Overview: This page covers Knox's myriad zombie lies to media and paying groups with their long-available rebuttals. See this page for the 500 or so zombie lies in Knox's English-only 2013 book.

Amanda Knox Is A Fake Advocate For The Wrongfully-Imprisoned

Posted by The Machine

Fake hysterics

Long post. Click here to go straight to Comments.

1. Lies Of Omission, Ignored Judicial Facts

Amanda Knox is making a grim and despicable profession out of being a self-styled advocate for the “wrongfully imprisoned” while demonizing Italian justice and numerous Italians.

That is seriously bizarre when you consider the fact that she herself tried to frame an innocent black man for rape and murder and wrongfully imprison him.

She was sentenced to three years in prison for this crime and is a convicted felon for life.

And now?

Now serial-liar Knox is attempting to blame Meredith’s death entirely on another black man.

She brushes such inconvenient facts under the carpet whenever she speaks at Innocence Project events or speaks to journalists. The list of her lies of omission has become enormous now.

Chief among them #1: Knox never mentions the Italian Supreme Court’s most damning findings against her: ie, it’s a proven JUDICIAL FACT that she was at the cottage when Meredith was killed, that she washed Meredith’s blood off in the small bathroom, and that she lied repeatedly to the police.

Chief among them #2: Knox pretends that Rudy Guede was the lone killer, who broke into the cottage alone, even though she knows that the Italian Supreme Court ascertained as JUDICIAL FACT that there were multiple attackers and that the break-in at the cottage was staged.

It’s easy to understand the reasons why Knox doesn’t want people to know there were multiple assailants and the break-in was staged.

The fact there were multiple attackers implicates Knox and Sollecito in Meredith’s murder because the Italian Supreme Court places them at the cottage when Meredith was killed. There is no evidence that anybody else was at the cottage that evening. 

The JUDICIAL FACT of the staging of the break-in at the cottage is a seriously inconvenient fact for Knox for these two reasons:

(1) it completely debunks the PR-sustained myth that Guede ever broke into the cottage; and

(2) the only person who could have had the motive and means for staging the break-in was Knox.

She and Sollecito were convicted of staging the break-in by Perugia Trial Judge Massei and as confirmed by Florence Appeal Judge Nencini.

Chief among them #3: Amanda Knox repeatedly makes the false claim she was “exonerated” by the Italian Supreme Court.

In reality she was acquitted only “due to insufficient evidence” (a finding by the way that the court illegally made, as it is forbidden by law from judging issues of evidence; they must all go back down to the appeal court).

Unfortunately that claim is unquestioningly accepted as fact by naive and credulous journalists and the attendees at Innocent Project events because in their haste to demonize Italy they don’t bother to do any due diligence - any simple fact-checking, any calls to Italy.

Knox minutes after Meredith’s body discovered


Amanda Knox’s book Waiting to Be Heard, her manipulative speeches at Innocent Project events that leave gullible dupes teary-eyed (and short on cash), and her media interviews are all part of an elaborate confidence trick.

She serially promotes the cynical lie that she had absolutely nothing to do with Meredith’s murder, Italy framed her,  and accordingly make as much money as possible from it.

Chief among them #4: No sentient human being capable of intelligent thought can conclude Amanda Knox had nothing to do with Meredith’s murder once aware of the Italian Supreme Court’s most damning findings against her:

The Italian Supreme Court ascertained there were multiple attackers. They placed Knox and Sollecito at the cottage when Meredith was killed. Another JUDICIAL FACT.

It is not difficult to work out from this who Rudy Guede’s co-assailants were. They couldn’t have been anyone else other than Knox and Sollecito.

Gleeful Knox buying scanty underwear, day after (CCTV)


Chief among them #5: Judge Marasca concluded Amanda Knox lied repeatedly to the police and falsely accused Diya Lumumba of murder - which makes her guilty of perverting the course of justice and assisting an offender at the very least.

The only people who could have staged the break-in at the cottage are Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.

Judge Marasca’s illegal claim that the DNA evidence against Knox and Sollecito isn’t reliable evidence is ridiculous beyond words and self-evidently untrue.

For example. Renowned DNA experts such as Professor David Balding and Professor Giuseppe Novelli have ruled out environmental contamination at the cottage.

Sollecito’s DNA on Meredith’s bra clasp was identified by two separate DNA tests. Of the 17 loci tested on the sample, Sollecito’s profile 17 out of 17. In other words, there was too much of Sollecito’s DNA on the bra clasp for it to have been caused by environmental contamination.

The suggestion that Sollecito’s DNA could have ended up on Meredith’s bra clasp due to tertiary transfer is just laughable.

Judge Chieffi noted in his Supreme Court report that even Conti and Vecchiotti who he otherwise impugned had ruled out contamination in the laboratory. This means the bra clasp couldn’t have been contaminated.

Meredith’s DNA on the blade of Sollecito’s kitchen knife wasn’t due to contamination either.

Judge Micheli ruled out contamination during the collection phase because the knife was sequestered from Sollecito’s apartment on Corso Garibaldi by a different police team to the one that collected evidence from the cottage on Via della Pergola on the same day.

2. Others With Similar Tendencies

Anna Sorokin

She managed to con hotels, banks and a jet company out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by pretending to be a billionaire heiress from Germany and spinning fantastical fairytales that Hans Christian Anderson would be proud of.

Anna Sorokin is not the only pathological liar who has pretended to be somebody that she isn’t and obtained money by spinning fantastical fairytales to gullible people who don’t have the common sense and “nous” to realise that they are being taken for a ride and defrauded.

The West Memphis Three

Damian Elchols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin were convicted of the murders of Steve Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore in West Memphis in the US State of Arkansas in 1994. However, they were freed in August 2011 after taking an Alford plea. This is a deal which allowed them to maintain their innocence while agreeing prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them. Jessie Misskelley repeatedly confessed that they had killed the three boys and he also knew precise details about the murders.

Brendan Dassey

Brendan Dassey was convicted of the sexual assault and murder of Teresa Halbach in 2007 after repeatedly confessing to the police. She was murdered on 31 October 2005 in Manitowoc County. The US Circuit Court of Appeals analysed Dassey’s claims that he was tricked by detectives into confessing to taking part in a crime he didn’t commit.

Howevever, in a four-to-three ruling, the court concluded that Dassey wasn’t manipluated into confessing. Brendan Dassey repeatedly confessed to the police and he also confessed to his mother in an telephone intercepted conversation. He knew multiple specific details about the murder of Teresa Halbach.

Rodney Reed

Rodney Reed was convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of Stacey Stites in 1998. Rodney Reed’s semen was also found in five rape victims, including a 12-year-old child.

Reed’s claims of innocence have been rejected by the trial jury and every other court to have considered it without dissent (two state district-court judges, nine state appellate judges, one federal magistrate judge, one federal district-court judge, and three federal appellate judges). His execution is on stay but despite celebrity pleas he is still on Death Row.

(Note: Tomorrow Friday 11 December in the US ABC’s 20/20 will air a two-hour investigation of his case.)

Daniel Holtzclaw

Daniel Holtzclaw is the Oklahoma City police officer who was convicted of raping and sexually assaulting a number of black women in 2015. He was sentenced to 263 years in prison. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States have rejected his appeals.

The main reason why the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States have rejected his appeals is that his victims’ stories are consistent - they described the same modus operandi i.e. the questions he initially asked them, the way he exposed himself through the fly of his police uniform and the way he took them to remote locations.

The clincher is that the GPS data from Holtzcalw’s car and the mobile phone records verify many of the geographical and timeline-related details.

In court, prosecutors produced DNA evidence that was found on a spot on the inside of Holtzclaw’s uniform trousers close to the zipper. It matched the DNA profile of one of his accusers.

Michelle Carter

Michelle Carter sentenced to two and a half years in prison for encouraging her suicidal boyfriend to kill himself through texts and phone calls. Carter was convicted in June 2017 of the involuntary manslaughter of Conrad Roy.

The prosecutor told the court that she has not accepted responsibility for her actions and that she has shown no remorse.

Knox at trial

4. Knox And The Multiple Enablers

Defending people who have been charged with and/or convicted of sexual assault and murder is a lucrative niche market for some lawyers and DNA experts. Payoffs for wrongful conviction can be enormous.

Greg Hampikian has represented a number of people who who have been convicted of sexual assault and/or murder such as Dennis Dechaine, Bradley Roberts, Carlton Gary and Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Bradley Roberts and Dennis Dechaine are child rapists.

Professor Gill always wants a piece of this kind of action. He also defends people who have been charged with and/or convicted of sexual assault and/or murder e.g. Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito and a serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw. He also cast doubt on the DNA evidence against Sean Hoey who was charged with 29 murders in Omagh in 1998. Hoey was acquitted of all charges.

Everything Amanda Knox does is motivated by self-interest. She speaks about these high-profile cases to stay in the limelight, and to make sure she keeps getting paid to speak about her experiences on the US college circuit and at Innocent Project events. She gets paid up to £7,000, plus expenses, for each speech.

She has learnt a mercenary lesson from her former PR consultant David Marriott i.e. she makes sure she writes an article or creates a podcast about high-profile cases when media interest is high, ensuring that she also gets mentioned in the media.

By supporting and championing the causes of the West Memphis Three, Brendan Dassey, Rodney Reed and others, she can propagate the idea that people are being wrongfully convicted of murder all the time.

The idea that Amanda Knox lies at night awake worrying about alleged wrongful convictions is hard to believe.

There is hard proof that she couldn’t care less about any of these people. She didn’t retract her false and malicious allegations against Diya Lumumba the whole time he was in prison, despite the fact she knew he was innocent. She was quite happy to let an innocent man face life in prison.

It speaks volumes that Amanda Knox doesn’t show any empathy or express any concern for the victims or their families of the WM3, Brendan Dassey and Rodney Reed.

It’s not surprising either when you consider the fact she was convicted of not only murder but sexual assault by multiple experienced judges at her trial in Perugia and her appeal in Florence.

Knox doesn’t display any high-order thinking skills such as analysis or evaluation when she speaks or writes about these cases.

There’s no substance to any of her comments. She completely ignores most of the evidence that led to the convictions of the WM3, Brendan Dassey, Rodney Reed and Daniel Hotlzclaw.

But no-one should be surprised because Knox isn’t concerned about truth and justice - she’s just concerned about self-promotion and portraying herself as an advocate for the wrongfully imprisoned.

Knox fleecing the sheep

4. Advice For New Readers

Anna Sorokin’s ruse that she was a billionaire heiress unraveled once her lies were discovered.

Amanda Knox’s ruse that she’s an advocate for the wrongfully imprisoned would have long ago unraveled too if people had actually bothered to read the official court reports. They would have long ago discovered that she’s a brazen charlatan and a compulsive liar.

The next time you see Amanda Knox on television dabbing the crocodile tears from her eyes and speaking with her quivering Larry the Lamb voice, it should be a stark reminder she’s a terrible actress who deserves a Rasberry Award for playing the role of someone who was wrongfully convicted.

The real Amanda Knox was at the cottage on Via della Pergola on the night of the murder washing Meredith’s blood off in the small bathroom whilst Meredith’s mutilated body was lying in a pool of blood in her room.

The real Amanda Knox was laughing and joking with Raffaele Sollecito at the police station on 2 November 2007 as if she didn’t have a care in the world whilst Meredith’s devastated friends were crying.

The real Amanda Knox was repeatedly telling the police a pack of lies in the days after Meredith’s murder.

The real Amanda Knox was trying to frame an innocent man for rape and murder on 5 and 6 November 2007 and refused to retract her false and malicious allegations the whole time Diya Lumumba was in prison.

It’s no wonder she omits to mention these details when she speaks to audiences at Innocence Project events and talks to journalists. They would soon realise what type of person she really is if she told them the simple truth.

5. Sugested Further Reading

These are on the theme of the duped groups.

Click for Post:  Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #1

Click for Post:  Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #2

Click for Post:  Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #3

Click for Post:  Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #4

Click for Post:  Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #5

Click for Post:  Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #6

Knox Squawks About Her Slime-Italy Franchise At Risk

Posted by Our Main Posters

The “Stillwater” Film

In the new “Stillwater” film Matt Damon’s character is in Marseille.

He is sort-of trying to get his murder-suspect daughter out of the hands of those meanies the French.

He and others have said that the film’s idea came in part from the case that Knox still widely misleads for cash.

The daughter admits at the end that she did provoke a death. Yeah that could be discombobulating to Knox.

Comments are mostly hostile to Knox under the YouTube at the top (see here).

Knox herself in the guise of several invented YouTube personas (confirmed to us by insiders; Imateapot51 is a main one) is there trying to fight back with fake facts.

At the moment Knox’s three main angles as her own sock-puppets are these:

(1) Knox was forced in illegal interrogation to confess

First, Knox did not confess, she blamed Patrick not herself, and second she was only ever interrogated twice - in December 2007 and July 2009 - both times at her own request. Even she testified at trial her pre-arrest treatment was just fine. 

(2) The Supreme Court vindicated her as there was no evidence

First, it was the Supreme Court’s Sixth Chambers (family-law court) not the First Chambers (murder court) that was “mysteriously” assigned the final appeal, and second under Italian law IT SHOULD NOT EVEN HAVE LOOKED AT THE EVIDENCE.

Any evidence quibbles should have been sent down to the Nencini Appeal Court. The evidence is massive and very damning in fact.

(3) Those Italian meanies refused compensation for her jail stay

Knox DID NOT EVEN APPLY FOR COMPENSATION though had she really been wrongly imprisoned a big award would have been a walk in the park.

Sollecito did apply for compensation. All courts squashed him like a bug, because of his numerous lies pre and post arrest, which wasted police time for months.

Try telling people this, Knox: It was actually the Supreme Court in Rome early in 2009 that ordered the two of you held till the legal process was done.

That was because it was advised that you might skip out - or cause bodily harm. Judge Hellman’s release of you late in 2011 was illegal in fact.

And you have incited bodily harm ever since.

Amazing Report Of Pushback By Hackers Against Dangerous Knox-Type Conspiracy Theorists

Posted by Peter Quennell

Two-Step Comeuppance of Parler

The nihilist forum Parler is now much in the US news, and not in a good way.

It has long hosted myriad Knox-type conspiracists, including many who organized to trash the Washington DC Capitol and possibly to execute some of the US political leadership.

The video report above explains how Amazon, Apple and Google have organized to put it offline as from early today.

Now there’s this amazing report about the exploits of a female super-hacker said to be in Austria. She has grabbed EIGHTY TERRABYTES of Parler posts, videos and volunteered personal information, and is putting the entire catch online for us all to see.

Gulp! And cyber security experts are suggesting that this was not illegal at all.

Parler was an enormous site requiring many servers - but it was built on the freebie Wordpress, good software, but inferior to our own and open to hacking in the way described below and on various sites elsewhere.

Parler was taken offline in the early hours of Monday, January 12, at around 5 am EST, but not before a hacker found a way to retrieve all data posted by users including messages, images, videos and users’ location data shared during last week’s attack on the Capitol Hill building in Washington, DC.

The data taken from Parler is still being processed but President Donald Trump’s followers are already voicing their concerns about what the data dump could reveal about them and their activity in Washington, DC last week. The [Parler] app has already disappeared from the Apple and Google app stores after they cut ties with the right-wing platform. 

