How The Clean-Up And The Locked Door Contribute To The Very Strong Case For Guilt

Comments

Excellent, James…very clearly presented.

@ James,

Thank You for this excellent post and photos.

The Knox ‘hickey’ is interesting too.

I am not an expert but it is the first ‘hickey’ I have seen that is of an irregular shape with angles visible and remarkably resembling a scratch.

I am aware the photo was taken sometime after Knox said (and witnesses testified) she acquired it. (just so happens it was around the time of the murder).

I also thought when a hickey naturally fades away with time that the fading is generally uniform.

_

Hi James

I’d like to elaborate on your fine article.

The evidence does not support the hypothesis of Guede locking the bedroom door. Meredith would certainly have locked the front door with a key when she returned to the cottage (because the latch was broken)

It is not logical to expect Guede exiting the bedroom, locking the bedroom door and going to the front door unlocking it with a key and leaving without locking the front door with the key.

I would also like to point out that someone was supposed to be fleeing the scene, had time to turn all the lights off! It is just so incompatible!!!!

Thank you very much James. I’ve never seen the picture of Knox’s clothes on the bed before - matching most of the apparel described by Quintavalle. It’s really difficult to understand how Knox and her entourage can keep straight faces when confronted by this kind of telling detail. Knox of course is famously as bold as brass with her deceptions. The best that can be said of her entourage is “love is blind”.

The photo of the back of the cottage renders inconceivable -

1. How Knox thought that she might be able to see in through Meredith’s window from the terrace (her e-mail), and

2. How Sollecito thought that there was any possibility that he could access the window from ground level (his prison writings).

@ James

In the photo of the cottage it appears that the shutters are solid as opposed to the slatted ones in Filomenas room. There is no window in AKs & MKs bathroom. Why go to the trouble to turn off lights? Turn them on, YES. Turn them off, NO

Thank you James wonderful presentation.

Just my two bits though. The pro Knox bunch would have us forget one (or sixty one) incriminating points. It is important not to forget the eight hours that Knox and Sollecito had to clean up. If I look at the photo above and others, I see two very tired people who have been up all night. They missed all of the evidence because the panic caused by the likely return of the other occupants of the cottage which was not an impossibility even though they expected to be alone. Also it is not impossible that they ran away first only to return to do the cleanup.

Well done James

Hi Starsdad:

Click on the image for the larger version? You’ll see that all the shutters are slatted. The perps during the cleanup would have known that so its doubtful that very many lights were on.

Bedside lamps are another matter.

I think at this stage we need to review the “balance of evidences”- no more dissecting individual points as they are well established by now. OR, if you so desire, are we here trying to convince the FOA? Well, I can tell you the result of the last exercise.

For example, I want to know, put the same questions in reverse, the answers to the following:

1. Do you think a homeless man sitting on a park bench has some valid reason to lie?

2. An indifferent shop owner, not really interesting in this case, has some valid reason to lie?

3. When it is has been clear that AK has told lies without any apparent reason, although the FOA keeps on providing excuses, why we should take her statements as gospel truth without any supporting evidences?

4. I have not seen the footprints of RG on the floor just outside the closed doors, but any routine detective can convincingly and definitely state whether he paused in front of the door and locked the same and then walked away. Why we should not believe the prosecutor and just believe the FOA?

5. I have reasonably good reasons to suspect that FOA knows who is really guilty but simply tries to defend the indefensible? For example, FOA refuses to explain the (1) cash deposit by AK (2) FOA acts as if all of them are the ultimate authority on the DNA sequence analysis (3) FOA refuses to debate honestly most of the evidences (including the fake brake in). This is only a few.

Now is the time to put the total picture in a good perspective.

Well said, Chami.

Excellent post, James.

RIP Meredith.

I find the following link offensive, and the title disgusting! Is there no decency left in this world?

http://www.dgmag.it/intrattenimento/cinema/the-face-angel-il-film-su-amanda-knox-girato-vicino-siena-64120

Hi Miriam

Its the same title as Barbie Nadeau’s book on which the movie will be based.

My guess is that if the movie actually does show some of Knox’s many quirks, which Barbie wrote a lot about, it’ll be Knox herself who will wish it wasn’t so.

