eleven concentric circles on the sole, in contrast to the seven circles on mine. My father and his consultants also noticed a small, Y-shaped deformity clearly visible in a number of the shoe prints photographed by the Polizia Scientifica and concluded this was probably a piece of broken glass from Filomena’s window that Guede stepped on as he walked across her room.

If they could substantiate that, it would be a big strike against the staged-break-in theory. If the shoe wearer murdered Meredith first and broke the window only subsequently, as Mignini and the judges had argued, that Y-shaped piece of glass would not have shown up in the bloody imprints around the body.

Regrettably, Guede’s shoes were not available, presumably because he ditched them; they were not at his apartment and they
were not among his possessions when he was arrested in Germany. What my family could do, though, was look for the same size and model Nikes and use them to demonstrate why the shoe prints at Via della Pergola had nothing to do with me.

My father started looking in every shoe shop he could find in Perugia, examining each pair of Nikes for the telltale pattern on the sole. My uncle Giuseppe did the same in and around Bari. The hunt was on.

*  *  *

A few days after the Ricciarelli court ruling, my sister stepped away from her desk into a corridor and bumped into her boss, along with the head of the medical section and the colonel in overall charge of logistics for the entire carabinieri force. The three of them pretended the encounter was spontaneous, but she understood right away it was anything but. The medical section was on a different floor, and the colonel had traveled from the other side of Rome. Funnily enough, she was the very person they wanted to talk to.

All three offered sympathy for the fact that I was languishing in prison and said they were concerned for Vanessa’s well-being. “Why don’t you take some time off so you can be with your family?” her boss suggested. The head of the medical section said he could issue a note saying she was under mental stress; that way, she could stay out for weeks, or even months.

Vanessa’s guard went up right away. In the carabinieri, psychological problems are automatic grounds to be fired. The force doesn’t want mentally unstable people walking around with firearms and powers of arrest. If she agreed to the proposal, she realized her superiors would have a document enabling them to get rid of
her whenever they wanted. And she wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

“Thank you for the offer,” she replied, “but if I want to be with my family, I’ll do it on my own time. The best way for me to overcome stress is to keep working.”

The three men looked at each other, then back at her, and walked away. Vanessa worried that the thing her anti-Mafia investigator friend had warned her about was now starting in earnest.

*  *  *

Mignini questioned Amanda again on December 17, and she, unlike me, agreed to answer his questions in the presence of her lawyers. She was more composed now and gave him nothing new to work with. She couldn’t have been present at the murder, she insisted, because she’d spent all night with me. When Mignini hammered her about the reasons she had mentioned Patrick’s name during her all-night interrogation, she talked about the pressure she’d been under and eventually burst into tears. At that point, her lawyers instructed her to say no more.

One detail Amanda offered was nevertheless used against us. She said that while she and I were lounging about my apartment on the night of the murder, she had read some
Harry Potter.
Soon after, the newspapers claimed this had to be a lie. They printed pictures of a
Harry Potter
book in her bedroom at Via della Pergola and suggested she had inadvertently given away her real whereabouts when Meredith was killed.