Profile: Rudy Guede | Profile: Amanda Knox | Profile: Raffaele Sollecito | Pictures

The final act begins today in a drama that has induced a lurid fascination across the world ever since the 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher was found with her throat slashed in the Italian town of Perugia 14 months ago.

Tales of drugs, sex games, red herrings and false accusations have kept the audience gripped and appalled in equal measure. Most mesmerising of all, however, has been the young woman at the centre of the case: Amanda Knox, Ms Kercher’s American flatmate, who appears in court today with her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, charged with sexual assault and murder.

“Foxy Knoxy” — her nickname since she was at school — has been portrayed as a sexually voracious girl who smokes cannabis and writes short stories about rape. A book about her, which relied heavily on extracts from the diary seized by police after her arrest in November 2007, was a Christmas bestseller in Italy. That prompted Ms Knox to try to have the case thrown out, claiming that the book had damaged her chance of a fair trial. She also demanded ¤500,000 (£453,554) in compensation.

In prison, the student from Seattle with the girl-next-door looks — “acqua e sapone” (soap and water) as they call it in Italy — has been in-undated with mail from her admirers, even offers of marriage. Viewers of an Italian television station voted her one of the personalities of the year.

Ms Knox, 21, and Mr Sollecito, 24, were sent for trial last October, at the end of pre-trial hearings in which a third suspect, Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast immigrant, drifter and small-time drug-dealer who fled to Germany after the murder, was given 30 years for his part in the crime.

By then they had been held for 11 months: in Italian law a person can be held for up to a year before being charged.

The Kercher family, who are not attending the opening, asked for the trial to be held in camera because of the “media circus” and “morbid interest” in the murder. More than 140 reporters are accredited for the hearing.

Ms Kercher, an exchange student from the University of Leeds, of Coulsdon, South London, came to Italy to study the language. She was found semi-naked with her throat slashed, under a duvet on the floor of her bedroom in the hillside cottage that she shared with Ms Knox and two Italian women.

Police found Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito, an IT student from a wealthy southern Italian family, already at the house, but they said that they had only just got there. The prosecution case is that Ms Kercher died in a sex game that went wrong. Mr Sollecito held her down, they say, while Guede tried to assault her sexually from behind and Ms Knox held a knife to her throat.

Prosecutors have indicated that the court intends to hold a maximum of two sessions of the trial each week, and lawyers say that it could last a year. Because of Italy’s cumbersome system of appeals, a definitive conviction — or acquittal — may not arrive until 2010 or even 2011.

Interest in the case hinges on the fact that it is the story of how Ms Knox, seemingly an American innocent, came to Perugia where she allegedly embraced sex and drugs with abandon, revelling in the freeedom of being far from home.

Since her diaries were leaked, listing her previous lovers, Ms Knox has undergone a drastic image reversal. No longer “Foxy Knoxy”, in jail she has appeared as a clean-cut figure, reading the Bible and playing Beatles songs on the guitar. At the pre-trial hearings she appeared pale and nervous, wearing little or no make-up and homely, embroidered blouses.

Her lawyers hope that the massive interest in Ms Knox will work in her favour. Her lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, said that since her arrestMs Knox had been subject to “misleading” scrutiny that made a fair trial impossible.

Prosecutors claim that Ms Knox appeared to know details of Ms Kercher’s death that only someone who had been there could know. DNA evidence also points to her involvement, they say.

When first questioned, without a lawyer, Ms Knox admitted that she was at the scene of the crime and accused Patrick Diya Lumumba, a Congolese barman, of being the murderer. She later withdrew both statements.

As for Mr Sollecito, who had a penchant for Japanese horror comics and a knife collection, police say that they found the imprint of a Nike shoe “compatible” with his in the blood in Ms Kercher’s room, and his DNA on Ms Kercher’s bra strap. He insists that he had nothing to do with the murder, which his lawyer, Luca Maori, says was carried out by Guede alone, after he broke into the cottage to steal.

Ms Knox said yesterday that she was not afraid because she believed that the evidence would prove her innocence. “Meredith was my friend.

I didn’t kill her,” she told Mr Ghirga.

“I am not afraid of the truth . . . I have been waiting for over a year for this moment. I am not a murderer.”

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