In a series of tweets posted by a self-described hacker from Austria, @donk_enby claimed to have gained access to all of the “unprocessed, raw” video files uploaded to Parler “with all associated metadata”. The hacker even included a link to the file library in order to prove that the data leak was real.

In a series of tweets, she wrote, “I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total. This may include things from deleted/private posts.”

She further said, “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” and “if you have the storage space for this, this is currently the best way to help out.” She further continued: “I’d estimate the total size for this would be ~80TB, 4TB per chunk. It’s S3/CloudFront so as much bandwidth as you can throw at it,” and “The crawl is now complete. 1098552 video URLs.”

***

She began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99 percent of its content. @donk_enby later shared a screenshot showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in latitude and longitude.

@donk_enby describes herself as “someone with a creative, but skeptical attitude toward technology,” to paraphrase a definition offered by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker association. “I want this to be a big middle finger to those who say hacking shouldn’t be political,” she said.

@donk_enby’s work has aided other researchers, including one at New York University’s Center for Cybersecurity. Her work is documented on the website ArchiveTeam.org, according to which, the data will eventually be hosted by the Internet Archive.org.

***

A user on Reddit said, “When I first heard of Parler I assumed it was some encrypted anonymous board where everyone would use pseudo names. Instead, I think they were afraid to get infiltrated, so they wanted to authenticate everyone and then display their full names and job titles. And then chose to be hosted on [Amazon’s] AWS…

I thought they were against surveillance and being tracked and all that?? And then they commit terrorism with no masks on during a time where there is a perfectly legal and valid reason to wear one. They even live stream themselves with their full names attached. I guess idiots are easier to brainwash…”

One shared a series of screenshots and said, “Remember how people were dunking on Parler for being built on WordPress? Well, through a plug-in exploit, literally all the user data (including photos of verified state id cards) has been retrieved by hackers and is being posted online. Lmao.”

The very definition of klutzy. All by itself this klutziness could really chill things going forward.

Add “Duper’s Delight” To Knox’s Many Strange Symptoms?

Posted by Our Main Posters

1. Pointer To A Syndrome

The excellent Liz Houle posted this perceptive video in March of last year.

It’s been suggested that we also carry a mention of Knox’s duper’s delight (aka duping delight) syndrome - or, perhaps more accurately, telling symptom.

The reason being that we have so often noted but without labeling it Knox’s tendency to blatant, malicious and obviously enjoyable lying, often for profit, when either a subtle shading of the truth or a mere shutting-up could serve her long-term interests well.

For example, when she gleefully fleeces paying audiences in claiming she wrongly served four year in Cappanne Prison because of those perverse Italians.

Of course three of those years inside were fully justified in the eyes of every Italian court that examined her framing of Patrick and Knox is rightly a convicted felon for life. She has never sued for damages, and not on those grounds complained to the ECHR.

So here we go.

2. Some Telling Analysis

Click for Article:  Dupers delight and the joy of conning

...sociopaths struggle with boredom and ways to get excitement. One way that they can get a rush is by manipulation and deceit, and deliberately conning someone. This is called dupers delight. The rush that they feel when they are conning someone who they feel is more stupid, and can’t see through their lies.

Click for Article:  Duping Delight - The Thrill of Lying

When Hitler so successfully lied to Chamberlain concealing that he had already mobilized the German army to attack Poland, he asked for a time-out from their meeting. With his generals who had been witnessing his most successful lies, Hitler went into an anteroom, where he reportedly jumped up and down with joy, and then having reduced his duping delight, he returned to the meeting.

Click for Article:  Psychopaths and Duping Delight

The phrase was coined by the psychologist and body language expert Dr Paul Ekman. and was defined by him as “the pleasure we get over having someone else in our control and being able to manipulate them”.

Duping delight most often manifests as a grin or a smirk which will flash across a person’s face, and is usually completely inappropriate to the situation or the topic that is being spoken about. The psychopath is either about to lie, or is lying to someone and they are believing it, and the smirk is a leaked expression of pleasure that they are getting away with it.

Click for Article:  Duping Delight, Eye Contact And Smiling

Two possible explanations exist for an increase in eye contact and smiling. One is that smiling happens more often because the liar is experiencing pleasure with the act of lying which has been extensively proven through research on psychopaths, con-men and pathological liars, the second says that a smile is in fact due to stress and embarrassment which causes a stress smile. An increase in eye contact is also explained in terms of a desire to measure the efficacy of the lie.

Click for Article:  Why do narcissists want to destroy people?

All narcissists are struggling to keep their duper’s delight and sadistic delight from taking over and turning them [from Dr Jekyll] into Mr. Hyde. The bloodlust stays under control as long as nothing triggers it too much.

But sometimes, circumstances just happen, and one thing leads to another, and they get full blown duper’s delight transformed into uncontrollable cruelty, or full-blown sadistic delight transformed into its hyper-form, homicide. And, metaphorically speaking, before you know it, the cute kitten suddenly gets squeezed to death.

Click for Article:  Pathological Lying: A Psychopathic Manipulation Tool

Unlike lies told out of fear or to hide shame, psychopathic lies are often told because they bring a shallow form of pleasure to the liar. This is called “Duper’s Delight.” This explains why psychopaths sometimes lie when it is completely unnecessary or when the truth would be more advantageous. Psychopaths also include a variety of details in their lies, not only because it makes their lies sound more credible, but also because they enjoy constructing a false reality and making others believe it. It feeds their need for power and provides them with sick entertainment.

This Behavior Analysis Is Pointing Most Viewers Toward Knox Guilt #2

Posted by Peter Quennell

This Behavior Analysis Is Pointing Most Viewers Toward Knox Guilt #1

Posted by Peter Quennell

Above: the first of two high-traffic videos by a behavoral analysis team.

A second is due soon, and one analyst has added more of his own perceptions of Knox in the video below. All claim they had no prior concrete knowledge of the hard facts.

Both videos seem to be driving a certain fraction over here to see what the hard facts admissible in court actually said. No doubt to find that Knox lied in the interview pretty steadily throughout. 

You can arrive at the viewer comments by scrolling down here and here.

Publicity Addict Knox On Duped ABC Show - Yet Again

Posted by Peter Quennell

Watch this Italian satire…

Much-watched Italian satire of publicity addict Knox

Pretty funny, even if you know zero Italian. Nobody at all thinks highly of Knox there - well, maybe except Sollecito, briefly, when he got a big payoff to quieten him after this event.

As too often, follow the money. This new appearance is yet another emanation of what is for now the world’s largest blood-money machine, with both Knox and ABC gaining financially.

And the real Italy and the real truth be damned, of course. A real pity considering that back in the 2009 trial days Ann Wise’s reporting on the ABC website from Italy was among the most valuable.

But it’s a window closing fast these days. The year 2020 will be the year when truth dominates, with new books and our own major exposures.

We are also considering at least one conference, the first probably to be in Italian, with key attendees from Italy.

Prosecutors & Evidence Experts: Bathroom Evidence Was #1 Against Knox

Posted by KrissyG

Long post. Click here to go straight to Comments.

1. The Body Of Evidence Context

In 2009 at trial the formidable Scientific Police (a major ally of the FBI) outgunned the defenses day-by-day.

Blowing of smoke was attempted with the DNA, but a huge problem for the defenses was that THEIR observers had witnessed all DNA processing and not once had registered a complaint.

Unfortunately in 2011 two notorious problems in Italian justice reared their heads at the first level of automatic appeal.

First, there was a new jury sitting there, often with a skeptical frame of mind, itching to do more than rubber-stamp. 

Second, trial prosecutors and experts typically don’t get to show up, so the jurors have weeks of reading to grasp a complex case.

In this appeal the patently wrongly qualified judges Hellman and Zanetti were actually appointed by the Umbria chief judge to tilt the playing field, made easier by those two factors.

Pretty blatantly they tried to re-run an illegal new trial, but with illegal DNA consultants, and with the prosecution component left out. Then Knox and Sollecito were prematurely released.

In early 2013 Judge Chieffi of the First Chambers of the Supreme Court scathingly annulled their outcome. At his instruction, late in 2013, in Florence, that same first appeal by RS and AK was re-run.

The Nencini appeal was not a second trial, as so widely misrepresented in the US. It was a repeat first appeal, properly run, on minimalist lines very similar to common-law appeals, under strict instructions from the Supreme Court.

So in Florence, what did we get to see? On this occasion over more than a day we got to see Florence prosecutor Crini remorselesly explain the 2009 trial prosecution’s case.

I do recommend reading these two posts, because they show just what the mountain of evidence, superbly packaged and presented, looked like, before the bent Fifth Chambers of the Supreme Court in 2015 mischaracterized pretty well every point.

Click for Post:  Today Lead Prosecutor Alessandro Crini Summarises The Prosecution’s Case

Click for Post:  Prosecutor Alessandro Crini Concludes, Proposes 30 Years For AK And 26 For RS

Knox knew what was coming, and was too terrified even to be there. And this is what a terrified Sollecito did next.

2. And So To The Bathroom, Please

Among the toughest evidence the Perugia trial jury and Florence appeal jury got to hear was the forensic evidence in the BATHROOM portion of the crime scene - as correctly understood to be the entire top floor of the house, and not merely Meredith’s bedroom alone. 

One thing we do know about the night of the murder is that there was a great deal of cleaning up.  Amanda Knox writes in her police statement of 6 Nov 2007, the night of her arrest:

‘One thing I do remember is that I took a shower with Raffaele, and this may explain how we passed the time. In truth, I don’t remember exactly what day this was, but I do remember we showered and cleaned ourselves for a long time. He took care to clean my ears and dry and brush my hair.’

She claims she cannot remember when this happened, but for some reason decided to include it in her statement to the police. On the morning of 2 Nov, the day the body of Meredith Kercher was found she also explained, 

‘The next thing I remember was waking up the morning of Friday, November 2nd around 10am and I took a plastic bag to bring back dirty clothes to go back to my house.’

A second reason Knox gives for returning to the cottage that morning was:

‘After we ate Raffaele washed the dishes but the pipes under his sink broke and water flooded the floor. But because he didn’t have a mop I said we could clean it up tomorrow because we (Meredith, Laura, Filomena and I) have a mop at home’. [For more about this, see my article The Curious Incident of the Pipes in the Night-Time]

Having decided to bring back some dirty clothes and fetch a mop from the cottage, she also decides to take a shower.  Filomena testified that when she arrived home she found the washing machine had clothes inside at the end of a cycle which were still ‘omido’ (=damp or humid)

Likewise, in Knox’ email to her friends at home written in the early hours of Sunday 4 November, two days after the body was found, more talk of cleaning up:

‘ It was the day after halloween, thursday. I got home and she was still asleep, but after i had taken a shower and was fumbling around the kitchen she emerged from her room with the blood of her costume (vampire) still dripping down her chin.’
[snip]
‘after a little while of playing guitar me and raffael went to his house to watch movies and after to eat dinner and generally spend the evening and night indoors. we didnt go out. the next morning i woke up around 1030 and after grabbing my few things i left raffael’s appartment and walked the five minute walk back to my house to once again take a shower and grab a chane of clothes. i also needed to grab a mop because after dinner raffael had spilled a lot of water on the floor of his kitchen by accident and didnt have a mop to clean it up.’

Imagine. All of this, before the body was even discovered.

‘i undressed in my room and took a quick shower in one of the two bathrooms in my house, the one that is right next to meredith and my bedrooms (situated right next to one another). it was after i stepped out of the shower and onto the mat that i noticed the blood in the bathroom. it was on the mat i was using to dry my feet and there were drops of blood in the sink. at first i thought the blood might have come from my ears which i had pierced extrensively not too long ago, but then immediately i know it wasnt mine becaus the stains on the mat were too big for just droplets form my ear, and when i touched the blood in the sink it was caked on already. there was also blood smeered on the faucet. again, however, i thought it was strange, because my roommates and i are very clean and we wouldnt leave blood int he bathroom, but i assumed that perhaps meredith was having menstral issues and hadnt cleaned up yet. ew, but nothing to worry about. i left the bathroom and got dressed in my room. after i got dressed i went to the other bathroom in my house, the one that filomena dn laura use, and used their hairdryer to obviously dry my hair and it was after i was putting back the dryer that i noticed the shit that was left in the toilet, something that definately no one in out house would do. i started feeling a little uncomfortable and so i grabbed the mop from out closet and lef the house, closing and locking the door that no one had come back through while i was in the shower, and i returned to raffael’s place. after we had used the mop to clean up the kitchen i told raffael about what i had seen in the house over breakfast. the strange blood in the bathroom, the door wide open, the shit left in the toilet.’

So, blood on the bath mat, on the tap, in the sink, excrement in the toilet - and yet no attempt to flush it nor to wipe the sink clean.

In Darkness Descending by Russell, Johnson and Garofano, which is written in a largely novelish style, there are flashes of good quality expertise from scientists the authors interviewed. In particular Garofano (who created the Carabinieri forensic labs used by Nencini) and Stefanoni (head of a section in the Scientific Police labs).

Each of the pair had a great deal of experience in criminal forensics.

Forensic team leader Stefanoni’s explanation of the blood drops in the bathroom is especially elegant and noteworthy.  It is worth bearing in mind that Mignini is quoted as saying the blood stain on the light switch was the strongest evidence of Knox’ involvement for him.

Forensics officer Gioia Brocci found an ‘unusually long streak of blood’ which extended from the rim of the wash basin all the way in a line towards the plughole, and another which followed the same pattern in the bidet.

Stefanoni explains this as her theory to the authors:

‘This is the knife moving around,’ she said extending her right arm away from her hips in an arc motion, as though she was throwing a Frisbee.  ‘These blood drips were left by the knife.  Too many droplets and look, the blood in the basin and bidet is paler, so it’s the knife that has been washed at that particular point’.

Pointing to other drops, she continues, ‘The drops on the box of cotton buds and the basin are dark.  This is blood before being washed.’

At the trial the court was impressed with Stefanoni’s expert testimony.  Trial judge Massei ruled the following to be an established fact quoting Stefanoni:

‘Traces that appeared to be of a blood nature were also present on the box of cotton buds, on top of the toilet seat, on the light switch and in the bidet, ‚and there was always the drop upwards, really on the edge and the same continuity up to the bidet siphon, of the common colour and in the same line‛ (pages 134 and 135).

Traces were present also over the bathroom door, not watered down but a vivid red colour.

The evidence collecting in the small bathroom she did with a ‘carta bibula’, which is an absorbent paper [disc] and to a question put to her by the defence of Amanda Knox’, she stated the following: “when we say finding a drop upstream and a drop downstream ... on the inside for example of the sink ... a drop on the edge of the sink and for continuity there was a drop that ended up towards the sink siphon and had a continuity, is not that one was to the right, one to the left, one here and one over there; it had its own continuity, I had deemed it proper to use the same disc of absorbent paper, as they were equal in colour, pink‛.

In 2015 the Fifth Chambers’ Judge Marasca refers to this as ‘diluted blood’.

Such material singled out was pink, of “washed blood ... in the sense it did not have the characteristic red colour of blood.

The same colour other than in the bathroom sink was noted inside the bidet (p. 152).

She specified further that it was not a strip, but “more little specks… with the same continuity‛ (page 153): they were “drippings” that gave this continuity‛ and the colouring was the same, always pink.

She did not believe then it might be different traces because of the continuity between the different drops. This is important, because pro-Knox defenders like to argue, ‘So what?  Knox lived there, of course her DNA is mixed with Meredith’s.

