http://tinyurl.com/34hfoq
Alcohol, drugs and promiscuous sex: the dark secrets
Making sense of the killing of Meredith Kercher
From Philip Willan in Rome November 10, 2007
PERUGIA IS one of those places where the quality of provincial life in Italy is seen at its best. A mediaeval town clinging to an Umbrian hillside, its treasures of art and architecture draw thousands of tourists every year. And in recent times its wealth, dynamism and cosmopolitan spirit have been boosted by a popular University for Foreigners, offering a unique cultural experience to students from around the globe.
Amanda Knox, a 20-year-old American, was certainly captivated by its magic. "I've made plenty of friends here, and I have a lot of fun. I'm actually at one of my most happiest places right now, " she gushed, in a message posted on MySpace.com on October 15. Two weeks later, on the night after Hallowe'en, Perugia's magic would turn to ashes for the fresh-faced, innocent-looking young blonde from Seattle.
The reassuringly safe and civilised city proved fatal to her friend and flatmate, Meredith Kercher, a lively 21-year-old from Coulsdon, south London, who was studying in the city as part of the Erasmus student-exchange programme. Meredith was preparing to return to London to celebrate her mother's birthday with a suitcase full of Perugia's famous chocolates - of which, she confessed in an entry on Facebook, she had recently been eating too much.
advertisementInstead, she was found lying on the floor of her locked bedroom with her throat cut, one foot sticking out from under a duvet and blood soaking her pillow. Even more shocking, her friend Amanda was last week arrested as an alleged accomplice in her rape and murder.
On Friday, Judge Claudia Matteini ordered Knox and two male suspects to be remanded in prison for a year. In a 19-page document explaining her decision, the judge said Kercher had been killed after refusing the sexual advances of the other two suspects, 44-year-old Congolese musician and bar manager Patrick Diya Lumumba and Knox's Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 23, who was also studying in Perugia.
According to the police reconstruction of events on the night of November 1, Knox was present at the time of the murder and did nothing to protect her friend, subsequently lied to police about what happened and attempted to confuse investigators by staging a fake burglary. In the worst scenario, investigators said, she may actually have held her friend down while she was being raped.
In a harrowing testimony published by the respected Corriere Della Sera newspaper, Knox described how she blocked her ears in terror as she listened to thuds of violence and her friend's screams from a neighbouring room. According to this version, it was Lumumba who killed Meredith. But rather than doing anything about the attack, Knox, who said she had been smoking hashish, simply left for her boyfriend's flat, waking up in his bed the following morning.
Even this partial and far from convincing confession was produced with difficulty. "Knox repeatedly covers her face with her hands and shakes her head," police noted at the end of her traumatic testimony.
Her boyfriend, Sollecito, has been tied to the crime by physical evidence, according to Judge Matteini's report: Nike sneakers compatible with marks left in the blood on Meredith Kercher's floor and a flick-knife compatible with the wound that caused her death. Sollecito told investigators that he had carried a knife since the age of 13, using it as a fashion accessory that he changed when he changed his clothes. Both men deny being present in the house when Meredith died, and so far no physical evidence has been found that would place Lumumba, a popular and respected figure in Perugia, at the scene of the crime.
T he murder in the privileged international set of Perugia's foreign students, with its morbid sexual motive, has gripped the Italian media just as much as the British, focusing a spotlight on the once quiet city's modern ills of alcohol, drugs and promiscuous sex. It is also one of the first judicial cases in Italy in which the characters of the protagonists have been illuminated by their writings on social networking websites.
Many newspapers published photographs of Meredith (Mez to family and friends) dressed as a vampire for Hallowe'en, with fake blood running from her lips. Posted on her Facebook entry the day before her death, they showed a carefree, happy and attractive brunette having fun and constituted a shockingly macabre coincidence the day after.
The internet offered an insight into the character of Sollecito, an information technology student from southern Italy, seen in television pictures as he nervously caressed and comforted Knox outside what has been dubbed the house of horrors.
"I am very honest, peaceful, kind, but sometimes completely mad," he wrote in a blog on wayn.com, where his professed desire for "strong emotions capable of surprising you" took on a sinister aspect in the light of what was to follow. In humorous photos posted on another site, he appears as a mummy, or perhaps a surgeon, swathed in toilet paper and clutching a large cleaver - another bitter irony now that he is accused of murder.
But the fullest picture to emerge from internet is that of Amanda Knox, or Foxy Knoxy, as she signed herself in her MySpace blog. The light-hearted banter takes on a new dimension in relation to her current predicament. It reveals that she had given up a job as a trainee at the German parliament in Berlin because she was not being given enough to do, causing embarrassment to the influential uncle who had fixed it for her.
And it describes her meeting a skinny girl with a room to rent in Perugia. "It's a cute house that is right in the middle of this random garden in the middle of Perugia. Around us are apartment buildings, but we enter through a gate and there it is. I'm in love," Foxy Knoxy wrote.
In a later post, a handyman comes to fix the washing machine and ends up staying the night. Foxy bumps into him in his underwear in the morning, and bursts out laughing. "Not because he's scrawny or anything, but because Laura Mezzetti, another flatmate had been complaining a couple days previously that she hadn't gotten laid in a long time. Forza Laura!"
The blog reveals Foxy had been working at night in a bar called Le Chic. "It's a really small place owned by this man from the Congo. His name is Patrick."
Besides the personal reminiscences there are short stories. Particularly striking, under the circumstances, is one in which two brothers fight because one had drugged and raped a woman. One character, Kyle, tries to laugh off the accusation: "A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don't know what they want ... You have to show it to them."' Testimony about the private lives of members of the Perugia household, particularly in relation to sex and drugs, inevitably looms large in the murder investigation, and has been published at length in Italian newspapers. Though it creates the impression that Meredith may have found herself in a sexually licentious environment that made her feel ill at ease, it is unlikely in itself to solve the murder. That will almost certainly depend on forensic science and the thoroughness and technical competence of the Italian forensic experts.
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by Heli » Sat Nov 10, 2007 2:09 pm
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by George » Sun Nov 11, 2007 8:56 am
The story of Meredith Kercher becomes ever more unthinkable. In the latest finding of an Italian judge, she died an agonisingly slow death after having her throat cut as she was sexually assaulted. No one knows who struck the mortal blow, but Ms Kercher's killing confounds the idea that young British women abroad are most at danger from sweaty loners stalking the badlands of Australia or Thailand.
She died in her bedroom in the Umbrian hill city of Perugia, which, until recently, was chiefly noted as a Renaissance and Etruscan treasure trove. Now, if you believe Corriere della Sera, it is Bangkok. Kebab shops and internet cafes have opened to cater for an international clientele with a taste for vodka, drugs and sex. Perugia, in the days since the murder, has become a byword for cultural and moral meltdown.
No doubt many young visitors still dutifully study Dante and phone home each week. But murder has revealed another image: of a world in which some cocktail of wealth, restlessness, intoxication and savagery led to a depravity that would appal any underclass predator. Three people are in custody, among them Ms Kercher's flatmate, Amanda Knox. Police believe she held her friend down as her neck was slashed by a flick knife allegedly owned by Raffaele Sollecito, Ms Knox's boyfriend. The third suspect is Diya Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner.
There are many alarming aspects of a blameless young woman's murder. Among them is the detail in the public domain before a charge has been brought, a motive offered or hard evidence supplied. The judge has spoken of 'grave indications of guilt' and the short circuitry of due process is unlikely to trouble those who have already forged the case for the prosecution. Even before the latest allegations emerged, 'Foxy Knoxy', who posed with a machine gun on MySpace, had been found guilty in the court of social networking. Her boyfriend, pictured on the internet as a mad doctor wielding a meat cleaver, was similarly damned.
Images that appeared to show warped hedonists at play have fed public fear that some new class of monster is emerging: rootless, devoid of conscience and modelled on a darker variant of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley. But the killing also evokes more arcane predators. Some accounts suggest Hindley and Brady, reworked for cyberspace. Others hint at Macbeth for YouTubers.
Knox's internet entries vied last week for the new media horror awards with the YouTube posting by Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the 18-year-old Finn who filmed himself, gun in hand, before killing seven fellow pupils, his school's headmistress and himself. He is the latest psychopathic narcissist to advertise impending slaughter. The phenomenon of disaffected young men who turn to murder, and the copycat nature of the Finnish massacre, makes this crime part of a chilling pattern. Yet Auvinen seems to have inspired less public revulsion in the UK than Knox. There is little equivalence between a declared killer pledged to 'eliminate all I see unfit' and a girl whose internet ramblings could, in normal circumstances, indicate just another spoiled attention-seeker.
Her familiarity, though, is what makes Knox so frightening to many. Her backstory, unlike Auvinen's, meshes with parents' fears. Thousands of girls flaunt, as she did, their bodies or their secrets on MySpace. In adult anxiety, they would have been easy meat for the 29,000 sex offenders recently debarred from prowling the site. They are also, supposedly, part of an over-sexualised generation who dabble in virtual friendships and live dangerous second lives until the real world swallows them up.
Perugia is becoming a morality tale about a generation for whom easy sex and easyJet have supposedly created a world without boundaries. But Knox's history does not support the idea that girls should be protected more closely and brought up more strictly. Taught by Jesuits and forbidden, as an American, to buy alcohol before she was 21, Knox appears to have been too naive and cosseted to avoid sex, drink and nemesis.
Ms Kercher, by contrast, was an emissary for young British women. The Erasmus scheme, on which she was enrolled, is the EU's 'flagship' education exchange programme. The relatively few UK applicants, compared with the rest of Europe, suggest that British students should widen their horizons, not narrow them.
Obviously, travel carries risks. Of the 200,000 who set out on gap years, a quarter report a 'bad experience', according to government research. Among the malaria and stolen laptops, there are occasional tragedies. Earlier this year, Lindsay Ann Hawker, also educated at Leeds, was found buried in a bath outside a Tokyo apartment. Such horrors underline the idea that clever, trusting, confident young women who treat the world like a global campus are courting extreme danger.
In reality, young people who never stray from British backwaters are just as likely, or unlikely, to meet some terrible fate. The killing of Ms Kercher does, though, illustrate one new threat. Privacy has been abolished, now that any bit of flesh or drunken foolery displayed on the internet is preserved for all time. Of 600 British companies surveyed recently, a fifth said they logged on to networking sites, such as Facebook, to vet applicants. In a world of universal celebrity, there is no right to silence.
What Knox and her friends did or did not do to Meredith Kercher is for the courts to decide. In the absence of any proof, a new fear has taken root. While the massacre in a Finnish school reflects a terrifying, but familiar, alienation in young men, the events in Perugia flout received wisdom. They suggest that the most pampered, spoiled, cherished and protected young people may also have the greatest capacity to become involved in unspeakable acts.
If there is any easy story to be told, it is that the ogres of modern life - the internet, celebrities, materialism, cheap travel - are not the perils they are made out to be, as long as children learn early to be responsible. We are not seeing the emergence of an amoral generation, in thrall to sensationalism.
Nor does the ability to see so much, both on internet sites, and in the flood of detail emerging from Perugia, imply that one crime, or one deviant group, denotes the death of conscience or the crumbling of values. Though young people live more exposed existences than any previous generation, the template for student life is still the vigil at Leeds University at which friends dropped flowers and lit candles to the memory of Meredith Kercher.
As for parents appalled by the warped novelties of a modern murder, there are only the oldest lessons of trust and faith. You try to equip your children to face the worst dangers of the world and hope they never meet them.
mary.riddell@observer.co.uk
She died in her bedroom in the Umbrian hill city of Perugia, which, until recently, was chiefly noted as a Renaissance and Etruscan treasure trove. Now, if you believe Corriere della Sera, it is Bangkok. Kebab shops and internet cafes have opened to cater for an international clientele with a taste for vodka, drugs and sex. Perugia, in the days since the murder, has become a byword for cultural and moral meltdown.
No doubt many young visitors still dutifully study Dante and phone home each week. But murder has revealed another image: of a world in which some cocktail of wealth, restlessness, intoxication and savagery led to a depravity that would appal any underclass predator. Three people are in custody, among them Ms Kercher's flatmate, Amanda Knox. Police believe she held her friend down as her neck was slashed by a flick knife allegedly owned by Raffaele Sollecito, Ms Knox's boyfriend. The third suspect is Diya Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner.
There are many alarming aspects of a blameless young woman's murder. Among them is the detail in the public domain before a charge has been brought, a motive offered or hard evidence supplied. The judge has spoken of 'grave indications of guilt' and the short circuitry of due process is unlikely to trouble those who have already forged the case for the prosecution. Even before the latest allegations emerged, 'Foxy Knoxy', who posed with a machine gun on MySpace, had been found guilty in the court of social networking. Her boyfriend, pictured on the internet as a mad doctor wielding a meat cleaver, was similarly damned.
Images that appeared to show warped hedonists at play have fed public fear that some new class of monster is emerging: rootless, devoid of conscience and modelled on a darker variant of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley. But the killing also evokes more arcane predators. Some accounts suggest Hindley and Brady, reworked for cyberspace. Others hint at Macbeth for YouTubers.
Knox's internet entries vied last week for the new media horror awards with the YouTube posting by Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the 18-year-old Finn who filmed himself, gun in hand, before killing seven fellow pupils, his school's headmistress and himself. He is the latest psychopathic narcissist to advertise impending slaughter. The phenomenon of disaffected young men who turn to murder, and the copycat nature of the Finnish massacre, makes this crime part of a chilling pattern. Yet Auvinen seems to have inspired less public revulsion in the UK than Knox. There is little equivalence between a declared killer pledged to 'eliminate all I see unfit' and a girl whose internet ramblings could, in normal circumstances, indicate just another spoiled attention-seeker.
Her familiarity, though, is what makes Knox so frightening to many. Her backstory, unlike Auvinen's, meshes with parents' fears. Thousands of girls flaunt, as she did, their bodies or their secrets on MySpace. In adult anxiety, they would have been easy meat for the 29,000 sex offenders recently debarred from prowling the site. They are also, supposedly, part of an over-sexualised generation who dabble in virtual friendships and live dangerous second lives until the real world swallows them up.
Perugia is becoming a morality tale about a generation for whom easy sex and easyJet have supposedly created a world without boundaries. But Knox's history does not support the idea that girls should be protected more closely and brought up more strictly. Taught by Jesuits and forbidden, as an American, to buy alcohol before she was 21, Knox appears to have been too naive and cosseted to avoid sex, drink and nemesis.
Ms Kercher, by contrast, was an emissary for young British women. The Erasmus scheme, on which she was enrolled, is the EU's 'flagship' education exchange programme. The relatively few UK applicants, compared with the rest of Europe, suggest that British students should widen their horizons, not narrow them.
Obviously, travel carries risks. Of the 200,000 who set out on gap years, a quarter report a 'bad experience', according to government research. Among the malaria and stolen laptops, there are occasional tragedies. Earlier this year, Lindsay Ann Hawker, also educated at Leeds, was found buried in a bath outside a Tokyo apartment. Such horrors underline the idea that clever, trusting, confident young women who treat the world like a global campus are courting extreme danger.
In reality, young people who never stray from British backwaters are just as likely, or unlikely, to meet some terrible fate. The killing of Ms Kercher does, though, illustrate one new threat. Privacy has been abolished, now that any bit of flesh or drunken foolery displayed on the internet is preserved for all time. Of 600 British companies surveyed recently, a fifth said they logged on to networking sites, such as Facebook, to vet applicants. In a world of universal celebrity, there is no right to silence.
What Knox and her friends did or did not do to Meredith Kercher is for the courts to decide. In the absence of any proof, a new fear has taken root. While the massacre in a Finnish school reflects a terrifying, but familiar, alienation in young men, the events in Perugia flout received wisdom. They suggest that the most pampered, spoiled, cherished and protected young people may also have the greatest capacity to become involved in unspeakable acts.
If there is any easy story to be told, it is that the ogres of modern life - the internet, celebrities, materialism, cheap travel - are not the perils they are made out to be, as long as children learn early to be responsible. We are not seeing the emergence of an amoral generation, in thrall to sensationalism.
Nor does the ability to see so much, both on internet sites, and in the flood of detail emerging from Perugia, imply that one crime, or one deviant group, denotes the death of conscience or the crumbling of values. Though young people live more exposed existences than any previous generation, the template for student life is still the vigil at Leeds University at which friends dropped flowers and lit candles to the memory of Meredith Kercher.
As for parents appalled by the warped novelties of a modern murder, there are only the oldest lessons of trust and faith. You try to equip your children to face the worst dangers of the world and hope they never meet them.
mary.riddell@observer.co.uk
-
George - Posts: 79
- Joined: Fri Mar 24, 2006 5:53 am
- Location: Europe
by gwen » Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:14 am
All-American sweetheart who plunged into world of drink, drugs and easy sex
Friends baffled by how ‘wholesome’ girl from Seattle is alleged to have become mixed up in death of the British student Meredith Kercher
In her home town of Seattle, Amanda Knox was described as a wholesome young woman — the perfect date for a high-school prom. Her friends are trying to comprehend how she could have become an alleged sexual deviant capable of a role in the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher.
When she arrived in Perugia for a three-month stay, Ms Knox, 20, was seen as an all-American sweetheart, a soccer player of note and an accomplished rock climber.
But something happened to her in those three months, according to people within the university community of the Umbrian hill town. At some point, apparently quite early on in her stay, she lost control. In the town’s seedier bars, she soon became known as someone who was capable of intense jealousy and rage. She dedicated her free time to the drink, drugs and easy sex of Perugia’s nightlife.
As she contemplates spending up to a year in an Italian jail awaiting charges — she was detained yesterday along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, 24, and Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, 38 — those who knew her spoke out. One acquaintance said that Ms Knox had not been corrupted by any particular person because she was “already up for it”. She had plunged fresh from Seattle into a world of vodka, marijuana and free-and-easy sex. According to Mr Sollecito’s statement to police, she went to bed with him the day they met and, according to leaked testimony, she was known to pick up men in the bars and internet cafés. Ms Knox is thought to have “befriended” at least one North African man.
Acquaintances confirm the report of Ms Kercher’s friend, Sophie Purton, that Ms Kercher had been alarmed by the men whom Ms Knox brought home, including some “strange types”.
This is not the woman her friends in the US know. Dominick Balsoma, 21, told The Times that Ms Knox was his first date and perfect for his high-school homecoming dance. She was, he said, a good student and sportswoman. They were educated together at the private $12,000-a-year Jesuit-run Seattle Preparatory School, where pupils recited daily prayers and adhered to a strict dress code. She played an orphan in a school production of the musical Annie, and was popular among her peers. “She was always smiling. The last time I saw her, she was very excited about going to Italy,” he said.
Mr Balsoma said that they had stayed friends and had attended the University of Washington together. She e-mailed him only a few weeks ago, he said. He was surprised to learn that she had posted a short story on her MySpace page describing the rape of a girl. In the story, Baby Brother, a man called Edgar asks his brother, Kyle, whether he carried out a rape with a drug called “hard A”.
Mr Balsoma said: “Normal people can write horror stories, but it does suggest a side of her that might not have been public. It is possible that she fell in with the wrong crowd, but I cannot believe she could have been involved with that crime . . . she is just not a violent person.”
In Perugia, locals have told The Times that their town has two faces, both of which appear to have seduced Ms Knox. For tourists and second-home owners it is an idyllic Umbrian hilltop town, the home of the Renaissance painter Pietro Vannucci, nicknamed Perugino, and many Etruscan, Roman and Renaissance treasures. The historic centre of Perugia has long had pubs and bars, but joining them are internet cafés and kebab houses to cater to a multracial, multicultural population of students and immigrants. “Perugia is Italy’s Ibiza,” said the newspaper Corriere della Sera this week.
It is a heady cosmopolitan atmosphere for the young (Ms Kercher was about to turn 22 and Mr Sollecito is 24) but many of the “hangers-on” in the student culture are older. Mr Lumumba, the man Ms Knox accuses of murdering and sexually violating Ms Kercher, is 37. He denies that he was at the “house of horrors” at all, and claims that he can prove it.
He certainly knew Ms Knox well, however, because she worked for him at Le Chic, the bar he recently acquired in the centre of Perugia, helping him to serve customers on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
One theory is that Ms Knox, described by acquaintances as jealous of other attractive women, fell out with Ms Kercher because she had told friends that she, too, wanted to help out at Le Chic. “There are a lot of older men who hang around the student community,” said Mirko Palmesi, an Italian-Canadian who recently left Perugia after studying at the University for Foreigners. “I used to ask myself all the time what these older types were doing with us.”
Mr Lumumba came to Perugia because it houses the University for Foreigners, an institution set up in the 1920s to encourage the study of Italian language and culture. Unlike most students, however, he stayed on and made a living as a reggae musician and barman, becoming a well-known figure in Perugia’s night life.
Did he wield a malign influence over the youngsters, leading them into a life of sex and drugs? Not according to those who know him. They said that he was a “gentle soul, respectful and respectable” with a Polish wife and baby son.
Some Italian locals claim that American students cannot cope with the alcohol. Unlike Italy, the US prohibits the sale of alcohol to under 21s. A bus stop near Ms Knox’s home is plastered with posters advertising “buy one, get one free” deals at pubs and bars during happy hour. “We start drinking about six and just carry on,” one student commented. “It is perfectly normal.
“These foreign kids tend to have a lot of money in their pockets,” said Ivo Banella, a trade union official in Perugia. “By local standards they are rich kids, with cash from their unsuspecting parents, who have no idea what their children get up to here.” Joints are openly smoked even on the Cathedral steps and hard drugs change hands in dark corners.
Drugs remain at the heart of the case. Marijuana was grown by the students at the whitewashed cottage Ms Knox and Ms Kercher shared with two Italian girls and Ms Knox and her boyfriend admitted smoking on the evening of the murder, which they claim accounts for their confused accounts and memory lapses.
On the ten-minute walk from the University for Foreigners to the cottage where Ms Kercher was killed is a grim municipal park and basketball court, which even during the day is haunted by homeless migrants and by young dealers.
Some foreign students are planning to leave. “I am going back to London,” said Lina, one of Ms Kercher’s fellow students from Leeds University. “I am taking a break. We are all scared and shocked.” Would she come back to Perugia? “I’m not sure. It is a great place, but I’m not sure”.
Meanwhile, the young American woman at the heart of the mystery sits in an isolation cell in the new prison outside the town, far from the nightlife she used to take part in.
According to prison sources, she is calm and controlled, refusing to answer questions but writing page after page of her version of events that fateful night — the latest in a line of changing stories full of inconsistencies and contradictions.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 844000.ece
Friends baffled by how ‘wholesome’ girl from Seattle is alleged to have become mixed up in death of the British student Meredith Kercher
In her home town of Seattle, Amanda Knox was described as a wholesome young woman — the perfect date for a high-school prom. Her friends are trying to comprehend how she could have become an alleged sexual deviant capable of a role in the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher.
When she arrived in Perugia for a three-month stay, Ms Knox, 20, was seen as an all-American sweetheart, a soccer player of note and an accomplished rock climber.
But something happened to her in those three months, according to people within the university community of the Umbrian hill town. At some point, apparently quite early on in her stay, she lost control. In the town’s seedier bars, she soon became known as someone who was capable of intense jealousy and rage. She dedicated her free time to the drink, drugs and easy sex of Perugia’s nightlife.
As she contemplates spending up to a year in an Italian jail awaiting charges — she was detained yesterday along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, 24, and Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, 38 — those who knew her spoke out. One acquaintance said that Ms Knox had not been corrupted by any particular person because she was “already up for it”. She had plunged fresh from Seattle into a world of vodka, marijuana and free-and-easy sex. According to Mr Sollecito’s statement to police, she went to bed with him the day they met and, according to leaked testimony, she was known to pick up men in the bars and internet cafés. Ms Knox is thought to have “befriended” at least one North African man.
Acquaintances confirm the report of Ms Kercher’s friend, Sophie Purton, that Ms Kercher had been alarmed by the men whom Ms Knox brought home, including some “strange types”.
This is not the woman her friends in the US know. Dominick Balsoma, 21, told The Times that Ms Knox was his first date and perfect for his high-school homecoming dance. She was, he said, a good student and sportswoman. They were educated together at the private $12,000-a-year Jesuit-run Seattle Preparatory School, where pupils recited daily prayers and adhered to a strict dress code. She played an orphan in a school production of the musical Annie, and was popular among her peers. “She was always smiling. The last time I saw her, she was very excited about going to Italy,” he said.
