Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (13 page)

1. I know the police are confused as to why it took me so long to call someone after I found the door to my house open and blood in the bathroom. The truth is, I wasn’t sure what to think, but I definitely didn’t think the worst, that someone was murdered. I thought a lot of things, mainly that perhaps someone got hurt and left quickly to take care of it. I also thought that maybe one of my roommates was having menstral problems and hadn’t cleaned up. Perhaps I was in shock, but at the time I didn’t know what to think and that’s the truth. That is why I talked to Raffaele about it in the morning, because I was worried and wanted advice.

2. I also know that the fact that I can’t fully recall the events that I claim took place at Raffaele’s home during the time that Meredith was murdered is incriminating. And I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrik, but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me than what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele’s house.

3. I’m very confused at this time. My head is full of contrasting ideas and I know I can be frustrating to work with for this reason. But I also want to tell the truth as best I can. Everything I have said in regards to my involvement in Meredith’s death, even though it is contrasting, are the best truth that I have been able to think.

I’m trying, I really am, because I’m scared for myself. I know I didn’t kill Meredith. That’s all I know for sure. In these flashbacks that I’m having, I see Patrik as the murderer, but the way the truth feels in my mind, there is no way for me to have known because I don’t remember FOR SURE if I was at my house that night. The questions that need answering, at least for how I’m thinking are:

1. Why did Raffaele lie? (or for you) Did Raffaele lie?

2. Why did I think of Patrik?

3. Is the evidence proving my pressance at the time and place of the crime reliable? If so, what does this say about my memory? Is it reliable?

4. Is there any other evidence condemning Patrik or any other person?

5. Who is the REAL murder? This is particularly important because I don’t feel I can be used as condemning testimone in this instance.

I have a clearer mind than I’ve had before, but I’m still missing parts, which I know is bad for me. But this is the truth and this is what I’m thinking at this time. Please don’t yell at me because it only makes me more confused, which doesn’t help anyone. I understand how serious this situation is, and as such, I want to give you this information as soon and as clearly as possible.

If there are still parts that don’t make sense, please ask me. I’m doing the best I can, just like you are. Please believe me at least in that, although I understand if you don’t. All I know is that I didn’t kill Meredith, and so I have nothing but lies to be afraid of.

I finished writing and handed the pages to Ficarra. I didn’t remember the word for “explanation.” “This is a present for you”—“
un regalo
,” I said.

She said, “What is it—my birthday?”

I felt so much lighter. I knew that I was blameless, and I was sure that was obvious to everyone. We’d just had a misunderstanding. I’d cleared the record.

I was on the police’s side, so I was sure they were on mine. I didn’t have a glimmer of understanding that I had just made my situation worse. I didn’t get that the police saw me as a brutal murderer who had admitted guilt and was now trying to squirm out of a hard-won confession.

My
memoriale
changed nothing. As soon as I gave it to Ficarra, I was taken into the hall right outside the interrogation room, where a big crowd of cops gathered around me. I recognized Pubblico Ministero Giuliano Mignini, who I still believed was the mayor.

An officer stood in front of me as straight as a gun barrel and read me my rights. It was in Italian, only some of which I understood. They handcuffed me. A third person held on to my upper arm. They said, “You’re under arrest. We’re taking you to prison.”

As groggy and mixed-up as I was, those official words startled me. “You’re doing what?!” I asked, raising my voice, agitated. I couldn’t make sense of this news.

I thought that they were keeping me to protect me. But why would they have to arrest me? And why did they have to take me to prison? I’d imagined that maybe “custody” meant I’d be given a room in the
questura.
That Mom could be there with me.

It’s inconceivable to me now that I hardly reacted. It didn’t occur to me that I should again ask for a lawyer—or that I needed one. I assumed that once I’d signed my testimony, the moment for a lawyer had passed. I was completely preoccupied with distinguishing between real memories versus whatever I’d imagined. I was lost in my head, trying to remember everything Raffaele and I had done hour by hour, minute by minute, on the night of Meredith’s murder so that I could tell the police. I was still replaying my interrogation. I didn’t—or couldn’t—grasp how much trouble I was in.

If they ever said that I was a murder suspect, I either didn’t hear it or didn’t understand it. I heard “it’s only for a few days,” “bureaucratic reasons,” and “it’s all under control.”

“Okay,” I said reflexively. I’d fought hard for myself during the night, and I was totally passive now. I had nothing left.

