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

  2

  The blue-eyed Amanda Knox was only five when someone invented the nickname that was to become famous, or infamous, worldwide many years later. In her hometown of Seattle – a rainy, hard-working city on America’s north-west coast, best known as the birthplace of Bill Gates, Boeing and Starbucks – Amanda started playing soccer at a very young age and spent hours kicking a ball around the backyard of her house with her sister Deanna, her junior by a year and a half.

  It was on the playing field that she earned the nickname ‘Foxy Knoxy’. There was nothing sinister behind the name, according to Amanda’s German-born mother Edda Mellas, a maths teacher.

  ‘Amanda was like a fox. She played as a defender and she was so intense, so focused; she was short and she’d crouch down and she’d stop people out of nowhere. I don’t know how she did it,’ Edda recalled.

  In all the sports she took up – gymnastics, swimming, softball or whatever it was – Amanda was always fiercely competitive. ‘She just liked the thrill of the competition. She was going to do it and do it well. That’s Amanda,’ Edda said.

  Edda and her husband Curt Knox, a vice-president of the local Macy’s department store, broke up when Amanda was a year old and Edda was pregnant with Deanna.

  ‘We divorced when Amanda was fairly young. Her dad was there for games and things but for a long time afterwards it was just the three of us,’ Edda recalled.

  Curt lived five blocks away and the girls were always walking back and forth between the two homes. ‘My parents decided to live very close to each other because they wanted to make me and my sister feel that we were a family, even if we were in two different houses,’ Amanda said later. A few years later, Edda fell in love with Chris Mellas, an IT consultant with dual American and Mexican nationality thirteen years her junior, and he became Amanda and Deanna’s stepfather.

  The family turbulence didn’t appear to affect Amanda’s schoolwork. She was exceptionally studious and at thirteen won an award ‘in recognition of an extraordinary student’. When she had to choose a high school, she told Edda: ‘Find me the most academically challenging.’ Edda picked the private Seattle Preparatory School, a very traditional, Jesuit-run establishment charging fees of $11,800 a year, which expected its students to give their best in both schoolwork and sport. Edda was told that as a private Catholic school, it made all applicants take an entrance test and from those with the highest scores, took first the Catholics and then ‘picked the cream of the non-Catholics’.

  The only advice Edda gave Amanda before the test was: ‘Do your best, feel happy with what you’re doing.’ She didn’t believe in telling her daughters they must get top marks. Amanda took the test and did so well that the school accepted her even though her family couldn’t afford the full fees.

  Amanda thrived at Seattle Prep. The school’s head, Kent Hickey, later described her as ‘a good and thoughtful girl, very talented in drama. A very strong student.’ Amanda had a passion for performing, acting in a string of musicals – Annie, Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, and Honk!, the musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Ugly Duckling’. She preferred what she saw as the ‘interesting’ characters to the lead roles – the rowdy orphan Pepper in Annie and Chava, the daughter who runs away to get married in Fiddler on the Roof.

  For Chris Mellas, Amanda was an easy child to raise. ‘Amanda loved her school and her schoolwork; she’s a nerd. All of her friends are goofy nerds; one guy is in love with biochemistry and talks only about that,’ Chris said. ‘Sweet as can be, dumb as a stump, and incredibly intelligent. That’s Amanda.’

  She led what he called ‘a fairly regimental life’: ‘Same breakfast every day, school, homework, a break to watch The Simpsons, more homework, then bed – the same every stinking day. All you had to do was tell her to stop doing homework and go to bed. She always played lots of sport at weekends. I took her rock climbing when she was thirteen, and she even got into the US Youth Soccer Olympic Development Programme, but she dropped it because it was too much of a commitment.’

  Although successful in both schoolwork and in sport, Amanda was, according to her sister Deanna, ‘book smart, but not street smart. She doesn’t always pick up social cues.’ This could be embarrassing. Once when Amanda had eaten too much in a restaurant she suddenly got up and stretched her arms out. Everyone stared at her. Another time, when her hairdresser asked what she thought of her new shoes, Amanda replied bluntly: ‘They’re hideous.’

