Pizzas galore!

In a letter to her American boyfriend she writes: "Dear DJ, right now I really feel the need to hold you in my arms. I have this knot inside and I feel as if someone really cold and strong is squeezing my head. I beg you, I cannot stay alone right now. I hate being weak, but I am not well and I'm tired. I want to go home......How can they treat me like this, staring at me as if I am a murderer? They really believe that I am, and that's not OK. This cannot be my life. I beg you, this cannot be my life. Please hold me in your arms, now."

In a letter to her mother Ms Knox writes: "I beg you, don't leave me here. You must get me out. I don't belong in this place. I want to come home to you. I miss my life. I love you."

Recording her daily prison routine she writes: "I do exercises, I sing, I write, I read, I sleep, I eat, I drink. And I think........ I can go to the library. I have eight television channels I can watch in the cell, I have a bathroom and a reading light". She says she watches MTV and "sometimes" the TV news.

Ms Knox records her "happiness" when Patrick Lumumba Diya, the Congolese barman she accused of the murder, was released without charge for lack of evidence.

The diary records her desperation on finding she had gained weight in jail. "I've got fat. When I arrived in Italy I weighed 60 kilos, now I weigh 66, six kilos more. Mamma mia! I must stop eating biscuits. I won't eat any more until I'm down to 55 kilos."

When her cellmates start to squabble she notes that "It's not right keeping people caged up like this. The evil bottled up inside them comes out when they get the chance, like wild animals."

She lists her resolutions, saying she will behave "more cautiously" when released. "I will never smoke marijuana again. When they free me I will go back to the United States, but I will come back to Italy to study. I’m not afraid of this country, it's part of me now. This is place I call home. And before all this happened I was so happy."

Prosecutors in Perugia have closed their eight month investigation into the murder, and a judge must decide by mid-July whether to press charges. The three suspects are also accused by prosecutors of "simulating a crime" by allegedly smashing a window to make it appear that there had been a break in at the cottage.

Ms Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, was in Perugia to attend the University for Foreigners on an exchange from Leeds University under the European Erasmus programme. Ms Knox's parents - Edda Mellas, her mother, and Curt Knox, her father, who are divorced and have both remarried - claim the handling of the crime scene by investigators has been "shoddy", with evidence such as Ms Kercher's bloodstained bra mishandled.

They challenged police forensic evidence which allegedly shows DNA traces of both Ms Kercher and Ms Knox on a kitchen knife seized at Mr Sollecito's flat, with Ms Knox's trace near the handle and Ms Kercher's at the tip. They have also criticised leaks to the Italian media of interrogations and testimony.

Mr Guede, who fled to Germany after the murder but was intercepted and extradited to Italy, maintains that he and Ms Kercher had "incomplete" consensual sex at the cottage, and that he was in the bathroom with stomach pains when an intruder entered and killed her. He later identified the intruder as Mr Sollecito, and claimed Ms Knox had also been present. Lawyers for both Mr Sollecito and Ms Knox have dismissed this.

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