Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (7 page)

I’d grown up thinking of Tiziano Tedeschi as an uncle. When I was little, he and my father were almost inseparable, although the closer friendship was now between my father and Tiziano’s older brother, Enrico. My father knew Tiziano as a friend, not by
reputation. Still, he imagined Tiziano would do everything he could to safeguard my interests.

Papà couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed by the response. Tiziano said he put a call into the Questura and there was nothing to worry about. He was told it was all routine.

My sister, Vanessa, made her own separate inquiries and felt much less reassured. The first time she called the Questura, they left her waiting on the line, even though she announced herself as a lieutenant in the carabinieri, and never took her call.

The second time, she had herself put through from the carabinieri’s regional switchboard, to make it more official. This time she got through, but only to a junior policeman clearly her inferior. (In Italian law enforcement, protocol on such matters is followed scrupulously.) “Listen,” the man told her impatiently, “everything is fine.”

“Is there someone I can talk to who is in charge of this case?” Vanessa insisted.

“No, no. It’s all routine. Don’t worry.”

Unlike Tiziano Tedeschi, though, my sister
did
worry. To her, the conversation raised a lot more questions than it answered.

*  *  *

Amanda was exhausted. She would sprawl out on the chairs in the Questura, complaining of feeling unwell. Her interpreter noticed she was unusually pale and further noticed that her pallor revealed a small red mark on her neck. The police seized on this as possible evidence of injury during the murder, but it was nothing, most likely the residue of a love bite I had given her myself.

Shortly after I returned with pizza on the afternoon of
November 4, Monica Napoleoni announced that Amanda, Filomena, and Laura needed to accompany her back to the murder house. They were gone for two or three hours. Later, I learned that Amanda had broken down, shaking and weeping, after she was asked to go through the knife drawer in the kitchen. Napoleoni asked her if anything was missing. Nothing was.

It didn’t seem to us that the investigation was going anywhere. What we didn’t realize was that they had already decided we were somehow involved and were watching us like hawks for any word or sign or gesture that would corroborate their suspicions. The waiting room where we sat was bugged, and our phones were now tapped too.

That night, still at the Questura, Amanda started asking me the meaning of various Italian swearwords. I gave her the English equivalents of
vaffanculo
(fuck off) and
li mortacci tua
(I spit on your dead ancestors), and we started laughing. It was just a stupid conversation to pass the time. But, to the eavesdropping Perugia police, it added to a mounting body of evidence that something was seriously wrong with us.

Pressure to solve the case was growing by the day. In a city that made a significant part of its living off foreign students, a brutal murder such as Meredith’s was hardly good for business. “Perugians,” the city’s mayor, Renato Rocchi, said, “expect the culprit to be identified quickly and punished in exemplary fashion.” The police chief, Arturo De Felice, was getting the message loud and clear. “Every investigative tool at our disposal,” he promised, “every resource and area of expertise, has been deployed to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible.”

The truth, though, was that the authorities were still clueless
about the most important pieces of evidence—in particular, the identity of whoever made the bloody shoe prints and footprints, and the source of the DNA samples found around the house that did not belong to anyone who had come forward so far. If Rudy Guede had not skipped town, he might have been tested, identified, and apprehended by now. Instead, the police could only turn to what they had, the DNA and fingerprint traces in the house that they
could
identify. Laura had an incontrovertible alibi because she had been out of town on the night of the murder. The same went for the boys downstairs. Filomena had not only been with her boyfriend, but with Luca and Paola too. That left Amanda and—since I was always with her when she came to the Questura—me.

What did they have on us? Nothing of substance. But they did find our behavior odd, and we had no real alibi for the night of November 1 except each other, and we did not have lawyers to protect us, and we seemed to have a propensity for saying things without thinking them through. In other words, we were the lowest-hanging fruit, and the police simply reached out and grabbed us.

