What motive would she have to kill her room mate?
Knox/Sollecito Appeal Verdict due Today
- Thread starter SteveJ
- Start date
Linked below are some of the 'questions which have never been answered'; most of them certainly weren't answered in the Appeal, because Knox & Sollecito's defence team did not dare to challenge all the conclusions reached in the 2009 Trial, in which both were found guilty. Because of the defence team's reluctance to challenge, the Appeal court could only consider a greatly limited amount of evidence:
Meredith Kercher crime scene: The Questions that have never been Answered | Mail Online
Meredith Kercher crime scene: The Questions that have never been Answered | Mail Online
At the drop of a hat
This is the thing that made me think she was guilty:
But its not evidence, you can't lock someone away for that. All the real "evidence" is very circumstantial.
or unreliable due to poor handling of the forensic aspect of the investigation.
The haunting pictures are of the poor girls' fathers (more than mothers somehow, maybe because it's 'but for the grace of god'): John Kercher; the guy whose daughter was murdered in Japan, the girl who's missing in York, the girl who was murdered in Bristol. These guys are broken into pieces.
Yep. Reminds me of Sarah Payne's father too, mate.
A sensible overview of the case, written by The Times' John Follain:
KILLER QUESTIONS
They may have been coached to hide their true feelings, but the expressions of the judges and jurors were an open book. Surprise and shock registered on the faces of the appeal tribunal in Perugia as they watched a video taken by the forensic police who searched the whitewashed cottage where Meredith Kercher was murdered.
That summer’s day in the medieval, vaulted Hall of Frescoes was the pivotal scene of the 10-month appeal trial of Amanda Knox, 24, and Raffaele Sollecito, 26 — the moment that freedom suddenly became possible, if not probable, for the former lovers.
The rotund, bespectacled Stefano Conti, one of two specialists in forensic medicine appointed by the court to review two crucial traces of DNA evidence, gave a sardonic running commentary on the behaviour of the Roman scientific squad searching for clues in the cottage. They failed to use clean protective gloves to handle each item of evidence or biological sample, Conti pointed out. They passed Meredith’s bra clasp to one another before placing it back on the floor where they had found it. The officer who picked up her bra wore no gloves at all.
As the senior appeal judge, Claudio Pratillo Hellmann, recalled last week after acquitting Knox and Sollecito of sexually abusing and murdering Meredith, the DNA review was “the most difficult moment” of the trial.
“The prosecutors understood that their case was at risk, and it was at that moment that the trial became a battle with no holds barred,” he said.
The courtroom fight over this international cause célèbre ended with a sobbing Knox being rushed out by guards and flown home to a heroine’s welcome in Seattle.
But, far from resolving the mystery of how and why Meredith died, the acquittal has fuelled the unanswered questions over her fate. Are we “back to square one”, as Meredith’s brother Lyle said after the verdict? What are the mysteries still to be resolved? And will we ever know what truly happened? Meredith, a 21-year-old language student from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found lying virtually naked, her throat cut, in her bedroom in the house she shared with Knox and two other young women on the afternoon of November 2, 2007. “Case closed,” an over-optimistic police chief proclaimed just four days later.
The investigators thought Knox had handed them the keys to the mystery. Under questioning she placed herself at the crime scene on the night before the body was found. She had been in the kitchen, with her hands over her ears, she said, while Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner for whom she worked as a waitress, killed Meredith.
Police promptly arrested Lumumba, Knox and her boyfriend. But Knox later went back on her testimony, insisting she had been with Sollecito at his flat all night.
Investigators were forced to release Lumumba after witnesses testified he had been working at his bar on the night of the murder. Knox and Sollecito stayed behind bars.
Forensic evidence then prompted the arrest of another African immigrant, Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter. Part of his palm print was on a cushion under Meredith’s body, his DNA was in her body where he had apparently groped her sexually, and his DNA was mixed with hers in drops of blood inside her shoulder bag.
The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, accused Guede, Knox and Sollecito of killing Meredith when she resisted their attempts to force her into a sex game.
Certainly, there appeared to be compelling evidence that Knox was lying. She had tried to frame Lumumba. The defence now claimed that an intruder had broken into the cottage and attacked Meredith; but the break-in had clearly been staged. Amateurishly, a room had been ransacked before the window into it was smashed — the glass lay over the strewn clothes instead of under them. Was this to cover Knox’s tracks? There were mixed traces of Knox’s and Meredith’s blood in the bathroom and another room. Bloody footprints had been left by Knox and Sollecito in the bathroom and in the corridor. Knox had behaved bizarrely at the police station after the murder, kissing and caressing Sollecito and doing yoga exercises. Sollecito had said he spent much of the murder night on his computer, but this was disproved by experts.
Still, this was all circumstantial evidence rather than proof. The Rome forensic police came to the rescue of the prosecution team. They reported that Meredith’s DNA was on the blade of a kitchen knife found at Sollecito’s flat — and Knox’s was on the handle. This was believed to be one of the murder weapons.