  On yet another occasion, when Deanna was with some friends, Amanda walked up to them, looked Deanna up and down in disgust and asked loudly: ‘What the heck are you wearing?’ She often approached perfect strangers, greeting them breezily: ‘Hi, I’m Amanda. How are you?’ Men often thought she was flirting with them, but according to her family she just wanted to get to know people.

  Edda said her eldest daughter was not only ‘not street smart’, she was much too trusting. ‘She sees good in every person she meets; she doesn’t realise that you have to kind of protect yourself. For me as a mother, it was scary,’ Edda said.

  Late one night when Amanda was seventeen or eighteen, she called Edda to say she was on her way home, had taken a shortcut through an alley and a man was walking close behind her. ‘Keep talking to me, get out on to the main street,’ Edda urged her. When Amanda got home she and Edda rowed about the risk she took and Amanda promised to be more careful in future.

  It was when she was in her early teens and starting to learn Latin and the history of Ancient Rome that Amanda first got interested in Italy. At the age of fifteen, she made her first trip to the country with her family, visiting Pisa, Rome, the Amalfi Coast and the ruined city of Pompeii. She became fascinated by Italian culture and way of life. Edda gave her Under the Tuscan Sun, the best-selling, idyllic portrait of life in Tuscany by Frances Mayes. Amanda loved the book, and the film Stealing Beauty by Bernardo Bertolucci, starring Liv Tyler as an American teenager who has decided to lose her virginity during a stay in a stunning Tuscan villa.

  Amanda started telling her parents: ‘I wanna get out, I wanna study abroad. Italy is cool.’

  After graduating with high marks from Seattle Prep, Amanda chose to study Italian, German and creative writing at the city’s University of Washington. She hesitated between becoming a writer, becoming an interpreter or, as she put it later, ‘doing a bit of both’. What mattered most to her was to be close to her family; she would go abroad to study, but only for a year, and then come back to live in Seattle. At university, as at school, Amanda ‘ran by her own agenda’, as her father Curt put it.

  Edda explained: ‘Amanda didn’t need to be popular, she never needed to follow what the other girls were doing; if they all did their hair a certain way, she’d do it different. She liked being unique and doing her own thing; she never wanted to be one of the pack.’ Few female students shared her love of soccer and rock climbing, for instance.

  Jeff Tripoli, a student friend who edited the campus newspaper, confessed later to having had ‘a huge crush on Amanda – but I had no luck’ and described her as ‘the girl next door – cute and wholesome.’

  Amanda stuck out like a sore thumb: ‘She was nerdy in a good way: she threw tea parties with her friends – in Seattle that’s weird, we’re obsessed with coffee – and the tea was always exotic. She was sporty and actually a bit of a tomboy rather than sexy.’ Tripoli never saw Amanda dress provocatively. ‘At a Halloween party – usually it’s an excuse for girls to dress up slutty – but Amanda wore the least revealing clothes of all. I felt like telling her she hadn’t got the point of Halloween.’

  She never slept around, Tripoli remembered – she had what he called ‘two long-term relationships during her two years at the university. ’ Her Seattle boyfriend DJ (short for David Johnsrud) shaved his hair Mohawk-style, wore a kilt because he was proud of his Scottish blood and shared her passion for tea parties and rock climbing.

  Tripoli once joked to Amanda: ‘You’re cute,
but you have a weird taste in men.’

  She shot back: ‘Tell me about it.’

  But Amanda was a late bloomer as far as boyfriends went. Like Tripoli, Deanna thought she was a bit of a tomboy. Keen on photography, Deanna once asked Amanda to dress all in black and wear make-up so that she could take a portrait of her for a photography assignment at high school. The moment Deanna had finished, Amanda exclaimed, ‘Get this off of me!’ and then ran off as soon as her sister had removed the make-up.

  Amanda’s first kiss was when she was sixteen or seventeen but she didn’t have a regular boyfriend until she was at university and was by all accounts naïve where boys were concerned. She once went to a friend’s house and started showing yoga poses to some high-school kids there.

