The Murder of Meredith Kercher (10 page)

A
s the investigation into Meredith’s murder continued, detectives began to theorize that robbery may have been a motive. Although it had been quickly discounted during the early days of the investigation, the police were revisiting the idea when they learned that Meredith had withdrawn 250 euros from her bank two days before she was killed. The money, detectives believed, was to pay her rent. Her landlord, however, said that the rent money had not been received.

The robbery motive theory was given at least some credence when Rudy Guede told the investigators that when he arrived at the cottage with Meredith, she had gone into her room and opened a drawer and noticed that cash, presumably part of which had been her rent money, was missing. He claimed that she then went into Amanda’s room to see if the money was there, at
the same time complaining that Amanda was always ‘doing drugs’ and that she was fed up with her. Upon hearing Guede’s story, the police speculated that Amanda may have stolen the money from Meredith to buy drugs – possibly from Guede. In that scenario police theorized that either the missing money or Meredith expressing her dissatisfaction to Amanda about her use of drugs, or both, may have led to a confrontation between the two that had also led to Meredith’s death.

On hearing the speculation, Amanda’s family dismissed it as ‘ridiculous’ – even more so than the earlier sex attack theory. To support their argument, the family said that Amanda had no need to steal any money from Meredith because she had thousands of dollars of her own money in her bank account – money she had saved from a number of jobs and from donations by family members who had helped her out with her college fund. Similarly, Raffaele came from a wealthy family, drove an expensive car, and had no reason to become involved in stealing money. Guede, a number of people pointed out, was the one person out of the trio who did need money, and some even suggested that he had implicated Amanda at the encouragement of the police.

Investigator Edgardo Giobbi, a member of the Rome Serious Crimes Squad, equivalent to the FBI in the U.S., had his own theories about the missing money. According to Giobbi, police examined Meredith’s cash
machine withdrawals prior to her death and found that most had been for about 30 euros at a time – except for the withdrawal of the 250 euros two days before her death. Despite the protestations from Amanda’s family, Giobbi supported the theory that Meredith may have accused Amanda of stealing from her.

‘That accusation, which Kercher possibly made in front of Rudy Guede, sparked a row,’ proposed Giobbi. ‘Kercher… withdrew around… 250 euros two days before her death, most likely to pay her rent. Her landlord did not receive the money, and there is no trace of it, although Amanda Knox was carrying 215 euros when she was taken into custody.’

Of course, there was no proof that she had stolen money from Meredith – only the
possibility
that she had done so. The 215 euros in Amanda’s possession could just as easily have been her own money. It was also possible, Giobbi continued, that Amanda and Guede were alone together at the cottage when Meredith came home at around 9 p.m.

‘Alternatively, Guede may have stolen the money from Kercher’s room which he then used to pay for his train ticket to Germany,’ Giobbi added.

Meanwhile, the Italian police said that yet another crucial piece of evidence had surfaced. A bloody fingerprint, they said, was found on a water tap in the bathroom next to Meredith’s room. Giuliano Mignini said it belonged to Amanda Knox and suggested that she could have been cut in a violent struggle.

Mignini’s many critics however – including experts hired by the defence legal teams – argued that the fingerprint could have come about in any number of ways. It was possible, they said, that she had injured herself in a manner that had absolutely nothing to do with the crime. After all, she had lived in the same flat as Meredith and two other girls, and the fingerprint could have been the result of a simple domestic accident.

At a hearing for her release, experts also argued that the knife bearing Meredith’s DNA and Amanda’s DNA near the handle was inconclusive. Experts would be willing to testify in court that the knife in question could not have been used to inflict two out of the three slash wounds to Meredith’s neck. The knife also did not match an imprint left in blood on a bed sheet at the crime scene. Amanda’s DNA could have been on the knife because she had probably used it in the preparation of food at Raffaele’s flat. Meredith’s DNA, although a match, had been at such a low level that it would be discarded in courts of law in the U.S. and Britain, and defence experts said that it could have got onto the knife through cross-contamination from other DNA in the laboratory. Because of the large amount of blood at the crime scene, the knife – if it was the murder weapon – should have had equally large amounts of Meredith’s DNA on it.

After hearing Mignini argue that the three suspects might flee Italy if freed, the judges decided that the
suspects should remain in jail while investigation continued. Amanda responded to this in a somewhat positive manner by saying that ‘when all this is finished, here is where I want to live.’ While it was generally believed that by this she meant Perugia and not Capanne prison, she did characterize her prison cellmates as ‘marvellous’, adding, ‘and the other prisoners are also very nice with me. We have spent time together. We do a load of things together.’

Now that she was being housed with prisoners convicted of crimes similar to those she was suspected of committing, including murderers and sex offenders, Amanda appeared more peaceful and composed than when she first arrived.

