Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (29 page)

In testifying, I wanted to make a point: You guys make me sound like I was crazy that I found three droplets of blood in the bathroom sink and didn’t call the police immediately. But I was a twenty-year-old who handled the situation the same way a lot of inexperienced people would have. It’s easy to look back and criticize my response, but when I went home that day I didn’t know there had been a break-in or a murder. To me, it was a regular day. Yes. The door was open. But I’d known since I moved in that the lock was broken. Maybe it was a cause for concern, but I just figured one of my roommates was taking out the trash or had run to the corner store. I was focused on getting ready for our romantic weekend in Gubbio. My thoughts were mundane.
I’ll grab a shower. I’ll pack. I’ll get back to Raffaele’s, and we’ll go.

I knew I wasn’t going to convince Mignini that I was innocent. He was too invested in bringing me down to be open to changing his mind. That was okay. I was addressing the people who hadn’t yet taken sides.

My lawyers’ advice was straightforward: “Remain calm. We’ll ask the questions. No one will rush you. It’s okay to say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

I didn’t want to say, “I don’t know,” but in the two years since the interrogation, my memory of it had grown hazy. I didn’t want to hang on to that night. I’d tried to let it go. I wondered if people would understand how traumatizing it was.

During the weeks leading up to my testimony, I was nervous. What sort of questions would the prosecution ask? Would I be emotionally up to speaking?

But when anyone asked me what I was thinking about my court dates—June 12 and 13—I’d take a deep breath and say, “I’m ready, I’m ready. It just needs to happen.”

I knew Mignini liked to intimidate people. I gave myself a pep talk.
He scared and surprised you the first and second times. But three times? I don’t think so!

As the date got closer, I slept little and talked less. Journalists reported that I was pale and had dark circles under my eyes.

True. I was wearing my anxiety on my face. The day before I had to testify, a nasty cold sore appeared on my lip. My mantra for myself ran through my mind.
You are not afraid. You are not afraid of Mignini. This is your chance.

When I saw the prosecutor in court, Mignini seemed like a blowhard in a silly robe. I wished I had felt that way when he questioned me before.

The first person to question me was Carlo Pacelli, Patrick’s lawyer. Lawyers technically aren’t allowed to add their own commentary at this point, only to ask questions. But he made his opinions known through pointed questions like “Did you or did you not accuse Patrick Lumumba of a murder he didn’t commit?” and “Didn’t the police officers treat you well during your interrogation?”

The lawyer looked disgusted with me. I sat as straight as I could in my chair and pushed my shoulders back—my I-will-not-be-bullied stance.

Within a few minutes I realized that the interpreter hired to translate my English into Italian—the same useless woman I was assigned earlier in the trial—wasn’t saying precisely what I was saying.

I’ve finally gotten a chance to speak! If she gets it wrong, I’ll lose my chance forever.

“Your Honor, I’d like to speak in Italian,” I said politely. I didn’t think about whether it would work or whether it was a good idea. All I could think was,
I have been waiting my turn for nearly two years. This is it!

At least prison life had been good for my language skills.

I was relieved to be able to speak directly to the jury. The hard part wasn’t the Italian; it was being an active listener for hours at a time, making sure I heard the questions correctly and that my questioners didn’t push me around.

Pacelli tried to insinuate that I’d come up with Patrick’s name on my own in my interrogation. “No,” I said. “They put my cell phone in front of me, and said, ‘Look, look at the messages. You were going to meet someone.’ And when I denied it they called me a ‘stupid liar.’ From then on I was so scared. They were treating me badly, and I didn’t know why.

“It was because the police misunderstood the words ‘see you later.’ In English, it’s not taken literally. It’s just another way of saying ‘good-bye.’ But the police kept asking why I’d made an appointment to meet Patrick. ‘Are you covering for Patrick?’ they demanded. ‘Who’s Patrick?’ ”

We went over how I found the room for rent in the villa, my relationship with Meredith, my history with alcohol and marijuana, and what happened on November 2. The prosecution and the civil parties were confrontational. I was able to respond. It took two exhausting days, and there were a few questions I couldn’t answer.