Mr Balsoma said that they had stayed friends and had attended the University of Washington together. She e-mailed him only a few weeks ago, he said. He was surprised to learn that she had posted a short story on her MySpace page describing the rape of a girl. In the story, Baby Brother, a man called Edgar asks his brother, Kyle, whether he carried out a rape with a drug called “hard A”.
Mr Balsoma said: “Normal people can write horror stories, but it does suggest a side of her that might not have been public. It is possible that she fell in with the wrong crowd, but I cannot believe she could have been involved with that crime . . . she is just not a violent person.”
In Perugia, locals have told The Times that their town has two faces, both of which appear to have seduced Ms Knox. For tourists and second-home owners it is an idyllic Umbrian hilltop town, the home of the Renaissance painter Pietro Vannucci, nicknamed Perugino, and many Etruscan, Roman and Renaissance treasures. The historic centre of Perugia has long had pubs and bars, but joining them are internet cafés and kebab houses to cater to a multracial, multicultural population of students and immigrants. “Perugia is Italy’s Ibiza,” said the newspaper Corriere della Sera this week.
It is a heady cosmopolitan atmosphere for the young (Ms Kercher was about to turn 22 and Mr Sollecito is 24) but many of the “hangers-on” in the student culture are older. Mr Lumumba, the man Ms Knox accuses of murdering and sexually violating Ms Kercher, is 37. He denies that he was at the “house of horrors” at all, and claims that he can prove it.
He certainly knew Ms Knox well, however, because she worked for him at Le Chic, the bar he recently acquired in the centre of Perugia, helping him to serve customers on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
One theory is that Ms Knox, described by acquaintances as jealous of other attractive women, fell out with Ms Kercher because she had told friends that she, too, wanted to help out at Le Chic. “There are a lot of older men who hang around the student community,” said Mirko Palmesi, an Italian-Canadian who recently left Perugia after studying at the University for Foreigners. “I used to ask myself all the time what these older types were doing with us.”
Mr Lumumba came to Perugia because it houses the University for Foreigners, an institution set up in the 1920s to encourage the study of Italian language and culture. Unlike most students, however, he stayed on and made a living as a reggae musician and barman, becoming a well-known figure in Perugia’s night life.
Did he wield a malign influence over the youngsters, leading them into a life of sex and drugs? Not according to those who know him. They said that he was a “gentle soul, respectful and respectable” with a Polish wife and baby son.
Some Italian locals claim that American students cannot cope with the alcohol. Unlike Italy, the US prohibits the sale of alcohol to under 21s. A bus stop near Ms Knox’s home is plastered with posters advertising “buy one, get one free” deals at pubs and bars during happy hour. “We start drinking about six and just carry on,” one student commented. “It is perfectly normal.
“These foreign kids tend to have a lot of money in their pockets,” said Ivo Banella, a trade union official in Perugia. “By local standards they are rich kids, with cash from their unsuspecting parents, who have no idea what their children get up to here.” Joints are openly smoked even on the Cathedral steps and hard drugs change hands in dark corners.
Drugs remain at the heart of the case. Marijuana was grown by the students at the whitewashed cottage Ms Knox and Ms Kercher shared with two Italian girls and Ms Knox and her boyfriend admitted smoking on the evening of the murder, which they claim accounts for their confused accounts and memory lapses.
On the ten-minute walk from the University for Foreigners to the cottage where Ms Kercher was killed is a grim municipal park and basketball court, which even during the day is haunted by homeless migrants and by young dealers.
Some foreign students are planning to leave. “I am going back to London,” said Lina, one of Ms Kercher’s fellow students from Leeds University. “I am taking a break. We are all scared and shocked.” Would she come back to Perugia? “I’m not sure. It is a great place, but I’m not sure”.
Meanwhile, the young American woman at the heart of the mystery sits in an isolation cell in the new prison outside the town, far from the nightlife she used to take part in.
According to prison sources, she is calm and controlled, refusing to answer questions but writing page after page of her version of events that fateful night — the latest in a line of changing stories full of inconsistencies and contradictions.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 844000.ece
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gwen - AKA Gagal_05
- Posts: 29597
- Joined: Sat Feb 24, 2007 6:42 pm
by gwen » Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:17 am
Meredith's body flown to the UK
The body of murdered British student Meredith Kercher has been flown back to the UK.
Her coffin arrived at Heathrow Airport on an Alitalia flight from Rome.
American student Amanda Knox, 20, her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, and bar owner Diya Lumumba, 37, are suspected of killing Miss Kercher.
The three have all been remanded in custody over the death of the 21-year-old who was found with her throat cut in Perugia on 2 November.
Meanwhile, the parents of two suspects held over the student's murder have visited them in prison in Italy.
Visits were made by the parents of both Miss Knox, who shared a flat with Miss Kercher, and Mr Sollecito, in Perugia.
Leeds University student Miss Kercher from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found stabbed at her flat.
Knife collection
Mr Sollecito's father went to visit his son on Saturday morning.
He said: "He has a passion for knives, but nothing more. There are many forms of collections, but this doesn't imply anything."
On Friday, an Italian investigating judge said a pocket knife owned by Mr Sollecito was probably the murder weapon.
Miss Kercher was stabbed in the neck, and police say she died fighting off a sexual attack.
Miss Kercher shared a room with Miss Knox, who has accused Mr Lumumba of knifing Miss Kercher to death.
According to the judge, Miss Knox said she had to cover her ears to drown out the British woman's screams.
Forensic evidence
The three suspects will remain in jail for up to a year while investigations into Miss Kercher's death continue.
Police are waiting for further forensic evidence before deciding whether to charge them.
All three protest their innocence, but the investigating judge ruled that there was enough evidence to hold them.
In a 19-page ruling, the judge concluded that they should be held until a hearing is fixed to press charges.
Mr Lumumba, from DR Congo, has been in Italy since 1988, while Mr Sollecito was a student at the local university. Miss Knox is from Seattle, Washington state.
Italian news reports said earlier on Sunday that lawyers for Mr Lumumba lodged a request with a court to prevent Miss Kercher's body leaving Italy.
It is thought Mr Lumumba's legal team wanted a second post-mortem examination.
Meredith Kercher was a student in the Italian city of Perugia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7088667.stm
The body of murdered British student Meredith Kercher has been flown back to the UK.
Her coffin arrived at Heathrow Airport on an Alitalia flight from Rome.
American student Amanda Knox, 20, her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, and bar owner Diya Lumumba, 37, are suspected of killing Miss Kercher.
The three have all been remanded in custody over the death of the 21-year-old who was found with her throat cut in Perugia on 2 November.
Meanwhile, the parents of two suspects held over the student's murder have visited them in prison in Italy.
Visits were made by the parents of both Miss Knox, who shared a flat with Miss Kercher, and Mr Sollecito, in Perugia.
Leeds University student Miss Kercher from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found stabbed at her flat.
Knife collection
Mr Sollecito's father went to visit his son on Saturday morning.
He said: "He has a passion for knives, but nothing more. There are many forms of collections, but this doesn't imply anything."
On Friday, an Italian investigating judge said a pocket knife owned by Mr Sollecito was probably the murder weapon.
Miss Kercher was stabbed in the neck, and police say she died fighting off a sexual attack.
Miss Kercher shared a room with Miss Knox, who has accused Mr Lumumba of knifing Miss Kercher to death.
According to the judge, Miss Knox said she had to cover her ears to drown out the British woman's screams.
Forensic evidence
The three suspects will remain in jail for up to a year while investigations into Miss Kercher's death continue.
Police are waiting for further forensic evidence before deciding whether to charge them.
All three protest their innocence, but the investigating judge ruled that there was enough evidence to hold them.
In a 19-page ruling, the judge concluded that they should be held until a hearing is fixed to press charges.
Mr Lumumba, from DR Congo, has been in Italy since 1988, while Mr Sollecito was a student at the local university. Miss Knox is from Seattle, Washington state.
Italian news reports said earlier on Sunday that lawyers for Mr Lumumba lodged a request with a court to prevent Miss Kercher's body leaving Italy.
It is thought Mr Lumumba's legal team wanted a second post-mortem examination.
Meredith Kercher was a student in the Italian city of Perugia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7088667.stm
-
gwen - AKA Gagal_05
- Posts: 29597
- Joined: Sat Feb 24, 2007 6:42 pm
by gwen » Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:21 am
'A bit of fun' that turned to a killing
Life becomes cheap when we don't put much of a premium on self control, writes, Julia Molony
Sunday November 11 2007
There is something powerfully compelling about a story of the sexually motivated killing of a young woman, in which one of the alleged perpetrators is herself a fresh-faced beauty of just 20.
That beauty is subconsciously equated with goodness has been investigated and proven. When ugly people commit crimes, we sneakily suspect them of succumbing to an inner misanthropy, or bitterness born out of a graceless existence. For the beautiful to be bad is considered a perversion of nature -- a snub to opportunities afforded by smooth skin and sparkling eyes. We cast it as an example of something good being spoiled, a waste. Beauty and malevolence, we think, can't co-exist without the influence of external corruption.
The as yet unanswerable question that is hanging in the air currently then, is what exactly corrupted Amanda Knox? Two weeks ago she was a carefree, 20-year-old language and creative writing student from a privileged family in Seattle, Washington, with a wealth of friends and thanks to her girlish good looks, no shortage of male admirers. Today, she's facing possible charges of manslaughter and sexual assault, and is currently languishing in solitary confinement in an Italian jail.
The chain of events that led to this, via the horrific and terrifying death of Amanda's British flatmate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher at the moment remains a mystery, muddied by contradictory accounts from the three suspects, and the repeatedly retracted and altered testimony of Amanda Knox. There is certainly no shortage of tabloid-friendly fodder to fuel lurid speculation about what exactly went on. Already, the usual eroded-morality scapegoats, drugs, promiscuity, and binge-drinking, have been flashing up prolifically in headlines related to the story. Those much-heralded symbols of the imminent moral collapse of a generation-in-waiting are now being offered up as part of the relentless search for An Explanation.
Amanda continues to deny being directly involved in Meredith's death, pointing the finger at an acquaintance of hers, 37-year-old Congolese immigrant and local Barista, Patrick Diya Lumumba.
Italian police however remain adamant that Amanda was directly involved in the attack. At the time of writing, it had been reported that they favoured the theory that Knox and Lumumba collaborated in a sexual attack on Meredith, which became manslaughter when the British girl tried to resist their advances.
Leaks to the press include details of the American girl's finger marks imprinted on her deceased flatmate's face. Police believe that the pair then colluded with Amanda's Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to cover up their involvement in the killing.
For her part, Knox, who initially denied being in the house at all at the time of the attack, has now gone as far as to confirm some of the more lurid elements of the story.
"Yes we were in the house that evening. We wanted to have a bit of fun. We were drunk. We asked her to join us. Diya wanted her. Raffaele and I went into another room and then I heard screams," she reportedly told police.
By her own account, Amanda lived a relatively hedonistic lifestyle. It's likely that, like most people her age, she equated having a good time with abandoning herself, without censure, to her whims and desires; drinking what she liked, sleeping with who she wanted. As a generation, when we step outside of the office or the lecture hall, we don't put much of a premium on self-control. Almost without realising it, we romanticize a beat-generation style belief in the sovereignty of our pleasure. Still young and selfish, we've been raised under the solipsistic notion that nothing is more valuable or important than the quality of our own experience. We adhere to the philosophy that, I party therefore I am. Our lives have only as much meaning as the displays of enjoyment and fun that we exhibit in snapshots on our myspace and facebook pages.
For the most part this is fine, because usually the only people we really risk hurting are ourselves. Thankfully, for the vast majority of us, getting our kicks doesn't come at the expense of someone else's free will, their safety, even their life. It is risky though, because part of the very basis of the way we enjoy ourselves is to relinquish judgement and control. We drink until we are drunk because it's fun. But we do so knowing that when drunk, we are more likely to give in to blind compulsion, to act on impulses that the reigns of sobriety would normally keep a check on. The upshot of this is, for most of us, only ever as dreadful as waking up feeling remorseful after an ill-judged one-night stand, or booze-fuelled row. Sadly for the family of Meredith Kercher, there seems to have been darker, more sinister desires working with her flatmate Amanda Knox, which, without the permissiveness spirit of a hedonistic night out, may never have surfaced to such devastating effect.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news ... 16750.html
Life becomes cheap when we don't put much of a premium on self control, writes, Julia Molony
Sunday November 11 2007
There is something powerfully compelling about a story of the sexually motivated killing of a young woman, in which one of the alleged perpetrators is herself a fresh-faced beauty of just 20.
That beauty is subconsciously equated with goodness has been investigated and proven. When ugly people commit crimes, we sneakily suspect them of succumbing to an inner misanthropy, or bitterness born out of a graceless existence. For the beautiful to be bad is considered a perversion of nature -- a snub to opportunities afforded by smooth skin and sparkling eyes. We cast it as an example of something good being spoiled, a waste. Beauty and malevolence, we think, can't co-exist without the influence of external corruption.
The as yet unanswerable question that is hanging in the air currently then, is what exactly corrupted Amanda Knox? Two weeks ago she was a carefree, 20-year-old language and creative writing student from a privileged family in Seattle, Washington, with a wealth of friends and thanks to her girlish good looks, no shortage of male admirers. Today, she's facing possible charges of manslaughter and sexual assault, and is currently languishing in solitary confinement in an Italian jail.
The chain of events that led to this, via the horrific and terrifying death of Amanda's British flatmate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher at the moment remains a mystery, muddied by contradictory accounts from the three suspects, and the repeatedly retracted and altered testimony of Amanda Knox. There is certainly no shortage of tabloid-friendly fodder to fuel lurid speculation about what exactly went on. Already, the usual eroded-morality scapegoats, drugs, promiscuity, and binge-drinking, have been flashing up prolifically in headlines related to the story. Those much-heralded symbols of the imminent moral collapse of a generation-in-waiting are now being offered up as part of the relentless search for An Explanation.
Amanda continues to deny being directly involved in Meredith's death, pointing the finger at an acquaintance of hers, 37-year-old Congolese immigrant and local Barista, Patrick Diya Lumumba.
Italian police however remain adamant that Amanda was directly involved in the attack. At the time of writing, it had been reported that they favoured the theory that Knox and Lumumba collaborated in a sexual attack on Meredith, which became manslaughter when the British girl tried to resist their advances.
Leaks to the press include details of the American girl's finger marks imprinted on her deceased flatmate's face. Police believe that the pair then colluded with Amanda's Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to cover up their involvement in the killing.
For her part, Knox, who initially denied being in the house at all at the time of the attack, has now gone as far as to confirm some of the more lurid elements of the story.
"Yes we were in the house that evening. We wanted to have a bit of fun. We were drunk. We asked her to join us. Diya wanted her. Raffaele and I went into another room and then I heard screams," she reportedly told police.
By her own account, Amanda lived a relatively hedonistic lifestyle. It's likely that, like most people her age, she equated having a good time with abandoning herself, without censure, to her whims and desires; drinking what she liked, sleeping with who she wanted. As a generation, when we step outside of the office or the lecture hall, we don't put much of a premium on self-control. Almost without realising it, we romanticize a beat-generation style belief in the sovereignty of our pleasure. Still young and selfish, we've been raised under the solipsistic notion that nothing is more valuable or important than the quality of our own experience. We adhere to the philosophy that, I party therefore I am. Our lives have only as much meaning as the displays of enjoyment and fun that we exhibit in snapshots on our myspace and facebook pages.
For the most part this is fine, because usually the only people we really risk hurting are ourselves. Thankfully, for the vast majority of us, getting our kicks doesn't come at the expense of someone else's free will, their safety, even their life. It is risky though, because part of the very basis of the way we enjoy ourselves is to relinquish judgement and control. We drink until we are drunk because it's fun. But we do so knowing that when drunk, we are more likely to give in to blind compulsion, to act on impulses that the reigns of sobriety would normally keep a check on. The upshot of this is, for most of us, only ever as dreadful as waking up feeling remorseful after an ill-judged one-night stand, or booze-fuelled row. Sadly for the family of Meredith Kercher, there seems to have been darker, more sinister desires working with her flatmate Amanda Knox, which, without the permissiveness spirit of a hedonistic night out, may never have surfaced to such devastating effect.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news ... 16750.html
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gwen - AKA Gagal_05
- Posts: 29597
- Joined: Sat Feb 24, 2007 6:42 pm
by Seraph » Thu Nov 15, 2007 4:09 pm
Telegraph e-paper
Meredith suspect's DNA found on knife
By Malcolm Moore in Perugia
Last Updated: 7:51pm GMT 15/11/2007
The DNA of the American student accused of murdering her British flatmate in a violent sexual game has been found on the handle an eight inch kitchen knife, it has emerged.
Suspects Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
Traces of Amanda Knox's DNA were allegedly discovered near the handle of the knife, while traces of Meredith Kercher's DNA have been discovered near the tip, police disclosed.
The black-handled kitchen knife was found at the house of Knox's Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 23 - ten minutes walk from the scene of the crime.
According to police, Miss Kercher had never visited Sollecito's house.
Meredith's flatmate told mother 'I feel on edge'
Giacinto Profazio, the head of the Flying Squad in Perugia, Italy, confirmed that there were traces of Miss Kercher's DNA at the tip of the blade, and traces of Knox's DNA near the handle.
'It is not blood, but the DNA is very important,' he said. Knox, 20, from Seattle, Sollecito, and Patrick Diya Lumumba, a 37-year-old Congolese bar owner, are all in prison pending charges of sexual assault and murder.
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Police believe that although the suspects washed the knife clean of any blood, they were unable to remove the DNA. It is possible that Knox left her traces on the knife while washing it.
Mr Profazio added: 'The knife had been cleaned with bleach, which removes blood, but not DNA.' It is understood the kitchen knife may have come from the house that Knox and Miss Kercher shared in Perugia.
Police confiscated several blood-soaked rags, sheets and towels, as well as a bloody blue sweatshirt from Sollecito's house.
They also confiscated two other smaller flick knives from Sollecito, which were free of any DNA. Police said that the whole of Sollecito's house had been cleaned with bleach and that tests carried out with ultraviolet lights at the house on Tuesday did not reveal any other evidence.
Lawyers for all three suspects said they would file requests for their clients' release.
The requests will be heard by an independent court in around ten days time. Miss Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, south London, was found with her throat cut on Friday November 2.
Police believe she was forced to participate in an 'extreme' sexual game at knifepoint before being killed.
Filomena Romanelli, another of Miss Kercher's housemates, was taken to Sollecito's house specifically to search through the knives in the kitchen to see if any were missing. Her evidence may have helped police identify the blade among the knives at Sollecito's house.
She said claimed Sollecito had acted oddly on the day when Miss Kercher's body was found, and added that he had been 'asking strange questions about how the body was found and how Meredith had been killed.'
She said claimed some of her friends, who ferried Knox and Sollecito to the police station, had even checked their car 'to see if Raffaele and Amanda had left something compromising behind'.
Sollecito has admitted that it has been his habit to carry a knife since he 'was 13-years-old'.
He even took a flick-knife into the police station when he was called in for questioning over Miss Kercher's murder.
A source close to the investigation said: 'It is astonishing, but then this is the bravado that suspects often exhibit in these cases'.
Luciano Ghirga, Knox's lawyer, said: 'I cannot comment, because our forensic experts have not had a chance to analyse these results themselves yet.'
Lawyers for Sollecito also refused to comment on the forensic analysis.
Some bloody tissues and a bloody sponge were also found at Sollecito's house, but his lawyers said he suffered regularly from nosebleeds. The blood has not been analysed yet.
However, lawyers for Lumumba were encouraged by news that the forensic scientists have yet to find any evidence that links him to the scene of the crime.
Giuseppe Sereni, a lawyer for Lumumba, said: 'There will be no traces of Patrick's DNA in the house, because he was never there. But we are still waiting for confirmation.'
Meredith suspect's DNA found on knife
By Malcolm Moore in Perugia
Last Updated: 7:51pm GMT 15/11/2007
The DNA of the American student accused of murdering her British flatmate in a violent sexual game has been found on the handle an eight inch kitchen knife, it has emerged.
Suspects Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
Traces of Amanda Knox's DNA were allegedly discovered near the handle of the knife, while traces of Meredith Kercher's DNA have been discovered near the tip, police disclosed.
The black-handled kitchen knife was found at the house of Knox's Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 23 - ten minutes walk from the scene of the crime.
According to police, Miss Kercher had never visited Sollecito's house.
Meredith's flatmate told mother 'I feel on edge'
Giacinto Profazio, the head of the Flying Squad in Perugia, Italy, confirmed that there were traces of Miss Kercher's DNA at the tip of the blade, and traces of Knox's DNA near the handle.
'It is not blood, but the DNA is very important,' he said. Knox, 20, from Seattle, Sollecito, and Patrick Diya Lumumba, a 37-year-old Congolese bar owner, are all in prison pending charges of sexual assault and murder.
advertisement
Police believe that although the suspects washed the knife clean of any blood, they were unable to remove the DNA. It is possible that Knox left her traces on the knife while washing it.
Mr Profazio added: 'The knife had been cleaned with bleach, which removes blood, but not DNA.' It is understood the kitchen knife may have come from the house that Knox and Miss Kercher shared in Perugia.
Police confiscated several blood-soaked rags, sheets and towels, as well as a bloody blue sweatshirt from Sollecito's house.
They also confiscated two other smaller flick knives from Sollecito, which were free of any DNA. Police said that the whole of Sollecito's house had been cleaned with bleach and that tests carried out with ultraviolet lights at the house on Tuesday did not reveal any other evidence.
Lawyers for all three suspects said they would file requests for their clients' release.
The requests will be heard by an independent court in around ten days time. Miss Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, south London, was found with her throat cut on Friday November 2.
Police believe she was forced to participate in an 'extreme' sexual game at knifepoint before being killed.
Filomena Romanelli, another of Miss Kercher's housemates, was taken to Sollecito's house specifically to search through the knives in the kitchen to see if any were missing. Her evidence may have helped police identify the blade among the knives at Sollecito's house.
She said claimed Sollecito had acted oddly on the day when Miss Kercher's body was found, and added that he had been 'asking strange questions about how the body was found and how Meredith had been killed.'
She said claimed some of her friends, who ferried Knox and Sollecito to the police station, had even checked their car 'to see if Raffaele and Amanda had left something compromising behind'.
Sollecito has admitted that it has been his habit to carry a knife since he 'was 13-years-old'.
He even took a flick-knife into the police station when he was called in for questioning over Miss Kercher's murder.
A source close to the investigation said: 'It is astonishing, but then this is the bravado that suspects often exhibit in these cases'.
Luciano Ghirga, Knox's lawyer, said: 'I cannot comment, because our forensic experts have not had a chance to analyse these results themselves yet.'
Lawyers for Sollecito also refused to comment on the forensic analysis.
Some bloody tissues and a bloody sponge were also found at Sollecito's house, but his lawyers said he suffered regularly from nosebleeds. The blood has not been analysed yet.
However, lawyers for Lumumba were encouraged by news that the forensic scientists have yet to find any evidence that links him to the scene of the crime.
Giuseppe Sereni, a lawyer for Lumumba, said: 'There will be no traces of Patrick's DNA in the house, because he was never there. But we are still waiting for confirmation.'
I love my dog. He does nothing for political reasons.
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Seraph - Posts: 1632
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- Location: United Kingdom
by wvgirl » Thu Nov 15, 2007 8:16 pm
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From Times OnlineNovember 15, 2007
Amanda Knox 'is turning to religion' says chaplain at Perugia prison
Amanda Knox: she has been visited by the chaplain and nuns while in prison
Richard Owen, of The Times, Perugia
Amanda Knox, the American suspect in the murder of Meredith Kercher, is “turning to religion”, according to the chaplain at the prison where she is being held, who said that they had discussed the Resurrection.
The Italian press has singled out Ms Knox, 20, as the main suspect in the case, describing her as a woman with “the face of an angel but ice-cold eyes”. La Stampa called her “the Dark Lady of Seattle”.
But she had been visited by nuns as well as by Father Saulo Scarabattoli, the chaplain at the prison outside Perugia where the three suspects are being held in isolation from each other. He said that his impression was that Ms Knox, who was brought up a Catholic but claims “not to believe in anything”, was “turning to religion”.
She has a copy of the Gospel of St Mark by her bed and has told the priest that she bitterly regrets her “wild” lifestyle and will change her ways. She had vowed never to use drugs again, Father Scarabattoli said.
He said: “If I had met her on the outside I would never have imagined her capable of doing what she is accused of.” They had discussed “not the news of the day” in her cell but, rather, “philosophy, history and the meaning of life”. He described her as a “fragile young woman” and said that he had advised her not to watch the news on the television provided in the cell.
