Case 270: Meredith Kercher
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The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova once said, "'Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.'" For British-born Meredith Kircher, this rang true from a young age. Meredith first visited Italy on a family holiday when she was just 18 months old and again at the age of 8. She loved the way the waitstaff at restaurants treated her and her three siblings like young adults rather than children, handing them the menus before anyone else.

In her childish eyes, everything just seemed so sophisticated. So fond were these early memories that in year 9 of high school, Meredith began studying Italian. Her teacher noticed she had a natural flair for the language, which was bolstered further by a two-week exchange program to southern Italy later that year. The experience was transformative and Meredith became enamored with Italian culture.

On the last day of the trip, as her classmates wept with sadness over having to say goodbye, their teacher noticed that Meredith was the only one who was smiling. "I'm not sad because someday, when I'm older, I know that I'm going to live here," Meredith remarked. "I know that Italy is going to be a part of my life forever." True to her word, when Meredith turned 18, she enrolled to study Italian and European politics at Leeds University.

Not entirely sure what she wanted to do with her life, she contemplated working at the European Parliament in Brussels or following in her father's footsteps to become a journalist. Although Leeds was over 200 kilometres from her home in South London and she didn't know anyone there, this four-year course was particularly enticing to Meredith as it offered the option of spending the third year studying abroad.

She spent the first two years knuckling down on her studies and working part-time to fund her upcoming travels, until August 2007, when at the age of 21, the time finally came to pack her bags for Italy. Spoilt for choice when it came to picking a beautiful location, Meredith chose Perugia, a cosmopolitan city located in the heart of central Italy's Umbria region.

Known for its large international student population and medieval town centre, Meredith felt that staying in a smaller city with just 160,000 residents would give her a better opportunity to interact with others than if she stayed in a major city like Rome or Florence. It also had good airport links and an annual chocolate festival, and Meredith adored chocolate.

She promised her sister Stephanie, whom she was particularly close to, that she'd make plenty of friends so the two would have places to stay when they travelled the country together once Meredith's studies were complete. Although the move was daunting, Meredith's easy-going and enthusiastic personality ensured she made friends easily. Within four days of arriving in Perugia, she'd already secured a place to live.

Number 7, Villa della Pergola, was a two-story whitewashed cottage perched on a steep hillside below the city. On one side, it overlooked a lush sweeping valley dotted with cypress trees and olive groves. On the other was a ring road that bordered the city's medieval walls and a multi-level car park overseen by a row of weathered apartment buildings. Just a few minutes' walk from Perugia's University for Foreigners, it was a popular neighborhood for students.

The cottage had been subdivided into two separate dwellings. The lower floor was occupied by four young Italian men, while the upper story housed two Italian law students, Filomena and Laura, both aged in their late twenties. The young women welcomed Meredith with open arms, assigning her a small room at the back corner of the cottage. The room next to Meredith's was vacant, but it wouldn't be for long.

Philomena and Laura informed Meredith that a 22-year-old American student would be arriving in a few weeks' time and had already paid her deposit. Her name was Amanda Knox. Meredith Kircher fully embraced her new life in Perugia.

Through her language studies at the University for Foreigners, she befriended a group of British students who became a support network for one another as they navigated their new surroundings. Meredith helped put her fellow Brits at ease. Not only were her Italian skills the strongest of the bunch, her quick wit and infectious laugh made others feel welcome and included.

Meredith spent her days studying, exploring the city, and hunting down low-cost meals with her new friends, always keen to snag a bargain. In the evenings, they often met for dinner or drinks at one of the local bars, where they'd share stories about their day-to-day experiences and laugh over linguistic mishaps.

By the time Halloween rolled around on Wednesday October 31 2007, Meredith had been living in Perugia for almost three months and was settling in nicely. To celebrate Halloween, she dressed up as a vampire and joined a group of her friends for a dinner party followed by a night on the town. They stayed out until the crack of dawn, dancing the night away.

The next day, Thursday November 1, was All Saints Day, a national public holiday in Italy that honours the saints of the Catholic Church. An exhausted Meredith dragged herself out of bed after midday, the fake blood from her vampire costume still staining her chin. Laura and Philomena were away for the holiday, so the house was quiet. Only Meredith's American housemate Amanda Knox was home.

She and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Solicito, were sitting in the common room eating pasta when Meredith arose. The trio chatted briefly before Meredith jumped in the shower, threw a load of laundry into the washing machine, and then headed to a friend's place. It was a mellow night for Meredith and her three British girlfriends. The group ate pizza and watched The Notebook, pausing the film halfway through to eat homemade apple crumble for dessert.

By 8:30pm, Meredith was tired. She borrowed a textbook from one of her friends and made plans to meet her for a class at 10am the following morning. Meredith then lightheartedly said that 10:30 was more realistic. It was a running joke among Meredith's loved ones that she was notoriously late for everything and terrible at keeping time. Meredith and her friend Sophie said goodbye to the others and began the short walk to their respective homes.

When they reached the turnoff for Sophie's place, they made plans to catch up the following evening, before hugging each other goodbye and going their separate ways. The following morning of Friday November 2, Perugia resident Elisabetta Lana braved the bitterly cold air to step outside. It had been a strange evening for Elisabetta. Overnight, she'd received a phone call warning that someone had placed a bomb in her toilet.

Although the bomb threat turned out to be a prank, Elizabetta was left feeling shaken. As she tended to her roses, she heard a ringing sound coming from a bush in her garden and followed it. It was a mobile phone. Still on edge from the prank call, Elizabetta contacted the postal police, a special division of the state police dedicated to crimes involving communication devices.

At their request, Elisabetta brought the discarded phone to the nearby police station. It didn't take long for officers to identify its owner. The Italian SIM card was registered to Filomena Romanelli, who lived at number 7 via Della Pergola, roughly half a kilometre from Elisabetta's home. Filomena no longer used the SIM card in question.

She'd given it to her housemate, Meredith Kircher, so that Meredith could make cheap local calls during her time in Italy. Filomena had spent the previous evening out of town with her boyfriend but was back on the outskirts of Perugia attending a festival for All Souls Day. The annual celebration was a day to commemorate and pray for loved ones who had passed away.

Oblivious to the fact that Meredith's phone had been found, Philomena's own mobile phone rang just after midday. It was her American housemate, Amanda Knox. Amanda told Philomena that she'd spent the night at her boyfriend's house and had just returned to Villa della Pergola to find some strange occurrences. Amanda said that when she arrived home at around 11am, the front door was open but nobody appeared to be home.

She went to take a shower in the small bathroom she shared with Meredith, only to find what looked like some drops of blood in the sink and smeared on the bath mat. Amanda showered regardless. She then went to dry her hair in the larger bathroom at the other side of the house. She glanced into the toilet and saw it contained unflushed faeces. Knowing that no one in the house would forget to flush after themselves, Amanda told Philomena she was scared.

Philomena asked where Meredith was. Amanda said she didn't know. She was currently walking back to her boyfriend Rafael's place and Philomena was the first person she'd called. Philomena told Amanda to go back to the house and check that everything else was in order. They then ended the call. Philomena was worried that Meredith might have cut herself and gone out to seek medical care, accidentally leaving the front door open behind her.

She tried calling both of Meredith's mobile phone numbers, her local Italian one and her British one. Meredith always kept both phones with her, using the Italian SIM for local communications and the British one to stay in contact with friends and family back home. Both numbers rang out. This set off alarm bells for Philomena. She knew that Meredith was incredibly close to her mother, Arlene, who was battling a serious illness back in England.

The two spoke numerous times every day, and Meredith always kept her phones close in case she received an urgent call regarding her mother's health. In fact, she never turned her British one off. Philomena called Amanda back, panicked. Amanda said she'd just reached Raffaele's house and the two were going to go check on the cottage together. Philomena waited roughly 10 minutes before calling Amanda again.

This time, Amanda told her: "Someone's been in your room. They smashed your window. But it's bizarre. It doesn't look like they've taken anything." Meanwhile, half a kilometre away, a second mobile phone was found at the bottom of Elisabetta Lana's garden. This one contained a British SIM card. At 12:35pm, two officers from the postal police arrived at number 7 Villa Della Pergola to ask about the discarded phones.

They found Amanda Knox and Raffaele Solecito standing outside. The couple told the officers there had been a break-in and they couldn't get hold of Amanda's housemate, Meredith. They'd tried her room but the door was locked and there was no response when they bashed on it or called her name. Raffaele said they'd contacted the Carabinieri, Italy's national military police force, and were waiting for someone to arrive.

The postal police officers told them about the two mobile phones that had been found nearby, one of which was registered to a resident of this address. Amanda said it couldn't be Filomena's phone because the pair had just spoken. She led them into the house and showed them Filomena's bedroom. Her window had been smashed and shattered glass littered the room.

Clothing was scattered across the floor in what looked like a ransacking, but strangely, valuable items such as a laptop, gold jewelry, a digital camera, and designer sunglasses sat untouched out in the open. Everything else in the cottage, aside from the mysterious drops of blood and unflushed toilet, appeared to be completely normal. At that moment, Philip Manor arrived home with her boyfriend and two of their friends.

She rushed into her room and confirmed that nothing appeared to be missing. She also identified the second mobile phone found at Elisabetta Lana's house as belonging to Meredith Kircher. During this entire fiasco, there had been no noise or movement from inside Meredith's room.

Amanda told the police that Meredith sometimes locked her door if she was going away or getting changed. But Filomena disputed this, saying Meredith always kept her door unlocked. Becoming increasingly panicked, Filomena ordered, "Break down the door." The postal police didn't have authority to do so without a warrant and were concerned about causing any damage to private property. Filomena's friend Luca didn't hesitate.

He backed up, raised his leg, and kicked the door several times before it finally flew open. With the door off its hinges, Philomena began screaming hysterically. The officers shouted, "Everyone out of the house! Now!" Meredith's bedroom was in disarray with splashes of blood streaking the walls and blood pooled on the tiled floor.

A beige quilt had been taken off the single bed and thrown onto the floor to cover something up, but there was little doubt as to what. At the end of the quilt closest to the door, a bare foot protruded out from underneath. Homicide investigators quickly arrived and cordoned off the scene. Under the quilt was the body of 21-year-old Meredith Kircher, naked aside from a long-sleeved top which had been pulled up to reveal her bare torso.

Her jeans and underwear had been removed and sat crumpled by her feet, along with her blood-stained bra which had been cut off from her body post-mortem. A pile of blood-soaked towels sat nearby. Dozens of cuts and bruises covered Meredith's body, a majority of them on her face and neck. Her hyoid bone, the small U-shaped bone at the base of her neck, was fractured, indicating either an attempted strangulation or a hard blow.

Bruising to Meredith's nose, nostrils and lips suggested someone had attempted to suffocate her by clamping their hands over her nose and mouth. Other bruising on her face and body indicated that she'd been forced to kneel down while her arms were pinned behind her back and her face forcefully crushed into the floor. Small cuts to Meredith's neck suggested she'd been threatened with a knife while forced into this submissive position and sexually assaulted.

Her throat was then slit twice before her body was dragged closer to the bed. The smaller of the slashings was 4cm deep, followed by a final 8cm deep wound which severed Meredith's right thyroid artery. Although this final injury was fatal, it wasn't an instant death. The condition of Meredith's lungs indicated that she'd likely survived for several minutes before finally suffocating on her own blood.

Back in England, Meredith's mother, Arlene, was watching the news when she saw a bulletin reporting that a yet-to-be-identified young British woman had been killed in Perugia. Arlene told herself there was no way it could be her daughter. The two had just spoken the previous afternoon and nothing about their conversation was out of the ordinary. Arlene tried calling Meredith's phone. There was no answer.

