Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (19 page)

Whenever Stefanoni was put on the spot, she would either take off on flights of extraordinary wordiness or else resort to monosyllables. We also noticed she had a habit of twirling her finger through the ends of her long, black hair. She was a nervous witness, which was good for us.

For the mass media, the pretrial hearings had little to do with the evidence; they were an opportunity to photograph Amanda and me for the first time since our arrests. I chose not to show up at all the first day, partly because I didn’t want to be hounded by photographers, and partly because I was still afraid that Amanda would do or say something stupid. I’d be brought up to Perugia from Terni in a maddeningly tight cage in the back of a van and was feeling
vulnerable because I was back in solitary for the duration of the hearings.

Not that the newspapers cared. They were interested mostly in Amanda, her demure white blouse, her minimalist makeup, and her natural good looks. Never mind whether we were guilty or innocent, present or absent; the story line insisted we were
belli e dannati,
the beautiful and the damned. When I smiled at her and blew her kisses at the second hearing, the newspapers were full of it, and it did us only harm.

*  *  *

The hearings stretched out over more than a month and gave us a few reasons to be hopeful. The Albanian superwitness, a man named Hekuran Kokomani, showed up in court wearing a baseball cap and a hoodie concealing most of his face. When my lawyers cross-examined him, he fell apart in spectacular fashion. He couldn’t remember what time or even what day he supposedly saw me with Amanda and Guede in Via della Pergola, and he said it had been stormy—an observation contradicted by weather data for both October 31 and November 1. He said Amanda had a gap between her front teeth, prompting great hilarity when, at the judge’s request, she smiled to prove him wrong.

We also managed to obtain the parking lot video footage after proving to the court—from the prosecution’s own documentation—that it existed and was in their possession. In the long run this would be helpful, but Mignini managed to use it against us by pointing out that the car carrying the Polizia Postale arrived at 12:35, according to the time stamp on the tape. This was fifteen minutes before I called the carabinieri; only later would we work out that the time stamp was wrong.

Judge Micheli issued his ruling at the end of October. On the plus side, he found Guede guilty of murder and sentenced him to thirty years behind bars in an accelerated trial requested by Guede himself. Judge Micheli also accepted our evidence that it wouldn’t have been that difficult to throw a rock through Filomena’s window and climb the wall.

But, Spider-Man or no Spider-Man, he still didn’t believe Guede got into the house that way. He argued that Filomena’s window was too exposed and that any intruder would have run too great a risk of discovery by climbing through it. Therefore, he concluded, Amanda and I must have let him in. There seemed to be no shaking the authorities out of their conviction that the break-in was staged.

To our astonishment, Judge Micheli broadly accepted Dr. Stefanoni’s testimony, despite the many doubts he’d raised in questioning her. (My father later laid much of the blame on our consultant, Vincenzo Pascali, who was upbraided by the judge for failing to follow court protocol and confusing what was already a complicated issue.) Micheli said he couldn’t accept that
both
the kitchen knife and the bra clasp had been contaminated, because they had been collected in entirely different places. And that was that. The upshot: Amanda and I were ordered to stand trial, and to remain in custody until it was over.

Another judge, another crushing disappointment.

*  *  *

Despite prevailing, the prosecution couldn’t help being stung by Kokomani’s embarrassing performance, and they took one line in Judge Micheli’s ruling particularly to heart. Without Kokomani’s testimony, Micheli said, nothing indicated that Guede, Amanda,
and I had known each other before the night of the murder. “The assumption that there was a criminal conspiracy remains fatally unsupported by actual evidence,” he wrote. With the clock ticking down to the start of our trial and the prosecution still wedded to the idea that Meredith’s murder had been some sort of ritual slaughter, the pressure was on to find some of that evidence.

On November 20, an unemployed university researcher named Fabio Gioffredi made a providential appearance in the prosecutor’s office and provided what Mignini was looking for. Two nights before the murder—which is to say, more than a year earlier—Gioffredi said he had seen Amanda, Meredith, Guede, and me outside the house on Via della Pergola. He had glimpsed us for just an instant. Still, the moment lodged in his mind because he had just had a minor car accident; he scraped another vehicle as he pulled out of a parking space down the street.

