The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single) Read Free

said, but she had also implicated others. The evidence against her and her two accomplices was overwhelming.
    Like everyone else in the United States who read the initial news reports, I assumed she was guilty.
    A week later, I got a call from a man who identified himself as Tom Wright. He said he was a friend of the Knox family. He claimed that Amanda was being framed for murder—and he told me something that had not been reported in the American papers: that the chief prosecutor in the case was none other than Giuliano Mignini.
    Wright laid out many startling facts about the case that had not gotten into the early press reports. He said Amanda was innocent and that the case against her was being concocted out of thin air. He asked for my help, since I had had my own run-in with Mignini and had written about him in
The Monster of Florence
.
    I looked into the case to see if there was any truth to Wright’s assertions. I called Mario Spezi and my other contacts in Italy. I read about the case in the Italian papers. I spoke to a noted criminologist, Paul Ciolino, who had been sent to Italy by CBS News to analyze the case. I was deeply shocked by what I found. It was obviousthe case against Amanda and Raffaele was bogus. The
actual
evidence against her was not only weak—it was nonexistent. It indeed looked like the Perugian police and prosecutors were ginning up a case against her.
    But why? What was going on? Why would Perugian prosecutors and police fabricate a case of murder against a young American student, her boyfriend, and a third man? On the surface it made no sense.
    As I looked deeper into the case, the reasons started to become clear.
    The investigation went off the rails immediately after the murder, when investigators were under enormous pressure to solve the crime quickly. Well before the crime scene had been analyzed, Mignini and the police had focused their suspicions on Amanda Knox because, as they explained later, her behavior following the murder seemed unusual. They conducted what they called a “behavioral-cognitive” investigation that suggested Amanda and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were psychopathic killers. A police officer claimed, for example, that Amanda did a cartwheel in the police station while waiting to be questioned, which they took to be a sign of guilt. The Perugian chief of police, Edgardo Giobbi, noted that as Amanda was putting on booties to enter the crime scene, he saw her swivel her hips in what he thought was a seductive fashion. He also observed her eating pizza a few days after the murder. He told CBS investigator Paul Ciolino that when he saw that, he “knew she was guilty,” as any normal person would have been “home in bed crying.”
    And so they hauled Amanda and Raffaele in for an interrogation, hoping to break them down and get a confession.
    And they succeeded. The next morning they produced a “confession” in which Amanda (in perfect police-jargon Italian) said she had a kind of confused vision of being present at the crime scene and hearing the screams. Later, it turned out this “confession” had been coerced during a vicious interrogation by more than two dozen cops and prosecutors, who screamed at her, threatened her, told her lies, and slapped her several times on the back of the head. Even though Italian law requires that all interrogations be taped—and every other interrogation in the investigation was taped—no tape or even partial transcript of Amanda’s interrogation has ever turned up. Mignini later explained that they forgot to make one.
    And thus, on the morning of November 6, police and prosecutors in Perugia held a triumphant press conference in which they announced that they had solved the case and arrested three perpetrators, “
caso chiuso
” (case closed), they said. The third man was a bar owner named Patrick Lumumba, who Amanda had named as possibly being at the scene of the crime. (Later, it would turn out the