Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (26 page)

Rather, he went on a mean-spirited tear against Amanda and me over the tiniest details, much as Mignini and Comodi had done before him. If we knew on the night of the murder that we were going to Gubbio the following morning, he asked, wouldn’t Amanda logically have taken a change of clothes to my house and showered there? Wouldn’t that have saved time? (He appeared to forget she was expecting to go to work that night.) Why would she take a mop to my house when I had cleaning supplies of my own and needed only to wipe up a small amount of water? How come she slept in until ten or ten thirty when she was, by nature, a morning person? Didn’t we want to take full advantage of the day?

These questions all pointed to an exaggerated form of moral disapproval: because we didn’t go to bed punctually and rise early,
because we dawdled on our way to Gubbio—a mere forty-five-minute drive from Perugia—and didn’t mind walking back and forth between our apartments to gather our things, we must somehow be degenerate people. More likely, in the judge’s view, we simply lied about it all. We lied and we smoked a joint and we had sex. What other proof of murder did a court of law need?

*  *  *

Even Massei understood that he needed to address the issue at the heart of the case, the DNA evidence, and he did so at great length, reproducing every argument he and his colleagues had heard over months of testimony. In the end, though, he ducked the whole question of which side the science favored. Instead of determining whether Stefanoni’s methodology and results had met acceptable standards, he focused on her
intentions.
Nothing, he said, suggested that she had prejudged the situation or was looking for results to confirm the identities of the suspects already in custody. Because her
intentions
as an honest working professional were good, her results must also be good. “From a strictly logical point of view,” he wrote, “there is no reason why Dr. Stefanoni would have wanted to manipulate the results from the [DNA] machine to seek out indications that one or other of the defendants was guilty.”

With that, he dismissed the entire controversy.

As it turned out, Massei may not have been entirely correct to say there was no evidence that DNA results were used to fit a predetermined story line. Giuliano Mignini, of all people, had given a television interview a couple of months earlier in which he stated quite openly that he was looking for a certain result from the kitchen-knife analysis.

Mignini was asked by a special correspondent for the show
L’altra metà del crimine
(The Other Half of the Crime) how he could be so sure my knife was the murder weapon when the DNA readings had come back “too low” and did not appear to conform to international standards. Mignini stuttered and danced around the question before replying in gloriously convoluted Italian,
“Ho ottenuto di farlo risultare.”
I managed to get it to come out right.

His answer didn’t take refuge in science, or in Dr. Stefanoni’s judgment. He seemed willing to take full ownership of the conclusions reached at the Polizia Scientifica lab in Rome.

*  *  *

Life in the protected section had two relatively bright spots that spring. The first was that an old professor of mine from Perugia, Alfredo Milani, agreed to come to Terni as often as twice a week to tutor me. He obtained special permission to come outside of normal visiting hours, so it didn’t affect how often my friends and family could see me. And Milani was spectacular. We would go to the prison library, away from the protected section and away from the visiting room with its big concrete barrier, and work for hours at a time. Milani liked to bring material on a CD-ROM so I could upload it directly to my laptop, but this made the prison authorities nervous and he was told he needed to obtain written permission. Sometimes he had permission; sometimes he brought a CD anyway, even if it meant risking confiscation.

Milani was more than a teacher. He was a true friend, who always asked after my well-being and brought me presents, most memorably a Rubik’s Cube. He guessed, correctly, that it would be a good distraction to while away the hours. It took me three months
to solve the riddle of that cube, something that engaged the attention of my father because he remembered that a Rubik’s Cube was part of the plot of
The Pursuit of Happyness,
the film he saw on the night of Meredith’s murder. Such are the coincidences of my life.

