Amanda Knox's study abroad adventure turned into a nightmare when her housemate was brutally murdered and she found all police attention pointed at her.
In this episode, we'll learn about the twists and turns of this murder case that gripped Italy, the UK and the United States.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:00:26] It is the story of a young woman whose study abroad programme went horribly wrong.
[00:00:31] But it is also the story of the Italian justice system, the power of the media, and at the centre of it all, a British woman who was violently murdered.
[00:00:42] It is also a personal story, for reasons which I will reveal shortly.
[00:00:47] And on a quick admin note, this episode will be talking about quite a nasty murder investigation, so if you would prefer not to listen to this, then I’d advise to press pause now.
[00:01:01] Ok then, let’s talk about the trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:01:06] Perugia is a hilltop city in Italy. It is a beautiful place, narrow old streets, Etruscan arches, fantastic views that stretch for miles.
[00:01:19] It is also a student city, with a very good university, Università degli Studi, as well as a university for foreigners to learn Italian, the Università per Stranieri.
[00:01:31] Every year, thousands of foreigners flock to the city, whether that’s for a short Italian course or a longer exchange programme.
[00:01:41] And they have a lot of fun. Rent is cheap, there are lots of bars, restaurants, parties, lots of people to meet and make friends with, lots of cultural activities, or hedonistic activities if that's more your vibe.
[00:01:58] It’s great, and if you are wondering why I know this, and am saying this with such certainty, it's because I was one of those foreigners.
[00:02:08] At the start of 2006, I went to the Università per Stranieri for an Italian course. I lived in Perugia, and went to the same university where today’s story all took place.
[00:02:21] But this isn’t about me.
[00:02:24] A year and a half after I left, two young women arrived in Perugia, no doubt full of expectation and excitement.
[00:02:34] The first was called Meredith Kercher, and she was from England. She was a student at the University of Leeds, and like many of her peers, she had chosen to spend a third year abroad studying at a foreign university.
[00:02:51] The second was Amanda Knox, who was a linguistics student at the University of Washington. She had decided to spend a year abroad, she thought Florence was too full of Americans–which it is–and had settled on Perugia as her destination.
[00:03:10] And the way in which you found accommodation in Perugia back then was by little posters that people would put up all over the city: room available, or flatshare wanted. You would tear off a little phone number, call up and take a look at the room, decide that you liked the look of it, or move on to the next one.
[00:03:31] For Kercher and Knox, they found themselves living together in this way, sharing a small house with two young Italian women.
[00:03:43] They were different characters, Kercher and Knox, but they got along. They went out for pizza, they did things together, they were friendly but not best friends.
[00:03:56] Kercher would, reportedly, spend more time with English friends, while Knox was happier to mingle with Italians.
[00:04:05] And they were different people. Kercher was a more studious young woman, keen to get good grades, whereas Knox was less focussed on her studies.
[00:04:18] And in late October, a month and a half after arriving in Italy, Amanda Knox saw a man who caught her eye, and would end up distracting her from class. His name was Raffaelle Sollecito, and he was a shy-looking computer science student.
[00:04:38] Knox would later say that he reminded her of Harry Potter.
[00:04:43] The pair got talking, and swiftly became romantically involved with one another. She would stay over at his house, which was a five minute walk away from hers, they would watch movies together and smoke marijuana.
[00:04:58] And that was what they did on the evening of November 1st, 2007. They watched Amelie, smoked marijuana, and had sex, or so she would later recall.
[00:05:11] The following morning, Knox went back to her house for a shower. Sollecito was a 23-year-old male computer science student, and, perhaps as you can imagine, his bathroom wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to take a shower.
[00:05:29] She returned home, and saw that the front door of her house was open. This was unusual, kind of strange, but she didn’t think too much about it, as it had been faulty for a while.
[00:05:44] She got into the shower, and it was only when she got out that she noticed that there were spots, small drops of blood on the bathroom floor.
[00:05:55] She knocked on Kercher’s door, but there was no answer. She then tried to open it, but it was locked. What’s more, Kercher, her housemate, wasn’t answering her phone.
[00:06:09] And she always answered her phone.
[00:06:13] Worried, Knox returned to Sollecito’s house, and the pair tried to figure out what to do.
[00:06:21] They returned to the house, and found Kercher’s phone had been dumped behind the house, and saw that one of the windows had been smashed.
[00:06:30] They called the police, who came to investigate, but refused to smash Kercher’s door, on the grounds that it would be damage to private property. By this point, one of Kercher and Knox’s Italian housemates had arrived, along with a friend.
[00:06:47] They decided the situation was serious, and the friend kicked open Meredith Kercher’s door.
[00:06:56] They were confronted by a horrific sight: A bloody duvet which covered the lifeless body of Meredith Kercher.
[00:07:05] The police pushed past to survey the scene, and Knox and Sollecito were ushered out of the house.
[00:07:12] The detectives on the scene questioned Knox and Sollecito, but they were free to go, while the police gathered evidence.
[00:07:21] On November 5th, just three days after the gruesome discovery of Kercher’s dead body, Knox went again to the police station to give evidence.
[00:07:32] She was a valuable witness. She was the housemate of the victim, it was her who had first seen the blood, raised the alarm, and led to the gruesome discovery.
[00:07:43] She told the police what she knew, going over and over the events of that evening. She was with Sollecito, she returned to the house the following morning, took a shower, and it was only afterwards that she noticed that something seemed odd.
[00:08:00] She was told that she was being questioned as a witness, so she didn’t need a lawyer.
[00:08:06] What’s more, she was told that things would be worse for her if she had asked for a lawyer, it would suggest some kind of guilt.
[00:08:15] And Knox, so she insisted, was innocent.
[00:08:20] She wasn’t provided with an interpreter, so this was all in Italian, the Italian of someone who has only been in the country for a few weeks, and–in her own words–she had the Italian of a 10-year-old child.
[00:08:35] There she was, speaking in broken Italian, not really understanding what she was being asked, knowing nothing about the Italian legal system, thousands of miles away from home, and only 20 years old at the time.
[00:08:50] She was interrogated for hours, and on November 6th, the Italian police proudly announced that Knox was not just a witness; she had signed a written statement admitting that her original story, the one I just told you, was a lie. She confessed to her role in the grisly murder.
[00:09:13] According to the written statement, the killer was the owner of the bar in which Amanda Knox worked, a Congolese man called Patrick Lumumba.
[00:09:24] Lumumba had come to the house, so Knox said, and murdered Kercher while Knox was in another room. Knox even went to the length of telling the police that she put her hands over her ears not to hear her housemate’s screams.
[00:09:41] Lumumba was promptly arrested, but he seemed confused, insisting that he had nothing to do with it.
[00:09:49] He was no murderer, he was working in his bar all evening, just ask the half a dozen people who were there with him.
