Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (18 page)

Certainly, the word
compromise
was pejorative, but otherwise I’m not sure my father would have disagreed: yes, he was working night and day to defend me and was absolutely interested, as a matter of constitutional right, in bringing “the prosecution at hand” to a screeching halt.

To us, Profazio’s letter revealed a more profound motive for the wiretaps: the police were nervous about the work we were doing to undermine their investigation and wanted to monitor everything we were doing.

*  *  *

One pleasant surprise from the investigation files was that the bloody shoe print, the one that had caused us to expend so much energy and motivated so much of the courts’ early decision to hold me in pretrial custody, was no longer deemed to be mine. Rudy Guede had come clean in a conversation with Mignini in May and admitted that the shoe belonged to him.

I was not off the hook entirely. The police still insisted that the bloody footprint at the murder scene, the one accompanying the left shoe print that was now identified as Guede’s, belonged to me. The scenario this conjured up—of Guede hopping on one foot and me, shoeless, hopping on the other as if in some kind of three-legged race—was obviously absurd and logistically impossible, but no matter. We still had to find a way to counter it.

When my defense team examined the official paperwork, they noticed that the analysis of the footprints—including extensive inquiry into the length and shape of the foot likely to have produced them—had been conducted by two members of the Polizia
Scientifica in Rome, working not in their official capacity but as private consultants charging thousands of euros to Mignini’s office. One of the analysts, Lorenzo Rinaldi, was a physicist, not a specialist in anatomy, and the other, Pietro Boemia, was a fingerprint technician with no further scientific credentials. That begged the question: if Mignini’s office felt it needed to contract the job out to private consultants, why wouldn’t it go to people with more pertinent qualifications? The whole thing stank.

We were stunned, too, to discover that some of the most important parts of the evidence were not handed over at all. We were given a document detailing the Polizia Scientifica’s conclusions about the DNA evidence on the knife and the bra clasp, but we had none of the raw data, nothing that would enable us to make our own independent evaluation. We put in a request for the data and, when it was rejected, filed another. The DNA evidence was now the bedrock of the case against me. What possible motivation could there be to withhold it?

Something else we were missing was video footage from the surveillance camera in the parking structure across the street from the murder house. We knew the prosecution had this because it was on their evidence list, and we knew it could be significant in settling the question of whether Inspector Battistelli arrived before or after I called the carabinieri on November 2.

But the prosecution was playing hardball, meaning we’d have to appeal the decision to a judge. And that was not now going to happen until after the long Italian summer break.

*  *  *

Already by June, the heat in the protected section was stifling. We’d soak towels in cold water and hang them over the bars of our
windows to try to block out the sun. And we’d fill buckets with water and slop them on the ground, just to keep the temperature down by a degree or two.

With the heat came shorter tempers and constant confrontation, both along the corridor and on the exercise yard. A Lebanese prisoner, Ahmed (I’ve changed this name, as I have the names of most of my fellow prisoners), was in my face more than the others, forever needling me about Meredith’s murder and every last detail he’d read in the newspaper. Ahmed was a smart guy, one of the few with family money, and he knew exactly how to hit me where it hurt most.

“Hey, you know what I’m going to do with Giulia Bongiorno?” he said one day. “I’m going to fuck her up the ass!” Everyone who heard collapsed in laughter. He’d go after my family, tease me about Amanda, whatever it took to provoke a reaction. I’d get back at him the same way, making fun of the fact that his family was so rich, calling him a spoiled kid, even giving him a hard time because he’d been adopted.

I was not proud of doing this, but it was a way to survive. Sometimes, I felt that prison stripped us of our humanity and reduced us to attack dogs, good only for turning on each other at the slightest provocation. Was this how I was going to spend the next thirty years of my life? The thought was too awful to contemplate.

I did make some friends, if that’s the right word. Early on, a man not too much older than me named Filippo Greco let me know that he was a fan of comic books and Japanese manga. So we talked about that and got along well enough to become cellmates. He told me about an ex-girlfriend and their complicated breakup, and sympathized with everything I was going through. Really, he sounded so normal I almost forgot that he was in here because he had raped someone.