Thanks, James. I’d never noticed the blood drip along the edge of bathroom door. Perhaps the door was nearly closed thus hiding the offending droplet during the cleanup. You mention it is diluted with water from washing the face of the door. Water plus blood equals cleanup.

The blue bath mat with Raffaele’s footprint on it having been left at the scene versus discarded was as you implied quite intentional. She could implicate Raf with that bathmat and keep him on her side, perhaps later excuse it with a ‘woops I shouldn’t have left it there, sorry about that Raf’.

I think Knox’s constant mention of carrying plastic sacks “for dirty clothes” was an excuse for all the plastic bags of soiled and bloody rags and bloody clothes she was removing from the cottage. She feared being seen in the streets carrying items including maybe a broken glass or bottle to a dumpster. Correct me if this was not possible.

Your good photos of the cottage reminded me of Knox’s story of leaning over the balcony trying to climb over it to peer into Meredith’s window with Raf being afraid Amanda would fall and getting rather panicky. That story has always seemed odd but rung true. Could it be a cover story in case their fingerprints were found on the railing there? Was it some effort to peek inside and make sure Meredith was still tied up? Was it a gambit to rescue the left-behind lamp as someone suggested? Raf’s panic about it did seem real.

Had Knox tried to show off by proving to Raf she could climb into Meredith’s window to scare her sometime during the evening long before the real violence started? Maybe Meredith had locked her door and was trying to study so they wanted to disturb her, but then Amanda was prevented from completing the daredevil stunt by cautious Raf. They were eager to tell police of Amanda’s nearly accomplished sortie over the railing to peer into Meredith’s window. They might have been hoping to see her undress or something voyeuristic but then backed off and went to Plan B. They were partially explaining to cover up something more nefarious, which only the two of them saw the significance of. Amanda’s last remark to the court, “You got it all wrong,” was probably the truth insomuch that a lot has been misunderstood about the events of the murder night.

Thank you for the photos and factual review, well-written.

Truly excellent article. It is really hard to imagine anyone reading it and not agreeing with the conclusions. I didn’t know about the streak of blood on the door and the clothes, and these make me all the more convinced that they will not get off. Also, like starsdad pointed out, there is zero reason for Guede to have closed the door or done any of the other things that he is supposed to have done. Closing the door or taking Meredith’s keys would serve only one purpose and that is to delay the discovery of the crime the next day. What difference would that have made to Guede when he had already made a run for it during the night, without attempting to clean any evidence of his presence? Assuming he had some reason to want it, why would he leave the front door open, thereby risking immediate attention that something is wrong. Why on earth would AK “scoot” all over the house in the nude if she thought one of her roommates was just taking out the trash? Makes no sense whatsoever.

In April 2008, la Corte di Cassazione motivation, in reference to confirming the cautionary arrest of Knox, noted the following:

“Orbene, lo sviluppo argomentativo della motivazione è fondato su una coerente analisi critica degli elementi indizianti e sulla loro coordinazione in un organico quadro interpretativo, alla luce del quale appare dotata di adeguata plausibilità logica e giuridica l’attribuzione a detti elementi del requisito della gravità, nel senso che questi sono stati reputati conducenti, con un elevato grado di probabilità, rispetto al tema di indagine concernente la responsabilità, tra gli altri, di A. M. K. in ordine ai delitti a lei contestati.”

which loosely translated states “that the motivation must be founded on a coherent, critical analysis of the indicative elements AND THEIR COORDINATION INTO AN INTERPRETATIVE ORGANIC WHOLE” (my emphasis). In other words, do not cherry pick the data; it must all ‘hang together’. This back in April 2008, before most of the other court rulings on the case.

@Marcello, thank you for that line and translation. That very point about it all hanging together and NOT taking individual pieces of evidence as examples of the whole, has been underlined in the Hellman Appeal quashing.

It is important to know (and note) that the Italian’s are focussed on this, and the ever-changing denial/no blame here responses of the FOA we can wholeheartedly discount as they NEVER look at the evidence as a whole. (What is considered a perfectly acceptable standard for upholding RG’s conviction is dismissed as irrelevant for AK and RS. Crime scene boundaries seemingly alter to suit the whim of the moment.)

