Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 37

I reminded myself that we also had common sense on our side. There was no motive. I had no history of violence. I'd barely met Rudy Guede. Raffaele had not met him at all.

Luciano and Carlo came to see me the day before the pretrial started. "We'll be as strong and forceful as we can," Luciano promised.

Carlo, the pessimist, said, "Don't get your hopes up, Amanda. I'm not sure we'll win. There's been too much attention on your case, too much pressure on the Italian legal system to think that you won't be sent to trial."

Chapter 23

September 18October 28, 2008

The agente slid the cage door closed and turned the lock. Terrified and claustrophobic, I was alone inside a cramped, cold metal box barely large enough to sit in. I put my mouth up to the honeycomb panel and sucked in air. I heard the van's double doors slam and felt the vehicle lurch as we pulled away from Capanne. The four blue-uniformed guards could see the countryside; I could not. I knew we were twisting and turning our way to the courthouse in downtown Perugia for the pretrial that would decide if the prosecution had enough evidence against Rudy Guede, Raffaele, and me to send us to trial.

The excursion made me feel more trapped than I felt in jail. I was like a package on a FedEx truck-on board but untended. The guards' job was to deliver me. Nothing more.

I longed to look out the window. I'd been outside the prison only once since my arrest, and that was only because I needed to see an eye doctor. Being in prison where the vistas are all broken by bars had made my eyes nearsighted. During that earlier trip, I heard children playing, and I started sobbing. It made me think of my family and of all I'd lost.

The pretrial was a far more jarring experience.

As the van rolled down the ramp and into the courthouse's underground garage, one agente said, "The journalists are waiting for you, Kuh-nox."

"You're going to be a good girl so we don't have to handcuff you, right?" another guard said. I had always been so polite and docile that a guard had once said to me, "If all the inmates were like you, we wouldn't need prisons."

I'd thought to myself, Because I shouldn't be a prisoner.

Between leaving the van and entering the double doors of the courthouse, I had a few moments in the open air but not free rein. A guard held my arm, using it to steer me into the building and, from there, into the antechambers used to confine prisoners. Later, in the courtroom, one guard stood behind me. Another was stationed a few steps to the side.

Walking down the hall, I was sandwiched between two guards, with a third agente ahead of us. "Remember. Do not say anything to the press. Don't even look at them," one cautioned.

As we rounded a corner, cameras flashed. Media people were yelling questions in Italian and English-"Are you guilty?" "Are you innocent?" "Why did you do it?" "Did you do it?" "What happened to Meredith?" "What do you have to say?"

The journalists and photographers were barricaded behind a rope. I didn't notice their faces, only huge black camera lenses and blindingly bright explosions of light. I felt so self-conscious that I instinctively ducked to hide my face.

And then it was over. The courtroom-closed to anyone who wasn't involved in the case-was pin-drop quiet. My team's table was on the far right. The table for Raffaele's lawyers was next to mine. Rudy Guede was to sit with his lawyers behind Raffaele's table. But on the first day, I was the only one of the three defendants there.

Relieved that the room wasn't full of people, I sat down and waited for the judge. Then the double doors I'd come through opened again, and the Kercher family walked in.

My first thought wasn't They think I'm a murderer. It was Meredith's parents? I finally get to meet them.

I asked Carlo if it would be okay to say h.e.l.lo. He checked with their lawyer, Francesco Maresca, and came back saying, "Maresca said, 'Absolutely not.' Now is not the time."

Will there ever be a right time?

I knew I had to listen to my lawyers on this one, but I was still waiting for a moment when we could exchange glances so that I could convey my sympathy.

When I tried to catch their attention, they glared at me, and I felt as if I'd been slapped. I also felt completely humbled. Meredith's mom's expression was both hard and sorrowful.

I was devastated. I'd antic.i.p.ated meeting them for a long time. I'd written and rewritten a sympathy letter in my head but had never managed to put it on paper. Now I felt stupid. How had I not antic.i.p.ated their reaction? Why are you so surprised? What do you think this has been about all along? My grief for Meredith and my sadness for her family had kept me from thinking further. Of course they hate you, Amanda. They believe you're guilty. Everyone has been telling them that for months.

The first day of the pretrial was mostly procedural. Almost immediately Guede's lawyers requested an abbreviated trial. I had no idea the Italian justice system offered this option. Carlo later told me that it saves the government money. With an abbreviated trial, the judge's decision is based solely on evidence; no witnesses are called. The defendant benefits from this fast-track process because, if found guilty, he has his sentence cut by a third.

Guede's lawyers must have realized that he was better off in a separate trial, since the prosecution was intent on pinning the murder on us. The evidence gathered during the investigation pointed toward his guilt. His DNA was all over Meredith's room and her body, on her intimate clothing and her purse. He had left his handprint in her blood on her pillowcase. He had fled the country. The prosecution called Guede's story of how he "happened" to be at the villa and yet had not partic.i.p.ated in the murder "absurd"-though they readily believed his claims against Raffaele and me. One of the big hopes for us was that with so much evidence against Guede, the prosecution would have to realize Raffaele and I hadn't been involved.