She then called Meredith's father, her ex-husband John, and told him what she'd heard. Although John was alarmed, he assured his ex-wife that there were lots of British students in Perugia and Meredith would surely be fine. But when John tried calling Meredith himself, his anxieties peaked every time her phone clicked to her automated message bank. John was a journalist and he decided to use his contacts to see if he could dig up any more information.

He dialed the number of the foreign desk for the Daily Mirror newspaper. The person he spoke to said they'd call back when they had any more information. The wait seemed like a lifetime for John. Although Meredith hadn't lived with him since his divorce from Arlene, the two remained close, speaking on the phone most days.

Before she moved away for university, Meredith visited her father every Friday night for dinner and the weekly screening of her favourite TV show, the American sitcom, Friends. John had just seen Meredith a few weeks earlier when she'd made a quick return trip to England to buy some winter clothes and a warmer quilt. She'd been her normal, happy self and talked excitedly about her time in Perugia. After an agonising half an hour, John's phone rang.

His contact at the Daily Mirror said they had a name of the victim. With great hesitation, they said: "The name going around Italy is Meredith." Within hours of Meredith's body being discovered, Via della Pergola was teeming with reporters. Although Perugia had its fair share of crime, particularly when it came to drugs, murders of this magnitude were entirely unheard of.

A foreign student being brutally killed in their own home was major news and everyone wanted to be the first to break the story. With all eyes on the investigation and the student population needing reassurance they were safe, the pressure was on to solve the case. Fast. There was no doubt that Meredith had been a victim of sexual violence, but it also appeared that robbery could have been a motive.

Two of Meredith's purses had been rifled through and her wallet, house keys and both of her mobile phones had been stolen. The keys had then been used to lock her bedroom door. A cheque of Meredith's bank account revealed that two days prior to her death, she'd withdrawn 250 euros from an ATM. This coincided with her rent payment which was due at the start of the month.

But Meredith hadn't yet paid her landlord nor was there any sign of the cash anywhere on the property, leading to the suspicion that this too was likely stolen during the attack. The state of her room indicated that someone had been looking under her bed after the murder had occurred. At first glance, the broken window in Philomena's bedroom appeared to have been the perpetrator's point of entry.

But for the first officers on the scene, this immediately raised some red flags. For starters, some clothing had been removed from one of Filomena's cupboards and haphazardly scattered around in an apparent ransacking. However, the broken glass from the window lay on top of the clothing, not under it as one would expect. This implied that the clothes had been scattered around first and the window broken afterwards.

Not only was nothing of value stolen from Filomena's bedroom, other cupboards, drawers and boxes of hers hadn't even been touched. If someone was ransacking the room looking for valuables, why hadn't they searched the whole room? A 4 kilogram rock roughly the size of a human head was found underneath Filomena's desk, having seemingly been used to smash the window from the outside.

Filomena's window on the second floor was fitted with wooden shutters, which she insisted she'd left closed. Yet the shutters were found only slightly ajar and perfectly intact. For the rock to have shuttered the glass but not the shutters, the shutters would have had to be opened. But the only way to open them from the outside was to pry them open.

This meant the intruder would have had to scale the wall once to open the shutters, go back down to throw the rock, and then scale the wall again. The problem with this scenario was that Filomena's window was roughly three and a half meters off the ground and there was nothing underneath to climb on. Scaling the wall would require what one investigator described as a "superhuman effort". And not just once, but twice.

The ground outside was damp and muddy, yet there was no evidence on the outside wall such as shoe marks or traces of earth to indicate such a climb had occurred. About halfway up, an old nail could have theoretically been used as a foothold. Had it been used as such, investigators were sure the nail would have fallen out or at the very least become bent. But the nail showed no such damage.

Furthermore, there were no footprints or signs of disturbance in the vegetation underneath the window. The rock itself also raised questions. At 4 kilograms, it would have been incredibly difficult for someone to heave it so high into the air when a smaller, lighter rock could have just as easily done the trick. The top portion of Filomena's window pane was still intact, indicating the rock had been thrown at low speed from a short distance away.

Broken glass lay on the internal windowsill, but strangely, there was none on the floor directly underneath. If the intruder had pulled themselves in via the window, investigators believed at least some of the glass would have fallen down. If not naturally, the intruder would have had to move some of it out of the way to avoid being cut as they pulled themselves in. It also didn't make sense that an intruder would target Filomena's bedroom over one of the others.

In addition to being difficult to reach, it was in full view of the main street and lit up by the headlights of any passing cars. The rear windows were not only out of sight, but one had a table and chair underneath it which could have been climbed upon to scale the broiler and reach the window. With all these inconsistencies and no other signs of forced entry, investigators quickly became convinced that the window had actually been broken from the inside.

The break and enter was completely staged. Whoever killed Meredith had likely attempted to derail the investigation when the truth was much more simple. They had come in through the front door. This meant that either Meredith knew her killer and let them inside, or they had a key.

Bolstering this theory was the belief that a random intruder would have been desperate to flee the scene as quickly as possible. They wouldn't stick around to lock Meredith in her bedroom and fake a robbery. It also seemed unlikely that they'd go to the effort of stealing both of her mobile phones, only to dispose of them a short distance away. Blood marks on the quilt covering Meredith's body indicated it had been placed there after she was already dead,

In criminology, this is typically known to indicate remorse and is usually done when a killer knows the victim. Investigators immediately honed in on those in Meredith's social circle. Her friends told the police there was a young Moroccan man named Hesham who had a bit of a crush on Meredith. In the weeks leading up to the murder, they'd all been out dancing together when Hesham started acting inappropriately, pulling his pants down in front of Meredith.

Police tracked Hesham down but could find nothing to tie him to the crime. They started gathering all the photos that had been taken from the Halloween party Meredith had attended the night before she was killed, scrutinising each one for potential persons of interest. The police learned that Meredith had been casually dating one of the downstairs tenants, 22-year-old Giacomo Silenzi.

Although the relationship was still very new, Meredith had agreed to do a favour for Giacomo while he was out of town for the public holiday. He'd been growing a couple of cannabis plants in his room and Meredith agreed to water them for him, even though she was nervous about doing so. Investigators forced their way in to the lower floor of the cottage. Inside, nothing appeared to be out of place. But there was something of interest.

several small drops of blood. Giacomo and his housemates were quickly tracked down, each claimed to have been out of town visiting family at the time of Meredith's murder. These alibis were confirmed, ruling all of them out as suspects. The blood in their apartment was determined to have come from a stray cat they'd been caring for who had injured its ear.

Meredith's Italian housemates, Filomena and Laura, also had airtight alibis, having been out of town on the night in question. This left just one resident of Number 7 Villa della Pergola who was in Perugia at the time Meredith was killed: Amanda Knox. The postal police officers who had first arrived at the crime scene had been suspicious of Amanda from the moment they arrived.

For starters, they thought that Amanda and her boyfriend, Raffaele Solicito, had seemed startled, nervous, and embarrassed by the police presence. Secondly, Amanda's story that she'd showered despite finding the front door open and blood in the bathroom just seemed bizarre. Amanda told one detective she thought one of her housemates might have simply left the door open while they went to put the bins outside. The detective noted this as odd.

The bins were clearly visible from the front porch, and Amanda would have been able to see this wasn't the case. As for the drops of blood in the bathroom sink, Amanda said she'd recently had her ears pierced and had been taking her earrings out over the sink to clean them. She assumed that's what caused the blood. Amanda said she'd been more concerned about the smear of blood on the bath mat, but thought it might have been menstrual blood that Meredith had forgotten to clean up.

It was only when she noticed the unflushed faeces in the other bathroom that she started to get the feeling that something wasn't right. When she returned to the house with Raffaele, she looked in the bathroom again and saw that the faeces had since been flushed away. According to Amanda, this led her to believe that the killer might still be in the house. Detectives checked the toilet for themselves. The faeces were still there.

But it wasn't just the investigators who were dubious about Amanda Knox's behaviour. Within hours of Meredith's body being discovered, Meredith's Italian housemates and British friends had gathered on the property to help with the investigation. They stood outside, waiting for their next instructions. As reporters milled around the police cordon, camera crews honed in on Amanda and Raffaele. They didn't look like two people who had just discovered a horrific murder.

Instead, they appeared perfectly composed, embracing one another warmly, and often leaning in to kiss each other on the mouth. Unsure what to make of Amanda's claims, police summoned Meredith's friends and housemates to the station for questioning. There, Raffaele and Amanda's odd behavior continued. While Meredith's friends were visibly distraught, investigators noted that Amanda and Raffaele seemed indifferent to the entire situation.

While they waited for their turn to be questioned, they were witnessed laughing, kissing, and pulling faces at one another. Numerous times Amanda complained about being tired, yet an officer saw her doing what they described as stretches, the splits, and a cartwheel. The officer wondered how she could be behaving like this when a dead body had just been found in her house and told her off. Meredith's friends were asking themselves the same question.

It seemed to them like Amanda was boasting about being the one who found Meredith's body as though it was something to be proud of. They resented the fact that she complained about being tired and hungry when she was lucky to be alive. Raffaele seemed equally nonchalant to the seriousness of the situation. At one point, he was overheard on the phone bluntly saying, "'They've slit her throat,' as though it was a normal occurrence."

One of Meredith's friends remarked that she hoped Meredith hadn't suffered. Amanda responded harshly, "What do you think?" She had her fucking throat slit. For investigators, there was no doubt that Amanda Knox's behaviour was out of the ordinary, but there were no immediate reasons to suspect her of the crime. On paper, Meredith Kircher and Amanda Knox were quite similar.

The Seattle-born and bred Amanda had grown up in a middle-class family with divorced parents and was particularly close with her sister. She was a keen and athletic student at her Catholic high school, with a particular love for soccer and rock climbing. As a teenager, a family trip to Italy sparked Amanda's love for Italian culture, and she eventually enrolled to study Italian, German, and creative writing at university.

When Amanda told her parents she intended to spend one year studying abroad, they weren't entirely pleased. They considered Amanda to be book smart, but not necessarily street smart. She was also too trusting of people and could be incredibly naive. Regardless, they supported the decision, recognising it as an opportunity for growth and maturity.

Amanda saved for her trip by working multiple jobs and arrived in Perugia a few weeks after Meredith had already settled in. Meredith took Amanda under her wing, showing her around town and introducing her to her friends. While they got along fine, Meredith confided in her friends and family that she found some of Amanda's behaviour off-putting. In comparison to her British friends, Amanda was very extroverted and energetic.

Mid-conversation, she'd sometimes jump up and start doing yoga poses or play her guitar. Meredith thought Amanda liked to show off to get attention. One night when Amanda joined Meredith and her friends at a restaurant, the Brits were taken aback when Amanda suddenly stood up and started singing loudly at the top of her voice.

As Amanda described on her Facebook page: "I don't get embarrassed and therefore have very few social inhibitions. I love new situations and I love to meet new people. The bigger and scarier the roller coaster, the better." Meredith told her friends and family that Amanda's quirks irritated her, as did her hygiene habits. She complained that Amanda didn't do her fair share of the housework and sometimes forgot to flush the toilet.

Amanda had also left a cosmetic case in the bathroom with an adult toy and condoms out on display and had brought some strange men back to the house, which made Meredith uncomfortable. While the two maintained an amicable relationship and sometimes hung out together around the house, they mostly did their own thing. As Amanda told Meredith, she was more interested in spending time with Italians so she could immerse herself in their language.

Amanda had an American boyfriend back home, but the two had decided to open their relationship while they both studied abroad. Amanda didn't consider herself to be particularly experienced with the opposite sex, and she viewed Italy as a chance to be a bit more adventurous. In her first few weeks in Italy, she had a few casual dates before meeting Raffaele Sollecito.

