Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (17 page)

I assumed that people who dedicated their lives to religion were trained to be nice—that it was part of their professional code of conduct and not always authentic. I had a cautious reaction to Don Saulo even after he said that the priesthood bound him to keep in confidence whatever I told him. I didn’t trust him. My lawyers had warned me that whoever was asking me questions was likely to be a police informant.

But I quickly came to believe that Don Saulo’s decency and compassion were genuine. This made our first few conversations painful for me. Each time, I’d ask him, “Do you believe I’m innocent?”

“I believe you are sincere,” he would answer. Tears rolled down his cheeks and mine.

Sincere is not the same as innocent. But I soon stopped needing that affirmation from him. I could tell that he was an intelligent, caring person interested in me as another human being. He didn’t push to know about my case or even to get me to talk.

Of course, Don Saulo did offer me many opportunities to join the Catholic Church, and God came up in all our conversations. Although I still didn’t believe in an omnipotent being or revere any faith as inarguable Truth, I slowly moved away from the rebellious stance I’d taken in high school. Instead of thinking that religion inhibited individuality, I came to see it as the collective wisdom of countless generations. I respected it as a way to examine fundamental questions. What does it mean to be human? What defines a good life? Why do we exist? Religion was Don Saulo’s language, and it gave me a way to talk with him about my feelings, insecurities, and ideas.

I tried not to discuss my case with anyone but Mom, Dad, and my lawyers. But I confided in Don Saulo about my interrogation, how guilty I felt about naming Patrick, and how confused I was by what had happened to me. “If you did not knowingly wrong someone, Amanda,” he said, “you did not sin.”

And Don Saulo did look out for me. Every Tuesday he screened a movie in the women’s ward under the guise of “rehabilitation.” To my amazement, he convinced prison officials to let me attend. The theater was a large room, empty except for rows of plastic chairs and a piano, which we weren’t allowed to touch, and a retractable movie screen.

Movies, like everything else, brought out Don Saulo’s emotional side. I can’t remember the lights once coming back on at the end of a movie when his cheeks weren’t wet and his voice didn’t quaver, whether we’d just watched
The Passion of the Christ
,
Bruce Almighty
, or
The Princess and the Frog
.

And he burst out laughing as easily as he cried. One day, when we were talking in his office, I shifted in my hard chair, clearly uncomfortable. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“My
culo
hurts,” I answered.

He chuckled. “You mean your
sedere
hurts,” he corrected me, smiling.

Culo
—“ass”—is a word I’d picked up from Gufa. No one would use such a vulgar term in front of a priest unless she were trying to offend him. I was embarrassed, but Don Saulo was amused.

My visits with him were optional. I saw Don Saulo for half an hour a few times a week because he was the only person I met at Capanne who liked sharing and debating ideas. Most conversations I had were with people I didn’t like—my cellmate, some doctors, Vice-Comandante Argirò, the cops who came to Capanne to confiscate more and more of my things. I had no choice but to speak with them. Not being able to choose where I went and whom I saw made me anxious. It seemed as if everyone around me was trying to chisel their way into my head. Even the letters I wrote had to be turned over to the guard in an unsealed envelope—to be photocopied for the police, I later discovered. I felt I had to protect myself from invasion.

Each morning, after the other prisoners had filed outside for
passeggio
, an
agente
would escort me to the infirmary for the first of my required twice-daily visits. All prisoners are under some sort of observation, but someone—probably the prosecutor—had ordered that the doctors question me regularly for my first six months at Capanne in the hope that I’d say something incriminating.

It would never have occurred to me to take anything to improve my mood or help me sleep, but almost every doctor recommended antidepressants and sedatives. The psychiatrist seemed particularly determined to get me to succumb to drugs. I countered with an emphatic “No!” each time. I wasn’t about to give the prison officials
more
control over me than they already had.

Doctor-patient confidentiality didn’t exist in prison. A guard was ever-present, standing right behind me. This bothered me so much that, as time went on, I skipped a needed pelvic exam and didn’t seek help when I got hives or when my hair started falling out. Whatever happened in the infirmary was recycled as gossip that traveled from official to official and, sometimes, back to me.

How each visit went depended on the doctor, and I was grateful for any gesture that wasn’t aggressive or disdainful. A female physician liked to talk to me about her trouble with men. And one day, when I was being seen by an older male doctor, he asked me, “What’s your favorite animal?”

“It’s a lion,” I said. “Like
The Lion King
—
Il Re Leone.
”

The next time I saw him he handed me a picture of a lion he’d ripped out from an animal calendar. I drew him a colorful picture in return, which he taped to the infirmary wall. Later, when he found out that I liked the Beatles, one of us would hum a few bars from various songs to see if the other could name the tune.