The other bright spot was that I was put to work in the library to update the catalog and set up a computerized lending system. Not only did this get me away from the rapists and the perverts for a few hours each day; it was also a sign, I think, that the prison administrators were looking out for me and maybe even felt sorry for the bind I was in. It was a welcome relief from the numbing monotony of the protected section and gave me a structure and a purpose for each workday other than endless immersion in my legal case. When I asked for help with the library work, they gave me an assistant from the ordinary section of the prison, a thoroughly engaging local scam artist named Carlo Merluzzi, who, when he wasn’t cataloging with me, played chess and teased me about my relationship with Amanda.

“Stop writing to her all the time!” he would insist. “Don’t you have anything else to do?”

She was hardly my only correspondent; I was writing to dozens of family members and supporters all the time. True, Amanda and I
were
regularly exchanging letters and books and music CDs, but that seemed only healthy to me; we were enduring the same unjust punishment and we were helping each other through it. Amanda sent me a number of Kafka novels, including
The Trial,
which hit home in ways most students who read it in college can scarcely imagine. I sent her an Italian novel by Anna Marchesini entitled
Il terrazzino dei gerani timidi
(The Balcony of the Timid Geraniums), about a young girl coming to grips with a mystifying adult world.
The central character was a little like me—introverted and living in her own poetic imagination.

My family, as usual, didn’t understand why I was in such close touch with Amanda. When they visited, our conversations were fraught with tension and frustration, which quickly got me down. Since my new cellmate, Gaetano Raucci, was a psychiatrist, I had an opportunity to talk the situation over with a professional.

Raucci was an odd bird, not immediately approachable. He and his wife had gone through a bitter divorce, during which she had accused him of molesting their infant daughter. He was found not guilty in the lower court, but then sentenced to prison on appeal. I could never figure out whether I thought him guilty or innocent, but he was, understandably, an angry guy. He’d watch current-affairs programs on TV and vent for hours about Italy’s political leaders. Or he’d tie himself up in knots over his favorite soccer team, Inter Milan.

When it came to my family, though, his wisdom shone through. I shouldn’t act too defensively, he said; it was a mistake to adopt a posture of knee-jerk opposition to them. If I wanted them to listen to my point of view, I should offer something, even a symbolic gesture, to soften them up. Following Raucci’s advice, I made coffee for family visitors and brought cups to each of them, with the right amount of milk or sugar. They were no less hostile on the subject of Amanda, but at least they gave me the time of day. And, for a while at least, I kept my cool.

*  *  *

My family was not beating up on Amanda entirely without cause. What I did not know at the time, because they preferred not to
fill me in, was that they were exploring what it would take for the prosecution to soften or drop the case against me. The advice they received was almost unanimous: the more I distanced myself from Amanda, the better. The legal community in Perugia was full of holes and leaks, and my family learned all sorts of things about the opinions being bandied about behind the scenes, including discussions within the prosecutor’s office. The bottom line: Mignini, they were told, was not all that interested in me except as a gateway to Amanda. He might indeed be willing to acknowledge I was innocent, but only if I gave him something in exchange, either by incriminating Amanda directly or by no longer vouching for her.

I’m glad my family did not include me in these discussions because I would have lost it completely. First, my uncle Giuseppe approached a lawyer in private practice in Perugia—with half an idea in his head that this new attorney could replace Maori—and asked what I could do to mitigate my dauntingly long sentence. The lawyer said I should accept a plea deal and confess to some of the lesser charges. I could, for instance, agree that I had helped clean up the murder scene but otherwise played no part in it. “He’d get a sentence of six to twelve years,” the lawyer said, “but because he has no priors the sentence would be suspended and he’d serve no more jail time.”

To their credit, my family knew I would never go for this. It made even them uncomfortable to contemplate me pleading guilty to something I had not done. It was, as my sister, Vanessa, put it, “not morally possible.”