Forensic pathologists said Meredith’s wounds had been caused by two knives, pointing to more than one killer. The team from Rome also reported that Sollecito’s DNA was on Meredith’s bra clasp. (Only much later would it emerge that the police had retrieved this from the bedroom floor a full 46 days after first spotting it.) The case rapidly became a sensation. The prime suspect was an intelligent and alluringly pretty American, only 20 at the time, who, reporters joyously discovered, had been nicknamed “Foxy Knoxy” back home in Seattle. That this was for her skills on the soccer pitch was lost in the rush to find out more.
Knox was portrayed by the lawyer for the bar owner, Lumumba, as an unscrupulous and manipulative she-devil, and by her defence team as “a wholesome girl” wrongly accused.
The prosecution case was that Kercher, a hard-working young woman from a modest background, had become exasperated by Knox’s slovenly and promiscuous behaviour as a housemate.
She had remarked to her father that “Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a boyfriend”. She told friends that Knox left a vibrator and condoms in the bathroom and brought “strange men” to the cottage. Investigators leaked Knox’s diary, in which she had listed seven sexual partners, three of whom she had slept with after her arrival in Italy, including a man she had met on the train on her way to Perugia. On Facebook she had put down as her interests: “Men.”
He suggested that an argument between Meredith and Knox escalated when Guede and Sollecito joined the American “under the influence of drugs and maybe of alcohol” in trying to force Kercher into a heavy sex game that ended in murder. The sensational 11-month trial ended in guilty verdicts and jail sentences of 26 years for Knox and 25 years for Sollecito.
Some months later, in August 2010, I met Knox briefly in Capanne women’s prison, which is a short drive from Perugia. She had cut her hair and looked younger and more frail than during her trial. She wore a red Beatles sweatshirt, black leggings and silver nail varnish.
I was told she had been reading — in Italian — the 427-page summary by the two judges at her trial, who had dissected the inconsistencies in her evidence.
The summary suggested that Knox, Sollecito and Guede had arrived at the cottage at about 11pm. Knox and her boyfriend had gone to her bedroom to have sex, and, excited by a situation “heavy with sexual stimulus”, Guede had walked into Kercher’s room wanting to have sex with her.
Kercher rejected him — she was tired, and had a new boyfriend anyway — but Knox and Sollecito intervened to assist him. According to the judges, they were probably drugged on hashish and seeking “erotic sexual violence”. Forcing Kercher to yield to Guede was a “special thrill that had to be tried out”.
They suggested Sollecito cut Meredith’s bra with a small knife he always carried — collecting knives was a hobby. As Guede sexually assaulted Kercher with his fingers, Sollecito stabbed her in the neck. Kercher screamed — a neighbour heard her — and Knox stabbed her in the throat with a kitchen knife, the judges argued. She took several minutes to die as she inhaled her own blood.
That was the lurid and damning case that Knox had to fight when she returned to the Hall of Frescoes last November for her appeal.
Her demeanour had changed. Gone was smiling and self-confident “Foxy”, whose manner may have helped secure her conviction. After three years in prison, Knox was much more demure.
The appeal hearing began auspiciously for her when the deputy judge remarked: “The only certain and undisputed fact is the death of Meredith Kercher.”
The comment prompted prosecutors to complain that the court had already made up its mind, but it was a portent of what was about to be revealed.
The appeal court’s decision to grant a defence request for an independent review of two items of DNA evidence — the kitchen knife and the bra clasp — proved devastating for the prosecution’s case.
The two experts — Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, from La Sapienza University in Rome — said the DNA trace on the knife blade could not be attributed to Meredith because it was too slight. They said Sollecito’s Y chromosome was on the bra clasp, but it could have been the result of contamination by police mishandling of the evidence. From then on, the prosecutors fought a losing battle to discredit Conti and Vecchiotti.
Outside the courtroom the Knox camp’s media offensive exploited the experts’ conclusions.
Knox’s family — her mother, father, stepfather and friends — had come well primed for battle. Homes had been remortgaged and funds raised.
With the help of a PR company in Seattle, they dominated prime-time shows on the leading American TV networks, dramatically influencing public opinion there — so much so that the prosecutor Mignini thundered in court that he had never seen a convict hire a PR firm to prove her innocence.
Mignini himself was a key target. In what appeared to have been a turf battle with prosecutors in Florence, he had been given a suspended 16-month prison sentence for abuse of office after tapping the phones of police officers and journalists in a separate investigation into a serial killer. It was a reflection of the fragmented and politicised condition of the Italian justice system.
The prosecutors tried but failed to switch the focus away from the forensic evidence by introducing Guede, the third party to the murder. He had been prosecuted separately because he had opted for a “fast track” trial that offers a lighter sentence as an incentive. Jailed for 16 years for murder, he had appealed to the Supreme Court in Rome — Italy’s highest court — which confirmed his conviction, ruling that Guede had sexually abused and murdered Kercher with “unidentified accomplices”.