May Meredith’s friends and family see justice delivered in this year; may she finally rest in peace poor girl.

A good presentation of another two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.  Thank you.  It is good that we keep this up.  It is persistent and therefore effective drawing attention to the damning details.

As the evidence is so clearly presented and explained here it is difficult to understand how it is that there continue to be those who continue to argue that black is white. 

I am particularly keen to know what they are thinking about Amanda Knox over at ABC (for example) now that they have seen her up close and that the SC has published its reasoning report.  She came across phony on the screen so how more so in the flesh? 

There have not been any statements (as far as I can tell) from Knox or her family about the report and it would appear that the networks have refrained from pursuing this. 

After all the hype and adulation about her book.

Why?

Good summary of the cleanup evidence, James.

James wrote, re the bathmat bloody (partial) footprint and lack of a blood trail to it: “The defences have an improbable theory -  that Guede, despite his homicidal rage, was smart enough to hop about on his left foot with a clean shoe on, and the other bare but covered in blood, and that having by this means entered the bathroom and washed his bloody right foot, disastrously leaving his (supposed) imprint there in the process, he then returned to Meredith’s bedroom inadvertently standing in blood with his left shoe and leaving with a trail of bloody left shoe prints -  in which case the exercise of washing his foot was entirely in vain, on two counts, after all that careful hopping around.”

This is one of those damning facts that to me proves that Guede did not act alone, and that there was a cleanup in the bathroom/hallway.

Knox is lucky she didn’t commit this crime in the U.S. where she might be sitting on death row.

hello thundering

I realize that we have passed on to other things but your comment caught my eye. I agree
wholeheartedly with your insight. There is something brewing on the networks here because I see more and more questioning going on. This is inevitable because in a country founded upon hyperbola the truth will eventually emerge. Of course there will always be those who refuse to see and in fact will make up things to explain the unexplainable..

On another note however, I have always been puzzled by the running on the steps after the scream. It has been suggested that it was Guede on his own but I think it was all three. It was only later that Knox and Sollecito went back to do the cover up hence the duvet over Meredith.
What do you think?

While cleaning out a storage room this week I ran across Raf’s prison letters to “Dear Papa and big sister mainly….” Exhausted from decluttering boxes, I sat on couch and read Raf’s 12 pages of letters that night that were translated by Belle of Milano. Wow, did some things jump out with the benefit of hindsight.

James Raper’s good photo of the blue rug points out what Raf said in his November 7, 2007 letter, the first letter.

Describing the morning of November 2, 2007 Raffaele writes:

“As soon as we arrived in the house I put aside the mop in the entrance and I directed myself towards the other rooms in order to see what the devil had happened. Those moments I remember well because I was shaken and alarmed. (my note: for goodness sake, why so shaken and alarmed? He had barely entered the cottage and had seen nothing scary at all yet). He goes on, “I seem to have seen that Amanda had taken the mop bucket and carried it in to another room…The first thing I noticed was that the room of Filomena (called Molli) had the door wide open. Ah, I forgot, Amanda had opened the house with the keys…” Here he muses on the cottage door being wide open per Amanda’s claims, sounds like he’s steering away from the issue of Filomena’s door open and sensed he said too much.

A few statements later, “...in the bathroom there were stains of blood on the sink and the floormat (blue bath rug pictured above in Raper’s post)...and the rest of the bathroom was clean. {Now here comes the clincher: “The stains on the mat were diluted by water.”}

How in the world did Raf know that? Couldn’t the light color of the stains on the rug have easily been made by a slight smear stain which when pressed into the cotton fabric of the rug would be partly absorbed and so would be fainter to see? Was it truly clear to the eye that this rug had been washed? It seems to me Raf betrays guilty knowledge here.

Of course the biggest faux pas he makes is revealing that Molli’s door was wide open. If that was the case, it would have been visible to Amanda on her shower visit to the cottage and the broken window obvious, then she would have no excuse to linger in the cottage to shower, she would have been freaked out by a burglary.