Indeed, the reader might be telling themself ‘So the perpetrator rinsed the knife. It doesn’t prove it was Knox’.

However, the critical point is that, although the DNA mixed samples are separate, Stefanoni was able to prove conclusively to the satisfaction of the court that the DNA was deposited at the same time, together.

From Judge Massei:

In the small bathroom, three traces of the victim’s blood were found on the bathmat; on the light switch plate with two switches there were traces “of diluted blood, blood presumably mixed with water, as it was pale pink in colour’ (page 76) which also came from the victim.

A sample was taken from the front part of the faucet of the sink, which yielded the genetic profile of Amanda Knox; another sample taken from a specimen visible to the naked eye on the edge of the drain of the bidet yielded the genetic profiles of the victim and of Knox, a genetic mixture also found on the box of cotton buds near the sink.

The drippings found inside the sink appeared to be diluted blood, pink in colour, proven by testing to be human blood and yielding the genetic mixture of the victim and Knox.

On the toilet cover there was a bloody substance which yielded the genetic profile of the victim; this was also found on the door-frame. Near the toilet flush was another stain presumed to be blood, but which ended up yielding a negative result.

And:

‘Moving on to the findings taken from the small bathroom, it was pointed out that there was a substance most likely of a blood-derived nature on the ‚edge of the bidet drain‛; the sample was taken during the inspection in order to extract the specimen that yielded a genetic result of a mixed profile: victim plus Knox. It was positive for human blood.

The same procedure was done on the container of cotton swabs that was on the sink. The collected sample revealed a mixed genetic profile; victim plus Knox and it tested positive for human blood.

On the left part of the sink, there was a trace. This too was most likely of a blood-derived nature since it was of a pinkish colour, like the others.

This particular trace originated from the high part and went towards the drain, towards the lower part. The analysis provided the following results: human blood and the genetic profile of the victim plus that of Amanda Knox.

The samples taken from the toilet lid in the small bathroom provided as a genetic result: victim profile and human blood.

The trace present on the right side of the inside part of the bathroom door frame was positive for human blood and it revealed the genetic profile of the victim.

So, we now see, the (dead) victim’s blood is all over the small bathroom and the diluted blood indicates the purpose was to clean whatever item caused the continuous drips across the basin and the bidet.

So, how did Stefanoni establish that the DNA of Knox was left there at the same time as the victim’s diluted blood?  From Judge Massei:

In response to specific questions regarding these traces, she stated that if they had originated from two different people and in an independent and distinct way, one from the other, what would have formed would have been a mixture of the trace: two DNA that would be separated at the start but that would have joined to form a single trace.

She believed it improbable however, to think of such an origin for the trace, which was proven mixed, and this because of the fact that the same area was affected and because of the much diluted blood appearance.

She stressed, as well, that both of the two specimens recovered in the bidet were more abundant on the rim and on the plug on the drain, compared to the part, which is let’s say, slanted, where there is a very narrow line of the substance. However, she stressed, to the naked eye, this link was evident” (page 157).

In effect, the mixed samples came from similarly diluted ‘rivulets’ of pink liquid (water + blood).  = Deposited the same time at the same event.

3. Some Conclusions From The Above

It is a certain and inescapable fact that Knox and Meredith’s DNA were mixed together at the same time.  Secondly, not only deposited at the same time but shows a mixture of a highly visible substance.

This is rather chilling, when you realise the substance is blood and the blood is of the newly murdered victim, rinsed with water.  It also shows, it could not possibly have been mixed ‘because Knox lived there’.  Knox’ sole coagulated blood on the tap, Stefanoni did say she could not date.

It does raise the question of why Knox and Sollecito told the police about the drops of blood in the sink without cleaning it up.  Most likely, they knew it was Meredith’s and reasoned that it didn’t matter if Knox’ possible DNA was also there, as ‘she lived there’.

Gladwell’s assertion that ‘there was no forensic evidence’ is shown to be both utterly false and ignorant.  For me, as for Stefanoni and Mignini Smoking Gun #1 is the dripping blood in the bathroom.

And indeed, the final Supreme Court ruling decrees that ‘Knox did wash her hands of the victim’s blood.’

Powerful Evidence Of Knox’s Presence Locked Inside Meredith’s Room

Posted by James Raper

Red star, where lamp found; blue star, lamp’s normal position

Long post. Click here to go straight to Comments.

1. The Lamp Tellingly Not Mentioned In Knox’s Book

During the case it was frequently suggested that there was no actual evidence of Knox’s presence in “the murder room”, i.e in Meredith’s bedroom.

Now, years later, this is parroted by Malcolm Gladwell.

However this is to ignore the presence of her desk arc lamp there, not to mention a preponderance of other circumstantial evidence, including a knife with Meredith’s DNA on it’s blade in Sollecito’s kitchen.

Also, by the way, one must ignore, as the 5th Chambers of the Supreme Court duly noted, the compelling forensic evidence that Knox had washed Meredith’s blood off her hands in the small bathroom. Quite how she had blood on her hands without her having been in the room, which was locked until forced open, would be a mystery though the 5th Chambers explained “her contact with the victim’s blood would have occurred after the crime and in another part of the house.”

“Would have”? Yea, right! So come on, show us where that other blood is! If, perchance, they meant blood that had been removed then who, one wonders, would have done that? The 5th Chambers did not even ask itself the question, but in any event it accepted that Knox was in the cottage at the time of the murder.

Back to the lamp.

2. Who Had Reason To Move The Lamp

The bald facts are that Knox had such a lamp which was the only source of illumination for her own room. When Meredith’s locked door was forced open, Knox’s lamp was found on the floor immediately behind it.

What was it doing there? This was not a question that was ever adequately adressed by any of the judges when considering her complicity in the murder.

Let us redress that oversight.

Knox denied knowing that her lamp was in Meredith’s room and has never offered a plausible, indeed innocent, explanation for it being there. Accordingly we can rule out that Knox had lent it to Meredith at any time.

This leaves us with two possible options; that either Meredith or Rudy Guede had taken it from Knox’s bedroom, without her consent, and for some purpose.

Why would Meredith have done this? She had a wall light above her bed and her own desk lamp, neither of which were not working. Even if she had, why on the night of (and in the no more than two hours before) her murder, only to leave it on the floor behind her door? There is no reason at all to believe that Meredith had borrowed the lamp just prior to her death that evening.

Likewise, no plausible explanation can be offered for Guede taking the lamp.

If Knox was unaware that her lamp was there, could she have been unaware that it was not in her room?

Two days after the discovery of the murder this is what Knox wrote in her e-mail, referring to the discovery of Filomena’s broken window after she and Sollecito had returned to the cottage –

Convinced that we had been robbed I went to Laura’s room and looked quickly in, but it was spotless like it hadn’t even been touched. This, too, I thought was odd. I then went into the part of the house that Meredith and I share and checked my room for things missing, which there weren’t.

How could she have possibly have missed it? Her own room was quite small and cramped and the desk lamp should have been either on her desk or her bedside table. It would have been a fairly prominent item, and an important one, because she had no other means of illumination,  and it’s absence would be impossible to miss even if, while checking, she was only paying mimimal attention.

Furthermore, according to her account she had been in and out of her room when visiting the cottage earlier that morning. She had undressed for a shower in her room but had to return for a towel, and then return to her room again to get dressed. Never noticed that her lamp was missing be it she had no reason to actually check on that occasion.

Knox was, of course, lying (there are many aspects of her e-mail which are simply not credible) but she had to say that she checked her room because there had been a burglary, had there not? She has to convey the impression that she herself believed, innocently, that there had been a genuine burglary and in doing so she was hoping to draw the investigators’ attention away from two important matters. The first was that the burglary was staged. That is now a settled judicial fact in the case. The second was that there had been a post murder manipulation of the crime scene by the removal of blood traces, though ultimately the Supreme Court did not accord this the status of a judicial fact, largely due to obfuscation on it’s part, and a tendency to put the telescope to it’s blind eye.

Furthermore the Supreme Court did not mention Knox’s lamp at all.

Obviously it’s presence, in the position in which it was found, in Meredith’s room, plays into the notion of a post murder manipulation of the crime scene. If Meredith is a most unlikely agent for it being there, then how do we rate Knox and Guede’s agency?

Knox’s lamp and Meredith’s lamp were both on the floor, at either end of Meredith’s bed. This suggests that they were being used to check under the bed as this area, with the wall light on, would have been in shadow.

It is difficult to imagine what incriminating item Guede would have been looking for and why it would have been of particular importance to him, to the extent that he ignored everything else. We have to bear in mind that the room already had incriminating forensic traces of his presence there, and fairly obvious ones at that, which it never occurred to him to remove. We know that he had blood on the sole of his left shoe but the positioning of these prints did not indicate that he was looking under the bed. No, they went straight from Meredith’s room to the front door, not even changing direction to lock Meredith’s door, enter the small bathroom, or Filomena’s room.

It is admittedly speculation but Knox might have been looking for an earring. She’d had her ear pierced several times and from a photograph of her taken by the press outside the cottage we can see that one of her earrings is missing.

The very presence of that lamp there has to be considered as potentially incriminating and of Knox. It is a fact that has to be assessed and evaluated, and Knox would surely have appreciated that questions would be asked and that adverse inferences could be drawn. That this is obvious is recognized even by her own supporters whose response is to take Knox’s e-mail at face value and claim that her lamp was a plant by the police.

Yes, really.

The lamp is part of the overwhelming circumstantial case against Knox and, I would argue, has had a particular resonance for her since, so much so that she has always simply ignored it.

Why would she leave it there? Probably for the same reason that she did not get around to removing the trace of her own blood on the faucet of the sink in the small bathroom. Not thinking clearly because she was shattered, having been up all night and, probably, as a result of having indulged in drugs and/or alcohol.

In any event it was left behind. An oversight which, at some point, must have occurred to her. When might that have happened? It would have had to be when she was no longer in possession of Meredith’s keys or, at least not in a position to retrieve these in time given the train of events set in motion.

A perpetrator would not want to be found in possession of those keys. On the face of it the keys could have been taken by Guede, but clearly the keys had remained in the possession of those who had arranged the staged burglary and the post murder manipulation of the crime scene, and it is very improbable (as argued elsewhere) that Guede had any involvement with that.

Very probably the keys were tossed away into heavy undergrowth afterwards, or disposed of down some drain and then, some time later, Knox had the sudden realisation that this left her and Sollecito with a problem. She could not simply retrieve the lamp and return it to her room without breaking down Meredith’s door.

Actually that could have been done, though not without some difficulty, and it would have fitted with a burglary and a violent assault on Meredith, though here the intelligent observer would have to assume from the circumstances, and no doubt Knox and Sollecito would have pondered on this, that Meredith had surprisingly been unable to thwart the lone intruder, had locked herself in to her room with her phones still with her, and would have undoubtedly called the emergency number for the police while all this, and the breaking down of her door, was going on.

However when exactly the oversight occurred to her would also be critical. I personally believe that it was much later than most people would think. I do not think that the plan to stage a burglary and remove the blood traces from the corridor was put into operation until after they had listened to music for half an hour from 5.30 am and maybe was still in operation when Knox was seen by Quintavalle at his store at 7.45 am. When they had finished that I have no idea but it would have been at a time in the morning when it was unlikely that anyone i.e Filomena would come calling. And they could still have cleared off to Gubio for the day.

So, throwing away the keys could be after, say, 9 am, and then some time after the dreadful realisation dawns.

Perhaps it was always the case that Knox and Sollecito needed to be present when the murder was discovered, and in circumstances which they could control in such a manner as to convince others of their complete lack of complicity in what had happened. Maybe much of what then happened had already been pre-planned, including the story of Knox visiting the cottage to have a shower etc.

If one assumes this and that then Knox realises her mistake with the lamp, then what subsequently transpired makes a lot more sense.

A discovery process which had initially seemed manageable became, with her error, laden with danger. The lamp had to be retrieved but, with Sollecito’s assistance, this could still be achieved in the confusion of Filomena and her friends attending the cottage and breaking down the door themselves. Should Filomena have perhaps baulked at the idea of doing any damage then I suspect Knox and Sollecito would have pressed her to authorise this, if not actually do this themselves, and just how innocent would that have then made them look! Win, win. What would complicate matters was if the police were also there, imposing order and preserving a crime scene, and so the possibility of anyone alerting the police had to be delayed.

Now let us look at the phone records with the above in mind.

3. Zooming In On The Timing Of Events

From 12.07 until 12.35 am on the morning of the discovery of the murder, Knox and Filomena exchanged telephone calls, whereby Knox slowly ramped up the worry on Filomena’s part as to what was going on and Meredith’s safety. As a consequence of the first call, by Knox, made from Sollecito’s bedsit, Filomena asked her to check certain things out e.g ring Meredith’s phones and keep her informed, but otherwise had not heard enough to indicate that she herself needed to return to the cottage, or that the police needed to be involved.

However Filomena remained concerned and called Knox three more times until Knox answered her from the cottage at 12.35 to inform her that her bedroom window had been broken and her room had been trashed. Knox would have been fully aware what the effect would have been of the latter call. Filomena was adamant. Knox had to call the police. More importantly, for Knox, Filomena would now definitely be returning to the cottage. Who would get there first? Filomena or the police? The answer, for Knox, would not be in doubt. It was another 16 minutes before Sollecito called the 112 number, time enough for Filomena and her friend (who were on the road when they had spoken) to arrive before the police.

At 12.47 whilst awaiting the arrival of Filomena, Knox called her mother.

The circumstances of that call are extremely puzzling. In retrospect I think the call was simply to fill in time and keep her nerves steady.

As to that call (4.47 am Seattle time, while Edda and Chris were still asleep, and prior to the discovery of Meredith‘s body) Knox not only did not mention that in her e-mail but in taped conversation with her mother and in her trial testimony she steadfastly declined to recall that it had occurred. Ostensibly the call would have been, of course, to report the break in. So what would be the problem with that? On the other hand, what was so important about it that her mother should know, and at that moment? Knox was aware of the time difference between Italy and Seattle, and that it would have been early in the morning in Seattle, as she acknowledged in her trial testimony. If Knox had a premonition then why not wait a little longer for resolution? Indeed, Edda’s puzzlement with her daughter was expressed on tape as follows –

A: Oh, I don’t remember this.

M: OK, you’d called me once telling me…

A: Honestly, maybe I was shocked.

M: Yes, but this happened before anything had really happened, besides the house…

A: I know that I was calling, but I remember that I was calling Filomena; I don’t remember having called anyone else, and so the whole thing of having called you… I don’t remember.

M: Mhmm… why? Do you think? Stress?

Knox clearly did not want to discuss her motive for the call, then nor later, nor as to what had transpired in conversation with her mother (and stepfather) before the discovery of Meredith’s body.

On her Facebook page Knox had written that she enjoyed new situations and “the bigger and scarier the rollercoaster the better”. Well, her error was going to make for one mother of a rollercoaster, one that would scare the life out of her.

Not only was the timing of the 12.47 call inconvenient to her mother but I found it interesting to note from Knox’s phone records (covering 2nd Oct - 3rd November) that mother and daughter do not appear to have called or texted each other once by phone up until that 12.47 call. It would appear then that in so far as they remained in direct communication with each other for that period it must have been by e-mail or Skype. Indeed Knox has referred to such communication being via internet café. One can therefore imagine that her mother was very surprised to receive that call. It is also very difficult to accept that Knox could not recall a phone call she was not in the habit of making.