The next line of inquiry was through a different lawyer, who was on close terms with Mignini and was even invited to the baptism of Mignini’s youngest child that summer. (Among the other guests at the baptism was Francesco Maresca, the Kerchers’ lawyer,
who had long since aligned himself with Mignini in court.) This lawyer said he believed I was innocent, but he was also convinced that Amanda was guilty. He gave my family the strong impression that Mignini felt the same way. If true—and there was no way to confirm that—it was a clamorous revelation. How could a prosecutor believe in the innocence of a defendant and at the same time ask the courts to sentence him to life imprisonment? The lawyer offered to intercede with Mignini, but made no firm promises. He wasn’t willing to plead my cause, he said, but he would listen to anything the prosecutor had to offer.

Over the late spring and summer of 2010, my father used this lawyer as a back channel and maneuvered negotiations to a point where they believed Mignini and Comodi would be willing to meet with Giulia Bongiorno and hear what she had to say. When Papà presented this to Bongiorno, however, she was horrified and said she might have to drop the case altogether because the back channel was a serious violation of the rules of procedure. A private lawyer has no business talking to a prosecutor about a case, she explained, unless he is acting with the express permission of the defendant. It would be bad enough if the lawyer doing this was on my defense team; for an outside party to undertake such discussions not only risked landing me in deeper legal trouble, it also warranted disciplinary action from the Ordine degli Avvocati, the Italian equivalent of the Bar Association.

My father was mortified. He had no idea how dangerous a game he had been playing and wrote a letter to Bongiorno begging her to forgive him and stay on the case. He was at fault, he said, and it would be wrong to punish her client by withdrawing her services when I didn’t even know about the back channel, much less approve it. To his relief, Bongiorno relented.

My family, though, did not. Whenever they came to visit they would suggest some form of compromise with the truth. Mostly they asked why I couldn’t say I was asleep on the night of the murder and had no idea what Amanda got up to. Vanessa, one of the most vocal advocates of this line of defense, later acknowledged that they had all “hammered my balls” over it. And it didn’t work. I became hostile and defensive; they would accuse me of losing my head over Amanda; and so the merry dance would go round and around until we were all furious and exhausted.

I had little peace even from some of my more casual visitors. In early October, I received the first of two visits from the bishop of Bari, Don Luigi Martella, whose niece was a big supporter of mine. He too wanted to know why I would throw away my life to “save” Amanda’s. I explained, once again, that I was not acting out of some amorous obsession but because I knew her to be innocent. To be fair, Don Luigi was very responsive, and we talked at length about how difficult it was to accept suffering for something I had not done. I should take strength from Christ’s example, he said; sometimes the acceptance of suffering is what gives a person’s life meaning. I appreciated that, and I also appreciated him looking around the prison and saying, “This is not your house.” I derived a lot of strength and encouragement from that remark.

A few days later, I finally plucked up the courage to tell my family I wasn’t going to take their hammering anymore. I wrote a letter to my aunt Magda—but intended for all of them—in which I made clear I wasn’t going to abandon Amanda, especially since she was growing more despondent with every passing month about the chances of regaining her freedom. “I’m really fond of her,
zia,
” I wrote, “and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do and how I’m
supposed to do it. Unfortunately I’ve understood that Papà, Vanessa, you,
zia
Sara, and many others in the family do not have any sympathy for her, because I’ve been told over and over that her behavior has been one of the causes of the trouble I’m in. You don’t know how deeply this position of yours upsets me. For more than three years I’ve had to fight against it, against the thinking of my own family.”

Rereading the letter now, I’m proud of what I wrote because it expressed all the indignation I felt at the time and drew a clear line in the sand. There were some things I just wasn’t prepared to do, and my family needed to understand that in unambiguous, uncompromising terms.

“Have you ever asked yourself,” I went on, “why I am sometimes reluctant to write to you unless you write first and ask me to respond? It’s for this reason. I no longer have the strength to put up with your desire to blame Amanda for things she is not responsible for and does not deserve. I hope you’ll understand and send this message to the other members of the family. Papà told me a little while ago that he thought I was doing all this because she doesn’t love me anymore and I’m desperate. In other words, that I’m frantically trying to get her attention even though she’s ignoring me.