Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (27 page)

“Well, that’s not the way it is. First, she is not ignoring me; the affection and the desire to help each other are mutual. Secondly it’s of no consequence to me whether she loves me or not, seeing as there’s nothing I can do about it in this situation. I’ll resolve that issue by myself once we get out of here, and you can rest assured I won’t go crying to anyone if I end up disappointed.”

Then came the crux of the matter: “Amanda and I are one now.”

Io ed Amanda siamo una cosa sola adesso.

This was my manifesto. “Whoever mistreats her, mistreats me,” I said. “Whoever speaks ill of her does the same to me. Whoever thinks bad things about her does so to me as well. These are not just words. It’s the truth. Jesus said the same thing on behalf of all human beings who are faithful to the Word of God. More humbly, I am saying the same thing about a girl for whom I feel an immense affection, whom I consider more than a sister and closer to me than if she were of my own blood, my own DNA, my own flesh.”

I think they finally got the message.

My father, who had been less vehement than some of the others but was nevertheless part of the general anti-Amanda chorus, wrote a letter back saying he would always be on my side, no matter what, and that he had nothing to do with the attempts to get me to change my testimony.

His concern, he said, had been mostly about the letters I’d been exchanging with Amanda, because he was afraid the police or the prosecutors might intercept them and misuse them as evidence against us. Now, though, he had the grace to back down, which I appreciated. As he put it, what was the point of distancing myself from Amanda at this juncture, three years after our arrest and close to a year since our conviction in Judge Massei’s court?

I had made many mistakes over the course of my long and painful misadventure. But my determination to stick by Amanda, and by what I knew to be the truth, was one thing I knew I had exactly right. Nothing in the world—not the people I cared about most, and certainly not the threat of further punishment for a crime I did not commit—could induce me to change my mind.

*  *  *

I never felt at home in prison—how could I?—but I did slowly get used to its strange rhythms and peculiarities. Where once I was appalled by the jokes and the not-so-subtle threats my fellow inmates made at each other’s expense, I found myself beginning to join in. One of the most pathetic figures in the section was a man convicted of raping a number of wheelchair-bound women. He was short and stubby and covered in tattoos, and we knew him only by his last name, Pozzi. Mostly, we steered well clear, but one day one of the transsexuals decided to jump on a food trolley and have himself wheeled past Pozzi as a sexual offering. “Don’t worry,” the transsexual said, “I can’t move my legs!”

Another contemptible inmate was an old man with no teeth who had brutally raped a ten-year-old boy in his basement and stuck a broomstick up his anus. We never let him forget it. “Hey,” people would call out when he passed, “do you have a broom I could borrow?” I even did it myself once. Not my proudest moment.

I had the creepy feeling, when I thought on it, that I was slowly turning into one of them.

*  *  *

The appeals court took eight months to read through the files before convening its first session at the end of November 2010. It was difficult to imagine any judge looking at our case objectively, because we’d had our hopes raised and crushed so many times. On the other hand, we knew that Italian appeals courts tend to reverse rulings, if only to leave all options open for the Corte di Cassazione—hence the much-observed (and, to me, absolutely hair-raising) maxim that in Italy, 50 percent of all criminal court decisions are routinely wrong.

Our hopes rested largely on our request for an independent assessment of the forensic evidence. Not only were we confident that such an assessment would turn out in our favor; if the appeals court granted us such a review, it would be a strong early indication that our judges were, finally, fair-minded people. What were the chances of that? The presiding judge, Claudio Pratillo Hellmann, was originally from Padua, in the north of Italy, and his deputy, Massimo Zanetti, was from Viterbo, outside Rome. So they weren’t lifelong members of the Perugia establishment. Beyond that, the “popular judges” were a little better educated than the ones we had under Judge Massei because the rules governing appeals hearings called for a high school diploma as the minimum qualification. Was that a guarantee of anything? At this point, who knew?

