Deadly exchange

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

This hillside Italian fortress city from the Middle Ages -- Perugia—is best known for its chocolates, not its murders.

But on Nov.1, 2007, that may have changed.

When police forced open a bedroom door in this student rental cottage, they found the naked body of a young English woman covered by a bed quilt. She'd been stabbed in the throat, her blood thoroughly soaking the cotton shirt bunched up around her neck.

All the forensic evidence pointed to attempted rape and murder.

A broken window suggested an intruder.

The awful crime here on the via Sante Antonio would quickly have been forgotten as yet another head-shaking statistic -- sad but not all that uncommon -- except for the authorities’ gruesome theory of the murder.

According to an investigating judge who issued a very preliminary kind of finding, it appears that the young English woman died at the hands of her friends. That she--the victim--refused to play along in their high-voltage game of drugs and group sex and as a consequence was tortured, sexually assaulted, stabbed and left to die.

In the days afterwards, the violent sex crime electrified Italy and beyond as pictures of three suspects appeared in the news.

Could this United Nations of disparate characters have actually done what police investigators believed?

The Italian computer student …

The Congolese bar owner...

And--oddest of all--the person who seemed to be the connective tissue to all the players, the victim's roommate, a fresh-faced 20-year old Seattle college student on a kind of junior year abroad?

Her name is Amanda Knox and she was studying Italian here at the University for Foreigners.

The riddle near the center of this lurid murder story is Amanda Knox and to begin to find out who she is we have to travel almost 6000 miles west, to Perugia's sister-city of Seattle, Washington.

In this coffee-mad city, Amanda was the bubbly barista -- the latte and cappuccino artiste -- at this busy espresso bar near the University of Washington.

She was in her junior year at the U doing dean's list level work in German and Italian studies.

She was a delight to her former dorm mates.

Dennis Murphy: What are the kind of personality traits you're thinking about?

Alexandra (friend of Amanda Knox): Generous, kind, genuine, optimistic, bubbly. Pretty much all the good words that you can find in a dictionary, she was.

Amanda: A welcome presence when you had the flu.

Meredith: She took me over to her house. Made me a bath, made me dinner, made me tea -- put me to bed.

Dennis Murphy: So she's taking care of you kind of....

Meredith: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Amanda's parents had divorced when she was two. She and her sister were raised by her mother, a grade-school teacher, in this modest single family home in West Seattle.

She attended an expensive Catholic prep school. A soccer player.

Andrew (friend of Amanda Knox): I think about her smile and how beautiful it was. It just reflected her beautiful personality.

Those who know her describe a day-dreamy young woman who liked dorky clothes and had a retro ear for classic rock, the Beatles.

Favorite movies? Easily digested fantasies like The Princess Bride and the Shrek series.

She liked to write short stories and backpack in the Cascades.

By most accounts here, Amanda was no different than thousands of other young Seattleites growing into young adulthood. Outdoorsy. Tasting the first freedom of college, first jobs, and first serious boyfriends. If there is a downside to her high-spiritedness, friends reflect that maybe she was naive in her judgment about the new people she was so eager to seek out. Boys. She tended to take in strays.

Male friend of Amanda’s: She is a bit trusting and overly optimistic. It's sort of like why shouldn't I trust this person? I haven't done anything to them. Why shouldn't I be okay with them?

To the point, her friends have said, that they had to warn her to be more careful when it came to strangers.

Amanda was known as a light drinker in her circle, tipsy after only a shot, as a now notorious cell phone video that made its way onto YouTube shows.

She wasn't one to smoke a joint or take party drugs, according to her friends.

The club scene was alien to her.

On Aug. 14 this year, she was off to Europe. The first great adventure of her life. The first time she was truly on her own.

She'd keep the posse back home up to speed on her journey through her webpage blog on MySpace.

She gave a final shout-out: "peace out suckers, loves Amanda.”

And she was off.

Meanwhile, in England another young student -- also a language major -- was preparing to leave for university studies in Italy. She was 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, a recent college graduate. Meredith, like Amanda, was going to be living in Perugia, Italy for the next school term.

Both young women had to find a place to live.

Their paths would meet in a little house with a splendid view over the Umbrian valley below.

They were two young women in Italy expecting the most exciting year of their lives.

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