“But your experts had the opportunity to be there, as was their right,” Judge Massei scolded the lawyers for Amanda and Raffaele. “They chose not to go, they were given ample notice.”
So Stefanoni tested the blade sample alone in her lab. Her notes indicated that her initial finding was, as she wrote in English on the report, “too low.” But then she amplified the settings of her equipment to the very limit of Italian and international forensic guidelines. Only then did she find a match to Meredith’s DNA. Because she had no material left to double-test, that result should have been thrown out—no forensic protocol
allows for single-tested evidence. But the prosecutors took it anyway and built their case around it. On cross-examination, the defense had a heyday.
After getting Stefanoni to admit that she had written “too low” at least four times on her report, Bongiorno, Raffaele’s lead lawyer, turned to the crime scene video that documented the collection of evidence and pointed out Stefanoni’s diamond tennis bracelet on the outside of her surgical gloves.
“Is that your beautiful bracelet?” asked Bongiorno.
“Yes,” said Stefanoni slowly.
Bongiorno then watched the video as Stefanoni moves to another sample. Her diamond bracelet is in the same location outside the glove.
“Look! Look! There it is. You didn’t change gloves at all, did you?” Bongiorno gloated. “Did these mistakes happen in your lab, too?”
Stefanoni admitted her mistakes, but insisted that her results were still valid. “If the blood evidence is a positive match, it is not always important how much there is. A match is a match, and the material on the blade matches the victim.”
Throughout the trial, Giuliano Mignini, the lead prosecutor, was described by the Seattle-fed U.S. press as a hot-tempered monster who had abused author
Douglas Preston years earlier and was inclined to wild theories. But it was his co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, who proved the real hothead. The dark-haired, beautiful woman clinging aggressively to her youth wore tight Max Mara pantsuits and designer sneakers under her black court robe and sported dangling bracelets and a giant diamond ring that added a touch of sparkle to the courtroom. When she heard the defense’s Dalla Vedova questioning his paid consultant Sara Gino about Stefanoni’s mistakes at the crime scene and again in the laboratory, she slammed her fists on the table and stormed out of the courtroom, returning a few minutes later with an elaborate black lace fan to cool herself.
“Pardon me, your honor, but it is hard to keep calm when the defense is insulting the state’s forensic expert,” she said, smiling. “They are calling her a liar. I could easily say the same about them, but it’s not professional.” A chain smoker, Comodi often finished her questioning with a cigarette in one hand and her lighter in the other, barely waiting to get out to the hall before lighting up. Mignini left all the technical questioning to her because she was adept at tripping up witnesses and winning back any ground lost on cross-examination.
Comodi loved props. Once, in order to prove a point about footprints, she removed her own shoe and walked around in her stocking feet to show the jury how the sole of one shoe could not be easily confused with the sole of another. During her closing arguments, she pulled a bra out of her handbag and wrapped it around her microphone stand, using a letter opener to simulate how she believed Raffaele removed the bra from Meredith’s body.
She also had a playful sense of humor. She asked Michele Battistelli, one of the first police officers on the scene, about his shoe size to refute defense claims that the size 11 prints at the villa could have been made by the investigators. A big man, he answered, “Size 13,” at which Comodi giggled and blurted out,
“Complimenti!”
(alluding to the old saw that shoe size correlates with penis size).
Many of the prosecution’s witnesses were called simply to refute charges of sloppy police procedures. Alberto Intini, head of the Rome forensic unit that collected the evidence, was challenged by Dalla Vedova about the presence of Raffaele’s DNA on Meredith’s bra clasp, collected weeks after the crime. Finally, frustrated by his unit’s being portrayed as keystone cops, Intini declared, “DNA doesn’t fly!”