Until Knox published her book the only information that was available about the 12.47 call (apart from the phone log which showed that it lasted 88 seconds) came from her mother (who reported that her daughter was concerned about the break in) and her stepfather Chris Mellas. Mellas says that he interrupted the conversation between mother and daughter to tell Amanda to get out of the cottage. In her book Knox tells us (her memory now having returned) that he yelled at her but that she was “spooked” enough without that. But what had really happened to spook her? It was just a burglary after all, even if the matter of Meredith’s whereabouts was as yet unresolved. None of her own possessions had been stolen.

Furthermore Filomena was on her way to take charge. The call she made to her mother after the discovery of the murder (the one she remembered) was perfectly understandable, the prior call, without further context, less so.  Readers will already know where I am coming from, but I believe that it was whilst walking back to the cottage with Sollecito that Knox realised her mistake with the lamp. However, it could have been earlier than that. In any event this realisation would have set the cat amongst the pigeons for her. So, it was both a comfort and a rehearsal call, not simply because there had been a burglary, but because she knew a hazardous set of events was about to unfold on Romanelli’s arrival at the cottage. The fact that her mother and stepfather already had the jitters was not a good omen.

Still, retrieving the lamp and returning it to her own room remained perfectly feasible, provided the police were not there. However Romanelli had yet to arrive and time was running out. Both Knox and Sollecito knew that any further delay in calling the police would look suspicious. Finally they did so, at 12.51, though it is probable that the postal police had unexpectedly arrived before then. In my book I have argued that the likely time of arrival of the postal police was probably about 12.48-9. Indeed that may have been why Knox brought her call to her mother to an end.  (e.g “Looks as if someone is coming. Gotta go now.”)  I wonder if that is another reason why Knox would not want to remember the call, particularly during the taped conversation with her mother in the prison. She would not want to prompt her mother to that recollection. That wouldn’t fit with the claim, as related to the postal police, that they had already called the Carabinieri. In any event, the opportunity to retrieve the lamp had been lost.

I have always thought that the oddities in Knox’s own account of events reveal and explain much even if, ostensibly, she appears to be giving an innocent account of everything. In her e-mail she refers to her panic and specifically links this to concern over Meredith’s whereabouts and safety. However the panic had apparently suddenly subsided, and her concern was significantly lacking, non-existent actually, when the postal police made their surprise entrance before the arrival of Filomena and her friends. We can also see why she says, before that, that Sollecito would want, and allegedly attempt, to break Meredith’s door open.

Had I been in Knox’s shoes, and with a mutual alibi with Sollecito, I too would have thought the discovery of the murder of “my best friend” would have been manageable, but for that damned lamp. There would be questions to be answered, of course, but she had already thought all that through, hadn’t she?

As it happened, things did not turn out too bad for her in the immediate aftermath. She was not, she thought, under immediate suspicion as she must have feared she would be. Seemingly nobody had twigged to the lamp business, nor to the staged burglary. She must have thought the police immensely stupid for her to have got away with that, as she thought she had. She was also the centre of attention and coping reasonably well, but for that dicey moment when she was shown the drawer of knives in the kitchen. Her confidence had soared sufficiently for her to even claim that she had checked her room and had found nothing missing!

In her e-mail she also wrote –

It was then that we decided to call the cops……. [Raffaele] first called his sister for advice and then called the Carabinieri. I then called Filomena who said she would be on her way home immediately. While we were waiting two ununiformed police investigators came to our house. I showed them what I could and told them what I knew. Gave them phone numbers and explained a bit in broken Italian, and then Filomena arrived with her boyfriend Marco-f and two other friends of hers. All together we checked the house out, talked to the police and in a big [word missing] they all opened Meredith’s door. I was [standing] aside really having done my part for the situation.

Knox is in overdrive here. First of all, she did not call Filomena in their last telephone conversation. It was the other way around. Secondly, that call was not after Sollecito had called 112. Thus she has the 112 call some 16 minutes before it was actually made rather than 16 minutes after it should have been made. And finally, what does she mean by saying “I was standing aside really having done my part for the situation”?

The “situation”? That rollercoaster has turned into barely concealed “duper’s delight”!

But wait! What were those “hard facts” she claims the police had mentioned later during her interview?

Let me see. Hmm. Suspicions, certainly. The locked door, the lamp, the quilt, the staged burglary? An e-mail in which she is is just a bit too full of herself and the content of which, in places, was just a bit too unreal, daffy and lah-di-dah, to be true? The strange and inappropriate behaviour at the police station? No wonder she didn’t ask the police to elaborate.

4. Additional Information On The Lamp

This is adapted from my book (US version and UK version). There is additional information in Parts 3-6 including Knox’s trial questioning of this previous slightly different version.

5. Our Next Post

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Why Does Knox Book So Stridently Smear Italian Officials?

Posted by Peter Quennell

HarperCollin’s Jonathan Burnham and Claire Wachtell who edited and published Knox’s book

1. Reminder For Knox Book Team

Presumably your team remembers this jubilant (and to Italy pretty insulting) book announcement.

It was made on the day when you agreed to pay Amanda Knox a rumored $4 million, for a “full and unflinching”  account” of “her struggle to cope with a nightmarish ordeal” and you set out your hopes and intentions.

NEW YORK (AP)—Amanda Knox has a book deal.

The young exchange student whose conviction in Italy and eventual acquittal on murder charges made headlines worldwide has an agreement with HarperCollins to tell her story. The 24-year-old Seattle resident, imprisoned for four years in Perugia, Italy, has not publicly discussed her ordeal beyond a brief expression of gratitude upon her release last October.

“Knox will give a full and unflinching account of the events that led to her arrest in Perugia and her struggles with the complexities of the Italian judicial system,” HarperCollins said in a statement Thursday.

“Aided by journals she kept during her imprisonment, Knox will talk about her harrowing experience at the hands of the Italian police and later prison guards and inmates. She will reveal never before-told details surrounding her case, and describe how she used her inner strength and strong family ties to cope with the most challenging time of her young life.”

The book, currently untitled, is tentatively scheduled for early 2013.

“Many accounts have been written of the Amanda Knox case, and countless writers and reporters have speculated on what role, if any, was played by Knox in that tragic and terrifying sequence of events,” HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham said in a statement.

“No one has yet heard Amanda Knox’s own account of what happened, and this book will give Knox an opportunity to tell the story in full detail, for the first time. It will be the story of a crime and a trial, but also a moving account of a young woman’s struggle to cope with a nightmarish ordeal that placed her at the center of a media storm, and led to her imprisonment.”

2. So Why Multiple False Accusations Like This One?

May we ask? Was truth too was in the contract, as Knox had just served three years for lying? Was due diligence on Knox’s claims done before the book deal was done and the book shadow-written? What was expurgated at the last moment and why were UK and Italian editions halted?

Did your shadow-writer Linda Kulman and your editor Claire Wachtell got in touch with at least some of the mentioned people in Perugia?  And where there were multiple accusations of crimes against Italian officials, did you give all the targets, or at least some of them, any chance at all to explain their side?

The Knox book has been out for nearly 18 months now. You have paperback and Kindle and audio editions. This very serious accusation of Dr Mignini in the box below has gone globally viral.

It is unique in the ferocity of an accusation that could wreck a prosecutor’s career, even send him to prison. And it could cost Knox serious additional prison time if proved wrong - as it already has been. See below the quote for the truth. Not only was Knox not interrogated at all - Dr Mignini was not even there.

[This is from pages 90 to 92 on the voluntary recap/summary session.

Eventually they told me the pubblico ministero would be coming in.

I didn’t know this translated as prosecutor, or that this was the magistrate that Rita Ficarra had been referring to a few days earlier when she said they’d have to wait to see what he said, to see if I could go to Germany.

I thought the “public minister” was the mayor or someone in a similarly high “public” position in the town and that somehow he would help me.

They said, “You need to talk to the pubblico ministero about what you remember.”

I told them, “I don’t feel like this is remembering. I’m really confused right now.” I even told them, “I don’t remember this. I can imagine this happening, and I’m not sure if it’s a memory or if I’m making this up, but this is what’s coming to mind and I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

They said, “Your memories will come back. It’s the truth. Just wait and your memories will come back.”

The pubblico ministero came in.

Before he started questioning me, I said, “Look, I’m really confused, and I don’t know what I’m remembering, and it doesn’t seem right.”

One of the other police officers said, “We’ll work through it.”

Despite the emotional sieve I’d just been squeezed through, it occurred to me that I was a witness and this was official testimony, that maybe I should have a lawyer. “Do I need a lawyer?” I asked.

He said, “No, no, that will only make it worse. It will make it seem like you don’t want to help us.”

It was a much more solemn, official affair than my earlier questioning had been, though the pubblico ministero was asking me the same questions as before: “What happened? What did you see?”

I said, “I didn’t see anything.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see anything? When did you meet him?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Where did you meet him?”

“I think by the basketball court.” I had imagined the basketball court in Piazza Grimana, just across the street from the University for Foreigners.

“I have an image of the basketball court in Piazza Grimana near my house.”

“What was he wearing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was he wearing a jacket?”

“I think so.”

“What color was it?”

“I think it was brown.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I’m confused!”

“Are you scared of him?”

“I guess.”

I felt as if I were almost in a trance. The pubblico ministero led me through the scenario, and I meekly agreed to his suggestions.

“This is what happened, right? You met him?”

“I guess so.”

“Where did you meet?”

“I don’t know. I guess at the basketball court.”

“You went to the house?”

“I guess so.”

“Was Meredith in the house?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did Patrick go in there?”

“I don’t know, I guess so.”

“Where were you?”

“I don’t know. I guess in the kitchen.”

“Did you hear Meredith screaming?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could you not hear Meredith screaming?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I covered my ears. I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m just imagining this. I’m trying to remember, and you’re telling me I need to remember, but I don’t know. This doesn’t feel right.”

He said, “No, remember. Remember what happened.”

“I don’t know.”

At that moment, with the pubblico ministero raining questions down on me, I covered my ears so I could drown him out.

He said, “Did you hear her scream?”

I said, “I think so.”

My account was written up in Italian and he said, “This is what we wrote down. Sign it.”

This False Accusation In Knox’s Book, Challenged

In multiple pages of testimony at trial four years prior to the book it was made crystal-clear that Dr Mignini was not even there then at the central police station.

See the hard facts summarised below. He was only called in later, after Knox insisted in writing her first false accusation, and his only roles were to warn Knox she needed a lawyer and to observe while she insisted on writing a second accusation.

(1) Amanda Knox turned up at the Perugia central police station late at night, unwanted and grumpy, and was advised to go home and get some sleep.

(2) Inspector Ficarra later said if she really wanted, she could help, she could build a list of possible perps, in a recap/summary session (not an interrogation).

(3) For maybe 45 minutes, starting at 12:30 am (when the interpreter arrived), Knox quite calmly listed seven names along with maps drawn.

(4) Knox had a wailing conniption, which really startled the four others present, when Knox saw an outgoing text to her boss she had just said wasnt there.

(5) Police did what they could to calm her down, and she insisted on writing out three statements in supposed elaboration in less than 12 hours.

(6) She was warned she should have a lawyer each time, the second warning by Dr Mignini, but each time she shrugged off this advice and pressed on.

(7) Cassation ruled the first two statements could not be used to indict Knox at the murder trial, but all three could be used to argue her framing of Patrick.

Who believes this? The defense teams! Do read the numerous court transcripts of testimony describing events on that night. Not one defense lawyer challenged even one word of the above.

Legal Prospects For HarperCollins Of The False Accusations

Have you ever had any book out, ever, which slimes an American prosecutor? Which contains malicious lies long pointed out? Which you still heedlessly propagate?

Your prospects and Knox’s are not pretty. This is what some of our own lawyers are suggesting.  Italian obstruction-of-justice laws could be applied to HarperCollins and those party to it - note the legal fate of Andrew Gumbel the equivalent of Linda Kulman for Raffaele Sollecito.

So could the federal and state American Son of Sam laws requiring the forfeiting of all of that world-record $4 million in bloodmoney plus any fees paid to helpers like Linda Kulman and profits for HarperCollins.

Also there could be the invoking of Italian and American laws against the harassment of victims’ families, a horrific ongoing crime against the Kerchers perpetrated by many (Knox included) which the misleading book certainly helps to stir up.

Knox Frequently Smears Others On Drug Use, Severely Understates Her Own

Posted by Peter Quennell

Effusive Knox book team Robert Barnett, Linda Kulman (shadow writer) and Ted Simon

1. Previous Reporting

Please see our previous posts here and here.

Knox was discovered by police to have been sleeping with a dangerous drug-ring leader for drugs since she met him and had sex on a train to Perugia. That connection led them to capture him and directly helped to put him in prison.

2. Questions For Knox & Team

That hot potato of a book you put together and marketed for a rumored $4 million… did you exercise any due-diligence fact-checking?

What exactly did you tell the publishers to assure them? Hard truths or truthiness? Especially as the UK and Italian publishings were halted, for legal reasons, at the very last moment. And as Knox had already served three years for lying.

That Knox had been consorting with a drug wholesaler, Federico Martini, and sleeping with him (as she herself admitted in the diary her own team circulated) quite possibly in return for free drugs was right out in the open in court and in the Italian media way back in January 2009.

That was even before her trial really got under way and a full four years before you put together her book deal.

See our past three posts. Now new proof of Knox’s dangerous doings has emerged with a first published police report, and the Italian media are now all over this.

The release in Italy of police wire-tap transcripts of conversations between Knox and this drug kingpin she was instrumental in imprisoning is said to be only a matter of time.

So are Italian TV crimeshows featuring persons with personal knowledge of Knox’s shenanigans.

Please take a look at these key passages in Knox’s book - your book - where she drops a small army of others in it for drug use and for unsavory measures to hide it.

Knox heavily disguises here that her own drug doings were way, way worse. You were surely not a party to this serial misleading?

If not, this could be just the right time to put real distance between yourself and Knox. She will unquestionably be charged with other false claims soon, and you would surely not want to be called to court as a person of interest.

It seems only fair to warn, if you dont already know, that these Knox fibs are only a very, very, very small fraction.

3. Twenty Book Quotes That Hide The Real Story

They said I wasn’t the first roommate they’d interviewed. A guy they called “totally uptight” was interested in renting, until he found out they smoked””¬cigarettes and marijuana. “Are you okay with that?” Filomena asked. “I’m from Seattle. I’m laid back,” I answered. “I don’t smoke cigarettes, but I’ll share a joint.” A few minutes later they rolled one and passed it around. I inhaled deeply and relaxed.

Around our house, marijuana was as common as pasta. I never purchased it myself, but we all chipped in. For me, it was purely social, not something I’d ever do alone. I didn’t even know how to roll a joint and once spent an entire evening trying. I’d seen it done plenty of times in both Seattle and Perugia, but it was trickier than I thought it would be. Laura babysat my efforts, giving me pointers as I measured out the tobacco and pot and tried rolling the mixture into a smokable package. I never got it right that night, but I won a round of applause for trying. Either Filomena or Laura took a picture of me posing with it between my index and middle finger, as if it were a cigarette, and I a pouty 1950s pinup.

What I didn’t know when I arrived was that the city had the highest concentration of heroin addicts in Italy. I never heard about the high level of trafficking and drug use until I was in prison, bunking with drug dealers.