This was an insight into the mystifying processes of Italian law. How could justice be served by trying Guede separately? Why had he not been brought to give evidence at the first Knox trial? Why were his accomplices “unidentified” when Knox and Sollecito had been convicted of joining him in the murder? The answers lay in the fact that his supreme court appeal started just after Knox’s appeal began in Perugia — and the two cases overlapped, a bizarre way of seeking out the truth.
Once Guede’s Supreme Court appeal had been dismissed he was summoned to the witness box in Perugia, where his contribution was damning yet so limited that it did not sway the judges and jury.
Rather than taking him through the events of the killing, Mignini read out a letter in which Guede had written of “the horrible murder of a ... wonderful girl by Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox”. Challenged by one of Knox’s lawyers, Guede stood by the letter, saying: “It’s not as if there is my truth, and the truth of Tom, Dick and Harry. What there is is the truth of what I lived through that night, full stop.”
A lawyer for the Kerchers detailed the injuries Meredith suffered, arguing it would have been impossible for Guede to hold her down, sexually assault her, try to suffocate her, try to strangle her and wound her with more than one knife.
But it was too late. The appeal panel of judges and jurors had made up their minds. A juror confided after the “not guilty” verdicts had been delivered that the court had decided to acquit because of doubts over the forensic evidence, and because it saw no motive for the murder.
Pratillo Hellman explained: “To convict, the penal code says you have to be persuaded beyond every reasonable doubt. The smallest doubt is enough to not condemn.”
But he added enigmatically: “Maybe Knox and Sollecito know what happened that night, because our acquittal verdict stems from the truth which was established in the trial. But the real truth can be different. They may be responsible, but there isn’t the evidence… So, perhaps they too know what happened that night, but that’s not our conclusion.”
The judge’s comments earned him a new nickname, which investigators texted to each other delightedly: “Pontius Pratillo”, after Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands of responsibility for the execution of Jesus Christ.
The prosecution scored one potentially significant victory. The court found Knox guilty of slandering the former bar owner Lumumba by initially claiming he had killed Kercher. It sentenced her to three years in prison, but released her as she had spent almost four years behind bars.
“That’s absurd, absurd,” Mignini fumed. “Knox accused Lumumba to throw the police off her tracks. Why else would she accuse him?” In Perugia, at least, the prosecution can count on overwhelming backing. After the verdict, a crowd several thousand strong massed outside the courts, amid jeers at defence lawyers and chants of “Assassini, assassini!” (murderers, murderers) and “Vergogna, vergogna!” (shame, shame). In bars across the picturesque city, and on the main cobbled street, Corso Vannucci, many dissected the case for days afterwards — the consensus was that Knox and Sollecito were at the cottage when Meredith died, but no one agreed on what role they played.
Last week’s acquittal is far from the last word on the case. The judges have 90 days to draft a report explaining the reasons for the verdict. Then the prosecution and the defence will have a further 45 days to lodge a new and last appeal. Only rulings by the Supreme Court are considered definitive in Italian justice.
Guede’s lawyers said he would appeal for a new trial if the Supreme Court confirmed Knox’s acquittal — on the grounds that it would contradict the Ivorian’s conviction for killing Meredith alongside unidentified accomplices. “So I’m supposed to be Meredith’s only assassin?” Guede is reported to have told a prison visitor. “I’m supposed to have struck that poor girl with a knife 40 times? I confessed my responsibilities and I accused those who were in the house with me.
“I’m in prison, and the others are free and happy at home. If it wasn’t them in the house that damned evening, who are the other accomplices supposed to be? The money made available to Amanda and the media strategy helped to free her.”
......
KILLER QUESTIONS
They may have been coached to hide their true feelings, but the expressions of the judges and jurors were an open book. Surprise and shock registered on the faces of the appeal tribunal in Perugia as they watched a video taken by the forensic police who searched the whitewashed cottage where Meredith Kercher was murdered.
That summer’s day in the medieval, vaulted Hall of Frescoes was the pivotal scene of the 10-month appeal trial of Amanda Knox, 24, and Raffaele Sollecito, 26 — the moment that freedom suddenly became possible, if not probable, for the former lovers.
The rotund, bespectacled Stefano Conti, one of two specialists in forensic medicine appointed by the court to review two crucial traces of DNA evidence, gave a sardonic running commentary on the behaviour of the Roman scientific squad searching for clues in the cottage. They failed to use clean protective gloves to handle each item of evidence or biological sample, Conti pointed out. They passed Meredith’s bra clasp to one another before placing it back on the floor where they had found it. The officer who picked up her bra wore no gloves at all.
As the senior appeal judge, Claudio Pratillo Hellmann, recalled last week after acquitting Knox and Sollecito of sexually abusing and murdering Meredith, the DNA review was “the most difficult moment” of the trial.
“The prosecutors understood that their case was at risk, and it was at that moment that the trial became a battle with no holds barred,” he said.
The courtroom fight over this international cause célèbre ended with a sobbing Knox being rushed out by guards and flown home to a heroine’s welcome in Seattle.
