Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (8 page)

I couldn’t believe what was coming out of her mouth. I was only dimly beginning to realize what she and the others were implying. Amanda, the murderer? It seemed too crazy to believe.

Amanda, meanwhile, was waiting for me. And waiting. She had brought some homework into the Questura but was having a hard time concentrating. She was stiff and achy from fatigue and thought she might feel better if she stretched a bit.

She was by an elevator, away from the main waiting area, but she was seen, of course. Ivan Raffo, a young policeman who had come up from Rome, remarked how flexible she was. And Amanda, allowing herself to be charmed in the worst of all circumstances, decided to show him what she could do.

It was a disastrous idea. When I first heard about what happened next, I understood that Amanda, being Amanda, was mostly interested in being open and friendly to the officer. But I also
realized she had not been thinking smartly, to say the least. Later, in court, Chief Inspector Rita Ficarra described her shock at walking by and seeing Amanda doing cartwheels and splits. In a police station. In the context of a murder investigation. At least two other senior officers saw her too.

Shortly after, Ficarra and her colleague Lorena Zugarini told Amanda they needed to have a frank conversation. And so began her own long night of the soul.

*  *  *

As my interrogators ratcheted up the pressure, they asked me to empty my pockets. I knew immediately this was not a good development. I pulled out a handkerchief, my wallet, my cell phone, and at last, with all eyes on me, the pocketknife.

One of them picked it up with a piece of cloth and took it swiftly out of the room. I tried to explain that it was something I just carried around with me, but that wouldn’t wash. Even I knew things were no longer all right.

“Don’t I have the right to a lawyer?” I asked.

They said no.

“Can’t I at least call my father?”

“You can’t call anyone.” They ordered me to put my cell phone on the desk.

People came in and out of the room in a great flurry of activity. At one point, I found myself alone with just one of the policemen. He leaned into me and hissed, “If you try to get up and leave, I’ll beat you into a pulp and kill you. I’ll leave you in a pool of blood.”

The evening was described very differently by the police officers in court. They denied that I ever asked for a lawyer, or that I was put
under duress of any kind. Daniele Moscatelli, the cop from Rome, said, “Whatever he wanted, water or whatever, was made fully available to him.”

But, I can assure you, I was scared out of my wits, and completely bewildered. I had been brought up to think the police were honest defenders of public safety. My sister was a member of the carabinieri, no less! Now it seemed to me they were behaving more like gangsters.

Then came a sound that chilled my bones: Amanda’s voice, yowling for help in the next room. She was screaming in Italian,
“Aiuto! Aiuto!”

I asked what was going on, and Moscatelli told me there was nothing to worry about. But that was absurd. I could hear police officers yelling, and Amanda sobbing and crying out another three or four times.

What was this? When would it ever end?

*  *  *

Something was exciting the police more than my pocketknife, and that was the pattern they had detected on the bottom of my shoes. By sheer bad luck, I was wearing Nikes that night, and the pattern of concentric circles on the soles instantly reminded my interrogators of the bloody shoe prints at the scene of the crime, which were made by Nikes too.

I had no idea of any of this. All I knew was, the rest of the interrogation team piled back into the room and told me to take off my shoes.

“Why?” I asked.

“We need them,” came the answer.

I did as I was told. “Socks too?”

“No, you can keep your socks on.”

The rounds of questioning began all over again: “Tell us what happened! Did Amanda go out on the night of the murder? Why are you holding out on us? You’ve lost your head
per una vacca
—for a cow!”

They wanted me to sign a statement they had prepared. The first part was a big mash up of the events of October 31 and November 1, most of which, I have to admit, was the result of my own confusion. The account began with the lunch at Via della Pergola, Meredith going out, and the two of us leaving in the later afternoon. But then it described me going home alone and working at the computer while Amanda headed to the center of town.

The statement had my father calling around eleven o’clock, which is what he almost always did, and Amanda returning to my house at around one in the morning.

By the time I read what the police had prepared, it was deep into the night, I was exhausted and scared, and I could no longer think straight. Absurd as it sounds, the statement struck me as accurate enough up to this point. I simply missed the fact that I was—from the investigators’ point of view—cutting Amanda loose for the entire evening and depriving her of the only alibi she had.

I objected to just one paragraph. It was a logical continuation of what the police already had me saying, but I missed the connection; I just knew this part was not right. It read, “In my last statement I told you a lot of crap because she [Amanda] talked me into her version of events, and I didn’t think about the inconsistencies.”

I told my interrogators this part needed to be changed, but they wouldn’t back down. Instead, they unexpectedly became much friendlier and said I shouldn’t worry about this paragraph. It was just something they needed and it wouldn’t affect my position one
way or the other. Essentially, they were asking me to trust them. Part of me still wanted to. I wanted to believe this was a world in which the police did their jobs responsibly. And part of me just couldn’t wait for the hellish night to be over.

At three thirty, after five hours of relentless interrogation, I signed.

*  *  *

At this point, Amanda herself had already cracked. As she later told it, her interrogators insisted they had concrete proof she was at the house on Via della Pergola the night Meredith was killed. When she said she had no recollection of this, they threatened her with thirty years in prison and hit her repeatedly on the head. (The police denied threatening her in any way.)

They asked her over and over about the text message she had sent Patrick, her boss at Le Chic, and said it showed she had arranged to meet him even after he told her she didn’t need to come into work that night. But this was clearly a distorted interpretation. Yes, she had written
ci vediamo più tardi
—see you later—but in both Italian and English that can simply mean “see you around.” The fact that Amanda had added the words
buona serata
—have a good evening—made it abundantly clear she expected no further contact with him that night. But the officers ignored these last two words of her text and later omitted them from the written statement they prepared for her to sign.