One week prior to Meredith's murder, Amanda was attending a concert at the university when she locked eyes with the 23-year-old, a bespectacled computer science student originally from southern Italy. Raffaele's father was a prominent urologist and his mother had recently passed away. Described by friends as quiet and studious, Raffaele had a somewhat different take on himself.

On social media he wrote that he was "honest, peaceful and sweet, but sometimes absolutely crazy." Raffaele also kept an online blog in which he wrote about his disappointing college experience and his desire to find "bigger thrills." Although Raffaele was shy and not used to getting much attention from the opposite sex, when he saw Amanda Knox smiling at him at the concert, he struck up the courage to approach her.

The two immediately hit it off. Speaking in a blend of broken English and Italian, they spent almost every night together from that point on, with Amanda returning to Villa della Pergola intermittently to fetch clean clothes and check in with her housemates. Anyone who spent time around the couple could tell that Raffaele was completely smitten with Amanda. His father noted that Raffaele had never spoken about a woman the way he spoke about her.

When Raffaele visited Via della Pergola to cook Amanda dinner, her housemates noticed that Raffaele followed her around like a shadow, kissing and cuddling her even while she did the dishes. Meredith's friends told investigators that there had been some friction between Meredith and Amanda, but Amanda denied this. While they hadn't been extraordinarily close, she had nothing but fond memories of Meredith.

The two did the grocery shopping together, some bathed on the terrace while sipping espressos, and borrowed clothes from one another. Amanda claimed she'd last seen Meredith on the afternoon before her body was discovered. Amanda and Raffaele had been hanging out in the cottage's common area smoking a joint when Meredith woke late after her big night out for Halloween. She'd been her normal self before leaving for her friend's place at around 4pm.

An hour or two later, Amanda said that she and Raffaele walked back to his apartment, a one-bedroom bedsit a ten-minute walk from Villa della Pergola. Amanda had recently gotten a job working at a bar called Le Chic and she'd been rostered on to work later that evening. To her delight, she received a text message from her boss saying she was no longer needed.

The couple stayed in for the night, watching the French movie Amelie on Raffaele's computer and having a late dinner before going to bed sometime after midnight. The next morning, Amanda said they both slept in. She decided to walk back to Via della Pergola to shower at home and get a fresh change of clothes. She also needed to grab a mop because the pipes under Raffaele's kitchen sink had sprung a leak and he didn't have a mop of his own to clean it up.

When Amanda noticed all the strange occurrences at the cottage, she walked back to Raffaele's apartment and he then accompanied her back home to see what was going on. Raffaele's version of events was more or less the same, but investigators obtained the couple's phone records and discovered a strange discrepancy. When the postal police arrived at Via della Pergola at around 12.35pm, Raffaele told them he'd just called the Carabinieri,

His phone records revealed he hadn't actually made this call until 12:51, 16 minutes after the postal police were already on the scene. He had, however, called his police officer sister to tell her about the situation at the cottage and ask for her advice. Amanda told the police that when she returned to the cottage to find the strange occurrences, she tried calling Meredith, but both of her phones kept ringing out.

Her phone records confirmed that she did try calling both of Meredith's mobiles, but they only rang for a couple of seconds before she ended the calls. While the hunt for evidence ramped up, covert intercepts were placed on both Amanda and Raffaele's phones. Nothing incriminating was captured, yet the couple continued to seem oddly unaffected by the gruesome tragedy.

This too was noted by the owner of a local clothing store, Carlos D. Rinaldi, who contacted the police to voice his concerns. On Saturday November 3, the day after Meredith's body was discovered, Carlos noticed Amanda and Raffaele walking the aisles of his store. He recalled: "They were all over each other, kissing and embracing. Their behaviour was so exhibitionist that the other customers were looking at them.

Amanda picked out some lingerie and brought it to the cash register. Carlos overheard Raffaele say, "You can put these on at home and we can have wild sex." The police had given Amanda and Raffaele strict instructions not to speak with anyone about the case. But on Sunday November 4, Amanda sent a lengthy group email to her friends back home in Seattle,

In it, she detailed her version of events on the night of Meredith's murder and the day her body was found. Amanda explained, "I have to get this off my chest because it's pressing down on me and it helps to know that someone besides me knows something." She then wrote casually about her future plans, saying she was looking for a new place to live but, quote, "It kinda sucks that we have to pay the next month's rent.

She continued, "'I guess I'll go back to class on Monday, although I'm not sure what I'm going to do about people asking me questions, because I really don't want to talk again about what happened. I've been talking an awful lot lately and I'm pretty tired of it. Anyway, that's the update. Feeling okay. Hope you all are well.' One friend was so taken aback by the email that they forwarded it straight to the police."

In an attempt to ascertain Meredith's time of death, police looked at her phone records. At 8:56pm she'd tried calling her family in England, presumably to check in before calling it a night, but the call had gone unanswered. An hour later, at around 10, the phone was used to dial Meredith's voicemail service, but the call was cancelled before it connected.

Shortly after, another call was made to Meredith's bank in England, but this failed to connect because the mandatory foreign prefix hadn't been entered. At 10:13pm, a 9-second internet connection was recorded, which was possibly related to an incoming multimedia message. Investigators therefore concluded that Meredith was still alive at this time.

An elderly woman named Nara Capizzali lived in an apartment overlooking the cottage at 7 Via della Pergola. Nara told the police that she went to bed early on the night of November 1, but woke up sometime at around 11 or 11:30 pm to use the bathroom. Although she didn't look at the clock, she assumed this to be the time because she was in the habit of waking up at around the same time each night.

As Nara passed her dining room window, she heard what she described as an agonising woman's scream coming from the direction of the cottage. It made her skin crawl. But what Nara found most unsettling was that it didn't seem like a cry for help. She recalled, "It was just a scream, and then nothing."

Nara said she looked out the window but couldn't see anything. A few seconds later, she heard the sound of gravel and leaves crunching under someone's feet as they ran up the cottage's driveway. This was followed by the sound of footsteps as they ran up the iron stairway leading from the car park across the street. There was only one set of footsteps, but moments later, Nara heard another person scurry up the driveway and run in the opposite direction.

CCTV footage was obtained from the car park, but the only detail of interest was an unidentifiable shadowy figure that was captured around 8.41pm. Nothing was captured during the key time period where screams were heard between 11 and 11.30pm. Regardless, Nara's statement led investigators to believe that this was an accurate window for Meredith Kirch's time of death.

They were particularly interested in Nara's claims of having heard two sets of footsteps. Given that the two major wounds on Meredith Kirch's neck varied in size, it had been concluded that two different knives had been used during the attack. The bloody outline of one was visible on the bedsheet. This led to the question of how one person could have wielded two separate weapons while also maintaining control over Meredith and inflicting the other injuries.

The evidence indicated that Meredith had struggled for her life, yet there were no skin cells or foreign DNA underneath her fingernails to suggest that she'd scratched or clawed at her attacker. For investigators, this was a sure sign of a multi-perpetrator attack. Amanda and Raffaele both claimed they hadn't left Raffaele's apartment at any point.

Their phone records revealed that they both typically kept their mobile phones switched on until late at night. On the night that Meredith was killed, however, Amanda turned her phone off at 8:35. Raffaele turned his off seven minutes later. The couple claimed they'd slept in late the following morning.

Amanda's phone supported this, remaining off until around midday. But Rafaeles was turned back on at 6:02am, a time he claimed to have been asleep. With these inconsistencies in Rafaeles' story, he was summoned back to the police station to repeat his version of events for the evening of November 1. Amanda arrived with him but was told to wait outside.

The two had barely left one another's side since Meredith's body was discovered, which prompted the question of whether they were staying close in a bid to keep their stories straight. Investigators hoped that separating them might elicit some new information. And they were right. Raffaele told police that his earlier statement was incorrect. The truth was that he and Amanda had parted ways at around 9pm.

According to Raffaele, Amanda told him she was going to Le Chic, the bar where she worked, to meet up with some friends. Raffaele spent the evening in his apartment alone, where he smoked a joint and spent the next few hours surfing the internet. During this time, he watched the film Amélie and spoke to his father. Amanda returned sometime around 1am.

Raffaele couldn't recall anything about their interaction, only that they woke at around 10am the next morning and Amanda said she had to return to her house to have a shower and change her clothes. When asked why this version of events differed from his original one, Raffaele replied: "I told you a lot of bullshit in my earlier statement because Amanda had convinced me that her version of what happened was right, and I didn't think of the inconsistencies."

Police checked Raffaele's claims against Amanda's phone records. Amanda had previously told them that she never responded to her boss's text message saying she didn't need to come into work on the night of November 1. But phone records revealed that she'd actually written back straight away, acknowledging the message and signing off with the Italian words "Chi vediamo". In English, this translates to "We will see each other later".

Amanda's boss was Dia Patrick LaMumba, a Congolese immigrant who'd been living in Perugia since 1988. Although his bar La Chic wasn't very successful, Patrick himself was an upstanding, respected member of the community. Involved in the local music scene, he played in a reggae band and organised for other musicians to perform at the university.

Although he had no prior criminal record, Amanda's text message combined with Raffaele's updated story had investigators wondering: Was it possible that Amanda had taken Patrick Lumumba back to Villa della Pergola? From the waiting room, Amanda was called in for formal questioning, but only as a witness. Under Italian law, this meant an attorney wasn't required to be present.

Over several hours, Amanda maintained that she never left Raffaele's apartment on the night of Meredith's murder. She explained that the text message to Patrick LaMumba was simply being lost in translation. "Chi vediamo" was her way of telling Patrick goodbye, like an American would say "see you later". She didn't realise that the translation could be taken literally, but as the police pressed on, they could tell that Amanda was beginning to crack.

One officer told her, "I want to help you, but you need to tell me who the murderer is. You know who the murderer is. You know who killed Meredith." Amanda began to sob uncontrollably. "Patrick," she said. "It's Patrick." Case File will be back shortly. Thank you for supporting us by listening to this episode's sponsors. Have a question or need how-to advice? Just ask Meta AI.

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Thank you for listening to this episode's ads. By supporting our sponsors, you support Casefile to continue to deliver quality content. Amanda Knox signed a statement in Italian confirming that on Thursday November 1 2007, she left Raffaele's apartment at around 9pm and walked to the basketball courts at Piazza Gramana, a town square just around the corner from Via della Pergola.

There, she met her boss, Patrick LaMumba, and the two walked back to Amanda's house. Meredith Kircher had just returned from her friend's place. At some point, Meredith and Patrick disappeared into Meredith's bedroom while Amanda stayed in the kitchen. She wasn't sure how long the two were in there, but she eventually heard Meredith screaming. Amanda was so scared that she covered her ears. After that, she couldn't remember a single thing that happened, explaining:

"I have a lot of confusion in my head. I do not remember if Meredith screamed or if I heard any thuds because I was in shock, but I could imagine what was going on." The police didn't believe Amanda's claim of memory loss. Although they weren't sure whether Amanda was directly involved with Meredith's death, they were convinced she'd helped Patrick Lumumba in some way. They also remained convinced that Raffaele Solocito had played a role.

By retracting Amanda's alibi, Raffaele had essentially removed himself from the picture, but his new version of events had raised some new inconsistencies. It also didn't explain why both he and Amanda had turned their mobile phones off at almost the exact same time on the night of Meredith's murder. Raffaele claimed that he'd watched the film Amelie alone after Amanda had left the apartment.

But her forensic examination of his computer determined that the film had actually been watched at 6.30 p.m. After that, the computer wasn't accessed again until 5.32 a.m. At a time, Raffaele claimed to have been asleep. Raffaele also said he spoke to his father on his mobile phone at around 11 p.m. Phone records revealed they'd actually spoken on Raffaele's landline at 8.42 p.m.

