The Counterfactual Adulation of Amanda Knox
The claim there is ‘no evidence’ against Knox in the 2007 death of her housemate rears its head yet again
In high-profile criminal cases, where views differ on someone’s guilt or innocence, time is often on the side of the accused. That is surely true in the case of Amanda Knox, the young American woman who was twice found guilty of killing her housemate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007, and then had her murder convictions — though not a separate one for calunnia, or slander — overturned. Of the two parties here, only one can speak. Kercher is dead and buried, while Knox has decades to “tell her story,” putting her spin on things with the help of a supportive media, altering and embellishing the facts for the consumption of people unfamiliar with the evidence, testimony, judges’ opinions, and accounts of those who were at or near the crime scene.
Indeed, time is on Knox’s side, and we may never hear the end of “what she went through over there.” Documentaries, books, articles, and podcasts sympathetic to Knox keep pouring out, fostering, in the popular mind, the sense of a kind, relatable young woman railroaded by a loony prosecutor and court system. Poor, poor Amanda. There is one message, one angle, one point of view, and facts are irrelevant. Did you know that prison can be harsh? Did you know that tabloids go to absurd lengths for attention? Those issues are far more important than the boring, technical stuff that the old-fogeyish judges across the pond in Italy have droned on about in their lengthy opinions.
The latest example of Knox-worship is a 5,322-word essay by Jessica Olin, “In the Multiverse,” which appears in the October 9 edition of the London Review of Books. In part, it is a review of Knox’s book from this spring Free: My Search for Meaning, a follow-up to 2013’s Waiting to Be Heard, and this summer’s Disney+ release, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (from which the featured art above is taken).
Like other supporters, Olin is eager to portray Knox as a victim, and the facts of the case are of little concern. Right at the start, Olin sets the tone: “The lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, pursued a case based on circumstantial evidence, gut instinct and his fantasies of female depravity, painting the 20-year-old Knox as a sex-crazed psychopath.”
At the end of the essay, Olin quotes Valerie Stivers, writing in a piece in Unherd that “there has never been any evidence” of Knox’s guilt. Is there only circumstantial evidence, or no evidence at all? In the end, they add up to the same.
Which Side Is More Credible?
As Alan Dershowitz has noted in his occasional commentary on the case, Italy is far from the judicial backwater that much of the spin makes it out to be. In Italy as in other democracies, the requirements for a murder conviction are extremely high, as they must be. Evidence beyond a reasonable doubt and moral certainty are prerequisites. Yet Olin and many others want us to believe that a respected judicial system in a western nation twice convicted Knox of the most serious of crimes based on nothing at all. A case made of air. The Italian police and courts didn’t like her free-spirited lifestyle, so on a whim, with no evidence at all, they decided to ruin her life.
The hand-waving dismissal of the prosecution and its case will be familiar to those who followed media coverage closer to Knox’s release from a jail in Italy in 2011 and her return to the United States. Talk shows tended to present a few sound-bites about disputed evidence and a flawed investigation, then the segment quickly moved on to growing up with Knox in Seattle, what a likable, open, fun-loving girl she was, and the unfairness of “what she went through over there.”
Reading Olin’s piece, many readers are likely to accept these claims or fail to see any reason to challenge them. After all, Knox was cleared, wasn’t she? And cleared by the appeal courts of that same judicial system “over there” that convicted her. Nowhere does Olin acknowledge that, while a technical acquittal may have been the legally correct decision because of certain missteps in the course of the investigation, legal and factual innocence are not even distant relatives. Nowhere would a reader of Olin’s essay learn that Italy’s highest court in January 2025 definitively refuted the Knox side’s efforts to have her June 2024 conviction for calunnia, or slander, overturned. The court upheld her conviction, without apologies.
This is no minor omission. Understanding the basis for that ruling, and Knox’s motives in lodging one of the most serious possible accusations against an innocent man, is crucial to an informed view of the case.
For someone who never ceases complaining about what it is like to be wrongfully accused, how that destroys a person’s reputation and life, Knox is curiously quiet about the man who went to jail as a direct result of her false accusation. What happened to Patrick Lumumba, the owner of the bar Le Chic in Perugia which briefly employed Knox as a server, was pretty harrowing. The police came to his home in the early morning and hauled him off right in front of his family. He spent weeks in jail and might still be there if a professor who happened to be in Le Chic on the night of the murder had not come forward to vouch for Lumumba’s alibi.
Unity of Evidence
The Florentine court that convicted Knox of slander in 2024 carefully weighed the circumstances under which Knox made her false accusation. She was not under arrest, was not a suspect or a person of interest, and had voluntarily come along with her then-boyfriend, Rafael Sollecito, to the police station in Perugia. The Knox version is that she came under a brutal “interrogation,” during which the police slapped and threatened her until she finally broke down. But others who were there attest that the officers treated her kindly and simply asked her to try to recall any facts that might help the investigation.
In January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, having considered all the evidence and testimony about what took place in the police station that night, definitively ruled that Knox’s account was a hoax. In its June 2024 ruling, the Florentine court that convicted Knox of slander quotes the ECHR’s ruling that there was “nothing to support the conclusion that the applicant [Knox] had been subjected to the inhuman and degrading treatment complained of.”
The Florentine court’s ruling reminds us that, even if we were to accept for the sake of argument that the police subjected her to aggressive questioning, that was far from the sole circumstance in which she made false accusations against Lumumba. It refers to a written statement by Knox, after the meeting with the officers and “marked by autonomous presentation and timing,” that presents highly specific details about alleged events in the cottage where Kercher died. In the course of a lengthy written statement not made under duress, Knox claimed that she had seen Lumumba near the door of the cottage and that she subsequently heard Kercher screaming while Knox herself lay curled up in the kitchen with her hands over her ears. She explicitly and repeatedly accuses Lumumba of having killed Kercher.
As the Florentine court acknowledges, Knox’s voluntary, lengthy, detailed, entirely bogus written account of how her housemate died came well after her so-called interrogation, and it is very far from the kind of “excited utterance” that one might make in the heat of the moment. As the ruling states, “The manuscript was written spontaneously and freely, as the defendant herself confirmed during her examination, decidedly denying that she had received any instructions or had been subjected to any conditioning by the police or anyone else” (emphasis added).
False accusations could have served one purpose: to divert attention from Knox herself and offer up a scapegoat. Nor, by any stretch of the term, are they the only damning statements Knox made while not under police interrogation. As the ruling recounts, Knox told her mother, during a talk, that she knew well what she had done to Lumumba, and — another smoking gun — admitted that she was present at the cottage when the crime occurred. “But it is stupid,” the ruling quotes Knox telling her mother. “I can’t say any more, because I know that I was there and I can’t lie about it. I have no reason to do it.”
Despite knowing what her lies had done to an innocent man, the ruling observes, Knox did not tell the police that she had lied and that Lumumba was blameless. Here, again, is a fact that you will not hear mentioned in the course of Knox’s post-conviction career as an advocate for the wrongfully accused.
Maybe by now the claim that there is “no evidence” begins to sound just a bit curious to some ears. But, as Judge Mignini wrote in his opinion, there is more. Much, much more. The totality of evidence, available on the website truejustice.org and a few other brave sources for anyone who is curious, puts to rest any notion that the case against Knox was circumstantial to nonexistent.