Oddly, Gioffredi had no memory of the details of the other car. There was no police report on the accident and no insurance claim. Gioffredi said he gave his phone number to the owner of the other car, but never heard from him and never paid any money for the damage. In other words, there was no independent record of the incident. Still, he was sure he remembered Amanda, whom he did not know, wearing a long red coat with large buttons (which she did not possess). He said that the rest of us, whom he did not know either, were in dark clothing.

My family’s reaction to Gioffredi was that he was just another
pestamerda,
an annoyance much like Kokomani, whom we could swat away with relative ease. It didn’t take long for one of the computer consultants hired by my father to establish that, at the exact time Gioffredi said I was meeting Amanda and Meredith and
Guede, I was in fact at home, on my computer, reading and taking notes on a complicated genetic-programming paper I was reading for my thesis.

Then something very strange happened. My father found it impossible to get through to Luca Maori’s law office. Papà had been in almost daily contact because Maori’s assistants, Donatella Donati and Marco Brusco, were cataloging and analyzing all the trial materials as they came in. Now Papà could not get them to return his calls.

At length he went to Perugia to confront Maori directly. Nobody greeted him as he entered the office; he had the sense everyone was shrinking away from him. What was going on? He marched right up to Maori and demanded an explanation.

“It looks bad, very bad,” Maori told him. “This Gioffredi is a credible guy and I don’t know that we can counter him.”

My father was incredulous. The man charged with taking on my defense was not only freezing him out; Maori plainly believed I might actually be guilty.

All of us knew from the beginning that Maori had doubts about taking on the case. We chalked it up to his uncertainty about Amanda, which my family understood and largely shared. To be fair, the issue was not just whether I was innocent. The longer the case went on and the more rulings went against me, the greater the risk to Maori’s reputation and career in Perugia. Still, we had to wonder, if he had this little faith in me, why had he gotten involved at all?

Papà told him about the data from my computer, but still Maori was skeptical. “Why don’t you let me see it?” he asked.

My father didn’t have the data with him, but he said his brother, Giuseppe, could fax it over. The atmosphere in Maori’s office was thick with mistrust and pent-up emotion as they waited for the fax
to arrive. Five minutes, ten minutes passed. My father got on the phone with my brother; something seemed to be wrong with his fax machine. Then Maori’s machine started acting up. Time continued to tick by, and Maori grew ever frostier.

Finally, the pages started to come through. Maori read them, nodded, and picked up the phone to speak to Donati and Brusco. Clearly he was telling them it was okay to talk to the Sollecitos again. Maori’s coldness vanished in an instant, replaced by his habitual charm. He wanted my father to believe everything was back to normal, as though the entire episode had simply not occurred.

My father, though, was apoplectic. He said nothing, but he knew he could never fully trust Luca Maori again.

*  *  *

The prosecution, undeterred by its previous announcement that the investigation was over, spent much of November digging up other witnesses to testify against us, and leaking the most damaging parts to the newspapers. One witness we had already heard from in the pretrial hearings; he was a homeless heroin addict named Antonio Curatolo, who claimed to have seen Amanda and me lurking near Piazza Grimana on the night of the murder, looking as if we were waiting for someone. We didn’t take him seriously at first because he also remembered seeing buses waiting to take people to discotheques, and on November 1 there had been no such bus service because it was a holiday. But Judge Micheli, for some reason, found him credible, and Mignini would later use him to substantiate the theory that the murder occurred closer to midnight than to 9:00 p.m.

Another enduringly troublesome witness was Marco Quintavalle, the owner of a convenience store a few steps from my house,
who had been interviewed by police several times in the immediate aftermath of the murder and asked if he remembered me buying bleach. He did not, describing me as a quiet, polite regular customer. Now, more than a year later, he suddenly remembered that he had seen Amanda come into his shop early in the morning of November 2 to purchase cleaning materials. At least, he thought it was Amanda. He was riddled with uncertainty, and his receipts from that morning showed no evidence of purchases, incriminating or otherwise. Still, the prosecution jumped all over him and later put him on the stand to bolster the argument that Amanda and I had spent that morning wiping the murder scene clean of our traces—but not, curiously, Guede’s. It was one of their more dishonest, not to mention absurd, arguments, because any forensics expert could have told them such a thing was physically impossible. Still, it was all they had, and they single-mindedly stuck to it.