November 11, 2007   Raf writes: I woke not long ago. Yesterday I saw my father, uncle Giuseppe and Mara. I am glad that my father is close to me and also uncle, I didn’t expect that he would come, I was very pleased. I was given the clean clothes, and I did not understand that outside there were all of my party. All this gives me great strength. Instead I had information that on the morning of Friday, when I was sleeping and Amanda went to take a shower at her home, she had gone also with an Argentinian guy…I suppose, in a laundry and that this here wedged in the washing machine the clothes including the blue Nike shoes…All this makes me totally lose faith in Amanda after she continues to lie…I want to say, I don’t know much, but although she doesn’t seem to me at all capable of killing, someone who can be capable of telling lies to hide the fact that she’s in rapport with people not very recommendable. Indeed, I begin to think that she cheated on me and hid the impossible. But who doesn’t cheat, I am sincere and won’t ever do such a thing because I won’t lower myself to a certain pettiness; if I am with a person who says they like me and I don’t want to go on, I change. There is no need of escapades. I do not like to lie, either to myself or to others.” (but of course he is lying about the murder, that’s a trifle compared to staying loyal to Foxy it seems)

November 16—“I am starting to have perpetual panic attacks and palpitations in anticipation of these scientific tests that fire unsettling shots of this sort (after TV reports of the knife at his apartment found with traces of Meredith and Amanda)

November 18—“They are keeping me in jail because there is a kitchen knife with a trace of Meredith’s DNA. It seems like a horror movie…(here he enters the childish story of pricking Meredith’s hand while cooking.)

“I am not quiet because if they have found a trace so ridiculous they can find many, so many others on the rags and so on…What a nightmare! They should first of all show that the knife is indeed the weapon of the crime: knife, type of cut, the obvious traces on the blade, etc.. Then if they want to find invisible traces of Meredith in my house, find some in the streams of this passage! There must be a divine justice to all this! I continue to wake up in the morning with accusatory faces that fix me as a murderer….What an absurd story….”

blah blah blah. He uses the word “absurd” many times. The letters continue through November 23, 2007.

Unless the emphasis is due to the translation and is not Raf’s original meaning, I found his angry outburst using the words “find some {invisible traces of Meredith at his house} in the streams of this passage,” as a very alarming way of expressing it, a guilty way of implying he had washed away evidence in water and it would not easily be found. His father’s metaphor of making water run uphill or upstream seems to echo here, if Raf really did use the Italian word for “streams”. Streams refers to water and washing, streams of water. Statement Analysis Peter Hyatt said water images are linked to sexual acts.

We believe that the broken pipes and mopping of water below his kitchen sink may have all been efforts at using water to clean away every possible trace of Meredith’s blood or DNA that could have transferred to his apartment. He mockingly says they could find evidence on “the rags”.!!?! He dares the investigators to find it, and refers to streams, hinting he has washed all these traces away in streams. Raf pretends to refer to streams of words and dares them to read between the lines. I think if he did actually use the Italian word for streams as in water, he reveals his anger that all the washing up after the crime was for nought, since the police had still found traces on the most important thing of all: the murder weapon. This near revelation of Raf’s comes while he is so worked up about his kitchen knife with traces of Meredith’s DNA on it. After he introduces the subject of the knife he immediately launches the “pricking her hand” excuse, and then gets heated about invisible traces of Meredith in his house. Irritated, he mockingly dares investigators to “find some in the streams of this passage!” He means the remark to appear ironical and outraged, but it could be a Freudian slip of his guilt. He immediately follows the “streams of this passage!” challenge with a comment on divine justice and a description of his waking up in the mornings with accusatory faces that fix him as a murderer, images that must be surfacing in his dreams.

By November 19, Raf has spoken with a female trainee teacher, describes her as cute. “She has a beautiful smile with curly blonde hair. I was very pleased that she smiled at every joke that I made. I seemed to receive a gust of spring air in a huge room dark and cold.”