Still, what came next shocked me. After my arrest, I was taken downstairs to a room where, in front of a male doctor, female nurse, and a few female police officers, I was told to strip naked and spread my legs. I was embarrassed because of my nudity, my period—I felt frustrated and helpless. The doctor inspected the outer lips of my vagina and then separated them with his fingers to examine the inner. He measured and photographed my intimate parts. I couldn’t understand why they were doing this. I thought,
Why is this happening? What’s the purpose of this?

The doctor and nurse weren’t rough with me, but it didn’t matter. Being on display, nude, in front of strangers while they discussed me was the most dehumanizing, degrading experience I had ever been through. I didn’t protest. I waited silently, feeling violated and angry. In my head I was screaming,
Stop it! Stop it now!

Next they checked my entire body for cuts and bruises, clawing through my hair to get to my scalp and inspecting the bottoms of my feet. A female police officer pointed out different places to examine and document. I thought,
Why are they measuring the length of my arms and the breadth of my hands? What does it matter how big my feet are?
Later, I realized they were trying to fit the crime to my dimensions. What would Meredith’s wounds be like if I’d been the one who stabbed her?
Could
I have stabbed her from my height? They took pictures of anything they thought would be significant.

I pointed out the hickey Raffaele had given me. It had faded to a pinkish tinge on my throat, but I didn’t want to appear as if I were hiding anything from them. The police seemed totally uninterested and recorded it perfunctorily. But during my trial the prosecution used it as evidence to fit one of their ever-changing scenarios.

Raffaele. I didn’t know what to think of him. How could the person I’d felt so close to have abandoned me? Had he really said, “Amanda left that night” and “Amanda asked me to lie for her?” Or were the police just telling me that? I no longer knew whom I could trust. I felt betrayed and alone.

More than anything, I wanted my mom. She would help me explain what had happened and get me out of this nightmarish experience.
Where is she? How can I reach her? Is she waiting for me at the train station?

I was finally allowed to get dressed. The police had brought me an airy skirt from the villa with my hiking boots. It seemed like such a ridiculous choice for November that I wadded it up in my purse and put back on Raffaele’s clothes, which I’d been wearing before.

I asked to use the bathroom. A female police officer stood in front of the stall with the door open.
Why is she standing here? I can’t relax enough to pee, even if she’s looking away.
I guessed this unwanted guardian was somehow supposed to keep me safe.

Eventually I put aside my inhibitions long enough to be able to pee. After that they closed the handcuffs back around my wrists. I think they’d left them intentionally loose, but I was so submissive I reported their breach. “Excuse me,” I said. “But I can slip my hand out.”

They tightened them.

Then they shoved a wool hat down over my eyes. “Duck your head,” Ficarra ordered. “Don’t look up.” She mumbled something about “journalists.”

We were standing in a dark foyer. Everything was hushed. My head bent, I was looking at the floor when I suddenly recognized the backs of Raffaele’s feet ahead of me. I felt a clenching in my chest. I hadn’t seen him since we’d come inside the
questura
together. I had no idea where he’d come from—or why he was walking just steps ahead of me. I so badly wanted to say something, but I knew I shouldn’t make a sound.

I just wanted this ordeal to end.

I was consumed by worry for Patrick. I felt that time was running out for him if I didn’t remember for sure what had happened the night of Meredith’s murder. When I’d said, “It was Patrick,” in my interrogation, the police pushed me to tell them where he lived. As soon as I’d mentioned his neighborhood, several officers surrounding me raced out. I figured that they’d gone to question him. I didn’t know that it was too late, that they’d staged a middle-of-the-night raid on Patrick’s house and arrested him.

Then the doors to the
questura
opened, and I was led outside. No one had told me that what I’d said had been made public. With my head down, it didn’t register that there were photographers snapping my picture. Nor could I know that the police would be holding a press conference at which they’d announce, “
Caso chiuso
”—“Case closed.” Or that, that evening, news sites would report Raffaele’s, Patrick’s, and my arrests for “a sexual encounter that went horrifically wrong.”

When I look at the pictures of me now—standing in Raffaele’s oversize warm-up pants and fleece jacket, a gray wool hat pulled over my eyes—I recall how I followed their directions like a lost, pathetic child. I didn’t question, I didn’t object, I just put my head down when they told me to and trusted that this would all make sense soon. In that moment, I couldn’t see—and it didn’t have anything to do with the hat.

I was half-carried, half-pushed from the building, with Ficarra and another person each holding me under an arm. They directed me into a police car, then got in on either side of me. “Duck your head to your knees during the ride,” one of the police officers ordered. “Do not try to sit up.”

Sirens wailed.

