“Listen, you know I knew those girls, I knew them both, Meredith and Amanda, but nothing more, you know that,” Rudy told Giacomo. “I’ve been to their house twice, the last time a few days before all this business, but I didn’t do anything. I have nothing to do with this business. I wasn’t there that evening. If they have found my fingerprints it means I must have left them there before.”
Giacomo told Rudy that the police were looking for him. So when Rudy was stopped for fare-beating on a train between Mainz and Wiesbaden, in a panic he confessed to the train cops that he was wanted for murder in Italy.
Rudy’s flight to Germany counted against him at trial. Even though Rudy was taken into custody in
Germany as a murder suspect, the authorities there did not interrogate him. But his father, Roger Guede, who hadn’t seen his son in more than five years, flew to Germany and was able to visit him and give him the latest news from Italy, where rumors were swirling about Amanda and Raffaele’s possible involvement in Meredith’s murder.
Il Messaggero
’s Carmignani also traveled to Coblenza prison and spoke to Roger Guede after his visit. “He keeps repeating that he didn’t kill her,” Rudy’s father said, shaking his head. “That’s all he says. I’m his father, but what can I do? Nothing. I wasn’t there for him before, he doesn’t want me to be there now.”
VALTER BISCOTTI ALSO DASHED to Germany to offer Rudy legal services, free of charge; he is always eager to insert himself into headline-making cases. A small, hunched man with closely cropped, graying hair, he constantly walks up and down Perugia’s corso Vannucci in quick, short steps, drumming up business and looking for reporters. His suits are loose and his shoes are scuffed. Known as “the Jackal” to Italians and as “Cookie Man” or “Biscuit Man” to the Anglo press—a play on his last name—Biscotti has made his career
defending public enemies and unlikely victims. In one of his reputation-making cases, he won a civil judgment for the family of an undercover police officer killed by Red Brigades terrorists. He is also currently representing the family of “Brenda,” a Brazilian transsexual whose mysterious death is linked to an admitted affair with a prominent Roman governor. Biscotti brought Brenda’s mother from the Amazon to make the TV rounds, and he is famous for selling access to his clients—reputedly charging Universal, the parent company of NBC, sixty thousand euros for a jailhouse chat with Rudy. (NBC denies making this payment. Biscotti says the interview is scheduled to take place in March 2010.)
That is roughly the amount of his fee for defending Rudy, but Biscotti took the case pro bono immediately after Guede’s arrest. He frequently charges media outlets for “photocopies” of documents and “secretarial fees” related to long, on-camera interviews. Because he feared racial bias if Rudy was tried with Amanda and Raf, Biscotti requested the fast-track trial, which involved only a few witnesses in addition to the forensic evidence. At that proceeding, in October 2008, prosecutors demonstrated that most of the DNA samples from Meredith’s room, including incriminating
traces on her body and his bloody handprint on the pillow underneath it, belonged to Rudy. Nevertheless, the state’s autopsy results showed that more than one person killed her. Luca Lalli, the coroner who first examined Meredith, would testify during Amanda and Raffaele’s trial that the size, shape, and location of Meredith’s dozens of cuts and bruises could only be explained by more than one assailant. She had finger bruises around her neck. She had a bruise on her chin and over her mouth, as if someone pressed a palm to her chin, covering her mouth and scratching her nose. She had identical bruises on each of her inner elbows, compatible with her arms being held back. There were also small, finger-size bruises on her body consistent with a female hand and, on her pillow, a small, bloody shoeprint that could never be positively identified beyond the range of Italian sizes 36-38. Amanda wears size 37.
Rudy was convicted of sexual assault and murder and acquitted of theft. He was sentenced to thirty years, which, because he chose the fast track, was essentially guaranteed to be reduced on appeal. Although he has steadfastly denied murdering Meredith, by the time he got to court he admitted being in the house, no doubt because the proof of that was irrefutable.
In essence, Rudy changed his story three times. When he was arrested, he said simply that “some Italian guy” had done the killing; during his fast-track trial, he said that unknown assailants had beaten him up; at his appeal hearing, he said that it was Raffaele and that he heard Amanda’s voice and saw her silhouette through a window. His reward for placing them both at the scene would be a substantial reduction in his sentence.