“Do you like marijuana?” I blurted. “It is my vice,” Raffaele said. “It’s my vice, too,” I said. I loved the phrase in Italian. Raffaele looked surprised, then pleased. “Do you want to come to my apartment and smoke a joint?”  I hesitated. He was basically a stranger, but I trusted him. I saw him as a gentle, modest person. I felt safe. “I’d love to,” I said.

When I first saw [flatmate] Laura, she was dry-eyed. She came up and hugged me and said, “I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry. I know Meredith was your friend.” Then she sat me down and said, “Amanda, this is really serious. You need to remember: do not say anything to the police about us smoking marijuana in our house.” I was thinking, You can’t lie to the police, but I considered this anxiously a moment and then said, “Okay, I haven’t yet. I won’t.”

When we finished, a detective put me through a second round of questioning, this time in Italian. Did we ever smoke marijuana at No. 7, Via della Pergola? “No, we don’t smoke,” I lied, squirming inwardly as I did. I didn’t see that [flatmate] Laura had left me with any choice, and I felt completely trapped by her demand. I could barely breathe until the detective moved on to a new topic, and when he did, I was hugely relieved. I thought that was the end of it.  Aside from what I said about our villa’s drug habits, I told him everything I could possibly think of.

I didn’t think I could take any more surprises, but they kept coming. Next, the police opened up a closet to reveal five thriving marijuana plants. “Does this look familiar?” they asked. “No,” I said. Despite my earlier lie about not smoking in our house, I was now telling the truth. I was stunned that the guys were growing a mini-plantation of pot. I couldn’t believe I had talked to them every day since I’d moved in six weeks earlier and they’d never mentioned it.

She led me through the waiting room and into the same office with the two desks where I’d spent so much time. As we were walking, she looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “You said you guys don’t smoke marijuana. Are you sure you’re being honest?”  “I’m really sorry I said that.” I grimaced. “I was afraid to tell you that all of us smoked marijuana occasionally, including Meredith. We’d sometimes pass a joint around when we were chilling out with the guys or with Filomena and Laura. But Meredith and I never bought any pot; we didn’t know any drug dealers.”

I replied to the message telling him that we’d see each other right away. Then I left the house, saying to my boyfriend that I had to go to work. Given that during the afternoon with Raffaele I had smoked a joint, I felt confused because I do not make frequent use of drugs that strong.

It was during this conversation that Raffaele told me about his past. How he had a horrible experience with drugs and alcohol. He told me that he drove his friends to a concert and that they were using cocaine, marijuana, he was drinking rum, and how, after the concert, when he was driving his passed-out friends home, how he had realized what a bad thing he had done and had decided to change.

We talked about his friends, how they hadn’t changed from drug-using video game players, and how he was sad for them.

That night I smoked a lot of marijuana and I fell asleep at my boyfriend’s house. I don’t remember anything. But I think it’s possible that Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her and then killed her.

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.

The prosecution’s simple story was absolutely false, but it apparently rang true for the authorities. They added flourishes in the course of the trial””Meredith was smarter, prettier, more popular, neater, and less into drugs and sex than I was. For some of or all these reasons, she was a better person, and I, unable to compete, had hated her for it.

Laura and Filomena had always bought the marijuana for the villa’s personal use. But when Filomena shrugged her shoulders helplessly on the stand, she made it seem that the only reason marijuana was in the house was because of me.

When Mignini brought up names of guys who’d come over, Laura replied, “Those are my friends.” When he asked if anyone in the villa smoked marijuana, she said, “Everyone.”

Carlo [Dalla Vedova], who’d never sugarcoated my situation, said, “These are small-town detectives. They chase after local drug dealers and foreigners without visas. They don’t know how to conduct a murder investigation correctly. Plus, they’re bullies. To admit fault is to admit that they’re not good at their jobs. They suspected you because you behaved differently than the others. They stuck with it because they couldn’t afford to be wrong.”

In Quito, where she lived, Laura [another Laura, in Capanne, not flatmate Laura] had dated an Italian who invited her to Naples for vacation and bought her a new suitcase. When she landed at the Aeroporto Internazionale di Napoli, it was not her boyfriend who met her plane but the customs police. They arrested her for the cocaine they found sewn into the luggage’s lining. The boyfriend, it turned out, had not only turned her into a drug mule, but had lied about his name. He was untraceable. She was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.

Curatolo was recalled as a witness, but he came under different circumstances. The onetime homeless man was now in prison himself, on drug charges.... He confirmed that he was now in prison, adding, “I haven’t quite understood why yet.” Asked if he’d used heroin in 2007, he answered, “I have always used drugs. I want to clarify that heroin is not a hallucinogen.

Curatolo didn’t know what he was talking about, poor guy. If my life didn’t depend on his being wrong, I’d just feel bad for him,” I reported. ““The broadcasts here are saying that he’s a confused drug addict!” someone cried.

Knox-Camp Denial Of Drug-Ring Link Results In Shot Across Knox’s Bows; Many Now Digging

Posted by Our Main Posters

1. The New Response To The Knox Camp By Giallo

A denial of any links between Knox and the dangerous drug ring on what may be one of Chris Mellas’s numerous websites has resulted in a second, tougher, report from Giallo.

Also (see part 2 below) it has resulted in the posting by Giallo of some hard police evidence (images above) of Knox’s very unsavory associations. This translation of a news-agency summary of the new Giallo story is by Miriam.

Mez Case: Amanda Knox hung out with a pusher and had sex with him

Amanda hung out with a pusher and was intimate with him, so reveals an article of the magazine GIALLO, which publishes documentation of the relationship between the two. This information is contained in an informational note of Perugia’s police, written on the 19th January 2008, two months after the Meredith Kercher murder.

The name of the guy is Federico, a young man from Rome, who ended up in jail for dealing drugs in 2011. As reported by the magazine, the guy “was arrested with two pushers, Luciano and Lorenzo, during an investigation starting from the wire tapping of Amanda Knox’s cell phone”.

The young Roman , according to the informational note, was the pusher for Amanda, and her lover. In fact Federico, according to the document, ” would have occasionally supplied drugs to Amanda Knox and they probably had sexual intercourse.”

It seems that Amanda cited Federico in one of her notebooks that were confiscated after the homicide. He was on the list of Italian guys which she had sex with. On her Myspace profile she had written about him, even including a nude picture of him.

“I met Federico on the train with my sister, while I was going from Milan to Florence. We smoked (pot?), my first smoke in Italy” writes Amanda. ” After we put to bed my little sister, we went into his hotel room. I told my friends I could not imagine myself in bed with somebody I just met, but for Cristiano (??) I changed my mind” writes Amanda.

As GIALLO reports, in the informational note there are many more details on the people she hung out with; “even cited is one of Fedrico’s friends, Luciano A., Napolitan, a person with a criminal record for drug and weapons trafficking and also for attempted murder of his brother with a knife.

Luciano ended up in jail on April 4th 2008 a few months after the informative note.  He was found in Perugia at Fontivegge train station with 20 grams of cocaine.

2. Translation Of The January 2008 Police Report

See the image of a police report at the top here. Giallo posted this Perugia Flying Squad report of 19 January 2008 which notes an association between Amanda Knox and a drug ring uncovered by way of her mobile phone. Translation is by Jools.

QUESTURA DI PERUGIA - SQUADRA MOBILE 3RD SECTION

Perugia 19.01.2008

SUBJECT: Annotation [Brief summary]

[Page1]

We the undersigned Officers and Agents of the Judicial Police of P.G. Chief Superintendent Stefano xxxx and Chief Assistants Lorena xxxx, Andrea xxxx, hereby report as follows:

In the course of the investigation in relation to criminal proceedings 9066/07 [crime case number of Meredith Kercher murder] it was verified that an Italian person with the name of “Federico” would from time to time supply drugs to the [person] known as Amanda KNOX, and also allegedly had relations with her of a sexual nature.

The technical task was then activated of tapping the calls of telephone number xxxxx being used by the same person [Knox].

During this period of phone tapping it was possible to ascertain by the telephone file records of the “Wind” company that [the other phone] was in the name of xxxxxx (still in process of identification) but was being used by Federico xxxx, born in Rome on 18/04/1975, resident in xxxxxx (PG), in fact domiciled in Perugia, address: Via xxxxxxx, Ground Floor. The same [F.] also has frequent contacts with transsexuals, to whom he sells drugs.

By means of the technical activities it was established that xxxx is contacted by phone with the presumed clients “ordering” from him the quantity of drugs they want to buy, and in turn according to the demands he contacts various Maghrebie [north African] individuals ordering the desired amount.

[Page 2]

Federico moves around by car using a model Citroen C1 Tg xxxx. From the investigations carried out the car appears to be in his father’s name identified as Andrea xxxx.

It was also ascertained that xxxxxx associates with habitual criminal characters with multiple criminal records for serious crimes in the matter of drugs and personal grievous harm such as Luciano xxxx, born in xxxx xxxxxxxxxx on 17/11/80, with whom he maintains frequent contacts aimed at drug dealing using the phone line xxxxxxx which users name is assigned to his brother Giuseppe xxxx.

The aforementioned Luciano on 28/07/06 was arrested by the Carabinieri in Foligno on account of being responsible of the ATTEMPTED MURDER of his brother Antonio to whom he inflicted 16 stab wounds with a kitchen knife.

We also note that through verifications on the SDI [the State Police automatic palmprint and fingerprint identification system] Federico xxxx has been several times stopped and checked along with Luciano xxxx and other people from southern [Italy] all convicted habitual criminals in matters of drugs, weapons and more.

Finally we report that Federico occasionally seeks help for the distribution of the narcotic substance from a transsexual, (in course of identification) who used the telephone xxxxxxx.

The above as per duty of office.

Signed…

3. January 2009 Reports Of The Drug Ring Trial

The Giornale Dell’Umbria carried the longest report of the trial, but it is no longer online. In January 2009 Catnip posted these translations of shorter versions.

Terni Magazine

The cocaine traffickers trial(s)

(ASCA) - Perugia, 14 Jan ““ The murder of Meredith Kercher and the context from which it flowed forth, one tied to the “youthful world of standardised behaviours, values and deviances”, continues to generate discussion. Evidencing this, this morning, is the local daily Il giornale dell’Umbria (always attentive to the investigative and procedural phases of cases) which, in telling the news of the sentence of 2 years and 8 months’ imprisonment of a cocaine drug dealer who would have known and visited Amanda Knox, asks itself whether this circumstance would have had considerations in the inquest into the murder and, above all whether, now, it could have implications in the appeal case in regard to the American and to Raffaele Sollecito.

The police arrived at the pusher through the mobile phone numbers found in the list stored on Amanda’s phone. The calls between the two handsets would have taken place [intercorse] in the days prior to and following the murder of Mez, giving rise, therefore, to a deeper understanding that led to the discovery of a drug ring for university students and professionals. A trafficking for which a case file was opened, involving three young men as the main leads (one being hypothesized as the American’s supplier and lover).

In particular, there is a police note [informativa] appended to the file in which it is emphasised “during the course of investigative activity relating to criminal proceedings 9066/07 (that for the homicide of Kercher ““ editor) it was ascertained that an Italian person “¦ [ellipsis in original] had occasionally supplied Amanda Knox with stupefying substance [i.e., narcotics ], as well as presumably having had relations of a sexual nature with her”.

The police action, effected also by means of phone intercepts, ascertained that the three supplied the acropolis [= the hill top city centre] of the capital as well as part of the periphery with cocaine, in response to client orders and also to satisfy the request of the North Africans [maghrebini].

The defendants (represented by the lawyers Maria Laura Antonini, Aurelio Pugliese and Angelo Frioni), have opted for different strategies: one a request for judgement in continuation [in continuazione] with other penal positions suspended; one request of plea bargain [patteggiamento], rejected by the judge, and one fast-track, concluded, as mentioned, with the 2 year and 8 month sentence.

Umbria24 Report

Amanda Knox’s “lover” on trial for dealing cocaine: A 35-year-old sentenced who was supplying another two drug dealers.

A young Italian man is on trial who would have given drugs to Amanda Knox and who would have had a sexual relationship with her. So writes the Giornale dell’Umbria today, which in its article cites a passage from a police note that would have been appended to the case file against the young man and two other persons who, according to the prosecution, would have been at the centre of a cocaine drug ring in Perugia. The three were in fact found through intercepts effected during the course of investigations into the murder of Meredith Kercher.

One of the three, a 35-year-old who would have supplied drugs to the other two, defended by lawyer Aurelio Pugliese, was sentenced via fast-track trial to 2 years and 8 months. One of the other two (defended by lawyers Maria Laura Antonini and Angelo Frioni and who are following different paths in proceedings) would have been identified as “Knox’s lover”. The daily cites a police note in support:

«During the course of investigative activity in relation to criminal proceedings 9066/07 (the Kercher murder ““ editor) ““ one can read in the passage reported by the Giornale dell’Umbria ““ it was ascertained that an Italian person”¦[ellipsis in original] would have occasionally supplied stupefying substances to Amanda Knox, as well as having had, presumably, relations with her of a sexual kind«.

4. Likely Billiard-Ball Reverberations

Knox was never charged with drug use or drug dealing.  As Tuesday’s post noted, it was for the defenses to make something of it at Meredith’s murder trial if they wanted to.

Maybe seek a reduced charge arguing diminished responsibility. But they didn’t.

It is clear that neither the police or prosecution put a foot wrong, and by the end of 2009 they had put away both Knox and the drug dealers. And it is clear that it is not they who are now pushing this story. 

However Knox will take a lot of hits if she can not come up with better answers - preferably some answers involving the full truth.

• This grim new story, still unfolding, might next result in the publishing of the police intercepts of Knox’s phone-calls and the appearance of informed people on national TV.


• The reporting does activate State Department rules about not intervening in foreign trials for crimes with drug components, though via Andrea Vogt’s excellent digging we know that interest was at zero anyway.


• The much-touted appeal to the European Court of Human Rights is now a non-starter, though what we know of it so mangled the facts and the law that it was probably already in a Strasbourg waste-paper basket.


• And once again it helps to undermine the Knox-as-timid-nice-naive-girl image which many in Seattle and all in Perugia who encountered her have always known to be more or less opposite of the real Knox.

5. The Picture of Knox Now Coming To Dominate

As our posters Stilicho, Michael and Nell have all noted, Knox’s 2013 book carries plenty of effusive claims about her own extreme naivety, and how all around her were harder and brasher, and pushing drugs, while she participated only occasionally and very reluctantly.

In Italy the timid-nice-girl persona was severely dinged at trial when the viewing population witnessed a loud, hectoring, pushy callous Knox on the witness stand trying to make out she was weak and silly. See our reports of Knox on the stand at the time here and here. 

Now, finally, the increasingly dominant picture in the US is one of a highly aggressive risk-taking drug user who may have repeatedly connected with unsavory drug sources long before she ever encountered Sollecito.

Already a heavy drug user, who was quite treacherous enough to publish drug-use accusations about her Perugia room-mates and friends, and put them between herself and the fire.

Maybe the drug reporting will drive home that this was never a good idea

Knox’s Multiple Accounts Of Her “Interrogations”: Incriminating Pattern For Sure

Posted by James Raper

1. Today’s Context To This Post

In a day or two Judge Nencini’s sentencing report will be released. Are we all clear on precisely why the Nencini appeal court in Florence had to meet?

