Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (23 page)

It wasn’t pretty; I heard the whole thing from three or four cells away. Beppe was hit in the head with a gas bottle and screamed,
“Fate tutti schifo!”
You’re all disgusting! Then he broke Ahmed’s nose, grabbed his finger, and tore off the tip with his teeth.

I did my best to stay calm. This was a gangland vendetta, I rationalized, and had nothing to do with me.

Having the cell doors closed most of the day certainly made the section feel safer, even if it was more claustrophobic. And I had some protective friends. Some time before the fight, I had shared a cell with another mafioso, a Neapolitan drug trafficker I knew just
as Gennaro. He made me cakes and told stories of his life on the streets. I also struck up a friendship with a gangster named Vittorio Vespa, who sang Neapolitan songs through my keyhole. “Ask for a song,” he would say, “and I’ll sing it.” Vespa would then sing what he wanted regardless, and we would both laugh.

These weren’t bad people to have looking out for me.

One solace was a new passion I discovered for painting; I threw myself into it and spent weeks at a time working on reproductions of famous artworks or copies of Japanese manga images. It was a great way to empty my mind of all its troubles and focus on something creative.

Another solace was a blossoming correspondence with Amanda. Not only did we smile at each other in court, we sent each other music and magazines and books—which the prison authorities permitted as long as they were all paid for—and exchanged frequent letters. It was a way for each of us to break the tension of the trial. Amanda wrote to me about all sorts of mundane things, everything from the new music she was discovering to her efforts to be better at “girly” things and turn out more formally in court. She also let me know that she had my back, just as I had hers.
Io lo so che non sono sola, anche quando sono sola,
she wrote in Italian at the end of one letter. I know I’m not alone, even when I’m alone. And then her familiar sign-off:
Ti voglio bene.
I love you.

I liked hearing from her so much I asked for permission to phone her from time to time. My lawyers thought this was a terrible idea, as the line was bound to be tapped and anything we said could be used against us in ways we might not even be able to imagine. My family was similarly unimpressed.
“Sei coglione!”
my sister, Vanessa, railed at me. You’re an idiot!

The prison authorities granted my request, but for the phone
calls to happen, Amanda needed to give her consent too. She never did; most likely she was was listening to her lawyers a little more carefully than I was listening to mine.

*  *  *

At the end of July, just before a monthlong summer vacation, the court granted our request to see Dr. Stefanoni’s underlying data. When we reconvened in September, my consultants came out swinging. Not only had the DNA test on the kitchen knife come back “too low,” Dr. Stefanoni had overridden the machine to force it to come up with a result on a single, irreproducible sample. Recognized scientific protocols should have told her that no reliable result was possible.

The test on the bra clasp, meanwhile, had also come back “too low” and presented an incomplete genetic profile, meaning that the identification of my DNA was far from confirmed. Adriano Tagliabracci, the specialist we hired from the University of Le Marche in Ancona (whose DNA lab is, unlike Stefanoni’s, certified by the International Society for Forensic Genetics), told the court the identification she obtained was common to three to four people out of every thousand. So in Perugia, a city of 160,000, the identification—even assuming it was not compromised by contamination at the scene—would potentially apply to five or six hundred people.

The prosecution, in response, accused Dr. Tagliabracci of trying to smear the good name of government crime-lab workers so courts would stop using them and turn to private labs like his instead. It was a curious argument. They also produced the kitchen knife itself, parading it around the courtroom like a holy relic inside a clear plastic box, stamped
HANDLE WITH CARE
in English for the
benefit for the foreign press. They did not mention, of course, that the way the knife had originally traveled from my kitchen to the Polizia Scientifica lab in Rome broke recognized chain-of-custody rules. As the prosecution’s own paperwork showed, it was not put in a sealed evidence bag but was placed in an envelope and mailed inside an ordinary box.

