An Italian newspaper called her the Dark Lady of Seattle, but it is the
nickname she gave herself on her blog, Foxy Knoxy, that has stuck. Amanda
Knox, a 20-year-old American student, is a key suspect in the sexual abuse
and murder of her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, 21, in the
otherwise-idyllic hill town of Perugia in Umbria on November 1 last year.
A senior Italian investigator, meeting her for the first time after the
killing, says he was impressed by Knox’s “virgin-like beauty”. But in the
same breath, he added that he was struck even more by the way she played
with the truth. “Knox is very calculating. She lies shamelessly,” he said.
Precisely how an attractive, gifted, wholesome American student found herself
at the heart of a particularly sordid and brutal murder has yet to be
established by prosecutors and the police. They have dozens of blood samples
and other forensic evidence to analyse from the whitewashed cottage where
Knox and Kercher lived – and four suspects.
Knox, her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and two other
acquaintances – Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, from the Ivory Coast, and Patrick
Diya Lumumba, 37, the Congolese manager of the bar where Knox worked – are
as yet uncharged of sexually abusing and murdering Kercher, a Leeds
University student from Coulsdon in Greater London. They are all in jail
save for Lumumba, who has been released but is still being investigated.
According to the judicial investigation, Kercher spent the early part of her
last evening watching the romantic film The Notebook on a DVD at the home of
her friend Sophie Purton. At about nine o’clock, she told Purton she was
tired and left to walk home alone. When she arrived, the prosecution says,
Knox was among those waiting for her. Eyewitnesses and CCTV recorded Knox
walking to the cottage at 8.40pm before Kercher arrived home.
At the cottage, some or all of the suspects are alleged to have subjected
Kercher to a vicious sexual assault, some holding her down while Guede is
said to have raped her at knifepoint. Bruises to Kercher’s face and body
indicated that she was most likely forced, with her face pressed to the
floor, to endure a sexual act, before she was stabbed to death.
According to the 50-page autopsy report, Kercher was stabbed three times in
the neck. The last and deepest thrust missed her carotid artery, but Kercher
is believed to have been in agony for about 10 minutes before bleeding to
death. Traces of both Knox’s and Kercher’s DNA have been found on the
eight-inch kitchen knife thought to be the murder weapon; Knox’s was near
the handle and Kercher’s was at the tip of the blade.
Files from the investigation seen by The Sunday Times Magazine, including the
suspects’ testimonies to investigators and to their own lawyers as well as
witness statements and interviews with judicial and police sources, paint a
more perplexing portrait of Foxy Knoxy.
) ) ) ) )
Knox was born and grew up in Seattle on America’s northern Pacific coast,
famous for Bill Gates, Boeing and Starbucks. Her mother, Edda, is a maths
teacher; her father, William, the vice-president of the local Macy’s
department store. They divorced in 1989, when Knox was two years old, and
have both remarried since.
Knox went to the £5,900-a-year Seattle preparatory school, run by Jesuits and
the second-fanciest school in the city. She followed the school’s strict
dress code, sang in the choir and said her daily prayers. Kent Hickey, the
school’s head, has only positive memories of Knox, who played football
competitively.
“She was a good and thoughtful girl, very talented in drama. A very strong
student,” was all he would say before invoking privacy laws and clamming up.
She played the part of an orphan in the school’s production of the musical
Annie.
She remained a good student at Seattle’s Washington University, where she read
Italian, German and creative writing, making the Dean’s List of
high-achievers. Knox studied hard but also found time for sport – she played
football, went rock climbing and did yoga – and worked in two bars on the
campus, which echoes Oxbridge; it boasts neo-gothic libraries and halls, and
even a quadrangle, lined with cherry trees.
There, almost all Knox’s friends refuse to talk about her, at the request of
Knox’s parents, who have hired a public-relations adviser to help them. It’s
a measure of how badly the more lurid stories about Knox have been received
that Jeff Tripoli, the news editor of the university newspaper, posted on
his blog: “F*** the British press”.
