Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (28 page)

“But there is a trace,” Mignini said. “There’s the bra clasp with Sollecito’s DNA.”

But what about Amanda?

“The two of them say they were together—there’s a witness who saw them together. So Sollecito was there. Therefore Amanda was there.”

This was extraordinary, circular logic. It was a theoretical possibility, according to Mignini, that I wasn’t involved, but the only proof that Amanda, the “main instigator,” was at the scene was a controversial biological trace attributable to me!

Graham did not let up the pressure. “That’s not good enough. Where’s Amanda in all this?”

“Amanda is there because of the knife.”

“But you didn’t find the knife in the room.”

“Listen, listen . . .” Mignini was clearly scrambling. “I think there probably were traces but the police couldn’t see them. . . . The police didn’t analyze all the traces they found. They made choices.”

Graham went back to his experts. According to them, he said, standard procedure in such cases is to search exhaustively for traces of the most likely suspects. If at first those traces don’t materialize, you go back in and keep looking. “So we’re left with two possibilities,” Graham said. “Either she wasn’t there, or the analysis was not done properly. It has to be one or the other.”

Mignini was once again flustered. He cast doubt on the reliability of Graham’s experts. But he also raised a further, extraordinary possibility. “Theoretically, Amanda could have instigated the crime. . . . Someone could have instigated the crime standing in the next room.” He then said my name several times as if to
suggest—though he did not say so explicitly—that I was her robot and murdered Meredith on her instructions. Somehow, according to Mignini, this related to the version Amanda had been forced to give in the Questura when she said Patrick had murdered Meredith and she was in her bedroom blocking her ears.

My family and I read this with our jaws hanging open. Would Mignini dare raise this new theory of the crime in court? We were half hoping so because it was so inherently absurd. But Mignini did not dwell on it and changed the subject as soon as Graham allowed him to.

Mignini preferred to focus on what he said were indications of our presence
outside
Meredith’s room: footprints, shoe prints, bloodstains. Our experts had countered a lot of these already; the shoe prints and all the footprints, except those made by Amanda after her shower, were Guede’s. And we would soon learn that the footprints supposedly made in blood—something Mignini had argued for and Judge Massei had accepted—were no such thing. The most Patrizia Stefanoni had said on the stand was that she hadn’t tested the prints for traces of blood. But even this was not true.

As her own documentation now showed, she
had
tested the prints for blood, and the tests came back negative.

*  *  *

Sometime that spring, I made friends with a Neapolitan named Corrado, a former policeman now in solitary confinement for raping a prostitute. He reached out to me, for some reason, and I saw him on the exercise yard for games of soccer during the few hours a day when he was not forced to be alone. In one game, Corrado got hurt; he argued furiously with some of the other players about who was to blame and filed a formal complaint.

The others found this unforgivable and beat the crap out of him the next time they saw him. The guards rushed over, and again Corrado’s fellow soccer players were written up.

I wasn’t involved, but I got an earful from both sides and found myself caught awkwardly in the middle. One day, out on the yard, the old Neapolitan gangster Vittorio Vespa approached me and explained that a group of Neapolitans and Tunisians were planning to stab Corrado as we climbed the steps back up to our cells after the game. “Whatever you see on the steps,” Mosca advised, “keep walking. Don’t look at what is happening.”

I decided to tip off Corrado, which I did as discreetly as I could. As soon as the game was over, he ran up the stairs at full speed, as I had suggested, and escaped. The men who were supposed to stab him were confronted by some of their fellow prisoners and beaten up as punishment for failing to fulfill their mission.

Fortunately, nobody found out what I had done. And Corrado never showed his face on the exercise yard again.

*  *  *

At the end of June, the defense teams made an all-out effort to discredit one of the stranger witnesses who had produced testimony against us: Rudy Guede. I say “produced testimony” because he had not, to this point, actually testified in court. Rather, he had changed his version of the murder several times, making no mention at first of Amanda or me, and then belatedly “confirming,” in a letter to Mignini, that we were the culprits.