How could they do that in the absence of hard evidence? Edgardo Giobbi of the Servizio Centrale Operativo, the country’s serious-crime squad, essentially gave the game away in a British television documentary that aired six months after Meredith’s murder. Giobbi came up to Perugia from Rome to oversee the interrogations, so he knew the sequence of events as well as anybody. He had had it in for Amanda ever since he’d seen her bend down to put on protective footwear at the murder house on November 3 and thought he saw her do a suggestive hip-swivel known in Italy as
la mossa,
“the move.”

“The investigation was of an exclusively psychological nature,” Giobbi said, “because what enabled us to identify the culprits was,
most of all, our observation of their psychological and behavioral reactions while they were being questioned. We didn’t rely on any other kind of investigation, but this is what allowed us to finger the culprits in such a short time.”

Well, this was at least frank. And staggering too. They arrested us because they didn’t like us. Period. Not only did they have no physical evidence, they saw no need for any.

Of course,
something
was required to justify slamming us behind bars. Even in Italy, people don’t get arrested for swiveling their hips or kissing outside a house where a murder has just taken place. As November 4 turned into November 5, the police were still scratching around. The bugged room at the Questura wasn’t giving them much. (We know this because, if we had given them anything, they would have used it.) The taps on our phones were proving equally frustrating. Some of the investigators, I imagine, thought they would overhear a confession, or some indication of fear or panic. But of course we gave them nothing like that because we had nothing to confess.

What the police did learn from the wiretaps was that Amanda’s mother, Edda, was flying in from Seattle and would arrive on Tuesday, November 6. They also heard Amanda talking to her relatives in Germany, who were advising her to take refuge in the American embassy. In short, they could count on her to be vulnerable and alone for just one more day. After that, she might be out of reach, or out of the country. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that if we were to be arrested, it had to happen in the next twenty-four hours.

One real clue, one element of reasonable suspicion, was all they needed to pounce.

And I, inadvertently, gave it to them.

*  *  *

As November 5 began, we allowed ourselves to wonder if things weren’t slowly getting back to normal—the proverbial calm before the storm. There was no call from the Questura. Amanda went to class and wandered over to Le Chic to talk to Patrick. I stayed at home and worked on my thesis.

Then my father called and asked about my pocketknife. Carrying a small knife had been a habit of mine since I was a teenager—not for self-defense, mind you, just as an ornamental thing. I’d use one occasionally to peel apples or carve my name on tree trunks, but mostly I carried them around for the sake of it. Having a knife on me had become automatic, like carrying my wallet or my keys. The one in my pocket that day had been a present from my father.

“You should really leave it at home,” Papà advised. “You don’t want to get into trouble over it.”

I hadn’t given the knife a second thought. Now that he mentioned it, I still couldn’t see the harm. The blade was barely three inches long and hadn’t been opened in weeks. Besides, what kind of idiot killer would bring the murder weapon to the police station?

“Don’t worry,” I told my father. “I’ve had my knife on me every day and they haven’t even noticed it.”

Whoever was listening at the Questura pricked up their ears; I certainly had their attention now.

I got the call at about ten o’clock that night. I was at my friend Riccardo’s house for dinner, along with Riccardo’s sister and Amanda. The police said they wanted to talk to me. Not Amanda, just me.

“I’m having dinner and I can’t come right now,” I said.

That annoyed whoever was on the other end of the line. I wasn’t
taking the request seriously enough. “You need to come in right away,” he said.

I told him I would finish eating first. I didn’t care how urgent it was; I couldn’t be at their beck and call twenty-four hours a day.

*  *  *

My father called at eleven to wish me good night. By then I’d arrived at the Questura, with Amanda joining me for the ride. After all the times I’d supported her during her interrogations, she felt the least she could do was be there for me.

My father was alarmed. “Are you sure everything is all right? Why are you there yet again?”

“I can’t talk now, Papà, but don’t worry. Everything’s fine.”

My words in Italian—
stai tranquillo
—were the last my father would hear from me as a free man.