But Tripoli, 21, a journalism student from Las Vegas, turns out to be willing
to talk. He speaks about Knox both in the present tense and in the past
tense, as if in some way she was dead to him. Sipping a soft drink – a party
the previous night involved the outgoing editor eating a 12-egg omelette –
Tripoli doesn’t recognise the Knox he knew in the media coverage. “The
media wants a movie: pretty, reckless monster with no emotions kills
roommate at kinky sex party. But that’s not possible. Amanda is the girl
next door, wholesome and sporty and fun to be with.” Unprompted, Tripoli
says that he had “a huge crush” on Knox. He had no luck, though. What
attracted him so much?
“She’s got a cute personality. She’s funny and sporty. She’s cute, but not
beautiful or sexy. I was more attracted by her personality.”
Knox, he said, was nerdy in a good way; she had tea parties with her friends
where they drank exotic teas. “In Seattle, that’s weird,” he says.
Surely Knox wasn’t a teetotaller; had he ever seen her drunk? Tripoli gives a
tight, embarrassed smile. “I’ve seen her under the influence of alcohol. But
I’ve never seen her out of control.”
And the man-eater depicted by the media? “That’s crazy. She didn’t sleep
around. She had two long-term relationships over two years. She didn’t even
dress provocatively. At this Hallowe’en party, usually it’s an excuse for
girls to dress up slutty, but Amanda wore the least revealing clothes of
all. I felt like telling her that she hadn’t got the point of Hallowe’en
Tripoli says Knox was still attached to her last campus boyfriend, David
Johnsrud, after moving to Italy. At university he shaved his head
Mohawk-style, wore kilts and shared Knox’s taste for tea parties. Tripoli
once e-mailed Knox: “You’re cute, but you have a weird taste in men.” To
which Knox replied: “Tell me about it.”
In December 2006, during her second year, Knox posted a short story on MySpace
called Baby Brother; a young woman is drugged and raped by another young
woman. One passage reads: “She fell on the floor, she felt the blood on her
mouth and swallowed it. She couldn’t move her jaw and felt as if someone was
moving a razor on the left side of her face.” On her MySpace site, Knox says
she wants to meet “people with passions and ideas”, that she likes “to
always do new things”. Her heroine is “my mom”.
Assuming this is not simply adolescent grandstanding, on her Facebook page she
reveals her interests are “men”. Her entry for “About Me” reads: “A lot of
my friends say I’m a hippy, but I am thinking I am just weird. I don’t get
embarrassed and therefore have very few social inhibitions… The bigger and
scarier the roller coaster the better.” More prosaically, she loves the
Beatles, the Harry Potter books and Monty Python movies.
Knox had only one brush with the law in Seattle: a $269 fine for throwing a
noisy summer party at the house she rented a short walk north of the campus.
The houses on the leafy street are made of painted wood, sofas sit on the
porches and a few Stars and Stripes fly over doors. Neighbours recall waking
in the small hours to the sound of loud, drunken voices and of beer cans and
bottles being thrown down an alley. The cops came and Knox paid the fine,
getting her friends to pay her back afterwards. One neighbour remembers Knox
as bright, hard-working and focused, disciplined about her academic studies
and her sports, so excited about going to Italy that she spoke in Italian to
the neighbour’s husband, who had lived in Rome.
By the time she arrived in Italy for a three-month stay, a less than wholesome
Amanda Knox had emerged. According to a message she sent a friend, she met
and made love with a stranger on the train taking her to Perugia.
She was overjoyed to find a bedroom in a whitewashed cottage close to the
University for Foreigners, where she studied, raving about the view over
woods and hills. The cottage is perched on a slope on the outskirts of
Perugia, just below the old stone houses of the city’s historic centre,
which is home to both Renaissance treasures and a large multiracial
population of students and immigrants.
Among the students already living in the cottage was Meredith Kercher, who was
in her third year of a European-studies degree at Leeds and had gone to
Perugia on a one-year exchange. Knox didn’t make a very good impression on
Kercher. Her father, John, a freelance journalist, testified: “Meredith
spoke to me about Amanda in a joking way, as a girl who was sure of herself
and a bit eccentric. Knox boasted about being a great singer and said that
if she’d had a guitar, she would have shown her her talent.”
