A Death in Italy: The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case Read online

  To my parents

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part 1 - Path to Murder

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part 2 - Investigation

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Part 3 - Trials

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  Principal Characters

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  2 November 2007 – Festa dei Morti (Feast of the Dead)

  Ever since the Middle Ages, the people of Perugia have flocked to the yearly Fiera dei Morti (Fair of the Dead), a sprawling festival of market stalls loaded with local specialities and arts and crafts. In a traditional tribute to the departed, many of the stalls sell stinchetti dei morti, biscuits shaped liked bones, and the torcolo, a ring-shaped cake dedicated to St Costantius, one of the city’s patron saints, who was decapitated by barbarian invaders.

  On a sunny but freezing Friday lunchtime Monica Napoleoni, the dark-haired chief of Perugia’s Homicide Squad, had just detained some Romanian pickpockets at the fair when the operations room called her mobile.

  ‘The body of a young woman’s been found. Suspicious death,’ the duty officer told her. ‘Number 7, Via della Pergola.’

  A Detective Superintendent, Napoleoni had turned forty-four the previous day and cut an unusual figure in the Italian police force, not only because of the rank she’d achieved in spite of her sex, but also the strikingly feminine way she dressed, as if set on defying any macho colleagues. She liked to wear her silver, shield-shaped police badge as a pendant on a chain around her neck, and occasionally tucked her semi-automatic ordnance pistol into a Louis Vuitton handbag.

  She set off immediately in an olive-green Alfa Romeo, her colleague, Inspector Stefano Buratti, beside her.They already knew the part of the city they were headed for. While tourists flocked to the town centre, with its mix of medieval and Renaissance homes and picturesque cobbled streets, this house was just to the north-east of the ancient city walls. It was very close to the University for Foreigners, in a neighbourhood popular with both students and the North African drug dealers who were forever trying to attract their attention.

  Number 7, Via della Pergola was a whitewashed cottage with a tiled roof and green wooden shutters, perched on the hillside by a bend in the road winding above a valley. Behind it unfolded a landscape of rolling hills, olive groves, vines and cypress trees typical of the region of Umbria. Napoleoni drove through the open black gate and parked in an unkempt drive of gravel and patchy grass.

  Napoleoni noticed a young couple who looked like students standing only a few feet away from the cottage – an attractive blonde girl in a long white skirt and a boy with glasses and a bright yellow scarf – who were hugging and smothering each other with kisses. It was odd.

  ‘How can they do that with a dead girl inside?’ she thought to herself. ‘Maybe things aren’t as bad as that then.’

  A police officer came to brief Napoleoni. He had been sent to the cottage after a woman living 400 yards away reported finding two mobile phones lying on the ground in her garden. The phones had been traced to a British student, Meredith Kercher, who lived in the flat on the first floor. The young couple Napoleoni had just seen kissing each other had shown him a broken window, saying there must have been a burglary. Once inside, he found the door to Meredith Kercher’s room was locked, and could hear no sound from inside. When the door was kicked down, he said, the body of a young woman had been found lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He couldn’t tell who the victim was.

  Preparing to go inside, Napoleoni pulled on sterilised gloves and shoe covers – she always had some with her – and went into the tiny hallway, followed by her colleague Buratti and a woman doctor from the emergency services who had just arrived. Napoleoni went straight across the sitting room and turned left to get to the room with the broken window, which she was told belonged to a trainee lawyer called Filomena Romanelli.

  Napoleoni looked around the room, trying as she always did at a crime scene to make a mental photograph of everything she saw. A jumble of clothes and oddments looked as though they had been thrown on the floor; a stone as big as a human head, partially wrapped in a paper bag, lay beside a chair – presumably it’d been used to break in. But several things weren’t quite right. Shards of broken glass from the window lay on top of the mess of clothes, not under it – as if someone had first made a mess in the room and then broken the window.

  More shards were on the windowsill. But if the stone had been thrown from outside, she thought, the glass should have fallen to the floor. And a stone of that size would have shattered the shutters, which were ajar, before it ever hit the window, but they were undamaged. And why was the stone in a paper bag? Outside, the window was almost a dozen feet above the ground.

  ‘That’s strange. It looks as though someone’s done all this to make us think it’s a burglary,’ Napoleoni told Buratti.

  They walked down the narrow corridor to Meredith Kercher’s room. Napoleoni took just one step inside and stopped abruptly. The walls, a cupboard and the undersheet of the unmade single bed were streaked and splashed with blood. There was more blood on the floor. A beige quilt covered the body, which was lying between the bed and the cupboard; a naked left foot poked out from under it close to the door, and at the opposite end of the quilt, between the small bedside table and the wall, Napoleoni could see a crown of dark hair matted with blood.

