A decade after the murder of Meredith, Foxy should just shut up
Most years, on the anniversary of Meredith Kercher’s death, you can depend on Amanda Knox to pop back into the headlines in one way or another.
An appearance on a chat show, a pretty plea for clemency and understanding, a penitent’s gaze into the cameras, a halo brushed and gleaming.
she wrote a book in 2013 and appeared in a Netflix documentary last year, in which she claimed she was perceived as ‘a psychopath in sheep’s clothing’.
this year, here she is again, regular as clockwork, as predictable as a bang on a dull and cracked gong. ‘Foxy Knoxy’ has crassly marked the ten- year anniversary of the killing of her former housemate Meredith by publishing a rather self-serving essay.
‘there are some people who believe I have no right to mourn Meredith,’ she writes on the Westside seattle website, in the West Coast U.s. city she calls home. ‘they believe I had something to do with her murder — I didn’t — or that Meredith has been forgotten in the wake of my own struggle for justice — she hasn’t.’
Knox, twice found guilty of Kercher’s murder, before being finally acquitted by the Italian judiciary in 2015, recalls the things she loved about her ‘closest friend’ Meredith — a girl she knew for only 40 days before the young Briton died of stab wounds.
Quick, pass me a sliced onion and a handkerchief. this is going to get emotional.
Apparently, Amanda loved Meredith’s cute ol’ English accent, and remembers fondly how they would have espressos, eat cookies and go shopping together.
she recalls how Meredith even loaned her a pair of tights — like a big sister would.
SUCH
a lovely portrait of a rosy friendship! Perhaps she has forgotten that in the Netflix documentary, she admitted she and Meredith were not close. And it was no secret there had been friction between them over Knox’s unpaid household bills.
But never mind that. soon, we get down to the real nitty gritty — the terrible, terrible suffering. Amanda’s suffering that is, not Meredith’s, or Meredith’s family’s.
Indeed, Knox writes of her ‘decade of suffering’, in which her nice memories of Meredith are buried beneath ‘horrific autopsy photos and crime scene footage’.
Also to contend with were the slurs, false accusations and wrongful imprisonment, multiple trials, slanderous headlines and the shadows she just cannot shake off.
Most of all, there is her gripe that the murder of Miss Kercher is something she cannot escape because her death is ‘unfairly interlocked with my identity’. Amanda ju just can’t help herse self, can she? It is al always about her. sh she never stops to th think about the K Kerchers, whose loss is so much greater th than hers.
K Knox is trying to m make her name as an au author. If she really wa was a writer, she’d sto stop putting herself in the middle of this tra tragedy and write ab about other things.
B But she appears too sel self-centred and tonedeaf to the continuing misery of the Kerchers to do so.
Meredith’s sister, stephanie, has also released a statement to mark the tenyear anniversary of the murder in Perugia.
‘those who have had to experience the tragedy and despair of having someone taken from them in such a brutal way will tell you the pain and helplessness never ceases,’ she said.
she writes of seeing her sister’s body in the morgue, how the desperate struggle Meredith had put up to live was clear by her wounds. Even now, the family remain baffled by the discrepancies. Particularly that the man now in jail — Rudy Guede — was convicted on the basis that he did not act alone.
yet Italian police show no sign of investigating further into who else they think may have been involved.
DEsPItE
what tV detective dramas may have us believe, crimes are not always cracked. the guilty go free, the bereaved never get justice — and for the Kercher family, this is a particularly piercing agony. For them, the horror rolls on and on.
All the Kerchers want is justice — and for people to remember it was their daughter, not Knox, who was the victim in this crime.
yet a decade on from that terrible night, Amanda Knox still tries to conflate her sense of grievance and victimhood with Meredith’s.
If she really cared about her special, tights-lending, coffee- drinking best friend, wouldn’t she do the decent thing and keep quiet?