Kercher also told her father about Knox’s busy private life, remarking
caustically that “Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a
boyfriend.” To her British friend Sophie Purton, Kercher expressed concern
at what she called the “strange types” Knox brought home after meeting them
in bars and internet cafes.
One man she may or may not have brought home is the Ivorian immigrant Guede,
who, according to a senior investigator, “was crazy about Knox, he had a
morbid interest in her. He was always seeking out white women and perhaps
Knox attracted him because she was typically American”.
In mid-October, Knox started a relationship with the engineering student
Sollecito, a urologist’s son from southern Italy. In Knox’s eyes, Sollecito
must have had no trouble fitting the “weird” type she fancied. Sollecito
described himself as “a worrier” and passionately collected both knives and
unsharpened swords. “Since I was 13, I’ve always carried a knife in my
pocket, to make marks on trees,” he said in his testimony. His blog pictured
him wrapped in lavatory paper and brandishing a meat cleaver.
By his own account, Sollecito’s relationship with Knox was intense, beginning
on the night of the day they first met in mid-October. In a written
interview from jail with The Sunday Times, Sollecito said he had met Knox at
a concert of classical music.
“We liked each other immediately,” he said.
“I went up to her and she invited me that evening to go to the bar where she
worked. From the outset Amanda and I had an intense, albeit brief,
relationship, right up to the evening of the tragic event I’ve been linked
to.”
Sollecito knew Knox had had many boyfriends, but she was only his second
girlfriend. They began living together immediately, spending a lot of time
at his home and smoking cannabis – supply was plentiful, as it grew in the
garden of Knox’s cottage. One of his lawyers asked him about his sexual
relations with Knox and he replied: “We made love in the traditional way.”
But Knox did not stop seeing other men. Daniel de Luna, a Rome student, has
testified he went clubbing with Knox and other friends on October 20 and
that afterwards she took him to her home, where they slept together. To
another Greek friend, Spiridon Gatsios, Knox confided at the start of her
relationship with Sollecito that she “didn’t feel comfortable about it”, as
at the same time she had a relationship with an American boy – her last
campus boyfriend, Johnsrud, with whom she kept in touch by web camera.
The “tragic event” Sollecito referred to happened two weeks after he first met
Knox, on November 1.
From the very start, investigators suspected a woman had been involved in the
murder. Meredith Kercher, naked save for a sweater pulled up above her
chest, was almost completely covered by a quilt. A forensic expert confided
that covering a corpse was a gesture of pity, more typical of a woman than a
man.
That day, Knox’s face betrayed no sign of anguish or sorrow when police took
her to the cottage to help them search it. Inside the cottage, when
investigators asked her about the way Kercher may have died, Knox made the
same gesture again and again: “She’d press her hands to her temples and
shake her head, as if she was trying to empty her brain of something she’d
been through,” a judicial source said, adding that she may well have
succeeded in erasing “the most dramatic parts” of the night’s events.
But by the evening of November 3, Knox was apparently calm enough to buy two
thongs at a lingerie shop with Sollecito. A shopkeeper overheard Sollecito
say to Knox as they paid for the purchases: “You can put these on at home
and we’ll have wild sex.”
Five days after the murder, on November 6, Knox accused Lumumba, the manager
of the bar Le Chic, where she worked, of murdering Kercher. Knox testified
that she had brought Lumumba to the cottage, that he had gone into Kercher’s
bedroom, where they had sex. She said she was in the kitchen when she heard
Kercher screaming and had covered her ears with her hands. Knox was visibly
distraught as she testified.
“Knox was shouting one minute, and hugging a policeman for comfort the next.
She kept making the same head-shaking gesture she’d made when police
escorted her through the cottage, with her hands pressed to her forehead,”
the judicial source said.
) ) ) ) )
Knox has since gone back on this version, insisting that she spent the entire
night at the home of her boyfriend Sollecito, who backed this up in his
interview from jail. Witnesses and CCTV, however, show Knox walking in the
direction of the cottage on the night of the murder. Both Knox and Sollecito
have said they have confused recollections of that evening, as they were
both “high” on cannabis.
Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor, has argued that blood on a tap in the
bathroom was Knox’s and proved she was there on the night of the murder.