Father Scarabattoli said that Ms Knox had asked to attend Mass at the prison but that her request had been refused because she was not allowed contact with other prisoners, apart from an Italian woman with whom she was sharing a cell and who was also accused of murder.
He said that although she had attended a Jesuit school in the US, Ms Knox had told him that she did not believe in anything and had had no religious education. Father Scarabattoli said that Ms Knox was “looking for meaning in her life. I told her that life was like a train journey in which you are heading for a station immersed in fog and all the passengers have different expectations.”
He said that he had given her a copy of the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana with a commentary on a passage by St Luke on the Resurrection. “She asked me what the Resurrection was,” the priest said, adding that he would take her a copy of the Gospels on his next visit.
He said that they spoke in Italian, which Ms Knox studied in the US before arriving in Italy. However, she had asked for an Italian-English dictionary to look up unfamiliar Italian words.
Father Cesare Piazzoli, another priest who visits the prison to offer spiritual comfort, said that he had spoken to Raffaele Sollecito, Ms Knox’s Italian boyfriend, and had found to him to be “a young man of faith” who held to “certain values”.
A report issued by Judge Claudia Matteini alleges that Ms Kercher was sexually abused by Ms Knox, Mr Sollecito and Diya “Patrick” Lumumba before being stabbed in the throat.
Ms Knox has changed her version of events several times. Last weekend she told her mother, Edda Mellas, who visited her in prison, that she had told the truth when first questioned by police, telling them that she had been at Mr Sollecito's flat all night.
She changed her story in later interrogations, admitting that she had been at the cottage but claiming that Ms Kercher had been killed by Mr Lumumba, a Congolese immigrant in whose bar she occasionally helped out.
In that version Ms Knox said that she had heard Ms Kercher screaming from the bedroom but had stayed in the kitchen, blocking out the sound of her flatmate’s death throes by putting her fingers in her ears. She then told her mother at the weekend that this was untrue, and she had “not moved” all evening and all night from Mr Sollecito’s flat.
Police, by contrast, allege that she was in the bedroom and assisted in murder and attempted rape, perhaps by holding Ms Kercher down. Mr Sollecito has testified that he parted from Ms Knox at 9pm and did not see her again until she returned to his flat at about 1am. He insists that he was not at the cottage.
The passage from St Luke that Ms Knox discussed with the priest reads:
27 Then came to him certain of the Sadducees, which deny that there is any resurrection; and they asked him,
28 saying, Master, Moses wrote unto us, If any man’s brother die, having a wife, and he die without children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother.
29 There were therefore seven brethren: and the first took a wife, and died without children.
30 And the second took her to wife, and he died childless.
31 And the third took her; and in like manner the seven also: and they left no children, and died.
32 Last of all the woman died also.
33 Therefore in the resurrection whose wife of them is she? for seven had her to wife.
34 And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage:
35 but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage:
36 neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.
37 Now that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
38 For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.
39 Then certain of the scribes answering said, Master, thou hast well said.
40 And after that they durst not ask him any question at all.
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From Times OnlineNovember 15, 2007
Amanda Knox 'is turning to religion' says chaplain at Perugia prison
Amanda Knox: she has been visited by the chaplain and nuns while in prison
Richard Owen, of The Times, Perugia
Amanda Knox, the American suspect in the murder of Meredith Kercher, is “turning to religion”, according to the chaplain at the prison where she is being held, who said that they had discussed the Resurrection.
The Italian press has singled out Ms Knox, 20, as the main suspect in the case, describing her as a woman with “the face of an angel but ice-cold eyes”. La Stampa called her “the Dark Lady of Seattle”.
But she had been visited by nuns as well as by Father Saulo Scarabattoli, the chaplain at the prison outside Perugia where the three suspects are being held in isolation from each other. He said that his impression was that Ms Knox, who was brought up a Catholic but claims “not to believe in anything”, was “turning to religion”.
She has a copy of the Gospel of St Mark by her bed and has told the priest that she bitterly regrets her “wild” lifestyle and will change her ways. She had vowed never to use drugs again, Father Scarabattoli said.
He said: “If I had met her on the outside I would never have imagined her capable of doing what she is accused of.” They had discussed “not the news of the day” in her cell but, rather, “philosophy, history and the meaning of life”. He described her as a “fragile young woman” and said that he had advised her not to watch the news on the television provided in the cell.
Father Scarabattoli said that Ms Knox had asked to attend Mass at the prison but that her request had been refused because she was not allowed contact with other prisoners, apart from an Italian woman with whom she was sharing a cell and who was also accused of murder.
He said that although she had attended a Jesuit school in the US, Ms Knox had told him that she did not believe in anything and had had no religious education. Father Scarabattoli said that Ms Knox was “looking for meaning in her life. I told her that life was like a train journey in which you are heading for a station immersed in fog and all the passengers have different expectations.”
He said that he had given her a copy of the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana with a commentary on a passage by St Luke on the Resurrection. “She asked me what the Resurrection was,” the priest said, adding that he would take her a copy of the Gospels on his next visit.
He said that they spoke in Italian, which Ms Knox studied in the US before arriving in Italy. However, she had asked for an Italian-English dictionary to look up unfamiliar Italian words.
Father Cesare Piazzoli, another priest who visits the prison to offer spiritual comfort, said that he had spoken to Raffaele Sollecito, Ms Knox’s Italian boyfriend, and had found to him to be “a young man of faith” who held to “certain values”.
A report issued by Judge Claudia Matteini alleges that Ms Kercher was sexually abused by Ms Knox, Mr Sollecito and Diya “Patrick” Lumumba before being stabbed in the throat.
Ms Knox has changed her version of events several times. Last weekend she told her mother, Edda Mellas, who visited her in prison, that she had told the truth when first questioned by police, telling them that she had been at Mr Sollecito's flat all night.
She changed her story in later interrogations, admitting that she had been at the cottage but claiming that Ms Kercher had been killed by Mr Lumumba, a Congolese immigrant in whose bar she occasionally helped out.
In that version Ms Knox said that she had heard Ms Kercher screaming from the bedroom but had stayed in the kitchen, blocking out the sound of her flatmate’s death throes by putting her fingers in her ears. She then told her mother at the weekend that this was untrue, and she had “not moved” all evening and all night from Mr Sollecito’s flat.
Police, by contrast, allege that she was in the bedroom and assisted in murder and attempted rape, perhaps by holding Ms Kercher down. Mr Sollecito has testified that he parted from Ms Knox at 9pm and did not see her again until she returned to his flat at about 1am. He insists that he was not at the cottage.
The passage from St Luke that Ms Knox discussed with the priest reads:
27 Then came to him certain of the Sadducees, which deny that there is any resurrection; and they asked him,
28 saying, Master, Moses wrote unto us, If any man’s brother die, having a wife, and he die without children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother.
29 There were therefore seven brethren: and the first took a wife, and died without children.
30 And the second took her to wife, and he died childless.
31 And the third took her; and in like manner the seven also: and they left no children, and died.
32 Last of all the woman died also.
33 Therefore in the resurrection whose wife of them is she? for seven had her to wife.
34 And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage:
35 but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage:
36 neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.
37 Now that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
38 For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.
39 Then certain of the scribes answering said, Master, thou hast well said.
40 And after that they durst not ask him any question at all.
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wvgirl - Posts: 4307
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DNA tests link Amanda Knox and Meredith
by Mia » Fri Nov 16, 2007 12:06 am
Traces of DNA belonging to Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher were found on a knife at the flat of Raffaele Sollecito, Ms Knox’s boyfriend and co-accused in Ms Kercher’s murder.
Investigators said that the kitchen knife had traces of the two women’s DNA on its 8-inch (20cm) blade. Ms Kercher’s was on the tip, and Ms Knox’s close to the handle.
No trace of Mr Sollecito, 23, was found.
Detectives had said that a flick knife that Mr Sollecito carried around with him was “compatible” with the weapon used to slash the British student’s throat, but that that knife had yielded no DNA. The reports said that Ms Knox could have cut herself while washing it, or while holding it in her fist. Investigators have tended to discount the theory that she dealt the fatal blow, because of the force involved.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2878243.ece
Mia
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Mia - Posts: 81
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by wvgirl » Fri Nov 16, 2007 8:30 pm
From The TimesNovember 17, 2007
Richard Owen, Perugia
Meredith Kercher investigators say knife was part of a premeditated attack Amanda Knox faces a possible murder charge over the killing of Meredith Kercher
Prosecutors investigating the murder of Meredith Kercher believe that the knife found in the flat of one of the suspects was taken into Ms Kercher’s bedroom with the intent to kill or harm.
Detectives are to press for charges of premeditated murder. Two Italian students who shared the home of Ms Kercher testified “categorically” yesterday that the knife had never been part of their cottage kitchen. Detectives say that it must therefore have been brought in “with intent to kill or inflict harm”.
The 8in (20cm), black-handled kitchen knife was found in the flat of Raffaele Sollecito, 23. DNA traces of his American girlfriend, Amanda Knox, 20, and Ms Kercher, with whom she also shared a cottage, were found on the blade.
No traces of blood were found on the kitchen knife. But investigators said that “biological traces” remained, suggesting blood had been washed from the blade.
Giacinto Profazio, head of the Perugia police flying squad, said that DNA from both Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito had also been found on rags apparently used to clean the scene of the crime.
Police said that the cleaning lady at Mr Sollecito’s flat had testified that two empty containers of bleach found there had not been bought or used by her. The investigators’ supposition is that the bleach was used to clean the kitchen knife, and Mr Sollecito’s trainers, which match bloody footprints at the cottage, but on which no traces of either blood or DNA were found.
Yesterday Ms Kercher’s brother condemned parts of the media for publishing a picture of his sister as she lay dead on her bedroom floor. Lyle Kercher, 35, told La Stampa: “All I know is that when I saw they had published the photograph of my sister lying on the floor of her bedroom, I thought I was dreaming, I thought that this can’t be true. It is intolerable, absolutely intolerable. Allow us the right to suffer in peace.” Describing his sister as a “marvellous girl”, he said that the family had found it hard “not only because there still isn’t anyone guilty, but sometimes it almost seems as if there wasn’t even a crime.
“My family trusts the magistrates in Perugia. Totally. Let’s let them do their work.” He added that if those responsible for his sister’s death were not brought to justice it would be “like killing Mez a second time”.
Ms Kercher was found semi-naked with her throat cut two weeks ago. Ms Knox, Mr Sollecito and Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, 37, a Congolese bar owner and reggae musician, were arrested four days later and are being held on suspicion of murder and sexual violence. Police say that all three subjected Ms Kercher to a sexual attack before killing her.
It is unclear, however, whether all three still face murder charges. The overwhelming view among the people of Perugia is that Mr Lumumba, a popular figure in the town and a resident since 1988, has been framed. A march through the city’s streets demanding Mr Lumumba’s release will be staged tomorrow.
Several witnesses have testified that Mr Lumumba was behind the till and serving drinks at his bar, Le Chic, on the evening of the murder. However, none can swear that he was there the whole time, and police say that a signal trace of his mobile phone was recorded near the cottage between 8pm and 9pm. Giuseppe Sereni, his lawyer, said that police had so far found no traces of Mr Lumumba’s DNA at the cottage, “for a simple reason — he was never there”.
Police said that the search for a “fourth person” was continuing, following the discovery of faeces in the cottage lavatory and fingerprints on Ms Kercher’s bloodsoaked pillow which were not those of any of the three suspects. “The fourth person is more than a hypothesis,” one investigator told The Times.
Mr Sollecito’s lawyers yesterday lodged an appeal for his release, saying the leak to the media of the news that the DNA of Ms Kercher and Ms Knox was on the knife found in his flat “does not alter his position”.
© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Richard Owen, Perugia
Meredith Kercher investigators say knife was part of a premeditated attack Amanda Knox faces a possible murder charge over the killing of Meredith Kercher
Prosecutors investigating the murder of Meredith Kercher believe that the knife found in the flat of one of the suspects was taken into Ms Kercher’s bedroom with the intent to kill or harm.
Detectives are to press for charges of premeditated murder. Two Italian students who shared the home of Ms Kercher testified “categorically” yesterday that the knife had never been part of their cottage kitchen. Detectives say that it must therefore have been brought in “with intent to kill or inflict harm”.
The 8in (20cm), black-handled kitchen knife was found in the flat of Raffaele Sollecito, 23. DNA traces of his American girlfriend, Amanda Knox, 20, and Ms Kercher, with whom she also shared a cottage, were found on the blade.
No traces of blood were found on the kitchen knife. But investigators said that “biological traces” remained, suggesting blood had been washed from the blade.
Giacinto Profazio, head of the Perugia police flying squad, said that DNA from both Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito had also been found on rags apparently used to clean the scene of the crime.
Police said that the cleaning lady at Mr Sollecito’s flat had testified that two empty containers of bleach found there had not been bought or used by her. The investigators’ supposition is that the bleach was used to clean the kitchen knife, and Mr Sollecito’s trainers, which match bloody footprints at the cottage, but on which no traces of either blood or DNA were found.
Yesterday Ms Kercher’s brother condemned parts of the media for publishing a picture of his sister as she lay dead on her bedroom floor. Lyle Kercher, 35, told La Stampa: “All I know is that when I saw they had published the photograph of my sister lying on the floor of her bedroom, I thought I was dreaming, I thought that this can’t be true. It is intolerable, absolutely intolerable. Allow us the right to suffer in peace.” Describing his sister as a “marvellous girl”, he said that the family had found it hard “not only because there still isn’t anyone guilty, but sometimes it almost seems as if there wasn’t even a crime.
“My family trusts the magistrates in Perugia. Totally. Let’s let them do their work.” He added that if those responsible for his sister’s death were not brought to justice it would be “like killing Mez a second time”.
Ms Kercher was found semi-naked with her throat cut two weeks ago. Ms Knox, Mr Sollecito and Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, 37, a Congolese bar owner and reggae musician, were arrested four days later and are being held on suspicion of murder and sexual violence. Police say that all three subjected Ms Kercher to a sexual attack before killing her.
It is unclear, however, whether all three still face murder charges. The overwhelming view among the people of Perugia is that Mr Lumumba, a popular figure in the town and a resident since 1988, has been framed. A march through the city’s streets demanding Mr Lumumba’s release will be staged tomorrow.
Several witnesses have testified that Mr Lumumba was behind the till and serving drinks at his bar, Le Chic, on the evening of the murder. However, none can swear that he was there the whole time, and police say that a signal trace of his mobile phone was recorded near the cottage between 8pm and 9pm. Giuseppe Sereni, his lawyer, said that police had so far found no traces of Mr Lumumba’s DNA at the cottage, “for a simple reason — he was never there”.
Police said that the search for a “fourth person” was continuing, following the discovery of faeces in the cottage lavatory and fingerprints on Ms Kercher’s bloodsoaked pillow which were not those of any of the three suspects. “The fourth person is more than a hypothesis,” one investigator told The Times.
Mr Sollecito’s lawyers yesterday lodged an appeal for his release, saying the leak to the media of the news that the DNA of Ms Kercher and Ms Knox was on the knife found in his flat “does not alter his position”.
© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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wvgirl - Posts: 4307
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by wvgirl » Sat Nov 17, 2007 11:29 pm
From The Sunday TimesNovember 18, 2007
Arrest warrant for fourth Meredith Kercher suspect
Nicola Smith and Frances Kennedy
ITALIAN authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a fourth suspect following the murder of Meredith Kercher, the British student, in Perugia.
Police refused to name him, but he is believed to be a north African linked to drug-dealing who lived near the cottage where Kercher was killed.
The search for a fourth suspect was prompted by the discovery of a bloody fingerprint on Kercher’s pillow that did not come from any of the other three suspects. That fingerprint has now been matched with other DNA found in the cottage.
Italian newspapers yesterday claimed the same DNA may have been found on swabs taken from Kercher’s body, suggesting the fourth suspect was involved in sexually assaulting her.
The lawyer for Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, one of the other suspects, has claimed he was “set up” and will soon be freed.
“We have to conclude there was an attempt to make the blame fall on him and that means he was set up,” said Giuseppe Sereni, lawyer for Lumumba, a Congolese. It was partly “a question of race”, he added.
Senior sources close to the investigation admitted the case against Lumumba, 44, was in danger of collapsing for lack of forensic evidence.
Lumumba, manager of a bar, is being held with Amanda Knox, 20, an American student who lived with Kercher, and Raffaele Sollecito, 24, Knox’s boyfriend. In statements to police, Knox has blamed Lumumba for the murder. However, she later claimed she had not been in the cottage at the time of the murder.
This weekend, supporters of Lumumba held a demonstration, protesting his innocence. His Polish girlfriend, Alessandra Beata, visited him in prison and said: “When we hugged, we started laughing. We’re not mad, it was just the reaction of somebody who knows they’re not guilty and finds themselves in a crazy nightmare.”
© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Arrest warrant for fourth Meredith Kercher suspect
Nicola Smith and Frances Kennedy
ITALIAN authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a fourth suspect following the murder of Meredith Kercher, the British student, in Perugia.
Police refused to name him, but he is believed to be a north African linked to drug-dealing who lived near the cottage where Kercher was killed.
The search for a fourth suspect was prompted by the discovery of a bloody fingerprint on Kercher’s pillow that did not come from any of the other three suspects. That fingerprint has now been matched with other DNA found in the cottage.
Italian newspapers yesterday claimed the same DNA may have been found on swabs taken from Kercher’s body, suggesting the fourth suspect was involved in sexually assaulting her.
The lawyer for Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, one of the other suspects, has claimed he was “set up” and will soon be freed.
“We have to conclude there was an attempt to make the blame fall on him and that means he was set up,” said Giuseppe Sereni, lawyer for Lumumba, a Congolese. It was partly “a question of race”, he added.
Senior sources close to the investigation admitted the case against Lumumba, 44, was in danger of collapsing for lack of forensic evidence.
Lumumba, manager of a bar, is being held with Amanda Knox, 20, an American student who lived with Kercher, and Raffaele Sollecito, 24, Knox’s boyfriend. In statements to police, Knox has blamed Lumumba for the murder. However, she later claimed she had not been in the cottage at the time of the murder.
This weekend, supporters of Lumumba held a demonstration, protesting his innocence. His Polish girlfriend, Alessandra Beata, visited him in prison and said: “When we hugged, we started laughing. We’re not mad, it was just the reaction of somebody who knows they’re not guilty and finds themselves in a crazy nightmare.”
© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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wvgirl - Posts: 4307
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by Seraph » Sun Nov 18, 2007 9:53 am
OnlineNovember 18, 2007
Bills for bleach put question mark over evidence from Meredith Kercher US suspect's boyfriend
(Stefano Medici/AP)
Italian Raffaele Sollecito and his American girlfriend Amanda Know, both are suspects in the murder of British student Meredith Kercher
Richard Owen of The Times
As the net tightens round the "fourth suspect" in the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, till receipts found at the flat of Raffaele Sollecito, one of the three existing suspects, show he bought two bottles of bleach allegedly used to clean the murder weapon at a time when he had claimed to be still asleep.
The "fourth person" has been identified by police as a drug pusher from the Ivory Coast who was a frequent visitor to the cottage Ms Kercher shared with Amanda Knox, her American flatmate, and who lived nearby. He is believed to have habitually sold hashish to Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito, who have admitted smoking cannabis all afternoon on the day of the murder.
"We know his name and surname," one investigator said of the man police are seeking.
Police said they were "closing in" on the man, whose fingerprints were found on Ms Kercher's blood soaked pillow. His DNA was also found in forensic tests on Ms Kercher's body, suggesting he took part in the sexual attack and murder.
Meredith Kercher: Q&A
The murder of the 21-year-old student from London has appalled publics in Britain, Italy and the US. We explain the case
Multimedia
Pictures: murder in Perugia
Background
Timings crucial to Kercher murder investigation
Meredith suspect caught on CCTV
Murder alibi 'undermined' by mobile phone trace
Kercher murder may have been premeditated
Related Links
Arrest warrant for fourth Meredith suspect
Meredith police want tougher charge
Police have been rounding up African men in Perugia for "checks" for the past few days.
Il Messaggero said one hypothesis was that Ms Knox had falsely accused Diya "Patrick", Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of sexually attacking and murdering Ms Kercher to "cover up" for the real killer, to whom she was "close".
Supporters of Mr Lumumba staged a rally on the cathedral square in Perugia this weekend to demand his release. No trace of his DNA has been found at the murder scene and witnesses have testified he was at his bar, Le Chic.
Mr Lumumba has still to explain why he deleted a text message sent to Ms Knox on the night of the murder to which she replied "See you later", or why a signal trace of his mobile phone was recorded in the area of the cottage shortly afterwards. Police expect this week to recover the deleted SMS.
Mr Lumumba, Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito all remain in custody as suspects pending charges.
It has also emerged that one of two mobile phones used by Ms Kercher connected to the Internet for 8 seconds at 10.15 pm on the night of the murder and that other other received a call five minutes after midnight which was not answered. Both phones were found the next morning in the nearby garden, which in turn led police to the house where they found Ms Kercher's body.
Police said further evidence against Mr Sollecito had come to light in the form of receipts from a shop near his flat for bleach, purchased on the morning after the murder and allegedly used to clean an 8-inch kitchen knife as well as Mr Sollecito's Nike trainers. The first receipt was timed at 8.30 am November 2 and the second 45 minutes later, suggesting the first container of bleach had not been sufficient. The bleach was also used to clean up the flat itself.
Last week police laboratory tests revealed the DNA of Ms Kercher on the tip of the knife and Ms Knox's DNA close to the handle. Police suspect that Mr Sollecito and Ms Knox attempted to clean blood from the knife, failing to realise that this would still leave identifiable DNA traces. The receipts call into question Mr Sollecito's account of events on November 2, since he had testified that he did not get up until 10am, when he was woken by Ms Knox.
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© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd
Bills for bleach put question mark over evidence from Meredith Kercher US suspect's boyfriend
(Stefano Medici/AP)
Italian Raffaele Sollecito and his American girlfriend Amanda Know, both are suspects in the murder of British student Meredith Kercher
Richard Owen of The Times
As the net tightens round the "fourth suspect" in the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, till receipts found at the flat of Raffaele Sollecito, one of the three existing suspects, show he bought two bottles of bleach allegedly used to clean the murder weapon at a time when he had claimed to be still asleep.
The "fourth person" has been identified by police as a drug pusher from the Ivory Coast who was a frequent visitor to the cottage Ms Kercher shared with Amanda Knox, her American flatmate, and who lived nearby. He is believed to have habitually sold hashish to Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito, who have admitted smoking cannabis all afternoon on the day of the murder.
"We know his name and surname," one investigator said of the man police are seeking.
Police said they were "closing in" on the man, whose fingerprints were found on Ms Kercher's blood soaked pillow. His DNA was also found in forensic tests on Ms Kercher's body, suggesting he took part in the sexual attack and murder.
Meredith Kercher: Q&A
The murder of the 21-year-old student from London has appalled publics in Britain, Italy and the US. We explain the case
Multimedia
Pictures: murder in Perugia
Background
Timings crucial to Kercher murder investigation
Meredith suspect caught on CCTV
Murder alibi 'undermined' by mobile phone trace
Kercher murder may have been premeditated
Related Links
Arrest warrant for fourth Meredith suspect
Meredith police want tougher charge
Police have been rounding up African men in Perugia for "checks" for the past few days.
Il Messaggero said one hypothesis was that Ms Knox had falsely accused Diya "Patrick", Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of sexually attacking and murdering Ms Kercher to "cover up" for the real killer, to whom she was "close".
Supporters of Mr Lumumba staged a rally on the cathedral square in Perugia this weekend to demand his release. No trace of his DNA has been found at the murder scene and witnesses have testified he was at his bar, Le Chic.
Mr Lumumba has still to explain why he deleted a text message sent to Ms Knox on the night of the murder to which she replied "See you later", or why a signal trace of his mobile phone was recorded in the area of the cottage shortly afterwards. Police expect this week to recover the deleted SMS.
Mr Lumumba, Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito all remain in custody as suspects pending charges.
It has also emerged that one of two mobile phones used by Ms Kercher connected to the Internet for 8 seconds at 10.15 pm on the night of the murder and that other other received a call five minutes after midnight which was not answered. Both phones were found the next morning in the nearby garden, which in turn led police to the house where they found Ms Kercher's body.