At the second hearing, on December 10, Judge Zanetti offered a lengthy review of the case and immediately raised our hopes that the court intended to look at the evidence afresh. “We have to start from the one objective fact that is certain and beyond dispute,” he said, “that on November 2, 2007, shortly after 1 p.m., the corpse of the English student Meredith Kercher was found at Via della Pergola, 7.” The prosecution was furious at what it saw as a cavalier dismissal of other evidence it had worked so hard to establish and later argued that the court had been biased from the outset. But Zanetti’s point was simply that he and Judge Hellmann would not make assumptions or indulge anyone’s theories without hard evidence. Only in the context of a trial as flawed as ours could that be viewed as a controversial statement.

Later that same day, Amanda got up and made an impassioned plea on behalf of both of us. It was by far the longest speech she had delivered in court, and she did it entirely in Italian, which she now spoke fluently. My lawyers, and especially Bongiorno, did not want
me to say a word, so all I could do was listen and root for her in silence as she made the case that we were both victims of a terrible miscarriage of justice.

She started with Meredith, her friend, who she said had been kind, intelligent, and always willing to help out when asked. “Meredith’s death was a terrible shock for me. She was a new friend, a reference point for me in Perugia. . . . I always felt an affinity for her, and immediately after she was killed, I felt how terribly vulnerable I was too.” Amanda described how she leaned on me for emotional support, and also on the authorities, whom she trusted to get to the bottom of the crime. “It took me a long time to accept the reality that I was being accused and unjustly redefined as a person. I am not the person the prosecution insists that I am, at all. They would have you believe I’m a dangerous, diabolical, jealous, uncaring, and violent girl. Their whole case rests on that. But I’m not that girl and never have been.”

Amanda was indeed calm, considerate, and understated, the antithesis of the she-devil depicted in the tabloids. “I stand before you more intimidated than ever. Not because I’m afraid or because I’m a fearful person by nature, but because I have already seen the justice system fail me. The truth about me and Raffaele has not yet been recognized, and we are paying with our lives for a crime we did not commit. . . . I am innocent, Raffaele is innocent. We didn’t kill Meredith.”

The judges were rapt. For the first time since the beginning of our nightmare, I dared to believe that someone was listening to us.

*  *  *

My hunch was correct. Eight days later, Judge Hellmann issued the order we had been yearning for: he appointed two independent
experts from La Sapienza University in Rome to review the DNA samples found on the kitchen knife and the bra clasp, “to establish whose genetic profiles may be found there or, alternately, to explain why such an attribution is not possible.”

Amanda started taking deep breaths and gulping, as though holding back the urge to yell for joy. Her mother and stepfather wept openly with relief. I was beaming from ear to ear; I couldn’t quite believe I was hearing right. I saw the happiness on the faces of my family and thought,
Finally, we are turning a corner.
My heart was in my throat.

My father seemed to be keeping his composure, but he too was awash with emotion. As he and Mara left the courtroom, Mara overheard Manuela Comodi in the next room shouting
“Incompetenti!”
at nobody in particular. Then, as they stepped into the elevator and the doors closed behind them, Papà burst into tears—something he’d done maybe half a dozen times in his life. He told me later he’d been close to crying a week earlier when Zanetti made his statement about the court starting from scratch. Now he let it all out; three years of anxiety and consternation and constant defeat finally countered by some real glimmer of hope. When he stepped out of the elevator, he was too undone to face the television cameras and, uncharacteristically, marched away without comment.

It wasn’t over yet, of course. We still had to go through the appeals trial, piece by painstaking piece. But we knew now that we were going to get a fair hearing. Finally.

*  *  *

Back in the prison library, Carlo had no doubts: I was on my way out. “You know,” he said, “if the independent analysis goes well and you are released, you’ll have to let go of the whole Amanda
thing. There’s no point thinking about her. You’ll just need to move on.”

I said he’d misunderstood. I wasn’t interested in getting back together with her. I was just allowing myself to imagine us set free; maybe I would get a chance to see her face-to-face before she left the country. We’d gone through a lot together, and the only times we’d set eyes on each other in the past three years had been in court.

“Come on,” Carlo said, “you’re still crazy about her.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are.”

