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

  At a loose end on the afternoon of Sunday, 21 October, Rudy went to the cottage to see if he could watch a Formula One race in Brazil with the students in the semi-basement flat. They let him in, and as they watched Ferrari win the race and the championship, Rudy talked again about Amanda. One of the students bet that sooner or later, he would sleep with her.

  Shortly afterwards, Meredith found out that the elderly banker who owned the cottage had died. ‘It’s really weird!’ she laughed when she told her friend Sophie. ‘First the cat dies, and now the landlord’s dead.’

  To Amy, Meredith said: ‘It’s spooky. Things keep dying.’

  Amanda met her fourth conquest since arriving in Italy two months earlier at a concert of music by Mozart, Schubert and other composers at the university on 25 October. A shy, meek-looking computer science student from southern Italy who was due to graduate the following month, the twenty-three-year-old Raffaele Sollecito had moss-green eyes and wore glasses; later, Amanda’s friends said he looked like Harry Potter.

  Amanda had gone to the concert with Meredith, who left during the interval. After the interval, Raffaele overcame his shyness enough to take Meredith’s place next to Amanda and start talking to her. The two ‘liked each other immediately’, as he wrote to the author later. She suggested they meet that evening at Le Chic. Raffaele’s English was better than Amanda’s broken Italian, so they often resorted to English.

  That night, Amanda slept at Raffaele’s flat. He lived in an old, ochre-coloured house a short walk up a medieval street which wound its way up a hill behind the university. She practically moved in from then on, sleeping in his ground-floor bedsit and going back to the cottage every other day to fetch some clothes and talk to her flatmates. ‘From the outset, Amanda and I had an intense, albeit brief, relationship,’ Raffaele wrote.

  6

  Raffaele entered the world virtually asleep; the obstetrician had to shake him to make him cry and open his lungs. After that brusque birth, he was mollycoddled by his parents like many sons of Italian families. Brought up in the small town of Giovinazzo in the heel of Italy’s boot, the son of a wealthy surgeon who was also an urologist and a forensic doctor, Raffaele had what he called an ‘idyllic’ childhood. His mother gave up her career as an accountant to devote herself to the care of Raffaele and his elder sister. ‘I was always the darling of my mother and father, but above all of my mother. My mother’s world always revolved around the family and especially around me,’ he wrote to the author. As a result, he had always lived in an environment ‘softened’ by his parents’ unsparing care and attention.

  Raffaele was eight years old when his parents separated. ‘My mother only ever loved my father but he didn’t settle down until he found his current wife,’ Raffaele wrote. His parents continued to fuss over him – albeit separately – and he grew up, as he described himself, ‘very discreet, calm and introverted. My shyness has sometimes made me “scared of talking to people” because I didn’t want to be a nuisance or say something stupid.’ But he added: ‘I’ve always tried to force myself to overcome my limitations.’

  It was when he was still a boy that he started collecting knives as a hobby. His parents had a house in the country and he amused himself using a knife to carve inscriptions on the bark of pine trees. From then on, he carried a knife all the time. ‘Raffaele wore knives as if they were part of his wardrobe,’ a friend said. But he was careful with them. ‘He didn’t let anyone use his knives because he was scared we’d get hurt,’ another friend said.

  As a teenager, he was unpopular at school. Children made fun of him because he was mad about the cartoon Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, a Japanese manga series in which teenage girls with magical powers defend Earth against evil forces. He went so far as to dye his hair yellow, cut it in strange shapes and wear earrings like the cartoon characters.

  When he came to choose a university, he enrolled at the main university in Perugia, far from his hometown, to avoid his parents’ constant fussing. Shortly before leaving, he had his first brush with the law when police found him and two friends in possession of 2.6 grammes of hashish.

  Once in Perugia, he found it hard to settle in the private, men-only college his father had chosen, which had originally been founded for the orphan sons of doctors. He said he was too introverted and too homesick. But thanks to a generous allowance from his father, he lived comfortably and drove around in a costly Audi A3, sporting Dolce & Gabbana jeans and Jean Paul Gaultier shirts.