  ‘Amanda was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and there she was bending and posing and it never occurred to her that the guys were kind of looking at her. She doesn’t even realise when guys are flirting with her. I’ll say to her: “That guy was totally hitting on you,” and she’ll say: “What? I didn’t see anything!” ’ Deanna said.

  Later, Chris laughed when asked whether he had taught Amanda about the birds and the bees. ‘It wasn’t me, I didn’t have to. Edda did it, I’m sure.’ When a chatty Amanda wanted to talk to him about intimate details of her relationship with a boyfriend, Chris cut her off: ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t tell you when I do something.’

  ‘You’re telling me you don’t have sex just with Mom?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘I’m not having this conversation,’ Chris said.

  In an autobiographical account of her childhood – which has a detached, dreamy tone, partly because she wrote it in the third person – Amanda makes only passing references to the first two boyfriends she had as a student and wrote at much longer length about DJ, whom she met in the university’s climbing gym ‘where … people were adventurers, and it was with these people that Amanda felt most at home.’ DJ was in love with her for two years but said nothing, afraid of rejection, and the two were just close friends.

  They finally got together when Amanda asked DJ, as he walked her home after a party: ‘Whatcha thinking about?’

  He replied: ‘I’m thinking about you.’

  Amanda saw nothing unusual about herself, or so she wrote: ‘Once upon a time there was a very normal girl. She practised yoga, played the guitar and loved to sing … Some of this girl’s friends were musicians … It amazed her to see people who could use tools to create a sensation so beautiful, and so heartfelt.’

  She had kept a diary since she was a little girl; her dream was to become a writer. ‘For me, writing really is a way of expressing myself, it’s a way of being creative, of producing something and that for me means emotions,’ she said later.

  Amanda had ‘an incredibly active imagination’, according to her stepfather Chris. ‘Little things would spark huge novels in her head. She loved to lie out in the backyard and look at clouds going over. She’d say a cloud looked like a bunny or a dog, and then she’d turn it into a short story. Or she’d see an expression in her dog’s face and write about that. Her dreams and nightmares were always so incredibly vivid they bothered her,’ Chris said later.

  When her creative writing teacher asked the class to write a dark short story about events ten minutes before the discovery of a body, Amanda’s had a deceptively cosy title: ‘Baby Brother’. The main character, called Edgar, asks his younger brother whether he has drugged and raped a girl they both know. ‘A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don’t know what they want. You have to show it to them,’ Kyle replies. Soon afterwards, Kyle punches his elder brother in the face. ‘Edgar dropped to the floor and tasted the blood in his mouth and swallowed it. He couldn’t move his jaw and it felt like someone was jabbing a razor into the left side of his face … Edgar let himself fully rest on the carpet and felt the blood ooze between his teeth and out of his lips onto the floor. He spit into the blossoming smudge beside his head.’

  When Amanda told her stepfather she wanted to go and study in Italy, Chris told her frankly: ‘I don’t think you’re ready for it.’ He thought she was too immature to live abroad. ‘Amanda was too naïve, too trusting. She was harebrained,’ Chris said later. She would think nothing of setting out at 1 a.m. for a two-hour bicycle ride from the campus to Edda and Chris’s home.

  ‘I need a challenge,’ Amanda said.

  ‘It’s your decision, but I want you to know that I’m worried. I hope you’ll reconsider,’ Chris said. He didn’t want to smother his stepdaughter.

  But Amanda had made up her mind. She wanted to combine languages and creative writing and found out about a course in Rome that taught both. She loved Italy and wanted somewhere that would feel ‘new’ to her. But she worried that if she went to a big capital city like Rome, she would spend too much time with fellow Americans. She decided to go ‘somewhere much smaller where I could really be with Italians instead of with other Americans’ and picked Perugia. She had never been to Perugia and there was still so much to discover in Italy.