“No Evidence”?
Knox’s admission that she was at the cottage provides a segue for discussion of one of the crucial facts. The forensic examination found at least 15 bruises on the victim’s body, consistent with her having been restrained from multiple directions by more than one attacker. Some of the bruises were smaller than others and, according to forensic experts, were in the shape of a woman’s fingertips. Kercher had almost no defensive wounds on her fingers and hands, which flies in the face of the Knox side’s claim that Rudy Guede was the sole attacker. Try to imagine Guede covering Kercher’s mouth to keep her from screaming, restraining her from both sides, and stabbing her repeatedly all at once.
Moreover, the pillow found under Meredith’s body had a shoeprint on it of a smaller size than Guede’s, not matching the victim’s shoes. Footprints in the blood, revealed with luminol, were consistent with Knox’s right foot. Sollecito’s DNA was on Kercher’s bra clasp, and her DNA was on a knife that also had Knox’s DNA on the handle. The police quickly determined that the ostensible break-in, in a different room of the cottage — supposedly how Guede entered — looked staged, with glass from the broken window on top of the items thrown pell-mell around the room rather than under them. And on and on.
If the above constitutes no evidence, then one does have to wonder what extensive evidence would look like. And the facts above are just a few of all that came out in the investigation and trial. No wonder the book Meredith, by the victim’s late father John Kercher, begins with an account of what two postal policeman who showed up at the cottage about a matter unrelated to the not-yet reported murder, reported having seen: Knox and Sollecito standing outside the cottage with a mop and bucket, looking “surprised and embarrassed,” exchanging whispers.
Far from relying on circumstantial facts, the prosecution brought out an array of forensic and behavioral evidence that — to cite Dershowitz again — far eclipses the evidence in thousands of convictions that are not even considered controversial.
Politicizing the Case
It is not hard to see why Knox’s supporters largely avoid discussing her case in terms of the evidence, and often introduce emotionally charged, non-evidentiary factors in an effort to sway public opinion. Some of them even go so far as to try to make Knox out to be something akin to a social justice hero. Fit her into the great historical struggle against injustice and oppression, and people who might have gone one way or the other in their consideration of the evidence will suddenly feel tremendous pressure to show that they are on the right side of that struggle.
Typical of such efforts is Lisa Marie Basile’s December 6, 2017, “Where Are All the Feminists?” This Huffington Post article abruptly denies the existence of any credible evidence — without addressing any of the judges’ opinions setting forth the basis for Knox’s two convictions — and makes “an appeal to all feminists and people of rational thought” to take to the barricades in defense of Knox.
An article that sought to defend Knox through an analysis of the evidence would at least be deserving of respect, though in the end it would be unlikely to be very persuasive. An opinion piece that says, in essence, Take Amanda’s side or you’re a misogynist, deserves no respect at all. Sadly, the latter approach appears to be the modus operandi of many of her supporters.
We may never know the true story of what happened that murderous night in Italy, but what we do know, is that Knox and her supporters are happy in the ambiguity and to keep pretending that there is no evidence. That stance, however, doesn’t affect the actual facts, evidence, and guilt. George Orwell was right when he wrote, “However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.”
(Thanks to Peter Quennell for a translation of the Florentine court’s 2024 ruling.)
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“Poor, poor Amanda. There is one message, one angle, one point of view, and facts are irrelevant. ”
The facts are relevant, it’s just that those facts don’t point in any way at Amanda Knox. DNA on the victim pointed to one man alone as her assailant and killer. He was the one who fled the scene while Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were the ones who sounded the alarm when they realized that Kercher was missing. There is not a shred of physical to link anyone but Rudy Guede to the crime.
Incorrect. Rafael Sollecito was at the cottage with Amanda Knox for hours but phone records show that he did not call the carabinieri until after the postal police had shown up (about a matter unrelated to the murder). At that point, he knew well that they might wonder about her locked door and unresponsiveness and that not to have called the police by that point would have looked suspicious. That was the sole motive for “sounding the alarm” – not concern for Meredith. Acquaint yourself with the basic facts of this case before posting about it, please.
PS. The rest of claims in this article relating to the crime scene have been debunked repeatedly.
Great article Michael. Could you send me a translation of the Florentine court’s 2024 ruling please?
Not fully versed on the Knox case, but I clicked on your link to True Crime Rocket Science and am totally hooked. The book recommendations alone are worth the 30 min I just spent on the site. I’ll add one of my own that I am enjoying right now: Almost Paradise: The East Hampton Murder of Ted Ammon by Kieran Crowley. Totally compelling page-turner with real reporting. The only drawback is that I’ve got the great Eric Carmen song from Footloose going through my head the whole time.
Barbie Latza Nadeau, Newsweek’s Italy correspondent, wrote what may be the best book on the case under discussion here. It is detailed, and chilling. Especially the parts about the “Seattle message machine” that tried to shape media coverage of the case in a manner favorable to Knox and Sollecito.
Michael, surely you are trolling? Peter Quennell, Nick Van Der Leek, and now Barbie Latza Nadeau …? You are too good of a writer to fall in with such company. For a more balanced treatment by someone who doesn’t particularly like Knox personally, try Nina Burleigh’s The Fatal Gift of Beauty. If you prefer a chronological narrative there is Candice Dempsey’s Murder In Italy.
Burleigh and Dempsey are not real journalists. They both attempted to bypass the forensic evidence and whitewash Knox’s shocking record. I read their books years ago and did not find them at all helpful. By the way, “trolling” is one of those extremely vague terms that some people use when they cannot meet the high evidentiary standard that a more specific allegation would require. It’s not a term that anyone supposedly concerned about due process and the rights of accused persons should ever use.
Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellman, who acquitted Knox in the second trial, pointed out that if Amanda Knox was guilty the police version of her interrogation makes no sense. If she was guilty, she would have been at the apartment at the time the murder, and would have known that Patrick was not. And if Patrick was not there, that he was either working at his bar or at home with his family, and either way had a solid alibi.
If Amanda had been at her apartment, she would also know that Meredith was raped and murdered by Rudy Guede. It makes no sense that she would accuse someone who was not there, and almost certainly have an alibi, rather than simply name the killer
Peter Quennell is a well known eccentric – apparently except to writer Michael Washburn.
I’ve read this comment a few times and still can’t make sense out of it. You state, “It makes no sense that she would accuse someone who was not there.” Please explain why a false accusation would have limited itself to someone who was there. In the interest of truthfulness?
They are looking at a possible new witness. The court ruled Guede acted with others.
The court ruled at Rudy Guede’s trial that he “acted with others” because the prosecution intended to try Amanda and Raffael separately. When Cassation confirmed Rudy’s conviction this locked in his having “acted with others” as a legal fact that cannot be contested in an Italion court.
Magnini wanted them tried separately because the evidence was all against Rudy with only circumstantial evidence against the two students.
RE: “In January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, having considered all the evidence and testimony about what took place in the police station that night, definitively ruled that Knox’s account was a hoax.”
Per ChatGPT: The European Court of Human Rights found Italy guilty of violating Knox’s human rights; they failed to give her access to an attorney and a neutral translator. For this Italy was fined 1,800 pounds. The ECHR found there was insufficient evidence Knox received abusive treatment but did not deny such treatment may have occurred.