Police said further evidence against Mr Sollecito had come to light in the form of receipts from a shop near his flat for bleach, purchased on the morning after the murder and allegedly used to clean an 8-inch kitchen knife as well as Mr Sollecito's Nike trainers. The first receipt was timed at 8.30 am November 2 and the second 45 minutes later, suggesting the first container of bleach had not been sufficient. The bleach was also used to clean up the flat itself.
Last week police laboratory tests revealed the DNA of Ms Kercher on the tip of the knife and Ms Knox's DNA close to the handle. Police suspect that Mr Sollecito and Ms Knox attempted to clean blood from the knife, failing to realise that this would still leave identifiable DNA traces. The receipts call into question Mr Sollecito's account of events on November 2, since he had testified that he did not get up until 10am, when he was woken by Ms Knox.
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© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd
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Seraph - Posts: 1632
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by Seraph » Sun Nov 18, 2007 10:03 am
Page 2 of above article
Europe NewsMy ProfileOffersSitemapHe told police Ms Knox had returned to his flat at 1am but later in the morning decided to return to her own cottage to have a shower, taking Mr Sollecito with her. They found blood in the bathroom and a smashed window, with Ms Kercher's door locked. Police believe that Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito smashed the window themselves to simulate a break in and would have cleaned the cottage up if the police had not arrived. It is not clear in this reconstruction of events what they intended to do with the body, or indeed if they had any overall plan at all.
Italian press reports at the weekend said Ms Kercher had often had rows with Ms Knox over her bathroom habits as well as over Ms Knox's habit of bringing a string of "strange men" home. Friends of the pair have told police said they fell out over Ms Knox's "slovenliness" and her repeated failure to flush the lavatory in their shared bathroom. Filomena Romanelli, one of two Italian girls who also shared the house, has said they had a cleaning rota but Ms Knox refused to be part of it.
Police have seized a handbag belonging to Ms Knox which they believe may have been used to transport the kitchen knife from Mr Sollecito's flat and back again. They say this amounts to proof of "premeditated murder".
Giacomo Silenzi, Ms Kercher's Italian boyfriend , told a British Sunday paper she had been "beautiful and innocent". He said that he first suspected Ms Knox might have taken part in the killing as they were waiting to be questioned by police in Perugia as witnesses.
Meredith Kercher: Q&A
The murder of the 21-year-old student from London has appalled publics in Britain, Italy and the US. We explain the case
Multimedia
Pictures: murder in Perugia
Background
Timings crucial to Kercher murder investigation
Meredith suspect caught on CCTV
Murder alibi 'undermined' by mobile phone trace
Kercher murder may have been premeditated
Related Links
Arrest warrant for fourth Meredith suspect
Meredith police want tougher charge
He told The Mail on Sunday: "I was on the train heading back to Perugia from my parents' house when I got a call from Meredith's other flatmate Filomena, who told me what had happened. My stomach dropped - I just could not believe it."
At the police station he "couldn't help thinking how cool and calm Amanda was. Meredith's other English friends were devastated and I was upset, but Amanda was as cool as anything and completely emotionless. Her eyes didn't seem to show any sadness and I remember wondering if she could have been involved."
An Italian judge meanwhile has ruled that a further post mortem on Ms Kercher's remains can be carried out to establish the exact time of her death. The new post mortem was requested by lawyers for Mr Lumumba, who believe it will prove definitively that Ms Kercher died during the period when witnesses say Mr Lumumba was at his bar. A second post mortem would delay the funeral of Ms Kercher, whose body has been flown back to Britain, where the post mortem would presumably be carried out.
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© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Europe NewsMy ProfileOffersSitemapHe told police Ms Knox had returned to his flat at 1am but later in the morning decided to return to her own cottage to have a shower, taking Mr Sollecito with her. They found blood in the bathroom and a smashed window, with Ms Kercher's door locked. Police believe that Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito smashed the window themselves to simulate a break in and would have cleaned the cottage up if the police had not arrived. It is not clear in this reconstruction of events what they intended to do with the body, or indeed if they had any overall plan at all.
Italian press reports at the weekend said Ms Kercher had often had rows with Ms Knox over her bathroom habits as well as over Ms Knox's habit of bringing a string of "strange men" home. Friends of the pair have told police said they fell out over Ms Knox's "slovenliness" and her repeated failure to flush the lavatory in their shared bathroom. Filomena Romanelli, one of two Italian girls who also shared the house, has said they had a cleaning rota but Ms Knox refused to be part of it.
Police have seized a handbag belonging to Ms Knox which they believe may have been used to transport the kitchen knife from Mr Sollecito's flat and back again. They say this amounts to proof of "premeditated murder".
Giacomo Silenzi, Ms Kercher's Italian boyfriend , told a British Sunday paper she had been "beautiful and innocent". He said that he first suspected Ms Knox might have taken part in the killing as they were waiting to be questioned by police in Perugia as witnesses.
Meredith Kercher: Q&A
The murder of the 21-year-old student from London has appalled publics in Britain, Italy and the US. We explain the case
Multimedia
Pictures: murder in Perugia
Background
Timings crucial to Kercher murder investigation
Meredith suspect caught on CCTV
Murder alibi 'undermined' by mobile phone trace
Kercher murder may have been premeditated
Related Links
Arrest warrant for fourth Meredith suspect
Meredith police want tougher charge
He told The Mail on Sunday: "I was on the train heading back to Perugia from my parents' house when I got a call from Meredith's other flatmate Filomena, who told me what had happened. My stomach dropped - I just could not believe it."
At the police station he "couldn't help thinking how cool and calm Amanda was. Meredith's other English friends were devastated and I was upset, but Amanda was as cool as anything and completely emotionless. Her eyes didn't seem to show any sadness and I remember wondering if she could have been involved."
An Italian judge meanwhile has ruled that a further post mortem on Ms Kercher's remains can be carried out to establish the exact time of her death. The new post mortem was requested by lawyers for Mr Lumumba, who believe it will prove definitively that Ms Kercher died during the period when witnesses say Mr Lumumba was at his bar. A second post mortem would delay the funeral of Ms Kercher, whose body has been flown back to Britain, where the post mortem would presumably be carried out.
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© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
I love my dog. He does nothing for political reasons.
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Seraph - Posts: 1632
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by Seraph » Mon Nov 19, 2007 1:11 pm
More from Sky News on Channel 501 Reveals New Suspect
Updated:16:42, Monday November 19, 2007
Italian police have named the fourth suspect they are hunting over the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, say reports.
Rudy HermannRudy Hermann, 21, is from the Ivory Coast and has previous convictions for drug dealing and petty theft.
The development comes after a bloody fingerprint was found in the flat in Perugia where Meredith, 21, was killed, and another on toilet paper.
The print does not match the three people being held in custody.
Meredith's American flatmate Amanda Knox, 20, Knox's Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and Congolese bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, 38 are detained.
Meredith's throat was cutProsecutors believe the Leeds University exchange student from Coulsdon, Surrey, whose body was found on November 2, was sexually assaulted and murdered after refusing to take part in an extreme sex game.
Lawyers for the three suspects - who deny any involvement - said they hoped news of the fourth suspect could result in their clients' release.
Sollecito's lawyer, Tiziano Tedeschi, said the lead on the pillowcase traces was "good news".
"This is the first suspect, not the fourth," he said.
"They (prosecutors) didn't want to find the truth; they wanted to close the case."
Copyright © 2007 BSkyB
Updated:16:42, Monday November 19, 2007
Italian police have named the fourth suspect they are hunting over the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, say reports.
Rudy HermannRudy Hermann, 21, is from the Ivory Coast and has previous convictions for drug dealing and petty theft.
The development comes after a bloody fingerprint was found in the flat in Perugia where Meredith, 21, was killed, and another on toilet paper.
The print does not match the three people being held in custody.
Meredith's American flatmate Amanda Knox, 20, Knox's Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and Congolese bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, 38 are detained.
Meredith's throat was cutProsecutors believe the Leeds University exchange student from Coulsdon, Surrey, whose body was found on November 2, was sexually assaulted and murdered after refusing to take part in an extreme sex game.
Lawyers for the three suspects - who deny any involvement - said they hoped news of the fourth suspect could result in their clients' release.
Sollecito's lawyer, Tiziano Tedeschi, said the lead on the pillowcase traces was "good news".
"This is the first suspect, not the fourth," he said.
"They (prosecutors) didn't want to find the truth; they wanted to close the case."
Copyright © 2007 BSkyB
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Will Rogers
Will Rogers
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Seraph - Posts: 1632
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by George » Tue Nov 20, 2007 7:08 am
A drug dealer who boasted on the internet of being a “vampire who sucks blood” was arrested in Germany today on suspicion of involvement in the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher.
Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, who has joint Italian and Ivory Coast nationality, was named by Italian police last night as the fourth suspect being hunted on suspicion of sexually assaulting Ms Kercher. His DNA is reported to have been found on her body.
Mr Guede was often seen at the whitewashed cottage in the Italian city of Perugia where Ms Kercher lived with her American housemate, Amanda Knox, who is also a suspect. His fingerprints have been found on Ms Kercher’s bloodsoaked pillow and in the bathroom. Faeces recovered from the cottage lavatory also match his DNA.
Mr Guede disappeared soon after the murder, telling friends: “I’m going dancing in Milan.” But witnesses have reported seeing him in a street on the outskirts of Perugia three days ago.
In a video posted on the YouTube website under the name rudyhermann, Mr Guede is seen, seemingly drunk or under the influence of drugs, ranting to the camera. In a rambling outburst in English, he says: “Oh My God. I’m an extraterra. I’m from alien earth who must be called human people. Oh Mamma. I’m a vampire, I’m Dracula. I’m gonna suck your blood.”
He wrote on the website that his hometown is Ponte san Giovanni, a district of Perugia, and that he originally comes from Milan. The video is captioned, in Italian: “Ciao dearest ones, this is a gift from God. Tell me all and ask me anything.”
Mr Guede was held this morning in the German town of Wiesbaden, in an Interpol operation. A warrant had already been issued for his arrest by Giuliano Mignini, the chief investigating magistrate, and his photograph had been circulated to police at border crossings, ports and airports, and to bars and shops in Perugia.
Mr Guede’s photograph had also been circulated to bars and shops in Perugia, and his internet accounts were monitored. His profile on the Facebook website was last updated on Thursday.
Police said that Mr Guede, who is also known as The Baron, had been “adopted” by a local family with a view to his being taken on in their agricultural business, but they had fallen out with him over his “rebellious” behaviour. He has a history of drug dealing and violence and was once stabbed in the stomach during a fight in Perugia’s main piazza.
Reports say that he has been in Italy since he was a child. After leaving the agricultural business, he left Perugia for Milan, where he has been questioned several times over drugs offences. He then returned to Perugia, where he continued to deal in drugs among the many foreign students in the town.
Reports said that Mr Guede often played basketball in Piazza Grimana, between the University for Foreigners and Ms Kercher’s cottage.
Simone Benedetti, 19, a friend of Mr Guede, said the suspect had arrived in Italy aged 5 with his father, who had returned to Africa. Mr Benedetti said Mr Guede had been a shy, difficult child who told lies.
One Italian newspaper quoted police as saying that there was “unequivocal proof” that Ms Kercher was forced to kneel in front of the wardrobe in her bedroom as she was sexually assaulted and her throat was cut. Reports said that the duvet had been used not only to cover Ms Kercher’s body but also to drag it to where it was found on the floor between the bed and the door.
Police now believe that it is “psychologically significant” that Ms Knox made a reference to the wardrobe when first questioned by police, claiming that when police broke down Ms Kercher’s bedroom door, Ms Knox’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had told her he could see Meredith’s body covered by a duvet “in the wardrobe”.
Last week tests revealed that Ms Kercher’s DNA was on a kitchen knife found at Mr Sollecito’s flat, with Ms Knox’s DNA near the handle. Police suspect Mr Sollecito and Ms Knox tried to clean blood from the knife.
Police have seized a handbag belonging to Ms Knox that they believe may have been used to carry the knife to the cottage from Mr Sollecito’s flat and back again. They say this amounts to proof of premeditated murder.
Police may make public today the results of efforts to retrieve a deleted text message sent to Ms Knox on the evening of the murder by Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, who is also a suspect
The Times
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George - Posts: 79
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by Seraph » Tue Nov 20, 2007 3:42 pm
Meredith suspect freed after arrest
Press Association
Tuesday November 20, 2007 7:08 PM
One of the suspects in the killing of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy was freed - after a fourth suspect was arrested in Germany.
Bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, who had been held in a Perugia prison since November 6, said "thank God" as he was released and told reporters outside the prison gate that he was happy to be going.
But Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, was arrested in the western German city of Mainz. Guede emerged on Monday as another suspect in the killing of 21-year-old Miss Kercher, who was found stabbed to death on November 2 in her Perugia apartment.
Three others - Lumumba, Miss Kercher's American roommate Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito - have been held in prison in Perugia.
Detectives began searching for a fourth person after finding the fingerprint, which did not match the three people in custody, on a pillow in Miss Kercher's flat, and another on toilet paper.
German police confirmed they arrested an Ivory Coast national for travelling without a ticket on a train from Mainz to Frankfurt. The man appears to be Guede, and Perugia police chief Arturo de Felice said he would be extradited to Italy as soon as possible. "It's a matter of days, only days," he said.
Italian prime minister Romano Prodi thanked the German police for their help, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Guede was thought to have fled Perugia for Milan after the killing before going on the run. He was reportedly adopted by a family living in Perugia, although they are said to have since ceased all contact with him.
The news agency Ansa said the suspect used to play for a basketball team in Perugia and it was reported that he was popular with foreign students in the city.
In a bizarre video clip he posted on the YouTube website, Guede appears gurning and moaning at the camera, before saying: "I'm a vampire, I'm Dracula. I'm going to suck your blood."
Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2007, All Rights Reserved.
Press Association
Tuesday November 20, 2007 7:08 PM
One of the suspects in the killing of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy was freed - after a fourth suspect was arrested in Germany.
Bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, who had been held in a Perugia prison since November 6, said "thank God" as he was released and told reporters outside the prison gate that he was happy to be going.
But Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, was arrested in the western German city of Mainz. Guede emerged on Monday as another suspect in the killing of 21-year-old Miss Kercher, who was found stabbed to death on November 2 in her Perugia apartment.
Three others - Lumumba, Miss Kercher's American roommate Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito - have been held in prison in Perugia.
Detectives began searching for a fourth person after finding the fingerprint, which did not match the three people in custody, on a pillow in Miss Kercher's flat, and another on toilet paper.
German police confirmed they arrested an Ivory Coast national for travelling without a ticket on a train from Mainz to Frankfurt. The man appears to be Guede, and Perugia police chief Arturo de Felice said he would be extradited to Italy as soon as possible. "It's a matter of days, only days," he said.
Italian prime minister Romano Prodi thanked the German police for their help, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Guede was thought to have fled Perugia for Milan after the killing before going on the run. He was reportedly adopted by a family living in Perugia, although they are said to have since ceased all contact with him.
The news agency Ansa said the suspect used to play for a basketball team in Perugia and it was reported that he was popular with foreign students in the city.
In a bizarre video clip he posted on the YouTube website, Guede appears gurning and moaning at the camera, before saying: "I'm a vampire, I'm Dracula. I'm going to suck your blood."
Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2007, All Rights Reserved.
I love my dog. He does nothing for political reasons.
Will Rogers
Will Rogers
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Seraph - Posts: 1632
- Joined: Tue Jun 13, 2006 1:49 pm
- Location: United Kingdom
by wvgirl » Thu Nov 22, 2007 11:49 pm
From The TimesNovember 22, 2007
I am confused but I didn’t cut Meredith’s throat, says flatmate
Richard Owen in Rome
Amanda Knox, the American student accused of involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, told police after she was arrested that she was “very confused” about who had cut her housemate’s throat but insisted that she was not the killer.
In a rambling three-page statement, leaked to the Italian press yesterday, Ms Knox appears to have tried to redirect police suspicion to her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The day before, she had accused Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner.
“Who was the real murderer?” she wrote. “Why did Raffaele lie? What made me think of Patrick?”
Mr Lumumba, who spent two weeks in prison, was released this week for lack of evidence. He said that he would never forgive Ms Knox for telling police that she had heard Ms Kercher screaming while Mr Lumumba was in her bedroom.
Ms Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, South London, was found dead on November 2 in her bedroom at the cottage that she and Ms Knox shared with two Italian women. No trace of Mr Lumumba’s DNA was found in the room, or anywhere else in the cottage.
Il Messaggero reported yesterday that an unnamed woman professor who lives in the area had told police that she heard a “terrifying scream of fear” as she was passing the cottage at 2am. This would appear to be at odds with the official time of death, which police pathologists orginally put at between midnight and 2am but then moved back to between 10pm and midnight.
The paper said that a female student who lives near the murder scene had testified that she heard “strange noises” from the cottage garden at 1am, while another had said that a “coloured man” rushed past her from the direction of the cottage at 10.30pm.
In her statement Ms Knox claimed that Mr Sollecito had confided to her that in the past he had used cocaine and acid and that he suffered from depression. Mr Sollecito claims that on the evening of the murder he was at his computer until 1am, but police tests are said to have disproved this.
Ms Knox admitted that she and Mr Sollecito had smoked marijuana on the day of the murder, but she could not remember if they had read, studied or made love. She did remember having taken a shower together. She said that her memory of events was confused partly because of the drug but also because she was “in a state of shock and exhausted”.
She wrote: “I have serious doubts about the truth of my declarations. This is all very strange, I know, but what happened is as confusing for me as anyone else.”
She said that on the evening of the murder she had been at Mr Sollecito’s flat, and they had eaten a meal. “After supper I noticed blood on Raffaele’s hand, but I had the impression it might have come from the fish we ate.”
Tests on a kitchen knife found in Mr Sollecito’s flat, which police believe is the murder weapon, have revealed Ms Kercher’s DNA on the tip and Ms Knox’s DNA near the handle, but no trace of Mr Sollecito’s DNA. Ms Knox’s handbag, in which the knife is believed to have been transported from Mr Sollecito’s flat to the cottage and back again to be cleaned, was subjected yesterday to forensic science tests.
In her statement, on which she wrote “All the police must read this”, Ms Knox listed “all the men” who “knew Meredith”: Mr Lumumba, a Swiss man called Peter, a North African called Ardak, an Algerian called Yuve who worked at Mr Lumumba’s bar, a Greek named Spyros and a Moroccan that she knew as “Shaky” and who worked in a pizzeria. Witnesses have said, however, that these were friends of Ms Knox, not Ms Kercher. She also described Rudy Hermann Guede, the fourth suspect, who was arrested in Germany this week and is awaiting extradition to Italy, but did not name him, even though she is said to know him well.
Police suspect that Ms Knox named Mr Lumumba as the killer to cover up for Mr Guede. She worked part-time at Mr Lumumba’s bar. In her statement she said that she had been warned by police that she would be arrested and would spend 30 years in jail.
Amanda Knox's statement
“I have serious doubts about the truth of my declarations” “Who was the real murderer? Why did Raffaele lie? What made me think of Patrick?”
“[These memories are] surreal . . . I don’t know if they really happened or were just a dream”
“I don’t think Raffaele killed Meredith, but I think he’s terrified like me. And now he’s trying to find a way out by distancing himself from me”
“Everything I have said about my involvement in the death of Meredith, even if contradictory, is the best version of the truth I am capable of thinking. There’s something inside me which I think is true, but then there is another possibility which could also be true. I honestly do not know which is the real truth”
“My only certainty is that I did not kill Meredith”
“With the way the truth appears in my mind there is no way to verify it [Mr Lumumba as the murderer], because I don’t even remember with certainty that I was there”
“I’m doing my best. If you [the police] think there are parts of my story which don’t make sense, ask me. You must believe me, even if I understand the reasons why you will not believe me”
“I understand the stress the police are under”
I am confused but I didn’t cut Meredith’s throat, says flatmate
Richard Owen in Rome
Amanda Knox, the American student accused of involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, told police after she was arrested that she was “very confused” about who had cut her housemate’s throat but insisted that she was not the killer.
In a rambling three-page statement, leaked to the Italian press yesterday, Ms Knox appears to have tried to redirect police suspicion to her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The day before, she had accused Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner.
“Who was the real murderer?” she wrote. “Why did Raffaele lie? What made me think of Patrick?”
Mr Lumumba, who spent two weeks in prison, was released this week for lack of evidence. He said that he would never forgive Ms Knox for telling police that she had heard Ms Kercher screaming while Mr Lumumba was in her bedroom.
Ms Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, South London, was found dead on November 2 in her bedroom at the cottage that she and Ms Knox shared with two Italian women. No trace of Mr Lumumba’s DNA was found in the room, or anywhere else in the cottage.
Il Messaggero reported yesterday that an unnamed woman professor who lives in the area had told police that she heard a “terrifying scream of fear” as she was passing the cottage at 2am. This would appear to be at odds with the official time of death, which police pathologists orginally put at between midnight and 2am but then moved back to between 10pm and midnight.
The paper said that a female student who lives near the murder scene had testified that she heard “strange noises” from the cottage garden at 1am, while another had said that a “coloured man” rushed past her from the direction of the cottage at 10.30pm.
In her statement Ms Knox claimed that Mr Sollecito had confided to her that in the past he had used cocaine and acid and that he suffered from depression. Mr Sollecito claims that on the evening of the murder he was at his computer until 1am, but police tests are said to have disproved this.
Ms Knox admitted that she and Mr Sollecito had smoked marijuana on the day of the murder, but she could not remember if they had read, studied or made love. She did remember having taken a shower together. She said that her memory of events was confused partly because of the drug but also because she was “in a state of shock and exhausted”.
She wrote: “I have serious doubts about the truth of my declarations. This is all very strange, I know, but what happened is as confusing for me as anyone else.”
She said that on the evening of the murder she had been at Mr Sollecito’s flat, and they had eaten a meal. “After supper I noticed blood on Raffaele’s hand, but I had the impression it might have come from the fish we ate.”
Tests on a kitchen knife found in Mr Sollecito’s flat, which police believe is the murder weapon, have revealed Ms Kercher’s DNA on the tip and Ms Knox’s DNA near the handle, but no trace of Mr Sollecito’s DNA. Ms Knox’s handbag, in which the knife is believed to have been transported from Mr Sollecito’s flat to the cottage and back again to be cleaned, was subjected yesterday to forensic science tests.
In her statement, on which she wrote “All the police must read this”, Ms Knox listed “all the men” who “knew Meredith”: Mr Lumumba, a Swiss man called Peter, a North African called Ardak, an Algerian called Yuve who worked at Mr Lumumba’s bar, a Greek named Spyros and a Moroccan that she knew as “Shaky” and who worked in a pizzeria. Witnesses have said, however, that these were friends of Ms Knox, not Ms Kercher. She also described Rudy Hermann Guede, the fourth suspect, who was arrested in Germany this week and is awaiting extradition to Italy, but did not name him, even though she is said to know him well.
Police suspect that Ms Knox named Mr Lumumba as the killer to cover up for Mr Guede. She worked part-time at Mr Lumumba’s bar. In her statement she said that she had been warned by police that she would be arrested and would spend 30 years in jail.
Amanda Knox's statement
“I have serious doubts about the truth of my declarations” “Who was the real murderer? Why did Raffaele lie? What made me think of Patrick?”
“[These memories are] surreal . . . I don’t know if they really happened or were just a dream”
“I don’t think Raffaele killed Meredith, but I think he’s terrified like me. And now he’s trying to find a way out by distancing himself from me”
“Everything I have said about my involvement in the death of Meredith, even if contradictory, is the best version of the truth I am capable of thinking. There’s something inside me which I think is true, but then there is another possibility which could also be true. I honestly do not know which is the real truth”
“My only certainty is that I did not kill Meredith”
“With the way the truth appears in my mind there is no way to verify it [Mr Lumumba as the murderer], because I don’t even remember with certainty that I was there”
“I’m doing my best. If you [the police] think there are parts of my story which don’t make sense, ask me. You must believe me, even if I understand the reasons why you will not believe me”
“I understand the stress the police are under”
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wvgirl - Posts: 4307
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- Location: Almost Heaven
by gwen » Thu Nov 29, 2007 4:07 pm
U.S. Student "Going Crazy" In Italy Jail
20-Year-Old Seattle Woman Remains Jailed In Connection With British Student's Murder
PERUGIA, Italy, Nov. 29, 2007
(CBS/AP) An American student jailed in connection with the slaying of her British roommate was quoted Thursday as saying she was "going crazy" during her first days in jail.