But, far from resolving the mystery of how and why Meredith died, the acquittal has fuelled the unanswered questions over her fate. Are we “back to square one”, as Meredith’s brother Lyle said after the verdict? What are the mysteries still to be resolved? And will we ever know what truly happened? Meredith, a 21-year-old language student from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found lying virtually naked, her throat cut, in her bedroom in the house she shared with Knox and two other young women on the afternoon of November 2, 2007. “Case closed,” an over-optimistic police chief proclaimed just four days later.
The investigators thought Knox had handed them the keys to the mystery. Under questioning she placed herself at the crime scene on the night before the body was found. She had been in the kitchen, with her hands over her ears, she said, while Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner for whom she worked as a waitress, killed Meredith.
Police promptly arrested Lumumba, Knox and her boyfriend. But Knox later went back on her testimony, insisting she had been with Sollecito at his flat all night.
Investigators were forced to release Lumumba after witnesses testified he had been working at his bar on the night of the murder. Knox and Sollecito stayed behind bars.
Forensic evidence then prompted the arrest of another African immigrant, Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter. Part of his palm print was on a cushion under Meredith’s body, his DNA was in her body where he had apparently groped her sexually, and his DNA was mixed with hers in drops of blood inside her shoulder bag.
The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, accused Guede, Knox and Sollecito of killing Meredith when she resisted their attempts to force her into a sex game.
Certainly, there appeared to be compelling evidence that Knox was lying. She had tried to frame Lumumba. The defence now claimed that an intruder had broken into the cottage and attacked Meredith; but the break-in had clearly been staged. Amateurishly, a room had been ransacked before the window into it was smashed — the glass lay over the strewn clothes instead of under them. Was this to cover Knox’s tracks? There were mixed traces of Knox’s and Meredith’s blood in the bathroom and another room. Bloody footprints had been left by Knox and Sollecito in the bathroom and in the corridor. Knox had behaved bizarrely at the police station after the murder, kissing and caressing Sollecito and doing yoga exercises. Sollecito had said he spent much of the murder night on his computer, but this was disproved by experts.
Still, this was all circumstantial evidence rather than proof. The Rome forensic police came to the rescue of the prosecution team. They reported that Meredith’s DNA was on the blade of a kitchen knife found at Sollecito’s flat — and Knox’s was on the handle. This was believed to be one of the murder weapons.
Forensic pathologists said Meredith’s wounds had been caused by two knives, pointing to more than one killer. The team from Rome also reported that Sollecito’s DNA was on Meredith’s bra clasp. (Only much later would it emerge that the police had retrieved this from the bedroom floor a full 46 days after first spotting it.) The case rapidly became a sensation. The prime suspect was an intelligent and alluringly pretty American, only 20 at the time, who, reporters joyously discovered, had been nicknamed “Foxy Knoxy” back home in Seattle. That this was for her skills on the soccer pitch was lost in the rush to find out more.
Knox was portrayed by the lawyer for the bar owner, Lumumba, as an unscrupulous and manipulative she-devil, and by her defence team as “a wholesome girl” wrongly accused.
The prosecution case was that Kercher, a hard-working young woman from a modest background, had become exasperated by Knox’s slovenly and promiscuous behaviour as a housemate.
She had remarked to her father that “Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a boyfriend”. She told friends that Knox left a vibrator and condoms in the bathroom and brought “strange men” to the cottage. Investigators leaked Knox’s diary, in which she had listed seven sexual partners, three of whom she had slept with after her arrival in Italy, including a man she had met on the train on her way to Perugia. On Facebook she had put down as her interests: “Men.”
He suggested that an argument between Meredith and Knox escalated when Guede and Sollecito joined the American “under the influence of drugs and maybe of alcohol” in trying to force Kercher into a heavy sex game that ended in murder. The sensational 11-month trial ended in guilty verdicts and jail sentences of 26 years for Knox and 25 years for Sollecito.
Some months later, in August 2010, I met Knox briefly in Capanne women’s prison, which is a short drive from Perugia. She had cut her hair and looked younger and more frail than during her trial. She wore a red Beatles sweatshirt, black leggings and silver nail varnish.
I was told she had been reading — in Italian — the 427-page summary by the two judges at her trial, who had dissected the inconsistencies in her evidence.
The summary suggested that Knox, Sollecito and Guede had arrived at the cottage at about 11pm. Knox and her boyfriend had gone to her bedroom to have sex, and, excited by a situation “heavy with sexual stimulus”, Guede had walked into Kercher’s room wanting to have sex with her.
Kercher rejected him — she was tired, and had a new boyfriend anyway — but Knox and Sollecito intervened to assist him. According to the judges, they were probably drugged on hashish and seeking “erotic sexual violence”. Forcing Kercher to yield to Guede was a “special thrill that had to be tried out”.