  As soon as term began at the University of Washington, she started doing odd jobs in her spare time to help pay for her year abroad. She worked for a year in one of the campus cafeterias and in an art gallery, but the job she enjoyed most was helping seven- and eight-year-olds with their homework. Edda, Chris and Curt told her how much they could afford to contribute and Amanda surprised them all by budgeting as precisely as she could, working out how much she was going to need to pay for flights, rent and food, then saving her earnings to make up the difference.

  By spring of 2007, with only a few months to go before she was due to leave for Perugia, Amanda was so excited she talked of little else and went regularly to practise her rather basic Italian with a neighbour who used to live in Rome.

  When Edda and Curt took her out for dinner one evening and Amanda was talking as usual about her preparations, a worried Curt asked: ‘Hey, how are we going to be able to help you if something happens? What happens if you get sick? We’re not a short distance away.’

  She reminded him that several of Edda’s relatives lived in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, near enough for them to help in an emergency, but she would be fine anyway. Nothing bad was going to happen.

  In early July, Amanda had her only brush with the law in Seattle. She and the five female students she shared a house with threw a leaving party. The grey-painted wooden house was on a quiet, leafy street north of the university and neighbours called the police when some of the boys who had had too much to drink started throwing stones, empty beer bottles and cans around the front of the house and down an alley at the back. Amanda was inside comforting a drunken friend who had quarrelled with her boyfriend when the police arrived. ‘We’ll tell these boys to go home,’ Amanda promised the officer in charge.

  ‘That’s all right, but we’re also writing you a ticket,’ he replied.

  Amanda and her friends had to club together to pay the $269 fine.

  Amanda was due to leave for Europe that August, but she and Chris kept clashing over her year abroad. ‘You’re still immature. Not everyone has good intentions,’ Chris told her.

  ‘OK, but everyone has some good in them.’

  ‘Amanda, you’re just not ready for it. I’m scared you’re going to go over there and something is going to happen to you. What if you’re in an accident? You don’t speak the language that well. What would you do?’

  ‘You always worry too much. I’ll be fine. I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself.’

  In her diary, Amanda listed all the things she had to do before setting off for Italy. ‘Number 1: sex store,’ she wrote. In the packing list was a reminder to include condoms. She talked to DJ about their relationship; while she would be in Perugia, he would be on a long stay in China. They agreed that each of them would be free to have other relationships while they were overseas.

  On her Facebook site, Amana filled in the section ‘Interested In’ with the single word: �
��Men’. Of her ‘Relationship Status’, she wrote: ‘It’s Complicated’. Her favourite group was The Beatles, her favourite books the Harry Potter series, her favourite films anything by Monty Python. The section ‘About Me’ indicated she no longer thought of herself as ‘just a normal girl’: ‘A lot of my friends say I’m a hippy, but I am thinking I am just weird. 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.’

  Just before Amanda left Seattle, she accidentally stepped on a flower, crushing it. She felt so bad about it that she dug a little hole outside her house and buried it there, telling Deanna: ‘The spirit of the flower can’t be released until it’s buried.’ Deanna explained that Amanda was incapable of hurting anyone or anything: ‘My sister can’t kill a spider. When I’d find a spider in my room I’d tell her “Kill it!” but she would get a glass and take it outside.’

  The only time Deanna could remember Amanda hurting anyone was when she was seven years old and got into a fight with a boy at school who was picking on Deanna. ‘Hey, don’t mess with my sister!’ Amanda shouted and gave the boy a good punch. When the sisters rowed, they screamed at each other but never came to blows. Amanda didn’t do violence, and she didn’t do drugs – or only a little – according to Deanna. In the entire time that Amanda lived in Seattle, she had smoked a joint maybe twice, ‘because she likes experimenting, she wants to try everything.’

  Edda gave Amanda a lot of advice before she left, including a warning about Italian men. One of the guidebooks said they had a habit of whistling at foreign women and pinching their bottoms. ‘Just be careful,’ Edda warned.

  But Edda had more serious worries than bottom-pinching. ‘Try to be wary, to pay attention to what’s going on around you. Don’t trust everyone you meet. Be more on your guard. It’s a foreign country you’re going to.’