Detectives believe Knox accused Lumumba to cover up for Guede, whose bloody
fingerprints were on Kercher’s pillow. DNA samples on her body show he had
sex with her. He has admitted to being in the cottage at the time she died,
while denying he is guilty of her murder.
Perplexingly, according to a police source, Knox never spoke of Guede at all,
“as if he didn’t exist”, yet they called each other on their mobile phones
both before and after the murder.
Precisely who among the four suspects originated, perpetrated or participated
in the murder of Kercher remains unclear. Police believe a confession will
finally crack the conflicting denials. In the meantime, Amanda Knox appears
to have reverted to wholesome, confused all-American girl.
On November 17, in a conversation that was bugged by police, Knox talks to her
parents at the prison. “Yesterday was a bad day. The TV news called me a
liar. But I didn’t do anything,” she tells them.
“They’re trying to frighten you into saying something,” her mother says. Her
father advises Knox not to talk to anyone.
Knox protests that other prisoners stare at her as if she was “a horrible
being”. She adds: “My cell is cold and I’ve got a headache. I feel better
only during my walk. I can sing and even shout and that makes me feel good.”
When Knox’s mother tells her that Sollecito’s lawyers are saying
“nasty things” about her, Knox immediately changes the subject. “Mom, as
soon as I get out of here, after the court hearing, let’s go shopping,” she
says.
Sollecito has stopped short of accusing Knox, but he offered this appreciation
of her character to a lawyer: “I think she was in another world. She lived
life as if she was in a dream. Amanda’s only thought is seeking pleasure in
every moment.”
A judge has ordered Knox to remain in preventive custody until November 2008,
even though she has so far not been charged. If she is sent to trial and
convicted, she faces a jail sentence of 20 to 30 years for murder, which may
be even heavier if the court finds that the crime involved sexual abuse, or
that it was premeditated.
The prosecution remains convinced that Knox was involved in both sexually
abusing and murdering Kercher. One senior investigator said: “Knox is the
only one of the suspects who had the keys to the cottage, which means not
only that she was there but that she may well have organised their meeting
at the house.” He speculated that Knox may be covering for Guede because he
was supplying her with drugs, or because they were having a relationship.
Kercher may have refused to play along with the others from the very start.
Things probably degenerated, and Kercher perhaps threatened to denounce her
attackers; perhaps she accused Knox of letting the others in with her keys,
the detective said.
In the women’s wing of the Capanne prison, a 10-minute drive from Perugia, the
Jesuit-educated student rubs shoulders with former drug-traffickers and
prostitutes. Knox was at first placed in a small cell she shared with one
young, tight-lipped inmate convicted of helping to kill her own child. The
prison governor, Giacobbe Pantaleone, has transferred her to another,
larger, 13ft-by-16ft cell shared with two more talkative women in their
fifties, one of whom, he says, is “almost a mother figure to her”.
Knox spends long moments looking out of the window or staring at the wall,
motionless and lost in thought. The two cellmates are the only fellow
prisoners Knox meets, as she takes her daily two hours of exercise alone to
protect her from other prisoners’ hostility.
Father Saulo Scarabottoli, a soft-spoken priest who visits Knox, says she has
asked for a Bible, and the priest suggests passages for her to read, which
they then discuss. “We talk about good and evil, about love and about
forgiveness, “ he says.
Father Scarabottoli makes a point of not asking about the murder. All Knox
says about it, unprompted, is: “I’m not worried because I haven’t done
anything. I’m innocent. I’ll get out of here.”
Asked about Knox’s character, Father Scarabottoli replies: “Amanda manages to
control her emotions very well. People describe her as cold, but I think
it’s just her character. I have never seen her cry, but I don’t know what
happens when she is alone at night.”
Knox spends her days reading, writing and working on her Italian. Her request
for a guitar has been refused. In one notebook with a Spider-Man 2 cover
seized by police, the address written on the front page is neither the
Perugia cottage nor the prison, but her home in Seattle.
