I take defence.
Honestly, to me the best defence is to look at what actually happened, before, during and after the murder, with all that we can actually prove. The prosecution was never able to do this, which is a fundamental weakness in the case.
It's the fall of 2007. Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher are both foreign exchange students in the Italian city of Perugia, one from the US, the other from the UK. They have both moved into a shared apartment in the upper floor of a cottage perched on the side of the hilltop city, with a spectacular view of the valley below. Two Italian women, Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti, share the flat with Amanda and Meredith, while the bottom floor is a separate apartment, occupied by four Italian youths. It’s not the best of apartments; the house has not been properly kept, and Filomena has lodged complaints about her window shutters, but it’s fine for a couple of students experiencing life abroad.
The four women get along in the usual way of housemates. They hang out sometimes, talk, occasionally differ about housework, but nothing major. As the end of October comes, they’re all pretty settled and happy. Meredith and Amanda act like normal students abroad. They study, they party, they drink and smoke weed – the boys downstairs have a small plantation indoors – but nothing excessive. Meredith starts dating one of the downstairs boys, and hangs out with a group of English girls from the university. Amanda starts a job serving drinks at a bar owned by the Kongo-born Patrick Lumumba. And in late October, she meets a young Italian man named Rafaelle Sollecito at a concert. They fall for each other, and soon Amanda spends all her free time with her new boyfriend. At Halloween, Meredith dresses up and heads out with her friends. Amanda goes out too, but the party scene has started to wear out its welcome, and she goes to Rafaelle’s place.
November 1st
It’s Thursday, the day after Halloween, and the long holiday of All Saint’s Day ahead. Laura has left the city for the weekend, and Filomena and Amanda both plan on spending the night at their boyfriends’ places. The boys downstairs have left too. Meredith plans on going out, a quiet evening at one of her friends’ place, eating and watching a movie. Amanda has work in the evening, before and after which she will be with Rafaelle. She goes to hang out with him before work, and they start watching Amelie from Montmarte on his computer together.
What had promised to be a fairly hectic night for Amanda soon turns in her favor. At 20:18 she receives an SMS from her boss, telling her it’s a slow night and she doesn’t have to come to work. She sees and replies to him at 20:35. Even better, Rafaelle, who had promised to help a friend transport a bag via bus, is also freed from his obligations. The friend, Jovana Popovic, comes to his door at 20:40 and tells Amanda there’s no need, since the bus line wouldn’t take an unaccompanied bag. Hardly believing their luck, Amanda and Rafaelle settle in for a quiet and intimate night. Amanda turns off her phone so that she would have an excuse should Patrick change his mind. When Rafaelle’s father calls at 20:42, his son is washing dishes in preparation for dinner, grousing over a leaky pipe under the sink. Amelie ends at 21:10, and at 21:26 they watch episode 101 of the anime Naruto which lasts until 21:46. They follow this with dinner and the movie Stardust, but the movies become background for the antics of young love. They talk, smoke a bit, make love, and finally drift off to sleep.
Meredith’s night is similarly quiet, hanging out with friends at Robyn Butterworth’s place. Around 18 they start to eat a homemade pizza, then watch a DVD while eating apple crumble. At 20:45, Meredith and friend Sophie Purton leave, heading home together. Meredith and Sophie part at Sophie’s place at 20:55, and while Meredith walks the ancient streets of Perugia, she tries to call her mother, like she does every night. The call fails, and Meredith decides to try again when at home, where dodgy reception is less of an issue. The CCTV camera of the parking garage right across the street from the cottage captures her at 21:01, the last time she is seen alive by anyone other than her killer.
Enter Rudy Guede.