His father had sent him a goodnight text message at 11:14 pm, but Raffaele's phone was already switched off at this point, and he only received the message when he turned his phone back on at 6:02 the next day. The suspicion against Raffaele only intensified when a search of his pockets turned up a jackknife with a 3-inch blade. Raffaele explained he'd carried a knife with him since he was a kid, as he liked to make carvings in trees.

A search warrant was issued for Raffaele's apartment. Opening the door, investigators immediately noted the smell of bleach. Several bottles of bleach were found in his kitchen along with a receipt dated the morning of Sunday November 4, two days after Meredith's body was discovered. In Raffaele's cutlery drawer, one item in particular caught investigators' attention: a black-handled Marietti brand knife with a six and a half inch blade.

Although this was a typical knife of any Italian kitchen, it looked as though it had been recently cleaned. The knife was subject to forensic examination. No traces of blood were found, but there were several scratches on the side of the blade consistent with what one investigator described as "intense scrubbing". On the handle were traces of Amanda Knox's DNA,

This wasn't unexpected, Amanda had spent a lot of time at Raffaele's place and the two often cooked together. But something significant was found on the blade, trace elements of Meredith Kirch's DNA. Given that Meredith had never visited Raffaele's apartment before, this raised the question: How could her DNA have gotten on it unless it was used during the attack?

In Raffaele's bedroom, police found a collection of Japanese manga comics they described as a mix of pornography and horror. Some of them depicted extreme acts of violence, with the storyline of one comic revolving around the killing of female vampires on Halloween.

Not only did this strike investigators as noteworthy given Meredith had just dressed as a vampire for Halloween herself, they also noticed similarities between some of the images in the comics and the crime scene in Meredith's bedroom. While these finds were all compelling, police still didn't have anything that linked Raffaele to the crime scene. They turned to the forensic evidence. In Meredith's bedroom, a partial bloody shoe print had been found underneath the quilt that had been used to cover her body,

It was determined to be a men's size 9 with a pattern made up of numerous concentric circles. The print was compared to a pair of Rafaeles sneakers, a pair of size 9 Nike Air Force 1s. Although the results weren't conclusive, the initial analysis indicated a potential match.

With all these details coming to light, investigators theorized that Patrick Lumumba likely had a crush on Meredith and had asked for Amanda's help in getting the two together. After being told she didn't need to come to work, Amanda texted Patrick to let him know she'd see him later. She and Raffaele then went to meet him at the basketball courts at Piazza Gramana before walking him back to the cottage on Via della Pergola. There, Patrick joined Meredith in her bedroom.

Investigators couldn't be sure exactly what unfolded next, but they viewed Amanda as a seductress who had Raffaele completely under her spell. Both seeking excitement and adventure, Raffaele and Amanda likely intervened, and the group tried to force Meredith to do something sexual that she didn't want to do.

They likely threatened her with one of the knives that Raffaele admittedly always carried around, forcing her face into the floor and sexually assaulting her. When Meredith screamed, one of them panicked and slit her throat. The trio then desperately tried to clean up after themselves before staging a break-in and fleeing the scene.

But there was just one problem. The bloody shoe print wasn't a definite match to Raffaele and the police still hadn't uncovered any physical evidence putting Amanda or Patrick at the crime scene. Nervous that Amanda might flee the country, they decided it was time to make their move regardless. A cautionary arrest warrant was issued for all three suspects. At Patrick Lumumba's home, investigators found him warming milk for his 18-month-old son,

Appearing completely shocked by the police presence, he asked what was going on, to which one officer responded, "You know what you did." But Patrick claims he had nothing to do with Meredith Kirch's death. He said he'd only met Meredith a handful of times, the last being on Halloween when she'd showed up at Le Chic in her vampire costume. Patrick said he wasn't attracted to Meredith, nor had he flirted with her in any way.

As for the night she was killed, Patrick said he worked until closing time, which was sometime after midnight, and then went straight home. At no point did he see or speak to Amanda Knox. Following her arrest, Amanda retracted her previous statement. In its place, she submitted a handwritten statement of her own volition claiming that her previous version of events had been made under the pressure of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion.

Amanda claimed it was the police who suggested that Patrick Lumumba could have been involved. She only went along with it after they told her they had evidence proving she was at the cottage on the night of the murder and threatened to put her in jail for 30 years. According to Amanda, an officer had also hit her over the head when she didn't remember a fact correctly. Amanda wanted to set the record straight as she was worried that details were being lost in translation.

She said her recollection of the night of Thursday November 1 was hazy because she'd been smoking cannabis. She and Raffaele had also been doing a different version of the same thing every night that week and the days blurred into one. All she was sure of was that she and Raffaele had eaten a late dinner, after which Raffaele washed the dishes and his kitchen pipes began to leak.

The next thing she remembered with certainty was waking up the following morning at around 10 o'clock. After very little sleep and many hours of intense pressure from the police, Amanda said she started imagining the scenario in which Patrick Lumumba had come back to her house. She wrote: "I am unsure if they are real things that happened or are just dreams my mind has made to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions I am being asked.

But the truth is, I am unsure about the truth. Amanda acknowledged that her confusion must be frustrating for the police, but stated, I also want to tell the truth the best I can. I know I didn't kill Meredith. That's all I know for sure. The police firmly denied the allegations that Amanda had been mistreated or coerced in any way. But because she'd only been questioned as a witness, her interrogation hadn't been recorded.

Therefore, it was a case of Amanda's word against theirs. During Rafael Solachito's arrest hearing, he distanced himself from Amanda, but said that he too had cracked under pressure from police. He claimed the truth was Amanda had spent the entire night of Thursday November 1 with him at his apartment.

He flat out denied that the shoe print found in Meredith's bedroom was his, saying he'd never entered her bedroom and even if he had, he wasn't wearing his Nikes on the day she was killed. Patrick Lumumba stuck by his story that he'd worked at Le Chic all evening. It had been a quiet night with only about a dozen customers, hence why he'd texted Amanda not to bother coming in.

Patrick claimed there was at least one person who could vouch for his alibi, a Swiss professor whom he'd chatted to briefly while serving drinks. The only problem was, he couldn't remember the professor's name. Patrick claimed he'd opened the bar sometime around 5pm, but a search of Le Chic's records revealed that the first receipt of the night was timed 10:29pm. Patrick explained this was because he'd only billed the customers when they left. He stated,

"I didn't go to Amanda's house. I didn't kill Meredith. I'm innocent. And God knows it." It had been an incredibly difficult week for Meredith Kirch's family. Not only did they have to come to terms with the news of Meredith's murder and the subsequent arrests, there were additional hurdles to navigate given that the crime occurred in a foreign country. They were left feeling completely helpless.

The people of England rallied behind them, leaving floral tributes and notes for Meredith outside of her mother's home, her former high school, and online. When granted permission to do so, Meredith's mother Arlene, her father John, and sister Stephanie arrived in Perugia to formally identify Meredith's body.

John couldn't bring himself to enter the morgue. He wanted his last memory of his daughter to be the vibrant and happy young woman he'd had lunch with just weeks earlier, her whole life ahead of her. Arlene and Stephanie made the identification instead. To spare them the sight of Meredith's injuries, a crisp white sheet had been pulled up to her chin. Arlene asked for permission to kiss her daughter on the head.

The lead prosecutor present was so moved by this he had to remove himself from the room. Stephanie thought her sister looked peaceful but determined as though she was trying to express how hard she'd fought to survive. Stephanie said, "For that, I am eternally grateful and love her more than she could ever know. It was from that moment that we knew we had to fight for her too." Meredith's family agreed that more than one person had to be involved with the slaying.

Meredith had started studying karate at the age of 17 and had earned three belts. They'd seen her take on grown male opponents. If she was attacked by just one person, her family felt confident that Meredith could have held her own. Meredith's murder and the subsequent arrests were major worldwide news.

At a press conference following the identification, members of the media gathered from Italy, the UK and US as Stephanie described her little sister as one of the most beautiful, intelligent, witty and caring people you could ever meet. Her family took comfort in knowing that Meredith died while pursuing her dreams and during one of the happiest periods of her life. Stephanie stated:

"We love her then, we love her still, and she is still very much a part of our family, forever." With the three suspects behind bars, investigators had to build their case against them before any official charges could be made. They turned their focus onto the forensic evidence. Given that Amanda lived at the cottage and Raffaele had visited several times before, it stood to reason that their fingerprints, footprints, and DNA would already be present.

Therefore, investigators needed to find something indisputably tying them to the crime scene. Numerous bloody fingerprints had been found in Meredith's bedroom, but many of them were smeared to a point of being unidentifiable. Of the bloody fingerprints that were found, none were a match to Amanda Knox, Rafael S. Solecito, or Patrick Lumumba. No blood from anyone other than Meredith was found anywhere in the cottage.

The blood in the bathroom was determined to be Meredith's, indicating that someone had used the bathroom after committing the crime. The stain on the bath mat was determined to be a bloody footprint. Although it lacked the characteristics needed to make a definitive match, it was compared to the three suspects and provided a probable match to Rafael Solachito. Luminol, a chemical that reacts to traces of blood invisible to the naked eye, was sprayed throughout the cottage.

Several areas lit up, revealing partial bare footprints in Amanda's room, the bathroom, and the hallway outside of Meredith's bedroom. Testing determined them to be a probable match to both Amanda and Raffaele. Luminol testing of Filomena's bedroom also revealed two drops of blood which carried the DNA profiles of two individuals, Amanda Knox and Meredith Kircher.

While this was deeply incriminating evidence against both Amanda and Raffaele, investigators couldn't find a single piece of physical evidence to suggest that Patrick Lumumba had ever visited the property at all. But there was an even more troubling detail. When Meredith's body was found, a blood-soaked pillow had been placed underneath her body. On it was a bloody handprint that didn't match either of the three suspects. Police ran the fingerprints through their database.

There was a match. 20-year-old Rudy Guede was known to be a bit of a hanger-on of Perugia's student scene. Having immigrated to Italy from the Ivory Coast at the age of five, Rudy's father eventually returned to Africa, leaving a teenaged Rudy in the care of a wealthy Perugian family who put him into school studying hotel management. But Rudy was a habitual liar with no drive when it came to work or study. Disappointed with his behaviour, the family kicked him out.

Rudy worked odd jobs to get by but also started dabbling in petty theft and selling cannabis. The week before Meredith Kirch's murder, the owner of a preschool arrived at her workplace out of hours to find Rudy Guede on the premises. She called the police who discovered that Rudy had stolen a knife from the school's kitchen.

A search of his backpack also revealed a laptop and cell phone that had recently been stolen after a break-in at a local law office, along with a gold watch that had been stolen during a break-in four days prior. When the tenants of 7 Villa Della Pergola had been questioned after Meredith's death, they'd each been asked to provide a list of all the recent visitors to the property. The young men who lived downstairs had mentioned an African man with whom they sometimes played basketball,

They knew him from around town but only by his nickname, "The Baron". Amanda Knox had mentioned him too. She and Meredith had met him when they joined the downstairs neighbors to smoke a joint one night. According to the downstairs tenants, the Baron had asked them whether Amanda had a boyfriend and mentioned he wanted to sleep with her. Later on, he fell asleep on their toilet, drunk. When he woke up, he left the house without flushing.

Unable to ignore the similarity between the unflushed toilet at the crime scene, detectives had been eager to track the Baron down but had so far been unsuccessful. Little did they know that Rudy Gueda and the Baron were one and the same. With the bloody handprint on Meredith's pillow confirmed to belong to Rudy Gueda, investigators raided his apartment. There was no sign of him there or anywhere across town.

An international arrest warrant was issued and his name and face were splashed across the news. Witnesses came forward to report that they'd seen Rudy dancing at a Perusian nightclub at around 2:30 on the night of Meredith Kirch's murder. No one had noticed any blood on his clothing, but they did recall he was acting strange and smelled terrible. He'd also mentioned to some friends that he was thinking of going to Milan.

