Waiting to be Heard
I decided this month to take a look at true crime and this week features the falsely accused, making this weeks book Waiting to be Heard by Amanda Knox.
Now, most people are aware, even if only peripherally, of Amanda Knox’s story. She was the American student in Italy whose roommate was brutally murdered, and Knox was charged with and tried for her murder, convicted, then acquitted, convicted again, then finally acquitted. This is the story of what happened from Amanda’s perspective.
So in 2007 she’s 20 years old, and she approaches her parents about studying for a year in Italy. Like most of us that age, she was trying to find herself, and thought that a year out on her own, away from all that was familiar, might provide her with a pathway to her adult self.
This is not an unreasonable way to think, one needs that distance from the familiar to find out who they can really be, and so it was with great excitement that she set out for Perugia Italy for her year abroad.
And in short order she had found a room to rent with roommates Laura and Filomena and then while Amanda was visiting relatives in Germany, the fourth room was rented out to British student Meredith Kercher, which whom Amanda had a lot in common. They were both native English speakers, both in Italy for a year to study the language intensively, about a year apart in age….there was a strong basis for a lifelong friendship when they met. And they were building on that, over the 8-ish weeks they lived together before the tragic events of November 1, 2007.
Just about a week before, October 25, Meredith and Amanda had attended a concert together. Meredith left at intermission to meet with other friends of hers, but Amanda stayed, and met Raffaele Solecito. And Amanda can’t help but speculate what would have been different had she and Raffaele not met. I mean, he would have never been embroiled in the coming events. But would Amanda herself have been a victim? Or would having two of them at home together, Amanda and Meredith, been enough to stop what happened entirely?
What if’s will drive you crazy, and you cannot change the past. Amanda and Raffaele did meet and were instantly smitten with each other, rapidly spending every moment together, so that Amanda was spending the night at Raffaele’s place on November 1, 2007, as they talked about travel plans for the long weekend.
November 2, Amanda went home for a quick shower and to grab a mop, since Raffaele’s sink had flooded the night before. And when she got there, Amanda noticed the door was open. Not necessarily unusual, as the lock was not working properly. And she noticed a few other things. Drops of blood, which she wasn’t sure if she had started her period. Although the blood was dry, and when she noticed that she became concerned. Mostly because Meredith WAS fastidious with house keeping, especially in common areas, like the bathroom, where the blood was found. With that spooky thought, Amanda returned to Raffaele’s and said hey, something weird is going on at my house, will you come back with me.
And he did. And the police were called. And from there, Amanda went through the looking glass, into an absolute bizarro world of speculation and small town mentality. Like… I read Franz Kafka’s The Trial last week because I had read or heard somewhere that no matter what the protagonist Josef K. said, it was twisted to showcase his guilt. THAT theme was not present in The Trial, but holy hell was it present in Knox’s book.
Now, Knox was brutally self-reflective about how naïve she was with the police. I think she was unfair to herself. MOST people try to cooperate with the police. We’re raised that the police are there to help. I was a criminal justice major, I KNOW how deceptive police can be when they are seeking answers, and its entirely possible I’d have fallen into the same traps Amanda did. Why? Well, I distinctly remember one of my classes, we were discussing how criminal justice works around the world. And where America is adversarial, Europe is cooperative. Amanda even references that Italian criminal justice was supposed to be cooperative. Reading her lived experiences…it was decidedly less than advertised.
Her lawyer at one point even succinctly spelled it out for her: “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.”
And that literally sums up the investigation. Amanda wasn’t reacting the way the police thought she should, and so she was seen as suspicious. Basically, cultural differences sunk her.
Now, where I personally might have stopped the cooperation, was when they wanted to interview me a second time. More tellingly is that all of her roommates, immediately lawyered up. That might have given me pause as well. At least should have called the US embassy, which her aunt urged her to do, and hindsight being 20/20, she knows she should have. But she wanted to be helpful. She wanted to help the police catch whoever had done this, never realizing that they thought they already had.
Throughout the book, alarming statistics are introduced. Something like 95% of trials in Italy result in conviction. Of those convictions, 50% are later overturned! Fucking crazy! But if you think that’s crazy, it’s not like America’s doing much better, and whereas Italy will allow a conviction to be overturned on a second look at the evidence, which is what happened with Amanda’s case, in America, we only set aside a conviction if there’s a procedural error, or absolute proof of innocence….like DNA evidence that doesn’t match. And even then, you need a sympathetic judge who’s willing to look at it.
For Amanda, after her initial conviction, her attorney’s immediately got to work on her appeal, and she got a very good judge on the appeal, who saw the totality of evidence did not support the prosecutions increasingly bizarre and convoluted theory of the crime, and Amanda and Raffaele were acquitted.
Now…I knew this happened. I watched from America as the trial and theories unfolded and decided Italy was more interested in reviving the 15th century inquisition that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake than justice and so Italy suddenly became a no fly zone….which is stupid. You are far more likely to be falsely imprisoned by your home country where you spend 99% of your time than by the tiny amount of time you spend on vacation somewhere else, but what was happening to Amanda was sufficiently horrifying I couldn’t even imagine myself going to Italy for a week long tour of Rome for fear I’d end up tied to the stake next.
All of that is to say, when she was acquitted, I cried. Then and reading the book. Her absolute joy screams from the pages, and the joy her fellow inmates had for her made me cry. And her tension when the prosecution appealed the acquittal and she and Raffaele were again found guilty. She was in America at this point, but she has to keep apprised of what’s going on. In Italy, the prosecution can appeal a court decision just as the defense can. And the prosecution wasn’t about to let their theory of the crime go. The prosecutor was a joke too, although I don’t want to go into just how fucked up he was, the details are in the book and will horrify you as much as they did me.
Italian courts allow for I believe three appeals up to the highest court, and whatever the highest court decides, that stands, and there are no more appeals. And on March 27, 2015, the Corte di Cassazione acquitted Amanda and Raffaele on all charges. Which was a huge relief for all parties. Raffaele because he would have been instantly incarcerated with no hope for freedom before his sentence was served. Amanda was in the United States at this time, but Italy would have requested extradition. And while there’s a good chance the US would have refused to extradite, she would never have been able to travel outside the country again, because once she leaves the States, she could be extradited from whatever country she traveled to. But they were acquitted. And not just found, not guilty. Not guilty can mean there isn’t enough evidence to convict, not necessarily that you didn’t do it. They were both found factually innocent. Which, of course they were.
This book was outstanding. I mean, I knew the outcome. I watched the trial from America, I saw the Netflix special which came out in 2016. And for all that, it was still edge of my seat reading, to get those details that were not provided in trial or in Netflix, or the Joe Rogan interview. And I read with slow creeping horror as we got closer to the date of the murder, then with frustrated angst as I saw the verbal traps she fell into with the Perugia police, I shared her outrage over the prosecutor’s bizarre exaggerations and twisting of the truth. And her sorrow and horror when she was initially convicted to 26 years in Italian prison. And cried for joy when she was released.
I picked this book because Amanda has a new book coming out at the end of this month, and I’m trying to squish it into my reading list this year, but I wanted to see how she was as an author. And I can report she is an EXCELLENT author. Who lived through a horrifyingly tragic incident, for which she was blamed, despite being innocent. All she wanted was to learn Italian and find herself. Which…I mean she did. She succeeded on both counts. But man, what a price to pay. I don’t think even Amanda would recommend four years in an Italian prison as a means to learn the language and find yourself.