[00:09:57] And it wasn’t just Lumumba who was insisting that he was innocent. The morning after the signed confession, Amanda Knox wrote a lengthy letter in which she said that she retracted the confession, and she was forced to sign it under serious duress, with the police officers hitting her over the head and telling her that they had evidence linking her to the crime scene.
[00:10:24] She was confused, she had been interrogated for 50 hours without adequate food or water, she was in shock. She couldn’t remember exactly what happened, she had been smoking drugs with her boyfriend the night before, it was all a bit of a blur, but she certainly did not kill Meredith, or know who did.
[00:10:46] It wasn’t Lumumba; she had tried to pin the blame on him, inventing this story, to divert attention away from her.
[00:10:54] It didn’t matter, the police were not buying it.
[00:10:59] On November 9th, a week after the murder, an Italian judge ruled that the three suspects–Lumumba, Knox, and Sollecito–could be detained for up to a year while the police gathered the evidence to either convict or release them.
[00:11:16] Then, on November 15th, almost two weeks after the murder, the police made another big announcement. They had found a knife at Raffaele Sollecito’s apartment. And on the knife’s handle was the DNA of both Sollecito and Knox.
[00:11:36] And on the blade, traces of Meredith Kercher’s DNA, traces of the murder victim.
[00:11:44] It didn’t look good for the young couple, for Raffaele Sollecito and his American girlfriend, Amanda Knox.
[00:11:51] But then, a matter of days later, there was another suspect named in the murder, a young man called Rudy Guede. He was originally from the Ivory Coast but had lived in Perugia since he was a young boy.
[00:12:07] He was well-known to the police for petty crimes, drug dealing, and more recently, burglaries. He was also known to carry a knife…
[00:12:19] The day after he was named as a suspect, the German police announced that they had arrested him after he had tried to board a train without a ticket, and he was extradited, brought back to Italy.
[00:12:33] The very same day, Patrick Lumumba, the man who Knox had initially said committed the murder, was released.
[00:12:42] It turned out that, yes, Lumumba’s surprise and protests of innocence were justified.
[00:12:48] He was at his bar all night, and a Swiss professor came forward and testified that he had been talking to Lumumba all evening, he even had the receipt from the bar to prove it.
[00:13:01] For Rudy Guede, on the other hand, things did not look good.
[00:13:06] He had fled to Germany immediately after the murder, and the police would announce that they had found his fingerprints and other DNA evidence of him all over the crime scene, including his semen inside the victim.
[00:13:22] When questioned, he admitted to the police that he was in Meredith Kercher’s house during the night of the murder. But, he did not kill her.
[00:13:31] His account of what happened went as follows.
[00:13:35] He had been asked to come to the house by Meredith. The pair had sex, afterwards he had gone to the bathroom, as he had an upset stomach after eating a dodgy kebab.
[00:13:47] He sat on the toilet with his headphones on, listening to loud music.
[00:13:52] He came out of the bathroom and saw another man who told him, "black man found, guilty found", and then ran off into the night.
[00:14:03] And it was only then that he discovered Meredith, who had been stabbed multiple times and was dying in front of him. He tried to save her, but when he realised that he wouldn’t be able to, and fearing that the police would never believe his account of the story, he decided to flee. But first he wrapped Meredith’s body in a duvet, which explains his bloody handprint that was found under the pillow.
[00:14:32] Now, you might believe Guede, you might not.
[00:14:35] The police certainly didn’t.
[00:14:38] But, strangely enough, they also didn’t believe Knox or Sollecito’s account, and posited that all three were involved in the murder: Guede, Knox and Sollecito.
[00:14:51] All three were held in police custody until they were formally charged with murder in July of the following year.
[00:15:00] Guede, interestingly enough, opted to have a separate “fast track” trial, during which he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
[00:15:12] All throughout this, despite one man already being found guilty of murder, Sollecito and Knox were still in jail.
[00:15:22] And then in January of the following year, January of 2009, their trial began.
[00:15:29] To say it was a media circus is perhaps an understatement.
[00:15:34] It drew huge media interest from all over the world: in Italy, because that was where the crime took place. In the UK, because that was where the innocent victim was from. And from the United States, because that's where Knox was from.
[00:15:50] And the media interest wasn’t just because of where the people involved came from, there were multiple elements of the trial that intrigued and enthralled armchair detectives.
[00:16:03] First of all, the murder seemed unlikely.
[00:16:07] Knox and Sollecito didn’t look or sound like your typical violent murderers.
[00:16:14] Sollecito was a quiet, mild mannered computer science student with round glasses.
[00:16:20] Knox was a young American student on her study abroad year.
[00:16:25] The pair had only met a few weeks before. It might have been a whirlwind romance, but for them to have gone from smoking marijuana, having sex and watching movies together to discussing and then committing violent murder seemed…odd.
[00:16:43] What’s more, there was the not insignificant fact that Rudy Guede had already been charged and found guilty of the murder. What part did Knox and Sollecito play, then?
[00:16:56] For this we must now talk about the lead prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini.
[00:17:03] Mignini seems to have decided, almost from the outset, that Knox was guilty, he just needed to find a motive and some evidence that supported this hypothesis.
[00:17:17] He proposed to the court that Knox had attacked her housemate, and then she and Sollecito held her down while Guede raped her.
[00:17:27] Perhaps they had done this for sexual gratification, Mignini suggested, perhaps it was because they wanted to play some kind of drug-fueled sex game, and Meredith refused to take part.
[00:17:42] When this was all over, Knox and Guede stabbed her to death. The trio had then staged a burglary, they had then broken a window to make it look like someone had broken into the apartment.
[00:17:56] They were guilty, the prosecution alleged.
[00:18:01] Against the backdrop of all of this, journalists were looking for any tidbits that they could find that would give their readers more salacious gossip about Knox or Guede.
[00:18:13] They were delighted to find out that Amanda Knox’s MySpace nickname was “Foxy Knoxy”. Foxy is a slang term for sexually attractive.
[00:18:25] Any information on Amanda Knox’s life would be published by hungry journalists, the racier the better.
[00:18:32] They found people who gave details of her sex life, how she had slept with several Italian men shortly after arriving.
[00:18:40] She was painted as some kind of sex-crazed young woman.
[00:18:45] Even the BBC, which normally abstains from the worst tabloid gossip, ran articles with headlines “Who is the real 'Foxy Knoxy'?”
[00:18:56] And the entire thing spun out of control. Amanda Knox was a sex-crazed temptress.
[00:19:04] It wasn’t just her backstory. It was also her behaviour during the investigation and trial that journalists and prosecutors pointed to as a sign of her guilt.
[00:19:16] She seemed unmoved by the death of her housemate, and the police would report that she did cartwheels in the police station, which she would later say were only yoga exercises.