For at least an hour, Amanda was interrogated in Italian. The police officers said she seemed to understand the questions well enough, and the statement they produced described her Italian language skills as “adequate”—not an assessment I or the Italian
tenants at Via della Pergola would have shared, and not what the police themselves seemed to think the first night we were brought in for questioning. Then, at some point after midnight, an interpreter arrived. Amanda’s mood only worsened. She hadn’t remembered texting Patrick at all, so she was in no position to parse over the contents of her message. When it was suggested to her she had not only written to him but arranged a meeting, her composure crumbled; she burst into uncontrollable tears, and held her hands up to her ears as if to say,
I don’t want to hear any more of this.

The interpreter, Anna Donnino, tried to calm Amanda and told her how she had once suffered a memory lapse after breaking her leg. Could it be, Donnino suggested, that something similar had happened to Amanda because of the trauma of Meredith’s death? In the moment, Amanda appeared to accept this. The police officers kept asking about Patrick, kept insisting Amanda had been at the house. And, by the time she signed a statement at 1:45 a.m., this is what it said:

“I answered [Patrick’s] message saying we would meet up right away, so I left and told my boyfriend I had to go to work. . . . Immediately after, I met Patrik [
sic
] at the basketball court on Piazza Grimana and we went to my house together. I don’t remember if Meredith was there or if she arrived later. I’m having trouble remembering but Patrik had sex with Meredith—he had a thing for her—but I don’t remember too clearly if Meredith was threatened first. I remember confusedly that he was the one who killed her.”

Once the police had this spectacular document in hand, they came back to squeeze me and insisted that I sign my own statement. Looking now at the sequence of events, I can see how they used each of us to undermine the other. Once my signature was attached
to a document stating that Amanda had gone out for several hours on the night of November 1, they went back and told her I was no longer vouching for her. That, evidently, sent her into a tailspin of fear and confusion—fear of what the police might do to her, fear of what I was saying and what it said about me, and also fear for her own sanity.

As Amanda’s questioning continued, Prosecutor Mignini himself decided to take charge. He arrived at the Questura in the dead of night, apparently after being informed that Amanda had “broken,” and pressed her for a full confession. Again, Amanda was in floods of tears. Again, she was gesticulating with her hands and bringing them to her head—a detail that seemed particularly fascinating to Mignini, perhaps because hitting oneself in the head is sometimes associated with Masonic initiation rites.

At 5:45 a.m., Amanda signed a second statement detailing what were characterized as “spontaneous” pronouncements of hers. “I am very afraid of Patrik,” the statement began—an assertion apparently undermined by the fact that she had gone to see Patrick for a social call just the day before. Again, the narrative had Amanda going with Patrick to her house; again it described Patrick and Meredith having sex.

“At some point,” it went on, “I heard Meredith screaming and I was so afraid I blocked my ears. Then I remember nothing more. My head is full of confusion. I don’t remember if Meredith screamed or if I heard any banging, but I could imagine what might have gone on.”

Unfortunately, the statement also left open the possibility that I was involved. “Not sure if Raffaele was there that night,” it said. Amanda, according to the statement, was certain of only one thing:
that she woke up with me the next morning in my bed. The rest was one big question mark.

*  *  *

When I first found out what Amanda had signed her name to, I was furious. Okay, she was under a lot of pressure, as I had been, but how could she just invent stuff out of nowhere? Why would she drag me into something I had no part of? It soon transpired, of course, that she felt similarly about me. “What I don’t understand,” she wrote, as soon as she began to retract her statements, “is why Raffaele, who has always been so caring and gentle with me, would lie. . . . What does he have to hide?”

It took us both a long time to understand how we had been manipulated and played against each other. It took me even longer to appreciate that the circumstances of our interrogations were designed expressly to extract statements we would otherwise never have made, and that I shouldn’t blame Amanda for going crazy and spouting dangerous nonsense.

Our interrogators resorted to time-honored pressure techniques practiced by less-than-scrupulous law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world. They brought us in at night, presented us with threats and promises, scared us half senseless, then offered us a way out with a few quick strokes of a pen. The CIA once produced a document about such techniques and essentially itemized all the emotional stages we traveled through that night—confusion, fear, guilt, an irrational dependence on our interrogators, and a sense that the whole world had gone topsy-turvy. As my friend and supporter, Steve Moore, a twenty-five-year FBI veteran, described it from the police perspective: “If you’re trying to determine facts and
truth, you want your suspect clear, lucid, and awake. If you want to coerce your suspect into saying what you want them to say, you want them disoriented, groggy, and confused.”

Even before dawn broke on November 6, the authorities had us where they wanted us. True, neither of us had confessed to murder. But what they had—a web of contradictions, witnesses pitted against each other, and a third suspect on whom to pin the crime—was an acceptable second best.

For me, the night was not yet over. While Amanda endured her face-to-face encounter with Mignini, I was taken to another room and showered with threats and insults.

“You don’t know what you’ve done!” someone said. “Your family will be destroyed. You’ll spend the next thirty years in prison.”

Or again: “Your poor father, who knows how he will take this. What did he do to deserve a son like you? You need to tell us what happened!”

In retrospect, I’m not sure they were pressing me to confess to a crime. Their more immediate interest was in having me produce more incriminating testimony against Amanda.

“She went out. When did she go out?” I remember being asked.

“I’m not sure she went out,” I replied at one point. “I remember something totally different.”

“If you can’t remember, then it’s going to be bad for you. You are creating a lot of problems for yourself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never went into Meredith’s room. I never even saw the body. So I don’t know what you are trying to suggest.”

And so it went, around and around and around.

When it became apparent they would get nothing more out of me, I was arrested and handcuffed.

I asked to talk to my family again. I said I needed at least to inform my thesis director where I was. “Where you’re going, a degree’s not going to do you any good,” came the answer.