But sometimes what I thought was a kind overture would take an ugly turn. I was required to meet with Vice-Comandante Argirò every night at 8
P.M.
in his office—the last order before lights out at 9
P.M
. I thought he wanted to help me and to understand what had happened at the
questura
, but almost immediately I saw that he didn’t care. When I ran into him in the hallway he’d hover over me, his face inches from mine, staring, sneering. “It’s a shame you’re here,” he’d say, “because you are such a pretty girl,” and “Be careful what you eat—you have a nice, hourglass figure, and you don’t want to ruin it like the other people here.”

He also liked to ask me about sex.

The first time he asked me if I was good at sex, I was sure I’d misheard him.

I looked at him incredulously and said, “What?!”

He just smiled and said, “Come on, just answer the question. You know, don’t you?”

Every conversation came around to sex. He’d say, “I hear you like to have sex. How do you like to have sex? What positions do you like most? Would you have sex with me? No? I’m too old for you?”

His lewd comments took me back to the pickup lines used by Italian students when I’d relax on the Duomo steps in Perugia. I wondered if I should just chalk up his lack of professionalism to a cultural difference. Sitting across the desk from him, I thought it must be acceptable for Italian men to banter like this while they were on the clock, in uniform, talking to a subordinate—a prisoner.

He had me meet with him privately and often showed up during my medical visits, but I had always been so sheltered, I didn’t think of what he did as sexual harassment—I guess because he never touched or threatened me.

At first when he brought up sex I pretended I didn’t understand. “I’m sorry—
Mi dispiace
,” I’d say, shaking my head. But every night after dinner, I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. I had no choice but to meet with him. After about a week of this behavior, I told my parents what Argirò was saying. My dad said, “Amanda, he shouldn’t be doing that! You’ve got to tell someone!”

Knowing that Dad thought this was wrong validated my own thoughts. But Argirò was the boss—what could I do? Whom could I tell? Who’d take my word over his?

Silently, I rehearsed what I would say to him: “These conversations repulse me.” But when we were face-to-face, I balked, settling on something more diplomatic—“Your questions make me uncomfortable,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

I thought,
Because you’re an old perv
. Instead I said, “I’m not ashamed of my sexuality, but it’s my own business, and I don’t like to talk about it.”

It didn’t do a bit of good. He ended that night’s meeting telling me that my hair looked nice. It was in a ponytail. He tried to hug me before I left. I backed away.

I still wasn’t sure this was something I should bother Luciano and Carlo with. But when it continued for a few more days, I did.

Luciano looked revolted, and Carlo urged me, “Anytime Argirò calls you alone into an office, tell him you don’t want to speak with him. He could be talking about sex because Meredith was supposedly the victim of a sexual crime and he wants to see what you’ll say. It could be a trap.”

But I was so lacking in confidence I couldn’t imagine it would be okay to resist Argirò directly. I reminded myself that the pressure I felt during these sessions wasn’t anything close to the pressure I’d been put under during my interrogation. Argirò usually sat back and smoked a cigarette, and I knew that I could just wait out his questions. Eventually he’d send me back to my cell. I didn’t tell him off because I’m not a confrontational person. When something bothers me I try to ignore it and get over it or address it in a roundabout way. That’s why I wrote all those apology letters to my mom when I was young, instead of approaching her outright.

One night, Argirò asked me if I dreamed about sex, if I fantasized about it.

Finally I got up my courage. I took a deep breath. “For the last time,” I said, my voice pitched, “No! Why are you constantly asking me about sex?”

Argirò stared and shrugged, like it was no big deal—that it was my fault for not drawing the line in the first place.

Chapter 17

November 15–16, 2007

V
ice-Comandante Argirò broke the news. Instead of his usual greeting—a lecherous smile and a kiss on both cheeks—he stayed seated behind his desk. His cigarette was trailing smoke. His face was somber. Something was wrong.

He pushed a printout of an Italian news article toward me. It took me a minute to translate the headline: “Murder Weapon Found—With DNA of Victim and Arrested Suspect Knox.” Beneath was a fuzzy photograph of a kitchen knife and the words “A knife has been found in Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and the victim’s DNA on the blade. Investigators believe it to be the murder weapon.”

That doesn’t make sense. I must have read it wrong.

I made myself start over, slowly rereading the story, checking each word as I went. By the end I knew language wasn’t the barrier.

Argirò glared at me cruelly.

“Do you have anything to say?” he asked.

“It’s impossible!” I blurted. “I didn’t kill Meredith! I’m innocent! I don’t care what the article says! It’s wrong!”

“It’s proof,” Argirò said, smirking. “
Your
fingerprints.
Her
DNA.”

“I don’t know anything about a knife,” I said. “You can’t prove that I’m guilty when I’m innocent.”