It seems he realizes rather quickly (in prison since November 7th, admires the blonde on the 19th, natural enough), that there are more fish in the sea than Amanda, but since he has either lied to cover up her crime or been a partaker in it, he must honor his first decision to lie and continue lying. The English saying is, “Begin as you mean to go on”. The honor is to cling to what he started, no matter how bad the first decision. Stubbornness, pigheadedness, never changing seem to be the concept of honor in Raf’s case. He prided himself on that as it hid his shame from Papa and protected Amanda (and maybe himself if he participated beyond the cleanup.) His later remarks about Jesus and mama pulling strings of his destiny from heaven and his questions to Christ that he suffered for others and was it worth it, suggest he is covering for others, or at least that’s what he wants the readers to think. He’s writing these letters for public consumption and he is no dummy. He writes 9 letters, often skipping days, from November 7th to November 23rd, 2007 after first being imprisoned on rape-murder charges. He talks more of his childhood and university friends than anything else in frequent reveries of what their thoughts about him must be. It’s almost pitiful to realize his youthful naivete that the whole world is fixated on his plight. Now six years later he may be disabused of that grandiose fantasy about his importance to their well-being, sad but true. Life goes on and the heroic status of being the martyr loses its sheen pretty fast. He vacillates in the letters often about whether he remembers Amanda having gone out of his apartment or not, and for how long she was gone, as if keeping his options open to incriminate her with that at a later date.

Raf’s letters at:  http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dczj4fg3_0ghwmwgc9

“All this makes me totally lose faith in Amanda, after she continues to lie..”
That’s a very strong and clear statement, Hopeful…. I didn’t know of that… Thankyou

Hi Graham Rhodes,

Your comment about something brewing on the networks is interesting.  I am very curious as to how things will play out once the appeal gets underway and especially once there is a definitive guilty verdict.

Despite their seeming-blindness to facts and Truth, these TV personalities (particularly the ABC female adulators) must have even a modicum of reasoning ability and have some valid questions.  And if not they, the higher-ups at ABC who surely need to ensure that they are not ultimately taken as fools. 

That remains to be seen, though.

As for the running on the steps I think it was established in Massei’s court that the two witnesses who heard the scream and running footsteps (one of the two - Nara Capezzali) were reliable and that this fitted in with the timing of the scream and death.

The Defence and the Groupies went out of their way to discredit this witness testimony and there was even an attempt by 48 Hours Mystery to re-enact the running on the steps to try and prove that it was impossible for anyone in those apartments to hear it once their windows and shutters were closed. 

Based on what I have read I accept that the witness did indeed hear the sound of people running in different directions which would confirm the theory that there was more than one attacker. 

The fact that they all ran away after Meredith screamed is a natural reaction.  I think the scream will have shaken them out of whatever state of intoxication they were in to realise the enormity of their actions. 

Both the fear of the scream raising the alarm and bringing others to the cottage and the natural human tendency to hide from one’s own guilt will have caused them to run away in the immediacy of that awful moment. 

We know that Knox and Sollecito returned to the cottage once they had calmed down and ascertained that the scream hadn’t brought the police or anyone else out.  It is probable that they considered what to do during this time and we know that part of that was the clean up and staging at the cottage.

Here is Meredith’s blood on the light switch in the small bathroom. This cannot be explained by period blood since there is no evidence from the autopsy of menstruation and anyway the blood is clearly very diluted. The presence of blood this diluted is a bit of a giveaway unless it is the case that it is old.

_

Since it is mentioned by Massei I would presume that forensics determined the blood as being recent and thus relevant.

They couldn’t hope to do a thorough clean-up. 

For one, both are the offspring of comfortable families and probably had never had to do house cleaning on their own part.  We know that the housework was a point of contention between Meredith and Amanda and Raffaele had employed a cleaner.

And then they would both have been extremely tired and shocked which would mean that they were bound to miss things.

Then of course they were under pressure of time.  It being winter daylight will have been later and they could not be certain that no-one would turn up at the cottage before they had finished.  Whether Laura / Filomena or any of Meredith’s friends.

Small wonder they left so many sloppy streaks and prints and left Amanda’s lamp inside Meredith’s bedroom.

Mission impossible.

Hello thundering. Thank you for your comments regarding the running away.

One small point regarding network reporting particularly in the US and elsewhere is that because of the Jody Arias trial and it’s salacious content the viewing public has become jaded with old news aka Knox. also interviewers by and large couldn’t care less anyway since they follow a script and the higher ups (Fox News in particular) are only interested in ratings. Fox is particularly stupid in this regard since if there is no news worthy items then they invent things. It’s the Rupert Murdock way of doing things. After Randolf Hurst of course who started that nonsense.