As efforts to locate Rudi Guede ramped up, a friend of his contacted the police to let them know that they'd just received an email from Rudi, in which he claimed to be in Germany. The friend agreed to work with police to lure Rudi back to Italy. He contacted Rudi via instant messaging on the telecommunications app Skype, asking where he was and what was going on. Rudi claimed he was in the city of Dusseldorf, flat broke and sleeping on trains.

He said he'd seen the news and the police had it all wrong. He wasn't involved with Meredith's death, but he had been there on the night she was killed. He also said, "Amanda doesn't have anything to do with it." Rudy agreed to speak to his friend over the phone. He explained that he'd run into Meredith at a Halloween party on October 31 and the two had arranged to meet at her house the following night. When he got there, Meredith was the only one at home.

The two talked for a while, during which Meredith mentioned that some money was missing from her underwear drawer and she suspected Amanda might have taken it. Meredith was fired up, accusing Amanda of being a drug addict. She apparently said, "When Amanda comes back, I have to talk to her." Rudy claimed that after Meredith calmed down, the two of them began making out. They engaged in oral sex but stopped things there after realizing neither of them had a condom.

At around 9:30, Rudy went to the bathroom to use the toilet, his stomach feeling upset from a bad kebab. He put his iPod on and over the sound of the music, he heard the doorbell ring. After listening to about two and a half songs, he heard Meredith screaming. Rudy claimed he rushed out with his pants down only to find a man he didn't recognize standing over Meredith with a bloody knife.

It was too dark to see much of the man's appearance, but he was shorter than Rudy and had chestnut-colored hair. The man tried to stab Rudy, swearing at him in what sounded like a local Italian accent, before fleeing the scene. Realizing that Meredith had been stabbed, Rudy claimed he ran to the bathroom to grab some towels. He packed them into the wounds in Meredith's neck to try and stop the bleeding, but it was too late. She died in front of him.

Terrified of being wrongly implicated, he too fled the scene. Rudy's friend offered to wire him some money for a train ticket back to Italy where they could get him a good lawyer and figure everything out. Rudy agreed. But before he could collect the money, a ticket inspector caught him for fare evasion and he admitted he was wanted for questioning in Italy. Detectives were sent to extradite him back to Perugia.

Meanwhile, the Swiss professor who Patrick Lumumba claimed to have served on the night of Meredith's murder came forward. He confirmed that he was indeed at Le Chic on the night in question, eating dinner and chatting to Patrick Lumumba from around 8.30 to 9.55pm. With this airtight alibi and no physical evidence tying him to the crime scene, Patrick was released after almost three weeks behind bars.

He told reporters that Amanda Knox had thrown him under the bus to derail the investigation when, quote, "Amanda hated Meredith because people loved her more than Amanda. She was insanely jealous that Meredith was taking over her position as Queen B." With Patrick no longer a suspect, investigators maintained their theory about a group sex attack gone wrong. They simply replaced Patrick's role with Rudy Guede.

What Rudy didn't know was that investigators had already obtained his DNA from a hairbrush found in his apartment. Testing confirmed traces of Rudy's DNA were inside of Meredith's body, in bloodstains on her underwear and clothing, on her purse that had been rifled through, and in the unflushed toilet.

Furthermore, the partial bloody shoe print under Meredith's quilt that had been attributed to Rafael Solichito was compared to a pair of Nike Outbreak 2s owned by Rudy Gueda. While the treads on both Rudy and Rafael's Nikes shared remarkable similarities, the number of concentric circles differed. While testing had only revealed a probable match to Rafael's shoes, it revealed a conclusive match to Rudy's.

Back in Italy, Rudy added some more details to his version of events. He maintained that the window in Filomena's bedroom hadn't been smashed while he was there, and claimed that just before the attacker fled the scene, he'd warned, You are a black man. You will get the blame. As Rudy tended to Meredith's wounds, she apparently tried to tell him something, but he couldn't quite make it out. It sounded like, Aff.

Rudy said he wanted to stay and help or call an ambulance, but he didn't have his mobile and also feared that he'd get the blame. Instead, he ran home and changed his clothes. But the smell of Meredith's blood was nauseating and he needed to get away from it. He went to a friend's house and out clubbing, trying to act as normal as possible, while inside he was feeling extremely confused and traumatized. Rudy said:

"If I had been a man, I would have stayed and tried to save Meredith." According to Rudy's lawyer, this story explained why his client's DNA was found throughout the crime scene, but, quote, "It does not mean that he is the killer." Investigators begged to differ. In their view, the forensic evidence didn't just prove that Rudy Gueda was at the crime scene. It proved that he was involved with the crime itself.

Furthermore, they already knew that Rudy was lying about having prearranged plans to meet up with Meredith. In contradiction to his claim that the two had met at a Halloween party, Meredith's friends confirmed they had been at a completely different party and that at no point did they cross paths with Rudy Guede. Meredith had never mentioned Rudy to anyone, nor had anyone ever seen her with him outside of the one time they shared a joint at the downstairs flat

Friends of Rudy's also told police he had a habit of acting inappropriately towards women when he was under the influence and that he'd been accused of molesting girls before. As the story continued to dominate headlines, the media showed little interest in Rudy Guede. They were much more interested in Amanda Knox. As Daily Mail journalist Nick Pisa later explained to Netflix:

Meredith was a terribly attractive woman, and now we've got Amanda Knox involved as well, a pretty blonde girl, 20-something. It had that sexual intrigue, girl-on-girl crime, if you like. Day after day, new headlines came out about Amanda, in which she was portrayed as, quote, sex-obsessed, a she-devil, and a witch of deception."

Viewed by many as the puppet master behind Meredith's murder, some outlets labelled her "Amanda the Maneater". But it was when Amanda's online MySpace page surfaced that things really heated up. There, Amanda had listed her nickname as "Foxy Noxy". This was a childhood nickname given to her by her soccer teammates who deemed her quick like a fox.

The English-speaking media took it as a sign of Amanda's opinion of herself as some kind of seductive vixen, and the nickname quickly soared to infamy. It didn't help that Amanda had recently posted a photo of herself on Myspace from a visit to a Nazi history museum, where she posed behind a giant machine gun with a maniacal laugh on her face.

This picture was quickly spread by the media, as was a photo Rafael S. Solecito had shared on his own blog in which he was dressed like a mummy, brandishing a giant meat cleaver and holding a bottle of bleach. Videos of Rudy Guede also surfaced of him dressed as Dracula and looking into the camera as he said, "'I want to suck your blood.'"

Tabloid headlines accompanying these provocative images screamed, and Amanda was a drugged-up tart. Amanda's reputation as an immoral, sex-crazed temptress only got worse when CCTV footage was published of her buying underwear with Raffaele the day after Meredith's body was found. Tabloids printed the photos alongside headlines like one from The Standard, which read,

Pictures of the moment Foxy Noxy went shopping for sexy lingerie the day after Meredith's murder. These, along with the images of Amanda and Raffaele hugging and kissing outside of the crime scene were viewed as not only indifference to Meredith's murder, but possible arousal. What the tabloids didn't mention was that Amanda and her housemates had been forbidden from returning to their cottage while it was an active crime scene, and therefore had no access to their clothes.

Amanda wasn't shopping for sexy lingerie, but the bare basics. Nor had she been doing cartwheels and the splits at the police station as one officer reported. But yoga. According to Amanda, she had got up to stretch after sitting hunched over for so long, and another officer had asked her to show him how flexible she was. Adding further fuel to the fire, diary entries Amanda made whilst in prison were leaked to the press.

Tabloids reported that Amanda kept details of her many lovers and expressed her fears that she might have contracted HIV. Her entire stay in Italy was portrayed as one drug-fuelled sexual encounter after the other, bolstered by photos that surfaced of her partying back home in America. Journalist Nick Pisa said that as these photos and tidbits emerged, members of the press were thinking, quote,

Wow. Great. She's a complete and utter nutjob. You just couldn't ask for any better material to illustrate a story with. I don't think I've ever had so many front pages. Just story after story." For Meredith Kirch's family, the focus on Amanda Knox added insult to injury as she became the center point of the tragedy in which Meredith was often pushed to the sidelines.

Meredith's father, John, resented the Foxy Noxy nickname, saying it would, quote, "...come to define the case and shift its focus entirely from Meredith and the other suspects." Four weeks after the crime, more than 500 people crammed into the Croydon Parish Church on the grounds of Meredith's former high school for a memorial service. A floral tribute had been made to spell out her nickname, Mez.

Meredith's older brother Lyle lightheartedly told the congregation that Meredith would probably be looking down at the flowers, happy that her family had used her nickname as it was cheaper than spelling her name in full. Lyle reminded those gathered that it was important to remember Meredith for her endearing qualities, such as her quick wit and fantastic sense of humour.

46 days after Meredith Kirch's murder, on Tuesday December 18, investigators were doing another sweep for evidence in Meredith's bedroom when they lifted up a rug about 5 feet from where her body had been found. Underneath was the broken clasp from Meredith's bra. The clasp was tested and revealed some faint traces of male DNA. Although weak, there was no denying who it came from. Raffaele Solicito.

Given that it had already been determined that the bra had been cut from Meredith's body post-mortem, this placed Raffaele in Meredith's bedroom with her dead body. Raffaele's lawyers acknowledged that this finding wouldn't help Raffaele's case, but they argued that it wasn't definitive. The DNA trace was weak and it could have gotten there prior to the murder.

Investigators stuck to their initial theory that this was a sexually motivated crime involving all three suspects. They just couldn't be sure whether it was spontaneous or premeditated, or how exactly it spiraled so far out of control. They considered multiple scenarios before concluding it was most likely that Amanda and Raffaele had met Rudy at the basketball courts in Piazza Gramana.

All three of them were under the influence of cannabis and possibly alcohol and decided to go back to 7 Villa della Pergola. Rudy had already admitted to friends that he wanted to sleep with Amanda, so he might have seen this as his opportunity. Either that, or she might have promised to help him hook up with Meredith. Amanda and Raffaele both turned off their mobile phones and the trio then returned to the cottage sometime after 9pm.

Once inside, Meredith confronted Amanda about her missing rent money and her discomfort over Amanda bringing yet another strange man into their home. An argument broke out between them, igniting a rage that Amanda had been harbouring towards Meredith for some time. Tired of her serious and prudish nature, Amanda saw this as her opportunity to teach Meredith a lesson.

While Rudy excused himself to use the toilet, Amanda and Raffaele confronted Meredith in her bedroom. Their argument escalated until Amanda finally reached out and smacked Meredith's head into the wall. Raffaele, eager to impress Amanda, joined in on the physical altercation. Rudy heard the commotion and ran into the bedroom. Feeling a level of competitiveness against Raffaele and wanting to earn Amanda's approval, he too joined in.

As the violence escalated, things took a sexual turn. When Meredith refused to cooperate, Amanda and Raffaella each threatened her with a knife while Rudy started to sexually assault her. The more Meredith struggled, the harder the knives were held to her throat until she began screaming and one of the trio panicked and administered the fatal wound.

Amanda and Raffaele then fled with Meredith's mobile phones and ditched them so she wouldn't be able to call for help. Rudy momentarily tried to stop the bleeding before fleeing himself and then going out clubbing in a bid to create an alibi. Amanda and Raffaele returned to the cottage to clean up the scene and staged the break-in. In late January 2008, a new witness came forward with the startling revelation.

33-year-old Hakuron Kokomani told the police that on the night of Thursday November 1 2007, he was driving down Via della Pergola when he noticed something sitting in the middle of the road. It looked like a black garbage bag. Hakuron beeped his horn, but the object didn't move. He got out, only to realise it wasn't a bag at all, but a man and woman. Both of them appeared to be, quote, "off their heads".