On December 14 – six weeks after her death – Meredith Kercher was finally
buried at Mitcham Road cemetery, near Croydon, after investigators said that
no new autopsy would be needed. Her brother Lyle said in his eulogy: “She
had a warm and bubbly personality. All her friends and family can look back
and remember Mez for her endearing qualities, such as her quick wit and
fantastic sense of humour.”
On the day before the funeral, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica published
an interview with Knox obtained through her lawyer, in which she claimed she
was innocent of the murder. She describes herself thus: “A girl of 20, who
came to Perugia to learn Italian after she had studied Japanese. I have had
boyfriends, just like other girls of my age. I remember them all. In Italy I
felt intoxicated by freedom: sometimes I went a bit wild. I did things that
now I think were wrong. All that comes from my youth and my enthusiasm for
life. It certainly doesn’t come from some obscure and evil side of my
personality.”
It is as if there were two Knoxes – the ideal student in America, quirky but
wholesome, and the wilder version intoxicated by a new-found freedom in
Italy that she was ill-prepared for.
There is no doubt that Knox has something to hide about the night that
Meredith Kercher was murdered. She has contradicted herself repeatedly in
the various versions of her story she has given to investigators.
At best, she may have got involved with the “wrong kind of men” and suddenly
found herself a witness to a killing. At worst, her new wild side, buoyed up
by drugs, made her take a much more active role.
Knox has filled a hundred or so loose A4 sheets of paper with a diary
entitled, in Italian, La Mia Prigione (My Prison). In the diary, which has
been seized by police, Knox describes Kercher as “a smart and elegant girl”
who gave her lots of advice, including on whom she should make friends with.
But she turns against Sollecito, speculating that he may have raped and then
stabbed Kercher.
Knox lists the men she has slept with since arriving in Perugia, worries about
the risk of being infected with the Aids virus and notes every time whether
she used a condom or not. She promises never to smoke cannabis again. Of her
days in prison, she writes: “I sing, I write and when I go out for a walk I
sun myself and I’ve got a bit of a tan.” She receives many letters from
prisoners and admirers: “They tell me I’m hot and that they want to have sex
with me.”
On the last page of the diary, she asks: “What will I be like after all this?
I don’t think I’ll walk around alone in the evening. I want to live as happy
as I used to be, perhaps a bit more cautious. I imagine I’ve grown up a bit
now. Maybe now I know that the world can be really dangerous.”
The scene of the crime
Nearly 11 weeks ago, Meredith Kercher was brutally killed in the bedroom of
her student home in Perugia, Umbria. Here we look at some of the key events
surrounding the murder, and where it took place the night's events:
1. 7pm: Meredith Kercher watches a DVD at the home of her friend Sophie Purton
2. 8.40pm: Amanda Knox is seen leaving Raffaele Sollecito’s home by a Polish
student
3. 8.43pm: CCTV shows Knox walking towards the cottage that she lived in with
Kercher
4. 9pm: Kercher leaves Purton’s house after finishing the DVD, saying she is
tired and going home to bed
5. 10.15pm: One of Kercher’s two mobile phones connects to the internet for
eight seconds
6. From 10.29pm: Till receipts from Patrick Diya Lumumba’s bar, Le Chic,
allegedly prove he was working there
7. About 10.30pm: The witness Alessandra Formica says that her companion is
almost knocked over by a black man running away from Kercher’s house
8. After 10.30pm: Rudy Hermann Guede reportedly goes dancing in a nightclub
after fleeing the scene
Rudy Hermann Guede The Ivory Coast immigrant, 20, has admitted to being
in the cottage when Kercher died, but denies he killed her
Patrick Diya Lumumba The bar manager, 37, was accused of the killing by
Knox and arrested, but later released owing to lack of evidence. He is still
under investigation
Raffaele Sollecito Police say that there is strong evidence linking the
23-year-old Italian to the murder, including Kercher’s DNA on a knife at his
home
It makes no sense to me how Amanda can be seen walking into her house before the murder and not witnessed anything. How can she hear screaming and stick her fingers in her ears? Why not call the police or go get help? And if her other story is true, who takes a shower after seeing their front door has been opened and blood on the bathroom rug? If she did not see the blood, if you see the front door open, why wouldn't she immediately check on her roommate? Her story has too many holes to be believable. She needs to confess and salvage what little chance she has to come clean and respect the family of the victim by giving them closure. Even if she was not the one who stabbed her,she was connected to the crime because she was there. How does she explain being seen on the CCTV walking into the house right before the murder when she lied and said she was at her boyfriends?Who can think about shopping at a time like this? I sympathize for her family but they need to face facts:She's lying.