THE MOST HEARTBREAKING WITNESS was Meredith’s sixty-three-year-old mother, Arline Kercher, who looked out at the audience to describe her daughter’s death. “It’s not just the death, but the nature of it, the violence,” she said. “It’s such a shock to send your child to school and for them to not come back. We will never, never get over it.” Meredith’s family filed a civil suit against whoever was found guilty of killing their daughter, which accomplished two things: It prevented any guilty parties from profiting from the crime through books or movies, and—because the civil suit was heard in tandem with the criminal charges—it allowed them to have their own lawyers in the courtroom, who could present witnesses and cross-examine anyone who took the stand. The Kercher’s lead lawyer was Francesco Maresca, a fit, sexy, suave Neapolitan with long brown, wavy hair and blue eyes. His suspenders, his stylish fitted suits, and the tiny handcuff key chain hanging out of his back pocket were the focus of much female attention in the press corps. His father was a famous police official in Florence, involved in many high-level investigations, including the Monster of Florence, and Maresca spent a lot of his childhood under protective police escort. Sitting at the glass table in his Florentine office one evening, he told me
that he does not generally take on civil cases. He mostly represents Mafia clients and hard-core criminals. “I’m used to having clients put their pistol on the table before they sit down,” he said.
Part of Maresca’s brief was to prevent the media from molesting the memory of Meredith. At his request, images of her body were only shown in closed-doors sessions with reporters relegated to the upstairs pressroom, where the tiny television monitor was fixed on the lawyers and jury. Several of the jury members looked away at the most gruesome parts. Amanda would not look at all; she either doodled on her notebook or turned her chair away from the monitor. Raffaele stared at the screen, at times seeming mesmerized by the images in front of him.
It is not automatic in Italy that the civil lawyers for the victim agree with the prosecution’s theories, but in this case they did, and whenever Mignini’s team faltered, Kercher’s lawyer Maresca picked up the slack. To bolster the defense’s case, for example, Dalla Vedova called a witness to knock down the idea that the signs of a break-in had been staged. Retired police marshal Francesco Pasquali produced a PowerPoint presentation trying to prove how it was possible for someone of Rudy Guede’s height, weight, and athletic prowess to
toss a nine-pound rock at a window thirteen feet above the ground, break the glass without also breaking the narrow wooden frame, then scale the brick wall and open the window through the small hole in the glass without leaving any traces of fabric or blood.
Maresca, who understood how important it was for the prosecution to prove that the alleged break-in was staged, started slowly.
“So your special training as a physicist or engineer makes you an expert at rock-throwing dynamics?” he asked slyly.
“No, I am a ballistics specialist,” Pasquali replied.
“Have you ever conducted rock-throwing experiments before?” Maresca inquired. “Why don’t we get to see the raw video of the actual experiment instead of this edited version? How many times did it take you to hit the window?”
“No, this was the only one I’ve ever done,” he stammered, clearly shaken. “It took more than a couple tries.”
“Did you try the experiment with shutters closed, like they were the night of the murder?”
“No,” Pasquali admitted.
“Did you throw the rock overhand or underhand?” Maresca continued.
“Overhand.”
“Why? Is that the logical way to throw a nine-pound rock up to a thirteen-foot-high window? Such an impact would have shattered the window, there would be glass outside on the ground, too. Why was there glass on top of the clothing? Can you answer any of those questions?”
“I have no idea,” Pasquali said before slinking off the stand.
NO ONE IN THE JURY spoke English, so the defense tried to limit the number of witnesses who required a translator, understanding that translation would dampen the effect of their testimony. Edda Mellas was the only member of Amanda’s family to take the stand. She did not want to testify, but the defense thought she would be helpful because she received a telephone call from Amanda in the early morning hours of November 2, 2007. Alas for the defense, Edda was too honest, and her testimony didn’t help her daughter. She told Mignini during questioning that, yes, she had received a call from Amanda on the morning of November 2, 2007—three calls, in fact, the first one around 4 A.M. Seattle time. Since daylight savings had not kicked in
yet in the United States, that meant the call was made at noon in Perugia—well over an hour before police found Meredith’s body. The prosecutors always felt that Amanda made that call to her mother in a panic or to set in place an alibi of some sort. After all, people who live overseas, even for a few months, quickly learn to know what time it is back home. As a rule, Amanda would phone home at 3 or 4 P.M. in Perugia, just when her mother was getting up to go to work. So calling when it was the middle of the night in Seattle was a red flag and became an inconsistency in Amanda’s story that lodged in the minds of the jurors.