I’ve since read that the convoy of squad cars drove through Perugia, honking horns in triumph. I only know that we flew along the curving roads in a rush of sound, that we were moving so fast I thought I might get sick in the backseat, that the half-hour trip seemed without end. The officers kept their hands firmly on my back; my eye sockets pressed into my forearms across my knees. The hat pulled down, I was floating, as though I’d escaped from my own body.

Finally our car pulled through the main gate of the Casa Circondariale Capanne di Perugia—not that I knew where we were—and came to a stop inside a dim, cavernous garage. As the doors rumbled closed, I was allowed to sit up. A uniformed prison guard came over, and I tried to catch his eye. I wanted someone, anyone, to look at me and see me for who I was—Amanda Knox, a terrified twenty-year-old girl. He looked through me.

The inner garage door rolled open, and we drove into the prison grounds. My stomach lurched. Concrete walls, ablaze with orange lights and topped with coiled razor wire, stretched up to the night sky in every direction. I felt smaller and more frightened than I’d ever been.

We stopped in front of a single-story building in the center of the complex, where an empty squad car sat.
Raffaele’s car?
At a wave from our driver, we entered the building, Ficarra ahead of me, the other officer behind, each gripping one of my arms. Once inside, they let go. “This is where we leave you,” they said. One of them leaned in to give me a quick, awkward hug. “Everything’s going to be okay. The police will take care of you.”

“Thank you,” I said. I gave her a last, beseeching look, hoping this meant that finally they knew we were on the same side.

It didn’t.

I spent the next 1,427 nights in prison for a crime I did not commit.

Chapter 12

Evening, November 6, 2007, Day Five

O
ne guard was trying to flex the thick sole of my hiking boot. The other was shaking her head no.

Of all the things they took from me in my first few minutes as an inmate at Capanne Prison, this loss hit me the hardest. On my nineteenth birthday my stepdad, Chris, had given me his old GPS and taught me how to use it by driving me on a scavenger hunt. We ended up at an outdoor gear store, where I got to pick out my present: the boots I’d coveted for more than a year. I wore them hiking and mountain climbing and paired them with a skirt or dress when I wanted to make an offbeat fashion statement. The boots made me feel invincible—not dangerous, as the guards were implying. Did they think I’d kick someone with the hard, boxy toe? Or try to hang myself with the flimsy laces?

“Do you have other shoes?” the tall, sturdy guard asked me. She had a chiseled jaw and hair that had been dyed reddish purple, like a plum. Her name was Lupa, but prisoners weren’t allowed to call guards anything but
agente
or
assistente.

“No, the police took my sneakers,” I said. “But they went to my house to get these. Why would they give them to me just to take them away three hours later?”

The other guard, a short, fleshy blonde, continued pawing through my purse/book bag. I later learned the prisoners had nicknamed her Cinema because she spoke in slow motion. “You won’t be able to take any of this in with you,” she declared flatly.

Everything I needed was in that bag: my wallet, my passport, my journal.

“What about my textbooks?” I asked, pleading. “I have school. I’ll be back in class in a few days. I don’t want to fall behind.”

“When you leave you can request them from the storeroom,” Agente Lupa said.

I couldn’t believe what was happening. The police told me they would keep me safe, and then they’d just dropped me off here and left. Why would they have done that? They had already confiscated my cell phone and sneakers, and now the prison guards were taking the things that I always kept with me, the things that identified me. Without money, a credit card, my driver’s license, my passport, I felt completely vulnerable.

The next orders left me feeling even more defenseless. “Jacket, pants, shirt, socks,” Cinema demanded, holding out her hand.

I turned my face away as I took off each piece of borrowed clothing. I handed over Raffaele’s sweatpants, his shirt and jacket, his white tube socks.

The cold traveled up from the concrete floor and through my bare feet. I hugged myself for warmth, waiting—for what?
What’s coming next?
Surely they wouldn’t give me a uniform, since I was a special case. It wouldn’t make sense, since I’d be in prison so briefly.

“Your panties and bra, please,” Lupa said. She was polite, even gentle, but it was still an order.

I stood naked in front of strangers for the second time that day. Completely disgraced, I hunched over, shielding my breasts with one arm. I had no dignity left. My eyes filled with tears. Cinema ran her fingers around the elastic of the period-stained red underwear I’d bought with Raffaele at Bubble, when I thought it’d be only a couple of days before I’d buy more with my mom.

Mom must be frantic. Is she still waiting at the train station? Wandering around Perugia looking for me? Has she called the police to help find me? Does she know I’m here?

“Squat,” Lupa said.

I gave her a puzzled look.

She smiled encouragingly and bent her knees to show me. “You see?” she asked.