Are you seriously advancing an argument about this case using ChatGPT as your source? It simply aggregates existing sources – including biased and bogus ones – and presents a synthesis. There’s no way you don’t know this. The ECHR’s ruling clearly and definitively brands the Knox account a hoax, and translators and others who were present at the so-called “interrogation” have testified to the same effect.
Michael, pick any source you like. It is public record.
AP NEWS: MILAN (AP) — Europe’s human rights court on Thursday ordered Italy to pay Amanda Knox financial damages for police failure to provide legal assistance and an independent interpreter during a long night of questioning following the Nov. 1, 2007 murder of her British roommate. But the court said there was insufficient evidence to support claims of psychological and physical mistreatment.
BBC NEWS: Italy has been ordered to pay €18,400 (£16,000) to US citizen Amanda Knox, who spent years in prison for a murder of which she was later acquitted. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said Ms Knox had not had proper access to a lawyer and interpreter. But the court rejected Ms Knox’s claim that she was subjected to degrading treatment and slapped by police.
Glad that you have cited some news sources, but they just prove the point made in my article and in other informed accounts of the case. The courts ruled that Knox’s claim of having been slapped and threatened, until she broke down and accused an innocent man, was and is an egregious hoax. One that could have served but one purpose – to divert attention away from herself and onto a wholly innocent man. May I remind you that she was not under arrest, and there was no legal or other requirement for her to have a lawyer or interpreter present.
It’s disturbing that you and so many others persist in ignoring the extensive evidence and quiescently accepting the media spin. Cf. Alan Dershowitz: “In fifty years of practicing law, I have never seen more one-sided coverage of a case in the U.S. media…. There are thousands of people in jail in the U.S. on the basis of far less evidence than was presented against Amanda Knox…. The evidence against her is very, very considerable.”
The ECHR ruled there was “insufficient evidence” for Knox’s claim of physical and psychological abuse, which does not rule out the possibility it occurred. Their ruling is not surprising given that it is her word alone against so many police, and that they failed to videotape the interrogation as they should have once she became a suspect.
Alan Dershowitz by his own admission has not looked into the Knox case in detail and has never commented on any of its specifics. I think he is a friend of True Crime host Nancy Grace, who feels as you do about Knox, and that may be the reason for his generalizations.
You should also be aware that Peter Quennell is not a reliable source. Journalist Nina Burleigh wrote of him in the March 29, 2013 issue of Time Magazine. Google: “The Amanda Knox Haters Society: And How They Learned To Hate Me Too.”
The lack of legal sophistication in your most recent comment is pretty startling. For anyone making a claim such as Knox’s, the burden of proof is on the accuser – Knox. Her lies about the alleged police misconduct are glaring. No, they did not have a videorecorder set up when she spontaneously and voluntarily showed up at the police station with Sollecito. Videorecording is not the default when doing something as routine as asking Knox – who was not a suspect at that point and could have left at any time – to try to remember any facts that might help the investigation.
Dershowitz is deeply informed about the case. Unlike you, he has taken the trouble to read the judges’ opinions and trial testimony and consider the extensive forensic and physical evidence. As for “journalist Nina Burleigh,” why would you give her uninformed opinions more weight than those of Barbie Nadeau, who was in Perugia for the trial?
Per ChatGPT:“Nina Burleigh is an investigative journalist, author, and political commentator. Burleigh has contributed to outlets like Newsweek (where she served as national politics correspondent), The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. Her books reflect her investigative approach, combining reporting, research, and narrative journalism.”
Per ChatGPT: “Peter Quennell is not widely considered a reliable, impartial, or credible expert source on the Amanda Knox case. He presents himself as someone making sure the victim (Meredith Kercher) isn’t forgotten. However, many critiques of his work characterize his approach as biased, partial, and sometimes factually unsupported. One blog claims that his site and associated group operate more like a ‘hate-group’ or ‘obsessive camp’ focused on Knox, rather than sober analysis. There are also accusations of personal misconduct and unprofessional behaviour which further undermine his credibility as an expert source. If you encounter claims originating from Quennell (or his website), you should treat them as advocacy, not as objective research.
Relying on ChatGPT again, we see. The first blurb, about Burleigh, is lifted straight from her publisher’s promotional copy. Duh! The second cites “one blog” without identifying it. So, a pro-Knox blog slimed Quennell and claimed he is biased? Surprise, surprise! Unless you can put forward some informed arguments that specifically address the very substantial evidence in the Knox case, maybe we should let this exchange go. Anyway, thank you for reading and commenting.
Nina Burleigh/Time Magazine/March 29, 2013
In 2009, I sat down with TJMK founder Peter Quennell, who has always claimed he started the site to make sure that no one forgot the victim. A stout, ruddy Englishman living in New Jersey, he had been holding out the carrot of introducing me to the elusive Kercher family. He seemed vastly knowledgeable and connected. At the time, I also believed that Amanda Knox could be, indeed, a Charles Manson behind a pretty face. After a month in Italy doing reporting, however, I realized that some of the “facts” on Quennell’s website didn’t seem to be in the police record in Italy. I emailed him to ask where he had found out that Knox and Sollecito met police standing outside the murder house with a mop and bucket in hand. That damning incident was nowhere in the record, not even the prosecutor would confirm it, nor had Italy’s Polizia Scientifica ever tested such items, which would surely have offered up some useful DNA evidence, had they been used to clean blood. Quennell then accused me by email of being on the Knox family payroll, informed me that his sources in Perugia had seen me consorting with Amanda’s mother (I had in fact met with her once, in a public place, by then) and eventually started writing about how he was going to “train his scope” on my apartment in Manhattan, and closing emails with “how are the kiddies?”
Once again your comments betray the fact that you just aren’t very widely read in the literature about this case. The account of Knox and Sollecito standing outside the cottage with the mop and bucket does not originate with Quennell at all. It comes from the postal police who showed about investigating a report of a missing cell phone. (One of the same two officers saw the supposed break-in, in Filomena Romanelli’s room, and quickly determined that it looked staged.) As phone records have shown, Sollecito did not call the carabinieri until after the postal police had shown up and he knew well that they were going to find out about the locked door and unresponsive Meredith. Not having any choice at that point, he belatedly called the carabinieri and feigned concern.
You are unable to argue this case based on the evidence, hence are trying to create a smoke screen and make this all about the credibility of one source, but there is really no need to go down that irrelevant rabbit hole. The facts speak for themselves.
RE: “Rafael Sollecito was at the cottage with Amanda Knox for hours but phone records show that he did not call the carabinieri until after the postal police had shown up (about a matter unrelated to the murder).”
Phone records show when Rafael called carabinieri, but do not tell us when the postal police arrived. That was determined by a security camera across the street. The clock on the security camera was fast by about 10 minutes but when corrected it confirmed Rafael’s story: He had called carabinieri after discovering Filomena’s room had been broken into, and he and Amanda then went outside to wait for them. Postal police arrived first, and Rafael and Amanda thought they were the carabinieri. (There was no mop and bucket).