  College friends described Raffaele as ‘a good man, but shy and reserved, who could become emotional very easily’. When college staff talked to him, they often had the impression that his mind was elsewhere, that he was thinking about something totally different from what they were saying to him. He blushed easily, as for example when they told him off for parking his car in the wrong place outside the college.

  Raffaele was given a more serious warning when a friend told the staff that he watched pornographic DVDs full of explicit violence. One administrator discovered to his disgust that one of the films had scenes showing a woman having sex with an animal. He told Raffaele off and started watching him more closely. The staff came to suspect that he smoked cannabis but were never able to prove it. He also liked horror films and the controversial American artist Marilyn Manson. But surprisingly on one website he said that his favourite film was Hamlet. He defined himself as ‘very honest, peaceful, gentle but sometimes completely crazy’. One crazy moment was recorded by a college friend who took a photograph of him covered in toilet paper and holding a cleaver and a bottle of alcohol.

  Raffaele’s mother died in 2005, when he was twenty-one and still living in college. The doctor attributed the death to a heart attack, and no autopsy was carried out. The college’s administrators were told however that she had apparently committed suicide, upset by her ex-husband’s relationship with the woman who became Raffaele’s stepmother that September; they also heard that Raffaele’s mother had a weak personality and was excessively protective of her son, so much so that she was reluctant even to allow him out of the house. Raffaele later denied that she had committed suicide.

  He left the cottage that summer and eventually moved into his bedsit on Corso Garibaldi. In a blog, Raffaele vented his frustration at his years in the college in stark terms: the ex-resident he most admired was Luigi Chiatti, the so-called ‘Monster of Foligno’ – a waitress’s son who was serving a thirty-year sentence after confessing to killing two boys, aged four and thirteen. Raffaele added: ‘My impression is that all sorts of down-and-outs went through that college and they all had one thing in common: “depression”.’

  The college ‘castrated’ people: ‘it looks as if a place with 350 males cooped up together and where you can’t invite anyone in was meant to keep everyone’s instincts in check.’ What he wanted was to find ‘bigger thrills which will surprise me’.

  In the week following their meeting, Amanda and Raffaele spent hours on end together. A couple of days after they met, Amanda brought Raffaele to the cottage and he cooked spaghetti with mushrooms for her and Meredith.

  Filomena and Laura were struck by how much he clung to Amanda, especially since the two had only just met. They kept hugging and kissing each other. When Amanda got up to wash the dishes, he got up too, followed her and hugged her from behind as she stood at the sink, giving her little kisses. Later, when Amanda went to play the guitar, Raffaele again followed and sat next to her. Later, Laura called them ‘lovebirds’, but both she and Filomena felt Raffaele was so clingy that they kept their distance; they felt as if they risked being treated like intruders, butting in on something they didn’t understand.

  Raffaele told his father that he treated and pampered Amanda ‘as if she was a little girl’, and had washed and dried her hair. He drove her to nearby Assisi for a day out and, keen on boxing and martial arts, fooled around with her trying to teach her kickboxing. Later, Amanda wrote in her diary that one of her favourite things to do with Raf
faele was to kiss and look at him in bed, pull funny faces at each other and rub their noses together – ‘an Eskimo kiss they call it in the US, although I call it “unca wunca”.’

  On the nights she worked at Le Chic, he would meet her there at about 10 p.m., and go back at midnight to walk her to his flat. Amanda had become increasingly dissatisfied with her work at the bar; she complained in an email to her mother that Patrick wanted her to drink wine when she was serving customers, so she could help them choose their wine. Amanda thought it very weird of him to ask her to drink while working. To her flatmates, Amanda complained that Patrick wasn’t paying her (an accusation he later denied); she said she was going to quit.

  In one heart-to-heart conversation which Amanda described later, Raffaele confided that one night, at a concert with some friends, he had had ‘a terrible experience’. He had taken cocaine and marijuana, drunk rum as well and then driven his friends home. He decided ‘to change’ after that, but he still smoked marijuana often. He also told Amanda that he felt guilty about his mother’s death because he had gone away and left her alone before she died. She had told her son she felt lonely, had nothing left to live for and wanted to die. Amanda also opened up to him, telling him that she had been unpopular in high school ‘because the people in my school thought I was a lesbian’.

