Within minutes of meeting Amanda Knox for the first time, she plants her newborn daughter into my arms. Yes, Amanda Knox has a baby. She is in orange plaid pants and a wrinkled button-down shirt, her hair in a high bun, looking like a new mom who has not slept in a while. You remember her story, right? By then Rudy Guede , an acquaintance and known burglar who was convicted of the crime, had served eight years of a year sentence.
It is exactly 10 years since Knox was released from prison, chased through the winding roads of Perugia to a safe house in Rome before boarding a flight home, its touchdown in Seattle covered live by the news. And yet Knox, who is now an advocate for the wrongfully convicted, is still trying to square that caricature of herself — her murderous doppelganger, as she calls her — with who she really is, what she is allowed to be and the way her daughter will see her.
How much time should she spend trying to convince people of her innocence? To what extent is it okay for her to profit from the fame she never wanted?
For nearly four years Knox existed in a kind of legal purgatory, acquitted on appeal, and trying to live her life, but knowing she could be retried. Knox has long had a complicated relationship with the media. But while her legal purgatory may be over, a kind of cultural purgatory remains. How do you move forward when the tiniest details of your life can spur a tabloid frenzy? How do you grapple with using that name — to build a life or an identity or a career — when there is a dead woman whose tragic story is dredged up every time you speak?
What happened that night in Perugia may be debated forever. But there are some basic facts — not rumours, not wild theories from the prosecution, not tabloid spin. The body of Meredith Kercher, a year-old student at the University of Leeds, in northern England, was discovered in her bedroom in the house she shared with three room-mates, including Knox, on November 2nd, Guede — whose bloody fingerprints were found on the walls of the room, and his DNA on her clothes and inside her vagina — was tried separately from Knox and Sollecito and convicted before their trial began.
Nina Burleigh, an investigative journalist who covered the trial from Perugia. Guede was released last year. It would later be determined that there was no biological trace of Knox or Sollecito in the bedroom, according to court documents.
But after an all-night interrogation — in which Knox said she was hit in the back of the head by police and did not have a lawyer or interpreter present — Knox signed a confession, written in Italian, placing her at the house and accusing Patrick Lumumba , a Congolese bar owner who had been her boss, of the crime.
Knox recanted within hours, and the confession was later ruled inadmissible in court, but Knox would be convicted of defaming Lumumba. Any high-profile court case is as much a media battle as a legal one. She had not. In Britain as in Ireland , once a suspect has been charged, the law forbids journalists from speculating on their guilt or innocence until a verdict is reached, says Lieve Gies, a media scholar at the University of Leicester who studied the case.
But because this crime played out in Italy, she says, that rule did not apply. Knox was perceived as an unsophisticated American, loud and flamboyant, ignorant of Italian culture. An exhibitionist and slob who brought strange men to the house.
A sexual deviant who competed with her mother for attention, as the tabloids suggested. Finally, Knox called her mother in Seattle, who told her to call the police. Two officers soon appeared at the scene; they were postal police officers, used to investigating postal crimes, not murder investigations. They entered the apartment to investigate, and kicked down the door to Kercher's bedroom. Inside, they found Kercher's body on the floor, covered in a duvet that was soaked in blood.
Knox and Sollecito were taken to the police station, and for five days, they were interrogated. Later, Knox would say that no interpreter was present. Though her mother urged her to flee the country, Knox chose to stay in Perugia, wanting to meet Kercher's family.
Knox later said that she was bullied and beaten while in police custody. Finally, Sollecito admitted that Knox could have left his apartment at night while he was sleeping. When detectives presented this to Knox as an accusation, she broke down. Knox signed a confession saying that she had returned to her apartment on the night of November 1, , and had been standing in the next room while Lumumba stabbed Kercher to death.
On November 6, , Italian police announced that Kercher's killers had been found, and Knox and Sollecito were arrested. Lumumba had an alibi — he was seen bartending at Le Chic on the night of the murder. Two weeks later, a forensics lab reported the results of its examination of DNA evidence taken from the crime scene.
The evidence didn't point to Knox or Sollecito — it pointed to someone else: Rudy Guede, a friend of the Italian men who lived in the apartment below Knox's and Kerchner's apartment. Guede had been accused of several burglaries but didn't have any convictions on his record. He was immediately arrested in Germany, and admitted to being at the murder scene, but stated that he didn't kill Kercher.