Rudy has not had the best of autumns. Cut off by his sponsor family, the once promising basketball athlete now spends his time drifting around the student scene, hanging out with other youths, playing basketball, smoking weed. Those who knew him talked about a young man with plenty of issues; sometimes he would bother women at clubs, other times he would have worrying mental episodes, or be found sleeping in someone’s bathroom. However, money was drying up, and in the fall of 2007, Guede had taken up burglary to replenish his funds. Following a near capture by his victims at one of his first tries (where he brandished a knife as he made his escape), Rudy had become more careful in ensuring the places he broke into were empty. Once inside, Rudy would make himself at home. At a lawyer’s office, he smashed the second story window with a rock and scrambled up the wall, then calmly helped himself to a drink as he ransacked the place. At a neighbor’s place, he cooked himself a meal on the stove and threw clothes about without a care, ultimately setting a fire that killed the neighbor’s cat.
His luck had run out in Milan, on October 27th, where he had been caught red-handed in a nursery. The Milan police found and confiscated his stolen goods, but when they called the Perugia police, they were told to simply send him back. No arrest, no charges. So Rudy got his freedom, but he had lost all his ill-gotten gains. Rent day was coming up back in Perugia, and he needed immediate cash. Thankfully, he knew of a place.
From 19:30 November 1st, 2007, Rudy stalks the area from the Piazza near the cottage of Meredith and the others. Unbeknownst to him, he is caught on the parking garage CCTV at 19:51 and again at 20:20. The house looks empty enough, and Rudy knows many youths go home for the holidays. Since the rent was soon due, it would not be impossible to find a fat envelope somewhere within. He approaches the door and knocks. No answer. He knocks on the door downstairs. Same.
Now for the delicate part of his plan. The window closest to the upstairs door belongs to Filomena, and its shutters are too warped to close properly. It’s easy enough for Rudy to lean over the edge and pull one of the shutters more open. Moving back to the parking space, he finds a suitable rock and lobs it through the window. It smashes the glass, hits and flings open the inside shutter, tears through a paper shopping bag and comes to rest under Filomena’s chair. After taking a few moments to ensure no sound coming from the house, Rudy leaps down from the parking area and scrambles up the wall, using the downstairs bathroom window as foothold. Picking the largest shards from the broken window, he unlatches the frame and scurries inside. As he does so, he bumps into the filled-to-bursting closet of Filomena, sending her clothes spilling on the floor, which is now a mess of glass shards, overturned laptops, strewn clothes and torn bags.
After a quick check for cash, and perhaps a mental note to pick up the laptop before leaving, Rudy leaves Filomena’s room, closing the door behind him. Laura’s room is next, but Rudy, now calm enough, stops by the fridge to drink some juice from a carton. He continues into Laura’s room, but as he opens her drawer, he feels a rumble in his stomach, as the kebab he ate earlier makes itself known. With no real concern, Rudy plops himself on the toilet next to the kitchen and relieves himself. It’s a few minutes past nine, and things are about to go very, very wrong.
Rudy hears the front door open and freezes in place. Next he hears a voice calling out “Hello?” He quickly wipes, but doesn’t flush so he isn’t discovered. He stands up and sneaks to the bathroom door. What happens then may never be known or guessed at with certainty. Perhaps he sees Meredith go to her room, and sneaks to the front door only to find it locked and in need of a key. Perhaps he sees her with her phone out and figures she’s about to call the police. Perhaps she sees him, and he rushes after her in a mad dash as she tries to get to safety in her room. Perhaps he reasons leaving the apartment without any money is not an option. Or perhaps he sees a girl he had seen before, had been attracted to before, and something flips in his brain.
What we do know is that it ends with Rudy grabbing Meredith from behind in her room and pressing his knife to her throat. If he tries to calm her or threaten her, it doesn’t work. She pushes back against him, he loses his balance and they slam into her desk. No longer in control, Rudy tries desperately to stop Meredith from struggling. The knife goes in. She keeps struggling. The knife goes in again. And again. Meredith collapses on the floor, blood pouring from her throat. Rudy, his own blood pounding in his ears, is working on reflexes at this point. He flips her over, drags her a bit to the center of the room, puts a pillow under her and tears and cuts off her clothes. And Meredith draws her final, ragged breaths while Rudy molests her. Her last meal has yet to enter her duodenum, making it 21:30 at the very latest, likely somewhere between 21:10 and 21:20.