  A pair of black knickers and a slightly bloodstained white bra lay close to the foot. On the bedside table lay a copy of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, a postcard of Perugia and a sealed envelope addressed to John Kercher.

  The doctor from the emergency services bent down and slowly, delicately lifted the quilt. The girl lay on her back, her head in a pool of blood, her face turned towards the left, towards the window and the view beyond it; her brown eyes were open. She was naked save for two thin cotton tops that had been pulled up above her chest. There were splashes of blood on her breasts.

  On the front and right side of her neck were what looked like two knife wounds; it was hard to tell because of the blood smearing her neck and face. On the left side of the neck was a bigger, gaping wound the shape and size of half an orange. Napoleoni had seen awful things in her time – a sixteen-year-old boy who’d committed suicide with a rifle, and babies playi
ng with needles their parents had just used to inject themselves with heroin – but tears came to her eyes at the sight of what had been done to this young woman.

  ‘Mamma mia, she’s been butchered,’ she exclaimed softly. Her first impression was that it had been a sexual attack. But why was the body covered with a quilt? Since when did thieves – if it was a thief who had done this – undress a body and then cover it up again?

  The eyes of the young woman were to haunt her for a long time to come. ‘It was as if she was looking at me,’ Napoleoni said later. ‘She looked terrified. She looked as if she had seen and understood everything she’d been through, from beginning to end.’

  As delicately as she had lifted it, the doctor lowered the quilt back over the body.

  Part 1

  Path to Murder

  1

  Surrounded by hills in the heart of Umbria, a region known as Italy’s ‘green lung’ for its unspoilt landscape, the beauty of Perugia has long attracted both tourists and students from overseas. The narrow, cobbled streets of the hilltop city, which lies roughly halfway between Rome and Florence, trace crooked paths through charming squares with ornate fountains, past austere palaces and frescoed churches. Far above the intricate maze of streets, and mostly invisible to the visitors strolling through them, terraces are draped with jasmine and wisteria.

  Perugians are fiercely proud of their city – which since its foundation by Etruscans in the sixth century BC has been besieged, conquered and looted by ancient Romans, barbarians, Byzantines and most recently Austrians – but they are also notorious for being rather parochial. An Italian actor performing there for the first time was upset by the lukewarm applause of his audience and joked that it was because the locals saw nothing but hills day in, day out. ‘If only they could see the sea, or a flat horizon, they’d be more receptive to the world around them and have more open minds,’ he said.

  At the city’s University for Foreigners, founded under the dictator Benito Mussolini to spread Italy’s language and culture abroad, no fewer than 350 different ethnic groups coexist peacefully, making Perugia the most cosmopolitan city of its size – it has a population of 160,000 – in Italy. But in recent years the city’s growing prosperity and its student population have attracted drug dealers who skulk in its dark alleys as they wait for customers. In 2007, twenty-five people died of a drug overdose in the province of Perugia, the highest number of such deaths in any Italian province.

  A student in languages and politics, Meredith Kercher was at first torn between Milan and Perugia for her year’s study abroad. She worried that Perugia might be too small; so few of her friends had heard of the place. But in the end she chose Perugia, attracted by the city’s beauty, and she put her name down for the university’s Italian language course. She had first fallen in love with Italy as a child, when her parents John, a London-born freelance journalist, and Arline, who was from Lahore in India, took her there on family holidays. Meredith grew so fond of Italy she also went on school exchange trips as a teenager. She loved everything from the Italian way of life to the country’s art treasures and its food, especially pasta and pizza.

  Almost a Christmas baby – she was born on 28 December 1985 in Southwark, London – Meredith was a pretty, cheerful and studious girl. Brought up in Coulsdon, Surrey, she had two brothers, Lyle and John, but she was closest of all to her sister Stephanie, three years her senior.

  ‘Mez [Meredith’s nickname] and I were friends as well as sisters,’ Stephanie recalled. They had the same sense of humour and used to charge around the house singing, dancing and laughing for all they were worth. When they were little, the girls went to ballet and gym classes together. Later on, Meredith played football and when she was seventeen she took a year’s karate lessons, reaching her third belt.

  Meredith’s parents divorced when she was eleven. The two girls stayed with their mother but Meredith talked to her father on the phone almost every day, going to see him at his home in London once or twice a week. She won a scholarship to the Old Palace School, an independent private school for girls in Croydon. Gifted in languages, she took Latin and French for her A-levels and went on to study European politics and Italian at Leeds University, which often sent students for a year abroad as part of their course through Erasmus, the European student exchange programme. Her heart was set on Italy. Meredith loved reading, and wrote poems and stories. She had no definite career plans – she thought of becoming a teacher, or a journalist like her father, or using her languages at the European Parliament in the French city of Strasbourg.