My lawyers had never been given a chance to cross-examine him. So they could not demonstrate, for example, that when he chatted with his friend, Giacomo Benedetti, in the days before his arrest, he
had said categorically that Amanda had nothing to do with Meredith’s death. Nor had they had a chance to correct the public perception—as reported in the newspapers—that Guede had “identified” me as a culprit as early as April 2008, just before our hearing before the Corte di Cassazione. (The reports, as we learned once we were shown the official documentation, were flat-out wrong.) Now a number of Guede’s cellmates had come forward in the wake of our lower-court conviction and said he had confessed parts of the murder to them. We had a handful on the witness stand ready to repeat their stories.

This was one of the tensest episodes in our whole legal saga. One of the witnesses Amanda’s lawyers wanted to question was Luciano Aviello, the gangster who had befriended me in prison and later blamed the murder on his own brother. He had gone on to spend time with Guede in a prison in Viterbo. Giulia Bongiorno was vehemently opposed to calling him because she didn’t believe the story about his brother and didn’t expect the court to either; his testimony risked casting a shadow on the credibility of the other witnesses. She exchanged words with Amanda’s lead counsel, Carlo Dalla Vedova, but to no avail. Dalla Vedova appeared to think that any testimony blaming someone other than his client was worth having in the trial record. And so Aviello appeared.

The prosecution went into overdrive to stop any of the witnesses talking. When the first one was called—his name was Mario Alessi—he began to describe how he had held lengthy discussions of the crime with Guede, only to be swiftly interrupted by the lead appeals prosecutor (not Mignini, who remained actively involved, but Giancarlo Costagliola). In a spectacular intervention, Costagliola informed Alessi that, based on just the start of his testimony, he was now under investigation for lying.

Alessi asked for a minute or two to consult with his lawyers, at which point he fell entirely silent. The next witness, Aviello, was similarly told he was under investigation, in his case for slandering his brother. Clearly the prosecution intended to cow each of the witnesses by any means at their disposal.

Then Judge Hellmann stepped in and issued an order not only insisting that the witnesses be brought back in, but also stipulating that they would not be granted the usual right to remain silent. They had come to testify, Hellmann insisted, and he wanted to hear what they had to say. As long as they were in his courtroom, they would enjoy a modicum of protection.

This was excellent news, not because these witnesses were necessarily all that reliable, but because they indicated that Guede was completely
un
reliable. They also added alternative explanations for parts of the case that had either gone unexamined or had simply been blamed on us. Most useful in this regard was Alessi, who said Guede had talked about masturbating over Meredith’s body during the fatal attack. If anyone wanted an explanation of the semen stain on the pillowcase, this could be it.

A little over a week later, Guede himself took the stand. He was invited to offer specific rebuttals to the prison-house witnesses’ testimony, but he refused. Mignini revealed the existence of a letter Guede had written in response to Alessi and the others, and invited Guede to read it to the court. He said he had trouble deciphering it. So, farcically, Mignini read it himself. The letter was full of rhetorical flourishes about “blasphemous insinuations” and “scurrilous gossip,” as well as acrobatic uses of the subjunctive and other verbal sophistications that seemed entirely beyond a person like Rudy Guede. We could prove nothing, but our impression was
that Guede had considerable qualms about saying, under oath and in his own voice, that the prison witnesses were lying.

We would have much preferred him to speak up. Amanda and I were particularly incensed that Guede refused to answer questions directly addressing his role in the murder. Somebody needed to rebut his most recent contention that we’d all plotted the murder together. So Amanda and I both rose and gave impromptu statements.

Amanda went first. “The only times that Rudy Guede, Raffaele, and I have been together in the same place,” she said, “is in a courtroom.” The prosecutors glowered; this was one of the few points that Judge Massei had conceded to us, and raising it again was clearly effective. I mentioned the fact—also incontrovertibly in our favor—that Guede had not originally incriminated either of us. “How am I supposed to defend myself [from Guede’s accusations],” I added, “if he won’t answer any questions?”