As Rudy finishes, his senses come rushing back, and with them, the gravity of what he has just done. He has committed burglary and other crimes before, yes, but nothing like this. This is irrevocable. He has blood on his hands, and he places his handprint on the wall. His first instinct is to get towels to stem the blood coming from Meredith. He finds a few in the room, but they get soaked immediately. As he stands up, he sees that he has been kneeling in Meredith’s blood. Going into the small bathroom next to Meredith’s room – not the one he was in when she arrived – he washes his hands, then takes off his shoes and socks and rinses the worst of the blood off his pants. Distracted, he doesn’t notice the footprint on the bathmat made from blood and water. He picks up the remaining towels and goes back to the room.
By now, it’s likely clear to him that Meredith can’t be saved. Overcome by guilt, he covers her with the duvet from her bed. He sits down on the bed to rifle through her bags, his bloody knife leaving an imprint. He finds some money, Meredith’s keys and her two cell phones – one her own, British one, the other given to her by Filomena for use in Italy. Turning off the Italian phone is easy enough, but he fumbles with the British phone, accidentally dialing first her answering machine at 21:58, then the first number in her contacts at 22:00. The latter doesn’t go through, since there’s no country prefix. He gets up, not noticing part of his left shoe has stepped in blood, and walks out the door, closing and locking it. Rudy walks to the front door leaving fading prints of blood behind him, unlocks the door and slams it shut behind him. He doesn’t know the automatic lock on the door is broken, and a key is needed to both lock and unlock it. Heading down to the shaded paths below the city wall, Rudy takes the long way home when an incoming MMS scares him to pieces. He realizes the phones can likely be traced, so he chucks them into a garden and hurries home.
November 2nd.
Amanda, knowing nothing about the night’s events, lazily wakes up at Rafaelle’s place. Yesterday, they had made plans to visit Gubbio over the weekend, which she looked forward to. The leak under the sink had gotten worse in the evening, and Rafaelle was cursing over it. Since Rafaelle came from money, he had maid service, and no proper cleaning tools at home. Now in the morning, Amanda offers to bring a mop from her cottage. She’s already supposed to go there, since she needs new clothes for the trip and she prefers her own shower to Rafaelle’s. It’s before noon when she comes to the cottage and sees the door open. It looks wrong, but Amanda’s brain immediately tries to rationalize it. The lock is broken, someone simply forgot to use the key. These things happen. Stepping into the cottage, nothing seems out of the ordinary. Filomena and Meredith’s doors are closed. Meredith was supposed to be home, but as far as Amanda knew she could have spent the night at her friend’s. Amanda goes to take a shower, noticing a small drop of blood in the sink. Still, nothing that she’s never seen before. More worrying, as she steps out of the shower, there are no towels, and there’s a brown stain on the mat. At this point, the rationalizations start to wear thin (perhaps it’s period blood?) but there’s really nothing that hints at the truth. When Amanda goes to the other bathroom to use the hairdryer, she sees Rudy’s leftovers in the toilet, and at this point she’s starting to freak. She grabs the mop and hurries back to Rafaelle.
