Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (16 page)

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At the end of February, the prosecutor’s office released video footage of the Polizia Scientifica going over the house at Via della Pergola, first on November 2–3 and again on December 18, and we knew we had strong grounds on which to challenge their findings.

The forensic teams wore white Tyvek moon suits, with latex gloves and masks over their mouths and noses. But they often failed to change their gloves after they had touched bloodstains or other important evidence, raising immediate questions about contamination. They crowded into small spaces, bumped into each other, and did not take samples so much as wipe entire surfaces clean. Independent experts we consulted expressed alarm. The police had broken virtually every protocol, they said, and failed to ensure that their results could be verified through replication. We had no opportunity to go in and reanalyze the Polizia Scientifica’s findings, because many of the most important spots—including bloodstains on door handles, in the bathroom, on the refrigerator, and so on—had been removed completely.

We also gained some insight into the bra-clasp mystery. On November 2, the day after the murder, the piece of white material with the two metal clasps was photographed on the tile floor directly in front of Meredith’s bed. Somehow, though, the Polizia Scientifica did not recover it until December 18, forty-six days later, by which time the room had been turned upside down, Meredith’s clothes, bedding, and other possessions had been tossed into great, unwieldy piles, and the missing bra piece had unaccountably shifted under a carpet several feet away near Meredith’s desk.

The likelihood of contamination was so great our experts had doubts that a fair-minded court could attribute any significance to a single biological sample found attached to one clasp. How could it be that my DNA was entirely absent from the murder scene except this one tiny trace? With all the coming and going and the scant attention to protocol, it seemed perfectly possible that my DNA was picked up elsewhere in the apartment and transferred, perhaps by a police investigator wearing a dirty glove.

My father was confident enough about the incompetence on display that he decided, once again, to take the evidence public—this time to a local television station in Puglia called Telenorba. Again, the strategy backfired, though for different reasons this time. Many television viewers and critics were shocked to see the police’s video footage of Meredith’s near-naked corpse, including graphic images of the fatal wounds in her neck. The debate that immediately erupted across the country did not even touch on the Polizia Scientifica’s shortcomings; it was all about the shockingly poor taste of broadcasting the footage at all—a decision made by the station, not by my family. Mignini, taking full advantage, later filed suit against us for violation of Meredith’s privacy.

We should have been more patient. The findings were
promising, but we needed to wait for the government to produce its DNA evidence and see what exactly they had. Then, and only then, could we begin knocking down the most damaging allegations against us.

*  *  *

My last hope to avoid trial, or at least to get out of prison while I waited, lay with the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s high court, which agreed to hear a last-ditch appeal at the beginning of April. Giuseppe and Sara again said we should give this task to Giulia Bongiorno, and again my father demurred. Luca Maori gave him the name Alfredo Gaito, a Roman lawyer specializing in hearings before the Corte di Cassazione, and Tiziano Tedeschi vouched for Gaito as one of the best in the business.

If he was the best, though, he certainly did not show it to us. He demanded payment up front without offering my family the chance to sound him out. He never came to see me in prison and said nothing to suggest that this assignment excited or moved or infuriated him in any way. We knew the Cassazione would not review the evidence but would examine only the procedural correctness of the decisions made by previous judges. Nobody, though, offered us proper guidance on how best to challenge those decisions.

As it was, Gaito let Tedeschi—a lawyer with little previous experience of the Cassazione—do most of the talking. Our brief was essentially a rehash of the evidentiary points we considered to be in our favor, not a procedural approach at all. Since the Court was not interested in reviewing documents, it was essentially our word against the lower courts’, and the lower courts, inevitably, won.

Amanda and I were not present, but we were raked over the coals anyway for our supposedly wayward personalities, our “habitual drug use,” and the danger to society the Court said we
represented. The one victory we eked out was a finding that we should have been told we were under criminal investigation before our long night of interrogations in the Questura. The statements we produced would not be admissible at trial.

This was not at all the outcome my family had hoped for, and my father vented his fury in all directions. He had imagined that the white marble halls of the Cassazione were far enough from Perugia for clarity to shine through. Mostly he blamed the lawyers. Why was Gaito such a wash? Why hadn’t Luca Maori said anything? What did Tedeschi think he was doing?

Giuseppe and Sara had been right all along. It was time for a high-powered lawyer inspiring greater confidence to take on my defense. Given the slowness of the Italian justice system, we might now have to wait up to a year for trial to begin, maybe as long as two years for a conclusion. We could afford to make no more mistakes.

My father not only removed Tedeschi from the case; he never spoke to him again. I was left, once again, facing the darkness of my isolation cell with no end in sight.

 III 

 THE PROTECTED SECTION 

[Jesus said:] “Woe to you, lawyers! For you have taken away the key to knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and you hindered those who wanted to enter.”

And as He said these things, the scribes and the Pharisees began to assail Him vehemently, and to cross-examine Him about many things, lying in wait for Him, and seeking to catch Him in something He might say, that they might accuse Him.

—Luke 11:52–54

I
n May 2008, the authorities in Terni finally moved me out of solitary confinement. I was moved instead into the
sezione protetta,
a special “protected section” reserved largely for rapists, pedophiles, and other sex criminals, along with a smattering of Mafia informants and jailhouse snitches—prisoners seen as such pariahs they could not stay with the general inmate population because they were unlikely to survive.

I was told that the decision to place me there was less about the charges of sexual violence I faced than about my media notoriety. They were, they said, putting me there for my own good.

My own good? The record wasn’t too strong so far on things the authorities had done
for my own good.