No, the arrival time of the postal police is taken from their own records. Now you are advancing claims that not even the defense has tried to make. No one on either side of this issue, least of all the two accused, denies that Amanda and Raffaele had a mop and bucket with them when the postal police showed up at the cottage. The two have suggested that they needed those items because of a leak at Raffaele’s place, but there is a far more obvious explanation. The claim of a break-in in Filomena’s room is, frankly, absurd. Please explain how a 20-cm diameter rock, too heavy to have been thrown from the street, made it through a 12-cm gap in the shutters and landed in the room, and how the glass from the broken window was later found on top of the ransacked items when, supposedly, the window had been broken before the ransacking.
The rock could have been thrown from the carport just a few feet from Filomino’s window. Photos show glass both under and on top of clothing. The scene was compromised because a hysterical Filomina was admitted to her room. It is unclear whether the killer for some reason threw the clothes on the floor or Filomina was simply a messy roommate.
Returning the cell phones was a routine chore about which postal police had no time record. The two phones had been turned in to postal police about an hour apart. The question became whether postal police had returned only one phone or waited an hour to return both. Both phones were at the crime scene. See Amanda’s memoir for her account of the arrival of postal police; see also postal police testimony at trial.
Amanda got the mop from the cottage to take back to clean up a water spill at Sollecito’s from the night before. They returned it after they went back to the cottage together.
You personally saw them do this? What’s your source, please?
Thank you, Liz. I remember now.
Michael, a source for Liz’ comment is Barbi Nadeau’s “Angel Face” page 42
The mop story with the leak that could have been mopped up with a towel was about as believable as the shower story.
RE: the kitchen knife: First of all, neither Amanda’s DNA nor her fingerprints were found at the murder scene: a very small bedroom where an abundance of bloody prints and DNA from Meredith and Rudy Guede were found. The knife in question was too large to have inflicted the fatal wound; it was not the murder weapon, which has never been found. It had been taken from a drawer of knives in the kitchen of Raphael’s apartment by a police officer who testified he was guided by “policeman’s intuition”. Amanda had used it to prepare meals there, which explained her DNA on the handle. There was no blood on the blade, but a minuscule fragment was found that Perugia’s forensics officer insisted was Meredith’s DNA. Independent DNA experts appointed by the court testified the sample was too small to test with the equipment used, and that if it was indeed Meredith’s, its presence on the knife was almost certainly due to contamination in the lab. See motivations for the Hellman trial and final acquittal.
You are completely ignoring the fact that Amanda’s prints were hardly found anywhere else in the cottage, including her own room. Whether she was in a room or not is not proven or disproven by the presence or absence of her fingertips. Of course there was no blood on the blade; it was obsessively and repeatedly washed in an unsuccessful attempt to hide and destroy evidence. A plausible theory has never been advanced as to how the victim’s DNA got onto the blade if it was not the murder weapon.
Why are you denying Knox’s guilt while citing as a source Nadeau’s Angel Face, which decisively identifies Knox as the killer?
When asked if they had checked for Amanda’s prints in her bedroom they replied, “Of course not, why should we?” They also did not check the window sill where Rudy Guede entered Filomina’s room because they assumed the break-in was staged. How it was possible for Amanda to selectively remove only her DNA from Meredith’s room while leaving Meredith’s and Rudy’s behind, police did not venture to speculate.
THE BRA CLASP: Forty-seven days after the murder police were in need of evidence to continue to hold Rafael so they returned to Meredith’s bedroom. Video shows them enter garbed in “spacesuits” and latex gloves, kick around some litter, and pick up the bra clasp which they passed back and forth between them. The potential for contamination here is obvious. Raphael had tried unsuccessfully to open Meredith’s door the morning after the murder. When the police entered they could easily have picked up his DNA from the door and transferred it to the bra clasp (this is all on video). But in any case the court’s independent experts found clasp obviously contaminated. There was a partial of Raphael’s DNA present along with partials from four other unidentified males and of course Meredith. SOURCE: Independent DNA Review ordered by the Italian Appeals Court and carried out by Stefano Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, independent DNA experts from La Sapienza University of Rome.
What a circular argument. If you choose to adopt a solipsistic attitude, then, of course, there is no such thing as reliable evidence – at least reliable incriminating evidence. There are always “experts” who can be hired to question this and that. But, as Alan Dershowitz and others have acknowledged, the totality of the forensic evidence and testimony against Knox – not least her own statements about where she was when the murder happened – far eclipse the evidence in thousands of convictions that no one really finds to be controversial, and leave no reasonable doubt as to her guilt. As Dershowitz also said, she benefited enormously, in the eyes of an impressionable public, from being pretty and looking and acting like a sweet, innocent American young woman. Dershowitz did not say so in as many words, but, if Knox had been an overweight 40-year-old with bad skin, there would not be this international campaign on her behalf. Her supporters have relentlessly politicized the case and cashed in on her superficial endearing traits.
You are arguing that the quantity of evidence is more important than its quality. That 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 4. The correct answer is 0.
Is Alan Dershowitz a recognized expert in the Amanda Knox case?
ChatGPT: Good question. Short answer: not really — Alan Dershowitz is a very prominent lawyer and legal commentator, but he is not generally regarded as a forensic or case-specific expert on the Amanda Knox case in the way that DNA scientists or Italian criminal-procedure scholars are.: Some commentators (e.g., on the blog Opinio Juris) have criticized Dershowitz for getting some of the legal-technical details wrong about Italian law, His views are helpful for understanding some legal-theory issues (like extradition, double jeopardy, U.S. vs. Italian system), but if you want deep, case-specific factual expertise (especially about the DNA, crime scene, or Italian trial details), others may be more authoritative
Environmental DNA is present in virtually every crime scene I remember reading Professor Balding’s explanation and why the extra partial profiles on the clasp were just that, noise.
If Raphael had been in the murder room you would expect his DNA to be as plentiful as that of Meredith and Rudy Guede. And Amanda is not there at all.
So you are making Sollecito a central part of the discussion. Bad move. If this were a chess game, I would say, “Just to be sporting, I’ll let you take that move back, once you see what you have done.”
One of the many facts your desultory defense is not cognizant of at all is Sollecito’s incriminating statement to the police, once they had revealed to him that phone records had undermined his account of when he had called the carabinieri. He ceased vouching for the alibi he and Knox had used — that they were at his place the night of the murder — admitting, “What I told you before is a bunch of silly lies.” He went on to tell them that Amanda had gone out and he had no idea where she was when the crime occurred. Innocent people do not change their alibis multiple times, in response to inconvenient revelations.
When Knox, in a different room of the station, heard that Sollecito was no longer vouching for her alibi, she abruptly accused Lumumba — a false accusation she repeated verbally and in writing, when not in the presence of officers, and failed to retract when she had the chance to do so.
If DNA from the door to Kercher’s room somehow, improbably, ended up on her bra clasp, then why wasn’t it Luca Altieri’s DNA? He is the one who reportedly tried to force the door once it got around that Kercher wasn’t responsive.
RE: “If DNA from the door to Kercher’s room somehow, improbably, ended up on her bra clasp, then why wasn’t it Luca Altieri’s DNA? He is the one who reportedly tried to force the door once it got around that Kercher wasn’t responsive.”
Luca Altieri may indeed be one of the four unidentified males with DNA on Meredith’s bra clasp. A sample of his DNA was not taken because he was not a suspect.