TT, bloomfield hills, Usa/Michigan
The fact that Amanda Knox didn't show any signs of empathy after the discovery of Kerchers murder is a definite proof that she has sick mind. What more can tell us about her twisted character? She was the main suspect along with her boyfriend who tried to cover her claiming they have been together at his place on the night of the murder. All of them lie and they should now take the responsability!
Her flatmate died in a most horrific way (and in front of her eyes) and she is talking about "shopping" when she comes out of jail, how sick is that???!!
I also don't understand her parents, they can't be supporting the lies and not try to help justice and truth!? So what if it is their daughter?! Instead of helping the police they are even suporting their daughter to think how she is innocent!?
I really hope she will pay for the crime along with her lovers Solecito and Guede and stay jailed for life.
We don't want twisted people like that in our society.
Tam, Dubai, UAE
Wise comments, Angelface of Barcelona.
I agree with you. Only the truth will set her free.
Grace, Nanaimo, British Columbia
I feel that some dark facts are being avoided by the media. Is there a connection between the Halloween season, the Guede suspects vampire web postings and the satanic manner in which Ms. Kerchner died. We had a priest sacrifice a nun in America and all satanic facts were left out of the trial. The public was able to get those facts from our American press.
Billy Wingard, New Bern, USA /NC
The big problem here is that the Italian justice system, as with any of the best, which it indeed is, is going to demand more than a preponderance of probabilities. The burden of proof to be met will need to be beyond a reasonable doubt on the act itself. They will search for possible malice aforethought and any contemplative preamble to the death of Kercher. First prize will be that Knox was inarguably complicit in its outcome (i.e. the killing blows); second that she was the central architect of the murder plan, and third, that she involved from a passive stance, i.e. informed and therefore party to its prior contemplation. They will struggle with the second and third because there appears to have been little prior contemplation. Quite possibly, it was just one crazed, heedless, unstoppable sequence of events; one leading to another. In the end I think we will have nothing but an utterly meaningless, purposeless act of insanity with absolutely nothing to explain it.
Marc, Bloemfontein, RSA
She still has a lot more growing up to do. She needs to learn that only the truth will set you free. But then as she was raised in a hush hush, denying the truth culture, where even the university press is against reporting the true facts, this will be very hard for her. Only after she has cleansed her soul can she begin to regain the happy cute funny sporty personality I am sure she probably was. Untill than long moments looking out of the window or staring at the wall, motionless and empty are awaiting her. She will turn into a zombie, and it,s sad that her so called loved ones and friends are only concerned with image and not with her soul and personality.
angelface, Barcelona, spain
When Amanda was about her 14, her mother renarried at age 39 . The man she married was 27 years old.
Presumably, Amanda's mother and her new husband and teenage Amanda and Amanda's sister all lived together in one household.
Nothing has been written about this except that Amanda's mother remarried a man who was 27 when Amanda was about 14.
This may be a factor in Amanda acting out the way she has and in being sexually voracious.. Things may be involved concerning the dynamics of the new family which the ordinary member of the public cannot know.
I wish for Amanda and her biolgical parents the best.
The parents do not deserve such a nightmare on their hands.
I wish for Amanda , God's peace and understand.
Grace, Nanaimo, British Columbia
To all university and college students: don't drink, don't party too much, put a prayer on your facebook profile, and don't date too much.
Or else the press might decide you are guilty of murder in the next unsolved case!
Forensic evidence and testimonies are optionals in today's mediatic trials, what really counts is your alleged life-style!
Paolo, Dublin, European Union
Intelligence, backed by priviledge and a strict up-bringing plus an enormous ego, and FREEDOM to manifest the fantasy into a reality fueled by drugs and alcohol and others of the same ilk, in my opinion, means that FoxyKnoxy took part and/or planned the murder and now reality is biting back.