I felt the way about Guede that Meredith's family felt about me. As soon as I saw him, in a subsequent hearing, I thought angrily, You! You killed Meredith!

He didn't look like a murderer. He was wearing jeans and a sweater. It was almost impossible to imagine that he had cut Meredith's throat. But if he hadn't, his DNA wouldn't have been everywhere in Meredith's room. And he wouldn't have lied about Raffaele and me. The other thing I noticed: he wouldn't look at me.

I was relieved when Raffaele appeared on the second day of the pretrial. He smiled as soon as he saw me, as though he couldn't suppress it. After almost a year being apart from him, my second impression was the same as my first: he was honest and smart-and, even with shoulder-length hair, just as handsome as when I met him at the concert hall. It made me miserable to know that being my boyfriend had cost him so much. On the other hand, I felt grateful that he, out of all the people in Perugia, was the person I was going through this with. Getting his first letter had renewed my faith in him, and we now wrote each other regularly. I knew I could trust Raffaele with my life. And I was.

Mignini and his co-prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, were determined to establish a connection between Guede, Raffaele, and me.

Their theory seemed to be that I knew Guede from the time Meredith and I had met with the guys downstairs in front of the fountain in Piazza IV Novembre-the night Guede told the guys I was cute. He hadn't made an impression on me at all then. The prosecution hypothesized that, after that night, he'd gotten in touch with me, perhaps about buying drugs. They stressed that we had a relations.h.i.+p, and although they allowed that it wasn't necessarily romantic, they insisted that Guede, like Raffaele, was obsessed with me. They further decided-based on a blurb Raffaele had written on his Facebook page way before he met me-that we'd been bored on the night of November 1 and headed to Piazza Grimana. There, Mignini said, we ran into Guede at the basketball court. I purportedly said, "Hey, let's go hang out at my place."

The prosecution spun this a.s.sumption further. According to Mignini, we found Meredith at the villa and said, Hey, that stupid b.i.t.c.h. Let's show Meredith. Let's get her to play a s.e.x game.

I was horrified. Who thinks like that?

In their scenario, I hated Meredith because we'd argued about money. Hearing Mignini say that I told Guede to rape Meredith was upsetting. He added that I was the ringleader, telling Raffaele to hold her down. When he said that I threatened Meredith with a knife, I felt as if I'd been kicked. Even worse was hearing him say that when Meredith refused to have s.e.x, I killed her.

When he initially said we were bored and went to the piazza, it sounded spontaneous, but now he said I'd tried to trap Meredith on Halloween-a holiday he saw as evil. Mignini based this on a text I'd sent Meredith asking her to hang out on Halloween. He emphasized Raffaele's and my supposed immorality and inclination toward violent fantasy. His "proof"? Raffaele's j.a.panese comic books about vampires and the one Marilyn Manson song he had downloaded. In closing arguments, Mignini said Meredith's murder was premeditated and was a rite celebrated on the occasion of the night of Halloween-a s.e.xual and sacrificial ritual that, in the intention of the conspirators, should have occurred twenty-four hours earlier.

He was throwing motives against the wall to see which one stuck.

I wasn't used to the court lingo and depended on the young American woman who'd been appointed as my interpreter to fill me in on what was said.

The pretrial judge, Paolo Micheli, allowed testimony from two witnesses. The first was DNA a.n.a.lyst Patrizia Stefanoni for the Polizia Scientifica.

Starting right after we were indicted, Raffaele's and my lawyers had requested the raw data for all Stefanoni's forensic tests. How were the samples collected? How many cotton pads had her team used to swab the bathroom sink and the bidet? How often had they changed gloves? What tests had they done-and when? Which machines had they used, at what times, and on which days? What were the original unedited results of the DNA tests?

Her response was "No. We can't give you these doc.u.ments you continue to ask for, because the ones you have will have to suffice."

Then, during pretrial, the defense lawyers pressed again, and this time Judge Micheli granted the request. Stefanoni gave us some doc.u.ments-but not enough to interpret the data. When we objected, the judge shrugged and said, "Well, I asked her and she said those files aren't important for you."

Our only option was to question Stefanoni face-to-face about her methods.

Stefanoni was an attractive woman in her late thirties. Meticulously groomed, she had long dark hair, manicured nails, and olive skin. She wore tight suits that showed off her figure. The prosecution's questions were designed to let Stefanoni rea.s.sure the judge that all the testing had been done correctly.

Dr. Sarah Gino, our DNA expert, was a thin woman in her early thirties with short hair and thick gla.s.ses. Her convictions were absolute. She was insistent in her questioning of Stefanoni. Dr. Gino noted that Stefanoni hadn't provided enough information about her investigation for our defense to be able to critique her conclusions. How much of Meredith's DNA had she found on the knife blade? What was the evidence of the cleanup the prosecution was alleging?

Finally the judge granted Raffaele's and my defense teams' request for an independent review of Stefanoni's results. The expert he appointed was the head of the Polizia Scientifica-Stefanoni's boss.

Not surprisingly, this man rubber-stamped Stefanoni's work. It was done perfectly, he said.

That was the end of it.