The woman took a knife out of a bag and approached Hercuran with it, threatening for him to leave. A young black man then emerged. The woman told the two men to hide their faces, but it was too late. Hercuran recognized the black man from around town as Rudy Guede. He kept driving, and it was only when he saw the news about Meredith's murder that he recognized the man and woman to be Raffaele Solecito and Amanda Knox.

Hakuran claimed he'd been too scared to come forward until he realized how significant this sighting could be. Hakuran Kokomani wasn't the only one who'd been withholding important information. In early February 2008, homeless man Antonio Curatolo came forward to report that at around 9.30 on the night of November 1, he was in Piazza Gramana when he saw Amanda Knox and Raffaele Solicito hanging out and chatting animatedly.

Antonio knew the area and its people well as he spent his days loitering around and sleeping rough in a nearby park. Antonio claimed he saw them in the square again at around midnight, just before he left to sleep in the park for the night. This was a major breakthrough for investigators.

Combined with Hakuran Kokomani's reported sighting of the three suspects, it not only placed Amanda and Raffaele near the crime scene, but also debunked the couple's alibi that they hadn't left Raffaele's apartment the entire evening. A local shop owner also came forward claiming that an exhausted-looking Amanda had come into his shop at 7.45 on the morning that Meredith's body was discovered, at a time she claimed to have been asleep.

Prosecutors now had DNA evidence and witness statements linking all three suspects to the crime scene. In early July 2008, after eight months of gathering evidence, they finally felt they had enough to formally press charges. Amanda Knox, Rafael Solichito, and Rudy Guede were each charged with Meredith Kirch's sexual assault and murder.

Back in the United States, the Knox family hired a public relations advisor and began their own media campaign in Amanda's defense. They alleged that Amanda had been treated unfairly by the Italian police, who had interrogated her unlawfully and used physical abuse to coerce untrue statements in a bid to solve the case quickly.

In total, she had been interrogated for a total of 53 hours over five days, in a language she only had a beginner's grasp of. For the investigators, Amanda's behavior mightn't have been typical, but it had also been completely misinterpreted and then regurgitated as fact. Comments made by one of the lead investigators also raised some eyebrows. He'd said,

"We were able to establish guilt by closely observing the suspect's psychological and behavioral reaction during the interrogation. We don't need to rely on other kinds of investigation." The diary entries Amanda had written about contracting HIV had only been made after prison guards told her that her blood tests had come back positive for the disease.

In response, Amanda had written a list of all the men she'd ever slept with, seven in total, trying to determine who she could have contracted the disease from. A second blood test confirmed she didn't have HIV at all. The HIV threat was seen as a ploy to get Amanda to provide information about her sexual history so that prosecutors could leak it to the press, thus supporting their portrayal of her as morally loose.

Prominent names in legal circles started jumping on the bandwagon in support of Amanda, vocalizing their opinion that Amanda and Raffaele were simply scapegoats in a case where all fingers pointed to Rudy. Many believed the prosecutors were only continuing to go after the couple because they'd publicly displayed them as killers for so long that it would look bad to admit that officials had it wrong. As private investigator Paul Cialino told CBS News,

"We know one thing for certain in life, that when you're dead, the last guy who was with you is usually responsible for you being dead. And the last person that was with Meredith, from the horse's mouth, is Rudy." The Italian justice system offers defendants the option of what's known as a fast-track trial.

This essentially means that instead of going to trial before a jury, the defendant can have their case decided by a judge alone during the pre-trial proceedings. Given that this saves a considerable amount of time and money, the incentive for the defendant is that if they're found guilty, they're typically given a shorter sentence.

Given the overwhelming evidence against Rudy Gueda, including his own admissions that he was present at the time Meredith Kircher was killed, it came as no surprise when he chose to have a fast-track trial. While the judge decided whether or not there was enough evidence to put Amanda and Raffaele to trial, he'd also be coming to a verdict regarding Rudy's involvement. The pre-trial hearing commenced in September 2008.

Lawyers for Amanda and Raffaele argued that Rudy had acted in a lone wolf killing. It should have been a fairly open and shut case. He'd likely broken in intending to rob the place, thinking it was empty, but came across Meredith instead. He sexually assaulted and killed her, before fleeing with her rent money, credit card, and phones. Knowing what he'd done, he fled the country to evade detection.

Amanda and Raffaele, on the other hand, had no association with Rudy and were nowhere near the cottage on the night of the murder. Any DNA evidence suggesting otherwise had likely been contaminated, was inconclusive, or incorrectly tested. The prosecution disputed this, stating, "...all three left traces of their presence at the scene of the crime and were involved. We are convinced of that."

After 12 hours of deliberation, the judge concluded that several perpetrators had agreed to satisfy their sexual desires by launching some kind of sex game on Meredith Kircher. It quickly escalated in violence to the point that the only way to silence Meredith's scream was to slit her throat.

While the judge couldn't determine which of the attackers administered the fatal wound, the fact that none of them had stopped the attack or called for help meant they shared equal responsibility. The judge declared Rudy Gueda guilty and sentenced him to 30 years prison. As for Amanda Knox and Rafael Solachito, they would proceed to a full trial.

Meredith's family had mixed feelings about the decision. Her father John said, "...we were not elated, but we were, at least, satisfied that justice was progressing in the right direction. It was difficult to say what you feel at a time like this. It was certainly not relief, because I knew that this was, in effect, only the beginning."

Casefile will be back shortly. Thank you for supporting us by listening to this episode's sponsors. Thank you for listening to this episode's ads. By supporting our sponsors, you support Casefile to continue to deliver quality content. The joint trial of Amanda Knox and Rafael S. Solechito was one of the most highly anticipated events in Perugia's recent history, with several media outlets touting it as the trial of the century.

It was expected that the forensic evidence would be sharply contested, while the prosecution would have to convince the jury of their circumstantial evidence. With the case continuing to make international news headlines and attract heated debate, everyone had an opinion as to whether or not the two defendants were guilty. But they'd have to wait a while for a verdict. Amanda and Raffaele's trial was scheduled to take place twice a week, three weeks a month, over several months.

Meredith Kirch's family couldn't afford to stay in Perugia for that long, so they made the decision to only attend when it came time to testify. The proceedings were also held entirely in Italian, a language they didn't speak. As the trial got underway, the prosecution remained loyal to their ongoing theory about sexual misadventure.

The defense argued that the prosecution had put forward several different theories over the course of the investigation, but not a single one had produced evidence of any motive for murder. Amanda and Meredith might not have been close friends, but there was no deep hatred or animosity between them. Amanda might have been seeking adventure and casual romance during her time in Italy, but she was far from the sex-crazed party animal that the media made her out to be.

Similarly, Rafael S. Solechito didn't have a perverse obsession with the occult, and neither of them had a history of violence. They were simply two young people whose behavior had been misinterpreted by a prosecution team who refused to back down after vocalizing their theory so early on in the investigation. No matter how hard the prosecutors tried to put the puzzle together, the defense believed the pieces simply didn't fit.

Over the course of their investigation, not a single piece of evidence had been found to prove their clients ever had any interaction with Rudy Gueder beyond the one time Amanda had met him downstairs of the cottage. Phone records didn't link them in any way, and there was nothing to suggest Raffaele and Rudy had ever crossed paths at all.

As far as the prosecution was concerned, there was physical evidence that indisputably placed Amanda and Raffaele at the crime scene, such as their bare footprints which had been tied to the crime scene via luminol testing. But, as the defense pointed out, luminol doesn't just react to blood. It can also react to certain acidic substances, including some household cleaners, certain types of soil, rust, and even fruit juice.

In what has been described as a serious procedural oversight, the footprints were never tested to conclusively confirm that they had been made using Meredith Kirch's blood. Even if they had, the fact that Amanda's DNA was also present didn't mean both samples were deposited at the same time. The two women had also shared a house for six weeks, walking barefoot on the same floors. It was only natural that their DNA would be mingled over time.

Prosecutors had determined that the bloody bare footprint on the bath mat was a probable match to Raffaele's solecito and that it was too small to have been made by Rudi Guede. When experts for the defense inspected the print, they found that it had been incorrectly measured and that it was indeed compatible with the shape and size of Rudi's foot. Raffaele also had a distinctive feature on his second toe, known as a hammer toe, which didn't match the prints.

The knife found in Raffaele's apartment, which had been labelled the "Double DNA Knife", was put forward by the prosecution as being the murder weapon. Yet, this knife didn't fit the bloody outline of the knife that had been found on Meredith's bedsheets, nor did it match the size of either wound inflicted to Meredith's throat. Meredith's autopsy had determined that the murder weapon had been forcefully thrust into her neck as deep as the blade would go.

According to experts for the defense, the knife from Raffaele's apartment would have caused a much deeper wound if this had been the case. Prosecutors believed the knife had been cleaned, which explained why none of Meredith's blood was found on it. This would also explain the smell of bleach in Raffaele's apartment. But no traces of bleach were found on the knife, nor did a luminol testing reveal any evidence of a clean-up in Raffaele's apartment.

As the defense pointed out, if the knife had been cleaned so extensively, how had Meredith's DNA profile been retained? Not only didn't the so-called "double DNA knife" match evidence found at the crime scene, one expert testified that the traces of Meredith's DNA on the blade were so low that they hadn't even been detected during initial testing. The sample had to be amplified to a degree much higher than usual just to get the positive result.

Given that the tests were done in a lab where large amounts of Meredith's DNA was present, it was suggested that the DNA could have been accidentally transferred. Not only had this knife seemingly been picked at random from a drawer containing many others, control testing was never conducted on any other pieces of cutlery from the drawer to compare for background contamination.

Furthermore, the DNA samples attributed to Rudy Gueda were consistent with him being the perpetrator of a violent crime. Yet, the samples attributed to Amanda and Raffaele were so minor, and none were present in the murder room itself except for the almost indecipherable trace on Meredith's bra clasp.

Meredith's room was only small. If all three suspects had participated in the frenzied crime, why was Rudy's DNA all over the place but Amanda and Rafael's was not? Prosecutors posited that Amanda and Rafael had cleaned up afterwards. To the defense, it seemed ludicrous to think that they could have cleaned away their own prints and DNA while miraculously leaving only Rudy Guedes behind.

The scarce DNA samples linking Amanda and Raffaele to the crime could be explained by one thing: contamination. Their strongest argument in favor of contamination was the bra clasp that supposedly had Raffaele's DNA on it. When Meredith's body was first discovered, the clasp was found underneath her pillow, but accidentally wasn't bagged as evidence.

Instead, it was unknowingly moved around the room for 46 days before it was rediscovered. During that time, dust had gathered and many people had trampled around the house moving from room to room. Meredith's mattress had even been dragged around in the search for her missing belongings. Rudy Guedes' DNA was found on the fabric of the bra strap, while Raffaele's was only found on the small metal clasp. One of Raffaele's lawyers asked,

How can you touch the hook without touching the cloth? The defense suggested that Raffaele's DNA could have got on it in a number of ways. Not only was he a regular visitor at the house, he'd also admitted to trying to break Meredith's door down before her body was discovered. It was possible that his DNA had been transferred from the door to the room as more people came and went.

One expert testified that with each visit by investigators to the crime scene, the possibility of contamination increased. Another said that incorrect procedures had been followed and weren't up to international standards. The prosecution strongly disputed this, with several experts testifying that strict protocols were followed and contamination would have been impossible.

The most important testimony came from Patrizia Stefanoni, the lead forensic expert who oversaw the collection and testing of DNA evidence in Meredith Kirch's case. She testified that everything had been done to the highest possible standard, and there was no chance that any of the samples had been mixed. According to Stefanoni, there hadn't been a single instance of contamination in her lab in at least seven years.