MIDWAY THROUGH the Knox trial, while Rudy sat in prison waiting on his appeal, Biscotti threw himself a fiftieth birthday party. The invitation for the April 23, 2009, event declared the theme to be “Don’t Look Back in Anger”; the venue was listed simply as “The Red Zone,” no address needed. This faded disco down the hill from Perugia’s city center is a wildly popular spot with the university students. But it also attracts Biscotti’s crowd, the generation that christened the club when it opened about twenty-five years ago, which explains the pulsating, red-neon palm trees and Heart’s “Barracuda” screaming from the sound system. By choosing The Red Zone, Biscotti was making a
statement about his celebrity as a player in the Knox drama. The guest list made a statement of a different kind about the small, insular world of Perugia’s legal establishment.
As Biscotti, wearing a white bandana to match his bell-bottom pants, played lead guitar on a true-to-original rendition of “Smoke on the Water,” Paolo Micheli, the judge who convicted Rudy of Meredith’s murder, sat on a red sofa tapping his foot in time. Monica Napoleoni, head of the Perugia homicide squad, stood nearby with her sidekick Lorena Zugarani, the burly policewoman whose karate kick broke the window to the downstairs apartment in via della Pergola. (That kick, caught on video, became infamous among Amanda’s Seattle supporters, who used it as an example of shoddy police work, wrongly asserting that Zugarani was breaking a window in the girls’ apartment, not the one downstairs.) Various other faces from the Knox trial—legal assistants, Mignini’s briefcase man, and a couple of guards—mingled in the wings. Because it had been one of those rare days when the hearing ended early, only a few members of the foreign press were still around: John Follain of the
London Sunday Times,
Chapman Bell of NBC,
Andrea Vogt of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
and me. But the reporters had certainly all been invited; Biscotti made a point of knowing every journalist by first name.
“You were a little bit hard on Rudy in your last piece,” he would often say to me, laughing. “I could file a defamation suit, but I won’t this time.” (He has lodged suits against Joe Tacopina and Doug Preston for saying publicly that Rudy is the lone killer.)
“How’s Rudy doing?” I would ask frequently.
“
Tranquillo,
” Biscotti always says. “He’s studying, just like Raffaele. He’s writing, just like Amanda. He will come out with an education. A degree. He is using this time to better himself.”
ON NOVEMBER 18, 2009, just two days before closing arguments began in Amanda and Raffaele’s trial, Rudy stood before an appeals judge and for the first time spoke publicly about the night of the murder. He said he knew Meredith; they had met in the basement apartment on via della Pergola because he was friends with the four guys who lived there. They saw each other at a Halloween party and started talking, and he says she invited him to come over the next night.
“We didn’t have an appointment,” he testified. “She had just said I should come over, so I just went over and she let me in.”
Then, he says, the two of them started to kiss and things were moving along. But he said that neither of them had a condom, so they stopped and started talking. Rudy said that Meredith was complaining about Amanda. She checked her purse and noticed that money was missing, so she immediately blamed Amanda.
“‘My money, my money,’” he recalled Meredith saying. He heard her add, “‘I can’t stand her anymore.’”
Then, he says, he had a stomach cramp and had to use the bathroom. Meredith told him to use the bigger one down the hall. He put on his iPod and listened to four songs, during which time he heard the doorbell ring. He said he then heard Amanda and Meredith arguing, and a few minutes later, he heard a scream. He says he quickly came out of the bathroom, not even taking time to flush the toilet. He saw a man he did not know at the time, but who he later realized was Raffaele. He said he saw Amanda’s silhouette outside the window and heard Raf say to her, “Let’s go, there’s a black man here.” Then Rudy said he went into Meredith’s room to find her bleeding. He moved a pillow
under her and pressed a towel on her neck to try to stop the blood. He didn’t know what to do. He freaked out and ran away.
“Every time I close my eyes, I still see red,” he told his appeals judge. “I am not the one who took her life. But I didn’t save her. That’s the only thing I can apologize for.” Then Rudy turned to the Kerchers’ lawyers and told them, “I want the Kercher family to know that I didn’t take their baby girl away, and I didn’t rape her.”