“She said, ‘I know it’s early’ but she called because she felt someone had been in her house,” Edda testified through a translator. “She called again, twice more. The second phone call was that people were yelling and they found a foot in the room. She was very upset. It was disturbing. I said, ‘Oh my God.’ She couldn’t understand, only the foot.” Edda was referring to Meredith’s bare foot, which the roommates had seen sticking out from under her duvet.
But this testimony contradicted her daughter’s statement on the stand just a week earlier. Back then, Amanda had testified that she did not remember making that first call to her mother.
In fact, there was a lot that Amanda couldn’t remember when she testified at the tail end of the prosecution’s case. This was the most-attended court date of the entire trial, save the verdict, and Amanda arrived with a large cold sore on her upper lip, yet she did not look particularly nervous. She was clearly ready to speak her mind. Her low alto voice was smooth and calm, but she was not sympathetic. She came across as arrogant, at times interrupting Mignini so that she could finish a random thought. She started her testimony in English, but quickly became frustrated by the stop-and-start cadence of her translator. After two hours, she switched to fluent Italian marked by a strong American accent. But she did little to explain why she had falsely accused Lumumba of murder and even less to establish a solid alibi. (As soon as she got a lawyer, Amanda had reverted to her original claim that she spent the entire evening at Raf’s house—not at via della Pergola, hearing Meredith scream.)
Amanda simply brushed off questions that she thought were below her. And when Comodi aggressively pressed her about the phone calls to her mother, she was belligerent.
“During the conversation you had with her in prison, even your mother was amazed that you called
her at midday, which is three or four o’clock in the morning, to tell her that nothing happened,” said Comodi.
“I don’t know what had happened,” stammered Amanda. “I just called my mother to say we had been told to leave the house and that I had heard something.”
Comodi pressed on: “But at midday nothing had happened yet, the door had not been broken down yet.”
Amanda was cocky. “OK. I don’t remember that phone call. I remember that I called her to tell her what we had heard about a foot. Maybe I did call before, but I don’t remember.”
“You did do it,” whispered Comodi, smiling. A hush fell over the courtroom.
“Ok, fine, I did then,” said Amanda sarcastically. “But I don’t remember.”
Like so many moments during the trial, the tension in the courtroom began to rise. Amanda’s lawyers were fidgeting, and Mignini leaned back in his chair. At that point, Judge Massei interrupted the testimony to bring order back to his courtroom. He softly patted the air with outstretched hands to calm things down. “
Scusata, scusata, per favore, per favore
—excuse me, excuse
me, please, please,” he said, smiling gently. Then he turned a serious face to Amanda.
“You don’t remember, but the prosecutor just pointed out to you a phone call that your mother received in the night. So, it must have been true. It happened. Did you usually call her at that time? Did it happen on other occasions? At midday in Italy? At that time in Seattle? People don’t usually call each other in the middle of the night.”
Amanda nodded. “Yes, yes, of course.”
“So either you had a particular motive, or it was a habit,” said the judge.
Amanda’s two days on the stand heralded the beginning of the defense’s case. Her appearance did little to dispel the image that had been put forward by the prosecution of a disturbed young woman who might be capable of heinous acts. The defense had a lot of work to do.
8
“She Is Not Amanda the Ripper, She Is the Amélie of Seattle”
W
HEN THE PROSECUTION RESTED its case, the lawyers for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito had a choice to make. They could either work at cross-purposes, each group to save its own client, or the lawyers could stay united and risk a joint conviction. Thanks to his father’s money and powerful connections, Raffaele had the more experienced defense team. His lead lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, was easily the most powerful person in the courtroom, and Amanda’s attorneys never waivered from their strategy to ride her coattails.
Bongiorno is a small, birdlike woman who pecks at her sandwich and takes quick sips of her coffee during the lunch breaks. Her head darts back and forth as she
speaks, and her eyes seem to look everywhere at once. But she is a powerhouse. A prominent member of parliament for the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s own party, she is a household name in Italy—a sort of Italian Johnnie Cochran often involved in the flashiest legal cases. She made her reputation defending former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on Mafia charges when she was in her twenties. The prospect of losing this high-profile case was not something she took lightly.