[00:19:28] On Valentine’s day during her trial she wore a t-shirt with “all you need is love” on, and she smiled and looked even happy when she was in court.
[00:19:40] This wasn’t the behaviour of an innocent person, the prosecution alleged. No normal person would behave in this way.
[00:19:49] In the courtroom, the prosecutor brought out evidence that further tied the duo to the crime scene. There was the bloody knife, the murder weapon, and Mignini also announced that the police had found Sollecito’s DNA on the victim’s bra.
[00:20:06] It was not looking good at all, and after almost a full year, on December 4th, 2009, the trial was over. The jury declared that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were guilty of murder, and they were sentenced to 26 years and 25 years respectively.
[00:20:31] There were cheers outside the courtroom as justice had finally been served. This young woman who might look sweet and innocent had been proved to be a violent and cruel murderer.
[00:20:45] Knox and Sollecito’s families said they would immediately appeal the verdict, and the next two years were characterised by appeals, second and third opinions.
[00:20:57] As the appeals continued, more and more evidence came to light. Or rather, it came to light that more and more evidence wasn’t actually evidence at all.
[00:21:09] The supposed murder knife was reexamined, and it was found that it couldn’t have been the knife that killed Meredith; it was too big, and the traces of Meredith’s DNA that were found on the knife could have been from anyone or anything. It was a knife from Sollecito's kitchen, so of course his fingerprints were on it, as he used it for cooking. And given how much time Knox spent in his apartment, preparing and cooking food together, it's perfectly reasonable that her fingerprints would be on there too.
[00:21:26] And the other main piece of evidence for the prosecution was Sollecito’s DNA on the victim’s bra. When experts were consulted on the matter, they concluded that the manner in which the forensic investigators searched the house was so unprofessional that evidence would almost certainly have been contaminated, and nothing could be considered valid legal evidence.
[00:22:10] With these two pieces of evidence being completely discounted, there was nothing tying Sollecito and Knox to the scene. The only “evidence” of their guilt was Knox’s unusual behaviour. And of course, you don’t need to be an expert in Italian law to know that behaving in an unusual way isn’t enough to be convicted of murder.
[00:22:33] Finally, on October the 3rd, 2011, almost 4 years after the murder, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted, they were released from prison.
[00:22:47] Knox was found guilty of perjury, of lying to the police that Patrick Lumumba was involved, and she was sentenced to 3 years, but because she had already served almost 4, she was released straight away, and she was able to return to the United States.
[00:23:05] This, however, wasn't the end of it. In 2013 the Italian Supreme Court ruled that the pair should stand trial again. Knox refused to return to Italy for the trial, but she was found guilty by another court, and faced the possibility of spending the rest of her life in an Italian prison.
[00:23:29] There was some diplomatic ping pong, as the US government faced the very real possibility that it might receive an extradition request for one of its own citizens. Clearly, extraditing Amanda Knox to Italy would have been a pretty unpopular move domestically, but if the US didn’t extradite a citizen that had been found guilty in a court of law, it couldn’t really continue to make extradition requests to other countries if it wouldn’t uphold its part in the bargain and extradite one of its own.
[00:24:01] Fortunately, the case never went this far, and a year later, on March 27th, 2015, 2,702 days after Meredith was found brutally murdered, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were fully exonerated, acquitted of all charges.
[00:24:24] Importantly, Knox was “declared innocent”, not simply “declared not guilty”.
[00:24:31] This being said, there are plenty of people, not just on internet forums but also influential journalists, especially in Italy, who have never acquitted the pair, who continue to put forward this image of Foxy Knoxy, the American sexual deviant who murdered her housemate.
[00:24:50] This would make for a much more theatrical and interesting tale, but the reality is almost certainly less mysterious.
[00:24:59] Rudy Guede broke into the house, like he had done to several other houses in the days leading up to the murder.
[00:25:06] He was confronted by Meredith, there was a struggle, he raped and killed her and then fled.
[00:25:13] A horrible crime indeed, but one with a simpler explanation than the one suggested during the trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:25:21] Guede, it should be said, maintains that he was innocent, and says that Knox was involved.
[00:25:29] He is now a free man, after having served 16 years in prison and being released early for good behaviour.
[00:25:37] Whether he ever comes clean and reveals what really happened, remains to be said.
[00:25:44] OK then, that is it for The Trial Of Amanda Knox.
[00:25:48] As you may have gathered, we've only really scratched the surface in this episode, there is a lot more too to it, and it really is a fascinating story of police ineptitude, international diplomacy, the power of the media, and how the Italian legal system works, so we are actually going to be following up this episode with another, bonus episode, where we are going to go into all of this in much greater detail.
[00:26:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:00:26] It is the story of a young woman whose study abroad programme went horribly wrong.
[00:00:31] But it is also the story of the Italian justice system, the power of the media, and at the centre of it all, a British woman who was violently murdered.
[00:00:42] It is also a personal story, for reasons which I will reveal shortly.
[00:00:47] And on a quick admin note, this episode will be talking about quite a nasty murder investigation, so if you would prefer not to listen to this, then I’d advise to press pause now.
[00:01:01] Ok then, let’s talk about the trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:01:06] Perugia is a hilltop city in Italy. It is a beautiful place, narrow old streets, Etruscan arches, fantastic views that stretch for miles.
[00:01:19] It is also a student city, with a very good university, Università degli Studi, as well as a university for foreigners to learn Italian, the Università per Stranieri.
[00:01:31] Every year, thousands of foreigners flock to the city, whether that’s for a short Italian course or a longer exchange programme.
[00:01:41] And they have a lot of fun. Rent is cheap, there are lots of bars, restaurants, parties, lots of people to meet and make friends with, lots of cultural activities, or hedonistic activities if that's more your vibe.
[00:01:58] It’s great, and if you are wondering why I know this, and am saying this with such certainty, it's because I was one of those foreigners.
[00:02:08] At the start of 2006, I went to the Università per Stranieri for an Italian course. I lived in Perugia, and went to the same university where today’s story all took place.
[00:02:21] But this isn’t about me.
[00:02:24] A year and a half after I left, two young women arrived in Perugia, no doubt full of expectation and excitement.
[00:02:34] The first was called Meredith Kercher, and she was from England. She was a student at the University of Leeds, and like many of her peers, she had chosen to spend a third year abroad studying at a foreign university.
[00:02:51] The second was Amanda Knox, who was a linguistics student at the University of Washington. She had decided to spend a year abroad, she thought Florence was too full of Americans–which it is–and had settled on Perugia as her destination.
[00:03:10] And the way in which you found accommodation in Perugia back then was by little posters that people would put up all over the city: room available, or flatshare wanted. You would tear off a little phone number, call up and take a look at the room, decide that you liked the look of it, or move on to the next one.
