The Brutal Killing of Meredith Kercher – Part 2
The Investigation
After the discovery of the lifeless body of Meredith Kercher, Via della Pergola 7 became the centre of an intense State investigative activity. The primary agencies involved were: (i) investigative personnel of the Perugia Police; (ii) the State Prosecutor; (iii) the Coroner, who was accompanied by and assisted by a doctor; and, (iv) forensics staff from Rome. On November 4, 2007, while forensics activity was still ongoing, the house was accessed by staff from the Perugia Police, accompanied by Mezzetti, Romanelli and Knox, the housemates of Meredith. The occupants confirmed that they were not missing any knives from the house.
The days of November 6 and 7 were taken up by the searches of various properties including the house occupied by Raffaele Sollecito. During those searches various precautions were taken. For example, all persons initially entering Corso Guiseppe Garibaldi had shoe covers and wore gloves. The evidence disclosed that different teams conducted searches of Via della Pergola 7 and Corso Guiseppe Garibaldi. This aspect of the investigation is more thoroughly discussed in the forensic evidence section (below). From Sollecito’s house the following, inter alia, were seized: (i) from a kitchen drawer, a large kitchen knife (Exhibit 36); (ii) in his bedroom, a second knife with a blade 8cm long.
Due to biological analysis Rudy Hermann Guede became a suspect and on November 16, 2007, the house which he occupied in Via del Canerino was raided and searched. As a point of information, Guede had already fled to Germany and was later apprehended in that country and extradited back to Italy.
Various items were removed from the bedroom of Meredith Kercher, including the blood stained bra which she had been wearing immediately prior to the attack. Finally, on December 18, 2007, some six weeks after the initial search the forensics staff from Rome accessed Via della Pergola 7; the area of focus being the room occupied by Meredith. During this search additional items were bagged, including a piece of a bra with hooks [bra clasp] which belonged to Meredith. This find was to prove crucial in the prosecution of Sollecito. It was the only evidence discovered which signified his de facto physical presence in the bedroom of Meredith during the night of November 1-2, when she was murdered.
As one can imagine various precautions were taken during this period. For example, similar to the search of other properties, all persons initially entering Via della Pergola 7 had shoe covers and wore gloves; access to the rooms was limited and there was a permanent service of guards whose duty was not to let any unauthorized person access to the premises. The posting of guards was also backed up by surveillance of the house at the request of the Perugia Police. On December 18, 2007 the forensics team wore full protective gear and a prepared van was provided in which a television monitor was installed to allow the various parties to see what was happening and what was being accomplished. As a point of information, the person who helped co-ordinate the criminal investigation, Domenico Giacinto Profazi, said he did not change his gloves for each object he touched and that for every entry to the property he used the same gloves.
Aside from the forensic examinations and tests alluded to above, the other vital component of the investigation into Meredith’s murder, involved the questioning of various suspects and witnesses including Amanda Marie Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Hermann Guede. The author will now endeavour to summarise the various interviews, fastening on to the crucial parts which tend to support or undermine their accounts. As we shall see later, the accounts of Knox and Sollecito, coupled with their behaviour prior to and after the discovery of Meredith Kercher’s body, bolstered by forensic analysis, led the State authorities to believe they were directly involved in or worse still had murdered Meredith Kercher.
Amanda Knox’s Accounts
For the avoidance of doubt the following is a summary of the accounts given by Amanda Knox pre-trial and at her trial, in order to avoid duplication and/or to filter out material which was of fanciful weight or plain irrelevant.
A phone call was made by Knox at around 12.47pm on November 2, 2007, at a time appreciably earlier than the discovery of Meredith’s body. The phone call was made to Knox’s mother in the United States. It was accepted that local time in the US (Seattle, Washington) would have been almost 4am (3.47am–author). Knox’s mother, therefore, would have been asleep in bed. This conversation was not intercepted. However, based on a later conversation (November 10, 2007), the telephone line having lawfully been tapped, the mother displayed a perplexity indicating that in the earlier phone conversation Knox had told her of circumstances which, if she was a stranger to what had transpired, she could not have known. Knox was cross-examined on this point at trial. The reader is referred to the Galati [Supreme Court] appeal section infra under subheading (h) Ground 8 – The presence of the accused at the crime scene. This evidence controverted Knox and Sollecito’s alibi. It demonstrated that when the door of Meredith’s bedroom was broken down, Knox and, by implication Sollecito, already knew what lay beyond the door.
Knox, in an e-mail dated November 4, 2007, sent to friends or acquaintances in the United States, was admitted into evidence at her trial. The email refers to Knox having seen Meredith for the last time on the day of November 1st. She was with Raffaele and they ate lunch together in the house on Via della Pergola. Meredith said goodbye to them and left the house. Amanda states it was the last time she saw Meredith alive. Soon afterwards, she and Raffaele also left and went to his house to watch a movie, have dinner and spend the rest of the evening and night at that address. The following morning she got up around 10.30am to go to Via della Pergola 7 in order to take a shower and change her clothes. She also had to get a mop, because the evening before, Raffaele, after dinner, had spilled water from the sink due to a leak and was not able to clean it up.
Upon returning to Via della Pergola 7, she noticed that the door was wide open. She thought someone had gone to take the trash out or gone to the floor below, closing the door behind them but not locking it. She asked loudly whether anyone was at home, but no one answered. The door to Meredith’s room was closed, and this meant she was sleeping. She undressed in her own room and took a shower in the bathroom, nearest to her room and to Meredith’s room (the small bathroom). When she got out of the shower, she realised that on the little bath mat where she had placed her feet, there was blood and also, there were drops of blood on the sink and the faucet (tap). She left the bathroom and went to get dressed in her own room. Then, she went in the other bathroom to dry her hair, where there was a blow dryer. It was at this time that she noticed faeces in the toilet, which surprised her. She then took the mop and returned to Raffaele’s home, locking the door (on the way out).
