Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (12 page)

For several days my heart kept fluttering, I kept fainting, and the prison infirmary became concerned enough to write me a prescription for lorazepam.

I took it two or three times, and I suppose it must have worked, because the fainting fits stopped. Still, I didn’t like the way the tranquilizer made me permanently drowsy, so I stopped taking it.

I didn’t want to sleep through my captivity. If I wanted it to end, I realized, I needed to fight every step of the way.

*  *  *

My father was not entirely displeased about the kitchen knife, because, as he saw it, plenty of evidence indicated it could not have been the murder weapon. In his perennial optimism, he preferred to hold on to the fact that the police had found nothing
else
at my house despite picking the place clean. If the knife was the best they had, he calculated, we were still in the running to beat the charges.

Papà knew exactly how hard the police had searched, because he had seen them at it with his own eyes, on his first or second day in Perugia. He had stood in the entranceway to my building, as close to my front door as the police cordon would allow, and watched them cart away bath sponges, drainage plugs, detergent bottles—anything that might have been useful in cleaning up after a murder.

While he was there, he had come face-to-face with prosecutor Mignini. Mignini knew who Papà was right away, extended his hand, and, when my father said he was a doctor, asked what his area of specialization was. We later heard that Mignini had asked questions about my father’s professional reputation. It was a prescient line of inquiry, because my father was indeed good at what he did. He knew enough science to be attuned to the fine details of forensics, bloodwork and DNA analysis, and would soon become Mignini’s toughest and most unforgiving adversary.

*  *  *

The nuts and bolts of the investigation, the hard evidence, kept yielding good things for us. We were told that my Nikes had tested negative for blood and for Meredith’s DNA. So had my car, and everything else I had touched around the time of the murder. Even the mop Amanda and I carried back and forth on the morning of
November 2, an object of particular suspicion, was reported to be clean.

But a smear campaign was also in full swing, and in the media these things were barely noticed. Two days after the papers ran their sensationalist headlines about the knife, they trumpeted what they said was confirmation from Amanda that she was at the house on Via della Pergola when the murder took place. During a conversation with her mother in prison, they reported, Amanda had blurted out, “I was there, I cannot lie about that.” She seemed not to realize the conversation was being recorded, and the police picked up on it right away.

As we later learned, her words were completely twisted. The context for the line was Amanda’s exasperation that she was being asked to change her story and concede that she wasn’t with me on Corso Garibaldi on the night of the murder. So the word
there
did not refer to Via della Pergola at all, but to my flat. “This is so stupid,” she said, according to the police’s own transcript, “because I can’t say anything else. I was there, I can’t lie about that, and there’s no reason I should.”

Her mother had no particular reaction to this. It was in keeping with the rest of the conversation, in which Amanda expressed her frustration that the truth was somehow not good enough for Mignini and her police interrogators.

A few days later, another leak in the press pointed to a similar intent to do her—and me—harm. This time the papers quoted what they said was an extract from her diary. “I don’t remember anything,” the passage read, “but maybe Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped and killed her, and then put my fingerprints on the knife back at his house while I was asleep.”

Again, this was a malicious distortion. But, again, by the time
it was uncovered, the damage was done, and it didn’t matter that the truth had been flipped almost entirely on its head. The actual passage, expressing Amanda’s consternation about the kitchen-knife allegations, read as follows: “Raffaele and I have used this knife to cook, and it’s impossible that Meredith’s DNA is on the knife because she’s never been to Raffaele’s apartment before. So unless Raffaele decided to get up after I fell asleep, grabbed said knife, went over to my house, used it to kill Meredith, came home, cleaned the blood off, rubbed my fingerprints all over it, put it away, then tucked himself into bed, and then pretended really well the next couple of days, well, I just highly doubt all of that.”

Such smears not only turned public opinion against us, they also entered our case files and influenced the judges in their rulings. It would take years to set the record straight.