They suggested Sollecito cut Meredith’s bra with a small knife he always carried — collecting knives was a hobby. As Guede sexually assaulted Kercher with his fingers, Sollecito stabbed her in the neck. Kercher screamed — a neighbour heard her — and Knox stabbed her in the throat with a kitchen knife, the judges argued. She took several minutes to die as she inhaled her own blood.
That was the lurid and damning case that Knox had to fight when she returned to the Hall of Frescoes last November for her appeal.
Her demeanour had changed. Gone was smiling and self-confident “Foxy”, whose manner may have helped secure her conviction. After three years in prison, Knox was much more demure.
The appeal hearing began auspiciously for her when the deputy judge remarked: “The only certain and undisputed fact is the death of Meredith Kercher.”
The comment prompted prosecutors to complain that the court had already made up its mind, but it was a portent of what was about to be revealed.
The appeal court’s decision to grant a defence request for an independent review of two items of DNA evidence — the kitchen knife and the bra clasp — proved devastating for the prosecution’s case.
The two experts — Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, from La Sapienza University in Rome — said the DNA trace on the knife blade could not be attributed to Meredith because it was too slight. They said Sollecito’s Y chromosome was on the bra clasp, but it could have been the result of contamination by police mishandling of the evidence. From then on, the prosecutors fought a losing battle to discredit Conti and Vecchiotti.
Outside the courtroom the Knox camp’s media offensive exploited the experts’ conclusions.
Knox’s family — her mother, father, stepfather and friends — had come well primed for battle. Homes had been remortgaged and funds raised.
With the help of a PR company in Seattle, they dominated prime-time shows on the leading American TV networks, dramatically influencing public opinion there — so much so that the prosecutor Mignini thundered in court that he had never seen a convict hire a PR firm to prove her innocence.
Mignini himself was a key target. In what appeared to have been a turf battle with prosecutors in Florence, he had been given a suspended 16-month prison sentence for abuse of office after tapping the phones of police officers and journalists in a separate investigation into a serial killer. It was a reflection of the fragmented and politicised condition of the Italian justice system.
The prosecutors tried but failed to switch the focus away from the forensic evidence by introducing Guede, the third party to the murder. He had been prosecuted separately because he had opted for a “fast track” trial that offers a lighter sentence as an incentive. Jailed for 16 years for murder, he had appealed to the Supreme Court in Rome — Italy’s highest court — which confirmed his conviction, ruling that Guede had sexually abused and murdered Kercher with “unidentified accomplices”.
This was an insight into the mystifying processes of Italian law. How could justice be served by trying Guede separately? Why had he not been brought to give evidence at the first Knox trial? Why were his accomplices “unidentified” when Knox and Sollecito had been convicted of joining him in the murder? The answers lay in the fact that his supreme court appeal started just after Knox’s appeal began in Perugia — and the two cases overlapped, a bizarre way of seeking out the truth.
Once Guede’s Supreme Court appeal had been dismissed he was summoned to the witness box in Perugia, where his contribution was damning yet so limited that it did not sway the judges and jury.
Rather than taking him through the events of the killing, Mignini read out a letter in which Guede had written of “the horrible murder of a ... wonderful girl by Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox”. Challenged by one of Knox’s lawyers, Guede stood by the letter, saying: “It’s not as if there is my truth, and the truth of Tom, Dick and Harry. What there is is the truth of what I lived through that night, full stop.”
A lawyer for the Kerchers detailed the injuries Meredith suffered, arguing it would have been impossible for Guede to hold her down, sexually assault her, try to suffocate her, try to strangle her and wound her with more than one knife.
But it was too late. The appeal panel of judges and jurors had made up their minds. A juror confided after the “not guilty” verdicts had been delivered that the court had decided to acquit because of doubts over the forensic evidence, and because it saw no motive for the murder.
Pratillo Hellman explained: “To convict, the penal code says you have to be persuaded beyond every reasonable doubt. The smallest doubt is enough to not condemn.”
But he added enigmatically: “Maybe Knox and Sollecito know what happened that night, because our acquittal verdict stems from the truth which was established in the trial. But the real truth can be different. They may be responsible, but there isn’t the evidence… So, perhaps they too know what happened that night, but that’s not our conclusion.”
The judge’s comments earned him a new nickname, which investigators texted to each other delightedly: “Pontius Pratillo”, after Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands of responsibility for the execution of Jesus Christ.
The prosecution scored one potentially significant victory. The court found Knox guilty of slandering the former bar owner Lumumba by initially claiming he had killed Kercher. It sentenced her to three years in prison, but released her as she had spent almost four years behind bars.
“That’s absurd, absurd,” Mignini fumed. “Knox accused Lumumba to throw the police off her tracks. Why else would she accuse him?” In Perugia, at least, the prosecution can count on overwhelming backing. After the verdict, a crowd several thousand strong massed outside the courts, amid jeers at defence lawyers and chants of “Assassini, assassini!” (murderers, murderers) and “Vergogna, vergogna!” (shame, shame). In bars across the picturesque city, and on the main cobbled street, Corso Vannucci, many dissected the case for days afterwards — the consensus was that Knox and Sollecito were at the cottage when Meredith died, but no one agreed on what role they played.