The short conversation ended in a stalemate. I glowered at him.

“Why don’t you go back to your cell and think about what you want to say,” Argirò said.

I didn’t have any words for my anger—or fear. They were roiling inside me as the
agente
led me away.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked by the accusation about the knife. I’d been in jail for nine days, and I’d already been billed as a murderer.

My lawyers had to keep coming to Capanne to relay the ever-changing story of my supposed involvement and ask me if there was truth to the reports.

Investigators were claiming that I’d been responsible for holding Meredith down while either Patrick or Raffaele cut her throat, that I’d pressed so hard on Meredith’s face during the attack I’d left an imprint of my fingers on her chin. The police said that because the bruises were small, they’d come from a woman’s fingers, even though that’s not how it works. “It isn’t like a fingerprint,” Carlo explained. “You can’t tell the size of the hand by the size of the bruise. It depends on the circumstances and the pressure.”

This was another example of the prosecution misinterpreting evidence so it would put me at the murder scene and discounting the things that didn’t fit into their explanation. They had done the same thing a few days before, when they circulated the idea that only a woman would have covered Meredith’s ravaged body with a blanket. A few years later I learned that this is something first-time killers also often do. The detectives didn’t mention how improbable it is for a woman to commit a violent crime, especially against another woman. Nor did they acknowledge that I didn’t fit the profile of a violent woman. I’d never been in a gang; I had no history of violence.

The untruths kept coming—seemingly leaked from the prosecutor’s office.

In mid-November the press announced that the striped sweater I’d worn the night of the murder was missing, implying I’d gotten rid of it to hide bloodstains. In truth I’d left it on top of my bed when I came home to change on the morning of November 2. The investigators found it in January 2008—in the same spot where I’d taken it off. It was captured in photos taken of my room, which my lawyers saw among the official court documents deposited as the investigation progressed. The prosecution quietly dropped the “missing sweater” as an element in the investigation without correcting the information publicly. Convinced that arguing the case in the media would dilute our credibility in the courtroom, Carlo and Luciano let the original story stand.

Things that never happened were reported as fact.

The tabloids said I’d met a nonexistent Argentinian boyfriend in a Laundromat to wash my bloodstained clothes.
False.

The Italian news channel reported that cameras, mounted on the parking garage across the street from the villa, captured a girl dressed in a colored skirt or blouse, presumed to be me, emerging from the garage at 8:43
P.M.
the night of the murder.
False.

The police leaked this to the local press, and it rippled out from there. If true, it would have contradicted my alibi: I hadn’t left Raffaele’s apartment that night. The local headlines in those days often read “Amanda
Smentita
”—“Amanda Found in a Lie.” It bolstered the prosecution’s characterization of me as a depraved, deceitful person capable of murder.

Later, investigators decided the video image wasn’t sharp enough to decipher, that it would be too easy for the defense to knock down. But the damage had already been done.

The press reported police claims that Raffaele and I had destroyed the hard drives on four computers—his, mine, Filomena’s, and Meredith’s.
False.

Later, when a computer expert examined the computers, he discovered that the police had fried the hard drives. Whether it was on purpose or out of extraordinary incompetence, I never learned. But it’s hard to see how they could inadvertently have wiped out four computers, one after the other. My computer wouldn’t have given me an alibi. All investigators would have found was evidence of Meredith’s and my friendship—pictures from the Eurochocolate festival and of our hanging out at home.

Journalists reported that the police had confiscated “incriminating” receipts for bleach, supposedly from the morning of November 2.
False.

The receipts were meant to show that Raffaele and I had bought bleach—what Americans call household cleaner—and spent the night of the murder cleaning up the crime scene.

Four of the receipts were dated months before I arrived in Perugia, and bleach wasn’t among the items purchased. The last one was from November 4, two days after Meredith’s body was found. And it wasn’t for bleach. It was for pizza. But no press corrected the story or reported the truth.

There seemed to be an endless chain of headlines, like new pieces of candy to wave in front of people. New evidence! Amanda said this! As soon as the police fed them a new tidbit of unfounded news, the earlier headline would be replaced. The media seemed less interested in investigating the claims than in just hanging them out there. And the tabloid sensationalism of one country was recycled to become legitimate news in another.

Still, none of the investigators’ claims was as unfathomable to me, as damning, as the reports about the knife.

When I read the article in Argirò’s office, it seemed as fake as a grocery store tabloid claiming “Martian Baby Born in 7-Eleven Has Three Heads.”

Sitting in his cold office, staring at the printout, I could think of only two ways the knife news had come to be. Choice one was that the website had fabricated it. As dishonest and unprofessional as the media had been, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t go this far. Choice two was that the investigators had made a mistake.

