Category: Supreme Court
Monday, June 22, 2015
The Real Victim: Will The Cassation Report Promised Thursday Belatedly Suitably Acknowledge Her?
Posted by Slow Jane
It was a gloriously sunny early summer’s day.
I stepped out of the tube onto Tooting Broadway, with throngs of shoppers overflowing the pavements and schoolchildren milling around the bus stops in groups.
Now here at last, in Croydon Cemetery, fifteen bus stops later, I found Meredith’s grave, startling in its unexpectedness, after walking for quite a while, hopeless at following directions, having originally gone to the wrong graveyard altogether, the day before.
My heart pounded as her name suddenly leapt out at me.
The burial site is beautifully maintained, with miniature pink and red rose bushes and set in the peaceful landscaped grounds, with evergreens and lawns.
I stood for a while overcome with emotion, quite alone, with nobody in sight all around. I said a few prayers, including one pleading that Meredith’s murderers be brought to justice. I quietly sang Psalm 23 and pondered how this beautiful, funny, bright young student had lived a life that was all too short.
A feeling of pain - for her mother Arline and father John, and Stephanie, Lyle and John and for all her family and friends - contracted like a taut elastic band across my chest.
I recalled how at her funeral service at St John the Baptist Church many of the mourners, including sister Stephanie and friends from Leeds Uni had carried a single white rose each.
Stephanie read out a poem she wrote, ” Don’t Say Goodbye”. Her old school friends sang as a choir the requiem, In Paradisum. Two hymns sung at the service, on 14th December 2007, were “˜Abide with me” and “For the Beauty of the Earth”.
Meredith’s favourite record “With or without you” by U2 (below) was played.
As I sat on a creaky bench nearby under the shade of a gnarled old tree, I scribbled down the following lines:
- I came to pay my respects
To Meredith Kercher so dear
To all who knew her.
Go gently into that night
Enforced on you by the evil,
Those who walk in the darkness,
And you were in their path.
Your light shines
And the dark has not overcome it.
I write this article to reflect that this is about Meredith Kercher and her family and friends, and to reclaim the memory of her purity from the soiled agenda of the ex-defendants and the cruel IIP and FOA stalkers.
Stephanie Kercher had said, in response to Knox’s demand, on the launch of her “memoir”, that she be taken to visit Meredith’s grave, that Stephanie and her family just want a safe place for Meredith to rest in peace.
I cast my mind back to the news reports that broke in November 2013 that Raffaele Sollecito had nevertheless paid a “secret visit” to the spot. He had been in London in March 2013. He had the grace not to include pictures of the grave on his “London” Facebook page that he may have taken.
Newspaper reports reveal he was taken there by an “English friend” and left no flowers. The “friend” who was quick to betray Sollecito’s “secret” is speculated to be one Nigel Scott, ex-Lib Dem Councillor in Haringey, and a purported member of the Injustice in Perugia advisory board, the rather grand name of a lobby of aggressive pro-Knox advocates.
Scott put up a picture of the grave in a tweet ““ hastily taken down ““ as the news broke. He disparagingly refers to the grave as being in “poor condition”, with a temporary headstone marker.
His co-campaigner, Karen Pruett, maintains a Find A Grave webpage for Meredith and was forced by demand from enraged supporters of Meredith Kercher’s family to take down the picture of Meredith’s grave, most probably taken from the Daily Mail.
Notorious FOA poster Lyn Duncan - who tweets under the name of @Annella - and others, left “tributes” after the acquittal, despite one of their party, Doug Bremner Jr, having referred to the Kerchers as “Nazis” and another mocking Meredith’s grave lacking a headstone as late as 2011, when Knox was first acquitted by Hellmann, as shown in the Daily Mail.
Time has shown how Scott’s, Pruett’s and other Knox chums’ characters speak for themselves.
Meredith’s final resting place is beautiful, in a quietly understated way. The grave adjacent is of a Liverpool supporter aged 22, who died around about the same time as Mez, who was 21. It is very poignant to see.
Meredith’s headstone is fashioned out of marble and reads, ” We will always love you MEREDITH SUSANNA CARA KERCHER 28th Dec. 1985 ““ 1st Nov. 2007 Forever in our thoughts, always in our hearts.”
The temporary marker, so much derided by Knox’ supporters, remains at the foot. I left some Sweet Williams in a flower container and slowly walked away, moved and changed by the visit.
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