Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (29 page)

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The single most atrocious moment of the appeal came when Francesco Maresca, the lawyer representing the Kercher family, flashed brutally graphic photographs of the crime scene in open court, including images of Meredith’s near-naked body and the ghastly wounds to her neck. Amanda and I instinctively turned away, not because we had not seen such images before—we had—but because the moment seemed to be in such unforgivably bad taste. Maresca had spent years accusing us and our defense teams of exploiting Meredith’s death and soiling her memory, but here he was doing the very thing he was so fond of condemning in others. “Meredith was butchered, like victims of Mafia killings are butchered, in revenge for some wrong,” Maresca thundered as the gallery gasped and the press photographers snapped away. “I’m showing you these photos so you can see how she suffered as she died.”

These images had been shown by the prosecution during the evidentiary phase of the first trial, but when they did it, they at least cleared the public gallery and gave due warning. This time, in the words of the former FBI agent Steve Moore, who was in court, it
was “without warning, without dignity, without any apparent concern for Meredith or her grieving family, without decency.”

Extraordinarily, a few days later, Mignini tried to assail Amanda and me for shying away from the photographs, as though we were somehow betraying our guilt. “Why did Amanda and Raffaele not have the strength to look at Meredith’s martyred body?” he asked.

I can tell him why. Because the crime sickened us, as it sickened everyone. Because we had been victims of tabloid justice—lurid, headline-grabbing tactics uncorroborated by the facts—for four years now and were revolted by it. Meredith’s suffering had occupied my dreams and filled my prayers; I was not a lawyer, and her death was not a career opportunity. I derived no benefit from it, only pain, and I had no desire to dwell on it even for an instant. I had, in effect, been forced to stare at that ghastly crime scene every day since my arrest and come to grips with the fundamental absurdity of being held responsible for it. Enough was enough.

I had also listened, for hour upon hour, as my family and the consultants hired for my defense reconstructed the circumstances of Meredith’s death in all its minutiae. My father, being a doctor, had taken a particular interest in the grisly physical details, all the better to make sense of the crime scene and exclude even more emphatically that I could have played a part. He would give demonstrations to whoever asked, grabbing people from behind as he believed Guede had grabbed Meredith, and talking through the knife play, the attempted sexual assault, the hasty effort to stanch the blood, the decision to finish her off, and, finally, her agonizing last moments lying on the floor as she simultaneously bled and choked to death.

The crime, I could have told Maresca and Mignini, was brutal but not complicated. Guede broke in through Filomena’s window, started looking for the rent money, then went to the kitchen to help
himself from the refrigerator. (He left forensic traces of all this, and his history indicated that he liked to make himself at home in the places he broke into.) He detoured to the bathroom when he developed an urge to go and sat there while Meredith came in through the front door and slipped into her room. He appears to have been startled by her entry, and did not flush to avoid tipping her off to his presence. Meredith must have been attacked quickly, my father and my defense team believed, because she had time only to kick off her shoes and put them in the closet before being interrupted. (Her shoes were the only things she wore that night that remained unstained by blood.)

Guede crept into her room and grabbed her from behind under the chin and yanked his hand up over her mouth to prevent her from crying out. He held his knife to the right side of her neck as he issued his demands, presumably for sex. In the ensuing struggle, he jabbed her twice, causing blood to spurt out. Our best guess was that he didn’t set out to kill her, but at some point decided he’d caused so much damage he had no option but to finish her off. He tried to plunge the knife in farther but could not find the right angle. So he switched sides and stuck the blade a full eight centimeters into the left side of her neck, hacking back and forth in an effort to sever her carotid artery, which he missed.

As Meredith struggled for her life, her lungs filling with blood through the perforation he had made in her throat, Guede lost his right shoe and his foot started slipping around in the growing pool of blood. He waited for her to die, but her agony, according to the medical experts, continued for more than ten minutes. If Mario Alessi was correct, Guede may have masturbated over her body. He picked up his right shoe and walked to the bathroom to wash off his foot and sock before putting the shoe back on. That would
explain the bloodstains on the basin tap and the bidet, as well as the consistent pattern of left shoes and right feet. When he realized Meredith still was not dead, he threw a duvet over her body, stole her keys, phones, and money and locked her door to make sure she had absolutely no means of escape and no way of raising the alarm.