THE BREAK-IN: It is unfortunate that the postal police persuaded the carabinieri that the break-in of Filomena’s bedroom was a hoax. As result, the room never got a proper workup by forensics police. They estimated by looking that “not even spider man” could climb the outer wall to access Filomena’s window, so they did not try. (It can be done in seconds.) Testing the window sill where Rudy entered would almost certainly have revealed his fingerprints and DNA there. Also, it is a simple matter to determine whether a window has been broken from the inside or outside; you need merely examine a shard that is still in the frame edge-on. But none of these things were done. Cassation cited the above kinds of sloppy oversights, including the knife and bra clasp, as reasons for acquitting Amanda and Raphael without remand (retrial).
Mark Saha and Michael Washburn: I have no idea whose ideas here are more persuasive, but MAN OH MAN have I learned a lot and enjoyed reading every word of this back and forth.
My, my. When did the postal police ever “persuade the carabinieri that the break-in was a hoax,” thus preventing a proper forensic investigation of Filomena’s room from ever happening? You do realize that would be called obstruction of justice? It seems absurd to have to point out this out, but an allegation of such magnitude, which originates entirely with you, requires detailed documentation, or the person making it immediately loses all credibility. Such are the dangers of this kind of uninformed, armchair speculation.
Your claim about the postal police is a whopper – as is your guess that maybe Filomena was such a messy person that her room normally looked as if it had been ransacked. For the record, as other housemates attested, it’s Knox’s messiness that was known to have been a source of quarrels with Kercher. Which isn’t so very hard to believe given subsequent events at the cottage, is it?
Really, you can’t argue a criminal case through this kind of “off-the-top-of-my-head” speculation.
Postal police in Perugia were in charge of tech crimes which included cell phone theft. This was a college town and they knew it was not uncommon for a student to “lose” a phone so he/she could buy a newer model with the insurance money. When they returned two phones that had been thrown into some hedges, they suspected the owner (either Filomena or Meredith) was attempting this fraud. When Amanda and Raffael showed them Filomena’s room, they were immediately convinced the break-in was a hoax to explain theft of the phones. When the Carabinieri arrived postal police passed this information along to them. It became a murder case when Meredith’s body was found but the assumption of a staged break-in persisted..
The only DNA found in the room with the break in was a mixed sample of Meredith’s blood and Amanda’s DNA in a random spot on the floor. One judge thought it might have occurred from vigorous handwashing. I believe the final SC report makes mention of Amanda coming in contact with the victim’s blood at some point . They do suggest she may have been a witness only. Also of note the only thing reported missing was a bag of makeup.
I think yoiu mean the bathroom Amanda and Meredith shared, not the break-in room (Filomena’s) ?
Here is the link to a video of a young Perugian scampering up the outer wall of the apartment “like Spider Man” to access Filomena’s window. The police did not attempt this because they judged from looking that it was not possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JL6nIkaYLs
If the link is not hot, you can access the video by googling:
“Amanda Knox Case: Young Man Demonstrates Climb Up to Window at Murder Cottage.”
An expert climber with appropriate shoes. Newly installed bars on windows certainly helped. Where was any physical in that room of someone who walked through it ? Dirt on shoes , the wall , or even broken glass outside. The glass remained on the sill contained by the closed shutters. Maybe Guede staged the breakin because someone did.
The climber in the video says, “It’s really easy. Not just for me but for anyone.” The bars are higher than the window sill, so if they were not in the way the climber could certainly reach inside the window sill to pull himself up. A LOT of people walked through that room: Amanda and Raphael, the postal police, Filomena and three friends, and finally the carabinieri. For all that traffic, nobody bothered with a proper forensic workup. It was simply dismissed as a staged break-in (by the postal police). Guede had done a similar break-in of an upper floor lawyer’s office just weeks before.
There was no positive ID of Guede at the lawyers. The flatmate testified she shut the shutters as most Italians do on a daily basis especially when they were going away.The climb to open the shutters go up down at least twice shimmy over sill with the glass neatly lined up is quite the feat. Not a mark on the white stucco wall outside not a blade from the damp grass nothing on the floor. All this when the wall of the cottage is clearly visible from the road and car park. It was a holiday people were coming and going at that time.
The wood of Filomena’s shutters was weathered and swollen, making them hard to pull shut and lock. For this reason she was in the habit of leaving them open.. Per Burleigh,when initially interrogated by police she said she couldn’t remember whether she had shut them or not before leaving town for the holiday. When the case came to trial she testified she had definitely shut and locked them.
THE FINAL VERDICT:
The last Cassation said in its motivation that it was not remanding the case back to a lower court for retrial because, due to the incompetence of Mignini and the carabinieri, the crime scene was hopelessly contaminated and there was no credible evidence for a lower court to reconsider. It closed by stating that Amanda and Raphael were acquitted “because they did not commit the fact”.
As you have acknowledged here, the last Cassation did not “find Knox innocent,” but overturned her conviction on a legal technicality related to missteps in the investigation. That is a very far cry from clearing her or refuting all the evidence. Does the name O.J. Simpson ring a bell?
Amanda Knox is not O.J. Simpson.
Simpson was declared “not guilty” of the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman in a U.S. criminal court. This did not mean he was innocent. It meant the prosecution was unable to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The parents were still able to bring a successful civil suit against O.J. for the “battery and wrongful deaths” of Ron and Nicole.
The last Cassation was extraordinary because it did not remand the case back to the lower courts for retrial, and because it stated of Amanda and Raphael in the motivations that “they did not commit the fact.” They did not do it. They are innocent. The Kercher family cannot bring any further civil actions against them. It is over.
Did Amanda pay the man she falsely accused. That judgment is finalized too. As far as extra compensation I know her boyfriend tried but was denied because of his numerous lies and omissions.
I don’t know but it’s not relevant. It is not evidence of innocence or guilt.
RE: “As the Florentine court acknowledges, Knox’s voluntary, lengthy, detailed, entirely bogus written account of how her housemate died came well after her so-called interrogation, and it is very far from the kind of ‘excited utterance’ that one might make in the heat of the moment.”:
Actually this entire document is in Ch. 10, pp. 130-135, of Knox’s Waiting To Be Heard. It is not a confession but the rambling confused retraction of a very frightened girl. She writes: “Please don’t yell at me because it only makes me more confused, and that doesn’t help anyone.” And “In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion. Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly.” And “… I’m scared for myself. I know I didn’t kill Meredith. That’s all I know for sure.”
Amazing how selective you are in quoting that rambling statement of Knox’s. You have conveniently ignored passages where she writes of Patrick Lumumba, a wholly innocent man, “I am afraid of him” and repeats the false accusation that he killed Kercher. As for the hedging that you have quoted here, that is, obviously, an attempt to give herself an out when part or all of her account is disproven. Get it? “Here’s my non-binding alibi.” If it’s believed, it functions as an alibi and gets her off the hook. If it’s proven to be bogus — which it very quickly was — then she can say, “So what? That was never my official alibi, just a strange, confused memory that I had.”
If it has to be explained to you why Knox’s book might not be the most impartial and objective source for facts on this case, then you are beyond hope.
Knox sat in prison four years while Barbi Nadeau reported the police theory of the crime as fact and tabloids ran scathing stories about her sex life. Tabloid reporter Nick Pisa says at one point Knox was so hot a reporter in need of lunch money could fabricate something juicy about her and sell it over the wire in half an hour.