[00:03:31] For Kercher and Knox, they found themselves living together in this way, sharing a small house with two young Italian women.
[00:03:43] They were different characters, Kercher and Knox, but they got along. They went out for pizza, they did things together, they were friendly but not best friends.
[00:03:56] Kercher would, reportedly, spend more time with English friends, while Knox was happier to mingle with Italians.
[00:04:05] And they were different people. Kercher was a more studious young woman, keen to get good grades, whereas Knox was less focussed on her studies.
[00:04:18] And in late October, a month and a half after arriving in Italy, Amanda Knox saw a man who caught her eye, and would end up distracting her from class. His name was Raffaelle Sollecito, and he was a shy-looking computer science student.
[00:04:38] Knox would later say that he reminded her of Harry Potter.
[00:04:43] The pair got talking, and swiftly became romantically involved with one another. She would stay over at his house, which was a five minute walk away from hers, they would watch movies together and smoke marijuana.
[00:04:58] And that was what they did on the evening of November 1st, 2007. They watched Amelie, smoked marijuana, and had sex, or so she would later recall.
[00:05:11] The following morning, Knox went back to her house for a shower. Sollecito was a 23-year-old male computer science student, and, perhaps as you can imagine, his bathroom wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to take a shower.
[00:05:29] She returned home, and saw that the front door of her house was open. This was unusual, kind of strange, but she didn’t think too much about it, as it had been faulty for a while.
[00:05:44] She got into the shower, and it was only when she got out that she noticed that there were spots, small drops of blood on the bathroom floor.
[00:05:55] She knocked on Kercher’s door, but there was no answer. She then tried to open it, but it was locked. What’s more, Kercher, her housemate, wasn’t answering her phone.
[00:06:09] And she always answered her phone.
[00:06:13] Worried, Knox returned to Sollecito’s house, and the pair tried to figure out what to do.
[00:06:21] They returned to the house, and found Kercher’s phone had been dumped behind the house, and saw that one of the windows had been smashed.
[00:06:30] They called the police, who came to investigate, but refused to smash Kercher’s door, on the grounds that it would be damage to private property. By this point, one of Kercher and Knox’s Italian housemates had arrived, along with a friend.
[00:06:47] They decided the situation was serious, and the friend kicked open Meredith Kercher’s door.
[00:06:56] They were confronted by a horrific sight: A bloody duvet which covered the lifeless body of Meredith Kercher.
[00:07:05] The police pushed past to survey the scene, and Knox and Sollecito were ushered out of the house.
[00:07:12] The detectives on the scene questioned Knox and Sollecito, but they were free to go, while the police gathered evidence.
[00:07:21] On November 5th, just three days after the gruesome discovery of Kercher’s dead body, Knox went again to the police station to give evidence.
[00:07:32] She was a valuable witness. She was the housemate of the victim, it was her who had first seen the blood, raised the alarm, and led to the gruesome discovery.
[00:07:43] She told the police what she knew, going over and over the events of that evening. She was with Sollecito, she returned to the house the following morning, took a shower, and it was only afterwards that she noticed that something seemed odd.
[00:08:00] She was told that she was being questioned as a witness, so she didn’t need a lawyer.
[00:08:06] What’s more, she was told that things would be worse for her if she had asked for a lawyer, it would suggest some kind of guilt.
[00:08:15] And Knox, so she insisted, was innocent.
[00:08:20] She wasn’t provided with an interpreter, so this was all in Italian, the Italian of someone who has only been in the country for a few weeks, and–in her own words–she had the Italian of a 10-year-old child.
[00:08:35] There she was, speaking in broken Italian, not really understanding what she was being asked, knowing nothing about the Italian legal system, thousands of miles away from home, and only 20 years old at the time.
[00:08:50] She was interrogated for hours, and on November 6th, the Italian police proudly announced that Knox was not just a witness; she had signed a written statement admitting that her original story, the one I just told you, was a lie. She confessed to her role in the grisly murder.
[00:09:13] According to the written statement, the killer was the owner of the bar in which Amanda Knox worked, a Congolese man called Patrick Lumumba.
[00:09:24] Lumumba had come to the house, so Knox said, and murdered Kercher while Knox was in another room. Knox even went to the length of telling the police that she put her hands over her ears not to hear her housemate’s screams.
[00:09:41] Lumumba was promptly arrested, but he seemed confused, insisting that he had nothing to do with it.
[00:09:49] He was no murderer, he was working in his bar all evening, just ask the half a dozen people who were there with him.
[00:09:57] And it wasn’t just Lumumba who was insisting that he was innocent. The morning after the signed confession, Amanda Knox wrote a lengthy letter in which she said that she retracted the confession, and she was forced to sign it under serious duress, with the police officers hitting her over the head and telling her that they had evidence linking her to the crime scene.
[00:10:24] She was confused, she had been interrogated for 50 hours without adequate food or water, she was in shock. She couldn’t remember exactly what happened, she had been smoking drugs with her boyfriend the night before, it was all a bit of a blur, but she certainly did not kill Meredith, or know who did.
[00:10:46] It wasn’t Lumumba; she had tried to pin the blame on him, inventing this story, to divert attention away from her.
[00:10:54] It didn’t matter, the police were not buying it.
[00:10:59] On November 9th, a week after the murder, an Italian judge ruled that the three suspects–Lumumba, Knox, and Sollecito–could be detained for up to a year while the police gathered the evidence to either convict or release them.
[00:11:16] Then, on November 15th, almost two weeks after the murder, the police made another big announcement. They had found a knife at Raffaele Sollecito’s apartment. And on the knife’s handle was the DNA of both Sollecito and Knox.
[00:11:36] And on the blade, traces of Meredith Kercher’s DNA, traces of the murder victim.
[00:11:44] It didn’t look good for the young couple, for Raffaele Sollecito and his American girlfriend, Amanda Knox.
[00:11:51] But then, a matter of days later, there was another suspect named in the murder, a young man called Rudy Guede. He was originally from the Ivory Coast but had lived in Perugia since he was a young boy.
[00:12:07] He was well-known to the police for petty crimes, drug dealing, and more recently, burglaries. He was also known to carry a knife…
[00:12:19] The day after he was named as a suspect, the German police announced that they had arrested him after he had tried to board a train without a ticket, and he was extradited, brought back to Italy.
[00:12:33] The very same day, Patrick Lumumba, the man who Knox had initially said committed the murder, was released.
[00:12:42] It turned out that, yes, Lumumba’s surprise and protests of innocence were justified.
[00:12:48] He was at his bar all night, and a Swiss professor came forward and testified that he had been talking to Lumumba all evening, he even had the receipt from the bar to prove it.
[00:13:01] For Rudy Guede, on the other hand, things did not look good.