Guede was apparently afraid to return to his house by the most direct route, via Piazza Grimana, because of the risk of being seen covered in blood. So he took a much more circuitous route, walking down Via Bulagaio into open country and on to Via Sperandio, past Elisabetta Lana’s property, where he disposed of the phones, and back toward Corso Garibaldi and his apartment a few steps away from mine. He changed his clothes, got rid of the shoes and knife, and went out dancing to make it look as if nothing were amiss.

This was the crime. This was the sequence of events I was haunted by. I needed no reminder, no visual aid, and certainly no lectures from lawyers pushing their own agenda. On the contrary; it was little short of incredible that the prosecution had not put this together for itself, because all the evidence pointed to this scenario. Now that Conti and Vecchiotti had exposed the DNA evidence for the sham that it was, literally nothing was left to tie us to the murder. No physical evidence, no eyewitness testimony, and no plausible motive.

Giulia Bongiorno, in her summation, put it admirably: “Nobody here is disputing that this was a savage crime; nobody is disputing it was an unforgivable act. But the gravity of the offense does not translate automatically into more evidence against the defendants. If you’re wondering whether those photographs were shocking, I say, yes, they were. But they are also not the point.”

Bongiorno, even more than she had in Massei’s court, spent an extraordinary amount of her final presentation defending Amanda.
She said the prosecution wanted to present Amanda as a real-life incarnation of Venus in Furs, a coldhearted, diabolical woman who had used me, her weak-willed wingman, to commit unspeakable acts. But that, Bongiorno said, was not the real Amanda. Rather, she was like Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon character from the half-animated, half-live-action film
Who Framed Roger Rabbit,
which has always been popular in Italy. Why Jessica Rabbit? Because, Bongiorno said, she was a good-hearted, loving woman who was falsely accused of a crime and, because she was beautiful, was wrongly assumed to have loose morals and an evil heart.

My misfortune was simply to have been Amanda’s boyfriend, her
fidanzato
—her betrothed, as we say in Italian. At the time I was arrested, the only evidence tying me to the crime was the Nike shoe print that was quickly shown not to be mine. Everything else, the bra clasp and the rest, had been pretexts to keep on accusing me once the initial evidence fell away. “There are those who by getting betrothed acquire a family,” Bongiorno told the court acerbically. “He acquired a murder case.”

I was so worked up I badly wanted to address the court myself. Bongiorno talked me out of saying anything that pertained directly to the evidence, but I still have the draft of my original remarks. I felt I had been excluded from the proceedings so thoroughly it was almost as if I did not exist. I was, as I wanted to say, “Mr. Nobody,” of no apparent interest except as someone to condemn to years in prison as an accessory; an accessory to Amanda, that is, not to the crime.

“Mr. Nobody is a shadow flitting through the night, present all around the murder scene yet without leaving a trace,” I wrote. “Does Mr. Nobody exist? No, he does not, and if he does, he’s certainly not me.”

When I addressed the court, I focused instead on the
FREE AMANDA AND RAFFAELE WRISTBAND
I’d been wearing since the start of the first trial. I talked about how much it meant and how I had kept it as a badge of resistance to my imprisonment. At the end of the speech, I removed it and offered it to the judges as a symbol of my faith in their decision making. “
È arrivato il momento,
” I said. The moment has arrived.

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The lawyer’s final rebuttals took place on Friday, September 30, and Judge Hellmann insisted on waiting out the weekend before announcing a verdict, apparently to avoid the risk of civil disorder on a Saturday night. This final round of waiting was the hardest of all. I was back at Capanne, back in solitary confinement, unable to concentrate on anything except the knots of anticipation twisting my stomach.