When the Hellman acquittal returned her to the United States it became her turn to speak, as suggested by the memoir’s title “Waiting To Be Heard”. A defendant is entitled to defend herself and to be listened to and considered. I should think anyone truly curious about the Knox case would want to start by reading the memoir for her perspective. Then judge whether her version is credible enough to stand up to the accusations of Barbi Nadeau, Peter Quennell, and others who use her to sell books.
As Jordan Peterson would say, you are not just wrong, but guilty of the worst kind of wrong – the opposite of the truth. Partly because of her youth and beauty, Knox enjoyed countless advantages, in the aftermath of the murder and especially after her 2011 release from prison and return to the U.S., that a normal person would not have had, given the massive evidence of her guilt. She benefited from a whitewashing in the mainstream media without parallel in recent criminal history. Yes, the tabloids ran wild and printed all kinds of salacious stuff – what’s your point? What does any of that have to do with the evidence in the case? It’s what tabloids do, and while their conduct is abominable, it should not change one’s view of the evidence in the case. (Suppose a tabloid printed the headline: “Shocking Confession: O.J. Eats Human Hearts!” Would you therefore conclude that the evidence against O.J. Simpson should be dismissed?)
The George Orwell quotation at the end of my article is particularly apposite here.
I was responding to your suggestion that Knox’s memoir “might not be the most impartial and objective source for facts on this case”. It’s not. It is Knox’s personal account of what she experienced told from her perspective. With so many other books about the case out there, surely it is not inappropriate for her to add her own. Let readers judge for themselves whwre lies the truth.
RE: “Partly because of her youth and beauty, Knox enjoyed countless advantages”.
Bruce Fischer writes (Injustice in Perugia, pp 53-55): “Amanda was mistreated horribly by the media … headlines about [her] were … seen around the world, long before any evidence was even collected. With the help of the media, prosecutor Giuliano Mignini’s fictional character – the satanic, ritualistic sex-crazed killer Foxy Knoxy – was born. … The press declared [her] “a devil with an angel’s face.” She was called a she-devil: a diabolical person focused on sex, drugs, and alcohol. Her MySpace page was dissected. Photos that would normally be found on any twenty year old’s MySpace account were perceived as sexual. … The prosecution successfully used the media to assassinate Amanda’s character. …She was found guilty in the court of public opinion long before her trial began.” Sample of newspaper headlines: `FOXY KNOXY’ REVEALS HER LESBIAN TRAUMA; AMANDA KNOX SNARED BY HER LUST AND HER LIES; FOXY KNOXY THE `SHE-DEVIL’ WAITS SERENE; DIARY REVEALS FOXY KNOXY’S SEX SECRETS.
All the other evidence aside (and it’s a lot), there is no way she can be guilty of the slander of Lumumba but be innocent of the murder. No way in any universe.
A hair at the crime scene led police to believe the killer was Black (See, e.g., Angel Face, p. 105). Suspicion fell on Patrick because he was Black and knew both Meredith and Amanda. It is for this reason the police interrogation zeroed in on Amanda’s phone communications with Patrick the night of the murder. Judge Hellman in his acquittal motivation cited Amanda’s accusation of Patrick as evidence she had not been present when Meredith was murdered. If she had been there, she would have known Patrick was not, and if he was not, was either working at the bar or home with his family, and had a solid alibi either way. If she had been there she could simply have identified Rudy Guede as the killer. But because she wasn’t, she had no idea what happened that night. She was gas-lit by interrogators who pushed a frightened 20 year old girl to “imagine” she had been present and describe what “happened”. (See Hellman’s motivation)
RE: “All the other evidence aside (and it’s a lot), there is no way she can be guilty of the slander of Lumumba but be innocent of the murder. No way in any universe.”
It is entirely possible, and it happened. The final Cassation found her not guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher. The Florentine court found her guilty of slandering Patrick Lumumba. They are two different things. In fact, Judge Hellman wrote that it is because she was not guilty of the murder, and had not been there to know better, that she slandered Patrick instead of naming the true killer, Rudy Guede.
I think the fear came in when her boyfriend retracted her alibi. This is why she accused Lumumba when they told her they knew she went out. There was no abuse no slapping no denial of food and water. Why the need to make things up? She didn’t fully retract it she only said it was dreamlike.
“ my head is full of contrasting ideas and I know I can be frustrating to work with for this reason. But I also want to tell the truth as best I can. Everything I have said in regards to Meredith’s death , though contrasting are the best truth that I have been able to think”
Liz, it wasn’t like that. Amanda spent the night of the murder at Rafael’s place but was supposed to work at Patrick’s bar at 10 PM. Patrick texted her at 9 (about the time Meredith was being murdered by Rudy Guede) to say business was slow and gave her the night off. She texted him back, “Okay, see you later.”
Police suspected Patrick of the murder because he was Black and knew both girls. But because they assumed the break-in of Filomena’s room was staged someone had to have let him in with a key. They suspected Amanda of this. During interrogation they persuaded her that she was suppressing a traumatic event. She had forgotten her text to Patrick, and when confronted with it –“Okay, see you later” – sent at about the time of the murder, she broke. Humans are hugely susceptible to the power of suggestion and she was clearly terrified of her interrogators.
No it wasn’t like that at all. You say the police suspected Patrick of murder and somehow convinced Amanda of that which is untrue. Sollecito was called to the station that evening not Amanda. They initially didn’t even question her as you surely know. She was in the hall waiting and stretching and was told to go home or come into another room and give all the names of people once again who might have visited their cottage. The friendly conversation took a turn when in another room Sollecito backed away from their alibi. He wasn’t on his computer all night and said Amanda went out after all. Hearing this they check at her phone for the first time . Looking at the text see you later they ask who was this from, Amanda seeing the name blurted out it was him he killed Meredith. That all happened quickly it was after when they asked for more detail that it was suggested she might have amnesia due to witnessing the murder, In Amanda’s writing the following later she was more concerned about what Sollecito was saying and questioned her own memories. The changing stories were cause for alarm no one suspected Patrick before , she even told them where he lived.
Liz, yes, sorry, you’re right about the chronology here. Because the interrogation wasn’t videotaped accounts do differ on the details.
This is the most astonishing of the anti-Knox books I’ve seen:
As Done Unto You: The Secret Confession of Amanda Knox
by Andrew G. Hodges M.D.
Hodges is a practicing psychiatrist in Birmingham, Alabama who imagines he can read the “thought prints” writers unconsciously embed in their texts. His decoding of Amanda’s memoir and emails reveal a girl screaming her guilt in the murder of Meredith Kercher.
His other books decode the thought prints of Jesus Christ and Barak Obama, and solve the murders of Jon Benet Ramsey and Natalee Holloway. He is endorsed by former FBI agents and various police chiefs across the country, who boast of the convictions they could obtain if only his thought prints were accepted as evidence in court.
The book is available on Amazon, where you can use the “look inside” feature to explore it.
Hi Mark , When Amanda volunteered to come to the station she was a witness only her questioning was not planned it wasn’t an interrogation and no taping required. The questioning was halted in less than 2 hours after she accused her boss. At this point she needed a lawyer, believe she said she didn’t need one.
It would have helped to have this spontaneous accusation taped because you could have heard the informal questioning about visitors to the cottage and even Germany suddenly change . Raffael telling police she went out did that. The short timing of the accusation after their arrival at the station is the only record.