*  *  *

Even the police realized they were missing a big part of the picture. For all their efforts to pin evidence on Amanda and me, they knew that a lot of the crime-scene forensics did not match. Patrick, meanwhile, was drawing a big blank. Someone else had clearly been in the room when Meredith died, and soon news stories circulated about a “fourth man” still at large. Even before the papers named him, investigators knew exactly who that fourth man was: Rudy Guede.

From the beginning, the police had been intrigued by Stefano Bonassi, one of Amanda’s downstairs neighbors, who told them he found his toilet unflushed and full of excrement the night Guede slept over in early October. About a week after our arrest, one of Guede’s friends came forward and reported a weird IM exchange in which Guede hinted at a dark secret he could not reveal. The
Squadra Mobile had access to Guede’s fingerprints because of his arrest in Milan and checked them against a handprint made in blood on Meredith’s pillowcase.

They matched.

On November 19, the police broke into Rudy’s flat—just a few steps away from mine—and took a DNA sample from his toothbrush. That resulted in multiple further crime-scene matches. They also visited a friend of Guede’s named Giacomo Benedetti and sat in on a three-hour Skype chat with Guede that Benedetti set up. Benedetti’s instructions were simple: he was to do everything he could to induce his friend to confess. Benedetti did as he was told and asked Guede every question the police fed to him.

Guede had read news reports about the fingerprint match and was clearly scared. He admitted being in the house when the murder took place but said he’d been on the toilet when he heard screaming coming from Meredith’s room. He could describe the attacker only as an Italian man—no specifics—and said he had rushed to Meredith’s aid as soon as the man left. That, he said, would account for any traces of him the police might have found in Meredith’s room.

Interestingly, Guede said he had cuts on his right hand—which one would expect if he had been holding a knife and Meredith tried to fight him off. He put the time of the murder between 9:00 and 9:20 p.m., which my defense team came to believe was accurate. He said Amanda and Patrick had nothing to do with it. And he acknowledged never having met me in his life.

It was explosive stuff, too explosive to ignore, and the Squadra Mobile discussed how they might send an arrest team to Germany and try to run Guede to ground.

In the end, they didn’t have to. Hours after the Skype chat with
Benedetti, German police caught Guede riding a train near Mainz without a ticket. Once they realized who he was, they threw him in jail and began making plans for his extradition.

*  *  *

I remember watching the news of Guede’s arrest on the small-screen TV in my cell and seeing the Perugia police all puffed up with pride about catching him. If anything, I felt happier than they did, because Guede was a complete stranger to me. The relief was palpable. All along I had worried the murderer would turn out to be someone I knew and that I’d be dragged into the plot by association. Now I had one less thing to worry about. Not that I wasn’t still wary: so much invented nonsense had been laid at my door I was still half-expecting the authorities to produce more.

And they did. Mignini released Patrick Lumumba and simply replaced him in the official story line with Guede. Now it was Guede whom Amanda and I had supposedly met by the basketball court, Guede whom we had helped carry out the evil deed. Mignini, and Lumumba himself, accused Amanda of substituting one black African man for another in the account she gave in the Questura, all the better to shield Guede from prosecution and make life hell for Patrick. But this was turning reality on its head. The substitution came from the prosecutor’s office, not from Amanda.

It was remarkable how closely Mignini and Lumumba agreed on the new story line. Amanda had inserted Patrick into her narrative, they said, because she was about to be fired from her job at Le Chic and wanted revenge, pure and simple. Patrick said he was fed up with her flaunting her sexuality in front of the customers instead of doing her job, and he had reached the end of his patience. “By the end, she hated me,” Lumumba told the British newspaper the
Daily Mail.
“She’s the ultimate actress, able to switch her emotions on and off in an instant. I don’t believe a word she says. Everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie.”

