Kercher Meredith - Angel face: the true story of student killer Amanda Knox

Table of Contents

For all victims of sex crimes

Foreword

By Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Beast

ITS SUCH A SHOCK to send your child to school and for them to not come back.

That was the brokenhearted testimony of the mother of Meredith Kercher, the twenty-two-year-old British student killed in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007, at the trial of her daughters alleged killers two years later. We will never, never get over it.

As the mother of a nineteen-year-old myself, I shuddered at her words.

Hers is the nightmare that haunts every parent who sends a son or daughter off to one of the gap year or study-abroad programs that have become a right of passage for educated Western youth. But the rapid growth of such programs can be credited, in part, to parents woefulor is it willful?ignorance about what can happen when students suddenly find themselves in a foreign land, free from parental or college oversight, and surrounded by a new set of peers, all of them eager to experiment.

The picturesque Umbrian hill town of Perugia may have seemed an idyllic setting for cultural and linguistic enhancement. But for the kids who signed up to go, its greater attraction was its reputation as Party Central. The lengthy official and unofficial investigations into the minds and mores of Merediths accused killersher fun-loving American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Knoxs onetime Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecitoexposed a merciless culture of sex, drugs, and alcohol that was a chilling eye-opener to parents who learned of it too late. Only with Merediths horrific death did it become clear that she and her roommate had been mixing with a crowd that was headed not just for trouble, but into inexplicable evil.

Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyones definition of an all-American girlattractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul? Even when all the facts of the case seem to point so tellingly in her direction, how and why could Amanda, apparently without motive, have helped slash her roommates throat with the aid of her boyfriend and a seedy drug dealerand then gone on to repeatedly lie about the events of that terrible autumn night?

These questions obsessed all those involved with this case, from the legal professionals to the journalists and spectators who packed the Perugia courtroom for the trial. To the Italian prosecutors and the British tabloid press, she was a drug- and sex-obsessed vixen. To her family and her defenders in the American press, she was a wholesome coed framed by an aggressive and incompetent prosecutoror, at worst, led astray by a dissolute Italian boyfriend and the drug dealer Rudy Guede, who had gone on the lam in Germany immediately after the crime.

At The Daily Beast, we were fortunate, early on, to recruit the most diligent and talented English-speaking journalist covering this case.

Barbie Latza Nadeau, who has been reporting from Italy for Newsweek since 1997, arrived in Perugia the day after Merediths battered body was discovered in the house she shared with three other girls. A resident of Rome, fluent in Italian, Nadeau (who also happened to have been married in Knoxs hometown of Seattle) was uniquely suited to grasp all the factual and cultural nuances of this confounding case.

And she pursued them zealously. Over the next two years, she attended almost every session of Knoxs murder trial, read the entire ten-thousand-page legal dossier in Italian, and invested countless coffees, dinners, and glasses of prosecco in cultivating cops, lawyers, judges, witnesses, jurors, friends, and families. Nadeaus regular posts on The Daily Beast during the eleven-month trial established her as an authoritative voice on the casewith appearances on CNN, CBS, NPR, the BBC, and NBCs Dateline. But her pieces also got her blackballed by the Knox family because she declined to toe the line they force-fed to a U.S. media eager to get them on-camera: that Amanda was a total innocent railroaded by a rogue prosecutor in a corrupt justice system.

Daily Beast readers knew otherwise, thanks to Nadeaus thorough and balanced reporting. But her objective dispatches also earned her the enmity of ferocious pro-Knox bloggers, who hurled insults and threats, hoping to discredit her professionally. Instead, her reputation has been enhanced by her diligent pursuit of a story that most of the U.S. media, especially the morning news programs, badly misread.

Barbie Latza Nadeaus sensitive, clear-eyed, and compelling examination of a perplexing case is now a bookthe second in our provocative Beast Book seriesthat brings to American readers the first full account of this baffling case. The book finally gets behind the impassive angel face (as the Italian tabs sneeringly called the defendant) to find the real Amanda Knox. Mining diaries, social networking sites, exclusive interviews, and telling moments in the courtroom, Nadeau paints the first full portrait of a quirky young woman who is neither the she-devil presented to an Italian jury nor the blameless ingenue her parents believe her to be. What Nadeau shows is that Amanda Knox is, in fact, a twenty-first-century all-American girla serious student with plans and passions. But she is also a thrill-seeking young woman who loves sex and enjoys drugs and who wound up implicated in a devastating crime. What really happened that night in Perugia? As Nadeau explains in a new epilogue, we may never know.

In short, every parents worst fear...

A Note on the Sources

MOST OF THE MATERIAL in this book comes directly from official court materials, which are available only in Italian. All references to forensic evidence are based on the transcripts of court testimony and the ten-thousand-page crime dossier known as the Digital Archive. The archive includes police reports, photos, and most of the interrogation transcripts, as well as Amanda Knoxs and Raffaele Sollecitos prison writings and intercepts of their visiting-room conversations. I also refer to PowerPoint presentations, slide shows, and other exhibits presented in court by key witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense. Rudy Guedes testimony comes from interviews with his lawyers and official transcripts of both his fast-track and his appellate trials. The rest of the information about the trial was garnered by my attendance at every session of the eleven-month trial of Knox and Sollecito, except for two sessions in mid-June 2009. In addition, I viewed roughly ten hours of video taken during the crime scene investigation and listened to audiotapes of Amandas and Raffaeles interrogations in prison and the Skype call to Rudy Guede in Germany. Amanda and Raffaeles MySpace quotes and Amandas short stories come from downloads of their MySpace pages made before this material was removed from the Internet in 2007. I obtained Amandas personal e-mails to friends through sources in Seattle.

I first arrived in Perugia on November 3, 2007, the day after Meredith Kerchers body was discovered. I was on assignment for Newsweek. Over the next two years, I became personally acquainted with the prosecutors and lawyers on all sides of the complex case mounted against Knox and Sollecito and the simpler fast-track prosecution of Guede. I interviewed the principal players in both cases several times and often videotaped the interviews, which resulted in more than twenty hours of exclusive footage pertinent to the case. Unless otherwise attributed, quotes from Edda Mellas, Curt Knox, and the Sollecito family come from formal interviews and informal conversations throughout 2008 and 2009. Comments from the jurors come from interviews I conducted with them soon after the verdict in December 2009. Quotes from the lawyers and prosecutors are from text messages, e-mail exchanges, formal interviews, and informal conversations in Rome, in Florence, in the halls of the courthouse, and on the streets of Perugia. I spoke to all these attorneys frequently in various settings; Perugia is a small town where all sides involved in Italys trial of the century were constantly crossing paths.