Amanda Marie Knox, a 20-year-old from Seattle, has been jailed in Perugia since Nov. 6. On Friday, a judge must decide whether she and another suspect - her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito - should remain behind bars.
Knox agreed to talk to the Turin newspaper La Stampa, but not about the night Meredith Kercher was killed.
"No questions about that night; I don't want to be affected by things that I learn from outside," she is quoted as saying, speaking Italian. "Whenever I see Perugia footage on TV, I switch channels. What I have to say I want to say to judges alone. And to my lawyer."
Knox has given conflicting statements since Kercher was found dead in their Perugia apartment on Nov. 2. Kercher, a 21-year-old Leeds University student, was killed by a knife wound to the neck, and prosecutors said she died fighting off a sexual assault.
Knox first said she wasn't home the night of the slaying, but later told prosecutors she was in the apartment, saying she had to cover her ears to drown out Kercher's screams.
Her lawyer, however, is expected Friday to go back to the original version - that Knox was not at home - when he speaks to the judge ruling on Knox's detention, according to La Stampa and other Italian reports citing a defense document prepared for the hearing.
Knox told La Stampa that the first days in jail were difficult.
"The first days, I was kept isolated," she told the newspaper, speaking in Italian. "It was very hard; I couldn't have any relations with anybody." Then she was transferred to a ward housing people accused of sexual crimes, the newspaper said.
"My God, those days were terrible; nobody talked to me," Knox is quoted as saying. "I thought I was going crazy and I prayed that they would move me. When I arrived here, everything changed.
"They treat me with dignity," she said, adding that her fellow inmates are "wonderful."
Knox's and Kercher's DNA were found on a knife that investigators believe may have been the murder weapon; the knife was found in Sollecito's home.
The top investigating prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, wrote that the body of evidence against Knox has only grown as the probe continued.
It has been reported that Knox and Sollecito purchased thong underwear at a lingerie store two days after the murder was discovered, behaved provocatively and were overheard talking about going home to indulge in wild sex, reports CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey.
In addition to Knox and Sollecito, 23, Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast native, has been detained in the slaying. Guede is to be extradited from Germany. All have denied any wrongdoing.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/ ... 2203.shtml
20-Year-Old Seattle Woman Remains Jailed In Connection With British Student's Murder
PERUGIA, Italy, Nov. 29, 2007
(CBS/AP) An American student jailed in connection with the slaying of her British roommate was quoted Thursday as saying she was "going crazy" during her first days in jail.
Amanda Marie Knox, a 20-year-old from Seattle, has been jailed in Perugia since Nov. 6. On Friday, a judge must decide whether she and another suspect - her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito - should remain behind bars.
Knox agreed to talk to the Turin newspaper La Stampa, but not about the night Meredith Kercher was killed.
"No questions about that night; I don't want to be affected by things that I learn from outside," she is quoted as saying, speaking Italian. "Whenever I see Perugia footage on TV, I switch channels. What I have to say I want to say to judges alone. And to my lawyer."
Knox has given conflicting statements since Kercher was found dead in their Perugia apartment on Nov. 2. Kercher, a 21-year-old Leeds University student, was killed by a knife wound to the neck, and prosecutors said she died fighting off a sexual assault.
Knox first said she wasn't home the night of the slaying, but later told prosecutors she was in the apartment, saying she had to cover her ears to drown out Kercher's screams.
Her lawyer, however, is expected Friday to go back to the original version - that Knox was not at home - when he speaks to the judge ruling on Knox's detention, according to La Stampa and other Italian reports citing a defense document prepared for the hearing.
Knox told La Stampa that the first days in jail were difficult.
"The first days, I was kept isolated," she told the newspaper, speaking in Italian. "It was very hard; I couldn't have any relations with anybody." Then she was transferred to a ward housing people accused of sexual crimes, the newspaper said.
"My God, those days were terrible; nobody talked to me," Knox is quoted as saying. "I thought I was going crazy and I prayed that they would move me. When I arrived here, everything changed.
"They treat me with dignity," she said, adding that her fellow inmates are "wonderful."
Knox's and Kercher's DNA were found on a knife that investigators believe may have been the murder weapon; the knife was found in Sollecito's home.
The top investigating prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, wrote that the body of evidence against Knox has only grown as the probe continued.
It has been reported that Knox and Sollecito purchased thong underwear at a lingerie store two days after the murder was discovered, behaved provocatively and were overheard talking about going home to indulge in wild sex, reports CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey.
In addition to Knox and Sollecito, 23, Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast native, has been detained in the slaying. Guede is to be extradited from Germany. All have denied any wrongdoing.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/ ... 2203.shtml
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gwen - AKA Gagal_05
- Posts: 29597
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by gwen » Fri Nov 30, 2007 8:31 am
Knox, Italian Boyfriend in Court for Death of British Roommate
Friday, November 30, 2007
PERUGIA, Italy — An American university student and her Italian ex-boyfriend were in court Friday for a hearing to determine if they will remain jailed as suspects in the death of a British student.
A judge must rule on requests by the defense to release University of Washington student Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, who have been jailed in connection with the killing of Knox's flatmate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.
The two were picked up Nov. 6 and a judge confirmed the arrests a few days later, saying there was enough evidence against the two students to hold them while the probe continued. Lawyers appealed the decision and both suspects deny wrongdoing.
Knox and Sollecito were not seen arriving at court Friday, but police officials there confirmed the two were inside attending the closed-door hearing.
Kercher, a Leeds University student enrolled for a year of study in Perugia, was found dead Nov. 2 in the apartment she shared with Knox. She died from a stab wound to the neck, and prosecutors said she was killed resisting a sexual assault.
Knox has given conflicting statements since the killing, first saying she wasn't home the night of the slaying and later telling prosecutors she was in the apartment and had to cover her ears to drown out Kercher's screams.
According to prosecutors, a drop of Knox's blood found on a bathroom faucet places her at the apartment on the night of the murder or the morning after, and DNA from Knox and Kercher was found on a knife that investigators believe may have been the murder weapon.
The knife was found in Sollecito's home, while a bloody footprint located near Kercher's body has been matched to his shoes, placing the 23-year-old Italian at the crime scene, prosecutors say.
Lawyers maintain there is not enough evidence linking the knife to Kercher's wounds or the shoes to the footprint.
Sollecito says he was at his own Perugia apartment, working at his computer, but doesn't remember if Knox spent the whole night with him. Both suspects have explained confused recollections and conflicting statements by saying they had smoked hashish that night, according to court documents.
In addition to Knox and Sollecito, Ivory Coast native Rudy Hermann Guede is also being held as a suspect. He was arrested in Germany after an international manhunt and is awaiting extradition to Italy.
Guede has acknowledged that he was in Kercher's room the night she died, but said he didn't kill her and that an Italian who is trying to frame him did. DNA testing has confirmed that Guede had sex with Kercher the night of the murder.
A fourth suspect, Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, a Congolese who owned the Perugia bar where Knox worked, was recently released from jail for lack of evidence. Lumumba, initially fingered by Knox as the killer, remains under investigation and denies wrongdoing.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314081,00.html
Friday, November 30, 2007
PERUGIA, Italy — An American university student and her Italian ex-boyfriend were in court Friday for a hearing to determine if they will remain jailed as suspects in the death of a British student.
A judge must rule on requests by the defense to release University of Washington student Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, who have been jailed in connection with the killing of Knox's flatmate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.
The two were picked up Nov. 6 and a judge confirmed the arrests a few days later, saying there was enough evidence against the two students to hold them while the probe continued. Lawyers appealed the decision and both suspects deny wrongdoing.
Knox and Sollecito were not seen arriving at court Friday, but police officials there confirmed the two were inside attending the closed-door hearing.
Kercher, a Leeds University student enrolled for a year of study in Perugia, was found dead Nov. 2 in the apartment she shared with Knox. She died from a stab wound to the neck, and prosecutors said she was killed resisting a sexual assault.
Knox has given conflicting statements since the killing, first saying she wasn't home the night of the slaying and later telling prosecutors she was in the apartment and had to cover her ears to drown out Kercher's screams.
According to prosecutors, a drop of Knox's blood found on a bathroom faucet places her at the apartment on the night of the murder or the morning after, and DNA from Knox and Kercher was found on a knife that investigators believe may have been the murder weapon.
The knife was found in Sollecito's home, while a bloody footprint located near Kercher's body has been matched to his shoes, placing the 23-year-old Italian at the crime scene, prosecutors say.
Lawyers maintain there is not enough evidence linking the knife to Kercher's wounds or the shoes to the footprint.
Sollecito says he was at his own Perugia apartment, working at his computer, but doesn't remember if Knox spent the whole night with him. Both suspects have explained confused recollections and conflicting statements by saying they had smoked hashish that night, according to court documents.
In addition to Knox and Sollecito, Ivory Coast native Rudy Hermann Guede is also being held as a suspect. He was arrested in Germany after an international manhunt and is awaiting extradition to Italy.
Guede has acknowledged that he was in Kercher's room the night she died, but said he didn't kill her and that an Italian who is trying to frame him did. DNA testing has confirmed that Guede had sex with Kercher the night of the murder.
A fourth suspect, Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, a Congolese who owned the Perugia bar where Knox worked, was recently released from jail for lack of evidence. Lumumba, initially fingered by Knox as the killer, remains under investigation and denies wrongdoing.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314081,00.html
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gwen - AKA Gagal_05
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by wvgirl » Sun Jun 15, 2008 9:12 pm
From The Sunday TimesJune 15, 2008
Amanda Knox: the first in-depth interview with her parents
While Amanda Knox is locked away in an Italian prison accused of murder, her parents are living in a state of limbo, powerless to help her. Here they give their first in-depth interview about their daughter — and the rapidly unravelling case against her
John Follain
Watch footage of an interview with Amanda Knox's parents
At 4am on November 2 last year, on a cold dark morning in the American city of Seattle, Edda Mellas was woken by a phone call from her daughter Amanda Knox, calling from Perugia in Italy where she was studying Italian and creative writing. “Mom, I’m home and I’m okay,” Knox told her. Her mother said: “Okay, what’s going on?” Knox replied: “Well, something strange is going on.”
“Something strange” turned out to be the murder of Knox’s housemate Meredith Kercher, 21, a student from Coulsdon, Greater London, who was on an exchange as part of a European studies course. Italian investigators allege that the killer or killers forced Meredith to her knees to make her take part in a sex game and, when she refused, stabbed her in the throat three times. The blue-eyed Knox, together with her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, from the Ivory Coast, are in prison on suspicion of sexually abusing and murdering Kercher, but have yet to be charged.
In their first interview with non-American media, Knox’s parents and her younger sister, Deanna, who live in Seattle, have agreed to talk in detail about the investigation; they have finally persuaded Knox’s Italian lawyers that it is in her best interest to say what they think of the probe. None of the family have been questioned by Italian detectives. After a flurry of headlines and articles such as Hidden Dangers Lurk in Quest for Extreme Sex High and Foxy Knoxy’s Wild Sex after Murder, implying that Knox was sex-mad, they are friendly, but understandably wary.
Edda Mellas, 45, her ex-husband, Curt Knox, 47 – both remarried – and Deanna, 19, sit close together around the end of a long table in the office of their publicist in downtown Seattle. The parents divorced in 1989 when Amanda was two, and both have children from their second marriages. Edda, a maths teacher, has cut short a training workshop to be here. Curt has taken the afternoon off – he is a vice-president at Macy’s department store – and Deanna, a biology student and an amateur photographer, has interrupted her exam revision. She and her family are determined that her sister’s fate won’t affect Deanna’s studies; she has been able to travel to Perugia and see Knox only a couple of times.
The diminutive Edda is braced for an emotionally tough ride, a box of Kleenex at her side. Curt, who speaks in a slow, measured tone, sits ramrod-straight, sipping Coca-Cola. Deanna, blonde, attractive and bubbly, nibbles at chocolates for comfort. The family has built up a small but determined team from scratch; they have hired the Seattle PR veteran David Marriott, a former TV journalist, two Italian lawyers and two forensic experts. They can count on the moral support of Knox’s university friends. But they have no powerful contacts and are considering appealing to their congressman for help.
When Knox, 20, was jailed in Perugia after Meredith’s murder, a senior police officer proclaimed: “Case closed.” Knox had “confessed” to being in the cottage when Meredith died, investigators said, and forensic evidence marked her out as guilty. Rejecting last month a demand that Knox be moved from jail because of the weakness of the case against her to a shelter run by the Catholic charity Caritas, Judge Claudia Matteini, in charge of preliminary investigations, wrote that Meredith was “subjected to several violent acts characterised by extreme cruelty in a hideous crescendo, surely a sign of personalities who were perverse and without any inhibitions”.
The judge added: “There was first an act of suffocation, probably to stop her shouting, then of strangulation, given the marks of ruptured blood vessels found on her neck, then repeated cuts with a sharp weapon also in the neck area, one of which brought about her death.” The judge wrote there was “serious evidence” against Knox and expressed her “dismay and apprehension” at her cold, detached manner following the murder; the judge was struck by a woman so young “finding it so easy to govern her state of mind”.
But today, part of the investigation is unravelling. The same judge threw out Knox’s “confession” in April, doubts have been raised about the alleged “murder weapon” and DNA traces linked to the suspects, and the prosecutor leading the case is accused of wrongdoing in a separate probe. There is still no precise explanation of why, how, at what time or by whom Meredith was murdered.
) ) ) ) )
Despite her parents’ middle-class jobs, Amanda Knox grew up in a working-class area of Seattle. Asked how the divorce affected Knox, Curt says he moved only five blocks away and Deanna adds: “We walked backwards and forwards. Our neighbourhood was awesome. I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything.” The family recalls Knox as violent only on one occasion, when a boy was picking on Deanna at school. Knox, 7, gave him a bloody nose and was punished for it. “My sister can’t kill a spider. When I’d find a spider in my room I’d tell her ‘Kill it,’ but she would get a glass and take it outside,” Deanna says.
At the Jesuit-run, £5,900-a-year Seattle Preparatory School, Knox got top marks, acted in plays, sang in the choir and won an award for being an “extraordinary student” at 13. Curt says: “Amanda loves to find out new things, to have new experiences and to get to know people.” Deanna adds: “She likes things that are new and exciting – the bigger it is, the more fun she has.”
The way her family describe her, Knox sounds more a tomboy than a man-eater. She hated make-up and was keen on rock-climbing and soccer, among other sports. Her nickname “Foxy Knoxy” comes not from romantic conquests but from the soccer pitch – “She got that nickname when she was 11 because she was intense. She was a defender; she’d crouch and come out of nowhere to stop people,” Deanna says.
Deanna snorts with laughter when asked about media reports that her sister is “a man-eater”. She says: “That’s ridiculous. Amanda didn’t have her first boyfriend until university, when she was 19. She’s kind of a late bloomer. We talked about guys because I had a serious boyfriend way before she had one. I’d feed her advice.” The family says they know of only two boyfriends before Knox left for Italy; her American friends have refused to talk about her private life, but they too have denied she is “a man-eater”.
At Washington University, where she studied Italian, German and creative writing, Knox was again the model student, achieving top marks. In December 2006 she posted a story on MySpace in which a young woman drugs and rapes another woman. It reads in part: “She fell on the floor, she felt the blood on her mouth and swallowed it. She couldn’t move her jaw and felt as if someone was moving a razor on the left side of her face.” Her family claims to have spoken to the teacher who made her write this as a course assignment. She was told to write everything that happens right up to a crime. Curt says: “Amanda was graded down because the story she wrote wasn’t dark enough. It wasn’t what the teacher wanted.” University authorities have banned staff from talking publicly about Knox.
Knox decided to spend a few months studying in Italy. This got Edda worried because she saw her daughter as too trusting, seeing good in everyone. “I hoped she would learn a bit of fear before she left. I didn’t want her to go through life afraid, but I wanted her to have a little fear as far as self-preservation goes,” Edda says.
Edda and Curt took Knox out to dinner. Curt told her: “How are we going to be able to help you if something happens? What happens if you get sick? We’re not a short distance away.” Edda told her: “Try to be wary, to pay attention to what’s going on around you. Don’t trust everyone you meet.” Knox answered breezily: “Okay, Mom, I will. I will be fine.” The parents told her to be careful about Italian men, but didn’t worry too much. They thought Edda’s relatives – her mother is German and she has family in Germany, Switzerland and Austria – could step in if needed.
Knox travelled to Perugia in August last year, accompanied by Deanna. They visited relatives on the way. At a museum in Graz, Austria, Deanna photographed Knox as she pretended to fire a machinegun. The picture has been widely published as evidence of Knox’s supposedly warped nature. “We were just goofing around,” Deanna says. I ask her about the caption on the picture, which reads “The Nazi”. Deanna replies cheerfully: “Oh yeah, she wrote that. We’re of German descent – we were just goofing off.”
Deanna makes short shrift of what the family sees as one of many slurs on Knox, an e-mail she sent to a friend in which she said she had sex with an Italian on a train during that journey. “That is so untrue. I was everywhere with her. It’s true we met a guy called Federico and we had dinner with him. But nothing happened. I think Amanda was just making fun of Italian men. They stare at you a lot more than men do here. ”
It was Deanna who found her sister the whitewashed cottage where Meredith was to settle two months later. “I was waiting for Amanda outside the university, and I saw a girl putting up a poster about an appartamento. I went up to her, then ran to get Amanda.” The cottage, a short walk away and with a stunning view over the hills, bowled Knox over. “She was in love with the cottage. Her first words were ‘Oh, my gosh!’ She loved the view and having wilderness around her,” Deanna says. After a few days the girls flew home, with Knox impatient to return to Italy.
) ) ) ) )
Knox started her course in Perugia in October, one of 40,000 Italian and foreign students drawn to the picturesque city. She started a relationship with Sollecito, a urologist’s son and engineering student. Knox told her mother: “Raffaele looks like Harry Potter. He’s a nice quiet guy, really smart.” “Amanda was infatuated with Raffaele, but I don’t think you fall in love in just a week,” Edda says. Knox told her family nothing about Sollecito’s hobby, which he had had since he was 13, of collecting knives and unsharpened swords.
Knox couldn’t have been happier. “I’m having the time of my life. I love my housemates, I love school and I love the job I’m doing,” she told Edda. She said she had a new housemate: “Her name is Meredith. She’s from England. She’s really nice and I really like her,” Knox told her sister. She went to Perugia’s chocolate festival with Meredith in late October. “Meredith is fun. We had a great time,” Knox e-mailed. She also described Meredith as “beautiful, nice and fun and caring”.
Meredith, a European-studies student at Leeds University, was not as taken by Knox. Meredith’s father, John, testified that she told him: “Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a boyfriend.” The remark strikes Knox’s family as odd. “I don’t understand that. Amanda didn’t date anyone before Raffaele,” Edda says. Apparently, in this case at least, Knox had chosen not to tell her family everything: Daniel de Luna, a Rome student, has testified he slept with Knox at her home on October 20.
Knox began working in a bar called Le Chic two evenings a week. Edda told her to call her on those evenings when she got home. “I’ve always worried about my girls walking around at night,” Edda says. Knox reassured her, saying students sat out on the steps of the cathedral late and the town was safe. Deanna says her sister often made social blunders, such as stretching herself in a restaurant because she was full, or failing to realise a man was flirting with her. “Amanda’s book-smart, but not street-smart,” Deanna says.
When Knox first called Edda to say “something strange is going on”, she said she had spent the night at Sollecito’s flat, where they watched a film. She went home in the morning to have a shower, but found the front door open. She thought someone may have gone out into the garden. The door to Meredith’s bedroom was closed and Knox assumed she was sleeping. It was only when she stepped out of the shower that she noticed a few spots of blood by the sink.
Perhaps someone had cut themselves or one of the girls had her period. What really struck her as odd was finding the lavatory unflushed; the girls always flushed it. She said she went to Sollecito’s flat, they had breakfast, then she took him to the cottage. Knox managed to call two of her three housemates: “I can’t get hold of Meredith. Meredith’s door is locked. We tried to pound on the door to wake her and she’s not answering.” Edda told her to call the police. There was no panic in Knox’s voice, just worry. (Later, Edda asked Knox how she had felt then. “My mind didn’t jump to murder: it’s not something that comes into my life experience,” she replied.)
Edda was sitting up in bed wide awake when Knox called less than an hour later. She heard shouting in the background as Knox burst out: “Oh my God, they’re screaming about a foot near the cupboard, the cops are screaming. I’m outside the house. I don’t know what’s going on. I gotta go.” She called back moments later – Edda says this time Knox was extremely agitated. She said: “It’s not a foot, there’s a body. They’ve found a body near the cupboard or in the cupboard, I can’t make out which.” Edda asked: “Who is it?” Knox replied: “I don’t know, I haven’t seen but no one can get hold of Meredith. It’s Meredith’s room. I gotta go, the police want to talk to me.”
Meredith’s family have spoken about their loss in public only once. Her sister, Stephanie, said she “was one of the most beautiful, intelligent, witty and caring people you could wish to meet”.
Over the next couple of days Edda and Knox spoke many times. I try to press the family on Knox’s emotionless manner after the murder. Edda says she was more in shock than in tears, and she didn’t like to ask her about Meredith’s death so as not to upset her. “I asked her if she was okay. The fact that she seemed okay, that she was concentrating on helping the police, made me feel better.” Knox told her mother: “I need to answer the questions to try to help the police figure out what happened. I can’t believe someone would do this. They gotta find who did this.” Edda said: “I’m so proud of you for trying to do something.”
When police searched the cottage, Knox was filmed kissing Sollecito briefly three times while they stood outside. Deanna says: “That was for comfort. They’re rubbing each other’s backs for comfort. They’re not french-kissing!” Nor does the family give any importance to another film, of the pair buying thongs for Knox. The shop’s owner has said he heard Sollecito tell her: “You can put these on at home and we’ll have wild sex.” Edda says: “The cottage was sealed off. [Knox] needed underwear. I don’t believe Raffaele said that, but when people are going through a rough time they find ways of making themselves laugh.”
) ) ) ) )
On November 6, five days after Meredith’s murder, Knox was interrogated by police for nine hours until she signed a statement at 5.54am. Her family says that despite her good marks at university, Knox was not fluent in Italian, but no professional interpreter was present, only a police officer who could speak English and who was not always there. She was given no food and no water for all the nine hours. “I’ve never been so scared in my life,” Knox told Deanna later. Curt says: “Amanda was abused physically and verbally. She told us she was hit in the back of the head by a police officer with an open hand, at least twice. The police told her, ‘If you ask for a lawyer, things will get worse for you’ and ‘If you don’t give us some explanation for what happened, you’re going to go to jail for a very long time.’” Edda adds tearfully: “She was told she wouldn’t ever see her family again, and her family is everything to her.” Knox gave them a description of the officer who allegedly struck her, but it cannot be published for legal reasons. The Perugia police have denied striking her and have said she understood what she was signing.
Only a small part of Knox’s taped statement has been leaked to the media; the full transcript hasn’t surfaced, but according to Curt, the police asked Knox to “visualise what could have happened”. The family says it was the police who brought up the name of Patrick Diya Lumumba, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked. She first told police: “I recall in a confused way that he killed her.” Later she said: “I think I was in the kitchen. At a certain point I heard Meredith’s screams and I was afraid and I covered my ears.” She then wrote a four-page account going back on her previous statement, saying she was at Sollecito’s house on the afternoon and night of the murder. Knox wrote she was “very confused” about those hours, that she was high on cannabis at Sollecito’s house. She wrote: “I didn’t kill Meredith. That’s all I know for sure.”
The family look genuinely embarrassed when I ask them about Knox claiming she was so high on cannabis that she couldn’t recall precisely what happened. “She wasn’t a regular smoker of pot. A pothead is someone who smokes every weekend; Amanda tried it maybe twice the whole time she was in Seattle,” Deanna says. Her parents look as if they are hearing this for the first time. Doesn’t it show Knox became “wilder” in Perugia, I ask? “She likes to try everything,” Deanna replies.
Two months ago, the “confession” that Knox was in the kitchen of the cottage was thrown out by Italy’s supreme court on the grounds she had no lawyer present – the first “win” achieved by the family since Knox’s arrest. It is not the only hole in the investigation. Lumumba was first arrested, jailed for two weeks, then cleared in May of any suspicion. CCTV footage that investigators initially said showed Knox walking to the cottage at 8.40pm before Kercher arrived home on the night of the murder, has been dismissed; a judge ruled the quality of the footage was too poor to be of use. The time of the murder is still uncertain, estimated by a forensic pathologist to have been “no more than two to three hours after the victim’s last meal”. The time of the meal is unknown, but Kercher left a friend’s house to return to the cottage at about 9pm.
