The Mammoth Book of New Csi (12 page)
If Knox and Sollecito used this knife to kill Meredith, as the prosecution contended, why would they take it back to Sollecito’s apartment and put it in a drawer with the regular utensils to be used for cooking. Testifying at the trial, an officer said he used “police intuition” when he picked out that knife from Sollecito’s cutlery.
Officers testified that there was a strong smell of bleach in the apartment and that the knife looked exceptionally clean. Stefanoni testified that it had tiny scratches on the blade, compatible with intense scrubbing. However, no traces of bleach were found on the knife, so it had not been cleaned in the way police forensics experts said.
No DNA belonging to Knox was found in the room where Meredith had been killed. Both Knox’s and Meredith’s DNA was found in the bathroom they shared, as would be expected. Some was commingled in Meredith’s blood, though. With the aid of Luminol – a white crystalline compound used in crime scene investigations that glows blue when it comes into contact with traces of blood even after it has been cleaned up – a spot of blood was found in Filomena Romanelli’s bedroom. The prosecution maintained that Meredith was murdered when she refused to participate in a sado-masochistic sex game and the break-in was faked afterwards by Knox and Sollecito to cover up the crime. The window was broken from the outside with a large rock. This would have been a peculiar way to break into the house, according to Officer Profazio.
“I thought it strange as it would have needed a superhuman effort to climb up to it,” he said. “There was a much easier way in at the back, via a terrace and a boiler [room]. There was a chair and table on the terrace and it would have been a lot easier to get in this way.”
Filomena’s room was ransacked, but nothing was taken – even though jewellery and expensive sunglasses were left in plain sight. A laptop, a video-camera and other valuables had not been stolen from the house.
“They were all items that would have been taken in a break-in,” said Inspector Michele Battistelli of the Polizia postale.
Filomena testified that when she had first seen her room, she had thought: “What a stupid burglar.” Clothes had been pulled from the draws of the dresser. Shards of glass were found on top of them, leading investigators to conclude that the window had been broken after the room had been ransacked, not before.
“Straightaway I thought it was an attempt to make it look like a burglary,” said Inspector Battistelli. The defence did not counter this theory.
Another four spots of Kercher’s blood mixed with Knox’s DNA were found in the bathroom the women shared – on the sink, the bidet and on the side of a Q-tip box. Prosecutors argued that Knox washed Meredith’s blood from her hands in the bathroom. But all this could be explained innocently enough and the defence did not contest any of the lab results, except to say that it is common to find mixed DNA from two people who shared a house. There were other reasons that Knox could have been bleeding. Originally she told police that her pierced ears were infected and her mother, Edda Mellas, told
Newsweek
magazine that she had been menstruating – though neither scenario was presented to the jury. Knox’s supporters suggest that Meredith’s blood had been dropped by Guede on a spot where Knox’s dried blood or DNA already existed, even though Guede’s DNA profile was not identified in any of the five spots.
No fingerprints from Knox were found in Meredith’s bedroom. In fact, only one was found in the entire apartment – on a drinking glass in the kitchen sink. The lack of any witness or forensic evidence that placed Knox at the murder scene should have exonerated her. However, there were nineteen fingerprints in Meredith’s room that had been smeared or were otherwise identifiable. They could have been those of Knox or Sollecito.
Luminol revealed Knox’s footprint in the corridor outside Meredith’s room. But, again, this is hardly damning evidence. Luminol reveals prints left in bleach and some acidic juices as well as blood. Knox also testified that when she came home, she had taken a shower, then seen the blood on the floor, so she might have trailed it unknowingly. However, this also invited the question: if she came home to find the front door open, why did she take a shower before investigating further?
A bloody footprint was found on the mat in one of the bathrooms. This was said to be “absolutely compatible” with Sollecito’s foot by a forensic scientist testifying for the prosecution. An expert for the defence countered that it also matched Guede’s foot. But experts for both sides agreed that the print was not a positive identification because it lacked the swirls of a toeprint that could be matched to a specific individual.