Contrary to what you wrote in your post above (quoting “Injustice in Perugia”), “the press” did not label her anything. As in any high-profile case, she had ardent supporters and equally passionate detractors, some of whom went to extremes in an effort to sell newspapers. I have already explained why the silly behavior of tabloids is immaterial to the evidence and irrelevant to this discussion.
Regarding the “slander” conviction, which guilters seem to consider so important as an indicator of Knox’s “bad” character, Italy is one of only a few western countries that still have criminal defamation on the statute books. It was abolished in the UK in 2009, and its continued use in Italy is of concern to rights groups. It is frequently weaponised by Italy’s far-right Prime Minister to silence critics, and it’s being weaponised against Knox as well. Most probably this is to save face and to minimise any compensation due to her for wrongful imprisonment. And of course it assuages guilters who can console themselves with Amanda Knox being convicted of something. The problem being in most other countries what she supposedly did is not a recognised crime in most other countries, so they would not recognise it as valid.
The last time I checked, framing someone for murder is considered a serious legal and moral offense in many countries. So is lying to the police. Italy’s “far-right” prime minister was not in office in 2007 and is irrelevant to this discussion. The “guilters” in this matter are people who are familiar with the very abundant evidence.
It wouldn’t be prosecuted as “criminal defamation” though in the UK. Maybe as perverting the course of justice, but that’s a different type of offence, and it wouldn’t pass muster on statements made while in police custody (especially when coerced). For such charges to stick they would need to involve something like actively planting evidence against a person, not merely making a statement.
Knox was never coerced. She was not even under arrest when she gave false accounts — repeatedly and in elaborate detail — of how Kercher died.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that Amanda’s interrogation violated her human rights in not providing her with a neutral translator and an attorney. Italy was ordered to pay Amanda a 40,000 euro fine, and the statements she signed in interrogation cannot be used against her in court. Her reconviction of slandering Patrick by the Florance court was based solely on the “spontanious declaration” she wrote after her interrogation. That document is problematic because it expresses doubts that the statements she signed against Patrick during interrogation were true. This spontanious declaration can be found in its entirity in Knox’s memoir, “Waiting to be Heard”.
I invoked Meloni as an example of someone who often weaponises Italy’s Calunnia law. Criminal defamation laws are inherently problematic because they are typically used to settle scores, a bit like blasphemy laws. Suggest to a suspect that she, together with person X, murdered her roommate (when of course neither she nor person X were there), force her to make a statement accordingly, then prosecute her for defamation when X is found to have an alibi? Sounds like entrapment to me (and that’s something else that isn’t allowed in the UK).
You got this thing sized up perfectly and it absolutley all makes perfect sense when you think about it!
Amanda Knox, a 19-year-old college student with zero criminal history, fresh off the plane in Italy to study abroad, met a guy she’d been dating for about a week and thought: “You know what would really spice up this semester? Let’s commit a horrific murder with a drifter we barely know!”
Because it’s not a stretch whatsoever, not one iota, to think that’s what a female college student from the USA would immediately recruit their new boyfriend and a random acquaintance to help them brutally murder their roommate for absolutely no reason. It’s like a study abroad icebreaker activity, really. And then, being criminal masterminds, they cleaned up ALL the DNA evidence of themselves from the crime scene (impressive for first-timers!) but somehow forgot to clean up Rudy Guede’s DNA, which was literally everywhere. Also, they forgot to take the money and valuables that were actually stolen. Classic rookie mistake by these seasoned killers!
The “very abundant evidence” you mention must be the kind that’s so abundant it keeps getting thrown out by Italian courts. You know, the super reliable kind, even in the kangaroo court of Italian justice system. You need a a better and more reliable source than the esteemed Alan Dershowitz to legtitimize a judicial system that put its faith and trust in a whackjob like Mignini. Lest you forgot…the murder was timed to coincide with Halloween (or the night of All Saints) and was part of a “satanic” ritual involving drugs, alcohol, and an “extreme sex game” that escalated. You are a tool!!!!
I’m sorry but the level of argumentation in your post is just not very high. Only people with criminal records ever commit crimes? That’s a Catch-22, if you stop and think about it for one moment. No crimes would ever happen if they were a precondition to committing them. The reality is that the motives for murders are often bizarre and indeed incomprehensible to others — but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen. Contrary to your claim here, the killers did not succeed in removing Knox’s DNA from everything. It was found on the handle of the knife that had Kercher’s blood on the blade. Pretty damning! Just like the forensic evidence clearly indicating she took part in the attack and causing some of the bruising on Kercher’s body. And the luminol footprint. And the bloody bathmat. And the bra clasp. All happening in a house where she freely admitted she was present when the crime occurred. I’m going to ignore the third-grade insult at the end of your comment and ask you to become literate with the voluminous evidence about the case before you post about it.
The knife in question was never at the crime scene. It was taken at random from a drawer in the kitchen of Raffael’s apartment by an officer who says he was guided by “policeman’s intuition”.
Amanda used the knife to prepare meals at Raffael’s place which explains her DNA on the handle. Whether Meredith’s DNA is on the blade is problemetic. The sample was so small it was destroyed in testing so a standard confirmation retest was not possible. DNA experts testified at trial that if it was indeed from Meredith it was almost certainly due to contamination at the police forensics lab.
Mignini had a problem explaining how the knife got from Raffel’s apartment to Meredith’s place. If Amanda took it there, that is premeditation — and his theory of the crime was that it was a spontanious act of passion in a sex orgy gpne wrong. Mignini seriously suggested in court that Amanda routinely carried this large kitchen knife in her purse “for self defense.” The knife is dismissed by both the Hellman and final Cassation motivations reports/
Neither the luminol footprint nor the one on the bathmat have been identified as belonging to Amanda Knox. The bathmat print is surely Rudy Guide, and the luminol smudge may not be a foot print at all. Amanda’s DNA is not on the bra clasp.
No, comparison of the bathmat print to Guede’s foot size has definitely ruled him out. Moreover, Guede’s footprints led down the hall and out the door. He could not have caused the prints in either the bathroom or in Amanda’s room. Have you read any material on this case?
“Lorenzo Rinaldi is the director of the print identity department of the Italian Police The myth about the size of Rudy’s foot is largely the result of the report that Lorenzo Rinaldi presented in court.” See Injustice in Perugia for Rinaldi’s error. But the prosecution attributed the print on the bathmat to Raffaele, not Amanda. There is no physical evidence placing Amanda in the apartment at the time of the murder.
ECHR awarded 18000 euro not 40,000. Even though her original statements were thrown out she repeated them in her written statement “ away from police pressure” . Was she hedging her bets in case she wasn’t ready to fully abandon blaming Patrick just yet. What did the police know and what was her boyfriend saying? The fact she didn’t fully realize or recant for 2 weeks sounds like it was a really slow process for her.
It is also good to remember the knife is not the murder weapon. The lethal wound to Meredith’s throat is too narrow to have been inflicted by the full bladed kitchen knife.
You lack basic familiarity with the evidence. Forensic analysis found two different knives were used in the murder.
The knife with Amanda;s DNA on it was not the murder weapon. It is the kitchen knife she used to prepare meals in Raffael’s apartment. The murder weapon has never been found.