Now Knox’s family challenges the way the investigation has been conducted, its findings and even the prosecutor leading it. The way the crime scene has been handled is “shoddy”, Curt says. Two police videos dated November 3 and December 18, broadcast in April in the Channel 4 Cutting Edge documentary Sex, Lies and the Murder of Meredith, show the clasp of Meredith’s bloodied bra, on which Sollecito’s DNA was found, was moved about 4ft. “[Meredith’s] mattress wasn’t in the bedroom; it was in the living room on top of a couch and flipped upside down, and Meredith’s clothes were piled up, so there could be cross-contamination. It’s unbelievable. The whole room had been turned upside down,” Curt says.
Investigators say DNA traces of Meredith and Knox were found on an 8in kitchen knife seized from Sollecito’s home that they describe as compatible with that used for the murder – Knox’s trace was near the handle and Meredith’s closer to the tip. Details of how precise a match this was have not been released. But the forensic expert Carlo Torre, a respected professor who has done 6,000 postmortems and who has been appointed by Knox’s family as part of the defence team, has had access to reports on the autopsy and on the knife’s DNA traces by court-appointed experts. Curt says: “Amanda cooks, so there’s nothing surprising about her trace on the handle. But the expert told us the trace of Meredith was on the side of the knife, not the blade, and it had a very small chance of belonging to Meredith – he said it could belong to half the population of Italy!”
In a resigned tone, Curt says: “The only choice we have is to believe in the Italian legal system.” But he quickly adds that he doesn’t trust the police or the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini: “The approach has been to play the case out in the media rather than providing physical evidence. That blows me away. If this happened in the USA she would have been out months ago.”
Edda adds: “It gets scary when you have the prosecutor accused of wrongdoing in another case.” Mignini is to stand trial in November on charges of illegally bugging the phones of police officers and journalists, and obstructing an investigation by another prosecutor in Genoa. Mignini has said: “I would do again precisely everything I did and I’m sure the truth will emerge in the trial.” A source close to the investigation says he is currently preparing to request Knox, Sollecito and Guede stand trial. Curt adds: “The prosecutor’s reputation is at stake. You don’t make an international incident in the way this was done, the wild-sex-orgy drugs scenario and then say, ‘Oops, I kept your daughter in jail for six months.’ I don’t like it when people’s reputations are at stake and it’s them or a 20-year-old kid.”
The family are reluctant to say how they think Meredith died. They believe the evidence points to Guede, the only suspect who consistently admits to being in the cottage when Meredith was murdered. But, as Edda points out, “I don’t know Meredith or Rudy and I’m not going to speculate on rumours, because people are doing that about my daughter.” Guede, in an account ridiculed by investigators, has testified that Meredith invited him into her bedroom, where they began to have sex but stopped because they didn’t have a condom. He says he went to the toilet and when he came back he saw Sollecito rush out after killing Meredith. The latest report by a coroner, in April, found Meredith had been involved in sexual activity before she died but “it was impossible to tell whether it was consensual”.
Is there anything Knox has said or done since Meredith’s murder that makes her family believe she might be guilty? “Not the slightest smallest thing,” Deanna says. “No, never,” her parents echo. If she had been at the cottage that night, could Knox’s excessively trusting character have got her involved? “No, she wouldn’t have let another human being get hurt,” Deanna says.
) ) ) ) )
At the Capanne prison near Perugia, Knox is allowed two hours’ exercise outside her cell a day. She spends her days taking guitar lessons and doing yoga, but mostly studying Italian, French, Chinese, German and Russian. The family says she has lost 15lb, and has developed near-sightedness because of confinement in her cell, and will have to wear glasses for the first time. She exercises her eyes by staring out of the window. What keeps her going, her family says, is that she is innocent. “Because she did nothing wrong, she believes she is going to be released,” Edda says.
When they are in Perugia, the family can see her for an hour a week in the jail’s cramped visiting room. At least, they say, there is no glass panel separating them from her and they are free to hug each other. Knox rarely speaks about Meredith, but she did say once: “I can’t believe that this quiet, studious girl has gone. It’s surreal.
I can’t believe that someone broke into my house and killed my housemate.” Deanna says: “I try not to talk to her about the case. I try to make her laugh more than anything. We joked about the mike we think is in the lamp above us – you can see the wires. I cry afterwards, not in front of her.”
Curt says: “There was one time – the worst time I had in there. She cried in my arms for a half-hour out of the hour.” He chokes up. Edda says, sobbing: “It is just the hardest thing to walk away and leave her there. It is unbearable.”
Curt continues: “It was in January. She literally broke down. She couldn’t understand why she was there when she hadn’t done anything.” Deanna says: “Amanda cringes when the door opens when the visit is over because she doesn’t want to leave us. I was there with my mom. We were holding her hands. She held on tight. It’s like she never wants to let go.”
The family hesitate when I ask whether they have anything they would like to say to Meredith’s family. Edda is the first to break the silence: “We’re in a sticky situation because of what people have written about Amanda.
We’d like to reach out, but what will they think if we say to them, ‘Your daughter was my daughter’s housemate and we can only imagine your pain’? I can’t imagine what they are having to live through. It’s horrific, and every time rubbish comes out about the alcohol level in Meredith’s blood or her sexual activity, my first thought is, ‘My God, that poor family has to hear this again and again.’”
The family have thought long and hard about whether they could have done anything to save her from her fate. Curt recalls the meeting when he and Edda told Knox they would be too far away to help her themselves if something went wrong. “But we couldn’t have said, ‘You’re not going to go and study abroad and live your life.’”
Edda blames herself for being too naive when a cousin called and asked: “The police are talking to Amanda an awful lot. Are you sure they don’t think she’s a suspect?” Edda called Knox and said: “Don’t you want to come home?” Knox replied: “No, I’m helping and I want to finish school. I want to be here so I can answer questions.” Edda says: “That’s when I decided to go over there, but I wish I’d told her to come home.”
As the interview ends after 3½ hours, I have no doubt the family have been forthcoming and honest in their portrait of Knox. She remains innocent until proven guilty, and she has been ill-served, to say the least, by media coverage based on leaks from investigators. But it seems more than likely that Knox is hiding something even from her own family, as if she were covering for someone for some unknown reason.
Why has Knox failed to give a precise, consistent account of her actions on the night of Meredith’s death? Knox has testified that she was “very confused” about those hours, that she was high on cannabis at Sollecito’s house. Such confusion also underscores Sollecito’s versions: he first said Amanda was with him all night, then said this was a lie and that Knox had made him lie, only to claim that he had no precise recollection because he was high on cannabis.
The facts are that there is no evidence against Knox other than the DNA on the knife’s handle, which doesn’t prove she helped murder Kercher; a trace of her blood on the sink in the bathroom, which her family say was due to her ears bleeding after they were pierced; the “confession” that has been thrown out by the judge; and the testimony of Guede, who says she was at the cottage, but his account has been ridiculed by investigators.
All there is is a suspicion that she is hiding something because she has failed to give a convincing account of her actions that evening and night, and because of her cold, detached behaviour in the days that followed. Surely she should have shown more emotion at the loss of a “beautiful, nice and fun and caring” friend?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 113087.ece
Amanda Knox: the first in-depth interview with her parents
While Amanda Knox is locked away in an Italian prison accused of murder, her parents are living in a state of limbo, powerless to help her. Here they give their first in-depth interview about their daughter — and the rapidly unravelling case against her
John Follain
Watch footage of an interview with Amanda Knox's parents
At 4am on November 2 last year, on a cold dark morning in the American city of Seattle, Edda Mellas was woken by a phone call from her daughter Amanda Knox, calling from Perugia in Italy where she was studying Italian and creative writing. “Mom, I’m home and I’m okay,” Knox told her. Her mother said: “Okay, what’s going on?” Knox replied: “Well, something strange is going on.”
“Something strange” turned out to be the murder of Knox’s housemate Meredith Kercher, 21, a student from Coulsdon, Greater London, who was on an exchange as part of a European studies course. Italian investigators allege that the killer or killers forced Meredith to her knees to make her take part in a sex game and, when she refused, stabbed her in the throat three times. The blue-eyed Knox, together with her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, from the Ivory Coast, are in prison on suspicion of sexually abusing and murdering Kercher, but have yet to be charged.
In their first interview with non-American media, Knox’s parents and her younger sister, Deanna, who live in Seattle, have agreed to talk in detail about the investigation; they have finally persuaded Knox’s Italian lawyers that it is in her best interest to say what they think of the probe. None of the family have been questioned by Italian detectives. After a flurry of headlines and articles such as Hidden Dangers Lurk in Quest for Extreme Sex High and Foxy Knoxy’s Wild Sex after Murder, implying that Knox was sex-mad, they are friendly, but understandably wary.
Edda Mellas, 45, her ex-husband, Curt Knox, 47 – both remarried – and Deanna, 19, sit close together around the end of a long table in the office of their publicist in downtown Seattle. The parents divorced in 1989 when Amanda was two, and both have children from their second marriages. Edda, a maths teacher, has cut short a training workshop to be here. Curt has taken the afternoon off – he is a vice-president at Macy’s department store – and Deanna, a biology student and an amateur photographer, has interrupted her exam revision. She and her family are determined that her sister’s fate won’t affect Deanna’s studies; she has been able to travel to Perugia and see Knox only a couple of times.
The diminutive Edda is braced for an emotionally tough ride, a box of Kleenex at her side. Curt, who speaks in a slow, measured tone, sits ramrod-straight, sipping Coca-Cola. Deanna, blonde, attractive and bubbly, nibbles at chocolates for comfort. The family has built up a small but determined team from scratch; they have hired the Seattle PR veteran David Marriott, a former TV journalist, two Italian lawyers and two forensic experts. They can count on the moral support of Knox’s university friends. But they have no powerful contacts and are considering appealing to their congressman for help.
When Knox, 20, was jailed in Perugia after Meredith’s murder, a senior police officer proclaimed: “Case closed.” Knox had “confessed” to being in the cottage when Meredith died, investigators said, and forensic evidence marked her out as guilty. Rejecting last month a demand that Knox be moved from jail because of the weakness of the case against her to a shelter run by the Catholic charity Caritas, Judge Claudia Matteini, in charge of preliminary investigations, wrote that Meredith was “subjected to several violent acts characterised by extreme cruelty in a hideous crescendo, surely a sign of personalities who were perverse and without any inhibitions”.
The judge added: “There was first an act of suffocation, probably to stop her shouting, then of strangulation, given the marks of ruptured blood vessels found on her neck, then repeated cuts with a sharp weapon also in the neck area, one of which brought about her death.” The judge wrote there was “serious evidence” against Knox and expressed her “dismay and apprehension” at her cold, detached manner following the murder; the judge was struck by a woman so young “finding it so easy to govern her state of mind”.
But today, part of the investigation is unravelling. The same judge threw out Knox’s “confession” in April, doubts have been raised about the alleged “murder weapon” and DNA traces linked to the suspects, and the prosecutor leading the case is accused of wrongdoing in a separate probe. There is still no precise explanation of why, how, at what time or by whom Meredith was murdered.
) ) ) ) )
Despite her parents’ middle-class jobs, Amanda Knox grew up in a working-class area of Seattle. Asked how the divorce affected Knox, Curt says he moved only five blocks away and Deanna adds: “We walked backwards and forwards. Our neighbourhood was awesome. I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything.” The family recalls Knox as violent only on one occasion, when a boy was picking on Deanna at school. Knox, 7, gave him a bloody nose and was punished for it. “My sister can’t kill a spider. When I’d find a spider in my room I’d tell her ‘Kill it,’ but she would get a glass and take it outside,” Deanna says.
At the Jesuit-run, £5,900-a-year Seattle Preparatory School, Knox got top marks, acted in plays, sang in the choir and won an award for being an “extraordinary student” at 13. Curt says: “Amanda loves to find out new things, to have new experiences and to get to know people.” Deanna adds: “She likes things that are new and exciting – the bigger it is, the more fun she has.”
The way her family describe her, Knox sounds more a tomboy than a man-eater. She hated make-up and was keen on rock-climbing and soccer, among other sports. Her nickname “Foxy Knoxy” comes not from romantic conquests but from the soccer pitch – “She got that nickname when she was 11 because she was intense. She was a defender; she’d crouch and come out of nowhere to stop people,” Deanna says.
Deanna snorts with laughter when asked about media reports that her sister is “a man-eater”. She says: “That’s ridiculous. Amanda didn’t have her first boyfriend until university, when she was 19. She’s kind of a late bloomer. We talked about guys because I had a serious boyfriend way before she had one. I’d feed her advice.” The family says they know of only two boyfriends before Knox left for Italy; her American friends have refused to talk about her private life, but they too have denied she is “a man-eater”.
At Washington University, where she studied Italian, German and creative writing, Knox was again the model student, achieving top marks. In December 2006 she posted a story on MySpace in which a young woman drugs and rapes another woman. It reads in part: “She fell on the floor, she felt the blood on her mouth and swallowed it. She couldn’t move her jaw and felt as if someone was moving a razor on the left side of her face.” Her family claims to have spoken to the teacher who made her write this as a course assignment. She was told to write everything that happens right up to a crime. Curt says: “Amanda was graded down because the story she wrote wasn’t dark enough. It wasn’t what the teacher wanted.” University authorities have banned staff from talking publicly about Knox.
Knox decided to spend a few months studying in Italy. This got Edda worried because she saw her daughter as too trusting, seeing good in everyone. “I hoped she would learn a bit of fear before she left. I didn’t want her to go through life afraid, but I wanted her to have a little fear as far as self-preservation goes,” Edda says.
Edda and Curt took Knox out to dinner. Curt told her: “How are we going to be able to help you if something happens? What happens if you get sick? We’re not a short distance away.” Edda told her: “Try to be wary, to pay attention to what’s going on around you. Don’t trust everyone you meet.” Knox answered breezily: “Okay, Mom, I will. I will be fine.” The parents told her to be careful about Italian men, but didn’t worry too much. They thought Edda’s relatives – her mother is German and she has family in Germany, Switzerland and Austria – could step in if needed.
Knox travelled to Perugia in August last year, accompanied by Deanna. They visited relatives on the way. At a museum in Graz, Austria, Deanna photographed Knox as she pretended to fire a machinegun. The picture has been widely published as evidence of Knox’s supposedly warped nature. “We were just goofing around,” Deanna says. I ask her about the caption on the picture, which reads “The Nazi”. Deanna replies cheerfully: “Oh yeah, she wrote that. We’re of German descent – we were just goofing off.”
Deanna makes short shrift of what the family sees as one of many slurs on Knox, an e-mail she sent to a friend in which she said she had sex with an Italian on a train during that journey. “That is so untrue. I was everywhere with her. It’s true we met a guy called Federico and we had dinner with him. But nothing happened. I think Amanda was just making fun of Italian men. They stare at you a lot more than men do here. ”
It was Deanna who found her sister the whitewashed cottage where Meredith was to settle two months later. “I was waiting for Amanda outside the university, and I saw a girl putting up a poster about an appartamento. I went up to her, then ran to get Amanda.” The cottage, a short walk away and with a stunning view over the hills, bowled Knox over. “She was in love with the cottage. Her first words were ‘Oh, my gosh!’ She loved the view and having wilderness around her,” Deanna says. After a few days the girls flew home, with Knox impatient to return to Italy.
) ) ) ) )
Knox started her course in Perugia in October, one of 40,000 Italian and foreign students drawn to the picturesque city. She started a relationship with Sollecito, a urologist’s son and engineering student. Knox told her mother: “Raffaele looks like Harry Potter. He’s a nice quiet guy, really smart.” “Amanda was infatuated with Raffaele, but I don’t think you fall in love in just a week,” Edda says. Knox told her family nothing about Sollecito’s hobby, which he had had since he was 13, of collecting knives and unsharpened swords.
Knox couldn’t have been happier. “I’m having the time of my life. I love my housemates, I love school and I love the job I’m doing,” she told Edda. She said she had a new housemate: “Her name is Meredith. She’s from England. She’s really nice and I really like her,” Knox told her sister. She went to Perugia’s chocolate festival with Meredith in late October. “Meredith is fun. We had a great time,” Knox e-mailed. She also described Meredith as “beautiful, nice and fun and caring”.
Meredith, a European-studies student at Leeds University, was not as taken by Knox. Meredith’s father, John, testified that she told him: “Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a boyfriend.” The remark strikes Knox’s family as odd. “I don’t understand that. Amanda didn’t date anyone before Raffaele,” Edda says. Apparently, in this case at least, Knox had chosen not to tell her family everything: Daniel de Luna, a Rome student, has testified he slept with Knox at her home on October 20.
Knox began working in a bar called Le Chic two evenings a week. Edda told her to call her on those evenings when she got home. “I’ve always worried about my girls walking around at night,” Edda says. Knox reassured her, saying students sat out on the steps of the cathedral late and the town was safe. Deanna says her sister often made social blunders, such as stretching herself in a restaurant because she was full, or failing to realise a man was flirting with her. “Amanda’s book-smart, but not street-smart,” Deanna says.
When Knox first called Edda to say “something strange is going on”, she said she had spent the night at Sollecito’s flat, where they watched a film. She went home in the morning to have a shower, but found the front door open. She thought someone may have gone out into the garden. The door to Meredith’s bedroom was closed and Knox assumed she was sleeping. It was only when she stepped out of the shower that she noticed a few spots of blood by the sink.
Perhaps someone had cut themselves or one of the girls had her period. What really struck her as odd was finding the lavatory unflushed; the girls always flushed it. She said she went to Sollecito’s flat, they had breakfast, then she took him to the cottage. Knox managed to call two of her three housemates: “I can’t get hold of Meredith. Meredith’s door is locked. We tried to pound on the door to wake her and she’s not answering.” Edda told her to call the police. There was no panic in Knox’s voice, just worry. (Later, Edda asked Knox how she had felt then. “My mind didn’t jump to murder: it’s not something that comes into my life experience,” she replied.)
Edda was sitting up in bed wide awake when Knox called less than an hour later. She heard shouting in the background as Knox burst out: “Oh my God, they’re screaming about a foot near the cupboard, the cops are screaming. I’m outside the house. I don’t know what’s going on. I gotta go.” She called back moments later – Edda says this time Knox was extremely agitated. She said: “It’s not a foot, there’s a body. They’ve found a body near the cupboard or in the cupboard, I can’t make out which.” Edda asked: “Who is it?” Knox replied: “I don’t know, I haven’t seen but no one can get hold of Meredith. It’s Meredith’s room. I gotta go, the police want to talk to me.”
Meredith’s family have spoken about their loss in public only once. Her sister, Stephanie, said she “was one of the most beautiful, intelligent, witty and caring people you could wish to meet”.
Over the next couple of days Edda and Knox spoke many times. I try to press the family on Knox’s emotionless manner after the murder. Edda says she was more in shock than in tears, and she didn’t like to ask her about Meredith’s death so as not to upset her. “I asked her if she was okay. The fact that she seemed okay, that she was concentrating on helping the police, made me feel better.” Knox told her mother: “I need to answer the questions to try to help the police figure out what happened. I can’t believe someone would do this. They gotta find who did this.” Edda said: “I’m so proud of you for trying to do something.”
When police searched the cottage, Knox was filmed kissing Sollecito briefly three times while they stood outside. Deanna says: “That was for comfort. They’re rubbing each other’s backs for comfort. They’re not french-kissing!” Nor does the family give any importance to another film, of the pair buying thongs for Knox. The shop’s owner has said he heard Sollecito tell her: “You can put these on at home and we’ll have wild sex.” Edda says: “The cottage was sealed off. [Knox] needed underwear. I don’t believe Raffaele said that, but when people are going through a rough time they find ways of making themselves laugh.”
) ) ) ) )
On November 6, five days after Meredith’s murder, Knox was interrogated by police for nine hours until she signed a statement at 5.54am. Her family says that despite her good marks at university, Knox was not fluent in Italian, but no professional interpreter was present, only a police officer who could speak English and who was not always there. She was given no food and no water for all the nine hours. “I’ve never been so scared in my life,” Knox told Deanna later. Curt says: “Amanda was abused physically and verbally. She told us she was hit in the back of the head by a police officer with an open hand, at least twice. The police told her, ‘If you ask for a lawyer, things will get worse for you’ and ‘If you don’t give us some explanation for what happened, you’re going to go to jail for a very long time.’” Edda adds tearfully: “She was told she wouldn’t ever see her family again, and her family is everything to her.” Knox gave them a description of the officer who allegedly struck her, but it cannot be published for legal reasons. The Perugia police have denied striking her and have said she understood what she was signing.
Only a small part of Knox’s taped statement has been leaked to the media; the full transcript hasn’t surfaced, but according to Curt, the police asked Knox to “visualise what could have happened”. The family says it was the police who brought up the name of Patrick Diya Lumumba, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked. She first told police: “I recall in a confused way that he killed her.” Later she said: “I think I was in the kitchen. At a certain point I heard Meredith’s screams and I was afraid and I covered my ears.” She then wrote a four-page account going back on her previous statement, saying she was at Sollecito’s house on the afternoon and night of the murder. Knox wrote she was “very confused” about those hours, that she was high on cannabis at Sollecito’s house. She wrote: “I didn’t kill Meredith. That’s all I know for sure.”
The family look genuinely embarrassed when I ask them about Knox claiming she was so high on cannabis that she couldn’t recall precisely what happened. “She wasn’t a regular smoker of pot. A pothead is someone who smokes every weekend; Amanda tried it maybe twice the whole time she was in Seattle,” Deanna says. Her parents look as if they are hearing this for the first time. Doesn’t it show Knox became “wilder” in Perugia, I ask? “She likes to try everything,” Deanna replies.
Two months ago, the “confession” that Knox was in the kitchen of the cottage was thrown out by Italy’s supreme court on the grounds she had no lawyer present – the first “win” achieved by the family since Knox’s arrest. It is not the only hole in the investigation. Lumumba was first arrested, jailed for two weeks, then cleared in May of any suspicion. CCTV footage that investigators initially said showed Knox walking to the cottage at 8.40pm before Kercher arrived home on the night of the murder, has been dismissed; a judge ruled the quality of the footage was too poor to be of use. The time of the murder is still uncertain, estimated by a forensic pathologist to have been “no more than two to three hours after the victim’s last meal”. The time of the meal is unknown, but Kercher left a friend’s house to return to the cottage at about 9pm.
Now Knox’s family challenges the way the investigation has been conducted, its findings and even the prosecutor leading it. The way the crime scene has been handled is “shoddy”, Curt says. Two police videos dated November 3 and December 18, broadcast in April in the Channel 4 Cutting Edge documentary Sex, Lies and the Murder of Meredith, show the clasp of Meredith’s bloodied bra, on which Sollecito’s DNA was found, was moved about 4ft. “[Meredith’s] mattress wasn’t in the bedroom; it was in the living room on top of a couch and flipped upside down, and Meredith’s clothes were piled up, so there could be cross-contamination. It’s unbelievable. The whole room had been turned upside down,” Curt says.
Investigators say DNA traces of Meredith and Knox were found on an 8in kitchen knife seized from Sollecito’s home that they describe as compatible with that used for the murder – Knox’s trace was near the handle and Meredith’s closer to the tip. Details of how precise a match this was have not been released. But the forensic expert Carlo Torre, a respected professor who has done 6,000 postmortems and who has been appointed by Knox’s family as part of the defence team, has had access to reports on the autopsy and on the knife’s DNA traces by court-appointed experts. Curt says: “Amanda cooks, so there’s nothing surprising about her trace on the handle. But the expert told us the trace of Meredith was on the side of the knife, not the blade, and it had a very small chance of belonging to Meredith – he said it could belong to half the population of Italy!”
In a resigned tone, Curt says: “The only choice we have is to believe in the Italian legal system.” But he quickly adds that he doesn’t trust the police or the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini: “The approach has been to play the case out in the media rather than providing physical evidence. That blows me away. If this happened in the USA she would have been out months ago.”
Edda adds: “It gets scary when you have the prosecutor accused of wrongdoing in another case.” Mignini is to stand trial in November on charges of illegally bugging the phones of police officers and journalists, and obstructing an investigation by another prosecutor in Genoa. Mignini has said: “I would do again precisely everything I did and I’m sure the truth will emerge in the trial.” A source close to the investigation says he is currently preparing to request Knox, Sollecito and Guede stand trial. Curt adds: “The prosecutor’s reputation is at stake. You don’t make an international incident in the way this was done, the wild-sex-orgy drugs scenario and then say, ‘Oops, I kept your daughter in jail for six months.’ I don’t like it when people’s reputations are at stake and it’s them or a 20-year-old kid.”