‘The first few days I spent in isolation,’ she told a reporter for
Corriere Della Sera
. ‘It was very hard. I couldn’t have any relations with anyone… my God, those days were terrible. Nobody said a word to me. I thought I was going mad and I prayed that they would move me. When I arrived here, everything changed. They treat me with great dignity. It’s important.’

Before the year was over it was revealed that authorities at Capanne prison had confiscated Amanda’s diary and again, like previous documents and information, sections of it were leaked to the press. Some entries showed that Amanda had changed her story about the night of Meredith’s murder once again. This time she had claimed that Raffaele had
framed her for the crime – one in which she said he committed after playing a violent sex game. It seemed somewhat ironic that the details of her latest claim were made public shortly after she had apologized to Lumumba for falsely accusing him.

‘That night I smoked a lot of marijuana and I fell asleep at my boyfriend’s house,’ read an excerpt from the 50-page diary. ‘I don’t remember anything. But I think it’s possible that Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her, then killed her, and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he put my fingerprints on the knife. But I can’t begin to understand why Raffaele would do that.’

Certain diary entries appeared to contradict taped conversations between Amanda and her parents, surreptitiously obtained, during visits at the prison. In one of those conversations Amanda had said: ‘It’s stupid. I can’t say anything else. I was there [at the flat]. I can’t say anything else, there is no reason to.’

In her diary, however, she wrote that if she had been with Meredith the night she was killed, Meredith ‘would still be alive’. Why the contradictions? Was she simply trying to divert attention from herself?

In other parts of her diary Amanda’s vanity became apparent. In one entry she wrote that when she got an hour of ‘outside time’, she sat with her face towards the sun to get a tan. Prisoners at Capanne are allowed one hour outside during every 24-hour period.

‘I have received letters from fellow inmates and
admirers telling me that I am hot and they want to have sex with me,’ read another entry. ‘I have also had insulting letters.’ Another entry, described as chilling, recounted that she had travelled through Europe with a ‘kitchen knife in my bag’.

Six weeks after her murder, on Friday, December 14, 2007, Meredith’s family finally laid her body to rest at a private service for family and friends at a church near her home in South London. Dozens of Meredith’s friends from the University of Leeds, where she studied prior to going to Perugia, as well as other local friends, attended the service. Meredith’s family followed the casket, adorned with colourful flowers and her photograph, into the church. One of the floral decorations spelt out her nickname, ‘Mez’, with small yellow flowers. There were a number of tribute floral arrangements, including one that read, ‘You will always be in our hearts’. Another small bouquet was ‘From the City of Perugia’, and a card attached to a bouquet of white roses read, ‘Why such a tragic waste? May your smile be infectious in Heaven, Mez.’ Two large pillow-shaped arrangements made from small blue flowers were placed outside, one on either side of the church entrance. The funeral was followed by a private burial at the nearby Mitcham Road Cemetery.

O
n Saturday, December 22, 2007, police investigators revealed that Amanda had given herself away when she purportedly provided details of Meredith’s murder to friends and acquaintances – details, police insist, that would be known only to the killer and to the police. One of the facts that she had allegedly revealed was that Meredith had died slowly from a stab wound to the neck. Another, which had been provided to the police by Robyn Butterworth, was that Amanda said that she had seen Meredith’s body reflected in the mirror of the wardrobe in her room.

‘The question is,’ asked a source for the prosecution, ‘how did she know these particular details, as only police and the killer would have been aware of them?’

The information, as much of it had been from day one, was revealed in the media, this time in an article 
by Nick Piza, a reporter for the
Daily Mail
. The headline for Piza’s article had screamed out like the title of a story from an old issue of
True Detective
magazine: ‘Foxy Knoxy and the clue “only a killer would know”’. That headline, and countless others like it, had only touched the surface of what really happened, as was evident by information revealed when the
MSNBC
news agency sent former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt to Perugia. A one-time supervisor in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Van Zandt was now an analyst for NBC News and his job in this assignment was to help interpret the crime scene evidence and how Meredith had died. In particular, his report described just how gruesome and painful a death Meredith’s killers had put her through.

Van Zandt’s information was made possible by the chief investigators in Italy’s national crime lab, who gave him and NBC News access to Meredith’s murder file, a practice almost unheard of in the U.S. and the UK until after a case has been adjudicated. Every country has its own rules, regulations and standards that it follows, and it was thought that the decision to make the file accessible had the potential to assist police in the investigation rather than hindering them.

At any rate, information and photos in the file indicated that a large-bladed knife had entered the left side of the victim’s neck and come out the other side. A common kitchen knife such as that taken from Raffaele’s apartment fitted the bill which, according to 
the file, investigators believe may have been the murder weapon. Although analysts contended that the knife had been scrubbed with bleach, DNA traces belonging to both Amanda and Meredith were pointed out to Van Zandt.