Filippo and I were solid for a couple of months. Then, one day, he flew into a rage with his food server, whom he suspected of talking trash behind his back. Filippo reached through the slot in his cell door and grabbed the ladle out of the server’s hands. He whacked him in the head, shouting
“figlio di puttana!
” and telling him he hadn’t wanted soup for lunch in the first place. The server dropped his tureen, soup went everywhere, and both of them ended up in solitary confinement.

*  *  *

I focused on my studies and on going to the exercise room each morning and afternoon.
Exercise room
is probably too grand a term, as it did not contain any actual equipment. We’d lie down using two stools for support and do stretches. Or we’d lash big bottles of water on each end of a broomstick and use them for weight training. In another room, we had a Ping-Pong table, foosball and a chessboard.

I wrote a lot of letters, to my family and to a growing number of supporters from Giovinazzo, my hometown, and the wide world. When July 9 rolled around, I couldn’t help remembering Amanda’s birthday, and I decided it was time to break my silence with her—lawyers and family be damned. I wanted her to know I was thinking of her.

So I sent her roses. And began what would turn into a long correspondence in which we talked about music, or books—everyday things that seemed more comforting than the craziness around us.

It seemed easy to slip back into communication with her, not least because her Italian had improved enormously and we now had a comfortable common language. Neither of us harbored any ill will for what had been said in public. We knew, without having to
articulate it explicitly, that we had each other’s backs. Every time she wrote, she signed off
ti voglio bene,
the Italian way of saying “I love you.”

The roses I sent made the papers—of course they did—and gave my lawyers and family palpitations. They warned me in no uncertain terms never to discuss the case with Amanda and said sending presents could only attract unwanted publicity. Vanessa laid into me about that. Papà was more understanding, saying that the most important thing for me was to have moral support. While the correspondence with Amanda made him nervous, he trusted me not to do anything stupid.

I talked about Amanda with Filippo, my cellmate, and he listened, just as I had listened to his problems. One day, though, he told me he was bisexual, and his eyes started to brighten visibly when he looked at me. Then he burst into tears and tried to caress my face.

It was more pathetic than threatening, but it was definitely a deal-breaker. I moved in with another cellmate just as soon as I could.

*  *  *

In late August, my defense team was at last granted access to the murder house and had a chance to assess how much of a Spider-Man Rudy Guede would have had to be to break Filomena’s window and climb up the exterior wall.

The first thing they observed was that an intruder had no need to throw the rock from the grassy slope thirteen feet below the window. A gravel driveway leading from the street to the front door of the girls’ apartment included an open area a little to the left that overlooked the ravine. This area was at the same elevation as Filo-mena’s
window, separated only by a six-foot gap where the ground fell away sharply on the other side of a wooden fence. So Guede, or any other intruder, would not have had to hurl a rock in the air or clamber up with it; he merely needed to lob it about one-third of the distance required for a free throw in basketball, his favorite sport.

What about scaling the wall itself? Delfo Berretti, from Luca Maori’s office, decided he would have a go, removing only his work jacket before hitching himself up onto the iron grate covering one of the boys’ bedroom windows directly below Filomena’s. As photos taken that day show, Berretti had no trouble maneuvering himself into a position where he could have reached into Filomena’s broken window, opened it, and swung himself up to climb in. An iron nail was in the brick wall halfway between the two windows—the prosecution would later make a big deal of this—but Berretti didn’t even need it to pull himself up.

Again, I was struck by how capricious the courts had been. Judge Ricciarelli was so sure the wall was unscalable he used it as a reason to keep me in solitary confinement, when a little elementary checking would have told him his assumption was wrong. How many months or years of my life would his nonchalance end up costing?

My father hired a telecommunications expert to help resolve a few other mysteries from the night of the murder. The prosecution had given no adequate explanation for a series of calls registered on Meredith’s English cell phone after she’d returned from her friends’ house around 9:00 p.m., and many of them seemed baffling, assuming they were made—as the prosecution argued—by Meredith herself. We believed Meredith was dead by the time of the last two calls, and our expert Bruno Pellero intended to help us prove that.