The family are reluctant to say how they think Meredith died. They believe the evidence points to Guede, the only suspect who consistently admits to being in the cottage when Meredith was murdered. But, as Edda points out, “I don’t know Meredith or Rudy and I’m not going to speculate on rumours, because people are doing that about my daughter.” Guede, in an account ridiculed by investigators, has testified that Meredith invited him into her bedroom, where they began to have sex but stopped because they didn’t have a condom. He says he went to the toilet and when he came back he saw Sollecito rush out after killing Meredith. The latest report by a coroner, in April, found Meredith had been involved in sexual activity before she died but “it was impossible to tell whether it was consensual”.
Is there anything Knox has said or done since Meredith’s murder that makes her family believe she might be guilty? “Not the slightest smallest thing,” Deanna says. “No, never,” her parents echo. If she had been at the cottage that night, could Knox’s excessively trusting character have got her involved? “No, she wouldn’t have let another human being get hurt,” Deanna says.
) ) ) ) )
At the Capanne prison near Perugia, Knox is allowed two hours’ exercise outside her cell a day. She spends her days taking guitar lessons and doing yoga, but mostly studying Italian, French, Chinese, German and Russian. The family says she has lost 15lb, and has developed near-sightedness because of confinement in her cell, and will have to wear glasses for the first time. She exercises her eyes by staring out of the window. What keeps her going, her family says, is that she is innocent. “Because she did nothing wrong, she believes she is going to be released,” Edda says.
When they are in Perugia, the family can see her for an hour a week in the jail’s cramped visiting room. At least, they say, there is no glass panel separating them from her and they are free to hug each other. Knox rarely speaks about Meredith, but she did say once: “I can’t believe that this quiet, studious girl has gone. It’s surreal.
I can’t believe that someone broke into my house and killed my housemate.” Deanna says: “I try not to talk to her about the case. I try to make her laugh more than anything. We joked about the mike we think is in the lamp above us – you can see the wires. I cry afterwards, not in front of her.”
Curt says: “There was one time – the worst time I had in there. She cried in my arms for a half-hour out of the hour.” He chokes up. Edda says, sobbing: “It is just the hardest thing to walk away and leave her there. It is unbearable.”
Curt continues: “It was in January. She literally broke down. She couldn’t understand why she was there when she hadn’t done anything.” Deanna says: “Amanda cringes when the door opens when the visit is over because she doesn’t want to leave us. I was there with my mom. We were holding her hands. She held on tight. It’s like she never wants to let go.”
The family hesitate when I ask whether they have anything they would like to say to Meredith’s family. Edda is the first to break the silence: “We’re in a sticky situation because of what people have written about Amanda.
We’d like to reach out, but what will they think if we say to them, ‘Your daughter was my daughter’s housemate and we can only imagine your pain’? I can’t imagine what they are having to live through. It’s horrific, and every time rubbish comes out about the alcohol level in Meredith’s blood or her sexual activity, my first thought is, ‘My God, that poor family has to hear this again and again.’”
The family have thought long and hard about whether they could have done anything to save her from her fate. Curt recalls the meeting when he and Edda told Knox they would be too far away to help her themselves if something went wrong. “But we couldn’t have said, ‘You’re not going to go and study abroad and live your life.’”
Edda blames herself for being too naive when a cousin called and asked: “The police are talking to Amanda an awful lot. Are you sure they don’t think she’s a suspect?” Edda called Knox and said: “Don’t you want to come home?” Knox replied: “No, I’m helping and I want to finish school. I want to be here so I can answer questions.” Edda says: “That’s when I decided to go over there, but I wish I’d told her to come home.”
As the interview ends after 3½ hours, I have no doubt the family have been forthcoming and honest in their portrait of Knox. She remains innocent until proven guilty, and she has been ill-served, to say the least, by media coverage based on leaks from investigators. But it seems more than likely that Knox is hiding something even from her own family, as if she were covering for someone for some unknown reason.
Why has Knox failed to give a precise, consistent account of her actions on the night of Meredith’s death? Knox has testified that she was “very confused” about those hours, that she was high on cannabis at Sollecito’s house. Such confusion also underscores Sollecito’s versions: he first said Amanda was with him all night, then said this was a lie and that Knox had made him lie, only to claim that he had no precise recollection because he was high on cannabis.
The facts are that there is no evidence against Knox other than the DNA on the knife’s handle, which doesn’t prove she helped murder Kercher; a trace of her blood on the sink in the bathroom, which her family say was due to her ears bleeding after they were pierced; the “confession” that has been thrown out by the judge; and the testimony of Guede, who says she was at the cottage, but his account has been ridiculed by investigators.
All there is is a suspicion that she is hiding something because she has failed to give a convincing account of her actions that evening and night, and because of her cold, detached behaviour in the days that followed. Surely she should have shown more emotion at the loss of a “beautiful, nice and fun and caring” friend?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 113087.ece
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wvgirl - Posts: 4307
- Joined: Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:29 pm
- Location: Almost Heaven
by gwen » Thu Jun 19, 2008 10:33 pm
Amanda Knox Prosecutor Concludes His Probe
Prosecutor Indicates He Will Charge Amanda Knox With Murder
By NIKKI BATTISTE
June 19, 2008
The Italian prosecutor investigating the alleged role of American student Amanda Knox in the murder of her roommate insisted today that the victim was sexually assaulted and then murdered, despite a conclusion by forensic experts appointed by the court that sexual assault could not be proven.
A final report on the investigation by prosecutor Giuliani Mignini indicates that Knox and two other suspects are likely to be charged with voluntary homicide, sexual assault and simulation of a crime.
Meredith Kercher, a 22-year-old British student, was found strangled and stabbed last November in the Perugia house she shared with Knox. Both women were studying in the Italian city.
Within days of the killing, Knox, 20, of Seattle, was arrested along with her 24-year-old boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. A third person, Rudy Guede, 21, fled to Germany but was later returned to Italy.
The three have been in prison since their arrests, although they have not been charged with Kercher's murder.
The filing today of Mignini's report, which was obtained by ABC News, means his investigation into Kercher's death is complete.
Mignini claims that Kercher was raped, then strangled and stabbed in the neck. He accuses Knox, Sollecito and Guede of also stealing 300 euros from Kercher.
In addition, Mignini claims that Knox and Sollecito faked an attempted burglary of the house Knox and Kercher shared to make the Kercher murder appear to be the result of a burglary.
In response to today's filing, Knox's parents, Edda Mellas and Curt Knox, told ABC News in a statement, "We know our daughter is innocent and we will continue to support her in every way possible. We look forward to her eventual release and to her being found innocent of the charges against her."
They said the charges recommended by Mignini come as no surprise because "from the very beginning of the investigation into the tragic and senseless murder of Meredith Kercher, and even before evidence had been gathered and processed, Prosecutor Mignini has been wedded to the theory that Amanda and two others were responsible for Meredith's murder."
Mellas and Knox have alternated stays in Italy to visit Amanda for the one hour twice a week they are permitted in Capanne prison, where she has been held since last November. Defense lawyers for the three suspects have 20 days from today to present their counter arguments, after which the prosecutor will request indictments for the suspects. A preliminary hearing will follow, where the suspects could be freed or indicted and a trial date set.
A trial would likely begin before the end of the year.
Knox had contradicted herself by initially insisting that she wasn't in the apartment at the time of Kercher's murder, but during a lengthy interrogation by police said that she had a vision she had been at the apartment. The court, however, threw out that statement last month and objected to the methods by which the statement was obtained.
Guede has also contradicted himself. He initially said he was with Kercher in her bedroom and left briefly, and when he returned she was bleeding and he scuffled with a man wearing a hood. He said Knox and Sollecito were not at the apartment.
Guede later said Knox and Sollecito were at the apartment and Sollecito was the man he scuffled with in Kercher's apartment.
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/Story?id=5204417&page=1
Prosecutor Indicates He Will Charge Amanda Knox With Murder
By NIKKI BATTISTE
June 19, 2008
The Italian prosecutor investigating the alleged role of American student Amanda Knox in the murder of her roommate insisted today that the victim was sexually assaulted and then murdered, despite a conclusion by forensic experts appointed by the court that sexual assault could not be proven.
A final report on the investigation by prosecutor Giuliani Mignini indicates that Knox and two other suspects are likely to be charged with voluntary homicide, sexual assault and simulation of a crime.
Meredith Kercher, a 22-year-old British student, was found strangled and stabbed last November in the Perugia house she shared with Knox. Both women were studying in the Italian city.
Within days of the killing, Knox, 20, of Seattle, was arrested along with her 24-year-old boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. A third person, Rudy Guede, 21, fled to Germany but was later returned to Italy.
The three have been in prison since their arrests, although they have not been charged with Kercher's murder.
The filing today of Mignini's report, which was obtained by ABC News, means his investigation into Kercher's death is complete.
Mignini claims that Kercher was raped, then strangled and stabbed in the neck. He accuses Knox, Sollecito and Guede of also stealing 300 euros from Kercher.
In addition, Mignini claims that Knox and Sollecito faked an attempted burglary of the house Knox and Kercher shared to make the Kercher murder appear to be the result of a burglary.
In response to today's filing, Knox's parents, Edda Mellas and Curt Knox, told ABC News in a statement, "We know our daughter is innocent and we will continue to support her in every way possible. We look forward to her eventual release and to her being found innocent of the charges against her."
They said the charges recommended by Mignini come as no surprise because "from the very beginning of the investigation into the tragic and senseless murder of Meredith Kercher, and even before evidence had been gathered and processed, Prosecutor Mignini has been wedded to the theory that Amanda and two others were responsible for Meredith's murder."
Mellas and Knox have alternated stays in Italy to visit Amanda for the one hour twice a week they are permitted in Capanne prison, where she has been held since last November. Defense lawyers for the three suspects have 20 days from today to present their counter arguments, after which the prosecutor will request indictments for the suspects. A preliminary hearing will follow, where the suspects could be freed or indicted and a trial date set.
A trial would likely begin before the end of the year.
Knox had contradicted herself by initially insisting that she wasn't in the apartment at the time of Kercher's murder, but during a lengthy interrogation by police said that she had a vision she had been at the apartment. The court, however, threw out that statement last month and objected to the methods by which the statement was obtained.
Guede has also contradicted himself. He initially said he was with Kercher in her bedroom and left briefly, and when he returned she was bleeding and he scuffled with a man wearing a hood. He said Knox and Sollecito were not at the apartment.
Guede later said Knox and Sollecito were at the apartment and Sollecito was the man he scuffled with in Kercher's apartment.
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/Story?id=5204417&page=1
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gwen - AKA Gagal_05
- Posts: 29597
- Joined: Sat Feb 24, 2007 6:42 pm
by gwen » Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:54 pm
Suspect in Perugia Murder Case Seeks Fast-Track Trial
One of 3 Suspects Accused of Murdering U.K. Girl to Seek Fast-Track Trial
By PHOEBE NATANSON and ANN WISE
PERUGIA, Italy, Sept. 9, 2008
Defense lawyers for Rudy Guede, one of the three suspects in jail for the murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher, said today that they are convinced their client was not involved in the killing and that they will be able to prove it.
After reading the prosecutor's documents filed in the court this summer, the defense lawyers said during a news conference today that if the judge at a preliminary hearing next week decides that Guede should be indicted, they will ask that he be tried separately in a fast-track procedure based on the evidence presented to date.
Since Kercher was found seminaked with her throat cut at her Perugia home the morning of Nov. 2, 2007, the case has received wide public attention in Britain, Italy and the United States. One of the suspects is a 21-year-old American student Amanda Knox, from Seattle, who shared the apartment with Kercher and two Italian law students.
The judge at the pretrial, closed-door hearing, which is set to start Sept. 16 in the Perugia Courts, will decide whether Guede, Knox and her 24-year-old Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito should be indicted and stand trial for the murder.
The judge will also decide whether Guede, a 21-year-old Ivory Coast citizen, is guilty of Kercher's murder. A fast-track trial procedure calls for an immediate decision based on the evidence already presented to the court, and allows for a reduction of an eventual guilty sentence by one-third.
A decision is not likely to be announced on the first day of the hearing.
Prosecutors also want to charge the three with sexual violence and stealing 300 euros, two credit cards and two mobile phones from Kercher.
All three suspects deny sexually assaulting and murdering the student. Guede has admitted to being in the house with her the night she was killed but says he did not do it.
The prosecutor says he has forensic evidence linking all three to the scene of the crime.
Guede's lawyers told reporters today that they have decided to ask for a fast-track trial for their client because they do not want him connected to Knox and Sollecito.
"We feel the need for a separate trial," they told Italian wire agency Ansa. "We think we need to keep our position separate from the other two suspects."
The lawyers went on to say that "choosing this fast-track trial does not mean we are looking for a reduction of the sentence because our goal is his full absolution as Rudy Guede is totally extraneous to the crime." The lawyers added that they would also ask that their client be released from jail immediately.
Nicodemo Gentile, one of Guede's defense lawyers, said that in the evidence presented by the prosecutor there is "no link between Guede and the murder weapon, nor is he involved in the attempt to fake a theft at the scene of the crime in order to divert investigators."
He added, "We are aware that the accusations against our client are heavy but we are able to prove that there are other equally believable theories."
Should Knox and Sollecito not opt for the fast-track trial like Guede, the judge must decide whether they should be indicted or released.
If indicted, they will go forward with a regular trial, which is not expected to start until sometime early next year.
It is unknown if any of the three suspects will be present at the pretrial hearing next week; they do not have to be present. However, the lawyer for Kercher's family said they will certainly be there.
Both Knox and Sollecito have been in jail awaiting indictment since they were arrested in November.
Guede was arrested in December in Germany. He had left Italy before he was named a suspect and had not been ordered to stay in the country. He maintains he fled the scene of the crime -- and then the country -- because he was afraid he would be accused of murdering Kercher after he found her in a pool of blood and briefly tried to help her.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/sto ... 914&page=1
One of 3 Suspects Accused of Murdering U.K. Girl to Seek Fast-Track Trial
By PHOEBE NATANSON and ANN WISE
PERUGIA, Italy, Sept. 9, 2008
Defense lawyers for Rudy Guede, one of the three suspects in jail for the murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher, said today that they are convinced their client was not involved in the killing and that they will be able to prove it.
After reading the prosecutor's documents filed in the court this summer, the defense lawyers said during a news conference today that if the judge at a preliminary hearing next week decides that Guede should be indicted, they will ask that he be tried separately in a fast-track procedure based on the evidence presented to date.
Since Kercher was found seminaked with her throat cut at her Perugia home the morning of Nov. 2, 2007, the case has received wide public attention in Britain, Italy and the United States. One of the suspects is a 21-year-old American student Amanda Knox, from Seattle, who shared the apartment with Kercher and two Italian law students.
The judge at the pretrial, closed-door hearing, which is set to start Sept. 16 in the Perugia Courts, will decide whether Guede, Knox and her 24-year-old Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito should be indicted and stand trial for the murder.
The judge will also decide whether Guede, a 21-year-old Ivory Coast citizen, is guilty of Kercher's murder. A fast-track trial procedure calls for an immediate decision based on the evidence already presented to the court, and allows for a reduction of an eventual guilty sentence by one-third.
A decision is not likely to be announced on the first day of the hearing.
Prosecutors also want to charge the three with sexual violence and stealing 300 euros, two credit cards and two mobile phones from Kercher.
All three suspects deny sexually assaulting and murdering the student. Guede has admitted to being in the house with her the night she was killed but says he did not do it.
The prosecutor says he has forensic evidence linking all three to the scene of the crime.
Guede's lawyers told reporters today that they have decided to ask for a fast-track trial for their client because they do not want him connected to Knox and Sollecito.
"We feel the need for a separate trial," they told Italian wire agency Ansa. "We think we need to keep our position separate from the other two suspects."
The lawyers went on to say that "choosing this fast-track trial does not mean we are looking for a reduction of the sentence because our goal is his full absolution as Rudy Guede is totally extraneous to the crime." The lawyers added that they would also ask that their client be released from jail immediately.
Nicodemo Gentile, one of Guede's defense lawyers, said that in the evidence presented by the prosecutor there is "no link between Guede and the murder weapon, nor is he involved in the attempt to fake a theft at the scene of the crime in order to divert investigators."
He added, "We are aware that the accusations against our client are heavy but we are able to prove that there are other equally believable theories."
Should Knox and Sollecito not opt for the fast-track trial like Guede, the judge must decide whether they should be indicted or released.
If indicted, they will go forward with a regular trial, which is not expected to start until sometime early next year.
It is unknown if any of the three suspects will be present at the pretrial hearing next week; they do not have to be present. However, the lawyer for Kercher's family said they will certainly be there.
Both Knox and Sollecito have been in jail awaiting indictment since they were arrested in November.
Guede was arrested in December in Germany. He had left Italy before he was named a suspect and had not been ordered to stay in the country. He maintains he fled the scene of the crime -- and then the country -- because he was afraid he would be accused of murdering Kercher after he found her in a pool of blood and briefly tried to help her.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/sto ... 914&page=1
-
gwen - AKA Gagal_05
- Posts: 29597
- Joined: Sat Feb 24, 2007 6:42 pm
by pax » Sat Sep 13, 2008 5:48 pm
Amanda Knox: Trial by trollarazzi
By Candace Dempsey
Copyright 2008.
I don't know if UW honor student Amanda Knox is guilty or innocent. On the Web, those are fighting words. Accused of helping murder her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy, Knox has been undergoing trial by trollarazzi since she was arrested Nov. 6. "Amanda Knox sounds like one of those needy, screwed up rich kids, wandering around Europe with her credit cards and thinking she's totally invincible. She's a stupid, screwed up girl who got in way over her head," says a commenter on alt-crime in November, wildly exaggerating Knox's middle-class upbringing. Like many obsessed with Knox's unremarkable sex life, she based this description on one hasty British tabloid article, which was in turn based on caricatures of Knox's schoolgirl MySpace and Facebook pages. A date rape story written for a college class became a peek into a sinister, perverted mind.
Calling the 20-year-old Knox innocent until proven guilty is a sure-fire way to draw the wrath of the trollarazzi, the ragtag gangs of flamethrowers who plague the blogosphere. These trolls, says Wikipedia, post controversial messages "with the intention of baiting other users into a response." To the trollarazzi, Knox is guilty until proven guilty. Even on the day after Christmas, they could not resist. They piled trash on a Seattle PI blog in her hometown under the headline "Are We Being Fair?" One troll wished Knox a Merry Christmas in Italian, demonstrating the favorite tools of the genre: ALL CAPS. Multiple exclamation marks. Moral judgments. Sexism, bad spelling and stupidity. HO HO HO!!!! BUON NATALE AMANDA, YOU CONSCIENSELESS TRAMP!! In trolldom, it is okay to call a young woman you don't know a sociopath, serial killer, pathological liar or whore (one of the politer terms hurled at women who enjoy sex). Those who feed the troll by disagreeing are called "idiotic," "moronic" and "unstable." Often trolls wish them murdered and/or sexually abused. ...
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/demp ... 128383.asp
By Candace Dempsey
Copyright 2008.
I don't know if UW honor student Amanda Knox is guilty or innocent. On the Web, those are fighting words. Accused of helping murder her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy, Knox has been undergoing trial by trollarazzi since she was arrested Nov. 6. "Amanda Knox sounds like one of those needy, screwed up rich kids, wandering around Europe with her credit cards and thinking she's totally invincible. She's a stupid, screwed up girl who got in way over her head," says a commenter on alt-crime in November, wildly exaggerating Knox's middle-class upbringing. Like many obsessed with Knox's unremarkable sex life, she based this description on one hasty British tabloid article, which was in turn based on caricatures of Knox's schoolgirl MySpace and Facebook pages. A date rape story written for a college class became a peek into a sinister, perverted mind.
Calling the 20-year-old Knox innocent until proven guilty is a sure-fire way to draw the wrath of the trollarazzi, the ragtag gangs of flamethrowers who plague the blogosphere. These trolls, says Wikipedia, post controversial messages "with the intention of baiting other users into a response." To the trollarazzi, Knox is guilty until proven guilty. Even on the day after Christmas, they could not resist. They piled trash on a Seattle PI blog in her hometown under the headline "Are We Being Fair?" One troll wished Knox a Merry Christmas in Italian, demonstrating the favorite tools of the genre: ALL CAPS. Multiple exclamation marks. Moral judgments. Sexism, bad spelling and stupidity. HO HO HO!!!! BUON NATALE AMANDA, YOU CONSCIENSELESS TRAMP!! In trolldom, it is okay to call a young woman you don't know a sociopath, serial killer, pathological liar or whore (one of the politer terms hurled at women who enjoy sex). Those who feed the troll by disagreeing are called "idiotic," "moronic" and "unstable." Often trolls wish them murdered and/or sexually abused. ...
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/demp ... 128383.asp
-
pax - Posts: 22191
- Joined: Thu Mar 23, 2006 8:59 pm
- Location: No H8
by pax » Sat Sep 13, 2008 5:56 pm
Amanda Knox's prison diary: What did she really say?
By Candace Dempsey
September 2008
Murder suspect Amanda Knox never claimed she was "too sexy for the cops," that she was "only a target because I'm sexy" or that she slept with seven men in two months in Italy. Yes, I've seen "Il mio diaro del prigione," the prison diary that the University of Washington student wrote during her first month of incarceration in Perugia, Italy. Along with Rudy Guede and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, she is suspected of participating in the brutal stabbing death of her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, last November. On July 11, prosecutors asked to have charges filed against all three. Following a hearing, most likely in September, a judge will decide whether to order the three to stand trial. One hopes the Daily Mail (source of many a June leak) didn't pay big bucks for Knox's journal, thinking it would rival the sex diaries of Anais Nin. Nor is there anything that, on first glance, she needs to fear in court.
Depressed one minute, breezy the next, Knox writes mainly about the routine of prison life. What she eats for breakfast, what she's allowed to keep in the cell, who can visit, what she watches on TV and whom she'd like to see the second she gets out (in order: her mother, Raffaele Sollecito, her surviving roommates). "I don't know if they know what has happened to me," she says of roommates Laura Mezzetti and Filomena Romanelli, "but I want to tell them and I want to see them and of course I want my mom to meet them. They are the best friends I have here in Perugia." As Corriere della Sera notes, "Molti pensieri sono per Meredith." Many thoughts are for Meredith. "My friend was murdered," writes Knox. "My roommate, my friend. She was beautiful, smart, fun, and caring, and she was murdered. Everyone I know is devastated for her, but we are also all at odds. We are angry. We want justice. But against who? We all want to know, but we don't. "
Whether one believes Knox is guilty or innocent, it's hard not to view her as naive. Stop writing, any lawyer would tell the 20-year-old, stop writing before the police yank the diary from your cell. Maybe it will be leaked to the press at a really inopportune time, like right after your first hearing on November 30. Which it was. Although Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede also scribbled prison dairies, only Knox's keeps surfacing like the fin of a shark. It "emerged" in January and April and again on June 24, shortly after prosecutor Giuliano Mignini closed the investigation and said he was planning to seek charges against all three suspects. The diary, seized letters and other prison documents are part of the case file now available at the procura in Perugia at two euro per page.
Knox's efforts, gushed the Daily Mail, "must surely rank as one of most extraordinary and revealing documents ever to have been penned behind prison bars - the 80-page personal diary kept by Amanda 'Foxy' Knox."
So forget Solzhenitsyn coming to us from the Soviet gulag. Jack Henry Abbott scribbling In the Belly of the Beast. Il mio diaro del prigione is it.
Pity the poor harassed research assistant frantically skimming the handwritten, schoolgirlish pages, while a big-time reporter hovers over the desk. Rather than mimic the British, I'll give you the American version: Bigtime: "You gotta give me something, man. I'm on deadline. God, look at that. She's conjugating avere, the most basic of all Italian verbs. Thanking Dido and Paul McCartney for writing corny song lyrics. Doing a movie review of 'Synbad.' Can you believe it? I feel like I'm in kindergarten. Hurry up. Find me something I can sell." Frightened researcher: "I'm looking. I'm looking." Bigtime: "Okay, I got it. How about if we say she boasts about her sex life and/or beauty 24/7? You pull a few quotes. I'll go out and interview an expert on serial killers. So what if he's never met Knox or the other two suspects? I'll get him to say something classic, like she and Italian lover boy are involved in a folie-a-deux. We'll run with that."