“No, I’m not,” I insisted. “Let’s get back to work.”

*  *  *

It took the court-appointed DNA analysts, Stefano Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, six months to reach any definitive conclusions, in part because they had to battle as hard as we did to see the raw data from Dr. Stefanoni’s original tests. The court issued an order to produce the data, which Stefanoni contested, saying the extra information would add nothing of significance. Not until May 2011 did her office finally exhaust the legal process, raise a white flag, and hand everything over.

In the meantime, Conti and Vecchiotti had an opportunity to analyze my kitchen knife—something our experts had been denied. Not only did they confirm there was no blood on the blade, they also discovered traces of rye starch, presumably from bread Amanda or I had cut. Starch absorbs blood, so the discovery was a huge point in our favor: even if we’d scrubbed the knife clean with bleach, as the prosecution imagined, the residual starch would have given the game away. Instead, it demonstrated what we already knew: that the knife had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder.

We presented other exculpatory evidence, none more satisfying than the research Luca Maori’s office had done to destroy Antonio Curatolo’s credibility as a witness. Curatolo was the street bum in Piazza Grimana on whom the prosecution had relied to place Amanda and me outside in the late evening of November 1. He had remembered, though, that it was Halloween, with people in costumes and masks and students massing around buses laid on specially to take them to and from the city’s discotheques. November 1 was not Halloween; it had been the night before. We called the owners of several bus companies and proved conclusively that they had provided no service on the night of the murder because it was a holiday and the discos were closed. If Curatolo had seen us on October 31, which we doubted, it proved nothing.

When Curatolo took the stand in late March, he more or less self-destructed. Many of his most damaging answers weren’t in response to cross-examination by my lawyers; he did it all himself. Mignini asked when Halloween was, and he responded, “It must be the first or second of November, the day we celebrate the dead.” If Mignini was embarrassed by that, he didn’t show it.

Moments later, Judge Zanetti asked how Curatolo ended up on the streets, and he said it was by choice. He was an anarchist. “Then I read the Bible,” he added, “and I became a Christian anarchist.” The streets, he explained, were a way to follow the example of Jesus.

Was he still on the streets? No, he was living at “home.” Giulia Bongiorno, chiming in between the other lawyers and judges, got him to admit that “home” was in fact a prison, and that he had a lengthy criminal record for drug-related offenses.

Zanetti asked if Curatolo had been using heroin at the time of Meredith’s murder. He admitted he had, but added, “I’d like to point out that heroin is not a hallucinogen.”

This
was the prosecution’s star witness? One of the things Maori’s staff discovered was that Curatolo had testified in at least two other recent murder trials in Perugia. Clearly, the prosecutor’s office found him useful, despite the obvious strikes against him. We had to wonder, was he some kind of informant? Had he been promised a deal on his sentence in exchange for his testimony? After this performance it didn’t matter. Judge Hellmann was so flabbergasted by the hallucinogen answer he sent Curatolo packing, and he never troubled us again.

*  *  *

The next person to self-destruct, at least partially, was Mignini himself. In May he gave an interview to a British journalist named Bob Graham and appeared to be taken by surprise when Graham put him on the spot about how the crime took place.

Was it possible, Graham asked, that I was not involved at all? (The interview, conducted through an interpreter, was recorded and later transcribed.) Yes, Mignini responded after some hesitation, that was a theoretical possibility, except that Curatolo—Mignini was still relying on Curatolo—had placed Amanda and me together on the night of the murder. Amanda, for Mignini, was the principal instigator of the murder; either Amanda on her own, or Amanda and Guede together.

Why was the sperm on the pillowcase never tested for DNA? “We had to make a choice,” Mignini answered lamely. “We couldn’t analyze everything.”

Then Graham moved in for the kill. He said he had spoken to numerous forensic experts, veterans of Scotland Yard and the FBI, and they agreed it was a physical impossibility that someone involved in the murder could have left no trace in Meredith’s room.

“In that room, there isn’t a single trace of Amanda,” Graham noted. How come?