The defense found plenty of other problems with the knife. One of Amanda’s expert witnesses, Carlo Torre, explained that it was way too long to be the murder weapon. Meredith’s skin around the wound showed signs of bruising, suggesting that whatever knife was used was plunged all the way in. The length of the wound was eight centimeters, far shorter than the seventeen-centimeter blade on my kitchen knife. Still, the government insisted the knife was “not incompatible” with the murder weapon.

Amanda’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, asked the government’s own expert witness, Giancarlo Umani Ronchi, just how loose the definition of “not incompatible” was. “Aren’t you saying, Professor, that any knife with the same basic characteristics, which is to say with a single blade that cuts on one side only, would meet the same standard of ‘non-incompatibility’?”

Umani Ronchi replied, “Basically, yes.”

Umani Ronchi also drew inadvertent attention to the problem of Meredith’s last meal and the time of death when he argued that the coroner might have made a mistake during the autopsy. Perhaps the reason no food was found in Meredith’s upper intestine, he said, was that Dr. Lalli, the coroner, forgot to place a tie at either end of the duodenum, allowing whatever food was inside to slip down to Meredith’s lower intestinal tract before it could be detected. The argument was dubious to begin with because human intestines are
long and convoluted and it is difficult to see how half-digested food could simply slip through. But the argument was also wrong: video of the autopsy showed Dr. Lalli had in fact tied each end of the upper intestine, just as Umani Ronchi said he should have.

By early October, we were ready to petition the court for an independent analysis of the prosecution’s most important data: the DNA evidence, the autopsy results including the estimated time of death, and the computer analysis that had burned through three computers and potentially compromised a fourth. We didn’t bother to ask for a review of the footprint analysis by Rinaldi and Boemia because we had demonstrated some elementary measuring errors and felt confident that would suffice. But we did ask for tests on Nara Capezzali’s double-glazed windows to settle once and for all the question of whether she could have heard Meredith screaming.

It was all for naught. After two hours of deliberation, Judge Massei emerged from his chambers and decided he had enough information already. “The consultants [for each side] have brought an abundance of data to the court’s attention, which makes further analysis unnecessary,” he said in his written ruling.

It was perhaps the most shocking moment of the trial. The court was not interested in digging further into the scientific truth behind Stefanoni’s DNA tests, or the rest of the evidence we were contesting. Massei said he was content to have the arguments on either side and simply evaluate them himself. What that meant, in effect, was that he was calling an abrupt cease-fire in the war of attrition we were successfully waging against the prosecution’s case.

More bluntly, Massei had taken Mignini’s side, and we were going down.

*  *  *

Not everyone wanted to recognize the gravity of the situation right away. Amanda, for one, remained optimistic. “It’s only one part of the battle,” she told me as we walked out of the hearing. “We have so much more in our favor.” Most of our lawyers sought to put a similarly positive spin on things.

But not Bongiorno. She was incapable of pussyfooting around, and while I was not happy about her message, I was grateful she had the courage to deliver it. “They want Amanda,” she told me gravely, “and that means they’re going to ask for a life sentence for both of you. They’re going to argue that the bra clasp ties you to the murder scene, and they’ll get to Amanda that way because you both say you were together that night.”

Bongiorno asked, one last time, if I had anything to say that could put some distance between Amanda and me. I had heard that same question in different forms from everyone—my family, the police, and all my lawyers. Was I absolutely sure I wanted to vouch for Amanda’s whereabouts on the night Meredith died, even if it meant tossing my life away after hers?

I was adamant: “I have nothing to add to what I’ve already said. If we want to fight this battle, we have to do it my way, and that means establishing Amanda’s innocence as much as mine. There is no other way.”

Bongiorno listened and said no more. But, she also believed me. As she later confided, she wanted me to understand that arguing for Amanda’s innocence alongside my own made her task more challenging. Now, though, she was beginning to conclude that she had no choice.

My father was all over the place. He knew exactly how bad the
news was, but he wanted to shield me as best he could. “Whatever happens, don’t worry,” he told me. “There’s always the appeal. The work we’ve done won’t go to waste.”