I’d purposely tried to forget the emotional pain of the slap to my head. Other memories had become muddled by time. For instance, I remembered calling my mom only once after Meredith’s body was found, but cell phone records indicated that I’d made three calls while Raffaele and I were standing in my driveway.

During my testimony, I was clear. I never stumbled or stalled. I just said, This is what happened. This is what I went through.

I relaxed a little when it was Luciano’s turn to question me.

“During the interrogation, there were all these people around me,” I said. “In front and behind me, yelling, threatening, and then there was a policewoman behind me who did this.”

I slapped my own head to demonstrate.

“One time, two times?” Luciano asked.

“Two times,” I said. “The first time I did this.”

I dropped my head down as if I’d been struck and opened my mouth wide in surprise.

“Then I turned around toward her and she gave me another.”

“So you said what you said, and then you had a crisis of weeping. Then they brought you tea, some coffee, some pastries? When did this happen? If you can be precise,” Luciano asked.

“They brought me things only after I made declarations”—depositions—“that Patrick had raped and murdered Meredith, and I had been at the house covering my ears.

“I was there, they were yelling at me, and I only wanted to leave, because I was thinking about my mom, who was arriving soon, and so I said, ‘Look, can I please have my phone,’ because I wanted to call my mom. They told me no, and then there was this chaos. They yelled at me. They threatened me. It was only after I made declarations that they said, ‘No, no, no. Don’t worry. We’ll protect you. Come on.’ That’s what happened.

“Before they asked me to make other declarations—I can’t say what time it was—but at a certain point I asked, ‘Shouldn’t I have a lawyer or not?’ because I didn’t honestly know, because I had seen shows on television that usually when you do these things you have a lawyer, but okay, so should I have one? And at least one of them told me it would be worse for me, because it showed that I didn’t want to collaborate with the police. So I said no.”

Then it was Mignini’s turn. “Why did you say, ‘Patrick’s name was suggested to me, I was beaten, I was put under pressure?’ ”

As soon as I started to answer, Mignini interrupted with another question. He’d done the same thing to me during my interrogation at the prison. This time, I wasn’t going to let it fluster me. I was going to answer one question at a time. Showing my irritation, I said, “Can I go on?”

I described my November 5 interrogation again. “As the police shouted at me, I squeezed my brain, thinking, ‘What have I forgotten? What have I forgotten?’ The police were saying, ‘Come on, come on, come on. Do you remember? Do you remember? Do you remember?’ And then boom on my head.” I imitated a slap. “‘Remember!’ the policewoman shouted. And then boom again. ‘Do you remember?’ ”

When Mignini told me I still hadn’t proved that the police had suggested Patrick’s name, my lawyers jumped up. The exchange was so heated that Judge Massei asked if I wanted to stop.

I said no.

At the end, the judge asked what I thought of as a few inconsequential questions, such as, Did I turn up the heat when I got to the villa that Friday morning? Did we have heat in the bathroom, or was it cold? Rather, the judge was trying to catch me in an inconsistency. Why would I come home to a cold house when I could have showered at Raffaele’s?

Then it was over.

In the past I hadn’t been great at standing up for myself. I was proud that this time was different.

When the hearing ended, I got two minutes to talk to my lawyers before the guards led me out of the courtroom. “I was nervous when you first spoke,” Luciano admitted, “but by the end I was proud of you.”

Carlo said, “Amanda, you nailed it. You came across as a nice, intelligent, sincere girl. You left a good impression.”

I took this to mean that I didn’t come across as “Foxy Knoxy.”

For a while during the trial, the guards would let my parents say hello and good-bye to me in the stairwell just before I left the courthouse for the day. My mom, my dad, Deanna, Aunt Christina, and Uncle Kevin were waiting for me there that day. They hugged me tightly. “We’re so proud of you,” they said.

I hadn’t felt this good since before Meredith was murdered.

After another few days in court, the judge called a two-month summer break.