[00:13:06] He had fled to Germany immediately after the murder, and the police would announce that they had found his fingerprints and other DNA evidence of him all over the crime scene, including his semen inside the victim.
[00:13:22] When questioned, he admitted to the police that he was in Meredith Kercher’s house during the night of the murder. But, he did not kill her.
[00:13:31] His account of what happened went as follows.
[00:13:35] He had been asked to come to the house by Meredith. The pair had sex, afterwards he had gone to the bathroom, as he had an upset stomach after eating a dodgy kebab.
[00:13:47] He sat on the toilet with his headphones on, listening to loud music.
[00:13:52] He came out of the bathroom and saw another man who told him, "black man found, guilty found", and then ran off into the night.
[00:14:03] And it was only then that he discovered Meredith, who had been stabbed multiple times and was dying in front of him. He tried to save her, but when he realised that he wouldn’t be able to, and fearing that the police would never believe his account of the story, he decided to flee. But first he wrapped Meredith’s body in a duvet, which explains his bloody handprint that was found under the pillow.
[00:14:32] Now, you might believe Guede, you might not.
[00:14:35] The police certainly didn’t.
[00:14:38] But, strangely enough, they also didn’t believe Knox or Sollecito’s account, and posited that all three were involved in the murder: Guede, Knox and Sollecito.
[00:14:51] All three were held in police custody until they were formally charged with murder in July of the following year.
[00:15:00] Guede, interestingly enough, opted to have a separate “fast track” trial, during which he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
[00:15:12] All throughout this, despite one man already being found guilty of murder, Sollecito and Knox were still in jail.
[00:15:22] And then in January of the following year, January of 2009, their trial began.
[00:15:29] To say it was a media circus is perhaps an understatement.
[00:15:34] It drew huge media interest from all over the world: in Italy, because that was where the crime took place. In the UK, because that was where the innocent victim was from. And from the United States, because that's where Knox was from.
[00:15:50] And the media interest wasn’t just because of where the people involved came from, there were multiple elements of the trial that intrigued and enthralled armchair detectives.
[00:16:03] First of all, the murder seemed unlikely.
[00:16:07] Knox and Sollecito didn’t look or sound like your typical violent murderers.
[00:16:14] Sollecito was a quiet, mild mannered computer science student with round glasses.
[00:16:20] Knox was a young American student on her study abroad year.
[00:16:25] The pair had only met a few weeks before. It might have been a whirlwind romance, but for them to have gone from smoking marijuana, having sex and watching movies together to discussing and then committing violent murder seemed…odd.
[00:16:43] What’s more, there was the not insignificant fact that Rudy Guede had already been charged and found guilty of the murder. What part did Knox and Sollecito play, then?
[00:16:56] For this we must now talk about the lead prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini.
[00:17:03] Mignini seems to have decided, almost from the outset, that Knox was guilty, he just needed to find a motive and some evidence that supported this hypothesis.
[00:17:17] He proposed to the court that Knox had attacked her housemate, and then she and Sollecito held her down while Guede raped her.
[00:17:27] Perhaps they had done this for sexual gratification, Mignini suggested, perhaps it was because they wanted to play some kind of drug-fueled sex game, and Meredith refused to take part.
[00:17:42] When this was all over, Knox and Guede stabbed her to death. The trio had then staged a burglary, they had then broken a window to make it look like someone had broken into the apartment.
[00:17:56] They were guilty, the prosecution alleged.
[00:18:01] Against the backdrop of all of this, journalists were looking for any tidbits that they could find that would give their readers more salacious gossip about Knox or Guede.
[00:18:13] They were delighted to find out that Amanda Knox’s MySpace nickname was “Foxy Knoxy”. Foxy is a slang term for sexually attractive.
[00:18:25] Any information on Amanda Knox’s life would be published by hungry journalists, the racier the better.
[00:18:32] They found people who gave details of her sex life, how she had slept with several Italian men shortly after arriving.
[00:18:40] She was painted as some kind of sex-crazed young woman.
[00:18:45] Even the BBC, which normally abstains from the worst tabloid gossip, ran articles with headlines “Who is the real 'Foxy Knoxy'?”
[00:18:56] And the entire thing spun out of control. Amanda Knox was a sex-crazed temptress.
[00:19:04] It wasn’t just her backstory. It was also her behaviour during the investigation and trial that journalists and prosecutors pointed to as a sign of her guilt.
[00:19:16] She seemed unmoved by the death of her housemate, and the police would report that she did cartwheels in the police station, which she would later say were only yoga exercises.
[00:19:28] On Valentine’s day during her trial she wore a t-shirt with “all you need is love” on, and she smiled and looked even happy when she was in court.
[00:19:40] This wasn’t the behaviour of an innocent person, the prosecution alleged. No normal person would behave in this way.
[00:19:49] In the courtroom, the prosecutor brought out evidence that further tied the duo to the crime scene. There was the bloody knife, the murder weapon, and Mignini also announced that the police had found Sollecito’s DNA on the victim’s bra.
[00:20:06] It was not looking good at all, and after almost a full year, on December 4th, 2009, the trial was over. The jury declared that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were guilty of murder, and they were sentenced to 26 years and 25 years respectively.
[00:20:31] There were cheers outside the courtroom as justice had finally been served. This young woman who might look sweet and innocent had been proved to be a violent and cruel murderer.
[00:20:45] Knox and Sollecito’s families said they would immediately appeal the verdict, and the next two years were characterised by appeals, second and third opinions.
[00:20:57] As the appeals continued, more and more evidence came to light. Or rather, it came to light that more and more evidence wasn’t actually evidence at all.
[00:21:09] The supposed murder knife was reexamined, and it was found that it couldn’t have been the knife that killed Meredith; it was too big, and the traces of Meredith’s DNA that were found on the knife could have been from anyone or anything. It was a knife from Sollecito's kitchen, so of course his fingerprints were on it, as he used it for cooking. And given how much time Knox spent in his apartment, preparing and cooking food together, it's perfectly reasonable that her fingerprints would be on there too.
[00:21:26] And the other main piece of evidence for the prosecution was Sollecito’s DNA on the victim’s bra. When experts were consulted on the matter, they concluded that the manner in which the forensic investigators searched the house was so unprofessional that evidence would almost certainly have been contaminated, and nothing could be considered valid legal evidence.
[00:22:10] With these two pieces of evidence being completely discounted, there was nothing tying Sollecito and Knox to the scene. The only “evidence” of their guilt was Knox’s unusual behaviour. And of course, you don’t need to be an expert in Italian law to know that behaving in an unusual way isn’t enough to be convicted of murder.
[00:22:33] Finally, on October the 3rd, 2011, almost 4 years after the murder, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted, they were released from prison.