The defense team argued they hadn't been given enough documentation to fully interpret the DNA data. They requested specific information about certain procedures, such as how often the forensic team had changed their protective gear and exactly how the samples had been collected. These requests were denied. But the judge did agree to a review.

The task was assigned to the head of the scientific police, the person who worked above Patrizia Stefanoni. They confirmed that everything had been handled to the highest standard. The defense requested an independent review of the DNA evidence and forensic findings. The lead prosecutor rejected the request, arguing: "There is no need for a review, as the evidence was gathered in a very professional way by qualified persons.

The judge agreed. In addition to the DNA evidence, some questions were raised about the validity of key witness testimony. Hakuran Kokomani, the only person who claimed to have seen Amanda, Raffaele, and Rudy outside the crime scene on the night of the murder, was put on the stand. Over time, his version of events had differed slightly. He also testified that it had been raining on the night he drove by.

It hadn't been raining on the night that Meredith was killed, but it had been the night before. When pressed, Herculane couldn't be certain whether this alleged incident had occurred on October 31 or November 1, 2007. The defense argued that he was an unreliable witness and therefore there was nothing to prove Rafael S. Solechito had ever come into contact with Rudy Guede. As one lawyer commented,

The only link between them is the charge sheet. Nara Capuzali, the elderly woman who claimed to hear screams coming from Via della Pergola, was also put on the stand. Her account of hearing the screams around 11 and 11:30 on the night of Meredith's murder had been the key to prosecutors believing this to be Meredith's time of death.

However, the defense pointed out that Nara never actually looked at a clock. She had merely guessed the time based on her own personal habits. Rudy Gueda himself had timed the attack as happening at around 9:30. The activity on Meredith's phone at around 10:00 PM didn't prove she was still alive at this time. This activity could be explained by someone unfamiliar with the phone trying to either use it or turn it off.

After all, why would Meredith call her own voicemail only to hang up before it connected? And why would she call her British bank so late at night but forget to add the foreign prefix? The bank was the first number listed in her phone. It was therefore entirely possible that someone unfamiliar with the device had called it by accident.

The prosecution's answer for this was that Meredith was likely just relaxing on her bed, playing absentmindedly with her phone. But as the defense pointed out, Meredith had been exhausted from her night out the previous evening. Why would she just lie around, fully clothed, if she was preparing to go to sleep?

They deemed it much more likely that Meredith had been killed around 9.30, at a time that the prosecution's witness, homeless man Antonio Curatolo, had put Amanda and Raffaele at Piazza Gramana.

The screams heard by Nara Capozali either didn't happen between 11 and 11:30 or didn't come from the cottage at all, but one of the many other young people or drug addicts who frequented the busy area around Villa della Pergola. The defense argued that it didn't matter if there was no evidence to conclusively prove that Amanda and Raffaele had spent the entire night at Raffaele's apartment, because there was no evidence to prove otherwise.

Their hazy memories and conflicting timestamps were not proof of guilt. As had been the case throughout the entire investigation, all lies were on Amanda Knox for the duration of the trial. The press reported on her every move, including the outfit she wore and the way she styled her hair. When she first entered the courtroom, the press reported that she was beaming, with a reporter for the Daily Mail describing her as...

making an entrance like a Hollywood diva sashaying along the red carpet. Amanda later explained that she'd only smiled because she saw her aunt and uncle in the room and she was so grateful to see familiar faces. Amanda caused a stir on Valentine's Day when she wore an oversized t-shirt printed with the words, "'All you need is love.'"

Many members of the media interpreted this to be a sign of disrespect and the fact that Amanda wasn't taking the trial seriously. Some even believed it was a secret message to Raffaele. But according to Amanda, it was simply a line from her favorite Beatles song, and she thought it would be appropriate given the holiday. In summing up, the prosecutors called Amanda Knox an aggressive narcissist who manipulated others and had little empathy.

They claimed she dominated relationships and strongly disliked people who didn't share her opinions. As for Rafael S. Solechito, the prosecution concluded he was cold, emotionally unattached, and dependent on others. They told the jury that this was a sexually violent murder carried out for futile motives and, quote,

Meredith will never go home again to hug her loved ones. She was killed in a horrifying way and now her relatives can only go to the cemetery and stand quietly in front of her grave. You must give the accused what they deserve: a life sentence. The defense reminded the jury that they were sealing the fate of two young people when there was absolutely no motive and no reliable DNA evidence to connect either of them to Meredith's murder.

They urged the prosecution to explain to them how the bra clasp came to be moved and if they couldn't do that, then they should, quote, "have the courage to throw it away." After 11 months of testimony, the jury was finally left to deliberate. At midnight on Saturday December 5 2009, they reached their verdict.

Court resumed despite the late hour, with hordes of reporters and curious members of the public gathering on the streets outside. The verdict for both Amanda Knox and Rafael S. Solechito was the same. For the murder and sexual assault of Meredith Kircher, both were declared guilty.

Raffaele was sentenced to 25 years in prison, while Amanda was sentenced to 26. One additional year for also being found guilty of slandering her former boss, Patrick Lumumba, the man she'd wrongly accused. The verdict triggered mixed reactions. Amanda collapsed forward and began to sob, her parents looking on in disbelief. The blood drained from Raffaele's face while his stepmother collapsed.

Some members of the press began to cry. The Kirchers weren't sure how to feel. At a press conference held immediately after the verdict, Meredith's older brother Lyle told reporters: "Ultimately, we are pleased with the decision and that we got a decision. But at the end of the day, it is not a time for triumph or celebration. We are satisfied. But we are gathered here because our sister was murdered and brutally taken away from us.

Arlene said: "We are the ones who have been given a life sentence. We have to live with what's happened for the rest of our lives. People say that time heals, but it doesn't." News of the convictions sparked anger in the United States, with many believing that Amanda and Raffaele had been victims of a miscarriage of justice. The senator of Amanda's home state, Maria Cantwell, told the press:

"I am saddened by the verdict and I have serious questions about the Italian justice system and whether an anti-Americanism tainted the trial." The prosecution did not present enough evidence for an impartial jury to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that Ms. Knox was guilty. Donald Trump called for Americans to boycott Italy. One Washington Superior Court judge told the Seattle Post-Intelligence that Amanda's conviction, quote, "borders on the diabolical."

Another Washington lawyer accused the Italian prosecutors of turning a straightforward murder into, quote, She called the evidence against Amanda and Raffaele,

so ambiguous and compromised that it should have no place in a fair trial. In the Italian legal system, those convicted of murder are automatically given two rights of appeal, with each appeal hearing similar to a retrial. Two weeks after Amanda and Raffaele's guilty verdicts, Rudy Guedes' first appeal was held. This time, he directly identified Raffaele Solecito as being the man who killed Meredith.

He also claimed that when Raffaele fled the scene, another person was standing outside. He didn't see them, but he heard their voice and recognised it as being Amanda Knox. Both of Rudy Guetta's appeals were unsuccessful, but his decision to undergo a fast-track trial was rewarded. His 30-year sentence was reduced to just 16 years, almost half of his original sentence, and 10 years less than his co-accused.

Amanda and Raffaele's first appeal began in late November 2010, by which point they'd already spent three years behind bars. Addressing the court in Italian, Amanda's voice shook as she said: "I am innocent. Raffaele is innocent. We did not kill Meredith. I ask you to recognize that an enormous mistake was made and that no justice is rendered to Meredith or her loved ones by taking our lives away from us.

"I am not the person the accusers say I am. They say I am dangerous, devilish, jealous, uncaring and violent. Their theories depend on this, but I was never that girl." She offered an apology to Meredith's family, saying: "I can never know how you feel, but I have little sisters, and the idea of their suffering and loss terrifies me." Raffaele told the court he'd never hurt anyone in his life.

Removing a bracelet from around his wrist, he said, "My bracelet says 'Free Amanda and Raffaele'. I think the time has come to take it off." Their defense teams submitted another request for an independent review to be done of the DNA evidence, specifically the double DNA knife and Meredith's bra clasp. This time, their request was granted. Two independent forensic experts were tasked with reviewing the footage of the crime scene.

They couldn't believe what they were seeing. Various people came and went without wearing protective clothing or changing their booties, while key evidence, including the bra clasp, was handled without investigators changing their gloves. One expert described it as "total chaos, disorganization in every respect."

The independent experts concluded that the bra clasp had been incorrectly collected, handled, and transported, presenting numerous opportunities for contamination. In regards to the double DNA knife, they discovered that when this was collected from Raffaele's apartment, it was placed into an envelope that had been used to store new gloves.

It was then handled by an officer who had been in Meredith's bedroom earlier that day and in a lab that contained more than 50 items of Meredith's. Another officer later noticed the envelope wasn't properly sealed and closed it up with tape, while another then transferred the knife to a non-sterile box.

There was no doubt that the DNA on the handle belonged to Amanda Knox, but the sample attributed to Meredith was deemed to be so scarce that one expert concluded the likelihood of contamination being so high that it should be rendered inconclusive. The independent experts found that anti-contamination procedures weren't documented, basic errors had been made, and international DNA protocols ignored.

They rendered the evidence on both the bra clasp and double DNA knife as unreliable given the high likelihood of contamination. Key witness, homeless man Antonio Curatolo was once again put on the stand, having since been incarcerated for an unrelated incident. Asked if he saw Amanda and Raffaele at Piazza Gramana, Antonio responded:

In Perugia, shuttle buses were used to transport partygoers to different nightclubs around town, but barely any were running on the night Meredith was killed.

With Antonio now saying this sighting occurred the night before Meredith was killed, on Halloween, he'd essentially cast doubt on the only sighting that disproved Amanda and Raffaele's alibi. The prosecution suggested that Antonio might be getting confused with any number of tourist buses or public transport operating on Thursday November 1.

They also said this discrepancy was irrelevant given that Amanda had been at work on Halloween night and therefore couldn't have been in Piazza Grimano. But when Antonio also admitted to being a heroin addict who was high at the time of the sighting, the judge ordered him out of the courtroom, saying, "'Take him away. I'm done.'"

It was almost a year before the appeal verdict was announced. On the evening of Monday, October 3, 2011, a crowd of 4,000 people gathered outside the courthouse, the air thick with anticipation. Inside, Judge Claudio Hellman declared that the key evidence against Amanda Knox and Rafael S. Solecito was unreliable, and the first trial did not establish the appropriate standard of proof.

Hellman agreed with the independent findings that the DNA on the knife and Meredith's bra clasp was invalid. Thus, there was nothing to conclusively place Amanda and Raffaele at the crime scene. He discredited witness testimony from Antonio Curatolo and said that any discrepancies in Amanda and Raffaele's accounts of how they spent the night of Thursday November 1 2007 didn't mean that they'd provided false alibis.

In Hellman's view, the evidence pointed to just one person being responsible, and that person was Rudy Guede. He concluded that the break-in hadn't been staged at all, but was genuine. Both Amanda and Raffaele were declared not guilty of Meredith Kirch's murder and cleared of all related charges. Amanda's slander conviction against Patrick Lumumba was upheld, with her sentence increased from one year to three.

With this time already served, the judge ordered the pair's immediate release from prison. Amanda immediately began to sob. She managed to hug her lawyers and sister before being whisked from the courtroom. Raffaele gave a slight smile before his lawyer swept him into a warm embrace. While the Kirchers respected the decision, they couldn't understand how something that had been so certain two years prior could suddenly be so emphatically overturned.

To them, it felt like they were straight back to square one. England's Prime Minister, David Cameron, commented: "We should be thinking of the family of Meredith Kircher. Those parents had an explanation for what happened to their wonderful daughter, and that explanation is there no more." Patrick Lumumba, the man Amanda falsely accused, had struggled to find work in the wake of the allegation and had since relocated to Poland.