Van Zandt also saw photos depicting a large quantity of blood on Meredith’s hands. This suggested, he deduced, that she had reached up and grabbed her throat with her hands after she had realized that a knife had just been put through her neck. Bleeding profusely from the wound, she would have also reached backwards in an effort to hold herself up or push herself up, Van Zandt said. He also believed that the location of the foreign DNA on her body and the location and trajectory of the blood spray from her wound supported the investigators’ theory that Meredith was being sexually attacked from behind when she was killed. It was possible that she was bent over, or that someone was forcing her to her knees and threatening her with the knife before actually plunging it through her neck.

Van Zandt took his theory a step further, saying that whoever killed Meredith had most likely threatened her with a knife first, to get her attention and to tell her that she was going to comply with whatever it was they wanted to do to her.

At some point, for whatever reason, after taunting her with the knife and causing the minor superficial wounds, something happened that caused the person 
wielding the knife to decide to kill her. Perhaps she had threatened her attackers during the sexual part of the assault by telling them that she was going to turn them into the police, and she was killed to prevent that from happening. Or perhaps the killer just wanted the thrill of knowing what it felt like to kill someone. Whatever the reason, after the knife had been plunged all the way through her neck, Meredith died from drowning in her own blood.

After surveying the crime scene, Van Zandt expressed the opinion that it was highly unlikely that an intruder had broken into the cottage, as the suspects had claimed, primarily because the broken window was situated some 15 feet above a steep slope. To the former criminal profiler, it just did not seem like a plausible way into the cottage, and he sided with the Italian investigators who believed that the break-in had been staged. All-in-all, he believed the investigators had done a good job piecing the case together with evidence that led back to Amanda, Raffaele, and now, Rudy Guede.

Meanwhile, Italian police revealed additional information about their interview with Rudy Guede following his return from Germany. In addition to saying that he had been inside the cottage on the night of the murder and had consensual sex with Meredith – sticking by his story that someone had broken in and killed her while he was in the bathroom – he had 
purportedly told the detectives that he thought the brown-haired Italian male he had seen when he came out of the bathroom may have been Raffaele, who he claimed he did not know well. Whoever the man was, Guede told the police that the intruder had insulted him with a racial slur in Italian before leaving. He also claimed that he had heard Amanda’s voice, but that he had not seen her. He told the police that he had only met her once, at Le Chic, but nonetheless suggested that perhaps Amanda had mistaken him for Patrick Lumumba that night. The detectives were reluctant to buy into the suggestion, however, because the age difference between Rudy Guede and Lumumba is more than 20 years. Besides, aside from the colour of their skin they bore little resemblance to one another.

Police sources further stated that Guede’s DNA had been found on Meredith’s bra, which detectives now say was ‘ripped off’ her body during the attack. Combined with his statements to the police and others, not to mention the physical evidence that had been recovered, there was no doubt that Guede had been at the crime scene.

‘His version of events is full of lies and contradictions,’ Mignini said. ‘His DNA is on the victim and on the bra.’

On Friday, January 11, 2008, it was revealed that Italian forensic teams working over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays had isolated DNA from Raffaele Sollecito on a bra hook that had been found in 
December attached to another fragment of material that was not disclosed, following an additional search of Meredith’s room. Apparently the bra hook had been overlooked during initial searches of the crime scene, but the new evidence was enough to convince detectives that all three had been ‘actively involved’ in Meredith’s murder.

‘The fact that Sollecito’s DNA was found on the bra puts him at the crime scene,’ said a police source, while Raffaele, through his lawyer, Marco Brusco, had expressed ‘surprise’ that his DNA was found on the bra.

‘As I have already said,’ Brusco added, ‘we shall await the full report before saying anything, but my client is surprised to hear his DNA has been found.’

Hours later, investigators announced that they had used the chemical Luminol to look for traces of blood inside the house where Meredith was killed, and had found a bare footprint left in blood in Amanda’s bedroom.

When sprayed on surfaces at a crime scene, Luminol will detect blood, even when it has been cleaned up. A chemical reaction to iron in blood causes the chemical to ‘glow’ when used at night or under artificial black lighting, usually lasting about 30 seconds, long enough for investigators to photograph or otherwise document its presence.

‘This is a crucial discovery and very important,’ said Edgardo Giobbi. ‘It was discovered during the examination of the apartment and was in Amanda’s 
bedroom. At this stage we do not know if it was made by a man or a woman. It will be compared to the three suspects. There were also traces of blood found between the room and other parts of the apartment. Luminol also showed up traces of blood in Meredith’s bathroom and these are also being investigated.’

On Thursday, January 24, just when it had begun to look like the twists and turns of this bizarre case were subsiding, news was released that an Albanian man had come forward and told police and prosecutors that Amanda Knox had threatened him with a knife the day before Meredith’s body was found. In his statement, the Albanian said that while he was parking his car near the house where the murder occurred he bumped into a waste container. Two people came out from behind the container, and an argument ensued.