Chapter 27

September 1–October 9, 2009

T
he court-ordered summer vacation seemed as endless as the summers of my childhood. But in those days, summer meant freedom; now summer meant confinement. Two wasted months in captivity. At the end I would be no closer to getting out than I was on the first day.

In early September Luciano, Carlo, and another lawyer in Carlo’s office, Maria Del Grosso, drove to Capanne to see me.

Carlo leaned across the table in the visitors’ room. “Amanda,” he said. “They’re wrong!”

His customary pessimism had vanished. “There was no blood on the knife,” he said. “And there was so little DNA present they didn’t have enough to get valid results. We have everything we need to overturn the case!”

I leapt up. Bouncing around on the balls of my feet, I had so much to say that the words tangled in my mouth. “Thank you!” I said. “You did it! Tell me! How did you figure it out?”

The proof, he said, was in the papers.

We’d been asking to see the prosecution’s notes and test results since before the pretrial. Only by following in the Polizia Scientifica’s footsteps could we understand how the prosecution’s DNA analyst, Patrizia Stefanoni, had come up with her information.

The prosecution was legally required to share the evidence, but even on the pretrial judge’s orders they hadn’t released all of it.

That had been in September 2008. By then it was July 2009. Ten months had passed. On the day the court recessed for the summer, Judge Massei ordered the prosecution to give us the data.

They still held back some information, but within the papers they did give us, our forensic experts found the prosecution had failed to disclose a fact that should have prevented us from ever being charged. There was no way to tie this knife—and therefore, me—to Meredith’s murder. I’d always known that it was impossible for Meredith’s DNA to be on the knife, and I’d long known that the prosecution had leaked assumed evidence to the media. Now I knew that these mistakes weren’t missteps. Stefanoni and her team had made giant, intentionally misleading leaps, to come up with results designed to confirm our guilt.

I was both ecstatic and furious. Thrilled to know I could reclaim my life. Furious that they would have imprisoned me knowing full well that there was evidence that exonerated me. “How could they have done this?” I asked my lawyers. “Please, please explain that to me.”

Carlo, who’d never sugarcoated my situation, said, “These are small-town detectives. They chase after local drug dealers and foreigners without visas. They don’t know how to conduct a murder investigation correctly. Plus, they’re bullies. To admit fault is to admit that they’re not good at their jobs. They suspected you because you behaved differently than the others. They stuck with it because they couldn’t afford to be wrong.”

And for Mignini, appearing to be right superseded everything else. As I found out that summer, the determined prosecutor had a bizarre past, was being tried for abuse of office, and had a history of coming up with peculiar stories to prove his cases. His own case is currently pending on appeal.

In 2002, on the advice of a psychic, he reopened a decades-old cold case. The Monster of Florence was a serial killer who attacked courting couples in the 1970s and ’80s. After murdering them he would take the women’s body parts with him. Mignini exhumed the body of Dr. Francesco Narducci after the psychic told him that Narducci, who died in 1985, was the Monster and that he hadn’t committed suicide, as had been supposed. Instead, Mignini believed that Narducci had been murdered by members of a satanic sect, who feared the Monster would expose them. He charged twenty people, including government officials, with being members of the same secret sect as the Monster.

Mignini had a habit of taking revenge on anyone who disagreed with him, including politicians, journalists, and officials. His usual tactic was to tap their telephones and sue or jail them. The most famous instance was the arrest of Italian journalist Mario Spezi, and the interrogation of Spezi’s American associate Douglas Preston, a writer looking into the Narducci case, who subsequently fled Italy.

In the hour we had each week to discuss my case, my lawyers had never thought there was a reason for us to talk about Mignini’s outlandish history. Carlo and Luciano told me only when it became apparent that, for Mignini, winning his case against Raffaele and me was a Hail Mary to save his career and reputation.

“The whole story is insane!” I said. I couldn’t take it in. It struck me that I was being tried by a madman who valued his career more than my freedom or the truth about Meredith’s murder!

I
felt calmer when we returned to the courtroom in mid-September. I imagine Raffaele did, too. The prosecution’s forensic documents had answered our lawyers’ questions.