[00:22:47] Knox was found guilty of perjury, of lying to the police that Patrick Lumumba was involved, and she was sentenced to 3 years, but because she had already served almost 4, she was released straight away, and she was able to return to the United States.
[00:23:05] This, however, wasn't the end of it. In 2013 the Italian Supreme Court ruled that the pair should stand trial again. Knox refused to return to Italy for the trial, but she was found guilty by another court, and faced the possibility of spending the rest of her life in an Italian prison.
[00:23:29] There was some diplomatic ping pong, as the US government faced the very real possibility that it might receive an extradition request for one of its own citizens. Clearly, extraditing Amanda Knox to Italy would have been a pretty unpopular move domestically, but if the US didn’t extradite a citizen that had been found guilty in a court of law, it couldn’t really continue to make extradition requests to other countries if it wouldn’t uphold its part in the bargain and extradite one of its own.
[00:24:01] Fortunately, the case never went this far, and a year later, on March 27th, 2015, 2,702 days after Meredith was found brutally murdered, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were fully exonerated, acquitted of all charges.
[00:24:24] Importantly, Knox was “declared innocent”, not simply “declared not guilty”.
[00:24:31] This being said, there are plenty of people, not just on internet forums but also influential journalists, especially in Italy, who have never acquitted the pair, who continue to put forward this image of Foxy Knoxy, the American sexual deviant who murdered her housemate.
[00:24:50] This would make for a much more theatrical and interesting tale, but the reality is almost certainly less mysterious.
[00:24:59] Rudy Guede broke into the house, like he had done to several other houses in the days leading up to the murder.
[00:25:06] He was confronted by Meredith, there was a struggle, he raped and killed her and then fled.
[00:25:13] A horrible crime indeed, but one with a simpler explanation than the one suggested during the trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:25:21] Guede, it should be said, maintains that he was innocent, and says that Knox was involved.
[00:25:29] He is now a free man, after having served 16 years in prison and being released early for good behaviour.
[00:25:37] Whether he ever comes clean and reveals what really happened, remains to be said.
[00:25:44] OK then, that is it for The Trial Of Amanda Knox.
[00:25:48] As you may have gathered, we've only really scratched the surface in this episode, there is a lot more too to it, and it really is a fascinating story of police ineptitude, international diplomacy, the power of the media, and how the Italian legal system works, so we are actually going to be following up this episode with another, bonus episode, where we are going to go into all of this in much greater detail.
[00:26:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:00:26] It is the story of a young woman whose study abroad programme went horribly wrong.
[00:00:31] But it is also the story of the Italian justice system, the power of the media, and at the centre of it all, a British woman who was violently murdered.
[00:00:42] It is also a personal story, for reasons which I will reveal shortly.
[00:00:47] And on a quick admin note, this episode will be talking about quite a nasty murder investigation, so if you would prefer not to listen to this, then I’d advise to press pause now.
[00:01:01] Ok then, let’s talk about the trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:01:06] Perugia is a hilltop city in Italy. It is a beautiful place, narrow old streets, Etruscan arches, fantastic views that stretch for miles.
[00:01:19] It is also a student city, with a very good university, Università degli Studi, as well as a university for foreigners to learn Italian, the Università per Stranieri.
[00:01:31] Every year, thousands of foreigners flock to the city, whether that’s for a short Italian course or a longer exchange programme.
[00:01:41] And they have a lot of fun. Rent is cheap, there are lots of bars, restaurants, parties, lots of people to meet and make friends with, lots of cultural activities, or hedonistic activities if that's more your vibe.
[00:01:58] It’s great, and if you are wondering why I know this, and am saying this with such certainty, it's because I was one of those foreigners.
[00:02:08] At the start of 2006, I went to the Università per Stranieri for an Italian course. I lived in Perugia, and went to the same university where today’s story all took place.
[00:02:21] But this isn’t about me.
[00:02:24] A year and a half after I left, two young women arrived in Perugia, no doubt full of expectation and excitement.
[00:02:34] The first was called Meredith Kercher, and she was from England. She was a student at the University of Leeds, and like many of her peers, she had chosen to spend a third year abroad studying at a foreign university.
[00:02:51] The second was Amanda Knox, who was a linguistics student at the University of Washington. She had decided to spend a year abroad, she thought Florence was too full of Americans–which it is–and had settled on Perugia as her destination.
[00:03:10] And the way in which you found accommodation in Perugia back then was by little posters that people would put up all over the city: room available, or flatshare wanted. You would tear off a little phone number, call up and take a look at the room, decide that you liked the look of it, or move on to the next one.
[00:03:31] For Kercher and Knox, they found themselves living together in this way, sharing a small house with two young Italian women.
[00:03:43] They were different characters, Kercher and Knox, but they got along. They went out for pizza, they did things together, they were friendly but not best friends.
[00:03:56] Kercher would, reportedly, spend more time with English friends, while Knox was happier to mingle with Italians.
[00:04:05] And they were different people. Kercher was a more studious young woman, keen to get good grades, whereas Knox was less focussed on her studies.
[00:04:18] And in late October, a month and a half after arriving in Italy, Amanda Knox saw a man who caught her eye, and would end up distracting her from class. His name was Raffaelle Sollecito, and he was a shy-looking computer science student.
[00:04:38] Knox would later say that he reminded her of Harry Potter.
[00:04:43] The pair got talking, and swiftly became romantically involved with one another. She would stay over at his house, which was a five minute walk away from hers, they would watch movies together and smoke marijuana.
[00:04:58] And that was what they did on the evening of November 1st, 2007. They watched Amelie, smoked marijuana, and had sex, or so she would later recall.
[00:05:11] The following morning, Knox went back to her house for a shower. Sollecito was a 23-year-old male computer science student, and, perhaps as you can imagine, his bathroom wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to take a shower.
[00:05:29] She returned home, and saw that the front door of her house was open. This was unusual, kind of strange, but she didn’t think too much about it, as it had been faulty for a while.
[00:05:44] She got into the shower, and it was only when she got out that she noticed that there were spots, small drops of blood on the bathroom floor.
[00:05:55] She knocked on Kercher’s door, but there was no answer. She then tried to open it, but it was locked. What’s more, Kercher, her housemate, wasn’t answering her phone.
[00:06:09] And she always answered her phone.
[00:06:13] Worried, Knox returned to Sollecito’s house, and the pair tried to figure out what to do.
[00:06:21] They returned to the house, and found Kercher’s phone had been dumped behind the house, and saw that one of the windows had been smashed.
[00:06:30] They called the police, who came to investigate, but refused to smash Kercher’s door, on the grounds that it would be damage to private property. By this point, one of Kercher and Knox’s Italian housemates had arrived, along with a friend.
[00:06:47] They decided the situation was serious, and the friend kicked open Meredith Kercher’s door.
[00:06:56] They were confronted by a horrific sight: A bloody duvet which covered the lifeless body of Meredith Kercher.