On the way, she starts to rationalize again. Why make a fuss over what could be nothing, right? But she can’t shake the feeling, so she calls Meredith at 12:07 while Rafaelle mops. There’s no answer, only voicemail. Then she tries Filomena, who is at a fair with her friend Paola Grande, at 12:08. Filomena finds all this extremely worrying, and tells Amanda to go back and check. Amanda tries Meredith two more times (12:11), before a few more calls from Filomena pushes Amanda and Rafaelle to head out to the cottage, where they arrive at around 12:30. Amanda opens Filomena’s door, and they see the mess inside. Filomena calls again (12:34) and is informed of the break-in. Filomena calls her boyfriend Marco Zanetti (12:34) and gets him and Paola’s boyfriend Luca Altieri to drive over as well. Amanda and Rafaelle are still unsure of what to do. Meredith’s locked door is ominous. Rafaelle makes an attempt to bust it open before giving up. Amanda calls her mother in Seattle (12:47), regardless of time difference, while Rafaelle calls his sister, an officer of the Carabinieri. His sister is adamant that he contact the police immediately, which he does at 12:51. They go outside to wait for the Carabinieri. However when the police arrives, within minutes, it’s for an entirely different reason.
The Postal Police of Perugia have been contacted about two cell phones found in a garden and now two of them are on their way to return them to their owner. When they arrive, a few minutes before 13:00, they are instead hustled inside by two youths who babble about a break-in. To make matters worse, soon after Marco and Luca arrive by car, and a bit later, Filomena and Paola reach the cottage. Filomena immediately checks her room, seeing none of her valuables taken and glass on top of her knocked-over laptop, which she clears off. When Luca tells her about the police being there to return Meredith’s phones, something clicks in Filomena’s head. The broken window, the locked door, phones found outside. A terrible thought occurs to her, and she begs the police to break down the door. The two policemen, who feel in over their heads, refuse, so Filomena asks Luca, of far sturdier build than Rafaelle, to handle it. When he busts down the door, police and youths alike see a room covered in blood, and a duvet on the floor covering all of Meredith but her foot. One of the policemen steps inside and lifts the duvet, perhaps in a vain hope that it might not be too late.
Amanda didn’t see the room, but her Italian friends babble in the panic of the moment about their brief and traumatic view. Meredith was lying by the closet. No, Meredith was lying in the closet. There was blood on her throat. She was naked. At 13:24, Amanda’s mother calls again and receives the grim news. Five minutes later, the Carabinieri call for directions, a random fluke of timing having prevented them from securing a murder scene.
Enter Perugia’s finest.
Giuliano Mignini has, much like Rudy, not had a good year. The Perugian prosecutor has spent over six years working with a Florentine elite police force to uncover a secret Satanic sect responsible for a number of ritual murders, including the famous Monster of Florence. High-ranking masons, police chiefs, prosecutors and journalists had been monitored, arrested and charged based on Mignini and others’ brilliant deductions. But in 2007 it all came crashing down. The weakness of the cases were exposed in media. A massive international protest over journalists imprisoned over critical reporting resulted in the public shaming of Mignini and the dissolution of the elite police force. A normal mind might think this the righteous consequences of a prosecutor abusing his power, but to the brilliant mind of Mignini it showed the power and reach of his Satanic enemies.
And now he steps into the scene of a murder, a young woman stripped and covered, and on the day after Halloween too. A normal person might see it as a burglary gone wrong, but to the brilliant mind of Mignini? Much like his idol Sherlock Holmes, Mignini prides himself on his deductions. A duvet covering the victim? That is something a woman would do! A break-in at a second story window? Seems difficult, must be staged! Everything seems to point to one of the victim’s flat-mates, and it’s not difficult to decide which.
Detective Monica Napoleoni agrees. She also has a brilliant mind, the proper intuition of a police officer. She sees Amanda and Rafaelle standing outside, holding each other, giving each other brief kisses. A normal mind might think this a young man trying to comfort his girlfriend, traumatized over a friend’s brutal murder. The brilliant mind of Napoleoni sees a brazen hussy acting inappropriately at the scene of the crime. Mignini’s friend Giobbi, called in from Rome to help, also agrees. He stares at Amanda’s posterior as she pulls on plastic booties for a tour of the scene, and in his brilliant mind her slightly wiggling hips become a seductive dance intended to entrance the police officer. And when Mignini sees Amanda break down, crying with her hands over her ears, when asked about knives in the flat, a normal mind might think it’s a young woman stressed beyond the breaking point. Mignini’s brilliant mind sees a suspect trying to block out the screams of the murder, thus confirming his hypothesis.