It did not meet at the request of the prosecution. They had nothing to appeal, subsequent to the convictions they won at the 2009 trial. This was certainly not a new trial.

In fact, the Nencini appeal court met only at the requests of Sollecito and Knox.  It met exclusively to hear their appeal.

Did you notice who the court did not hear from? Knox herself.  She did send from Seattle a misleading and somewhat insulting note to the judge, attempting to explain why she was choosing to stay away.

Judge Nencini might have issued an immediate arrest warrant for Knox. But instead he merely confined himself to some sardonic remarks, while dropping Knox’s note disdainfully on his bench.

Judge Nencini would know that Knox’s note may be a first in legal annals: a convicted perp chooses not to show up in court for their own appeal.

2. Knox’s Book: A Minefield For Her

Knox’s note in effect claimed she was full of fear. Fear of what? Purportedly fear that the prosecution would make too strong a case.

The prosecution would make too strong a case? But they had done that already, in 2009. At appeals it is the defense teams calling the shots. Those convicted show up and advise their teams how to overturn the prosecution’s case.

Most likely the real source of Knox’s fear was her feckless paper-trail over some 30 months.

Knox has a trail of multiple contradictory outpourings since her late-2011 release. To this day, Knox still continues to throw things at the wall, in the hope that maybe one day a few of them will stick.

Knox’s book Waiting To Be Heard of one year ago more than anything is Exhibit A here. It was surely her easy-to-fault book that sparked extreme reluctance to look the judges and prosecution and those many in Perugia she had reviled in the eyes.

This is the first of two posts on the formidable evidence that Knox’s behavior in the days prior to her arrest constitutes, and Knox’s erratic attempts in the past 30 months to convince us, hey folks, don’t believe your lying eyes: there’s really nothing here.   

My post here is about what actually happened on the 5th November 2007 when Amanda Knox was sort-of helping the police at the central police station.

3. Realities 1 And 2: Knox Book v Knox On Stand

The police had called her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in to the station for questioning and Knox had accompanied him because she did not want to be alone. They had already eaten at the house of a friend of Sollecito’s.  Knox’s interrogation was not tape recorded and in that sense we have no truly independent account of what transpired.

The several police involved, including the interpreter, gave evidence at her trial, see the transcripts here (Anna Donnino) and here (Rita Ficcara) and here (Monica Napoleoni).

Anna Donino’s testimony, which is like night and day when compared with Knox’s claims, is summarised below. Rita Ficcara was exclusively or almost exclusively the questioner. At most only four officials (Rita Ficcara, Lorena Zugarini, Ivano Raffo, and Anna Doninno the interpreter) were there.  Monica Napoleoni did not enter the room. Refreshments were brought in several times.

There are accounts in books that have been written about the case but these tend to differ in the detail. The police and the interpreter maintain that she was treated well. Conflicting with their evidence, which meshes neatly, is what Knox says happened, and our sources for this are transcripts of her trial evidence and what she wrote in her book.

I shall deal with the evidence of the interpreter representative of the four officials in “Reality 3” below.

I am going to compare what she said at trial with what she wrote in her book but also there was a letter she wrote on the 9th and a recording of a meeting with her mother on the 10th November which are also relevant.

What she wrote in her book is fairly extensive and contains much dialogue. She has a prodigious memory for detail now which was almost entirely lacking before.  I am going to tell you to treat what she says in her book with extreme caution because she has already been found out for, well let us say, her creative writing if not outright distortion of facts. I shall paraphrase rather than quote most of it but a few direct quotes are necessary.

Knox arrived with Sollecito at the police station at about 10.30 pm (according to John Follain). The police started to question Sollecito at 10.40 pm (Follain).

In her book Knox describes being taken from the waiting area to a formal interview room in which she had already spent some time earlier. It is unclear when that formal questioning began. Probably getting on for about 11.30pm because she also refers to some questions being asked of her in the waiting room following which she did some stretches and splits.

She then describes how she was questioned about the events over a period from about the time she and Sollecito left the cottage to about 9 pm on the 1st November.

Possibly there was a short break. She describes being exhausted and confused. The interpreter, Knox says, arrived at about 12.30 am. Until then Knox claims she had been conversing with the police in Italian.

Almost immediately, the questioning resuming -

“Monica Napoleoni, who had been so abrupt with me about the poop and the mop at the villa, opened the door. “Raffaele says you left his apartment on Thursday night,” she said almost gleefully. “He says that you asked him to lie for you. He’s taken away your alibi.””

Knox describes how she was dumfounded and devastated by this news. She cannot believe that he would say that when they had been together all night. She feels all her reserves of energy draining away. Then -

“Where did you go? Who did you text?” Ficarra asked, sneering at me.

“I don’t remember texting anyone.”

They grabbed my cell phone up off the desk and scrolled quickly through its history.

“You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”

“My boss at Le Chic.”

Stop right there.

First, the interpreter, Rita Ficcara and Monica Napoleoni herself testified she never even entered the room.

Second, how were the police able to name the recipient of the text? The text Patrick had sent her had already been deleted from Knox’s mobile phone by Knox herself and Knox hasn’t yet named Patrick. In fact she couldn’t remember texting anyone.

It is of course probable that the police already had a log of her calls and possibly had already traced and identified the owner of the receiving number for her text, though the last step would have been fast work.

In her trial testimony Knox did a lot of “the police suggested this and suggested that” though it is never crystal clear whether she is accusing the police of having suggested his name. But she is doing it here in her book and of course the Knox groupies have always maintained that it was the police who suggested his name to her.

The following extract from her trial testimony should clear things up. GCM is Judge Giancarlo Massei.

GCM: In this message, was there the name of the person it was meant for?

AK: No, it was the message I wrote to my boss. The one that said “Va bene. Ci vediamo piu tardi. Buona serata.”

GCM: But it could have been a message to anyone. Could you see from the message to whom it was written?

AK: Actually, I don’t know if that information is in the telephone”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦..

GCM : But they didn’t literally say it was him!

AK : No. They didn’t say it was him, but they said “We know who it is, we know who it is. You were with him, you met him.”

GCM : Now what happened next? You, confronted with the message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?”

AK : Well, first I started to cry…....

And having implied that it was the police who suggested Patrick’s name to her, she adds”¦.. that quote again -

“You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”

“My boss at Le Chic.”

Here she is telling the Perugian cops straight out exactly to whom the text was sent. “My boss at Le Chic”.

But that does not quite gel with her trial testimony -

And they told me that I knew, and that I didn’t want to tell. And that I didn’t want to tell because I didn’t remember or because I was a stupid liar. Then they kept on about this message, that they were literally shoving in my face saying “Look what a stupid liar you are, you don’t even remember this!”

At first, I didn’t even remember writing that message. But there was this interpreter next to me who kept saying “Maybe you don’t remember, maybe you don’t remember, but try,” and other people were saying “Try, try, try to remember that you met someone, and I was there hearing “Remember, remember, remember…..

Doesn’t the above quote make it clear that the police were having considerable trouble getting Knox to tell them to whom her text message was sent? It would also explain their growing frustration with her.

But perhaps the above quote relates not to whom the text was sent but, that having been ascertained, whether Knox met up with that person later? Knox has a habit of conflating the two issues. However there is also the following quote from her trial testimony -

Well there were lots of people who were asking me questions, but the person who had started talking with me was a policewoman with long hair, chestnut brown hair, but I don’t know her. Then in the circle of people who were around me, certain people asked me questions, for example there was a man holding my telephone, and who was literally shoving the telephone into my face, shouting “Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?”

Then there were others, for instance this woman who was leading, was the same person who at one point was standing behind me, because they kept moving, they were really surrounding me and on top of me. I was on a chair, then the interpreter was also sitting on a chair, and everyone else was standing around me, so I didn’t see who gave me the first blow because it was someone behind me, but then I turned around and saw that woman and she gave me another blow to the head.

The woman with the long hair, chestnut brown hair, Knox identifies in her book as Ficarra. Ficarra is the policewoman who started the questioning particularly, as Knox has confirmed, about the texted message. “Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?” Again, surely this is to get Knox to identify the recipient of the text, not about whether she met up with him?






In the book though, it is all different.

In the book, the police having told her that the text is to someone called Patrick, Knox is a model of co-operation as, having already told them that he is her boss at Le Chic, she then gives a description of him and answers their questions as to whether he knew Meredith, whether he liked her etc. No reluctance to co-operate, no memory difficulties here.

Notwithstanding this, her book says the questions and insinuations keep raining down on her. The police insist that she had left Sollecito’s to meet up with - and again the police name him - Patrick.

“Who did you meet up with? Who are you protecting? Why are you lying? Who’s this person? Who’s Patrick?”

Remember again, according to her trial testimony the police did not mention Patrick’s name and Knox still hasn’t mentioned his name. But wait, she does in the next line -

“I said “Patrick is my boss.””

So now, at any rate, the police have a positive ID from Knox regarding the text message and something to work with. Patrick - boss - Le Chic.

Knox then refers to the differing interpretations as to what “See you later” meant and denies that she had ever met up with Patrick that evening. She recalls the interpreter suggesting that she was traumatized and suffering from amnesia.

The police continue to try to draw an admission from Knox that she had met up with Patrick that evening - which again she repeatedly denies. And why shouldn’t she? After all, she denies that she’s suffering from amnesia, or that there is a problem with her memory. The only problem is that Sollecito had said she had gone out but that does not mean she had met with Patrick.

Knox then writes, oddly, as it is completely out of sequence considering the above -

“They pushed my cell phone, with the message to Patrick, in my face and screamed,

“You’re lying. You sent a message to Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”

That’s when Ficarra slapped me on my head.”

A couple of blows (more like cuffs) to the head (denied by the police) is mentioned in her trial testimony but more likely, if this incident ever happened, it would have been earlier when she was struggling to remember the text and to whom it had been sent. Indeed that’s clear from the context of the above quotes.

And this, from her trial testimony -

Remember, remember, remember, and then there was this person behind me who—it’s not that she actually really physically hurt me, but she frightened me.”

In the CNN TV interview with Chris Cuomo, Knox was asked if there was anything she regretted.

Knox replied that she regretted the way this interrogation had gone, that she wished she had been aware of her rights and had stood up to the police questioning better.

Well actually, according to the account in her book, she appears to have stood up to the police questioning with a marked degree of resilience and self- certainty, and with no amnesia. There is little of her trademark “being confused”. 

So why the sudden collapse? And it was a sudden collapse.

Given the trial and book accounts Knox would have us think that she was frightened, that it was due to exhaustion and the persistent and bullying tone of the questioning, mixed with threats that she would spend time in prison for failing to co-operate. She also states that -

(a) she was having a bad period and was not being allowed to attend to this, and

(b) the police told her that they had “hard evidence” that she was involved in the murder.

Knox has given us a number of accounts as to what was actually happening when this occurred.

In a letter she wrote on the 9th November she says that suddenly all the police officers left the room but one, who told her she was in serious trouble and that she should name the murderer. At this point Knox says that she asked to see the texted message again and then an image of Patrick came to mind. All she could think about was Patrick and so she named him (as the murderer).

During a recorded meeting with her mother in Capanne Prison on the 10th November she relates essentially the same story.

In her book there is sort of the same story but significantly without mention of the other officers having left the room nor mention of her having asked to see the texted message again.

If the first two accounts are correct then at least the sense of oppression from the room being crowded and questions being fired at her had lifted.

Then this is from her book -

In that instant, I snapped. I truly thought I remembered having met somebody. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I didn’t understand that I was about to implicate the wrong person. I didn’t understand what was at stake. I didn’t think I was making it up. My mind put together incoherent images. The image that came to me was Patrick’s face.  I gasped. I said his name. “Patrick””it’s Patrick.

It’s her account, of course, but this “Patrick - It’s Patrick” makes no sense at this stage of it unless it’s an admission not just that she had met up with Patrick but that he was at the cottage and involved in Meredith’s death.

And this is from her trial testimony -

GCM : Now what happened next? You, confronted with the message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?

AK : Well, first I started to cry. And all the policemen, together, started saying to me, you have to tell us why, what happened? They wanted all these details that I couldn’t tell them, because in the end, what happened was this: when I said the name of Patrick I suddenly started imagining a kind of scene, but always using this idea: images that didn’t agree, that maybe could give some kind of explanation of the situation.

There is a clear difference between these two quotes.

The one from her book suggests that she was trying hard but that the police had virtually brought her to the verge of a mental breakdown.

Her trial testimony says something else; that a scene and an idea was forming in her mind brought on by her naming of Patrick.

In her book she states that a statement, typed up in Italian, was shoved under her nose and she was told to sign it. The statement was timed at 1.45 am. The statement was not long but would probably have taken about twenty minutes to prepare and type.

The statement according to Knox -

... I met Patrick immediately at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana and we went to the house together. I do not remember if Meredith was there or came shortly afterward. I have a hard time remembering those moments but Patrick had sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I cannot remember clearly whether he threatened Meredith first. I remember confusedly that he killed her.

The fact that the statement was in Italian is not important. Knox could read Italian perfectly well. However she does insinuate in the book that the details in the statement were suggested to her and that she didn’t bother to read the statement before signing.

Apart from what has been mentioned above, there are some other points and inferences to be drawn from the above analysis.

1.  Knox’s account destroys one of Sollecito’s main tenets in his book Honour Bound. Sollecito maintains that he did nothing to damage Knox’s alibi until he signed a statement, forced on him at 3:30 am and containing the damaging admission that Knox had gone out. But Knox makes it clear that she had heard from the Head of the Murder Squad that he had made that damaging admission, at or shortly after 12.30 am. Or is Knox is accusing Napoleoni of a bare-faced lie?

2.  It is valid to ask why Knox would not want to remember to whom the text had been sent. Who can see into her mind? Perhaps Knox realized that discussion of it would confirm that if she had indeed gone out then it was not to Le Chic, where she was not required. However even if she thought that could put her in the frame it’s not what an innocent person would be too worried about. Perhaps she did just have difficulty remembering?

3.  If there was no fuss and she did remember and tell the police that the text was to Patrick, and the questioning then moved on to whether she met up with Patrick later that evening, what was the problem with that? She knew the fact that she hadn’t met up with him could be verified by Patrick. She could have said that and stuck to it. The next move for the police would have been to question Patrick. They would not have had grounds to arrest him.

4.  Knox stated in her memorial, and re-iterates it in her book, that during her interrogation the police told her that they had hard evidence that she was involved in Meredith’s murder. She does not expand on what this evidence is, perhaps because the police did not actually tell her. However, wasn’t she the least bit curious, particularly if she was innocent? What was she thinking it might be?

5.  I can sympathise with any interviewee suffering a bad period, if that’s true. However the really testy period of the interview/interrogation starts with the arrival of the interpreter, notification of Sollecito’s withdrawal of her alibi and the questioning with regard to the text to Patrick, all occurring at around 12.30 am.  There has to be some critical point when she concedes, whether to the police or in her own mind,  that she’d met “Patrick”, after which there was the questioning as to what had happened next. Say that additional questioning took 20 minutes. Then there would be a break whilst the statement is prepared and typed up. So the difficult period for Knox, from about 12.30 am to that critical point, looks more like about 35 to, at the outside, 50 minutes.