[00:07:05] The police pushed past to survey the scene, and Knox and Sollecito were ushered out of the house.
[00:07:12] The detectives on the scene questioned Knox and Sollecito, but they were free to go, while the police gathered evidence.
[00:07:21] On November 5th, just three days after the gruesome discovery of Kercher’s dead body, Knox went again to the police station to give evidence.
[00:07:32] She was a valuable witness. She was the housemate of the victim, it was her who had first seen the blood, raised the alarm, and led to the gruesome discovery.
[00:07:43] She told the police what she knew, going over and over the events of that evening. She was with Sollecito, she returned to the house the following morning, took a shower, and it was only afterwards that she noticed that something seemed odd.
[00:08:00] She was told that she was being questioned as a witness, so she didn’t need a lawyer.
[00:08:06] What’s more, she was told that things would be worse for her if she had asked for a lawyer, it would suggest some kind of guilt.
[00:08:15] And Knox, so she insisted, was innocent.
[00:08:20] She wasn’t provided with an interpreter, so this was all in Italian, the Italian of someone who has only been in the country for a few weeks, and–in her own words–she had the Italian of a 10-year-old child.
[00:08:35] There she was, speaking in broken Italian, not really understanding what she was being asked, knowing nothing about the Italian legal system, thousands of miles away from home, and only 20 years old at the time.
[00:08:50] She was interrogated for hours, and on November 6th, the Italian police proudly announced that Knox was not just a witness; she had signed a written statement admitting that her original story, the one I just told you, was a lie. She confessed to her role in the grisly murder.
[00:09:13] According to the written statement, the killer was the owner of the bar in which Amanda Knox worked, a Congolese man called Patrick Lumumba.
[00:09:24] Lumumba had come to the house, so Knox said, and murdered Kercher while Knox was in another room. Knox even went to the length of telling the police that she put her hands over her ears not to hear her housemate’s screams.
[00:09:41] Lumumba was promptly arrested, but he seemed confused, insisting that he had nothing to do with it.
[00:09:49] He was no murderer, he was working in his bar all evening, just ask the half a dozen people who were there with him.
[00:09:57] And it wasn’t just Lumumba who was insisting that he was innocent. The morning after the signed confession, Amanda Knox wrote a lengthy letter in which she said that she retracted the confession, and she was forced to sign it under serious duress, with the police officers hitting her over the head and telling her that they had evidence linking her to the crime scene.
[00:10:24] She was confused, she had been interrogated for 50 hours without adequate food or water, she was in shock. She couldn’t remember exactly what happened, she had been smoking drugs with her boyfriend the night before, it was all a bit of a blur, but she certainly did not kill Meredith, or know who did.
[00:10:46] It wasn’t Lumumba; she had tried to pin the blame on him, inventing this story, to divert attention away from her.
[00:10:54] It didn’t matter, the police were not buying it.
[00:10:59] On November 9th, a week after the murder, an Italian judge ruled that the three suspects–Lumumba, Knox, and Sollecito–could be detained for up to a year while the police gathered the evidence to either convict or release them.
[00:11:16] Then, on November 15th, almost two weeks after the murder, the police made another big announcement. They had found a knife at Raffaele Sollecito’s apartment. And on the knife’s handle was the DNA of both Sollecito and Knox.
[00:11:36] And on the blade, traces of Meredith Kercher’s DNA, traces of the murder victim.
[00:11:44] It didn’t look good for the young couple, for Raffaele Sollecito and his American girlfriend, Amanda Knox.
[00:11:51] But then, a matter of days later, there was another suspect named in the murder, a young man called Rudy Guede. He was originally from the Ivory Coast but had lived in Perugia since he was a young boy.
[00:12:07] He was well-known to the police for petty crimes, drug dealing, and more recently, burglaries. He was also known to carry a knife…
[00:12:19] The day after he was named as a suspect, the German police announced that they had arrested him after he had tried to board a train without a ticket, and he was extradited, brought back to Italy.
[00:12:33] The very same day, Patrick Lumumba, the man who Knox had initially said committed the murder, was released.
[00:12:42] It turned out that, yes, Lumumba’s surprise and protests of innocence were justified.
[00:12:48] He was at his bar all night, and a Swiss professor came forward and testified that he had been talking to Lumumba all evening, he even had the receipt from the bar to prove it.
[00:13:01] For Rudy Guede, on the other hand, things did not look good.
[00:13:06] He had fled to Germany immediately after the murder, and the police would announce that they had found his fingerprints and other DNA evidence of him all over the crime scene, including his semen inside the victim.
[00:13:22] When questioned, he admitted to the police that he was in Meredith Kercher’s house during the night of the murder. But, he did not kill her.
[00:13:31] His account of what happened went as follows.
[00:13:35] He had been asked to come to the house by Meredith. The pair had sex, afterwards he had gone to the bathroom, as he had an upset stomach after eating a dodgy kebab.
[00:13:47] He sat on the toilet with his headphones on, listening to loud music.
[00:13:52] He came out of the bathroom and saw another man who told him, "black man found, guilty found", and then ran off into the night.
[00:14:03] And it was only then that he discovered Meredith, who had been stabbed multiple times and was dying in front of him. He tried to save her, but when he realised that he wouldn’t be able to, and fearing that the police would never believe his account of the story, he decided to flee. But first he wrapped Meredith’s body in a duvet, which explains his bloody handprint that was found under the pillow.
[00:14:32] Now, you might believe Guede, you might not.
[00:14:35] The police certainly didn’t.
[00:14:38] But, strangely enough, they also didn’t believe Knox or Sollecito’s account, and posited that all three were involved in the murder: Guede, Knox and Sollecito.
[00:14:51] All three were held in police custody until they were formally charged with murder in July of the following year.
[00:15:00] Guede, interestingly enough, opted to have a separate “fast track” trial, during which he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
[00:15:12] All throughout this, despite one man already being found guilty of murder, Sollecito and Knox were still in jail.
[00:15:22] And then in January of the following year, January of 2009, their trial began.
[00:15:29] To say it was a media circus is perhaps an understatement.
[00:15:34] It drew huge media interest from all over the world: in Italy, because that was where the crime took place. In the UK, because that was where the innocent victim was from. And from the United States, because that's where Knox was from.
[00:15:50] And the media interest wasn’t just because of where the people involved came from, there were multiple elements of the trial that intrigued and enthralled armchair detectives.
[00:16:03] First of all, the murder seemed unlikely.
[00:16:07] Knox and Sollecito didn’t look or sound like your typical violent murderers.
[00:16:14] Sollecito was a quiet, mild mannered computer science student with round glasses.
[00:16:20] Knox was a young American student on her study abroad year.
