The Trial of Amanda Knox

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

Amanda Knox, guilty of murder. The 22-year old American--already long convicted in the Italian court of public opinion--was found guilty in the only court that matters. A Seattle college student who only intended to come to Italy for a few months of study will, failing an appeal, spend at least 24 years of her life in an Italian prison. A parents' nightmare realized. Her onetime boyfriend convicted too in a case that inflamed passions on both sides of the Atlantic.

What ended Friday, Dec. 4 in an building from the Middle Ages began more than two years ago now in the same nearby streets of Perugia, Italy.

It was Nov. 1, the evening of All Saints Day, as the young English student made her way home through the cobbled streets of the ancient Italian fortress city. Meredith Kercher was 21 years old and just weeks before leaving Britain for her year abroad, she'd helped a musician friend with his video. Meredith--Mez to her friends--had, some thought, an exotic allure and her brief turn in the music video--a lark, really--captured the quality.

Now, months later, as she returned that night to her student bungalow in Perugia, perhaps, she reflected on what a pleasant evening it had been with her English girlfriends over at their digs. Pizza and a movie, the romantic teary story of eternal love, "The Notebook."

Maybe after clubbing till all hours the night before, she needed a low-key recovery night. It was Halloween and she'd gone as a female vampire with blood dripping from her fangs.

She'd bumped into Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese bar owner--her American roommate's boss--and he'd dangled an intriguing invitation before her: come DJ one night a week at the bar. It would be "Mez Night" at his hole-in-the-wall club, Le Chic.

Lumumba thought Meredith's good looks would be a draw. She told him she'd think about it.

But there'd never be a "Mez Night." There'd never be a year of studying literature at the University of Perugia. Never again a movie and pizza with girlfriends.

When she opened the door to the apartment she shared with three others, Meredith Kercher had less than two hours to live. She was found the next day after 1 p.m. A ghastly scene. Murdered in her bedroom, her throat slashed. Her killer or killers had thrown a bed cover over her bruised and mostly naked body.

The murder case, of course, became a national sensation. Not just that a promising life had been extinguished in such a brutal fashion but even more for the Italian authorities theory of the crime and the three they'd accused of doing it.

There was the African-born idler, Rudy Guede, a 20-year old hanger-on of the student scene in Perugia. He danced in the clubs and by reputation was a small-time marijuana dealer.

This is a homemade video Rudy Guede uploaded to a web page, him ghoulishly playing "Dracula." "I'm gonna' suck your blood," he moans.

The second person accused of killing Meredith was a slight Italian computer-sciences student, a doctor's son, 23-year old Raffaele Sollecito. He'd posted a picture of himself on a social networking site costumed as a mad surgeon with a bloody meat cleaver.

But to American ears the most baffling of all was the third person charged. Inexplicable, really. Sollecito's girlfriend of one week and the new roommate of the murdered woman: Amanda Knox, a 20-year-old Seattle student from the University of Washington.

On her web page, she'd uploaded a leggy glam shot and said her nickname was "Foxy Knoxy."

The Italian prosecutors asserted that after an evening of smoking marijuana with her boyfriend, the scrubbed American, Amanda Knox had plunged a knife into the throat of the roommate she'd quickly grown to hate, simmering tensions over money, men and drugs suddenly flaring into sexual humiliation turned murderous. Three-on-one: Rudy Guede accused of sexually assaulting the unwilling English woman from behind, as Sollecito the boyfriend gripped her arms and pushed her to her knees. Amanda Knox, the theory went, was in front, taunting her roommate with a kitchen knife.

That was two years ago. For the last year Amanda Knox and the onetime boyfriend have been on trial together in an Italian courtroom, charged with murder.

Twice a week they've been brought under guard from jail cells to hear the accusations made against them. The court an imposing stone hall from the Middle Ages where a Madonna looks down on the proceedings from a faded fresco above.

The jury, Italian style--two judges and six citizens --lean forward to take in what we call in America the opening argument.

Reporter Barbie Nadeau has covered the crime and trial for Newsweek magazine.

Barbie Nadeau: The prosecutor believes that what happened the night before was that Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede made a plan to do something to Meredith.

There would be months of testimony and evidence to follow. A story told by DNA, blood smears and ghostly luminoled footprints. Accounts of screams heard in the night. A deeply perplexing confession by Amanda later retracted.

Barbie Nadeau: You've got beautiful young women. You've got sex, you've got drugs, you've got lies. You've got a beautiful little Umbrian village. You've got all of these elements that would make a very intriguing movie. It's just unfortunate that it's real, that it really happened.

You'll see all of that now in the trial of Amanda Knox.

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