‘On the evening of 31st October I arrived in my car close to the house on Via della Pergola,’ the Albanian witness said. ‘As I was parking my car I hit a rubbish dumpster. A second later I saw two people, a man and a woman, who were behind it and they came towards me, shouting. We started arguing and then all of a sudden the girl pulled out a knife. She was shouting at me and pointing it at me. I am certain it was Amanda Knox, and with her was Raffaele Sollecito. Then, out of the darkness emerged another man. It was Rudy. The three of them were together… I’ve only come 
forward now because I was scared. I spoke with a lawyer before coming to see you but in the end I realized it was important.’

When this latest bombshell was made public, the police eventually admitted that they had known about the man’s purported encounter with the three suspects for some time, but said that the information had been kept secret because of its importance to the integrity of the case. The revelation, however, prompted a response from Mignini.

‘This is a very serious matter,’ Mignini said. ‘This statement was a secret and now it is in the public domain. I am not prepared to say anything else about it.’

The fact that Mignini even acknowledged the existence of the Albanian’s statement suggested its importance to the prosecution’s case and helped to further establish that the three murder suspects knew each other. Unidentified police sources also said that the man’s statement had been checked, including details such as that it had been raining that night, and there were other verifiable portions, such as when garbage containers are set out for pick-up and the locations where they are placed, among other details, had been shown to be correct.

‘He is an Albanian with a regular resident’s permit and he has no criminal record,’ said an unidentified source close to the investigation. ‘His story is being taken seriously as it proves that all three suspects knew each other. Knox and Sollecito have both denied 
knowing Rudy but this man’s statement puts them together and with a knife 24 hours before poor Meredith was murdered. It also suggests that the three were out there, armed with a knife and already planning this murder when they were disturbed and it [the murder] was put back a day. He is being taken as a serious and credible witness.’

By this point in the investigation – in part because of Rudy Guede’s ‘Vampire’ YouTube video in which he said, ‘I drink blood’ – detectives were beginning to examine a theory that Meredith had been murdered as part of a black magic ritual. It was suggested that the theory was being explored because of the prosecutor’s enthusiasm regarding conspiracy theories, and the fact that Mignini had long been fascinated, as is much of the public in Italy, with cases involving black magic and satanic worship.

‘This suggestion is being looked at primarily because of the date that the murder took place, November 1, which is All Saints Day, and the following day is All Soul’s Day, also known as the Day of the Dead,’ said a police source.

All Soul’s Day is a Roman Catholic day of remembrance for friends and loved ones who have died, and originates from the ancient pagans who celebrated a ‘Festival of the Dead’, in which it was thought that the souls of the deceased return for a meal with the family they left behind. Candles are placed in windows, believed to help guide the souls 
back to their home. All Soul’s Day follows All Saints Day as a reminder to Catholics that the faithful need to alter their focus from the souls in heaven to the souls in purgatory.

It is said that satanic worship has become somewhat widespread in Italy and at other locations across the Continent over the past several years. Contributing to the theory that Meredith’s murder may have been part of a satanic or black magic ritual was the fact that her throat had been slashed, resulting in much blood at the murder scene, and the fact that her body was partially nude when she was killed. Sexual abuse, including rape, is another characteristic sometimes found in such rituals.

By the end of January 2008 it was said that investigators had also found traces of DNA on Meredith’s bra that did not match any of the three suspects. This suggested that other people, besides the three suspects, may have been involved in her death, or that she’d had some kind of contact with at least one other person. It was also possible that the additional DNA was the result of cross-contamination, perhaps in the crime laboratory.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself ‘Friends of Amanda’ was set up and began acting as a sort of advocate for Amanda in the press, both in the U.S. and abroad. A Chicago criminal investigator was involved, working on the case for free, as was Seattle attorney Anne Bremner.

It was pointed out that the group did not represent Amanda Knox or her family in any official capacity. It appeared that the group merely acted as a watchdog, concerned primarily with how Amanda was being portrayed in the media.

By Friday, February 1, it was revealed publicly that DNA belonging to Rudy Guede had been found on Meredith’s bloody handbag. It was said that investigators believed the DNA had come from Guede’s sweat. Traces of blood were also found inside the handbag, adding further credence to a police theory that Meredith’s murder may have been motivated by theft of money and credit cards. Police had also announced that they were trying to locate two of Meredith’s credit cards that were unaccounted for.

‘The DNA was a match for Guede’s and there was also Meredith’s blood inside the handbag,’ said a police source. ‘Checks are still being carried out to see if there is any DNA from others inside the handbag. The theory we are working on is that the killer rifled through Meredith’s handbag and took her rent money.’