6.  Even if, for that period, it is true that she was subjected to repeated and bullying questions, and threats, then she held up remarkably well as I have noted from her own account. It does not explain any form of mental breakdown, let alone implicating Patrick in murder. In particular, if Knox’s letter of the 9th and the recording of her meeting with her mother on the 10th are to believed, that alleged barrage of questions had stopped when she implicated Patrick.  An explanation, for what it’s worth, might be that she had simply ceased to care any longer despite the consequences. But why?

7.  A better and more credible explanation is that an idea had indeed formed suddenly in her mind. She would use the revelation about the text to Patrick and the consequent police line of questioning to bring the questioning to an end and divert suspicion from her true involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher. She envisaged that she would be seen by the police as a helpless witness/victim, not a suspect in a murder investigation. As indeed was the case initially.  She expected, I am sure, to be released, so that she could get Sollecito’s story straight once again. If that had happened there would of course remain the problem of her having involved Patrick, but I dare say she thought that she could simply smooth that over - that it would not be a big deal once he had confirmed that there had been no meeting and that he had not been at the cottage, as the evidence was bound to confirm.

Reality 3: The Interpreter Anna Donnino Speaks

Here is a link to the translation of the evidence of the interpreter, Anna Donnino. I will simply summarise the main points from her evidence but it will be apparent immediately that she contradicts much of what Knox and her supporters claim to have happened.

Donnino told the court that she had 22 years experience working as a translator for the police in Perugia. She was at home when she received a call from the police that her services were required and she arrived at the police station at just before 12.30 am, just as Knox said. She found Knox with Inspector Ficarra. There was also another police officer there whose first name was Ivano. At some stage Ficarra left the room and then returned and there was also another officer by the name of Zugarina who came in. Donnino remained with Knox at all times

The following points emerge from her testimony :-

1. Three police officers do not amount to the “lots of people” referred to in Knox’s trial testimony, let alone the dozens and the “tag teams” of which her supporters speak.

2. She makes no mention of Napoleoni and denied that anyone had entered the room to state that Sollecito had broken Knox’s alibi. (This is not to exclude that this may have happened before Donnino arrived)

3. She states that Knox was perfectly calm but there came a point when Knox was being asked how come she had not gone to work that she was shown her own text message (to Patrick). Knox had an emotional   shock, put her hands to her ears and started rolling her head and saying “It’s him! It’s him! It’s him!”

4. She denied that Knox had been maltreated or that she had been hit at all or called a liar. She stated that the officer called Ivano had been particularly comforting to Knox, holding her hand occasionally.

5. The sole purpose of the “interrogation” was for Knox to list possible perps which she did in writing with maps; the meetin was not to say anything more about Knox herself;

6. She stated that prior to the 1.45 am statement being drafted by Knox (her own idea) she was asked if she wanted a lawyer but Knox said no.

7. She stated that she had read the statement over to Knox in english and Knox herself had checked the italian original having asked for clarification of specific wording.

7. She confirmed that that she had told Knox about an accident which she’d had (a leg fracture) and that she had suffered amnesia about the accident itself. She had thought Knox was suffering something similar. She had also spoken to Knox about her own daughters because she thought it was necessary to establish a rapport and trust between the two of them.

The account in Knox’s book is in some ways quite compelling but only if it is not compared against her trial testimony, let alone the Interpreter’s testimony:  that is, up to the point when she implicates Patrick in murder. At that point no amount of whitewash works. The Italian Supreme Court also thought so, upholding Knox’s calunnia conviction, with the addition of aggravating circumstances.

Knox Was Actually A Fake Exchange Student In Europe

Posted by Our Main Posters

Misleading NY Times interview here, original of this post here.

A Damning Question For Knox

Your book contains myriad easy-to-disprove false claims.

One repeated incessantly throughout was that you were a legitimate student, on a well-funded exchange program, on the same basis as Meredith. 

As always, I had gone to my mom first. She’s a free spirit who believes we should go where our passions lead us. When I told her mine were leading me 5,599 miles away from home, to Perugia, Italy, for my junior year of college, her unsurprising response was “Go for it!”....

Now I had to convince my dad. He’s a linear thinker who works in finance. He’s into numbers and planning. As practical and organized as he is, he’d have a lot of questions. So I approached him armed preemptively with the answers….

“Dad,” I said, trying to sound businesslike, “I’d like to spend next year learning Italian in a city called Perugia. It’s about halfway between Florence and Rome, but better than either because I won’t be part of a herd of American students. It’s a quiet town, and I’ll be with serious scholars. I’ll be submerged in the culture. And all my credits will transfer to UW.”

This mantra of earnest intentions appears again and again throughout the book.  You would return from Europe academically far down the road, and only one more year at college away from a dazzling career of some kind.

What total nonsense. How absurd.

• First, to those fellow students who knew you in Seattle and Perugia, all of this comes as a very big surprise. See the quote at the top above. You were mainly known for voraciously chasing boys and drugs, and any academic ambitions and career ambitions came a distant third and fourth. Perugia at the time had the reputation of being one of Europe’s easiest drug cities; was that as some acquaintances think the real reason you made a beeline to it?


• Second, you were utterly underfunded for a full academic year in Europe which costs Americans on average maybe $20,000. Why did your accountant father and math teacher mother not do the sums, see the huge shortfall,  and absolutely insist that you apply for the grants and scholarships that are readily available? How did you propose to work legally in Europe to make up the shortfall, as all Americans working in Europe require a work permit? (And what of your fingering Patrick for the murder, after he took a risk of losing his bar business in hiring you illegally?)


• Third, there is no way that your “study year” in Perugia (if it was to be a year, which is highly doubtful)  could represent your junior year at university. There is no way “all” your “credits” could be transferred to the University of Washington, because (1) the School for Foreigners (a non degree issuing junior arm of Perugia University) does not even issue credits that count for American universities; in fact it is only a glorified language school (nice, but no better than several in Seattle) which allows in anyone who wants to study there. And (2) unlike Meredith you were not even enrolled at the main university, so zero prospects of transferring credits from there.

Your status was in fact that of a loose cannon and quite the opposite of a typical American studying abroad. You had almost zero study load to keep you out of mischief and off drugs; compare that to Meredith’s 40-50 hours a week. You were really, while denying it, taking a year off from your studies and career in Europe, as this account  by an academic counselor makes quite clear.

The media have now repeated countless times that Amanda Knox was on a “study abroad program”.

In fact, as these things are defined, she was not. It is precisely that she was NOT on a study-abroad program that she was able to adopt a lifestyle that seems to have led her to where she is now.

To go on a study-abroad “program” means that you attend an organized and SUPERVISED curriculum and agenda, most often with peers, faculty and/or at the very least a local administrative staff person assigned to periodically look after the participants’ behavior and well-being.

In fact the University of Washington does not even have a study abroad “program” in Perugia.

It merely suggests to UW students that the Universita per Stranieri is a possible destination and place for students to go on their own, and if asked helps out with some administration.

Knox took the “non-conformist” path to study abroad. I recall reading that she did not want to go on a program so as to not follow the herd, so to speak. So she did study abroad, but cheaply, and outside an organized program by the University of Washington. She was basically in Perugia on her own.

This is characteristic of at least two type of people, those who are adventurous, exploratory and want a true full-immersion experience into the cultural side of the host country (usually Italian majors), and those who want to be untethered and to have total freedom and no one to answer to so they can do as they wish.

Her casual attitude to her studies and other strong hints in her behavior and writings suggests that she was the latter type.

And presumably her biological parents understood all of this and signed off on it, even before Amanda Knox ever left Seattle.

Parents especially should know that if Knox had attended a UW-operated or US-University run study abroad program with supervision, her attendance in class would have been monitored, and any behavior that would upset roommates may have been reported.

In these programs for the most part there are strict housing rules such as no overnight guests, let alone bringing guys home to sack up with. Most of the time roommates will complain on the spot or get back to the American administrators that they have an out-of-control roommate bringing guys home, drinking excessively, or doing drugs.

In addition, programs with the proper supervision have enough of a presence to let the participants know that someone is at least checking up now and again. And as a result they watch their behavior.

Furthermore, in well-run programs, students are given significant preparation about living in the specific host country and city with pre-departure materials and perhaps meetings, talking with ex-participants, and attending an extensive multi-day orientation where staff and even local police lecture them about the many pitfalls of living in a foreign and new environment away from home.

They are reminded that the laws are different in other countries, and more importantly that there are some bad people walking the streets. They are told to enjoy themselves and learn, but also to be careful, stay alert, stay out of trouble, and so on.

I myself work in study abroad and we know what unleashed unsupervised colleges students get themselves into. We are trained to look for potential problems and we visit all students accommodations at least once per month and speak with everyone there.

We have open-door counseling and professionals with years of experience on staff. We watch out for all our students regularly”; we know what behavior to look for, and when to intervene, at least most of the time.

Yes, it costs more to attend the Universita per Stranieri or any overseas university through a US-college or US-university monitored program with local on-site staff and supervision.

But the situation Amanda has created, or at least found herself in, is much less likely to happen to students on a supervised and accredited study abroad program.

Let’s face it, at the age of 20, 21, or 22, many young adults are still really more or less kids. Naive and vulnerable, especially those who have yet to explore their “wild side”, they sometimes see this as an opportunity to make up for lost time.

This is exemplified in the fact that many pass out from drinking in the days after they arrive. Bottom line, they need guidance, and no more so than when they are 8000 miles from home and on their own.

Knox took the “I am too good to go on study abroad program with fellow students” route and the cheapest way overseas.  And it is not proving so cheap anymore.

Her biological parents really should have known better. All parents should either make sure the students are mature enough, or make sure they have a structured environment that can assist them while abroad. It is well worth the extra cost and peace of mind.

So the media should please get this straight from now on.

• Amanda Knox was NOT on a study abroad “program” while in Perugia.  She was at most “studying abroad” as that term is used very loosely.


• She took a leave from the University of Washington to study Italian at what is essentially a glorified language school which anyone can attend.


• She was totally unsupervised in a high-risk situation where it would have seemed obvious to any supervisor that she was looking to break away.


• And she most likely would have had a very difficult time getting any credit for her studies from the University of Washington at the conclusion.

So. The worst possible deal for any student abroad. The parents signed off in advance.  It seems to have exploded on Knox. And poor Meredith died.

In fact so scary was your semi-connection to the University of Washington with its zero control and potential huge liabilities that SINGLE HANDED your irresponsible and dangerous arc in Perugia sparked reforms in universities throughout American

Mirroring a nationwide trend, the University of Washington is overhauling how its students and professors interface with foreign countries….

The UW study abroad experience today involves much more oversight than it did two years ago when Amanda Knox left on an unsupervised European adventure that quickly degenerated into a nightmare.

When Knox, who is on trial for murder in Italy, left her familiar U-district environs in late summer 2007, she embarked on her own independent study in Umbria with very few guidelines or institutional oversight.

She arrived in the tolerant student melange of Perugia, a vibrant college town with temptation at every turn and many paradoxes (drug deals and party plans are often made on the steps of the cathedral).

A month later, the honor student’s pub-crawling, pot-smoking college shenanigans had taken a very serious turn and she was being hauled off to the Capanne penitentiary, where she remains today, pleading her innocence as the trial and controversial accusations against her plod forward.

Once her troubles began, the university tried to offer support, but had very few official guidelines to follow for responding to the kind of complicated legal-judicial matter Knox faced.

It’s different now….

In the wake of several negative overseas episodes, officials are busy raising awareness about the positive impact the UW is having worldwide and taking steps to improve communications, regulation and emergency preparedness for its students abroad.

Compared with two years ago, international education officials are more closely tracking who, where and what study-abroad programs involve. The university has new rules:. The department chair has to sign off on the program. Insurance is required. So is a cell phone. No program money can be used to buy alcohol, just for starters.

“There’s a much more formal process now,” said Taso Lagos, a UW professor who teaches international communication and manages a study-abroad program in Greece. “With administrators that are very aware, with lines of communication open and policies in place if something happens.”...

The UW’s growing commitment to international education—- even in a budget crisis—is reflected in some developments. [UW Vice Provost for Global Affairs Stephen Hanson] was named a vice provost in January, and in the spring, the UW dedicated an entire wing of the Gerberding Hall administration building to growing an international mission and profile.

This year, a travel security and information officer is coming on board to oversee emergency response and preparedness, as is Peter Moran, a new director of international programs and exchanges who previously worked at the Fulbright Commission office in Katmandu, Nepal.

New guidelines are being put in place to streamline communications, ease financial transactions and institute mandatory training for faculty taking students abroad. The Global Support Project, a rapid-response team with one person from each branch of the central administration, takes on cross-disciplinary international challenges.

Such reforms aren’t unique to UW.

Universities across the country are examining how better to organize study abroad to meet blossoming demand from students (and prospective employers) for foreign experience. Many are turning to independent service providers whose business it is to contract housing, health care or niche risk management services dealing with legal, financial or public relations crises when things go haywire abroad…..

Though the university bore no responsibility for any of the events Knox became entangled in, media across the world continued to mention the University of Washington—whether it was because of character witnesses who were her college buddies, reports of wild off-campus parties Knox attended in Seattle or her studies while in prison.

And it gets even worse. Page 14 of Sollecito’s book says you were not even staying in Perugia for more than one semester or term.

This was maybe three or four days into our relationship. The night before we left [for Assisi], I noticed she was chatting on Facebook with an American friend. I asked who he was. Right away, she explained that she, like Meredith, had left behind a boyfriend when she came to Italy. His name was David Johnsrud, known as D.J., and… they chatted or e-mailed almost every day. D.J. was spending his junior year in China… As the conversation went on, I learned she had just bought a ticket to China to visit D.J. later in the year [this was in October] and my suspicions were confirmed.

That intention to quit Perugia so soon is missing from your own book. Strange.

Your fake front of a diligent, serious, demanding year in Italy appears again and again throughout your book.  It is the whole basis for why you were at least the equal of Meredith and her circle and the others who lived in your house.

For why you would have little time off for irresponsible partying. For why there was no way you could possibly feel jealous or over-competitive toward Meredith.

In fact, both you and your foolish parents acted grossly irresponsibly. And as a direct result, Meredith died.

For Multiple False Accusations, Knox Book Won’t Be Sold In UK Or Italy

Posted by Our Main Posters

[From the Dec 2008 NBC Dateline in which all interviewed concluded the two had cooked themselves]


A judicial order is understood to be imminent to require HarperCollins to withdraw the Knox book from all markets in Europe.

The exceptions are the UK or Italy because the publishers wisely tried to stay below the radar there. As for the US? The American arm of the publishers (wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps, both based in New York), would be left with little reason to fight. The First Amendment provides no automatic right to defame. 

The Knox book is not selling very well in the US, despite a media blitz, and sales are unlikely to perk up from now on. Revenues are probably far below costs. And Knox is increasingly unable to parrot what her ghost writer put in the book - Raffaele Sollecito ran into the exact same problem.

In the post below this one, one of the most serious of the false accusations is described. Lawyers are shaking their heads at the unbelievable stupidity of that inclusion. Did Robert Barnett and Ted Simon and the defense lawyers and publishers’ lawyers have any real clue about events?

Let us review where things stand.

BAD PR takes a position 180 degrees opposite to the truth and almost invariably fails to apply any lipstick to the pig.  GOOD PR takes a position 5 degrees from the truth and often eventually succeeds.

RS’s and AK’s books both took the 180 degree approach, the “dont believe your lying eyes” approach, the Wizard of Oz approach, the nuclear war approach.

