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was tight; Amanda was far from spoiled. She won a partial scholarship for the prestigious Seattle Preparatory School, a private Jesuit high school, where she excelled both academically and socially. Kent Hickey, president of Seattle Prep, never waivered in his support of her. “This is an extremely unusual situation,” Hickey told the Seattle Times. “A lot of people said ‘don’t get involved,’ but we can’t sit this out. This is really important and we can’t pick and choose the graduates we help.”
    Amanda had an appetite for travel from a young age. After studying Japanese her freshman year in high school, she spent a few weeks with a Japanese family as part of a student exchange program. Upon graduating, she went on to the University of Washington, where she studied German, Italian, and creative writing. She worked her way through college slinging coffee and taking orders at a fine-arts frame shop and saved up seven thousand dollars to study abroad—which was barely enough to afford a semester in Perugia.
    In the United States, the “angel face” that would grace dozens of Italian magazine covers was not such a standout. Amanda’s looks were close to the norm in Seattle, although her quirky personality and sense of
humor quickly endeared her to friends. In Italy, her blue eyes and even features were slightly exotic, and she soon highlighted her dishwater blond hair to match her Italian roommates’ and pierced her ears a few more times to fit into the Perugia scene. She hadn’t had many boyfriends in Seattle. Her true love was David Johnsrud, twenty-two, a student at the University of Washington known as DJ, with whom she rock-climbed and partied, but she often complained to friends that he stopped short of having sex with her. When lurid speculation about sex games began to swirl around Meredith’s murder, DJ told a British documentary filmmaker that “speaking personally and speaking to many of the other friends, we’ve never heard Amanda express any interest in that sort of group orgy thing.”
    Unlike Meredith, who enrolled in the Università degli Studi to complete a rigorous European studies program, Amanda did not come to Perugia as part of a structured exchange program. She devised her own independent study plan and enrolled in a hodgepodge of courses in German, Italian, and creative writing at the Università per Stranieri. Her semester abroad had no real supervision beyond an e-mail address for the University
of Washington’s office of International Programs and Exchanges. As a twenty-year-old, she was not even old enough to legally drink in the United States. In Perugia, no one cared what she did.
    In August 2007, Amanda arrived in Europe with ambitious plans. First she and her younger sister Deanna Knox, then eighteen, flew from Seattle to Hamburg, to visit their aunt, Dorothy Craft Najir. Amanda’s mom had been born in Germany and moved to the United States at the age of six, so Amanda was curious to see where she and her oma, or grandmother, had lived. After a few days tooling around Germany and Austria with their aunt and uncle, the Knox sisters flew to Milan and then hopped a train down to Perugia by way of Florence. On her September 2, 2007, MySpace page, Amanda wrote,
    from munich deanna and i flew off to italy together. landed in milan took a train to florence (on the way we met frederico, an italian guy who doesnt speak english).
    She later wrote in a personal e-mail to a friend that she had sex with him in the bathroom of the train. She elaborated on the same September 2 MySpace entry:
    in fact, met a guy named frederico on the train to florence from milan, and we ended up hanging out together in florence, where he bought both deanna and i dinner and then, when deanna went to bed, we smoked up together, my first time in italy . . .
    In Perugia, the sisters searched the classifieds and message boards for an apartment. Amanda’s uncle had lined up a two-week internship at the