More bloody footprints were found in Meredith’s bedroom, attributed to Sollecito by the prosecution. The defence said it belonged to Guede. A bloody footprint from a smaller shoe was found on a pillow beneath Meredith’s head.
“A woman’s shoeprint was found in Meredith’s room, of a size ranging from 36 to 38, on a pillow placed under the body,” said Monica Napoleoni, the head of Perugia’s murder squad. “Amanda Knox wears 37.”
Police forensic experts told her that the print came from a woman’s shoe because of its shape and small size. But it has never been matched to any footwear owned by Knox. It could not be positively identified to any of the suspects and investigators do not know to whom the shoe belonged.
A fragment of Kercher’s bra clasp is the strongest piece of evidence that links Sollecito to the murder. A small piece of the bra, with the hook on it, fell off when the bra was cut from Kercher’s body by her assailant. Sollecito’s DNA was found on the metal hook, at the very least placing him in the room, the prosecution contended. Or would have done if the crime scene evidence had been treated properly.
The clasp was identified and photographed when the forensic experts first examined the crime scene, but it was not collected as evidence until the third visit to the house nearly six weeks later when investigators realized it was missing. The house had been turned upside down in a police search in the meantime. Videos show that the clasp had been moved more than a metre from its original location and Sollecito’s lawyers argued that the crime scene had been contaminated. The tiny clasp had picked up Sollecito’s DNA in the mess, they say.
“How can you touch the hook without touching the cloth?” asked Sollecito’s defence attorney.
However, the prosecution says that the apartment was sealed the entire time and contamination was impossible as DNA does not fly around the room. The only other DNA belonging to Sollecito found in the apartment was on a cigarette butt in another room. But forensic specialists have testified that the investigators did not change gloves between taking samples and made other grave errors in collecting evidence. And the defence contended that there were significant shortcomings in the lab work.
The bra clasp is the only evidence that places Sollecito in the room where Meredith was murdered, and not a single trace was found that puts Knox in the room – no fingerprints, no identifiable footprint nor DNA.
The only witness who put Knox and Sollecito anywhere near the murder scene was a homeless man named Antonio Curatolo, who slept on a bench outside the University for Foreigners in the Piazza Grimana. Curatolo, who has been a key witness in two other high-profile murder cases, said he saw Knox and Sollecito in an animated argument in the Piazza Grimana between 9.30 and 11.30 that night. He tied his memory to the presence of the shuttle buses that carry young people to the various discos outside of Perugia. However, it was pointed out that, on All Saints’ Day, the discos were closed. Curatolo had been accompanied into the courtroom by prison guards. He was serving an eighteen-month sentence for selling cocaine.
With little firm evidence to rely on, the prosecution have also seen their theory called into question. They maintained that during a four-way sex game, Knox, Sollecito and Guede forced Meredith Kercher to submit to sex. They pushed her on to her knees and threatened her, then killed her. But Knox only knew Guede casually. Sollecito did not know him at all. Indeed, up to that point, Sollecito had only known Knox for six days. Would three people who barely knew each other conspire to commit a brutal, sexually motivated murder? Or did Rudy Guede, a known drug dealer and suspected thief, rape and murder Meredith on his own? While on the run in Germany, he made a call from an internet café via Skype, telling a friend that Knox had not been in the house at the time. He had spoken to Knox by mobile phone several times both before and after the murder. It was months after his arrest that he came up with the story about Knox and Kercher arguing over the rent and seeing a man who could have been Sollecito running from the house. And he refused to testify for the prosecution at the trial of Knox and Sollecito, though it would almost certainly have resulted in a reduction in his sentence.
Nevertheless, both Knox and Sollecito were found guilty of sexual assault, murder and other related crimes. Knox was sentenced to twenty-six years in prison; Sollecito to twenty-five. The verdict was unanimous. According to the judge, the court had determined that Knox and Sollecito had helped Guede subdue Kercher after she resisted his sexual advances. It was noted that Knox and Sollecito had smoked hashish and been reading sexually explicit and violent comics collected by Sollecito. These were alleged to have influenced their behaviour. The court ruled Knox and Sollecito acted without premeditation, and that they exhibited no particular malice against Meredith that motivated their crime.