He also stated that Knox and Sollecito were not involved. Guede opted for a fast-track trial. In October , he was found guilty of the murder and sexual assault of Kercher and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Knox and Sollecito chose to have a full trial and were tried together. The Perugian prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, painted a picture of Knox that shaped how the public saw her. He described a sex-crazed marijuana smoker who had dragged her boyfriend into a game of rough sex that ended in Kercher's murder — even calling Knox a "she-devil.
Knox's family and many supporters, mostly American, protested the sentencing. With a beautiful young woman at its center, the case became an international sensation. Supporters criticized the Italian legal system, which they said had major flaws, and claimed Knox was discriminated against because she was American and because she was an attractive young woman.
In April , Knox's and Sollecito's lawyers filed appeals, contesting the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses. The appeal process began in December This time, forensic experts said that DNA used in the first trial was unreliable.
In June , the defense called a witness who testified that, in prison, Guede had said Knox and Sollecito were not involved in the murder. Knox and Sollecito had support in their appeal from the Idaho Innocence project, a legal organization that uses DNA testing to prove the innocence of wrongly convicted people.
On October 3, , two years after their first trial, the murder convictions against Knox and Sollecito were overturned. Knox's prior conviction for defaming Patrick Lumumba was upheld, and she was sentenced to a three-year term and fined.
Upon the announcement of the verdict, reporters' cameras caught Knox breaking into tears. Not long after returning home, Knox picked up her studies at the University of Washington, majoring in creative writing. Whether it's coining new theories on what the Mona Lisa was thinking, or wondering about the stranger opposite us on the tube, we possess an endless capacity to speculate on a person's character, thoughts, and motivations based on the slender evidence of a facial expression.
The eyes, it is said, are windows to the soul. They are not. They are organs for converting light into electro-magnetic impulses. But this has never stopped us dreaming of them that way. Amanda Knox wasn't able to communicate her thoughts and feelings directly, either to the police or to the wider public. Her Italian, at the time of the murder, was poor, and her arraignment meant that she couldn't speak to the media. But there were plenty of pictures to go on. There was, therefore, an even greater emphasis on her expressions and physical behaviour than there would normally be in such a situation, right from the beginning.
This focus on the superficial shaped not just Knox's fortunes in the original trial, but her reputation around the world. Italian prosecutors were quick to leak stories about Knox doing cartwheels while in custody, because they knew the image, even if only imagined, would lead people to conclude that she was guilty. When the press published pictures of Knox with a smile on her face, readers around the world reacted the same way: no innocent person accused of a crime would behave like this.
An Italian friend of Kercher's, Giacomo Silenzi, was widely quoted: "Her eyes didn't seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved. It is astonishing how quick we are to draw conclusions about how a person ought to look or behave in circumstances we haven't ourselves even come close to experiencing.
How many of us have returned to our home after a night away to discover that our flatmate has been brutally murdered? How many of us can know what it feels like to be at the sharp end of a punishing interrogation, in a foreign country, carried out by men in uniform who seem absolutely convinced that they know what happened, who are as certain as we are confused, fearful and exhausted?
None of us. And yet we feel free to blithely pronounce, from a great distance, on whether someone in this situation is "acting weird" or not. What does it stem from, this over-confidence in facile intuitions about what other people are thinking? It probably has something to do with our innate difficulty in recognising that other people are as fully rounded and complex as we are. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton University, points out that there is a fundamental asymmetry about the way two human beings relate to one another in person.
When you meet someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs — your thoughts, and their face. As a result we tend to judge others on what we see, and ourselves by what we feel. Pronin calls this "the illusion of asymmetric insight". You know when you're hiding your true thoughts and feelings — pretending to be fascinated by your boss's endless anecdote, or grinning your way through an agonising first date — but you nonetheless tend to assume the other's appearance tells the full story of how they feel: if she's smiling, it's because she's genuinely enjoying herself.
Studies have found that people over-estimate how much they can learn from others in job interviews, while at the same time maintaining that others can only get a glimpse of them from such brief encounters.
The model we seem to work with is something like this: I am infinitely subtle, complex and never quite what I seem; you are predictable and straightforward, an open book. Of course, the asymmetry is likely to be particularly lopsided when we don't know the person; when we have only seen pictures of them on TV, in newspapers and magazines.
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