Hopeful, thank you for posting those excerpts from his letters. Very telling indeed. In fact, each letter is like a lie glaring you in the face. After all the explanations about diluted blood etc in his Nov 2nd letter, when he was asked about the bathmat in his Katie Couric interview, he said that they were not alarmed by the blood on bathmat because they were not sure it was blood, it just looked like a stain of some sort. So much for telling the truth.

I really, really fail to understand why the networks don’t ask them any questions that make sense. A single point like this could destroy them. Katie herself could have asked him “but you mention the blood very clearly in your letter, and in fact even talk about how it was diluted”. Why do the networks go on focusing so much on her sexual behavior, the kisses, and such nonsense instead of actual evidence? They were not convicted on behavior alone. Behavior is easy to explain, evidence is not. Do they answer only pre-approved and rehearsed questions and If so, why are the networks continuing to support them? It is so very frustrating to me.

I’ve just re-read AK’s faux-plaintive cry to Diane Sawyer regarding the retrial

“I felt like after crawling through a field of barbed wire and finally reaching what I thought was the end, it just turned out that it was the horizon and I had another field of barbed wire that I had ahead of me to crawl through.”

Is this not a tacit admission that she is an escapee and fugitive from justice, and that she knows she has never been set free, despite the angry protestations of “double jeopardy” etc from Knox groupies. In fact would a truly innocent person use the barbed wire/escape metaphor at all? Wouldn’t there be more concern with legitimately clearing one’s name once and for all?

@Odysseus
I agree with you about the metaphor.
A great shame that she has been encouraged,by those who should know better, to believe that evasion of justice and its consequences was a valid path to pursue.
Or even, indeed, that NOT telling the unadulterated truth - complete and un-fictional - was in any way acceptable.

What kind of society do we live in if people who tell lies, recklessly, are not made accountable for them?

@SeekingUnderstanding

“A great shame that she has been encouraged,by those who should know better, to believe that evasion of justice and its consequences was a valid path to pursue”.

Agreed. We’re back to the genesis of her habitual lying. Back to her upbringing where it must have been encouraged, consciously or otherwise. Or not sufficiently discouraged.

I wonder if having only a “single parent” at home,  from very early childhood, can make some sensitive children feel inadequate amongst their peers and so might lead to deception and excessive fantasy in relationships i.e. they are not at ease with others kids due to deep feelings of inferiority. The indelible image comes rushing to mind of the “grown-up” A.K. getting up and dancing on a table, or loudly strumming a single chord on her guitar, whenever she perceived (erroneously) that she being was left out of a conversation.

@Odysseus
Yes, quite. Genesis or Nemesis?
Whatever the -possibly complex- source of her dysfunctional behaviour, it certainly indicates a very poor, or fragmented, sense of self.
I am reminded of Jung saying how a person who is integrated, and has sufficient security (the ‘good enough’ model) is never concerned with impressing people. They don’t need to. And sadly, conversely, the hyper insecure personality is often painfully over-keen to impress others, to be praised, liked, noticed etc etc.etc.

Whoops, “being was” should be “was being” in post above. Indecision in sentence construction.

@Odysseus
Well, my brain automatically compensated!

@SeekingUnderstanding

Well said, I definitely agree with that. Especially your sensitive qualification of “sadly” with regard to the hyper-insecure personality. It’s not easy sometimes to keep that necessary compassion…

Only someone wanting to return later to clean up would lock the door and take the key with them.

A lone assasin with no intention of returning would not take the key with them.

Also, on initially attacking Meredith the attacker would not have been concerned with where the key is; and I think it’s unreal that, after the attack on Meredith, the perpetrator would have had time to look for a key.
Only someone who was familiar with the house and perhaps had a spare key.

Where next:

Or to next entry A New DNA Analysis Strongly Implicating Sollecito Seems to Have The Defense Forces Rattled

Or to previous entry Fast Forwarding And Minimalizing Demanded By Cassation Could See Appeal Conclude This Year