  In the summer of 2007, Meredith won a university grant worth some £2,600 towards her year abroad and worked for three months as a guide on tourist buses in London to raise more money for it. She was excited about the course, which started with a month of intensive Italian, after which she would study both Italian and European politics. However, Meredith’s plans were almost ruined when she was mistakenly enrolled on a course which had no year abroad. Meredith didn’t give up and helped to resolve the problem. ‘She fought so hard to come to Perugia,’ Stephanie said later.

  Meredith hated leaving her sixty-one-year-old mother Arline. But she left England in high spirits, promising Stephanie that after her year in Italy they would travel around the country together.

  ‘We laughed about making sure she would have lots of Italian friends for us to stay with,’ Stephanie remembered.

  Late that August, a twenty-one-year-old Meredith arrived in Perugia and went first to a hotel near the majestic Cathedral of St Lawrence, where the most highly worshipped relic is an agate ring which according to legend was slipped on to the Virgin Mary’s finger at her wedding. One evening, a couple of days later, Meredith went out for a pizza in a restaurant behind the cathedral with two new friends, Sophie Purton and Amy Frost, who had also just arrived in Perugia as exchange students. Like Meredith, Amy was studying languages at Leeds University, and the two had emailed each other a few weeks earlier and arranged to meet in Perugia.

  Sophie, who was studying chemistry and Italian at Bristol University, met Meredith for the first time that evening. Sophie usually found meeting new people difficult and was a year and a half younger than Meredith, but she immediately felt comfortable with her. She found Meredith fun, bubbly and quick witted; it was as if she’d known her for years.

  Over their pizzas, the three students talked about their families. Meredith’s parents, like Sophie’s, were divorced, but Sophie’s had separated when she was only six years old. Meredith talked about her sick mother, and how close she was to her sister Stephanie. When Sophie fondly praised her teenage brother Joe and pulled out a picture of him, Meredith and Amy burst out laughing. ‘You’re just like a proud mum!’ Meredith joked.

  Soon after her arrival, Meredith saw a note on a university student noticeboard about a room for rent in a nearby cottage. She called the mobile phone number and went to see the cottage as quickly as she could.

  Filomena Romanelli, a lively, fast-talking blonde, and Laura Mezzetti, a keen guitar player, both in their late twenties, were old friends and worked as trainee lawyers. They made Meredith feel very welcome in their home. Although it was only a two-minute walk from the university and the old Etruscan Arch, along a steep street leading to the city centre, the cottage felt as if it was in the middle of the countryside. An old farmhouse, it used to belong to a man known simply as ‘the market gardener’ in the neighbourhood because he grew fruit and vegetables on its sloping land. The current owner, an elderly banker who lived in Rome, had fully renovated it a decade earlier and divided it into two flats.

  Olive, fig, pear, cherry, chestnut and magnolia trees grew in the sloping, unfenced garden, which fell steeply away from the cottage down the hillside, stretching a fair distance down into the valley. Filomena had once walked around it trying to find out how big it was but had given up because the slope was too steep.

  Filomena and Laura showed Meredith round, careful to explain that the front door did
n’t close properly unless it was locked shut. Both their rooms were off the sitting room, which had a small kitchen in one corner. Four male students lived in the semi-basement flat. The two bedrooms they wanted to let were just down the corridor, and Meredith was enchanted when she saw the view from the square window in the end room. She loved art history, and the gentle, serene landscape framed by the window was straight out of a Renaissance painting. It plunged down the wooded hillside below her, stretching over hills of varying shades of brown and green, with rows of cypress trees on their crests, as far as the Apennine Mountains on the horizon to the east.

  Meredith followed the two friends out through a glass door on the other side of the corridor. She found herself on a big terrace from where she had a 360-degree view of the old churches, houses and walls that marked the edge of Perugia’s historic centre, only a stone’s throw away to the south, and of the countryside.

  The rent was £270 a month, with a deposit of two months’ rent. Meredith worried about having to pay so much upfront before even moving in, and mentioned it to her friend Sophie.

  But Meredith was in a hurry to leave the hotel which was eating into her funds. She decided to take the end room partly because the cottage was so close to the university but above all because the view enchanted her. She told Filomena and Laura that she would like to stay there until the university year ended in June. The two women were both delighted with Meredith; she was good-looking, clearly well-brought-up and reliable. Besides, they looked forward to practising their English with her just as Meredith wanted to practise her Italian.

  A week after first arriving in Perugia, Meredith checked out of her hotel and moved into the cottage. On some mornings she would wake to see the bottom of the valley shrouded in banks of mist that the sun soon dispelled.

  A couple of weeks after she moved in, Meredith’s new flatmates told her, another student would be coming to live in the room next door to hers – an American girl called Amanda.