Forget the sex smears. The real crime is that Foxy Knoxy was EVER charged with murderOn the night of November 1, 2007, Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old exchange student from South London, was murdered in a cottage on the Via della Pergola in the Italian university city of Perugia.
Her body was found by police the next day, locked in her ground-floor bedroom and covered in a blood-soaked quilt. She had deep stab wounds in her neck.
The only clothing on her body was a cotton shirt pulled up to the neck. Bruises indicated she had been held down, and there was male DNA in her body, indicating possible rape.
The post-mortem could establish only a broad time frame for her death — between 8.55pm and 12.50am. There was also evidence of a burglary, since house keys, money, mobile phones and credit cards were missing and a rock had been thrown through the window of the adjoining room.
Further investigation of the crime scene revealed fingerprints, palm prints and semen that did not match any of the residents of the cottage. There was also a footprint of a Nike trainer in blood. Two witnesses had seen a young black man running down Via della Pergola from the direction of the cottage at 10.30pm. They said he nearly collided with them.
The black man seen running away might have been sought as a suspect if the police believed that an outsider had killed Meredith.
But within hours of finding the body, they concluded that all the evidence of burglary — the broken window, strewn clothing, missing belongings — had been staged to mislead them.
It was an insider job, they decided, which narrowed the police investigation down to just seven suspects — four young Italian students who rented rooms in the basement of the house, where they grew cannabis plants; and, upstairs, Filomena Romanelli, Laura Mezzetti and Amanda Knox, who, along with the victim, shared the ground-floor flat.
As it then turned out, it was a holiday week in Italy, and all four of the Italian men had gone away to visit their families. Romanelli and Mezzetti, both legal trainees in their late twenties, were also away and had solid alibis.
That left only one other suspect, Amanda Knox, a beautiful 20-year-old American student from Seattle, who was at the house when the police arrived, kissing her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
Her alibi was provided by Sollecito, whom she had met the previous week at a classical musical recital. The two told police they were together at Sollecito’s flat all night. Knox said they had smoked marijuana, watched a DVD of the French film Amelie and slept together.
She returned to the cottage at 11am the next day to change her clothing, and it was then that she noticed blood in the shower.
Initially, Sollecito fully supported her alibi, but during three days of questioning, he changed his story, saying Knox had left his flat at 9pm to go to a bar, Le Chic, where she worked, and that she did not return until after midnight.
Under intensive interrogation, in which Knox was threatened with jail — and without being given access to a lawyer — she also altered her story, suddenly implicating Patrick Lumumba, the Congo-born owner of the Le Chic bar, as the killer.
On November 6, police arrested Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba for the murder of Meredith Kercher.
Even though Knox subsequently retracted her accusation, claiming she had been traumatised by police threats, the theory of the prosecutors now was that the murder proceeded from an orgy that got out of control.
But a problem developed when a Swiss professor, who had been at Le Chic on the night in question, swore he’d had an extended conversation with Lumumba during the time the murder was committed. In light of this alibi, and Knox’s admission that she had falsely accused him, Lumumba had to be released.
Meanwhile, on November 15 — a fortnight after Kercher’s death — the prints in her room were identified as belonging to Rudy Guede, a 20-year-old unemployed gardener from Ivory Coast, who fitted the description of the man seen running away.
His palm print was on the bloodstained pillow under Kercher’s hips. His DNA was found on her clothes and inside her. Guede also wore Nike trainers that were consistent with the bloody footprint on the floor.
This hard evidence unambiguously established that he was in Kercher’s room, had sexual contact with her, and left after her blood was spilled. He also had knowledge of the cottage. A fortnight earlier he had met the Italian men living downstairs while playing basketball and, in the week of the murder, he went there to smoke hash with them. On that occasion, he met both Kercher and Knox.
Guede was also under suspicion for other recent break-ins in Perugia and for stealing credit cards.
Less than a week before the murder, he had been briefly detained by police in Milan for climbing into a nursery and stealing an 11inch kitchen knife.
Guede, who had fled to Germany, was extradited back to Italy. But by that time Knox had become such a focus of the media’s attention, and the putative sex games by an angel-faced killer such a cornerstone of the story, that the Italian prosecutors were not about to abandon their group murder theory, even though Patrick Lumumba was now out of the frame.
To maintain this, chief prosecutor Giuliano Mignini posited a conspiracy by teaming up the two insiders, Knox and Sollecito, with the outside burglar, Guede.
Mignini had previously achieved considerable notoriety in Italy in a case in 2001 when he unsuccessfully attempted to attribute the suicide of a doctor to a secret satanic cult.
