My name is Amanda Knox… fury over new film
Read our cold case file and see if you correctly predicted the killer’s identity…
THE CASE:
It must have been an exciting time for Meredith Kercher back in August 2007. At 21, she’d moved to Perugia, Italy, where she would be spending the next year of her life. She was a Leeds University student and the year abroad was part of her European Politics and
Italian degree.
She was attractive, intelligent, caring and was sharing a flat with three other students – two Italian and one American.
Despite the distance, she still spoke to her family regularly.
Three months after she arrived in the country, on 1 November, she called her dad, John. He was in his local bank at the time and, knowing the call would be costing his daughter money, he offered to call her later that day.
But Meredith was due to meet friends that evening for dinner, so the father and daughter agreed to speak the following day.
That was the last John ever heard from his daughter.
The following day, when Meredith’s housemate, Amanda Knox, then 20, arrived home from her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito’s house, she found the front door open and drops of blood in the bathroom she shared with Meredith.
Perhaps the Brit had cut herself shaving?
As Meredith’s bedroom door was locked, Amanda assumed she was still sleeping, so she showered then headed back to Raffaele’s home. Later that
morning, she returned to her flat with him.
It was then she noticed a broken window in the bedroom of her other flatmate, Filomena Romanelli.
Banging on Meredith’s door, the pair were alarmed when she didn’t answer. Raffaele attempted to force the door open, but it wouldn’t budge, so they called the 112 emergency number.
In the meantime, Amanda called Filomena, who quickly arrived at the flat. While checking for missing items, they discovered Meredith’s two mobile phones (one English, one Italian) were in a nearby garden.
The police were reluctant to force Meredith’s door open, so Filomena’s friend kicked it down.
Inside they found Meredith’s battered naked body on the floor, covered by a duvet. The bedding was covered in blood and she’d been stabbed repeatedly, her throat slashed.
An autopsy later revealed that she had been sexually assaulted. While Meredith’s devastated family and friends tried to come to terms with the shocking news and the gruesome details hit the world’s headlines, police began investigating her murder.
As they begin to question Amanda and Raffaele, the two quickly turned from witnesses into suspects.
Their stories kept changing and, within days, Amanda revealed that she had been in another room of the house and ‘covered her ears’, as her boss at the bar she worked at, Patrick Lumumba, killed Meredith.
He spent two weeks in jail before an alibi stepped forward.
Why would she implicate him if she wasn’t involved?
And the tale only became more twisted when the police found bloody fingerprints belonging to a man called Rudy Guede. Officers arrested him on a train to Germany and Guede admitted he had been with Meredith on the night of her murder.
Shockingly, he said he went to the toilet but when he returned, he saw a shadowed figure holding a knife, standing over her as she lay bleeding on the floor.
However, his version of events did not match the forensic evidence, and Rudy couldn’t explain why one of his palm prints, stained with Meredith’s blood, had been found on her pillow.
In October 2008, Guede elected to undergo a ‘fast-track’ trial, separate to the other suspects. He was found guilty of murder and sexual assault and was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment, later reduced to 16 years.
But had he acted alone or were other people involved in the horrific killing, too?
Amanda and Raffaele quickly turned from witnesses into suspects
For the next four years, Amanda Knox continued to protest her innocence from prison.
An appeal in November 2010 found there had been many basic errors in the gathering and analysing of evidence and the investigation throughout was widely criticised, including the police’s refusal to allow Amanda to have a solicitor or an interpreter.
An independent forensic expert, Dr Stefano Conti, said the crime scene had not been secured and evidence could have been contaminated. ‘You could see a lot of coming and going of people without protective suits. In other words, total chaos,’ he said.
On 3 October 2011, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito had their convictions overturned. Yet, they still had to face a retrial, this time without either defendant present, and after 11 and a half hours of deliberations, a second jury found the pair guilty of murder.
The world was in uproar. Had they done it? Hadn’t they?
After further appeals, a final verdict was given by the Court of Cassation, Italy’s Supreme Court. The pair were found not guilty and completely exonerated of the crime in March 2015.
In 2019, Amanda Knox was paid €18,400 (£15,660) in compensation by Italy for its failure to provide her with a lawyer or competent interpreter when she was first arrested.
Amanda returned to the United States to complete her degree and she now works as a journalist. Yet the ‘guilty’ verdicts, despite being overturned, still continue to haunt her.
A new film, Stillwater, said to be inspired by the events in Italy almost 15 years ago, has just been released.
Amanda, who is now pregnant with her first child, says the film rips off her story without her consent at the expense of her reputation. Director Tom McCarthy has admitted that the film was ‘directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga’.
‘I would love nothing more than for people to refer to the events in Perugia as “the murder of Meredith Kercher by Rudy Guede”, which would place me as the peripheral figure I should have been, the innocent roommate,’ she said.
‘I never asked to become a public person… And when I was acquitted and freed, the media and the public wouldn’t allow me to become a private citizen again.’
That’s as maybe. But in the circus of the court cases and vilifying of the suspects, it was easy to forget that, at the centre of all of this is Meredith – a young girl who was callously murdered. And unlike Amanda Knox, there are no second chances for her…
‘I never asked to become a public person’