It’s remarkable how everything falls into place when you’ve already decided on the outcome.
The break-in is easy enough. Filomena says her room was tidy when she left, and that she found glass on her laptop. A-ha! If the room was tidy, the murderer must have made the mess, but if he or she did, then the glass from the break-in would not be on top of the mess! A more nuanced view, that Filomena might have kept a few things on the floor, and was largely referring to her spilled clothes and the shattered window as the “mess”, was not entertained. None of the photos show glass on top of anything except the laptop, and no proper forensic investigation of the room was made, but the deduction of the Perugian Law Enforcement was brilliant enough that it wasn’t needed.
Suspicion might have fallen on Amanda on day one, but the police knew they had nothing concrete on her. Her testimony – staying at home with Rafaelle – matches his, with no lies discovered. Except she must be lying, since they have deduced she was there and thus can’t have been with Rafaelle all night. Amanda spends half her waking days with the police, either in the station or on the crime scene. In her naivety she thinks she’s helping to solve her friend’s murder. The grueling sessions last well into the night, with Amanda being found exhausted and seemingly forgotten in the station in the small hours at one point. When she’s not with the police, her phone is tapped, every second of her conversations recorded and finely combed to find even a smidgen of evidence, a Freudian slip, anything.
On November 5th, Amanda meets her boss, Patrick. Her third day with the police had ended at 2:45 that morning, and she is tired and scared, when Patrick approaches her outside class. She tells him of her situation and her desire to quit working for now, and he comforts her with a hug. And if someone saw that – say, a Perugian police officer assigned to tail Amanda – they suddenly had something juicy to report. The police might have Amanda as their main suspect, but they knew a man had been at the scene too. Rafaelle was a possibility, sure, but he could also be a patsy, only used for an alibi. Early stories leaked by police spoke of “African” hair found at the scene, and perhaps Rudy’s presence at the CCTV had helped, but certainly a look at Amanda’s cell phone log sealed the deal – only an hour or so before Meredith’s murder there’s an SMS from Patrick to Amanda, and then a reply. Coincidence? To the brilliant minds of the Perugian Law Enforcement, certainly not!
But they needed to move quickly. Amanda’s parents were on their way, likely to pick up their girl. Forensics had not returned any of the evidence that would surely damn her yet. And they needed the contents of the SMSs. So, a final session is planned. Twelve officers are assigned, with Mignini waiting in the other side of the building. Amanda is still technically a witness after all. Once a suspect, all those pesky “rights to an attorney” comes in. So Giobbi orders them both in, though only Rafaelle gets a direct order. Perhaps they had intended to separate the two earlier, but Amanda decides to tag along, not wanting to be alone.
And so the interrogation of Rafaelle begins in the late evening of November 5th. Rafaelle is taken completely by surprise by the turn-around, as the police start to brusquely ask him if Amanda left the apartment at any point, which they knew she did. He had never imagined being fingered as a suspect or even suspect-adjacent, and suddenly the days before the murder seem a long time ago. It’s easy enough to remember where you were on 9/11, but Rafaelle is asked to remember where he was on 9/10. He hadn’t gone out, but Amanda had, hadn’t she? And he had gone to her after 1 in the morning. If it was a Thursday, well, she worked on Thursdays, so… But something doesn’t seem right, he is forgetting something, so Rafaelle asks for a calendar. The interrogation turns ugly, lots of shouting, his request denied. Finally, hours later, Rafaelle’s hazy description of Halloween is jotted down by the police and presented to Rafaelle as a “spontaneous” account of November 1st. At the end, the police have added a sentence: “Amanda told me to lie”. That doesn’t seem right either, but the police are all smiles now. Sign and you can leave.