Now, the prosecutor proposed a similar satanic scenario in which Guede, Sollecito and Knox went to the cottage together and then attempted to force Kercher to have sex with them.
When she refused, Guede and Sollecito took turns molesting her. Knox, whom he described as a ‘she-devil’, then stabbed her to death.
One stumbling block was the total absence of evidence that Guede was with either Knox or Sollecito, or that he had ever met Sollecito. While two witnesses had seen Guede running away, no one had seen Knox or Sollecito with him at the cottage.
Nor did Guede claim that either Knox or Sollecito were with him. His story was that Kercher herself had invited him to the cottage and they had consensual sexual contact. Lacking a condom, he left the room and went to the bathroom.
When he emerged, he saw an unknown man run out of the cottage and he found Meredith bleeding. So he ran away, too.
In light of the abundance of evidence against Guede, he was convicted of murder in a separate trial, while the investigation of Sollecito and Knox continued.
But this had trouble even placing Sollecito in the cottage. The police failed to find a single print in the room that was his or, for that matter, Knox’s.
In addition, speculation that the bloody footprint came from Sollecito’s Nike shoe proved wrong. It was from Guede’s Nike.
So until mid-December 2007, the police and prosecutors could not place either Knox or Sollecito at the murder scene. This gap was bridged by a belated DNA analysis of Kercher’s bra clasp (which had accidentally remained at the crime scene for 46 days). DNA on it matched Sollecito’s.
DNA analysis also identified both Knox’s and Kercher’s DNA on a kitchen knife in a cutlery drawer in Sollecito’s home. No blood was found on it — and, it later transpired, the blade was too long to be the murder weapon, which was never found.
Nonetheless, the trial proceeded, with the prosecutor painting a gory picture of a ‘she-devil’ who tortured her room-mate with a knife while Sollecito and Guede sexually abused her, then, when the orgy ended, slashed her throat and staged a burglary to dupe the police.
This story was based largely on the supposed DNA evidence of Sollecito’s presence at the scene.
Both Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murder and sexual violence. In December 2009, Knox was sentenced to 26 years’ imprisonment and Sollecito to 25.
The case then went to appeal, and an independent panel of forensic experts was appointed to review the crucial DNA evidence. It found in its 145-page report that the collection of the DNA evidence linking Sollecito to the crime scene was utterly flawed.
Not only were the police claims about the DNA not consistent with the actual lab reports, but a video showed the key items were picked up with a dirty glove that might have transferred DNA samples from the suspects. This meant cross-contamination was possible.
That left no credible evidence, and on October 3, 2011, the court threw out the murder and sexual violence convictions of Sollecito and Knox. Both were immediately released from prison and Knox flew back to America and signed a lucrative book contract.
The prosecutors are now appealing against the acquittal, so technically speaking the case remains unsolved. My assessment, however, is that Knox and Sollecito — despite all the poisonous character assassination directed at them — are both innocent of the murder, and the almost four years they spent in prison amounts to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.
The police investigation was wedded from the outset to the wrong narrative. It assumed that the crime scene had been staged to look like a burglary and so focused on the only available insider, Knox.
In doing so, the police neglected eyewitness sightings of a possible burglar running from the direction of the house at the approximate time of the crime.
If they had investigated that obvious lead, it would have quickly led them to Guede. His fingerprints, palm prints, shoe print and DNA would have established him beyond doubt as a person at the scene, and it’s probable he would have been arrested before he had a chance to flee to Germany — meaning the spotlight would never have been left to fall on Knox.
The case against Guede is, quite simply, overwhelming. He was an experienced burglar, having broken into three other places that autumn, and his previous visit to the cottage would have been an opportunity to case the joint.
There are several ways he could have entered the building — not least through the empty basement apartment, where Kercher had agreed to water the cannabis plants.
After stumbling on Kercher, assaulting and robbing her, he may have smashed the window from the inside to create an expedient means of exit. His DNA was found in Kercher’s pocket-book and credit cards. Moreover, €300 (£258) were missing.
In truth, what’s astonishing is that Knox ever stood trial. The appeals court stated the murder and sexual violence charges against her and Sollecito were ‘not corroborated by any objective element of evidence’.
In short, there was no evidence at the murder scene to show this was not the work of a single home invader.
The lesson here is that denying a suspect a lawyer can result in terrible injustice. If Knox had been provided with one, she would not have been allowed to succumb to police pressure and give untrue statements that resulted in her arrest, as well as that of two other innocent people.
Meanwhile, forensic evidence would have unambiguously identified the perpetrator as Rudy Guede — and there would have been no need for a prosecutor to conjure up a non-existent orgy out of thin air.
Original report
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