Standing confidently in front of the judge, Raffaele’s lawyer Giulia Bongiorno made a speech that gave me even more cause for optimism. Keeping the raw data from us until July 30 had violated our rights as defendants. If we’d had it earlier—when we first requested it—it would have altered the trial from the beginning. “The question for the court,” Bongiorno said, “is the DNA evidence decisive or not? If you believe it’s not, then there hasn’t been an injury to the rights of the defense. But if the DNA is decisive, you have to ask yourselves: Did the defense have the possibility to examine the data to be able to counter the conclusions? Did the defense have the diagrams, the electropheragrams, the quantity of DNA, the procedures? You have the answer.

“If you maintain that the missing documents are decisive for the defense, you must nullify the order to stand trial.”

Carlo picked up where Bongiorno stopped. “It’s evident that the rights of the defense were not fulfilled,” he said in a firm manner that presumed the judge and jury would agree. “If I’d had this data, I would have laid out a different defensive strategy from the beginning.”

Our lawyers’ arguments stirred up all my outrage. The prosecution had kept Raffaele and me in jail for twenty-one months for no reason. If the judges and jury were fair, they’d see that the prosecution had tried to thwart us.

After Carlo and Bongiorno petitioned to end the trial, the prosecution and civil lawyers fired back. They assured the judges and jury that the forensic evidence had been collected and interpreted 100 percent correctly, adding that there was a “mountain of evidence” proving our guilt.

Carlo had cautioned me that Judge Massei would almost certainly not abort the trial. Too much media attention and controversy surrounded it. “That’s okay,” Carlo said. “Our motion puts the court on notice. They now know that we can and will refute each of the prosecution’s arguments.”

Even with Carlo’s warning that I should not expect a quick end, I let my hopes rise. I’d already spent two frigid winters and two stifling summers behind bars. I’d missed two Christmases and two of my birthdays at home, two years of what should have been carefree college days. I’d missed out on my younger sisters’ girlhoods. My mind spun with hopeful possibilities.
What if they lose—today? What if the court accepts our petition to abort the trial? Could this be it? Maybe I’ll walk out of Capanne this afternoon!

That daydream lasted ten minutes. Everyone in the Hall of Frescoes stood for the second time that day. The judge and jury returned to their places. My heart was banging so hard I could hear it pound.
Please, please. Say the trial is over!

Adjusting his glasses, Judge Massei droned in his unassuming voice, “There will be no annulment. We’ll hear both sides discuss the forensic evidence.”

I swallowed hard and closed my eyes, willing my tears back in their ducts.

“We’re hearing Dr. Gino first today, is it?” Judge Massei asked.

Going or not going to these hearings was the single choice I was allowed to make. I chose to go. I took my seat and started listening.

N
o one was contesting the brutality of Meredith’s death—only how it had happened and who was responsible.

Everyone believed that Rudy Guede had been there and that he had killed Meredith. He was already serving a thirty-year sentence for her sexual assault and murder.

The goal of the prosecution was to prove that I had been there, too.

During the testimony phase, from January to July, witnesses discussed everything from my housekeeping habits to my character and sexual activity. It was intensely personal, and sometimes mortifying.

Picking up after the summer break, the forensics phase lasted only three and a half weeks, but it was still interminable: hour after hour of examination and cross-examination. Witnesses were called to talk about the knife, the bra clasp, my “bloody” footprints, how my DNA could have mixed with Meredith’s blood in the bathroom, and our alleged cleanup of the villa. Each expert explained how the evidence was found and documented, how results were calculated and interpreted. They were dissecting a crime I hadn’t committed, blaming me using terminology I didn’t know. I felt like an observer at someone else’s trial. The experts would say things like “Amanda’s DNA was on the knife handle,” and I would think,
Who is this Amanda?

I’d rest my chin in my hand, trying to look contemplative—a skill I’d developed during boring college lectures. But no matter how hard I tried to focus, my attention would wander, my head would bob, and the
agente
standing behind me would awaken me to the nightmare. More than feeling embarrassed, I was terrified that my inattention would be interpreted as my not caring and become another mark against me—even though some of the jurors also habitually dozed off.