  On one call home, Amanda put Raffaele on the phone for her stepfather to talk to. ‘I know where you live,’ Chris joked and Raffaele laughed. The two chatted for a bit. Raffaele spoke decent English and kept calling Chris ‘Mister’; Chris kept telling him not to. ‘Raffaele seemed an alright guy. A nice kid, very soft-spoken, a computer nerd – definitely the kind of guy I could see Amanda going out with,’ Chris said later.

  Amanda’s relationship with Raffaele caused her some soul-searching and she looked depressed when she sat down with her three flatmates around the cottage’s sitting-room table on the afternoon of 30 October. Amanda told them she felt guilty towards her American boyfriend DJ because she was ‘cuckolding him’ by sleeping with Raffaele. But Amanda then added: ‘But I don’t really feel guilty because with Raffaele I’m happy, he treats me well.’

  ‘But at least, you’ve told Raffaele that you’ve got a boyfriend in America?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, but he doesn’t care.’

  Filomena and Laura reassured her, saying things like that happened when lovers were far away from each other. Meredith was the only one of the four to say firmly that she had never cheated on anyone, that she would never do it and that fidelity was important in a relationship. The other young women knew that Meredith was going out with Giacomo, and they were sure that she wasn’t interested in anyone else and would never flirt with other men.

  Later that day, Filomena and Laura reminded Amanda and Meredith that the rent was due the following week, by 5 November. Meredith said she had the money ready: ‘If you want, I can give it to you now,’ she said. Filomena said it could wait until 4 November, when they would put all the money together before paying the agency. ‘Meredith is a real English girl, she’s more precise than we are,’ Filomena joked.

  That last week in October, Meredith and her sister Stephanie texted and emailed each other often to talk about her flight home in early November. They were chatting about Giacomo when Meredith suddenly told her sister: ‘By the way, I quarrelled with my American flatmate.’ Meredith mentioned it in passing, and Stephanie didn’t think of asking what the row had been about.

  7

  31 October 2007

  On the afternoon of Halloween, a Wednesday, Meredith sent a text message to her friend Sophie: could Sophie come round to the cottage? Giacomo had asked her a favour that worried her. He and the three other students in the semi-basement flat had five marijuana plants in a small room, and had asked her to water them because they’d gone to spend the All Saints holiday with their families near the Adriatic Coast.

  Meredith was a little nervous; she worried whether it was right to water the plants. She was also concerned because they’d told her not to tell anyone about them, not even her three flatmates. Sophie texted Meredith back saying she was sorry but she was too busy to come over then; they could meet later. Meredith and her English friends planned to have dinner together and then go on to the Merlin Pub for a Halloween party.

  Early that evening, after a long chat with her mother, Meredith went out to buy the things she needed for celebrating Halloween. As a child, she’d use bin liners to make herself a costume, and tie pumpkins with candles in them to sticks before setting out with her parents to call on neighbours. That evening in Perugia, she decided to dress up as Count Dracula and found a long black cloak with a stiff high collar, a pair of plastic vampire teeth and the fake blood she wanted. It came in a packet with some false teeth, marked in big letters ‘BLOOD AND FANGS’.

  Pleased to have got everything she needed, she walked back to the cottage. Filomena was at home and the two chatted about Halloween and how the British celebrate it. Meredith put the cloak on and fixed the false teeth and Filomena lent her some make-up. As Meredith was about to leave, she asked Filomena hesitantly: ‘Do I look all right?’

  Filomena said yes, and the two said goodbye. Laura had already left to stay with her family and Filomena was about to go and spend the next couple of days at her boyfriend’s. The cottage would be empty, save for Meredith and Amanda.

  It was the last time Filomena saw Meredith.