When Monday rolled around, we were called into court for a short hearing, then we had to wait again, for what turned into eleven excruciating hours. I spent some time talking to my lawyers, but otherwise I was a nervous jumble, not knowing what to do with myself. Reading the newspapers was of no interest; they just aggravated me. I thought of my chess games with Carlo in the library at Terni, but there was no chess set here. I worked my way mindlessly through a few sudoku puzzles, only to decide they were a waste of time.

I heard that Rocco Girlanda, the Italian parliamentarian who had befriended Amanda, wanted to see me, but he was not allowed in. Still, the courthouse authorities were relatively lenient, perhaps sensing I would not be a convicted murderer much longer. I was allowed to roam into the corridor outside my holding cell, and I
remember watching the sun set as a hare played nonchalantly outside. I stared at that hare and thought of the freedom he enjoyed. I prayed that I would soon be out there with him.

Shortly after nine thirty, we were ordered back into the courtroom. It was so packed I couldn’t see my father or my other family members or Amanda. Every square inch was jammed with police officers, lawyers, journalists, friends, and supporters. Bongiorno told me not to make eye contact with the police, so I kept my gaze in the other direction. I felt too sick to speak.

Then the judge entered. We all rose, and I grabbed the nearest hand. It belonged to one of my lawyers, but I couldn’t even tell you which one.

Judge Hellmann began,
“In nome del popolo italiano
 . . . .” In the name of the Italian people, the old cliché. The next phrase I grabbed on to was
“parziale riforma della sentenza di primo grado”
—partial revision of the lower-court sentence. Which part was
not
being revised? I imagined having a few years knocked off my sentence, no more, and felt desperation rise through my body.

Amanda, Judge Hellmann announced, was still guilty of slandering Patrick Lumumba. My heart sank a little further.

But that was all the bad news he had. On the main charges, of murder and sexual assault, we were acquitted
“per non aver commesso il fatto,”
because we did not commit the deed. On the charge of simulating a break-in, we were acquitted even more comprehensively,
“perché il fatto non sussiste,”
because no such crime took place. And then came the most beautiful words of all, Hellmann ordering our immediate and unconditional release from detention.

The room erupted in cheers. I had closed my eyes from the tension and now I reopened them to a scene of indescribable joy.
Bongiorno hugged me; she was beaming. My other lawyers hugged me too. I couldn’t see my father, but I later learned that he punched the air as our release was announced. Moments later, he wiped away a tear—using a tie originally given to him by his mother. I asked my lawyers if I could go and find my family, but they said there would be time to celebrate with them shortly; we needed to leave.

On the way out, I glanced at the police, who were lined up in their uniforms against a side wall. I wanted to see the dejection and disgust I knew must be written all over their faces, but they would not indulge me and looked away. It didn’t matter; the victory tasted just as sweet.

Finally, I saw Amanda, who was weeping her eyes out, her body racked by great waves of relief, anguish, and sheer incredulity. All I wanted, in that moment, was to be alone with her, to wish her well, to reflect on everything we had gone through, separately and together, over four long years. But we were at the eye of a tremendous storm, a crowd of screaming supporters and flashing cameras and a sea of blue official uniforms trying to keep some sort of order. Privacy was impossible.

We did, though, have a few moments together in the basement of the courthouse waiting for the cars that would take us back to our prisons one final time. The crowds were behind us now; it was just us and a couple of guards making sure everything ran smoothly.

Amanda took my hand and squeezed it ever so gently. She was still in shock, as I was, but no longer bawling. “What will you do now?” she asked.

“I’ll go to Bisceglie to be with my family, and then I’ll get organized and continue my studies. What about you?”

“I think my family’s already booked a plane to take me straight back to Seattle. I can’t wait to see my house and my friends.”

“You know something? I would have loved to see a huge, white Viking lady singing an operatic aria when the judge finished talking.”

Amanda looked at me quizzically.

“You know, ‘it’s not over until the fat lady sings’ . . .”

I think I got a hint of a smile out of her. But we were out of time.

“
Ciao,
Raffaele,” she said as she climbed into the back of a four-wheel drive.