*  *  *

The police’s tone was aggressive from the start. They wanted to know why Amanda was with me. I said she was my girlfriend and had nowhere else to go. They told her to wait while they took me into an interrogation room.

The questioning was led by two men, a tall, thin policeman I later knew as Marco Chiacchiera, the head of the Squadra Mobile’s organized-crime team, and a blond investigator from Edgardo Giobbi’s squad in Rome named Daniele Moscatelli. Monica Napoleoni, the Perugia police’s top homicide investigator, came and went as the interrogation progressed, as did other officers whose names I learned only much later from the legal files.

“You need to tell us what happened that night,” they began.

“Which night?” I asked wearily. I was getting tired of the endless questioning. I don’t think they appreciated my attitude.

“The night of November first.”

It had been a long week and now it was late. I couldn’t focus on which night they were talking about, or what I might have been doing. Hadn’t I already told them everything I knew?

“We need you to go over it all again and compare what you have to say with your previous statements. There may be something we’ve missed.”

“I don’t remember too well.”

“It doesn’t matter. Tell us what you can.”

I’m recounting this now at a distance of almost four and a half years and I certainly don’t claim to remember every word in the order that was spoken. The exchange, as I’m reproducing it here, is based on my memory. I can vividly recall the overall shape and tone and mood of the interrogation, because it scared me half to death and had a catastrophic impact. Some of it is confirmed by the documents the police themselves produced that night and by witness testimony in our trials; some of it has been contested and may well be contested again.

I’d like to be able to give you the full transcript, word by excruciating word. But the police, who were recording absolutely everything else concerning Amanda and me in this period—phone calls, e-mails, private conversations in the Questura—somehow omitted to turn on a single recording device that night. Or so they said. When challenged on this point, Prosecutor Mignini suggested that the Questura was suffering a budget crunch and preferred not to record our interrogations because the transcription costs would have been too steep.

My lawyers, and Amanda’s lawyers, subsequently argued that the
entire episode was unconstitutional because we had clearly crossed over from “people informed of the facts” to criminal suspects and, under Italian law, needed to be formally notified and provided access to legal counsel. We were vindicated on this point in the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s high court, as I will explain in more detail later. The fact that the night’s events were not recorded only heightened the stench of illegality.

I now believe that the only reason they asked me to recount the events of the night of the murder yet again was to catch me out in whatever inconsistencies they could find. They were, quite literally, out to get me, and I didn’t appreciate this until it was too late. I told them, again, about the afternoon at Via della Pergola, about smoking a joint—more than I should have volunteered, perhaps—and heading over to my place. I mentioned that Amanda and I gone out shopping, something I had apparently omitted in my previous statements. I couldn’t see the importance of this detail, but my interrogators gave me the strangest of looks.

I told them that one day had blended into another in my mind. Perhaps we’d gone shopping the day before. What did I know?

“You need to remember what you did,” one of them admonished.

They asked if Amanda had gone out that night, and on the spur of the moment, I couldn’t say. Was November 1 a Tuesday or Thursday? I asked. Because I knew she worked at Le Chic on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I noticed a calendar in the room and asked if I could consult it.

“Don’t touch the calendar!” one of them said sharply. The suddenness of this startled me.

Was November 1 the day Amanda spent the evening out and I stayed home? (I was thinking of Halloween.) Or was it the night
after that? Somehow I had the two muddled in my head and I couldn’t sort them out. As the interrogation continued, I offered both scenarios.

“Watch out,” they said, “you are getting yourself in trouble. You’re telling us different things. You need to understand the seriousness of the situation.”

I thought awhile before answering. “If it was a Thursday, she probably went to work.”

“You don’t know what she did, do you? Come on, tell us everything.”

Napoleoni was in the room for this part of the conversation. Without warning, she turned on me with venom in her voice. “What did you do?” she demanded. “You need to tell us. You don’t know what that
cow,
that
whore,
got up to!”