  Amanda tried hard to meet up with Meredith that evening and sent her a series of text messages. She asked Meredith about her plans. Just after 7 p.m., Meredith replied: ‘I’m going to a friend’s house for dinner. What are your plans?’ Almost an hour later, just before 8 p.m., Amanda again texted Meredith: ‘What are you doing this evening? Want to meet up? Got a costume?’ Less than ten minutes later, Amanda texted Meredith yet again: ‘I’m going to Le Chic and after who knows? Maybe we’ll meet up? Call me.’ Meredith stuck to her dinner plans but told her friends later that she felt guilty for not meeting up with Amanda.

  At Amy and Robyn’s flat on Via Bontempi, where ruts on the stone thresholds of smart palazzi still mark the passage of medieval carts, Meredith and half a dozen friends, all of them women students, had dinner, drank wine and put the final touches to their costumes before going out. Sophie was dressed up as the Devil, Amy as another vampire. Sophie, Amy and Meredith helped each other make themselves up with the fake blood and plenty of bright red lipstick. They got the blood to trickle down from the sides of Meredith’s mouth but it was messy and there was more on Meredith’s face than she wanted. She just laughed about it.

  At about midnight, Meredith and her friends went dancing at the Merlin Pub, then when it closed at 2 a.m. went on to the Domus nightclub. Meredith was too tired to dance, and sat at a table chatting. At about 3.30 a.m., she suggested they leave. The group headed home, passing by the cathedral on their way. They agreed to meet again at Amy and Robyn’s flat that afternoon; they would watch a film and have dinner together. The group accompanied Meredith as far as the top of the stairs on Piazza Grimana, where they said goodbye to her at about 4 a.m.

  The dark, narrow streets were filled that night with vampires, witches and ghosts. The atmospheric heart of Perugia had become haunted, just for the one night.

  1 November 2007

  According to Amanda’s own account, she woke up late, at about 10 a.m., in Raffaele’s flat. The previous night, she’d made up her face to look like a cat, and had gone alone to Le Chic where she chatted with Patrick over a glass of red wine, and then on to the Merlin and other pubs before meeting up with Raffaele. He took her to his flat where they smoked a joint together before going to bed. After breakfast, Amanda went to the cottage to have a shower and change her clothes.

  Just after 12.30 p.m., Filomena returned to the cottage with her boyfriend Marco Zaroli, a twenty-five-year-old engineering student, for a quick half hour to get changed before hurrying out again to a friend’s birthday party. Amanda was sitting on her own at the table i
n the sitting room, wearing a sweatshirt that had belonged to her American boyfriend DJ. Filomena asked Amanda to wrap up the birthday present she’d bought – thinking that, as a woman, she would make a better job of it than Marco. Amanda did as she was asked and because Marco’s handwriting was so poor, Filomena also asked her to write a birthday message. Before leaving, Filomena closed the window in her room. She closed one shutter, leaving the other one slightly ajar to let in some light.

  Not long after Filomena and Marco had gone, Meredith woke up. Amanda noticed as Meredith had her breakfast that she still had traces of fake blood on her face from the previous night. The two told each other how they’d spent Halloween. They also talked once more about Amanda going out with Raffaele, while also still supposed to be DJ’s girlfriend. Raffaele arrived at about 2 p.m. and had lunch with Amanda. She then played the guitar for a while. Meredith left the cottage at about 3 or 4 p.m., saying only ‘Ciao!’

  Meredith spoke to both her parents on the phone that afternoon. At 3.15 p.m., she called her father John and asked how he was. John was in a bank and they chatted for only a couple of minutes.

  ‘It’s expensive for you to call, I’ll call you this evening,’ John told his daughter.

  ‘But I’m going out this evening,’ Meredith said.

  ‘Well, I’ll speak to you tomorrow then,’ John said. As he said goodbye, he told her that he loved her.

  Meredith had a much longer conversation later with her mother, asking how that day’s dialysis had gone. She told her that she had booked a ticket to fly home on 9 November, in time to celebrate her mother’s birthday two days later. She told Arline about all the presents she was taking her, but wouldn’t say what they were. She also had a suitcase full of chocolates for her sister, she said. Mother and daughter also talked about another trip home which Meredith was planning for mid-December; she wanted to go to a ball she had been invited to. After that, Meredith said, she would try to get all her work done so she could be back once again for Christmas.