Having said that, it is clear from the excerpts that the American girl still thinks that there is an "out" of this situation and that in fact she is even preparing to sell her story afterwards.
She HAS TO pay for the crime.
Nothing short of a long custodial sentence will be good enough.
I hope Italian justice can be served and that if found guilty she rots in jail for the wicked events of that night that robbed an innocent British girl of her life and her future.
Kambiz Shahri, Pretoria, South Africa
This is a well written article that sums up all that I have seen written about the case.
It seems to me likely that Amanda could have committed the crime. Living in Italy for her was an adventure and it is easy for some inhibitions to be dropped when participating in and adventure.
I don't think the drugs are to blame for her memory loss, like the author of this article, I think she has deliberately tried to block the events from her mind and replace them with (an) alternate story line(s), and making herself believe these new stories. This serves to purposes, 1) to help her forget things she'd rather not remember, 2) it helps her to be "honest" when she is questioned.
If she committed the crime it was entirely pre-meditated, more likely that she wanted to try something "fun" and "different" and did not think about possible consequences... just enjoying the moment - just like Sollecito said. His role? Not clear. There hasn't been much written in English about his activities
MK, North Carolina, USA
Character is not made by extreme situations, but it is revealed by them. All those present, whoever they are showed an unimaginable level of sadism and inhumanity. The evidence plus the cowardice and incessant but changing lies of the three accused together with their stupidity and arrogance points in their direction. EG Knox giving an interview to a newspaper bleating about looking forward to clarifying events at the next questioning. Question time comes and she refuses to answer any difficult questions. As the evidence mounts the lesser parties will probably try to salvage what they can and start the mutual recriminations and accusations.
Mutley, London,
Good girls go bad all the time, especially these sheltered young girls who grow up surrounded by privilege and go out into the world with nothing but a credit card and a huge appetite for attention. In a lot of ways, this girl reminds me of Erica Sifrit. A wealthy, indulged girl, star athlete, good as gold, smart, but just naive and sheltered enough. Girls like these are sitting ducks for good guys who are 'exotic' or bad guys who lead them astray. They have no savvy, no street smarts, they think everyone has their best interests at heart, that nothing bad can ever happen to them and that everyone is 'nice'. She probably thought it was just some fun game and like a tv show, it would al work out in the end. Sorry, dear child...reality is ugly.
Marlene, Montreal,
Why does the author of this piece of work call the victim 'Kercher'. Surely of all the people in this dreadful episode she deserves to be addressed correctly and with respect. By using just her surname the author is degrading to the same level as her alleged attackers.
fconnor, birmingham, uk
SHOPPING and a PR company?
Not a care about the victim or her relatives.
Nothing but shopping.
Sociopaths/psychopaths have neither empathy nor inhibitions, and the proverbial shoe fits that one to a 'T'.
Robert Henry, London, UK
A lot of Americans study at my university as part of a study abroad program. many of them come from strict religious colleges where the girls have never been in a sexual relationship. almost all of them lose their virginity and try cannabis whilst they are here, they are not sedistic people but just become mislead by their new found freedom. i feel this is the case with knox where she became involved with the wrong crowd, one incident led to another leading to merediths death at which point knox was not incontol of the situation.
i am still unsure as to whether she was directly involved in the murder or just present at the time. my experience with these types of American girls, i am leaning to the latter of the two scenarios.
Andrew, Chester, UK
Doesn't really matter what you look like, social status or what school you attended. Your true nature transends all these things.
We are all capable of the most wonderous good or the most horrific evil...
illa, LA, CA
Amanda's deep thought's on the last page of her diary are not quite typical for an innocent girl who's witnessed the scene of a brutal murder of someone she knew and lived with. Tthere is some sociopathology/narcissism involved here. I would like to believe in her, but I can't. The signs are definitely there. I don't believe the honest truth will ever come from her. She is empty.
Susan, Vancouver, USA
There is no such thing as a typical face of a murderer - murderers come with all kinds of different faces, some brutish, some ordinary, some ugly, some beautiful, and some angelic. If murderers had a typical face, there would be far fewer murders than there are.
Vierotchka, Geneva, Switzerland