Meanwhile, a tired and bored Amanda tries to do some yoga exercises, when she’s pulled into another room for a new round of interrogation. It’s difficult at first, but an interpreter soon arrives. Unbeknownst to Amanda, Anna Donnino is a police officer too, working in tandem with the rest. She is asked about “African” acquaintances, including a young friend of her downstairs neighbors she only met that one time, whose name she can’t remember, and who is at this moment fleeing the country. But more importantly, she’s asked about the text messages to Patrick. She hands over her phone, and the tone changes. “OK. See you later.” To a normal mind, this is a young woman confirming that she won’t come to work and signing off. To the brilliant minds it’s an appointment to murder.
Everyone in the room becomes threatening. They tell her to confess what they know she did – that she met up with Patrick, went to her flat and murdered Meredith. Amanda protests, she was with Rafaelle. But they tell her Rafaelle has revoked her alibi. She was out of the flat! Amanda has no memory of that. Could the weed have caused a memory lapse? Surely not. But the police wouldn’t lie to her, would they? They tell her she will go to prison for 30 years. They slap her in the back of her head and tell her to remember. A pleased Giobbi hears her screams echo through the hall. The interpreter gently asks her if she hasn’t repressed a traumatic memory, much like she herself had done once. Perhaps if she imagines it? What does she see?
Amanda’s “imagination” is written down on a paper as another “spontaneous” declaration. After some coaxing and threatening, she finally signs it. It’s now after three in the morning, and Mignini can finally arrive on the scene. He takes a look at the declaration, and is displeased. It doesn’t contain his brilliant deduction about Amanda covering her ears, or the meeting with Patrick that sealed their fate. A new declaration is “spontaneously” written and signed. Amanda and Rafaelle are not freed, but imprisoned. The police go to Patrick’s place and drag him out in front of his family, and take him down to the station. They are not gentle.
The next day, Amanda writes down a repudiation of her declarations, but it is too late. The three suspects are publicly announced and paraded through the streets. The police hold a triumphant press conference, where they heap exuberant amounts of praises on themselves, for solving such a high profile crime so quickly, without forensic evidence. Just good old fashioned police intuition. Mignini is vindicated.
And then the forensic evidence comes in.
Turns out there’s nothing there pointing at any of the three suspects. Not a speck of their DNA in the murder room. The police rifle through Rafaelle’s apartment, and find a shoe that they claim could have made one of Rudy’s prints, but that’s it. Even worse, Patrick starts getting alibis. At first, the police try to discredit them, but they pile up.
But worst of all is who the evidence points to. It’s unknown just why Rudy was let go by the Perugian police after his Milan burglary, but it must come as an uncomfortable fact if they hadn’t, if they’d done their job, Meredith would be alive. Now, whether they actually remained firm in their belief in Amanda’s guilt, or they just wanted to cover their asses (perhaps a bit of both), they don’t let her go. In fact she’s promoted to ringleader, while Patrick is released and Rudy joins Rafaelle as her underling. Still, they need evidence, and they need it fast if the charges are to stick. Rudy has no connection to Amanda and Rafaelle, and when he is picked up in Germany, he denies the involvement of the others.
At the forensics lab, Patricia Stefanoni is pushed to find evidence that can put Amanda at the murder scene. She has already tested a whole bunch of Meredith’s things without any trace of Amanda. About the only thing she has is a knife that was picked up at Rafaelle’s place. It’s a common kitchen knife, picked up not because it matched the wounds of the victim (it didn’t), or the outline on the sheet (it didn’t), but because the police officer thought it looked cleaner than the others. And it is clean. While Stefanoni finds Amanda’s DNA on the hilt (nothing unusual), there’s no blood on the blade. In desperation, Stefanoni turns the machine’s sensitivity up, way beyond what it is made for, in a laboratory uncertified for such an operation. And in the stuttering peaks of noise, she finds a single, miniscule dot of not-blood DNA, belonging to the woman whose objects have been run through the same machine for days.