Lumumba had every right to be angry; he had spent two weeks in lockup for no reason. He had been able to prove that Le Chic stayed open throughout the evening of November 1, producing an eyewitness, a Swiss university professor, who vouched for his presence that night. One would expect his anger to be directed as much toward Mignini, who threw him in prison without checking the facts, as it was toward Amanda. But Lumumba and his strikingly aggressive lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, could find only vicious things to say about Amanda from the moment he got out of jail—even though he had not, in fact, fired her and remained friendly with her for several days after the murder.

By contrast, he never said a single word against Mignini.

*  *  *

My family was quietly optimistic, in the wake of Patrick’s release, that Mignini would soon run out of reasons to keep me behind bars. That optimism soared on November 21, when a lawyer from Luca Maori’s office was invited to watch the police conduct another search of Rudy Guede’s apartment. On the floor were numerous shoe prints with the same pattern of concentric circles as the ones at the crime scene. These did not, at first sight, appear to be made in blood so much as earth, as though the wearer had gone for a walk in the woods and dragged the dirt in behind him.

Our lawyer, Delfo Berretti, took pictures, and my father showed these to two technical experts. The prints, they said, were an exact match for the ones at Via della Pergola. Now we had concrete
evidence to show that the Polizia Scientifica’s report had been wrong. Among other things: Rudy Guede wore a size 45 shoe (size 11
¹
/
₂
in the United States), and I’m a 42
¹
/
₂
.

Still, we had a problem. Under Italian law, the defense is not allowed access to the prosecution files until the investigation is formally declared to be over. So, while I could be confident the shoe prints at Via della Pergola were not from my Nikes, I couldn’t prove that to a judge using official documents, unless the prosecution was willing to share what it had.

And the prosecution, as we’d come to expect by this point, was not budging an inch.

*  *  *

The reality of prison life was catching up to me. Regardless of how quickly things were developing in the case, the grim reality was that I was stuck spending almost every hour of every day alone, unable to see or hear anybody else. For long stretches, I would feel a crushing loneliness, a sense that nobody knew I was there and nobody cared. I would stare at the dust and the cockroaches on the floor, up to the single ray of light coming through the window, then back to the floor again, my mind spinning furiously around the events I was having such a hard time bringing into focus.

For the first few days, I yearned only for home, my family, the comfort of a warm bed, my car, my computer. I thought if I had a PlayStation it might even be bearable to wait in my cell while my father worked on getting me released. If only.

Then I started noticing the filth around me and could think only of scrubbing it clean. My family developed a routine to take away my dirty clothes, sheets, and blankets and bring them back
freshly laundered on the next visit. Slowly, I recovered an acceptable level of personal hygiene and, with it, some modicum of self-esteem.

After some initial hostility, the staff at the prison treated me decently. One guard talked about the nightmare existences that many prisoners had endured on the outside before they were locked up; she said prison came to some of them almost as a relief. It made me realize just how privileged and cosseted my life had been. After Patrick was released, one of the orderlies who brought my food shouted, “Hey, haven’t they let you out of here yet?” Some people, at least, recognized I was innocent.

I received regular visits from a doctor, a psychiatrist, and an educator who asked so many questions I felt sure she had been instructed to extract new indiscretions from me. I smiled and played along, but told her nothing. For two hours a day, I was allowed to leave my cell for a slightly bigger space with a grate in the ceiling opening directly to the sky. This was the exercise room, a ridiculous name for an empty dungeon barely big enough to run around, but I had to make the best of it. I made a point of running every day—until my knees started aching from the hard contact with the concrete floor and I felt obliged to stop before I did myself permanent damage. I also did stretching exercises that I’d learned from kickboxing. One way or another, I was determined to keep working out. It was essential to preserving my sanity.

I also turned to religion. I’ve never been super-devout, but I do take solace from the Scriptures and spent some time pondering my favorite passages from the Gospels. Wasn’t there a line in the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus blesses the oppressed and those who fall victim to the judgment of others? I would have to ask my cousin Annamaria, who knows the Bible forward and backward.