I’d been languishing in solitary confinement for six months now, presumably
for my own good
since the authorities had offered no other reason to keep me there. It’s difficult to describe just how crazy it can make a person to be deprived of contact with the outside world for twenty-three hours a day. I found it difficult to concentrate on anything for long. I lost my appetite. I struggled to write letters and gave up almost completely on journal entries. I struggled, particularly, to hold on to hope. I felt like a wounded animal, left to whimper in a corner and ignored except for an occasional hard kick
to remind me of how little anybody cared. Only the regular visits from my father and my other family members and friends kept me sane; they were the only things I had to look forward to.

Now my despair was compounded by fear. Who knew what fresh horrors were in store? The way I understood it, this was a whole new form of pressure from the authorities. Nothing was said explicitly, but the subtext seemed clear:
If you don’t want to tell us what we want to hear, you can take your chances with the perverts and child molesters and transsexuals and see how you like that instead.

That’s what I heard when they said they were putting me in the the protected secton
for my own good.
My only option was to steel myself and figure out a path to survival.

I was put in a cell on my own at first, which was a blessing, and I did my best to keep to myself. The name of the wing was not entirely euphemistic. The guards did keep a close eye on us, and my fear of immediate physical danger subsided quite rapidly. But I had no idea how I was going to find common ground with these people. They were loud and vulgar and mean and alarming. Almost immediately, they bombarded me with their idle, distorted opinions of Meredith’s murder to see if they could get a rise out of me.

I didn’t ignore them, but neither did I rise to their bait. I said, calmly, that my conscience was clear and waited until they changed the subject.

The experience brought back memories of a trip to Lisbon I took when I was twenty and the night my friend and I went to buy marijuana in the city’s red-light district. I remember a street brimming with prostitutes, pimps, and drug pushers; people with scars on their faces and trouble on their minds and who knew what weapons hidden beneath their clothing. I was the idiot tourist with
a fanny pack and a camera slung around my neck; I had never felt more vulnerable in my life. I could feel everyone’s hard stares as the hustlers and lowlifes sized me up as a potential customer, or an easy mark. I felt profoundly ill at ease and out of place.

I had a similar feeling now about my fellow prisoners. Only this time there was no beating a hasty retreat. These people were my world, for the foreseeable future.

Like some weirdly dysfunctional high school, the protected section had its clans and cliques that vied for the attention of newcomers like me. Two groups were considered outcasts and forced to fend largely for themselves: the pedophiles, mostly old men with strange leers and odd personal hygiene habits, and the transsexuals, who put the rest of us on edge because they flirted and giggled and made flamboyant public displays of their silicone boob jobs. The rest were organized largely by geographical region. The North Africans stuck together, as did the Umbria natives. The
napoletani
(Neapolitans) formed one Southern Italian clique, and the
baresi
(from Bari), the natives of my region, another.

I knew right away that joining any of these groups could spell trouble. They baited each other constantly; violence never seemed far from the surface. The tension was worst at mealtimes, when the prisoners designated as servers were judged by the exact amount of food they slopped on everyone’s plate. A little more or less could easily start a fight.

At times the tension was so great you could almost taste it, especially when prisoners got drunk on the wickedly strong hooch they made in their cell basins from basic supplies of apples, sugar, and yeast. (I tried it just once and found it disgusting.) One inmate who called another
figlio di puttana,
son of a whore, had boiling
oil thrown in his face. Another aggrieved prisoner smashed the gas bottle he kept in his cell for cooking and came after his target with the broken shards.

To this point in my notably sheltered life, the most violence I’d seen were a few drunken punches thrown at a club. Now I was in the midst of hardened criminals with hair-trigger tempers and feral instincts only heightened by being caged together. This was no place for a self-professed nerd and computer geek; the thought of being attacked by one of these guys, or even being caught in the fray, scared the shit out of me. I was exposed and unprotected in this “protected section” and could only live by my wits.

The guards did their best to break up the fights and were scrupulous about confiscating weapons. But the inmates were usually one step ahead of them. They made knives by sharpening down baby scissors or filing away at spoons. They would hide them in tubs of shaving cream or behind the radiators in their cells. Actually using these weapons was a big risk because being caught meant a trip to solitary confinement and double time for any charges leading to a conviction. But these were volatile people who sometimes acted first and thought better of it later.

The Bari group courted me to join them, as did the Neapolitans, but I said no to them all. Sometimes I would make a joke and say I wanted to be neutral, like Switzerland. Other times I would explain that I was disgusted with my country and was starting a new clique of my own called the United States—the country where most of my public supporters seemed to come from.

I was pleased to discover that I had a talent for keeping trouble at bay. I couldn’t flinch or run, because that could give my would-be tormentors the idea I had something to hide and encourage them to go after me all the more. Whenever I was taunted about Amanda,
or the knife I had supposedly plunged into Meredith’s neck, I had to face down my antagonists, if only to show that I wasn’t afraid. I was calm but insistent. My approach reminded me a little of the way my father taught me to react if we came across beavers in the wild; the most important idea to convey was that you weren’t worth antagonizing, either because you were unflappable or because you might just fight back.

I thought about a much-misunderstood line from the Bible, when Christ talks about turning the other cheek. People often think that Jesus was encouraging his followers to play the victim and say, “Go ahead, punish me some more, I’ll even make it easy for you.” But I think that interpretation is absurd, and makes Christianity seem like a religion fit only for masochists. Turning the other cheek
really
means meeting provocation with indifference and just a hint of defiance. It means telling your antagonist, “Do what you must, but you’re not going to get what you want, and it might just backfire.”

*  *  *

My sister, Vanessa, had her own daunting environment to deal with. She was the only uniformed woman in a teeming office of about a thousand carabinieri, and while she was used to attracting unwarranted attention, she became aware, over the spring of 2008, that she was being more than just noticed; she was being spied on.