I went over what I knew, step by step.

A knife from Raffaele’s kitchen with DNA from both Meredith and me wasn’t possible. In the week I’d known him, I’d used Raffaele’s chef’s knives to cook with, but we had never taken them out of his kitchen.

Meredith had never been to his apartment.

But I could present my argument only to myself and to Argirò.

I could tell that Argirò didn’t believe me. I knew the knife could not be the one used by Meredith’s killer. My heart felt as if it were being squeezed.

Back in my cell, I was quiet and withdrawn, spending the rest of the night venting to my prison diary. (That would end up being a mistake.) I told Gufa I was too tired to talk. I couldn’t sleep.

Luciano and Carlo arrived the next morning. “Are the police really claiming they found a knife in Raffaele’s apartment with my DNA on the handle and Meredith’s DNA on the blade?” I asked, desperate for them to say no.

“The police are saying that the knife is the murder weapon,” Carlo said. “Their forensic experts believe that it was capable of inflicting each wound on Meredith’s body. They’ve given up the idea that it was Raffaele’s pocketknife. Amanda, they’re saying you’re the one who stabbed Meredith. Is there something you need to tell us?”

Both men looked at me intently, gauging my reaction.

I couldn’t believe what they were asking me. “No! It’s impossible!” I shrieked, my body starting to shake. “The police have made a mistake. I never left Raffaele’s that night, I never took a knife from his apartment, and Meredith never visited me there. I didn’t have any reason to be angry with Meredith. And even if we’d had a fight I would have talked to her, not killed her!”

“We believe you, Amanda,” Carlo said immediately. “Don’t worry.”

Investigators apparently had confiscated the knife—a chef’s knife with a black plastic handle and a six-and-a-half-inch blade—when they searched Raffaele’s apartment after our arrest. It was the only knife they considered out of every location they’d impounded, the top knife in a stack of other knives in a drawer that housed the carrot peeler and the salad tongs. I’d probably used it to slice tomatoes when Raffaele and I made dinner the night Meredith was killed.

The officer who confiscated the knife claimed that he’d been drawn to it by “investigative intuition.” It had struck him as suspiciously clean, as though we’d scrubbed it. When he chose it, he didn’t even know the dimensions of Meredith’s stab wounds.

The knife was a game changer for my lawyers, who now feared that the prosecution was mishandling evidence and building an unsubstantiated case against me. Carlo and Luciano went from saying that the lack of evidence would prove my innocence to warning me that the prosecution was out to get me, and steeling me for a fight. “There’s no counting on them anymore,” Carlo said. “We’re up against a witch hunt. But it’s going to be okay.”

They were confident that once our forensic consultants could show how wrong the prosecution was, we would ultimately win. But I also think their promises were meant to keep me from spinning into crisis, especially since I only saw them once a week.

I was choked with fear. The knife was my first inkling that the investigation was not going as I’d expected. I didn’t accept the possibility that the police were biased against me. I believed that the prosecution would eventually figure out that it wasn’t the murder weapon and that I wasn’t the murderer. In retrospect I understand that the police were determined to make the evidence fit their theory of the crime, rather than the other way around, and that theory hinged on my involvement. But something in me refused to see this then.

Soon after the knife news came out, the police came to the prison to confiscate my purse/book bag. I was called down to
la piano terra
—“the ground floor”—to witness the seizure from storage and once again sign a document. They took what was left of the bag’s contents after the interrogation—my textbooks and notebooks for school, my wallet, a book of poems I’d been reading, my journal.

My journal must have been what they were looking for, because Meredith’s British girlfriends testified after my arrest that I’d been writing in it in the waiting room at the
questura
. I had done so to calm myself, but soon the contents were leaked to the press. In it, they found, among other things, my comments about wanting to compose a song in tribute to Meredith. (Ironically, I would later get a bill for the translation of the journal into Italian.)

The police officer who retrieved my things that day was the same one who usually came to the prison when the prosecution wanted to confiscate my belongings or have me sign a document about forensic analysis—an unshaven, overweight man with a crew cut. He was the cop who, during the interrogation, thought I’d told him, “Fuck you!” and who yelled it back at me.

He asked if I’d seen the news about the murder weapon.

I glared at him. “It’s a mistake,” I said. “I wasn’t anywhere near Meredith when she was murdered and neither was Raffaele’s knife.”

The officer shook his head and laughed derisively. “Another story? Another lie?” he scoffed. He looked at me as if I were the most vile, worthless thing he’d ever laid eyes on. No one had ever stared at me with so much hatred. To him, I was a lying, remorseless murderer. I heaved back great waves of anger but waited to get back to my cell before I broke down at the ugliness of it all—my friend being dead, my being in prison, the police following a cold and irrational trail because they had nothing better.