The notion that two knives were used is forensic speculation. Of the 47 bruises and injuries to Meredith’s body only three are knife wounds. Two of the wounds are shallow and one is a deep fatal thrust. The same knife could have inflicted all three.
The knife had Meredith’s blood on the blade and Knox’s on the handle. According to long-established precedent, saying “it was probably contaminated or something” is not a legal argument. A detailed and plausible theory would have to be set forth as to when and where contamination happened. This is really a side issue and you have nothing to say about the changing alibis, footprints in the blood, DNA on the bra clasp, Knox’s admission to her mom that she was at the cottage when the murder happened, her desperate false accusation of Patrick Lumumba, the staged-break in, the strange email she wrote to people in Seattle, on and on and on and on…
Sorry, but neither Meredith’s nor Knox’s blood was on the knife. Knox’s DNA was on the handle and what is alleged to be a partial of Meredith’s DNA was on the blade.
This exchange has turned into a game of “Last tag!” You haven’t begun to address any of the key evidence and have instead adopted a solipsistic stance out of a misguided wish to defend the indefensible.
Why did Amanda remember seeing blood on her boyfriend’s hands and thought it must be fish blood? Could she have been so stoned that her memories were really confused? I think the prosecutor said something to that effect that she just didn’t remember what happened that night. The story about the water spill and taking apart the pipe sounds like it could have been part of some cleanup. The police picked up a strong bleach spell in the apartment , the maid didn’t like to use bleach.
Liz, all of this is about Raffael’s apartment, not Meredith’s apartment where she was murdered. What is the point of a cleanup in Raffael’s apartment?
The broken pipe , the water on the floor and the return to the cottage the following day to fetch mop sounds unusual. The police entering the apartment noticed a strong bleach smell. The weekly cleaner said she was told to never use bleach. I do find the story of fish blood on his hands unusual. Was she trying to throw some shade at her boyfriend? Their story did fall apart in other ways such as when they got up the next day early not late and the fact that RS didn’t send any emails that evening like he claimed.
Good points, and just a few of the many holes in Knox’s and Sollecito’s shifting alibis. The bleach no doubt was from repeated washing of the knife used in the murder, in a failed attempt to remove all traces of the victim’s DNA.
The knife was not the murder weapon. The blade is too large to have inflicted the fatal puncture wound to Meredith’s throat. And if it had been used, why in the world would Amanda and Raffaele fear police were going to come to Raffaele’s apartment and pick it at random from the knives in his kitchen drawer? Hellman, in his motivations, asked, if they had really used the knife to kill Meredith, whether they would bring it back at all? Were they really going to prepare meals with a knife they had just used to murder someone? It is all speculation, and Hellman did not find it credible.
Again, you are not familiar with the case. The knife, like all other items and pieces of furniture in Sollecito’s rented apartment, had been catalogued. The perps knew that if the knife was found missing after the murder, it would not be a good look for them at all. So instead of getting rid of it, they tried (unsuccessfully) to cleanse it of all traces of the wielder and the victim.
You make Amanda and Raffaele sound awfully cunning, as if they planned Meredith’s murder in advance and considered every contingency. But that would be premeditation – and premeditation requires a motive – for which there is none. That’s why Mignini’s theory is that the murder happened spontaneously when a sex game spun out of control. He suggested the knife was at the scene because Amana routinely carried this oversized kitchen utensil in her purse “for self- protection,” which is ludicrous. The truth is more mundane. The knife is too large to have inflicted the fatal puncture to Meredith’s throat. It is not the murder weapon and was never at the crime scene. It was taken from a drawer in Raffaele’s kitchen by a police officer acting on a whim. See the Hellman and final Cassation motivations on this..
Obviously they did not consider every contingency. What I said in my previous comment referred to their actions after the murder, when their every thought would have been about concealment. Your argument about the knife being too large makes no sense at all. The tip of any sharp weapon can make an entry point that does not suggest the dimensions of the entire blade. In any event, two knives were used — rendering your argument about “the knife” irrelevant.
It was a deep puncture wound made by a stiletto type knife.. A butcher knife piercing that deep would have made a larger wound. It was ruled out as the murder weapon by a forensics expert at trial.
There were two knives involved, remember? And for you to bring up forensic expert testimony is a very bad move indeed. Three different forensic examiners testified under oath that Kercher’s wounds and bruises were consistent with multiple attackers. There goes the whole risible lie (Guede as sole attacker) that the defense has built its house on.
There is no need for two knives. The stiletto blade that inflicted the fatal deep puncture could have made the two shallower cuts as well. Rudy was known to have such a knife but it has never been found. The problem with multiple attackers is that they were not there. The murder room has an abundance of blood, DNA and fingerprints, all of which belong to either Meredith Kercher or Rudy Guide, It was a small room filled with furniture which easily accounts for Meredith’s many bruises as she fought for her life at close quarters. When Lifetime made its unfortunate TV movie about the case, they had to build a set larger than Meredith’s room to accommodate the girl and two attackers (Amanda and Raffaele). The bra clasp has a fragment of Raffaele’s DNA and other males but this is attributed to careless police work. Forensic police wore “spacesuits,” latex gloves and plastic booties which prevented them from contaminating the crime scene with their own DNA< It it not prevent them from contaminating the apartment by tracking blood and DNA from one room to another; e.g., transferring DNA from Meredith’s door to the bra clasp. There is videotape of them doing this.
Yes, Meredith had many bruises but she did not have defensive wounds on her hands and fingers, as people invariably do when trying to fight off a knife attack. Her family and friends have all attested that she was physically strong, had studied martial arts and was inclined to fight back against any aggressor. Forensic experts have unanimously testified that she was restrained by more than one person. There is no plausible theory of DNA contamination. Even if we accepted that Raffaele’s DNA was tracked inadvertently from the doorknob to the bra (pure speculation), how on earth does that exonerate him? The presence of his DNA on the doorknob is one more proof of his and Knox’s guilt.
Raffaele’s DNA was on Meredith’s locked door because he attempted to force it open the morning after the murder. There is no evidence he or Amanda were in the murder room. The final Cassation, the highest court in the land, said in its motivations that the crime scene had been hopelessly contaminated, and that the police and prosecutor were incompetent. It’s pretty damning.
No evidence he and Amanda were in the murder room? Again, you are not familiar with the most basic facts of this case. Namely the presence of the only working lamp from Amanda’s room under Meredith’s bed, and the inconsistency of Guede’s footprints from his having gone anywhere near Amanda’s room or the bathroom with blood smears smaller than his foot size on the bathmat.
Of Amanda and Raffael, Cassation said, “They did not commit the fact.”
Was she a frightened witness? Did she know something which she had to continue to lie about. She came in contact with the victim’s blood somehow according to them even though she was not believed to have been in the room. Cassation did not give her a complete free pass. They found dishonesty in her morning account of how she found Meredith. This reasoning is also in their report.
The droplet of Meredith’s blood that Amanda came in contact with was on the sink in the the bathroom they shared, and not in the murder room. Amanda found it the morning after the murder, before they had discovered Meredith’s body. She was curious and touched it with her finger, thus mixing her DNA with Meredith’s blood. This sample has been mistakenly reported as “mixed blood” and as having been found on the floor of Filomena’s room where Rudy had made entry through the window.