If there ever was a linchpin upon which an entire case rested, that bit of DNA was it. It’s seeded to reporters and presented to magistrates as a solid piece of evidence – the murderer’s DNA on the handle, the victim’s on the blade. That the victim’s DNA was almost certainly contamination is not mentioned, neither is the fact that a whole double-knife theory has to be invented to explain the knife not matching the wounds.
As for Rafaelle, when his shoeprint turns out to be a dud, the case against him starts to weaken. So they go back to the flat on December 18th, which at this point is a chaotic mess, most of it caused by police. Among the garbage strewn about Meredith’s floor they find the clasp to her bra, somehow not picked up back in November, and having rolled around the dirty floor. The police pick it up with dirty gloves, and sure enough, on it is found the DNA of Rafaelle. Of course, there’s also the DNA of several other men, but why perform tests on those?
To seal the deal, a couple of witnesses are found. One is a store-owner who claims he saw Amanda looking to buy bleach the day after the murder, though he somehow didn’t remember that when the police first asked him a year earlier. Another is a heroin addict who claims he saw Amanda and Rafaelle at the Piazza that very night. Of course, he was high on heroin, and describes buses that only ran on Halloween. The third is an old woman who heard a scream between 23:00 and 23:30.
The media does the rest of the work. Perugia’s finest leaks more than Rafaelle’s sink, flooding Italian and British media with all the lies Amanda had told, and the incriminating evidence against her, much of which had been swept under the carpet come trial. Eager to build on it, the tabloids dig into Amanda’s social media, gladly supporting Perugian Law Enforcement’s image of a sex-obsessed manipulative jezebel, much to Mignini’s liking. His co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, has persuaded him to tone down the Satanic ritual elements of his thinking, but the Madonna-*advertiser censored* dichotomy remains at the core of the new theory – Amanda was a loose American, setting her boy-toys on her flat-mate as punishment for her virginal ways.
Amanda sees all of her words twisted, all of her actions interpreted in the worst way. She becomes conscious of herself in appearances, which only makes it worse. Her former friends and flat-mates start looking back at all their interactions in the light of what everyone now knows – that she is a murderer. It’s not difficult to turn small complaints into simmering dislike, the occasional spat into resentment, a misunderstanding into a lie.
Rudy keeps his head down. Once he understands the situation, he starts pointing the finger at Amanda and Rafaelle. The case against him is strong, so better to be an accomplice than the sole killer. He opts for a speedy trial, where the prosecution and defense jointly blame Amanda. In the end he only gets 16 years in prison. He is already out on leave.
Amanda and Rafaelle go to trial together, and judge Massei is also a brilliant man. He doesn’t quite believe the sex-game-gone-wrong theory of the prosecution, but he can’t escape the DNA on the knife. So he does what any good judge would do, and invents his own hypothesis. Rudy assaulted Meredith while Amanda and Rafaelle were getting high. When they saw what he was doing they joined in and killed her together. Not really supported by anything, but a judge is a judge.
The rest of the story plays out in public. Judge Hellman reveals the depths of the Perugian police’s incompetence in the appeal trial, where independent experts tear Stefanoni’s evidence to shreds. Without those, the case collapses like a house of cards, but Mignini has cleverly enough made the case political. In his closing statements he calls upon national pride, implying corrupt American influence behind Amanda’s support. It succeeds, as the Supreme Court orders a new trial, where the fact that the evidence was “poor” or “non-existent” shouldn’t count if there is lots of it. But the farce has to end sometime. In the last round at the Supreme Court, the judges recognize the flaws in the Italian system that caused eight years of misery for everyone involved.
In the end, there really wasn’t a case against Amanda. A normal investigation may well have looked at her as a person of interest, but once forensics were in that really should have been it. But that is perhaps for minds less brilliant than others.