Vanessa, characteristically, was much blunter. She’d started coming to the court hearings following the dismissal of her criminal complaint and couldn’t help noticing the atmospherics: the confidence in Mignini’s demeanor, the way he took Stefanoni and Napoleoni out to lunch, the warmth he showed to the Squadra Mobile members as he put a paternal arm around them.

“Raffaele’s going to be convicted. I can feel it,” she announced. She said this not to be a killjoy, but because she cared passionately about me, and it broke her heart to think the struggle for my freedom would probably continue for years longer. My father was furious—not because she was wrong, but because she voiced her thoughts out loud.

*  *  *

Mignini and Comodi strode into court for closing statements as though they owned the place. Mignini made a point of mentioning that he had known both Judge Massei and his deputy, Judge Cristiani, for years and congratulated them on the way they’d handled the hearings. My family found that particularly nauseating, the closest thing to an open admission that the judges and the prosecution were part of the same chummy fraternity. According to Mignini, anyone who agreed with him—his fellow lawyers or the media—was admirably objective, while anyone who criticized him deserved condemnation for attempting to delegitimize the proceedings.

Still, Mignini’s swagger belied a considerable insecurity, which
became more obvious as he kept talking. First, he abandoned his sex-orgy-gone-wrong theory entirely. The new motive, as he expressed it, was that Amanda hated Meredith—for being too straitlaced, for having too many English friends, for criticizing Amanda when she forgot to flush the toilet. Mignini didn’t postulate any motivation for me whatsoever, saying only that I was Amanda’s inseparable
fidanzatino,
her “little boyfriend,” who presumably would do whatever she asked. Was this really Mignini’s idea of why people kill each other? Over an unflushed toilet?

Second, Mignini unexpectedly changed his tune about the murder weapon. He still insisted that my kitchen knife had inflicted the fatal wound, but allowed that it was too big for some of the other incisions. He suggested, instead, that I had brought along one of my pocketknives to initiate the attack on Meredith—a theory for which he did not have a shred of evidence. This switch in story lines sounded alarming at the time because it placed me at the center of the action, but in retrospect it was obviously a sign of prosecutorial weakness.

Mignini had to scrabble around to explain how Amanda, Guede, and I could have formulated a murder plan together without any obvious indication that we knew each other. Guede, he postulated,
could have
offered himself as our drug pusher. I
could have
been taking acid and cocaine as well as marijuana: “It’s difficult to say for sure.” Mignini’s speech became so bogged down with
might have
s and
could have
s and
perhaps
es and arguments of plausibility and compatibility and non-incompatibility that it was unclear how many hard facts he was relying on. He acknowledged that his entire reconstruction of the crime was
ovviamente ipotetica
—obviously hypothetical. One startling admission he made would prove useful
to us later on. If the break-in had not been staged, he said, “the two defendants would have to be innocent. . . . The break-in would be attributable to an outsider acting without help from either of them.” Our point exactly. Mignini’s line appeared to be a tacit admission that he had no other solid evidence to go on.

To maximize our role in the crime, the prosecution felt obliged to minimize Guede’s, to the point where they seemed to be taking his side. Mignini referred to him as “poor Rudy”; Comodi, in her own summation, described him as a “poor, disaffected young man” who had been deprived of the usual social protections and thus had valid reasons for going off the rails, unlike Amanda and me. Guede, she said, had not supplied the murder weapon. He had not staged a break-in. He had not chosen to attack the police or the investigators. Unlike us, he had shown signs of remorse, even pity as he brought towels from the bathroom to soak up Meredith’s blood.

This was an outrageous argument from start to finish. How were Amanda and I supposed to show remorse for a crime we had not committed? How could Guede, whom the authorities themselves believed deserving of a thirty-year prison sentence, be characterized as a victim of circumstance?

Comodi didn’t pause to justify her arguments; she merely kept on making them. She called me impassive and cold, willing to do absolutely anything to win the approval of others. Amanda, she said, was narcissistic, manipulative, and aggressive, incapable of empathy or emotional warmth, and focused so completely on satisfying her immediate needs she didn’t care what anybody else thought.