This now looks like really, really bad PR and no legal common sense at all.

This may have worked in temporary small ways in the US, though the movement has still not captured any big politician or big lawyer willing to head the parade. The Departments of State and Justice, very well informed on the case prior to the book,  are noticeably cold.

It only gets worse.

• In each case some money was made, but now all of that is at risk, in compensation to the victim’s family and in fines by the Italian state.


• In each case it will be a legal and public opinion disaster for the two and their support teams at the pending new appeal in Florence.


• In each case, their books had the stink of blood money; that is widely despised both in Italy and in the United States and has rarely turned out to be a good thing (ask OJ).


• In each case, the very existence of the book as an attempt to rain public hostility on the court during an ongoing legal process is a contempt of the court.


• In each case, the book contained myriad small mistakes and smears as we have been showing with Sollecitos book and have now begun with Knox’s. (See the links in left column.)


• In each case, the book contained one huge defamatory lie which might end up costing each of them years in prison.

In Sollecito’s book it was that the prosecution tried to force on him a deal to roll over on Knox, claiming there was no “real” evidence on him - but stacks of evidence in Knox’s case (gee thanks Sollecito).

In Knox’s case it was this absurd lie described below that Prosecutor Mignini illegally tried to talk Knox into firmly framing Patrick Lumumba.

In Sollecito’s case the book was almost instantly ripped apart on Italian national TV in the #1 crime talk show Porta a Porta with Sollecito’s dad seen squirming throughout the show.

Subsequently Sollecito’s own lawyer Maori had to come out publicly and renounce RS’s claim to the media - it was either that, or Bongiorno and Maori would have been dead certs for prosecution themselves. They were credited with helping to write the book.

Expect the same from Knox’s lawyers. In many places Knox drops them in it, and she describes Dalla Vedova in particular as performing various unethical and possibly illegal actions.

Thereafter in Sollecito’s case there was a drip-drip-drip phase in the Italian media. Yummi captured it really well in this in-depth post and it is worth reading again because for Knox we will likely see it repeated for the same reasons:

Then in RS’s case we had the two developments described here: (1) the complaints against him briefly going public and being widely reported, and (2) then being yanked behind the scenes by the Florence chief prosecutor, where they will be investigated for the next 3-4 months.

Even in the remote chance that the Florence appeal court declares Sollecito not guilty of Meredith’s murder (and he has now stacked more evidence against him, as has Knox), for falsely accusing court officials who handle mafia cases and have special protections he could still face up to ten years.

Sollecito’s lawyers and family and he himself are now all seriously off their game, and seemingly doing no more talking. Sollecito seems to be attempting to set up an escape route through Switzerland. Good luck with that.

Knox’s book now places her in the same position. In fact maybe worse. Two countries have been set at loggerheads by the private practice of foreign policy here. The complaint can therefore be pushed up further, to the powerful Council of Magistrates or even the President of the Republic.

And at that point, the complaint could be shared with the US Departments of State and Justice and the FBI. If that happens no official in the US, such as a judge deciding on an extradition request, would go to bat for Knox.

Knox seems cooked. By her own hands. Or those of the exploitative bunch around her.

Does Her Leaked Prison Diary Talk To Knox’s Mental Condition And Bullying By Those “Near And Dear”?

Posted by Peter Quennell

Corriere magazine has excerpted a new book by Fiorenza Sarzanini on the state of AK’s and RS’s psychology. Italian origiinal here. Click the image above for a Google translation.

A prison diary by Amanda Knox which Knox herself may have handed to the prosecutors is quoted in the article, and much more extensively in the book. It might be manipulative if she didn’t leak it, but it also seems a window into the state of her mental condition.

Amanda Knox seems to be describing Mellas family trauma, and she seems to points the finger at one person in particular: Chris Mellas.  His apparent nickname for her was “obtuse retard”.  This seems to us to ring true, as he is known on the internet for his abusive posts..

From The Sunday Times for November 30, 2008 (the link is now broken) our main poster Jools kindly translated this:

Diary reveals Foxy Knoxy’s sex secrets
A book explores the desires of the student accused of killing her UK housemate
John Follain

On the eve of a fateful summer journey to Italy, the American student Amanda Knox drew up a list of things to do before she left home in Seattle. Top of the list, according to her diary, was visiting a sex shop.

A book published in Italy last week quotes leaked extracts from Knox’s diary and portrays her as a young woman for whom sex is a key part of life. Knox, 21, will go on trial in January along with her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, accused of sexually abusing and murdering the Leeds exchange student Meredith Kercher in November 2007.

Kercher, 21, stabbed in the throat, was found half-naked in her bedroom in the Perugia cottage she shared with Knox. Rudy Guede, 21, an Ivory Coast drifter, has already been jailed for 30 years for the crime. All three pleaded not guilty.

The book, Amanda and the Others by Fiorenza Sarzanini, a journalist on Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, quotes previously unpublished extracts from diaries Knox kept from August 2007 until a few weeks after the murder. They have been seized by investigators.

Knox’s family protested at the publication of “Amanda’s personal and private property” and said they had no means to judge their authenticity.

“This seems to be yet another example of the continued leaks designed to harm Amanda’s character as there is no evidence to tie her to the brutal and senseless murder of Meredith Kercher. She is innocent,” they said in a statement.

Sarzanini said yesterday: “Knox isn’t obsessed with sex but she sees it as one of the predominant aspects of her life. This has influenced her life in the sense that it influences her relationships with both men and women.”

Before leaving Seattle, Knox, who is fond of making lists and called herself Foxy Knoxy, wrote that buying condoms was one of her priorities. On October 18, 2007, she lists four men with brief descriptions, including an American boyfriend.

Sarzanini comments: “It’s as if you [Knox] were always hunting men. You list your conquests as if you were displaying them like trophies.”

Knox writes to one boyfriend: “I’m waiting for you, I want to see something porno with you and put it into practice with you.” In another list, Knox names four men in Seattle and New York, and three in Florence and Perugia with whom she has had sex.

Knox writes: “Interesting isn’t it? I think it means that my sex life doesn’t correspond to my romantic emotional life. An obvious statement because the only one I’m in love with (even if in truth he isn’t the only one I want to have sex with) is incredibly far away . . . Sex is useless, well not useless but always disappointing unless I manage to establish emotional contact with someone.”

The book quotes testimony to police from Amy Frost, a British student friend of Kercher. She describes an episode on the day of Knox’s arrival at the cottage: “Meredith told us that Amanda put down in the bath-room a beauty-case in which there were condoms and a vibrator. They were visible and it seemed a bit strange to Meredith.” Kercher later told Frost: “Isn’t it odd that a girl arrives and the first thing she shows is a vibrator?”

In a sign of tension between Knox and the victim, Frost also relates that a few weeks before the murder Kercher had learnt from her housemates that one of them, Giacomo Silenzi, fancied her. When Kercher told Knox, she replied: “I like Giacomo too, but you can have him!” The remark upset Kercher, who later started a relationship with Silenzi.

Several witnesses quoted in the book depict Knox and Sollecito as not only failing to show any grief immediately after Kercher’s death, but also constantly cuddling and kissing as they sat waiting to be questioned at police headquarters, a few days before they were accused of the crime. “[Amanda] was in front of Raffaele. I remember that she stuck her tongue out at him, she made faces and then they’d laugh and kiss each other. In that moment I thought she was going crazy, that she was really crazy,” Frost testified.

Robyn Butterworth, a British friend of Kercher who saw Knox at police headquarters, gave evidence that Knox “seemed to me to be completely lacking any emotion”. Butterworth added that Knox and Sollecito “sent each other kisses by smacking their lips. At a certain point she stretched out on a few chairs and he caressed her feet. It was strange, it wasn’t a nice thing to watch”.

Prosecutors have argued that Knox’s alleged coldness after the murder, as well as her DNA on the handle of a knife that may be the murder weapon, points to her guilt. Knox’s parents have said Knox was in shock and was simply seeking comfort from her boyfriend.

In another diary that Knox started in prison on November 8, 2007, shortly after her arrest, there is a rare passage about Kercher in which she imagines her raped and killed.

She wrote: “I can only imagine what she felt in those moments frightened, injured, raped. But I imagine more what she went through when the blood went out of her. What did she feel? And the mother? Desperation? Did she have the time to find peace or in the end did she have only terror?”

Amanda Knox… Trapped, In Her Own Words

Posted by The Machine

Post Overview

Newcomers to the case and casual readers may not realize this.

But it is an indisputable fact that Amanda Knox has spun the truth. Tells lies. Deliberately, repeatedly, and very incriminatingly. I think it’s worth revisiting a few of her many lies for any new visitors to this board, so that they can get a clearer picture of the real strength of the case.

Some of Amanda’s vociferous supporters have claimed that Amanda only lied once - and that was because she was “smacked around” by the police, or put under pressure.

And that her confessions, in which she admitted to being at the cottage on the night of the murder, were thrown out by the Italian Supreme Court.

It doesn’t take a careful examination of the known facts to conclude that both these claims really are nonsense. Amanda’s first known lie wasn’t to the police, but to her flatmate, Filomena, on 2 November, the day after Meredith’s murder.

False claim one.

Amanda phoned Filomena at 12.08 pm, and said she was worried about the front door being open and blood stains in the small bathroom.

Amanda said she was going to call Raffaele, but according to Raffaele, Amanda had already returned to his apartment at 11.30 am, and then they had gone back to the cottage.

At 12.34 pm Amanda and Filomena spoke again. Filomena said, “We spoke to each other for the third time and she told me that the window in my room was broken and that my room was in a mess. At this point I asked her to call the police and she told me that she already had.”

False claim two.

Amanda and Raffaele didn’t actually call the police until 12.51 pm.

The postal postal police unexpectedly turned up at the cottage at 12. 35 pm.

False claim three.

Amanda and Raffael told the police that they had called the police and were waiting for them.

No they had not.

False claim four.

Amanda told the postal police that Meredith always kept her door locked.

Filomena strongly disagreed with her, and told the postal police the opposite was true.

Amanda and Raffaele were then taken in for questioning.

False claim five.

They said they couldn’t remember most of what happened on the night of the murder, because they had smoked cannabis.

It is medically impossible for cannabis to cause such dramatic amnesia and there are no studies that have ever demonstrated that this is possible.

Long term use of cannabis may affect short term memory, which means that users might have difficulty recalling a telephone number. But it won’t wipe out whole chunks of an evening from their memory banks.

False claim six.

Amanda accused Diya Lumumba of murdering Meredith at the cottage.

It’s true that two of Amanda’s such statements were not allowed out by the Italian Supreme Court. However, Amanda repeated the accusation, in a note that she wrote to the police on 6 November.

This note was not thrown out by the Italian Supreme Court, and it was admitted as evidence.

False claims seven & eight.

In her 6 November note Amanda claimed to have seen Diya Lumumba (1) at the basketball court at Piazza Grimana; and (2) outside her front door.

He was actually at his bar.

False claim nine.

Amanda’s supporters claim that she confessed to a lesser role in Meredith’s murder, and blamed Diya Lumumba, because she had been “smacked around” or put under pressure by the police.

But the real reason she had to say she was at the cottage was because she was informed that Raffaele Sollecito was no longer providing her with an alibi.

Raffaele had been confronted with phone records, and was now claiming that she was not with him the whole evening, and that she had only returned at 1.00 am. Amanda did not attempt to refute Raffaele’s claim, but now admitted that she had been at the cottage.

The significance of this about-turn cannot be stressed enough.

(Incidentally, Raffaele was also claiming that he had lied, because he had believed Amanda’s version of what happened and not thought about the inconsistencies. He is acknowledging that Amanda’s version had inconsistencies.)

If it had been true that Amanda had been “smacked around” by the police during questioning, why haven’t her lawyers ever filed a complaint? It was very telling that Amanda dropped her allegation of being hit by the police at her recent court hearing, and instead just claimed she had been put under pressure.

There’s a world of difference between police brutality and being put under pressure. It wasn’t the first time that Amanda has made a false and malicious accusation, as Diya Lumumba knows only too well.

False claim ten.

Amanda claimed to have slept in at Raffaele’s until the next morning.

However, her mobile records show that this was not so.  Amanda turned on her mobile at approximately at 5.32 am.

The only plausible explanation for Amanda’s deliberate and repeated lies? That she was involved in the murder of Meredith Kercher.

It should be no surprise to anyone following the case that the same three witnesses who have repeatedly lied, Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede, have all been placed at the crime scene.

By a total of 23 separate pieces of forensic evidence.

Renato Biondo has just recently provided independent confirmation that the scientifc police’s investigation was carried out correctly. And that the forensic findings are accurate.

Knox Reported Smiling & Singing During Micheli-Hearings Breaks

Posted by Peter Quennell

[click for larger images]

The Daily Telegraph has this report:

Amanda Knox, the young woman accused of murdering the British student Meredith Kercher, sighed and sang during breaks in her court appearance, it has been reported.

Miss Knox… is known to sing in jail to pass the time. During breaks in a pre-trial hearing, she sang hits by the band Feist [shot above] the Sun newspaper claimed.

A source at the court in Perugia, where Miss Kercher was found murdered, told the Sun: “During the hearing she never said a word. But outside when there were breaks for water and coffee she was smiling and singing. She was also huffing and puffing a lot - I think it was because it was a long day. It was a song by Feist and she said she sings to relax and deal with her stress.

Another shot of Feist that she may now regret.

And here’s Ester Walker of the Independent on the outfit Knox wore - smart move, apparently. (Tell THAT to the judge.)

What could possibly be more innocent than this outfit? Knox, the Seattle-born woman suspected of murdering British student Meredith Kercher, is only 21 and has dressed for her court appearance in Perugia, Italy, like the student that she is.

She wears a waist-length, white cotton smock top, which has red and blue flowers printed along the neckline, over a pair of blue denim jeans. Her hair is tied up in the schoolgirl-ish style, with the top half tied back off her bare face and secured with a purple plastic butterfly clip, and the rest loose.

Her entire outfit makes her look completely out of place in the Italian courtroom or flanked by policemen.

We’re still waiting for a take on Knox’s tan. Sprayed on? Or by the prison pool?

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Frontpage Comments

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Amanda Knox Said To Be Almost Certain To Face Murder Retrial Now'.


Reassurances for those smart emailers who might think Knox can claim we are somehow bedfellows…

By KrissyG on the post 'Amanda Knox Said To Be Almost Certain To Face Murder Retrial Now'.


Already Knox and Lewinski had a problem finding an actress who would want to play…

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Amanda Knox Said To Be Almost Certain To Face Murder Retrial Now'.


Amendment made to this pre-final para above to reconfirm this is one apolitical move that…

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Amanda Knox Said To Be Almost Certain To Face Murder Retrial Now'.


Knox’s op-ed in the Los Angeles Times is really a piece of work. Regardless of…

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #2'.


Uh, before James and Krissy leap up and down on me, and say such system…

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #2'.


James (and Krissy in previous post) touches repeatedly on system issues. Systems not optimised or…

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #2'.


Awesomely deep. I am reading it for the fourth time. Thoughts in due course. There…

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #1'.


Not that we are in the business of giving Amanda Knox legal advice…  But Knox…

By Peter Quennell on the post 'Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #1'.


While ECHR is a bit too notorious for “dividing the baby” in the way that…

By KrissyG on the post 'Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #1'.


To be fair, all the ECHR had was what Dalla Vedova for Knox submitted in…