He told reporters the only reason Amanda was acquitted was because she was American and rich, commenting, "'What Amanda did, I don't know. But I think she knows why Meredith died.'" Newspapers accused Judge Hellman of cracking under pressure from the United States. In response, Hellman admitted it was still possible that Amanda and Raffaele were guilty, but the evidence simply didn't exist to prove it.

He told the Corriere della Sera newspaper: "No one has been able to say exactly what happened. The truth will probably remain hidden." For the people of Perugia, the news came as a great relief. For four years their city had been plunged into global headlines, sullying its reputation as a charming town filled with art, history and chocolate, and instead portraying it as a notorious party town rife with sex and drugs.

This reputation as a dangerous place impacted the student population. The mayor of Perugia said he didn't care what the outcome was, he just wanted it to be over, commenting: "All of us have felt the hit from this media attack against us." Thirty hours after her acquittal, Amanda Knox returned to the United States. At the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, a throng of reporters gathered to capture her arrival.

A teary Amanda told them she was feeling overwhelmed and unable to grasp the reality of the situation, commenting, "'Thank you to everyone who's believed in me, who's defended me, who's supported my family. My family's the most important thing to me, so I just want to go and be with them.'"

Amanda's lawyer said that the Knox family had endured a grueling, four-year nightmarish marathon, but above all they wanted the public to remember Meredith and keep the Kircher family in their prayers. Meredith's father, John, said that while his family would never want to see innocent people imprisoned, quote,

Despite the findings of the Appeal Corps, the controversy regarding the forensic findings continued.

The prosecution team believed the entire process had been done under "unacceptable media pressure" and appealed the acquittals to Italy's highest criminal court. The case was reviewed by the Supreme Court of Cassation, where it was concluded that Judge Hellman had erred in his acquittal by not ordering any new DNA testing to be conducted on the disputed evidence.

The court also found that he'd failed to give weight to any of the circumstantial evidence against Amanda and Raffaele, and that too many questions remained unanswered. In March 2013, the Court of Cassation set aside the acquittals and ordered another retrial. This went ahead in September the same year, to much less fanfare and media attention than the previous proceedings, especially given that Amanda and Raffaele weren't required to attend.

After several months of reexamining the available evidence and testimony, in January 2014, Presiding Judge Alessandro Nancini reinstated the convictions. Once again, both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Solecito were declared guilty of Meredith Kirch's murder. This didn't mean the two were automatically sent back to prison. Once again, the verdict needed to be confirmed by the Court of Cassation before it became absolute.

Amanda was free to remain in the United States for the time being, while Raffaele had his passport taken away to prevent him from leaving the country. If the High Court confirmed their convictions, Italy could request that Amanda be extradited and the two could be ordered to complete the remaining 25 years of their sentences. Defense teams for both Amanda and Raffaele argued that Judge Nancini's findings were filled with "klamorous mistakes."

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, British journalist Andrew Gumbel wrote: "To read the new conviction report in detail is to enter a kind of alternate reality, where concrete facts appear ignored and alternate facts are seemingly plucked from the air. Kirch's murder is reduced to a parlor game and all roads lead to the inevitable, if not also foregone, conclusion that Knox and Solecito are guilty."

By this point, Meredith's murder case had received three trials and two High Court hearings over the course of seven years. Nancini's verdict was sent to the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome, where a panel had several options. They could overturn the convictions for a second time, in which case they could either dismiss the case entirely or have the errors in Judge Nancini's findings fixed.

Alternatively, given that Italy has no double jeopardy rules, they could order yet another trial. In March 2015, a Supreme Court panel of five deliberated for 10 hours before concluding that there was insufficient evidence to convict either Amanda Knox or Raffaele Solecito.

They ruled that the case against the two defendants had no foundation and that the entire process had been marred by glaring errors and investigative amnesia. The court blamed flaws in the investigation and the overwhelming media attention for creating a frantic search for suspects.

It concluded that there were no biological traces linking Amanda or Raffaele to the crime and that sloppy police work and contaminated evidence made it impossible to do an unbiased review of the evidence. The case was thrown out, with the court definitively ruling that the pair be fully exonerated. Amanda was at home with her family when the news came through.

A shriek of excitement rang throughout their home as Amanda immediately jumped on the phone with Raffaele and congratulated him on their mutual freedom. Speaking to reporters outside her home, Amanda said: "Right now I'm still absorbing what all this means, and what comes to mind is my gratitude for the life that's been given to me." Amanda Knox's claims of police mistreatment went before the European Court of Human Rights in France.

The court ruled that there wasn't enough evidence to support her claims of degrading police behaviour, but agreed that her defence rights had been violated given she wasn't provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her initial interrogations.

The court declared that these failures effectively derailed the fairness of the entire proceedings and ordered the Italian government to pay Amanda 18,400 euros in damages, the equivalent of around 21,000 US dollars. Amanda used this ruling to challenge her slander conviction against Patrick Lumumba. In an Instagram post, she explained...

"We are both victims of the violation of my human rights during my interrogation, without which I was helpless against the coercive pressure of the police." The outcome of that interrogation derailed the investigation into Meredith Kirch's murder and led to the wrongful imprisonment of three innocent people. Patrick Lumumba suffered 10 days of wrongful imprisonment and Raffaele and I nearly four years.

In October 2023, the Court of Cassation in Rome accepted Amanda's appeal and ordered a new trial for the slander conviction. As of February 2024, a trial date has yet to be set. Amanda shared the news on social media, writing, "I am no longer a convicted person, and I will fight with my lawyers to prove my innocence once and for all."

Four years after her release from prison, the paparazzi followed Amanda as she went about her life in the United States. Both her and Raffaele have written books about their experiences, with Amanda's memoir reportedly earning her around 4 million US dollars.

Some have accused her of cashing in on the tragedy, while her stepfather told the press that a majority of this money went to paying off the exuberant legal fees and multiple mortgages her family had to take out to pay for her defense. In a letter to Guardian journalist Simon Hattonstone, Amanda discussed how the media helped shape her into a villain by using decontextualized images. She wrote...

Some people have made claims that I am histrionic or autistic because it might explain strange behaviour. I think people have exaggerated how strangely I reacted. I was not concerned with what people were thinking. I wasn't remotely concerned with how people were looking at me. Now I take it more into consideration because I've had people dissect everything I do in a way that makes me pause.

As for the kisses she and Raffaele shared outside the crime scene, Amanda told Simon that was a single five-second moment taken from hours of footage. The media made it sound like I had no feeling whatsoever for what was happening in the house, she said. I was actually sitting there devastated and traumatised and shocked.

Amanda explained that any courtroom photos that captured her smiling were misconstrued into something sinister, when those smiles were only ever directed at her family. She said, I didn't want them to see me scared. I wanted them to know I'm okay, because they can't do anything about it. They don't speak Italian. They're just sitting there worrying about me, looking at the back of my head. That was turned into...

Amanda makes the catwalk across the courtroom because she loves all the attention. I never made eye contact with those journalists. They were just a bunch of lenses yelling out or making comments about what I looked like. Amanda is now a journalist, podcaster, and activist for the wrongly accused who lives in Seattle with her husband and two young children. She has described herself as flipping between wanting to be invisible and wanting to clear her name.

In a controversial move, she returned to Italy in 2019 to speak at the country's criminal justice festival, where she addressed the role the media played in the case against her. Through tears, Amanda said, "...on the world scene, I wasn't a defendant, innocent until proven guilty. I was a clever psychopath, dirty and drug-addicted whore, guilty until proven innocent."

It was a false and unfounded history that lit up people's imagination because it fed fears and fantasies. Despite this, she continues to acknowledge that the media can also be a force for good and views those who prosecuted her with empathy. Amanda explained: "The real justice happens when we see the other people with compassion, when we judge with moderation, and when we come back to each other after the pain with the courage of an open heart."

Many believe the case only ever attracted the level of attention it did because both Meredith and Amanda were considered to be conventionally attractive women who sat on different sides of the good versus evil scale. As journalist Jessica Bennett wrote in the New York Times, "...Ms. Knox became a kind of vessel onto which society could project its fears and judgments, as well as its pornographic fantasies."

Ms Knox was perceived as an unsophisticated American, loud and flamboyant, ignorant of Italian culture, an exhibitionist and slob who brought strange men to the house. She was a sexual deviant, a Karen who had accused an innocent black man of the crime. Despite Amanda and Raffaele's official exonerations, the case continues to attract speculation and public interest, with some still believing that the pair are guilty.

Journalist Barbie Latza-Nadeau wrote in her book, Angel Face, "...nothing in this case ever made sense, and no one, it seems, played by the rules. Amanda Knox will always be remembered as someone who hung in the balance between sinner and saint, good and evil, and Meredith's murder will always be a mystery that was blurred by the headlines and lost in translation."

One CBS reporter noted that the irony of this case is that the Italian authorities actually did a great job in that within three weeks of Meredith's murder, Rudy Guede was identified and caught. It was when they refused to drop Amanda and Raffaele as suspects that the problems began. Private investigator Bob Graham agreed, responding...

The prosecution dug a hole so deep that they couldn't get out of it, and pride, vanity, whatever it was, ensured they just kept digging. Rudy Guede was released from prison in November 2021, having served 13 years of his 16-year sentence for Meredith Kirch's brutal sexual assault and murder.

His lawyer told the press that Rudy had been adequately re-educated, while a lawyer for the Kircher family said the early release would renew the family's unspeakable suffering. Amanda voiced her opinion on Twitter, writing...

Gwede holds a tremendous power to heal others harmed by his actions. He has the power to tell the truth, to take responsibility, to stop blaming me for the rape and murder of Meredith Kircher, which a wealth of evidence shows he committed alone. Rudy was free for just over two years when in December 2023 his 23-year-old girlfriend accused him of personal injury, ill-treatment and violence.

He was charged with domestic assault, given a restraining order, and fitted with an electronic tag. Raffaele Solicito, who now works as a software engineer in Milan and has never been compensated for his wrongful conviction, commented to the press: "I don't follow Guedes' life, but in light of what has happened, it seems like he hasn't changed very much."

In the years following Amanda and Raffaele's exonerations, Meredith Kirch's family mostly remained silent. Throughout the lengthy legal proceedings, they continued to feel that Meredith was being written out of her own story. Testifying at the first trial, Meredith's mother Arlene described her daughter's death as, quote, "...unbelievable, unreal. In many ways it still is. I still look for her."

Their frustrations over the media attention given to Amanda increased upon finding out that a movie was being made about the case titled "Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy."

At the time, Arlene told the press, "I don't understand why it was called Amanda Knox when my daughter was the victim." The Kirchers focused on keeping Meredith's memory alive no matter what, leaving her room exactly as she'd left it, her table stacked with books and makeup. Every year they gathered on her birthday to raise a glass in Meredith's honor and share some of their favorite memories.

Prior to Meredith's death, her father John had bought the box set of friends so that the two could watch it together on Meredith's weekly visit. He watched it gather dust on the shelf, a constant reminder of their happy evenings together. As John explained to the Daily Mail, it was easier for him to pretend that Meredith had just gone away for a while. He liked to imagine that, quote,

"Someday soon she will ring me, her voice bubbling with laughter and enthusiasm, to tell me about her latest adventure." In January 2020, John was found lying on the road near his home with two fractured legs, a broken arm, and a head injury after a suspected hit and run. He died from his injuries shortly after. Four months later, Meredith's mother Arlene passed away from natural causes.

The couple's three surviving children released a statement saying that losing both of their parents so quickly brought its own tragedy, but, quote, "...we can take some solace in knowing that they are now united with Meredith and no longer have to live with the grief which consumed them." A poem Stephanie had written for her sister held more power than ever before. Delivered at Meredith's funeral, it read,

Remember, you are never alone. I am always with you when you roam. So close your eyes. I'm with you still. I haven't left you. I never will.