Meredith’s last confirmed call was to her family in England at
8:56 p.m. Nobody answered. Since she was in close contact with her ailing mother, she might ordinarily have been expected to try again, but she never did. Almost exactly an hour later, someone started calling Meredith’s voice-mail service but did not stay on the line long enough to get through. Two minutes after that, another call was made to the first number in Meredith’s contacts list, her bank in England, but the caller did not include the international dialing code.

These abortive calls seemed to be the handiwork of someone, most likely Meredith’s attacker, messing around with her phone. How could we establish that for sure? Pellero, an effortlessly brilliant telecommunications expert from Genoa, figured it out by matching up the phone records with the cell transmission towers where the signal for the calls had been picked up. He made his way from the house on Via della Pergola to the spot where it seemed most likely that the phones were tossed into Elisabetta Lana’s garden, stopping every few seconds and testing to see which transmission tower area he was in. He discovered that the odd calls around 10:00 p.m. were almost certainly not made at the murder house, but rather in the Parco San Angelo, an open area right across the street from Lana’s garden wall. Pellero talked to Elisabetta Lana and conducted a thorough inspection of her garden to try to pinpoint the exact spot from which the phones had been thrown.

To his surprise, she told him the Squadra Mobile had done exactly the same thing in the first few weeks after the murder. They had even tossed oranges from the street to try to simulate the trajectory of the discarded phones. It was quite likely, in other words, that they too understood that the cell transmission tower for the 10:00 p.m. phone calls did not match the house on Via della Pergola.

This aspect of the Squadra Mobile’s work was not in the case
records. If they had found what Pellero and my family thought they had, it would have contradicted Mignini’s evolving theory of the crime. But their work, if it existed, simply vanished.

*  *  *

My neighbor in the protected section was, like me, a headline maker. His name was Roberto Spaccino, and he’d been all over the newspapers following the murder of his pregnant wife, Barbara, about five months before Meredith died. According to his prosecutors, Spaccino had beaten Barbara for years and cheated on her right and left with the female customers of a small chain of Laundromats he operated. Spaccino, however, claimed an alibi. He said he’d paid a late-night visit to one of his Laundromats, only to find the house turned upside down on his return and his wife bludgeoned to death. Their two sons were still peacefully asleep in their beds.

I didn’t know what to make of the story, but Spaccino could not have been friendlier. We commiserated about our cases and the fact that both of our prosecution teams were convinced we had staged break-ins to cover our tracks.

Over time, I found the details of his story to be less than believable, but I kept that strictly to myself. He took a protective interest in me and kept me away from some of the crazier pedophiles and rapists. Compared to the rest of the block, Spaccino was almost normal.

*  *  *

The pretrial hearings that began in mid-September gave my legal team its first look at the woman who posed the greatest obstacle to my exoneration, Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni of the Polizia Scientifica’s crime lab in Rome. She was the one who appeared to be holding out
on handing over the DNA evidence. And the pretrial judge, Paolo Micheli, initially supported her position.

When we pointed out that we could hardly prepare for a cross-examination without seeing the documents on which Stefanoni’s work was based, Judge Micheli relented, if only a little. We received her conclusions, but not the data demonstrating how she got there.

It was becoming obvious the prosecution had something to hide, and while we were troubled by the refusal to hand over the most important evidence in the case, we had to presume that sooner or later we’d get hold of it. Even in her initial questioning by the judge, Dr. Stefanoni was forced to admit that her sample sizes were alarmingly small, that her results could not all be reproduced (something even she said was a standard scientific requirement), that there was some vagueness about where exactly on the kitchen knife she’d found Meredith’s DNA, and that she’d found traces of several people’s DNA on the bra clasp, not just mine. She also acknowledged that a contaminated or improperly analyzed DNA sample could, in theory, lead to an incorrect identification.