Investigators also delved into my past. Two members of the Squadra Mobile traveled to Giovinazzo and, according to several people they encountered, asked leading questions at my old school about a nonexistent episode in which I supposedly attacked a fellow student with a pair of scissors. They learned I had once been written up for possession of a tiny quantity of cannabis, an episode that was later blown up to suggest I was a drug pusher and maybe also an addict.

Most shockingly, they started making inquiries into my mother’s death in an attempt to cast suspicion on my family history. My mother, Vincenza Palmiotto, died of a heart attack in June 2005, as the certificate issued by the coroner’s office and signed by her doctor made abundantly clear. Still, the two officers saw fit to speculate that she had fallen into a deep depression in the years following the divorce from my father. She was so despondent about Papà’s
upcoming marriage to Mara, they claimed, that she “could have” been pushed to commit suicide.

The point of such an outrageous and unfounded inquiry was, presumably, to insinuate that mental instability ran in my family. Suicide, murder—what’s the difference? How could they sink so low as to drag my beautiful mother into their smear campaign? Really, the Perugia police are lucky I’m as even-tempered as I am, because nothing moves a Southern Italian to murderous rage more quickly than insulting the name of his dead mother. I can be grateful, I suppose, that she did not live to see the sick, twisted lengths the police were prepared to go to pin Meredith’s murder on me. This blow was as low as they dared to stoop, and I will never forgive them for it.

*  *  *

I thought about my mother every day in prison. Sometimes I saw her as my protector. Sometimes I thought of her untimely death the same way I thought about my imprisonment, as an illustration of how unjust and cruel life can be.

I grew up as loved as any child could wish to be, but I was also in the shadow of two parents who bickered and fought until the day my father decided he could no longer stand it and left. I was eight years old. My mother had planned for nothing than to be a faithful wife and mother, and the divorce left her devastated. For the rest of her life, she showed no interest in other men and never took a job. With Vanessa almost out of the house, I became her abiding preoccupation. She mothered me to pieces, to the point where people wondered if I could ever go out into the world and survive without her.

At times, it was stifling. She and my father continued to fight,
even over the bills we had to pay. By the time I was eleven or twelve, my mother was afraid to confront Papà directly and used me instead as her messenger, her go-between. I hated playing the role and retreated ever further into a fantasy world of comic books and video games, because they seemed simpler and more comprehensible than the emotional chaos around me.

I was a diffident, socially awkward kid. My childhood passion was the Japanese comic strip
Sailor Moon,
about a shy, fourteen-year-old girl whose magical powers turn her into a benign avenger, a champion of justice who, with her talking cat, reliably defeats the forces of evil. Believe me, there were times in prison I wanted to invoke Sailor Moon and defeat a few evil forces of my own.

When I finished high school, I needed to get away, so I applied for university in Perugia, where I had the opportunity to live cheaply at a residential college set up specially for the children of doctors. My father, who understood why I wanted to leave, thought it would be a smoother transition than launching out on my own. My mother, on the other hand, was anxious for me to stay close to home and talked me into applying to the University of Bari. My mind, though, was made up: when Perugia accepted me, it was time to cut my old ties and try life in a different part of Italy.

I didn’t regret the choice for an instant. The college had a midnight curfew but relatively few other rules. I made friends easily and enjoyed having a buffer from the
perugini,
the locals who tended to be reserved and a little cold, especially toward Southerners. My college roommates played pranks on each other. We dressed up in crazy costumes and had water-pistol fights; usual student stuff. Once, we heard a rumor that one of my fellow residents had a porn movie showing a woman having sex with a pig, so we watched it, just for laughs, and were mildly disappointed that the pig was merely
crosscut into the footage. The college’s administrators issued a mild reprimand when they found out about this. (The prosecution later seized on it as evidence that I was some sort of porn addict.)