Honestly, I didn’t even want to think about Guede. But I wasn’t about to let him spread lies so he could pin his murder on Amanda and me. Our indignation did not go unnoticed.

*  *  *

Two days later, Conti and Vecchiotti issued their report. It was even better than we could have hoped. Not only was there no trace of blood on the kitchen knife, they wrote, but the way in which Stefanoni and her colleagues had examined the tip for traces of Meredith’s DNA violated international protocols for “low copy number” DNA testing and could not be regarded as reliable. They were equally scathing about the bra clasp: they cited multiple reasons why the evidence might have been contaminated before it was
analyzed and said there were at least three Y chromosomes on the clasp, not just the one we knew about, pointing to any number of possible male subjects besides me.

We had to wait almost a month before Conti and Vecchiotti could be brought into court to present their results in person, and when they did, it was devastating to the prosecution. They took turns reading out chunks of testimony from the transcripts of previous hearings and overlaid them with extracts of the police’s own video footage, which they projected in the courtroom. The disconnect was so stark that at times it made people laugh out loud. While Stefanoni, Finzi, and others were quoted giving assurances that they used clean gloves at all times and observed all the appropriate protocols, the images gave a very different impression of police officials coming and going without gloves, without face masks, sometimes without protective clothing of any kind.

Members of the Polizia Scientifica were shown using the same swab to take samples of as many as three different bloodstains. We saw how they touched Meredith’s body and even her fatal wounds with their bare hands. Sometimes they used tweezers to place samples in evidence bags, but sometimes they used a finger—gloved or ungloved—to shove them a little further.

Conti and Vecchiotti explained that the kitchen knife had been put in a plastic bag, even though the FBI and other agencies around the world advise in no uncertain terms not to use plastic bags for such evidence. The knife was then left sitting around the Polizia Scientifica’s lab in Rome for six days before it was examined—another no-no because other items with Meredith’s DNA were being analyzed close by, and the risk of cross-contamination was considerable.

The most incriminating visual evidence of all, and the thing that made all the headlines, was footage Conti and Vecchiotti showed
of someone’s dirty glove handling the bra clasp when it was finally recovered from Meredith’s room on December 18, 2007. This, on its own, was prima facie evidence of contamination. But there was more: the video footage showed that no attempt had been made to seal off Meredith’s room from the rest of the house. The contents of the room had been tossed in all directions before the clasp was recovered. The clasp itself had grown rusty over time and was now unusable as a forensic sample. Conti and Vecchiotti concluded that there was no way the clasp could be used as evidence against me, or anyone else.

*  *  *

The prosecutors were beside themselves, and they let it show. They talked among themselves during trial testimony, threw their judicial robes onto their table in apparent disgust, and spent extended periods out of the courtroom altogether. At least once, the bailiffs had to go looking for them so the trial could continue.

I think it’s fair to say that Mignini, Comodi, and their colleagues were blindsided. They tried to poke holes in Conti and Vecchiotti’s work, without great success. They even gave the court a letter in which the head of the Polizia Scientifica objected to the way his team had been “stigmatized.” Judge Hellmann read it aloud and moved swiftly on. After the inevitable summer break—more agonizing waiting—the prosecutors recalled Dr. Stefanoni so she could defend herself, to no great effect, and they put in a formal request for yet another independent analysis of the DNA evidence because they weren’t satisfied with Conti and Vecchiotti’s work. Judge Hellmann not only turned them down; he declared the evidentiary phase of the trial over and ordered the lawyers to prepare closing statements.

I didn’t want to hope too much, but even in my most
fearful moments I could feel the tide turning decisively in our favor. As the appeals process neared its end, the number of friends and family members in attendance steadily grew. The anticipation was palpable. At one point, a group of my childhood friends asked Vanessa—the family Cassandra and uncompromising bearer of bad tidings—what she thought would happen. After all, she had been in law enforcement and had predicted the outcome all too accurately last time around.

“I don’t know for sure,” she told them cautiously, “but I think that this time we’re going to win.”