Rudy’s story is far-fetched. It is just too bizarre to believe that this man would have been at Meredith’s house on the very night her roommate and a lover set out to murder her—and that he would have gone to the toilet at the precise moment they came in. He testified to hearing a doorbell ring, but why would Amanda ring her own doorbell? It is unlikely that Meredith and Rudy had any plan to meet. None of Meredith’s friends saw him at the parties they attended the night of Halloween. Neither Rudy’s nor Meredith’s cell phones showed any trace of contact between the two. The more likely scenario is that Rudy met Meredith just twice. Once, in the downstairs apartment where they were all getting high, and the second time on the night she was murdered. Rudy says that he and
Meredith made out but stopped short of sex, yet Meredith’s body showed signs of vaginal and anal penetration and his DNA was present on her body. As Francesco Maresca, Kercher’s lawyer, told me once, even though the autopsy did not find conclusive evidence of rape, the bruises on her body were not compatible with even rough sex; they were a result of sexual assault. “Sex that ends with someone dead is not consensual,” Maresca declared. “Rudy’s story is unbelievable.”
But it is equally far-fetched to believe, as the Knox camp argues, that Rudy acted alone to kill Meredith. Leaving aside the coroner’s report, he simply wasn’t strong enough to overpower her, sexually assault her, strangle her, and kill her with two different knives, leaving wounds on both sides of her neck without her fighting back—and there was no evidence of that. Rudy’s presence in the murder room is undeniable, although what happened there remains unclear.
The prosecutors never believed Rudy’s story beyond his admission that he was in the house when Meredith died. They have always thought that he met up with Amanda and Raffaele and that the three went to the house together to sew up a drug deal. In fact, one person at the Knox trial testified that he had seen
Amanda and Raffaele with Rudy in the days before the murder. However, this person, Albanian immigrant Hekuran Kokomani, who works odd jobs around Perugia and is rumored to be a police informer, was seriously compromised when he was arrested for cocaine possession a few weeks before he appeared in court. (A popular
colpevolisti
theory is that the drugs were planted to try to keep him quiet. The
innocentisti
disagree.)
Another witness testified that he saw Amanda and Raffaele near the house the night of the murder. Antonio Curatolo, a bearded homeless man who lives on a park bench next to the basketball courts, was wheeled into the courtroom wearing his usual stocking cap and blanket for a coat, which gave the defense ample ammunition to brand him unreliable, in light of his peculiarities. Yet his testimony was surprisingly credible. Curatolo is obviously educated; he was the most politically correct witness at the Knox trial, referring to Rudy as a “man of North African descent” instead of
il nero
—the black guy. He knew Rudy from watching him play basketball and complimented his athletic skill. Curatolo was lucid in his descriptions of the area near the crime scene and convincing when he placed Amanda and Raffaele there, testifying that the two
stood at the gate and watched the house around 9:30 P.M. and again at around 10:30 P.M. on November 1.
AS GUEDE’S APPEALS JURY was deliberating on December 22, Valter Biscotti made his usual
passeggiata,
looking for reporters, but many of the foreign press had left town after the Knox verdict. He eventually ducked into the Sandri sandwich shop and saw me. He ordered his lunch and brought it to my table to predict exactly what was going to happen next and explain how he planned to defend Rudy in the third and final stage of his appeal, to the high court.
“This time, they will not absolve him,” he said between bites of polenta. “Rudy has promised to cooperate even more with the investigators, so they will cut his sentence first down to twenty-four years and then by one-third.” (A fast-track defendant automatically gets a one-third sentence reduction on appeal.)
“So he’s going to admit they all killed her together?” I asked.
“Rudy didn’t kill her, as I’ve told you many times,” he said. “Rudy is going to tell them what Amanda said to them both that night.”
“She told them to kill Meredith?”
“Directed Raffaele,” he said. “She orchestrated it all.”
“And he did whatever she said in exchange for what?”
“Sex,” he said. “Promises and enticements. Raffaele is weak.”
“And Rudy?”
“Rudy was in the bathroom; he came out and it was all over,” he said, repeating Rudy’s usual line. “Rudy has never changed his story.”