Meanwhile, headline writers around the world do a "sex and boasting about sex" spin on the same old document, while breathless reporters apparently forget they've leaked it before. "College Student Murder Suspect Amanda Knox Boasts In Jailhouse Diary of Fan Mail From Men"--Fox News. "Meredith Kercher Murder Suspects Claims To Be Sex Symbol"--Telegraph "I got 23 fan letters from guys today: Foxy Knox's disturbing diary"--Daily Mail "I'm only a target because I'm sexy."--Times of London "Sex Symbol" Amanda Knox Jailed For Murder, Or For Being "Too Sexy"?--Post Chronicle "Foxy Knoxy Protests Innocence and Details Her Many Lovers--Daily Mail "Brutal murderer or just too sexy for the cops? Is the suspect in an Italian murder case innocent or a narcissistic sociopath?"--MSNBC
Oddly enough, the Daily Mail got one thing right, unlike the prestigious Times of London, Corriere della Sera and other media outlets. The number of lovers. Seven total, not seven just in Italy. And the Mail noted she drew up the list because a prison doctor told her "incorrectly, Knox later concludes, that blood tests have revealed her to be HIV positive."
She then describes the birth control method used with each man and notes whether or not that constitutes safe sex. That's as salacious as the diary gets.
So what about those male admirers Knox is supposed to have boasted about? Did she say she was only a target because she was sexy? Did she compare her beauty to Helen of Troy? Let's start with the 23 love letters from men the Daily Mail says she bragged about receiving in prison. On Nov. 19, she does mentions that she got 23 "fan letters" that "the jail had been saving up for me." That brings her total to 35. A postcard notifying her that a package is being held at the post office makes it 36.
Yes, they're all from guys, 20-35 on average, but one 55 (he "thankfully offers fatherly advice.") "All of them reassure me that they believe me and wish me courage, and patience. Some ask me to have faith in God. Others bash the Italian justice system." Most do offer compliments on her beauty. She's also heard about Web sites that describe her as hot. However she doesn't say she's in jail or targeted by the police because she's sexy. She doesn't mention the police in this section at all. Nor does she compare her beauty favorably to the famous Helen.
"I think the same thing about this as I did before. If I were ugly would they be writing me wishing me encouragement? I don't think so. Oh, well, this is what my life is and I'll write to them and thank them for thinking of me." She adds "Jeez, I'm not even that good-looking! People are acting like I'm the prettiest thing since Helen of Troy!" "I don't care about this stuff," she says. "I just want to go home." Later she tells her friends about the fan mail. "Needless to say, I would much rather receive letters from you all, so here's my address."
What of Patrick Lumumba, the man arrested as a result of Knox's lawyerless "false confession"? Was Corriere della Sera right when it says, "She is 'happy' when Patrik Lumumba is released, as though she has forgotten that she was responsible for sending him to prison"? This may be small comfort to Patrick and his family, but the diary contains "multi pensiorni" about him and much talk of regret.
On Nov. 25 she says, "Why would I be in here for 20 years if I am, in reality, completely innocent? The only thing I screwed up on was when I said I saw Patrick, but I never said his name with any sort of malicious intent behind it. I only said it to say something. I was trying so hard to know something, and I know what I said was wrong, which is why I'm telling the truth, that I've remembered, now." On Nov. 29, shortly before the diary was seized, she returns to this topic. "I'm so sorry for all this confusion and in particular for what I did to Patrick. I'm happy that he has been set free." At the Nov. 30 court hearing, Knox allegedly burst into tears when asked why she had accused Patrick, her former employer at Le Chic. But, reports the Times of London, "Ms. Knox told the judge that she was sorry for the trouble that she had caused Diya Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner for whom she worked part time, by falsely claiming that he had had sex with Ms Kercher before murdering her. 'I am sorry for Patrick and for the whole situation,'" she said.
The maddeningly optimistic Knox hoped to be out by last Christmas. It's summer now in the famous Umbrian hills. The mystery of Meredith Kercher's murder remains unsolved.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/demp ... 142848.asp
By Candace Dempsey
September 2008
Murder suspect Amanda Knox never claimed she was "too sexy for the cops," that she was "only a target because I'm sexy" or that she slept with seven men in two months in Italy. Yes, I've seen "Il mio diaro del prigione," the prison diary that the University of Washington student wrote during her first month of incarceration in Perugia, Italy. Along with Rudy Guede and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, she is suspected of participating in the brutal stabbing death of her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, last November. On July 11, prosecutors asked to have charges filed against all three. Following a hearing, most likely in September, a judge will decide whether to order the three to stand trial. One hopes the Daily Mail (source of many a June leak) didn't pay big bucks for Knox's journal, thinking it would rival the sex diaries of Anais Nin. Nor is there anything that, on first glance, she needs to fear in court.
Depressed one minute, breezy the next, Knox writes mainly about the routine of prison life. What she eats for breakfast, what she's allowed to keep in the cell, who can visit, what she watches on TV and whom she'd like to see the second she gets out (in order: her mother, Raffaele Sollecito, her surviving roommates). "I don't know if they know what has happened to me," she says of roommates Laura Mezzetti and Filomena Romanelli, "but I want to tell them and I want to see them and of course I want my mom to meet them. They are the best friends I have here in Perugia." As Corriere della Sera notes, "Molti pensieri sono per Meredith." Many thoughts are for Meredith. "My friend was murdered," writes Knox. "My roommate, my friend. She was beautiful, smart, fun, and caring, and she was murdered. Everyone I know is devastated for her, but we are also all at odds. We are angry. We want justice. But against who? We all want to know, but we don't. "
Whether one believes Knox is guilty or innocent, it's hard not to view her as naive. Stop writing, any lawyer would tell the 20-year-old, stop writing before the police yank the diary from your cell. Maybe it will be leaked to the press at a really inopportune time, like right after your first hearing on November 30. Which it was. Although Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede also scribbled prison dairies, only Knox's keeps surfacing like the fin of a shark. It "emerged" in January and April and again on June 24, shortly after prosecutor Giuliano Mignini closed the investigation and said he was planning to seek charges against all three suspects. The diary, seized letters and other prison documents are part of the case file now available at the procura in Perugia at two euro per page.
Knox's efforts, gushed the Daily Mail, "must surely rank as one of most extraordinary and revealing documents ever to have been penned behind prison bars - the 80-page personal diary kept by Amanda 'Foxy' Knox."
So forget Solzhenitsyn coming to us from the Soviet gulag. Jack Henry Abbott scribbling In the Belly of the Beast. Il mio diaro del prigione is it.
Pity the poor harassed research assistant frantically skimming the handwritten, schoolgirlish pages, while a big-time reporter hovers over the desk. Rather than mimic the British, I'll give you the American version: Bigtime: "You gotta give me something, man. I'm on deadline. God, look at that. She's conjugating avere, the most basic of all Italian verbs. Thanking Dido and Paul McCartney for writing corny song lyrics. Doing a movie review of 'Synbad.' Can you believe it? I feel like I'm in kindergarten. Hurry up. Find me something I can sell." Frightened researcher: "I'm looking. I'm looking." Bigtime: "Okay, I got it. How about if we say she boasts about her sex life and/or beauty 24/7? You pull a few quotes. I'll go out and interview an expert on serial killers. So what if he's never met Knox or the other two suspects? I'll get him to say something classic, like she and Italian lover boy are involved in a folie-a-deux. We'll run with that."
Meanwhile, headline writers around the world do a "sex and boasting about sex" spin on the same old document, while breathless reporters apparently forget they've leaked it before. "College Student Murder Suspect Amanda Knox Boasts In Jailhouse Diary of Fan Mail From Men"--Fox News. "Meredith Kercher Murder Suspects Claims To Be Sex Symbol"--Telegraph "I got 23 fan letters from guys today: Foxy Knox's disturbing diary"--Daily Mail "I'm only a target because I'm sexy."--Times of London "Sex Symbol" Amanda Knox Jailed For Murder, Or For Being "Too Sexy"?--Post Chronicle "Foxy Knoxy Protests Innocence and Details Her Many Lovers--Daily Mail "Brutal murderer or just too sexy for the cops? Is the suspect in an Italian murder case innocent or a narcissistic sociopath?"--MSNBC
Oddly enough, the Daily Mail got one thing right, unlike the prestigious Times of London, Corriere della Sera and other media outlets. The number of lovers. Seven total, not seven just in Italy. And the Mail noted she drew up the list because a prison doctor told her "incorrectly, Knox later concludes, that blood tests have revealed her to be HIV positive."
She then describes the birth control method used with each man and notes whether or not that constitutes safe sex. That's as salacious as the diary gets.
So what about those male admirers Knox is supposed to have boasted about? Did she say she was only a target because she was sexy? Did she compare her beauty to Helen of Troy? Let's start with the 23 love letters from men the Daily Mail says she bragged about receiving in prison. On Nov. 19, she does mentions that she got 23 "fan letters" that "the jail had been saving up for me." That brings her total to 35. A postcard notifying her that a package is being held at the post office makes it 36.
Yes, they're all from guys, 20-35 on average, but one 55 (he "thankfully offers fatherly advice.") "All of them reassure me that they believe me and wish me courage, and patience. Some ask me to have faith in God. Others bash the Italian justice system." Most do offer compliments on her beauty. She's also heard about Web sites that describe her as hot. However she doesn't say she's in jail or targeted by the police because she's sexy. She doesn't mention the police in this section at all. Nor does she compare her beauty favorably to the famous Helen.
"I think the same thing about this as I did before. If I were ugly would they be writing me wishing me encouragement? I don't think so. Oh, well, this is what my life is and I'll write to them and thank them for thinking of me." She adds "Jeez, I'm not even that good-looking! People are acting like I'm the prettiest thing since Helen of Troy!" "I don't care about this stuff," she says. "I just want to go home." Later she tells her friends about the fan mail. "Needless to say, I would much rather receive letters from you all, so here's my address."
What of Patrick Lumumba, the man arrested as a result of Knox's lawyerless "false confession"? Was Corriere della Sera right when it says, "She is 'happy' when Patrik Lumumba is released, as though she has forgotten that she was responsible for sending him to prison"? This may be small comfort to Patrick and his family, but the diary contains "multi pensiorni" about him and much talk of regret.
On Nov. 25 she says, "Why would I be in here for 20 years if I am, in reality, completely innocent? The only thing I screwed up on was when I said I saw Patrick, but I never said his name with any sort of malicious intent behind it. I only said it to say something. I was trying so hard to know something, and I know what I said was wrong, which is why I'm telling the truth, that I've remembered, now." On Nov. 29, shortly before the diary was seized, she returns to this topic. "I'm so sorry for all this confusion and in particular for what I did to Patrick. I'm happy that he has been set free." At the Nov. 30 court hearing, Knox allegedly burst into tears when asked why she had accused Patrick, her former employer at Le Chic. But, reports the Times of London, "Ms. Knox told the judge that she was sorry for the trouble that she had caused Diya Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner for whom she worked part time, by falsely claiming that he had had sex with Ms Kercher before murdering her. 'I am sorry for Patrick and for the whole situation,'" she said.
The maddeningly optimistic Knox hoped to be out by last Christmas. It's summer now in the famous Umbrian hills. The mystery of Meredith Kercher's murder remains unsolved.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/demp ... 142848.asp
-
pax - Posts: 22191
- Joined: Thu Mar 23, 2006 8:59 pm
- Location: No H8
by pax » Sat Sep 13, 2008 6:17 pm
Meredith Kercher case: The Albanian witness's 1001 nights
By Candace Dempsey
September 18, 2008
Super witness Hekuran Kokomani will soon slip into an Italian courtroom and deliver a tale worthy of 1001 Albanian nights. He's the only person in the world who claims he saw American murder suspect Amanda Knox, her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede of the Ivory Coast in the same picture frame.
Journalists cannot wait to go faccia a faccia with him during the pretrial hearing on September 16. It's a shame they won't be allowed into the ancient courtroom to gauge his story-telling abilities for themselves.
It was a dark and rainy night, Kokomani's story begins. He was driving by the house that Knox shared with Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student. He accidentally knocked over (or merely grazed) a large plastic garbage can. Suddenly a knife-wielding Amanda and Raffaele confronted him. He threw various objects at the two young lovers--black olives, a Nokia cell phone--and then had a little chat with Rudy, who suddenly appeared.
If true, the Albanian's testimony would shore up prosecutor Giuliano Mignini's group conspiracy theory. He has accused the trio of murdering and sexually assaulting Kercher, a British exchange student last November in Perugia, Italy.
The problem is the alleged conspirators make an unlikely trio. Amanda says she knew Rudy "vaguely," since he visited the boys who lived downstairs from her. Raffaele says he's never met Rudy. The police haven't found emails, letters or even telephone calls that link the three. Nor did they discover traces of Amanda or Raffaele in Rudy's apartment.
Enter the "Albanian witness." If only, Mr. Mignini must be saying, this Kokomani could remember what night he survived this terrifying college student attack. Was it Halloween (when apparently it didn't rain)? Or November 1, the night Kercher died?
It would also have been nice if Kokomani had called the police or hadn't waited several months to come forward--when anyone could have woven an intricate tale about the suddenly famous trio, simply by cracking opening a newspaper.
But the biggest problem with Kokomani's story is he has apparently switched nights. When his story was first leaked to the press in late January, he said he saw the alleged conspirators at 8 p.m. on Halloween, not Nov. 1, when Kercher was murdered.
"Rehearsal for a killing," one Italian newspaper dramatically proclaimed.
Even the Times of London agreed: "The testimony also reinforces the theory that the murder was premeditated. 'It suggests that on Halloween night, October 31, the three were already together and thinking of an act of violence,' one source said."
Then Raffaele and Rudy produced alibis. Rudy's lawyer called the witness "a fantasist." Knox's lawyers said, "absolutely fake testimony." Silence. Then the Albanian witness was "heard" again by the prosecutor.
In late June his testimony was leaked to the press, right after the prosecution asked a judge to file charges against all three suspects. This time the witness evidently said he wasn't sure if he was attacked October 31 or November 1. His story was ornate.
He explained the two-month delay by saying somebody had offered him a 100,000 euro bribe "if he would return to Albania and not testify."
No one knows if he'll tell a believable tale in court, but he is certainly eagerly awaited. It will be good to hear his actual words instead of leaked depositions that may/may not be accurate. Defensive attorneys will be describing Kokomani's testimony as, well, cockamanie.
The big question is: Will he appear on time? Or will he get confused and show up a day late?
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/demp ... 8&x=10&y=3
By Candace Dempsey
September 18, 2008
Super witness Hekuran Kokomani will soon slip into an Italian courtroom and deliver a tale worthy of 1001 Albanian nights. He's the only person in the world who claims he saw American murder suspect Amanda Knox, her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede of the Ivory Coast in the same picture frame.
Journalists cannot wait to go faccia a faccia with him during the pretrial hearing on September 16. It's a shame they won't be allowed into the ancient courtroom to gauge his story-telling abilities for themselves.
It was a dark and rainy night, Kokomani's story begins. He was driving by the house that Knox shared with Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student. He accidentally knocked over (or merely grazed) a large plastic garbage can. Suddenly a knife-wielding Amanda and Raffaele confronted him. He threw various objects at the two young lovers--black olives, a Nokia cell phone--and then had a little chat with Rudy, who suddenly appeared.
If true, the Albanian's testimony would shore up prosecutor Giuliano Mignini's group conspiracy theory. He has accused the trio of murdering and sexually assaulting Kercher, a British exchange student last November in Perugia, Italy.
The problem is the alleged conspirators make an unlikely trio. Amanda says she knew Rudy "vaguely," since he visited the boys who lived downstairs from her. Raffaele says he's never met Rudy. The police haven't found emails, letters or even telephone calls that link the three. Nor did they discover traces of Amanda or Raffaele in Rudy's apartment.
Enter the "Albanian witness." If only, Mr. Mignini must be saying, this Kokomani could remember what night he survived this terrifying college student attack. Was it Halloween (when apparently it didn't rain)? Or November 1, the night Kercher died?
It would also have been nice if Kokomani had called the police or hadn't waited several months to come forward--when anyone could have woven an intricate tale about the suddenly famous trio, simply by cracking opening a newspaper.
But the biggest problem with Kokomani's story is he has apparently switched nights. When his story was first leaked to the press in late January, he said he saw the alleged conspirators at 8 p.m. on Halloween, not Nov. 1, when Kercher was murdered.
"Rehearsal for a killing," one Italian newspaper dramatically proclaimed.
Even the Times of London agreed: "The testimony also reinforces the theory that the murder was premeditated. 'It suggests that on Halloween night, October 31, the three were already together and thinking of an act of violence,' one source said."
Then Raffaele and Rudy produced alibis. Rudy's lawyer called the witness "a fantasist." Knox's lawyers said, "absolutely fake testimony." Silence. Then the Albanian witness was "heard" again by the prosecutor.
In late June his testimony was leaked to the press, right after the prosecution asked a judge to file charges against all three suspects. This time the witness evidently said he wasn't sure if he was attacked October 31 or November 1. His story was ornate.
He explained the two-month delay by saying somebody had offered him a 100,000 euro bribe "if he would return to Albania and not testify."
No one knows if he'll tell a believable tale in court, but he is certainly eagerly awaited. It will be good to hear his actual words instead of leaked depositions that may/may not be accurate. Defensive attorneys will be describing Kokomani's testimony as, well, cockamanie.
The big question is: Will he appear on time? Or will he get confused and show up a day late?
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/demp ... 8&x=10&y=3
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pax - Posts: 22191
- Joined: Thu Mar 23, 2006 8:59 pm
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by gwen » Tue Sep 16, 2008 1:54 pm
American Suspect Appears at Italian Hearing in Death of British Coed
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
An exchange student from Seattle suspected in the murder of her British roommate last November appeared in an Italian court Tuesday for a hearing to decide whether she'll face trial in the grisly slaying along with her former boyfriend and an African man.
Amanda Knox, 21, was escorted by police to the closed-door proceedings in Perugia, a university town in central Italy. Defendants in Italy have the right to skip court hearings, and Knox's former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, chose to remain in jail rather than attend.
Both have been held since shortly after the Nov. 1 stabbing death of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, 21, of England. The two shared a rented house in Perugia.
Also coming to court was Ivory Coast citizen Rudy Hermann Guede, whose has acknowledged being in the victim's room, where the body, with a neck wound, was found in a pool of blood.
All three suspects have denied any wrongdoing.
Hours after the hearing began, it was still in progress, with no participants emerging from behind closed doors.
Kercher's parents and sister attended the hearing, where their lawyer formally pressed a request to attach a civil suit to any criminal proceedings. In Italy, civil lawsuits can be attached to criminal trials. In the Kerchers' case, it would allow the family to more closely monitor case, receiving information that normally would be reserved for only defense lawyers or prosecutors.
Judge Paolo Micheli, who was conducting the hearing, was expected to rule on the prosecutors' indictment requests in several weeks, lawyers have said.
Micheli is expected to hold another closed hearing on Sept. 26 and on Sept. 27, witnesses are expected to be called, the Times of London reported.
Kercher, a student from Leeds University in England, was stabbed in the neck. Prosecutors say the suspects strangled and stabbed her. They also have alleged Guede engaged in sexual violence against Kercher, with the help of Knox and Sollecito.
No motives for the slaying have emerged.
Prosecutors have asked the court to charge the three with Kercher's death as well as counts of sexual violence and stealing $475 in cash, two credit cards and two cell phones from Kercher.
Kercher's family said they hoped for justice.
"We're pleased that we've reached a new phase in the process, hoping that justice will soon be done for Meredith," the victim's sister, Stephanie Kercher told reporters on Monday, with her parents by her side. The family recalled their loved one's "caring, loving nature, and laughter," and how she "loved everything about Italy."
Guede was arrested in Germany and extradited to Italy in December.
Knox, a 21-year-old student at the University of Washington, and Sollecito, 24, have given conflicting statements about what happened the night of the slaying.
Sollecito has said he was at his own apartment in Perugia, working at his computer. He said he does not remember if Knox spent the whole night with him.
Knox has insisted she was not at home during the slaying. But her DNA was found on the handle of a knife that prosecutors say might have been used in the slaying, while Kercher's DNA was found on the blade.
Guede, 21, has denied killing Kercher and has accused an unidentified Italian of trying to frame him.
A fast-track trial, during which evidence is presented in document form and no witnesses testify, leads to a lesser sentence, if the suspect is convicted.
Attending the hearing Tuesday was Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, a Congolese citizen who was originally jailed in the case. Lumumba's lawyer has requested to have a civil suit joined to any criminal proceedings against the three suspects. Lumumba has said he was planning to seek defamation damages from Knox, who accused him of involvement.
Knox at one point told prosecutors she was in the apartment the night of the slaying and had to cover her ears to muffle Kercher's screams while Lumumba killed her, according to court documents.
Lumumba owns a pub in Perugia that is a popular hangout for students. He is no longer a suspect.
Sept. 16, 2008: American murder suspect Amanda Knox is escorted by Italian police outside a courtroom.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,423125,00.html
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
An exchange student from Seattle suspected in the murder of her British roommate last November appeared in an Italian court Tuesday for a hearing to decide whether she'll face trial in the grisly slaying along with her former boyfriend and an African man.
Amanda Knox, 21, was escorted by police to the closed-door proceedings in Perugia, a university town in central Italy. Defendants in Italy have the right to skip court hearings, and Knox's former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, chose to remain in jail rather than attend.
Both have been held since shortly after the Nov. 1 stabbing death of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, 21, of England. The two shared a rented house in Perugia.
Also coming to court was Ivory Coast citizen Rudy Hermann Guede, whose has acknowledged being in the victim's room, where the body, with a neck wound, was found in a pool of blood.
All three suspects have denied any wrongdoing.
Hours after the hearing began, it was still in progress, with no participants emerging from behind closed doors.
Kercher's parents and sister attended the hearing, where their lawyer formally pressed a request to attach a civil suit to any criminal proceedings. In Italy, civil lawsuits can be attached to criminal trials. In the Kerchers' case, it would allow the family to more closely monitor case, receiving information that normally would be reserved for only defense lawyers or prosecutors.
Judge Paolo Micheli, who was conducting the hearing, was expected to rule on the prosecutors' indictment requests in several weeks, lawyers have said.
Micheli is expected to hold another closed hearing on Sept. 26 and on Sept. 27, witnesses are expected to be called, the Times of London reported.
Kercher, a student from Leeds University in England, was stabbed in the neck. Prosecutors say the suspects strangled and stabbed her. They also have alleged Guede engaged in sexual violence against Kercher, with the help of Knox and Sollecito.
No motives for the slaying have emerged.
Prosecutors have asked the court to charge the three with Kercher's death as well as counts of sexual violence and stealing $475 in cash, two credit cards and two cell phones from Kercher.
Kercher's family said they hoped for justice.
"We're pleased that we've reached a new phase in the process, hoping that justice will soon be done for Meredith," the victim's sister, Stephanie Kercher told reporters on Monday, with her parents by her side. The family recalled their loved one's "caring, loving nature, and laughter," and how she "loved everything about Italy."
Guede was arrested in Germany and extradited to Italy in December.
Knox, a 21-year-old student at the University of Washington, and Sollecito, 24, have given conflicting statements about what happened the night of the slaying.
Sollecito has said he was at his own apartment in Perugia, working at his computer. He said he does not remember if Knox spent the whole night with him.
Knox has insisted she was not at home during the slaying. But her DNA was found on the handle of a knife that prosecutors say might have been used in the slaying, while Kercher's DNA was found on the blade.
Guede, 21, has denied killing Kercher and has accused an unidentified Italian of trying to frame him.
A fast-track trial, during which evidence is presented in document form and no witnesses testify, leads to a lesser sentence, if the suspect is convicted.
Attending the hearing Tuesday was Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, a Congolese citizen who was originally jailed in the case. Lumumba's lawyer has requested to have a civil suit joined to any criminal proceedings against the three suspects. Lumumba has said he was planning to seek defamation damages from Knox, who accused him of involvement.
Knox at one point told prosecutors she was in the apartment the night of the slaying and had to cover her ears to muffle Kercher's screams while Lumumba killed her, according to court documents.
Lumumba owns a pub in Perugia that is a popular hangout for students. He is no longer a suspect.
Sept. 16, 2008: American murder suspect Amanda Knox is escorted by Italian police outside a courtroom.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,423125,00.html
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gwen - AKA Gagal_05
- Posts: 29597
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