I squatted, and the women stared at me. Unlike at the
questura
, these guards were at least kind. They seemed almost like two distant aunts, looking at me with sympathy and speaking to me softly, knowing that what they were asking was excruciatingly humiliating.

Naked and crouching, cringing with shame, I held on to the knowledge that I would be released as soon as I could clear up the misunderstanding with the police. A few hours or maybe a day or two. No more than three—and for sure in a special holding cell, not in the real prison. I saw myself striding out of the gate in my hiking boots, book bag over my shoulder, Mom walking beside me, holding my hand.

“Now cough,” Lupa said.

“What?” I asked, puzzled.

“Cough.” She faked a cough. I imitated her.

“Good,” Lupa said. “Here you go.”

She handed me back my clothes, and I got dressed. But I was still shoeless. “
Che taglia di scarpe porti?
” she asked, pointing at my feet—“What size do you wear?”

“
Porto una trenta-nove
,” I said softly—“I wear a thirty-nine.”

“Go and look in the nuns’ closet for something,” Lupa told Cinema.

The female ward at Capanne had a chaplain and five nuns, who ministered to the inmates six days a week, filling in where the Italian government fell short—which included clothing us, since it turned out there weren’t uniforms. The nuns kept a cabinet of donated apparel that they gave prisoners as needed—most of it worn out and poorly fitting.

Lupa pulled a lumpy, black plastic garbage bag out of a large bin and dropped it in front of me. It clanged against the floor. I dug down beneath the coarse, gray wool blanket folded on top and found a metal bowl and plate, a spoon and a fork, a plastic cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a plastic bag of gigantic feminine hygiene pads, a single roll of rough, brown toilet paper, and two sponges—one for scrubbing myself in the shower and the other for dishes. “Your provisions,” Lupa said.

I choked at the back of my throat. I was holding a sack of the only things the government thought were essential to my life. I was in prison, and alone.

At that point, I gave myself as strong a pep talk as I could muster.
This is temporary—a stupid bureaucratic system that can’t be bent. Like a roller-coaster ride that I’ve accidentally gotten on and can’t get off until it’s looped completely around. This is my own fault. I caused the confusion. Now I have to try to straighten it out.

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

“Whoa! No, no. Be brave. You’re okay,” Lupa said.

Cinema came back carrying a worn pair of rust-colored cloth slippers, which I squeezed on over my socks.

“Those work okay,” Lupa said, nodding approvingly. She held my upper arm, I gripped the garbage bag, and Cinema opened the door to the main hall. I walked out in a stranger’s discarded house shoes.

Vice-Comandante Argirò, whom I’d met just before my strip search, was waiting. He was a thin man, probably in his fifties, with a large hooked nose that took up most of his droopy face and a hunchback that jutted out between his shoulder blades. He spoke his name loudly and slowly. “Ar-gi-rò,” he’d said. “
Capi-sci l’i-taliano?
” Did I understand Italian? I nodded. “
Bene
,” he said, picking up speed. “
Sono vice-comandante. Capisci?
”

“
Sì
,” I said. Yes, I understood that he was a vice-commander and guessed that meant he was the second-highest person in charge of the prison.

When I’d first been brought inside from the squad car, I’d seen Raffaele through a barred glass window, locked in a hallway near the prison entrance. He was wearing his gray faux fur–lined jacket and was pacing back and forth, his head down. It was the first time since we’d been separated that I’d seen more than his feet. He didn’t look at me. I’d wondered if he hated me.

Raffaele and I hadn’t been together long, but I’d believed I knew him well. Now I felt I didn’t know him at all.

I wondered why he was being kept here, what the police thought he knew, what the bureaucratic reasons were for his presence at the prison. I didn’t know what was going on in Raffaele’s head, but I imagined that he was as scared as I was. I couldn’t imagine why he had betrayed me, but I wondered if he had been just as confused as I had been under interrogation, had lost faith in his own memories as well. Now I wonder if he realized then, unlike me, how serious our situation was.

I couldn’t catch his eye before I was led away.

The next step was getting my mug shot taken. I was told to sit in a chair bolted to the wall and to look straight ahead into a big, black metal box, like the camera they use at the Washington Department of Motor Vehicles. In the second before they made the picture, it dawned on me that I wasn’t supposed to smile for the camera. Later I was struck by how lost, how frazzled I appeared. My hair was wild. My skin was ghostly pale. My eyes were blank with exhaustion.

Argirò stared at the hickey on my neck, but said nothing. “Follow me, miss,” he said finally.