[00:16:25] The pair had only met a few weeks before. It might have been a whirlwind romance, but for them to have gone from smoking marijuana, having sex and watching movies together to discussing and then committing violent murder seemed…odd.
[00:16:43] What’s more, there was the not insignificant fact that Rudy Guede had already been charged and found guilty of the murder. What part did Knox and Sollecito play, then?
[00:16:56] For this we must now talk about the lead prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini.
[00:17:03] Mignini seems to have decided, almost from the outset, that Knox was guilty, he just needed to find a motive and some evidence that supported this hypothesis.
[00:17:17] He proposed to the court that Knox had attacked her housemate, and then she and Sollecito held her down while Guede raped her.
[00:17:27] Perhaps they had done this for sexual gratification, Mignini suggested, perhaps it was because they wanted to play some kind of drug-fueled sex game, and Meredith refused to take part.
[00:17:42] When this was all over, Knox and Guede stabbed her to death. The trio had then staged a burglary, they had then broken a window to make it look like someone had broken into the apartment.
[00:17:56] They were guilty, the prosecution alleged.
[00:18:01] Against the backdrop of all of this, journalists were looking for any tidbits that they could find that would give their readers more salacious gossip about Knox or Guede.
[00:18:13] They were delighted to find out that Amanda Knox’s MySpace nickname was “Foxy Knoxy”. Foxy is a slang term for sexually attractive.
[00:18:25] Any information on Amanda Knox’s life would be published by hungry journalists, the racier the better.
[00:18:32] They found people who gave details of her sex life, how she had slept with several Italian men shortly after arriving.
[00:18:40] She was painted as some kind of sex-crazed young woman.
[00:18:45] Even the BBC, which normally abstains from the worst tabloid gossip, ran articles with headlines “Who is the real 'Foxy Knoxy'?”
[00:18:56] And the entire thing spun out of control. Amanda Knox was a sex-crazed temptress.
[00:19:04] It wasn’t just her backstory. It was also her behaviour during the investigation and trial that journalists and prosecutors pointed to as a sign of her guilt.
[00:19:16] She seemed unmoved by the death of her housemate, and the police would report that she did cartwheels in the police station, which she would later say were only yoga exercises.
[00:19:28] On Valentine’s day during her trial she wore a t-shirt with “all you need is love” on, and she smiled and looked even happy when she was in court.
[00:19:40] This wasn’t the behaviour of an innocent person, the prosecution alleged. No normal person would behave in this way.
[00:19:49] In the courtroom, the prosecutor brought out evidence that further tied the duo to the crime scene. There was the bloody knife, the murder weapon, and Mignini also announced that the police had found Sollecito’s DNA on the victim’s bra.
[00:20:06] It was not looking good at all, and after almost a full year, on December 4th, 2009, the trial was over. The jury declared that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were guilty of murder, and they were sentenced to 26 years and 25 years respectively.
[00:20:31] There were cheers outside the courtroom as justice had finally been served. This young woman who might look sweet and innocent had been proved to be a violent and cruel murderer.
[00:20:45] Knox and Sollecito’s families said they would immediately appeal the verdict, and the next two years were characterised by appeals, second and third opinions.
[00:20:57] As the appeals continued, more and more evidence came to light. Or rather, it came to light that more and more evidence wasn’t actually evidence at all.
[00:21:09] The supposed murder knife was reexamined, and it was found that it couldn’t have been the knife that killed Meredith; it was too big, and the traces of Meredith’s DNA that were found on the knife could have been from anyone or anything. It was a knife from Sollecito's kitchen, so of course his fingerprints were on it, as he used it for cooking. And given how much time Knox spent in his apartment, preparing and cooking food together, it's perfectly reasonable that her fingerprints would be on there too.
[00:21:26] And the other main piece of evidence for the prosecution was Sollecito’s DNA on the victim’s bra. When experts were consulted on the matter, they concluded that the manner in which the forensic investigators searched the house was so unprofessional that evidence would almost certainly have been contaminated, and nothing could be considered valid legal evidence.
[00:22:10] With these two pieces of evidence being completely discounted, there was nothing tying Sollecito and Knox to the scene. The only “evidence” of their guilt was Knox’s unusual behaviour. And of course, you don’t need to be an expert in Italian law to know that behaving in an unusual way isn’t enough to be convicted of murder.
[00:22:33] Finally, on October the 3rd, 2011, almost 4 years after the murder, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted, they were released from prison.
[00:22:47] Knox was found guilty of perjury, of lying to the police that Patrick Lumumba was involved, and she was sentenced to 3 years, but because she had already served almost 4, she was released straight away, and she was able to return to the United States.
[00:23:05] This, however, wasn't the end of it. In 2013 the Italian Supreme Court ruled that the pair should stand trial again. Knox refused to return to Italy for the trial, but she was found guilty by another court, and faced the possibility of spending the rest of her life in an Italian prison.
[00:23:29] There was some diplomatic ping pong, as the US government faced the very real possibility that it might receive an extradition request for one of its own citizens. Clearly, extraditing Amanda Knox to Italy would have been a pretty unpopular move domestically, but if the US didn’t extradite a citizen that had been found guilty in a court of law, it couldn’t really continue to make extradition requests to other countries if it wouldn’t uphold its part in the bargain and extradite one of its own.
[00:24:01] Fortunately, the case never went this far, and a year later, on March 27th, 2015, 2,702 days after Meredith was found brutally murdered, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were fully exonerated, acquitted of all charges.
[00:24:24] Importantly, Knox was “declared innocent”, not simply “declared not guilty”.
[00:24:31] This being said, there are plenty of people, not just on internet forums but also influential journalists, especially in Italy, who have never acquitted the pair, who continue to put forward this image of Foxy Knoxy, the American sexual deviant who murdered her housemate.
[00:24:50] This would make for a much more theatrical and interesting tale, but the reality is almost certainly less mysterious.
[00:24:59] Rudy Guede broke into the house, like he had done to several other houses in the days leading up to the murder.
[00:25:06] He was confronted by Meredith, there was a struggle, he raped and killed her and then fled.
[00:25:13] A horrible crime indeed, but one with a simpler explanation than the one suggested during the trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:25:21] Guede, it should be said, maintains that he was innocent, and says that Knox was involved.
[00:25:29] He is now a free man, after having served 16 years in prison and being released early for good behaviour.
[00:25:37] Whether he ever comes clean and reveals what really happened, remains to be said.
[00:25:44] OK then, that is it for The Trial Of Amanda Knox.
[00:25:48] As you may have gathered, we've only really scratched the surface in this episode, there is a lot more too to it, and it really is a fascinating story of police ineptitude, international diplomacy, the power of the media, and how the Italian legal system works, so we are actually going to be following up this episode with another, bonus episode, where we are going to go into all of this in much greater detail.
[00:26:11] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:26:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