Last week’s acquittal is far from the last word on the case. The judges have 90 days to draft a report explaining the reasons for the verdict. Then the prosecution and the defence will have a further 45 days to lodge a new and last appeal. Only rulings by the Supreme Court are considered definitive in Italian justice.
Guede’s lawyers said he would appeal for a new trial if the Supreme Court confirmed Knox’s acquittal — on the grounds that it would contradict the Ivorian’s conviction for killing Meredith alongside unidentified accomplices. “So I’m supposed to be Meredith’s only assassin?” Guede is reported to have told a prison visitor. “I’m supposed to have struck that poor girl with a knife 40 times? I confessed my responsibilities and I accused those who were in the house with me.
“I’m in prison, and the others are free and happy at home. If it wasn’t them in the house that damned evening, who are the other accomplices supposed to be? The money made available to Amanda and the media strategy helped to free her.”
......
good article
I still cant help feeling that Knox has gotten away with it
I still cant help feeling that Knox has gotten away with it
The first of no doubt many 'My Prison Hell' stories:
Still, at least she survived...
Amanda Knox: Life in Prison and What's Next : People.com
Still, at least she survived...
Amanda Knox: Life in Prison and What's Next : People.com
Guardian book review:
Death in Perugia: The Definitive Account of the Meredith Kercher Case
from Her Murder to the Acquittal of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox
by John Follain
John Follain is the Rome correspondent for the Sunday Times and has been following the case since it began. His book is a neutral retelling of events, from the British student's murder on the night of 1 November 2007 to that acquittal a few weeks ago on 3 October. Death in Perugia is not a first-person narrative, nor one that expresses an authorial opinion on the guilt or otherwise of those on trial. Perhaps because of this objectivity, it's a gripping read: a balanced, detailed account that allows the reader to respond to the central question: did they or didn't they?
Few crimes in recent years have captured the imagination quite so much as the murder in Perugia of Meredith Kercher. The beauty and kindness of the victim, the fresh faces of her alleged assassins, and their passion for sex and drugs, all set against the backdrop of one of Italy's most stunning cities, made this a story that was as captivating as it was tragic. Now that both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito have been acquitted of Kercher's murder, the story becomes in some ways even more fascinating, as no one knows quite what to believe any more. Many people remain convinced that the two are guilty.
It was immediately clear to detectives who attended the crime scene that a burglary had been faked. Windows had been smashed, but they were too high for a burglar and the broken glass was on top of, rather than underneath, the flat's ransacked contents. No burglar, detectives thought, would have locked Kercher's room. The flat's front door hadn't been forced. It looked as if someone on the inside had been involved in the murder, or had at least let in the murderer.
Attention turned to Kercher's American flatmate for many reasons: Amanda Knox had a scratch on her neck, and her behaviour as detectives watched her was bizarre in the extreme – constantly kissing and laughing with her Italian boyfriend, doing yoga in the police station, and snapping at one of Kercher's friends, who had expressed the hope that Meredith didn't suffer, with the retort: "She fecking bled to death."
As investigators looked more closely at Knox, she emerged as a narcissistic attention-seeker who was sexually adventurous but also jealous of Meredith Kercher's cheerful contentment. Knox knew, it seemed, no boundaries, leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands. Detectives thought she was both sly and naive.
These character traits, however, were as nothing compared with the contradictions she got caught up in. At first she said she was there that fateful night; then that she wasn't. Pages of her diary were ripped out. Her phone, always on, had been switched off early that evening. She had used drugs. Most incredible of all, Knox claimed to have entered the flat the following morning, having found the front door open and blood in the bathroom, and rather than running outside and calling the police had gone straight ahead and had a shower without a second thought.
Her DNA was found on the handle of a knife that also had Kercher's DNA on its blade. That knife came from the kitchen of Knox's boyfriend, Sollecito. He, it emerged, was a habitual drug-user who liked knives and hardcore porn. His DNA was found on Kercher's bra clasp. He had lied about when he had used his computer, about the time of certain phone calls, and also about the time he'd eaten dinner.
A third man emerged as a suspect. Rudy Guede alleged that he had merely been making out with Meredith and was in the bathroom when he heard her screams from the other room. He tried, he said, to save her. Prosecutors didn't believe his story, especially when DNA evidence indicated a sexual encounter with Kercher – with, detectives thought, Knox and Sollecito involved as coercers. Various eyewitnesses came forward to place Guede, Knox and Sollecito at the scene of the crime, and the fact that the young lovers had bought bleach the following morning suggested they were trying to cover their tracks.
The evidence appeared overwhelming and all three were convicted. But earlier this month, Sollecito and Knox were acquitted. The lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, had told the jury "you can't make a black boy pay for everyone", but that is how it now stands: only Guede, raised in Perugia, born in Ivory Coast, remains in prison. Doubts had been raised about the DNA evidence: the bra clasp had been found 46 days after the initial police search and contamination seemed a possibility. Witnesses were shown to be confused. Knox stopped laughing and clowning around in court. The prosecutor himself was described as a sex-obsessed conspiracy theorist. Now, as the prosecution appeal to overturn the acquittal, there will probably be another trial.