On her return to Corso Garibaldi she told Raffaele what she had seen and he suggested that she call one of her friends. She then called Filomena Romanelli, who said that she had been out with her boyfriend and that Laura Mezzetti was also away, in Rome with her family. She then realised that the only one to have spent the night in Via della Pergola 7 was Meredith, about whom, however, nothing was known. Filomena seemed worried, so Amanda told her that she would call Meredith and afterwards she (Knox) would then call her back. She then called the two phones that Meredith had, but without getting any response. She then returned to Via della Pergola, this time with Raffaele. Upon returning home, she opened the door to Filomena Romanelli’s room and saw that the window was open and completely broken: there was chaos, but her computer was in its place on the desk.
Convinced that there had been a burglary, she went into the other rooms. Laura Mezzetti’s room was in order, and (further) nothing was missing from her own room. However, Meredith’s door was locked. She began to knock and to call out, without receiving any answer. She was then seized with panic and went on the balcony to see if she was able to see anything, but was unable to do so. She went down to the apartment below to ask someone, but no one was there. She therefore went back inside and Raffaele said that he wanted to try to break down the door of Meredith’s room, but he wasn’t able to.
According to Knox he had tried to break down the door with a kick which failed and he had not persisted in his effort. It was then that they decided to call the police, which is what Raffaele did. She let Filomena know about this, asking her to come home. While they were waiting, two police officers arrived (at the scene) and she showed them all that she had seen. Then Filomena arrived with her boyfriend and two other friends, and they broke down the door of Meredith’s room.
Slanderous Allegation
The account recited in Knox’s email was broadly corroborated by Sollecito in a statement to the police made between November 2 and November 4 (the exact date is not clear). However, on November 5, Sollecito returned for further questioning at the request of the police. This was to explore apparent anomalies in the account given by Sollecito. By then Sollecito and later Knox became prime suspects in the murder of Meredith Kercher. Knox was also interviewed by the police during the night between and November 5 and 6, 2007.
As a point of information the Supreme Court of Italy would later rule that the original statements made by Knox would be admissible against her for the slanderous allegation of falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba (Calunnia) but inadmissible for the sexual assault, murder, theft and knife allegations. The Supreme Court concluded that before being questioned Knox was a murder suspect and as such she should have been treated as a suspect with all the concomitant legal rights. For example, Knox never asked for a lawyer but under Italian law the police should have prompted her to get one. To that adjudication one caveat was placed. The Supreme Court ruled that the memoriale (written statement) which had been written down voluntarily by Knox on November 6, 2007 was fully utilizable at her trial pursuant to Article 237 of the Italian Criminal Procedure Code. As to the content of the memoriale, see immediately below.
On November 6, 2007, shortly after an arrest warrant was served on Amanda Knox, while awaiting transfer to a local prison, she requested some blank paper for the purpose of producing a written statement for delivery to the Chief Inspector of the State Police. In that statement, Knox prefaced her explanation of the various circumstances with the following phrase: “In my mind there are things that I remember and things that are confused”. She then wrote of having seen Meredith for the last time on November 1, 2007 in the afternoon, around 3pm or 4pm; they were at home at Via della Pergola 7, and Raffaele was also there. She and Raffaele stayed a little longer, and then, together they went back to his home (on Corso Garibaldi) to watch the movie Amelie. She then received a message from Patrick telling her it wasn’t necessary for her to go to work at the pub, since no one was there. Therefore, she stayed with Raffaele, with whom she smoked some marijuana. They had dinner together, but quite late, perhaps 11pm.
After dinner, she noticed a bit of blood on Raffaele’s hand and had the impression that it had to do with blood coming from the fish that they had cooked. Raffaele had then washed the dishes, but a break in the pipes had occurred under the sink. Water had leaked with flooding on the floor. Since they didn’t have a mop, they decided that they would do the cleaning the next day with a mop that she could get from Via della Pergola 7. She added that they were very tired and it was quite late. Her next recollection was the morning of November 2, around 10am, when she awoke. She took a plastic bag in which she placed her own dirty clothing to take home. She then made reference to the statement she had made in the Police Headquarters during the night between November 5 and 6, as well as on the morning of November 6. She explained that she made those statements under stress and (in light of) the particular situation that had arisen. In her own mind, she was seeing something like flashbacks which, however, seemed unreal to her, like a dream: eg, Patrick near the basketball court, near the front door of the house: of herself crouched down in the kitchen with her hands over her ears because in her own head, she had heard Meredith scream. She added that she wasn’t sure of the truth and that she was confused. She knew only that she had not killed Meredith. The declaration made by Knox was potentially damaging to her case. As a mixed statement (part inculpatory, part exculpatory), it could be used as proof that she was present in Via della Pergola 7 at the time of Meredith’s murder.
Giving Evidence
At the main trial of Knox and Sollecito, on June 12, 2009, Amanda Knox gave evidence which concluded the following day. She underwent questioning, requested by the civil party Patrick Lumumba and by the defence. She said she knew Rudy Hermann Guede, although just a little. She had met him in the centre of town, during the course of an evening in which she had also met the four men who lived in the downstairs apartment at Via della Pergola. They had introduced her to Rudy. Then she had spent most of the time with Meredith and they had returned home, all together. On another occasion, she met him (ie, Rudy) at the Le Chic pub. She also remembered attending a party in the second half of the month of October 2007, together with the four men (guys) who lived downstairs. She had smoked a joint and every so often, with friends, she used narcotics, marijuana.