When testimony wasn’t dull, it was disturbing. I couldn’t stand thinking about Meredith in the starkly clinical terms the scientists were using to describe her. Did her bruises indicate sexual violence or restraint? What did the wounds to her hands and neck suggest about the dynamics of the aggression? What did the blood splatter and smears on the floor and armoire prove about her position in relation to her attacker or attackers?

The hearings were tedious, gruesome, and enormously upsetting. But we were no longer at the crippling disadvantage we’d been at for two years. Now that the prosecution had been made to show their notes, testing, and some of the raw data, we finally had facts. And the facts supported what I had always known: Raffaele and I had had nothing to do with Meredith’s murder. Meredith had never come into contact with Raffaele’s kitchen knife. I hadn’t walked in her blood.

I wanted to cross-examine the prosecution. I wanted to ask how the story presented with such authority could be so at odds with the truth. Thank God we had Dr. Sarah Gino and Dr. Carlo Torre, both forensics professors at the University of Turin, in addition to Dr. Walter Patumi, out of Perugia. They took the stand and, one by one, began demolishing each of the prosecution’s claims.

On the witness stand, Marco Chiacchiera of the Squadra Mobile had explained that “investigative intuition” had led him to the knife. That flimsy explanation did not help me understand how the police could pull a random knife from Raffaele’s kitchen drawer and decide that it was, without the smallest doubt, the murder weapon. Or why they never analyzed knives from the villa or Rudy Guede’s apartment.

Then we heard the prosecution’s hired forensic experts describe the knife as “not incompatible” with Meredith’s wounds.

I wasn’t the only person who was perplexed. The experts debated the meaning of this phrase as intensely as they did the physical evidence being presented.

During cross-examination, Carlo demanded, “ ‘Not incompatible?’ What does that even mean? If the knife was compatible, wouldn’t you have written ‘compatible’? You wouldn’t have bent over backward, twisting words around to create this ambiguous meaning. ‘Not incompatible’? Am I to understand, perhaps, that the confiscated knife is ‘not incompatible’ if only because it’s a pointy knife with a single sharpened edge? Am I to understand that
any
pointed knife with a single sharpened edge—
most knives
—would equally qualify as ‘not incompatible’ with Meredith’s wounds? Yes?”

“Yes,” the expert answered.

During the afternoon hearing, it turned out that Raffaele’s knife was, in fact,
not compatible.
The blade was too wide to have inflicted Meredith’s two smaller wounds.

The third and fatal wound was a gash to the throat. The pathologist said Meredith had been stabbed at least three times in the same spot. But the blade of Raffaele’s kitchen knife, at 6.89 inches, was longer than the wound was deep—by more than 3.5 inches. Under Carlo’s questioning, Professor Torre, a serious man in his sixties who favored lime-green glasses, explained that in a moment of homicidal frenzy, it would be highly unlikely for a killer to plunge a knife in only halfway, to 3.149 inches. And the odds would rise to impossible when you considered driving a knife in, to precisely the same depth, measurable to a thousandth of an inch, three times in a row. Torre brought in a foam bust and an exact copy of the knife to demonstrate how implausible this feat would be. I thought it was a good idea, but I couldn’t watch anyone stab anything—even a dummy. The notion that anyone thought I could have done that to a person—to my friend—made me not just heartsick but feeling like I might throw up. I squeezed my eyes shut.

As he had done when the prosecution showed Meredith’s stomach contents, the judge cleared the press and public from the courtroom so photos of Meredith’s wounds could be projected on a pull-down screen. These were the same deeply disturbing autopsy photos Carlo had tried to show me seventeen months before. I knew then that I could never stand to look at them.

It kept me from glancing up.

But I couldn’t choose not to hear. Dr. Torre said there was a scratch at the top of the lethal wound. The pressure had been just enough to nick the skin, he said, adding that the scrape was made from the hilt. The only way this could have happened was if the full length of the blade penetrated Meredith’s neck. More proof that Raffaele’s knife could not be the murder weapon.