We will, of course, never really know what happened. Many remain convinced of Knox's guilt. "To my family," Meredith Kercher's father once said, "she is, unequivocally, culpable." One investigator said: "she's certainly not the first convict who claims she's innocent... My guess is that Amanda has convinced herself that she is." A prosecuting lawyer called her "a sorceress of deceit". Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese barman whom Knox falsely accused of the murder, said she was "the world's best actress". Others believe she was just a girl who, confused and in shock, behaved inappropriately but nothing more. Her lawyer said he would have been pleased to have her as a daughter.
It is a tribute to Follain and his publishers that this exhaustive account bears no sign of being a rush job. I would have liked the author to say who he thinks the guilty parties are, and to have stepped outside the story and told us why this case, more than any other, has so gripped the world's media (there have been 11 books so far and one film). But it's hard to imagine there will be a better book on the subject.
.........
Death in Perugia: The Definitive Account of the Meredith Kercher Case
from Her Murder to the Acquittal of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox
by John Follain
John Follain is the Rome correspondent for the Sunday Times and has been following the case since it began. His book is a neutral retelling of events, from the British student's murder on the night of 1 November 2007 to that acquittal a few weeks ago on 3 October. Death in Perugia is not a first-person narrative, nor one that expresses an authorial opinion on the guilt or otherwise of those on trial. Perhaps because of this objectivity, it's a gripping read: a balanced, detailed account that allows the reader to respond to the central question: did they or didn't they?
Few crimes in recent years have captured the imagination quite so much as the murder in Perugia of Meredith Kercher. The beauty and kindness of the victim, the fresh faces of her alleged assassins, and their passion for sex and drugs, all set against the backdrop of one of Italy's most stunning cities, made this a story that was as captivating as it was tragic. Now that both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito have been acquitted of Kercher's murder, the story becomes in some ways even more fascinating, as no one knows quite what to believe any more. Many people remain convinced that the two are guilty.
It was immediately clear to detectives who attended the crime scene that a burglary had been faked. Windows had been smashed, but they were too high for a burglar and the broken glass was on top of, rather than underneath, the flat's ransacked contents. No burglar, detectives thought, would have locked Kercher's room. The flat's front door hadn't been forced. It looked as if someone on the inside had been involved in the murder, or had at least let in the murderer.
Attention turned to Kercher's American flatmate for many reasons: Amanda Knox had a scratch on her neck, and her behaviour as detectives watched her was bizarre in the extreme – constantly kissing and laughing with her Italian boyfriend, doing yoga in the police station, and snapping at one of Kercher's friends, who had expressed the hope that Meredith didn't suffer, with the retort: "She fecking bled to death."
As investigators looked more closely at Knox, she emerged as a narcissistic attention-seeker who was sexually adventurous but also jealous of Meredith Kercher's cheerful contentment. Knox knew, it seemed, no boundaries, leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands. Detectives thought she was both sly and naive.
These character traits, however, were as nothing compared with the contradictions she got caught up in. At first she said she was there that fateful night; then that she wasn't. Pages of her diary were ripped out. Her phone, always on, had been switched off early that evening. She had used drugs. Most incredible of all, Knox claimed to have entered the flat the following morning, having found the front door open and blood in the bathroom, and rather than running outside and calling the police had gone straight ahead and had a shower without a second thought.
Her DNA was found on the handle of a knife that also had Kercher's DNA on its blade. That knife came from the kitchen of Knox's boyfriend, Sollecito. He, it emerged, was a habitual drug-user who liked knives and hardcore porn. His DNA was found on Kercher's bra clasp. He had lied about when he had used his computer, about the time of certain phone calls, and also about the time he'd eaten dinner.
A third man emerged as a suspect. Rudy Guede alleged that he had merely been making out with Meredith and was in the bathroom when he heard her screams from the other room. He tried, he said, to save her. Prosecutors didn't believe his story, especially when DNA evidence indicated a sexual encounter with Kercher – with, detectives thought, Knox and Sollecito involved as coercers. Various eyewitnesses came forward to place Guede, Knox and Sollecito at the scene of the crime, and the fact that the young lovers had bought bleach the following morning suggested they were trying to cover their tracks.
The evidence appeared overwhelming and all three were convicted. But earlier this month, Sollecito and Knox were acquitted. The lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, had told the jury "you can't make a black boy pay for everyone", but that is how it now stands: only Guede, raised in Perugia, born in Ivory Coast, remains in prison. Doubts had been raised about the DNA evidence: the bra clasp had been found 46 days after the initial police search and contamination seemed a possibility. Witnesses were shown to be confused. Knox stopped laughing and clowning around in court. The prosecutor himself was described as a sex-obsessed conspiracy theorist. Now, as the prosecution appeal to overturn the acquittal, there will probably be another trial.