The judges concluded that Knox and Sollecito had stabbed Kercher in the neck using two different knives, one of which had not been found. The bloody footprint found on a bathroom mat was made by Sollecito, the court stated, while the unidentified footprint in a bedroom had been made by Knox. Knox and Sollecito had then staged the apparent break-in at the house to make it appear that Kercher had been killed by an intruder. Knox had further attempted to shift the blame by falsely blaming Patrick Lumumba.
Plainly, the case was not going to end there and, in the run-up to an appeal, the crime scene evidence was examined again. The veracity of the “double DNA knife” was further undermined when two US experts wrote to the court expressing their concern. In the case of the knife, the letter says, contamination from other DNA present in the lab that did the analysis cannot be ruled out.
The technique used to examine the knife was standard at the time. A small sample of DNA is amplified by a polymerase chain reaction to create thousands of copies of the original segment. Then resulting segments are analysed using electrophoresis. A graph is produced that consists of a series of peaks whose heights represent how much of certain DNA snippets are present. Displayed on X-ray film, these peaks create a DNA “fingerprint” unique to an individual.
To minimize the risk of including peaks arising from contamination, most US labs only count peaks above a threshold of 150 relative fluorescence units (RFUs) and dismiss all those below fifty. According to Greg Hampikian of Boise State University in Idaho, who reviewed the DNA evidence, most of the peaks on the knife fell below fifty RFUs. This means contamination cannot be ruled out, the letter from the experts said. As the same lab may also have been running DNA profiles from other evidence in the case at the same time, tiny amounts of this could have contaminated the knife samples.
Significantly, no blood was found on the knife and it is thought unlikely that all chemically detectable traces of blood could be removed from the knife while leaving sufficient cells to produce a DNA profile.
“No credible scientific evidence has been presented to associate this kitchen knife with the murder of Meredith Kercher,” the letter stated.
It went on to say that the evidence from the clasp is equally inconclusive. A mixture of different people’s DNA was found on it, including, possibly, that of Sollecito. However, as Sollecito had visited the women’s apartment several times before the murder, his DNA could have made its way on to the clasp “through several innocent means”, the letter said.
Neither Knox’s nor Sollecito’s DNA was found on the rest of the bra, other items of Kercher’s clothing, objects taken from Meredith’s room or in samples from her body, the letter pointed out, although Guede’s DNA was found everywhere.
The prosecution’s star witness, Curatolo, plainly got his days mixed up. He later admitted he had seen the couple on the night of Halloween, as people were wearing masks. That was the night before the murder. However, he was also in the Piazza Grimana the day after the murder.
“Police and Carabinieri were coming and going, and I also saw the ‘extraterrestrials’, that would be the men in white overalls,” Curatolo said. “I am really certain, just as certain as I am sitting here, that I saw those two youngsters the night before the men in white outfits.”
According to Francesco Maresca, a lawyer representing the Kercher family, this supports his original story.
“What is key is that he is sure he saw them the night before the police came and that it was not raining,” said Maresca. “It rained on the thirty-first but not on the first.”
It seems in the Kercher case there was no smoking gun. But Knox did herself no favours in court. She failed to observe the strict decorum that Italians expect in the courtroom. She walked in like a beauty queen, pandering to the cameras and sometimes answered journalists’ questions with a coy smile. On Valentine’s Day, she also wore a “Let It Be”T-shirt and was seen winking at Sollecito and passing around chocolates. At times, she even lay her head down on the defence table. This was widely reported in the Italian press. The jury is not sequestered, so members were free to read about the case and were almost certainly exposed to stinging criticism of her conduct.
But when the jury delivered its guilty verdict after twelve hours of deliberation, Knox bowed her head and wept noiselessly, burying her head in her lawyer’s chest. Then, as she was being led from the courtroom by armed guards, she cried: “No, no, no!”
At the appeal, she was far more serious and delivered a passionate speech to the jury.