Agente Lupa took my upper arm again and guided me forward. Argirò fit the large, gold key in his hand into the lock of a bulletproof glass door reinforced with a row of metal bars on either side. All the doors looked the same—and they were all impenetrable without a key. He went in ahead of us, holding the door open until we’d gone through, then closing and locking it behind us.

We walked through a series of dingy cream-colored hallways. Argirò unlocked each barred door as we went. Even in my daze, I noticed that none of the doors had knobs. The
vice-comandante
used his keys as handles.

I was inside the women’s ward. Incredibly, as I went deeper and deeper into the cage, I didn’t have the urge to escape.

Argirò led us up a narrow stairwell to
il primo piano
—“the second floor” (what we call the first floor is known in Europe as the ground floor)—and tapped the key he was holding against the barred door. On the other side, a female guard used her own gold key to unlock the door and usher us into the infirmary. With a patient’s table in the middle of the floor, it was the first vaguely familiar-looking room I’d been in since walking into the prison. The doctor, an older man in a lab coat, his hair dyed dark, was sitting behind his desk. He looked down at the folder in front of him and up at me. “Name?” he asked.

“Amanda Knox.
K-n-o-x
.”

“Do you have allergies, illnesses, diseases?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, we’ll need to do blood work anyway,” he said. Just then I felt a sharp pinch from the back of my head. The nurse had snuck around me and plucked a hair from my scalp. I started to turn and glare at her, but instead asked the doctor, “Blood work? For what?”

“For diseases,” he said. “Sign this. For the tests.” He pushed a document and a pen in front of me, and I signed it. “How do you feel?”

“Worried,” I said. “Worried and confused.”

I shrank down in my seat.

“Confused?” he asked.

“I feel terrible about what happened at the police office. No one was listening to me,” I said. Tears sprang to my eyes again.

“Hold up there, now,” Argirò said.

“Wouldn’t listen to you?” the doctor asked.

“I was hit on the head, twice,” I said.

The doctor gestured to the nurse, who parted my hair and looked at my scalp.

“Not hard,” I said. “It just startled me. And scared me.”

“I’ve heard similar things about the police from other prisoners,” the guard standing in the background said.

Their sympathy gave me the wrongheaded idea that the prison officials were distinct and distant from the police.

“Do you need anything to sleep?” the doctor asked.

I didn’t know what he meant, because the idea of taking a sleeping pill was as foreign to me as being handcuffed. “No,” I said. “I’m really tired already.”

The doctor nodded to Argirò and the guards, and Lupa gently grabbed my upper arm, helping me to stand up. “Thank you,” I said to the doctor.

I bristled at Lupa’s touch, filled with resentment over being held on to like this. Did they think I might spontaneously do something horrible? But I forced myself to relax in her grip—I didn’t want my anger and anxiety to be misread. From the start I tried to make it clear that their clasping my arm was unnecessary. The whole time I was at Capanne, I always spoke calmly and moved slowly, deliberately. When an
agente
grasped my arm, I imagined my arm shrinking until her fingers could encircle it without coming into contact with my skin. The assumption that I needed to be restrained like this made me furious. I didn’t belong in a place where it was necessary to restrict people’s movement by holding their biceps or handcuffing them because they might attack without warning. I didn’t belong in prison.

Argirò led our procession up to
il secondo piano—
the third floor. “You’re not to speak to anyone except the guards,” he said. “No one but the guards.” I guess he said it twice to make sure I got it. But who else could I have spoken to? There was no one else around. A tall, thin, red-haired female guard opened the next locked door. This hallway was lined with closed metal doors. I could hear the sounds of TVs and women’s voices as we walked down the hall, but I saw no one until we came to the end. A pair of eyes peered out from the viewing window in the last door on the right.

The guard stepped forward and unlocked the last door on the left. Argirò went in first. He pointed at the TV, sitting on top of a gray metal box, opposite two beds. The TV was wrapped in brown paper and taped up, like a package waiting to be mailed. “Don’t touch this,” he said. “Don’t you even try.”

He must have been used to people who were much less compliant than I was. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to disobey him. I felt oddly small, like Alice in Wonderland, when everything around her was so much bigger.

The bed looked as uninviting as you’d expect in a prison, with its yellow foam mattress on an orange metal frame pocked with black spots where the paint had chipped off. Two ugly burnt-orange metal cabinets were bolted into the wall—to hold clothes, I guessed.

“Take everything out of the garbage bag,” the female guard said. “If you need anything call, ‘
Agente.
’ ”

“Am I allowed to make a phone call?” In movies, prisoners are allowed one phone call.

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. I needed to hear Mom’s voice more than I’d ever needed anything in my whole life.