We will, of course, never really know what happened. Many remain convinced of Knox's guilt. "To my family," Meredith Kercher's father once said, "she is, unequivocally, culpable." One investigator said: "she's certainly not the first convict who claims she's innocent... My guess is that Amanda has convinced herself that she is." A prosecuting lawyer called her "a sorceress of deceit". Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese barman whom Knox falsely accused of the murder, said she was "the world's best actress". Others believe she was just a girl who, confused and in shock, behaved inappropriately but nothing more. Her lawyer said he would have been pleased to have her as a daughter.
It is a tribute to Follain and his publishers that this exhaustive account bears no sign of being a rush job. I would have liked the author to say who he thinks the guilty parties are, and to have stepped outside the story and told us why this case, more than any other, has so gripped the world's media (there have been 11 books so far and one film). But it's hard to imagine there will be a better book on the subject.
.........
Do you have that in audio format Steve - preferably in a Jackanory ol'skool tip, but not in the stylee of that feckwit from Neighbours or Home & Away either?!
It's very hard to read into this case a good deal without concluding she had at the least something cursory to do with it...It's all a bit of a mind feck to be honest.
Yeah mate, even if we strip away all the drama (the focus on Knox's behaviour & appearance; the 'sex games' conspiracy theories; the 'innocent abroad' stuff etc etc), the questions about false accusations, false alibis and what seems to be the creation of an unconvincingly-staged crime scene still remain. And that's leaving aside the curious actions of a supposed thief who ignored expensive items such as laptop computers, and just happened to swiftly abandon all 'he' stole apart from 300 Euros (at a time when Knox had complained to housemates that she needed money) and, would you believe, a female housemate's make-up.
Not that you're that interested of course Steve?!
What a real feckin gossip you are pal - you're like an old biddy in a post-office knattering away with another old biddy about Coronation Street
Not that you're that interested of course Steve?!
What a real feckin gossip you are pal - you're like an old biddy in a post-office knattering away with another old biddy about Coronation Street
I just think that the facts of the case have been lost amongst all the sensational stuff, mate. Of course, I've no idea if Knox and Sollecito are truly guilty...but, by their words & actions, they haven't really helped themselves.
Guede could tell us the truth but until his attempts to get his conviction overturned are finally quashed he won't (and maybe not then).
The bottom line is that Italy's version of a justice system is a joke and that while we may well hold suspicions that Knox knows more than she says and/or is guilt of something they missed the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof by some distance.
There's a touch of the OJs about it.
They'll have fun getting her extradited to stand trial
They may as well drop it now. It was a botched investigation from the get go and there is no way they'll get a clean convictions now.
They may as well not bother, foxy knoxy has a strong US following. They would never get her extradited back to Italy, the US would never agree to it as the public outcry in the states would be crazy. On top of that we now know that the evidence is all pretty much fecked thanks to the police officers who handled it so poorly and ended up contaminating most of it.
Yeah, this seems to be merely a protest appeal*, to highlight flaws rather than actually revive the case. Also, any success would make it hard for Knox's forthcoming book to be taken seriously.
*This is not to say that the appeal isn't serious - one of its main features is criticism of the way the appeal judge supported the defence's claims virtually 100%.
*This is not to say that the appeal isn't serious - one of its main features is criticism of the way the appeal judge supported the defence's claims virtually 100%.
She just signed a book deal worth 2.5m
Will be reading that then, you know what they are like in prisons, should be lezzing off with each other left right and centre
Oh, it won't be like that, mate; Knox fancies herself as a bona fide novelist, so doubtless it'll read something like this:
My hands clasped the cold bars, as I stared across the barren prison courtyard. Esmerelda, a Romanian gypsy unjustly incarcerated for pick-pocketing, smiled and waved to me. Her gauche, golden bangles glittered despite an indifferent sun. It is only the kindness of strangers that keeps me from despair...
*cue string quartet*
Gyp-lit is so hot right now.
tell the truth Steve.
You have the hots for her.
You have the hots for her.
I actually think she's very attractive, chief. Unfortunately, her appearance blinds some people to the flaws in her defence.
..or she is a good actress.
I don't know if she is guilty or not..but somehow making all that money because someone died.....
Does this girl have no fecking shame. Making money off the back of a murder, unfecking real.
It surprises me that people would be surprised by this book. If she is as innocent as she claims and to be honest we can never say how innocent or guilty she is thanks to the italien police fecking up the evidence but if what she is saying is the truth then she has nothing really to be shamed of and has been through an ordeal herself. As I said before I think she has wrongfully convicted in the first place, I think she knows more than what she has let on to know but not guilty of murder
Unless she gives all the money from the proceeds to th victims family then it's a case of making money off the murder of another, if all she wanted is to get her side of the story out as she's innocent then she can do that and give the money away. If she makes any money out of this which will then be like a big slap in the face of the victims family.
fair enough, if I was in the same position as her I would do the same thing though.