Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 28

The officer who confiscated the knife claimed that he'd been drawn to it by "investigative intuition." It had struck him as suspiciously clean, as though we'd scrubbed it. When he chose it, he didn't even know the dimensions of Meredith's stab wounds.

The knife was a game changer for my lawyers, who now feared that the prosecution was mishandling evidence and building an unsubstantiated case against me. Carlo and Luciano went from saying that the lack of evidence would prove my innocence to warning me that the prosecution was out to get me, and steeling me for a fight. "There's no counting on them anymore," Carlo said. "We're up against a witch hunt. But it's going to be okay."

They were confident that once our forensic consultants could show how wrong the prosecution was, we would ultimately win. But I also think their promises were meant to keep me from spinning into crisis, especially since I only saw them once a week.

I was choked with fear. The knife was my first inkling that the investigation was not going as I'd expected. I didn't accept the possibility that the police were biased against me. I believed that the prosecution would eventually figure out that it wasn't the murder weapon and that I wasn't the murderer. In retrospect I understand that the police were determined to make the evidence fit their theory of the crime, rather than the other way around, and that theory hinged on my involvement. But something in me refused to see this then.

Soon after the knife news came out, the police came to the prison to confiscate my purse/book bag. I was called down to la piano terra-"the ground floor"-to witness the seizure from storage and once again sign a doc.u.ment. They took what was left of the bag's contents after the interrogation-my textbooks and notebooks for school, my wallet, a book of poems I'd been reading, my journal.

My journal must have been what they were looking for, because Meredith's British girlfriends testified after my arrest that I'd been writing in it in the waiting room at the questura. I had done so to calm myself, but soon the contents were leaked to the press. In it, they found, among other things, my comments about wanting to compose a song in tribute to Meredith. (Ironically, I would later get a bill for the translation of the journal into Italian.)

The police officer who retrieved my things that day was the same one who usually came to the prison when the prosecution wanted to confiscate my belongings or have me sign a doc.u.ment about forensic a.n.a.lysis-an unshaven, overweight man with a crew cut. He was the cop who, during the interrogation, thought I'd told him, "f.u.c.k you!" and who yelled it back at me.

He asked if I'd seen the news about the murder weapon.

I glared at him. "It's a mistake," I said. "I wasn't anywhere near Meredith when she was murdered and neither was Raffaele's knife."

The officer shook his head and laughed derisively. "Another story? Another lie?" he scoffed. He looked at me as if I were the most vile, worthless thing he'd ever laid eyes on. No one had ever stared at me with so much hatred. To him, I was a lying, remorseless murderer. I heaved back great waves of anger but waited to get back to my cell before I broke down at the ugliness of it all-my friend being dead, my being in prison, the police following a cold and irrational trail because they had nothing better.

Chapter 18

November 2007

During my first few days in prison, I would have loved any distraction, but the TV was covered up and declared off-limits. When I moved in with Gufa, I went from no news to a barrage. The TV blared practically 24/7.

Lupa, the agente who helped me so much in my early time at Capanne, had cautioned me: "The media are saying horrible things about you. Don't pay attention to it," she advised. "It will just upset you."

She was right.

My Italian was still elementary enough that if I wasn't paying close attention, I couldn't grasp much of what was being said. I embraced my new routine-do as many sit-ups as I could manage, write, read, repeat-as if ignoring the reports would make me immune to them, that they couldn't hurt me. I convinced myself that whatever awful things the media were saying about me were irrelevant to the case. It doesn't matter, I told myself. But in my heart I knew it did.

Mentally tuning out the TV helped, but it was impossible to drown out all the coverage-there was a television set bolted to the wall in every cell, and the set and I were locked in the same room twenty-three hours a day. The screen was flooded with my image. I felt as though I were looking at someone else. A picture of me talking to detectives outside the villa was a news channel staple. They replayed the footage again and again, often in slow motion, of Raffaele and me kissing in the villa's front yard after Meredith's body was found. They're making it into something it wasn't. The way they're manipulating this, people will think Amanda just couldn't keep her lips off Raffaele. They acted as though our affection showed such a flagrant disregard for Meredith that it was obvious Raffaele and I were hiding the truth. The commentators pointed to our consoling kisses as proof that we were capable of murder. Their remarks were so unfair, their expressions so smug. I wanted to scream, "Look into our faces! Do we really look ready to jump on each other and have s.e.x in the driveway?" What I saw then-and see now-is a young girl and guy in shock.

I felt violated, indignant that journalists could say or imply anything they wanted, that they could use my photo as a symbol of evil. I now understood the belief in some tribal cultures that having your picture taken robs you of your soul.

Reporters also plundered my Mys.p.a.ce page, and this felt just as intrusive.

When I created my social networking profile in high school, borrowing the soccer moniker my teammates had given me when I was thirteen seemed safer than using my real name. Sure, I knew foxy meant "s.e.xy" or "sa.s.sy," but that was the irony of it-and the fun. My soccer girlfriends had ironic and sa.s.sy nicknames, too. Martinez was Martini; Miller was Miller Light; Trisha was Trash. By college, when I graduated to Facebook, I seldom looked at Mys.p.a.ce. I could never have dreamed that something so harmless could later have such d.a.m.ning results, that the prosecution would focus on my nickname's other meanings-"wily" or "tricky."

Overnight my old nickname became my new persona. I was now known to the world as Foxy Knoxy or, in Italian, Volpe Cattiva-literally, "Wicked Fox."

"Foxy Knoxy" was necessary to the prosecution's case. A regular, friendly, quirky schoolgirl couldn't have committed these crimes. A wicked fox would be easier to convict.

They were convinced that Meredith had been raped-they'd found her lying on the floor half undressed, a pillow beneath her hips-and that the s.e.xual violence had escalated to homicidal violence.

They theorized that the break-in was faked.

To make me someone whom a jury would see as capable of orchestrating the rape and murder of my friend, they had to portray me as a s.e.xually deviant, volatile, hate-filled, amoral, psychopathic killer. So they called me Foxy Knoxy. That innocent nickname summed up all their ideas about me.

"Foxy Knoxy" also helped sell newspapers. The tabloids mined my Mys.p.a.ce profile and drew the most salacious conclusions. I resented that they took my posts and pictures out of context, emphasizing only the negative. A photo of me dressed in black and reclining provocatively on a piano bench, a shot my sister Deanna had taken for a high school photography cla.s.s, circulated. They published parts of a short story I'd written for a UW creative writing cla.s.s, about an older brother angrily confronting his younger brother for raping a woman. The media read a lot into that. There were pictures of me at parties and in the company of male friends, and a video showing me drunk. These were snippets of my teenage and college years. Not shown were the pictures of me riding my bike, opening Christmas presents, playing soccer, performing onstage in my high school's production of The Sound of Music. Looked at together, these latter images would have portrayed a typical American girl, not as tame as some, not as experimental as many, but typical among my age group-a group that had the bad judgment to put our lives online. Now, at twenty, all I could think was, Who's writing these articles? Is no one being fair?

"Foxy Knoxy, the Girl Who Had to Compete with Her Own Mother for Men" ran in England's Daily Mail. The writer speculated that my mom's marriage to Chris, a man they described as "young enough to be [my] own brother," intensified my feelings of rejection that "culminated" in Meredith's death. They conveniently overlooked the part of my Mys.p.a.ce page that read, "Foxy Knoxy's heroes." My answer was: "My mom."

My supposedly obsessive promiscuity generated countless articles in three countries, much of it based on information the police fed to the press. It seemed that the prosecutor's office released whatever they could to bolster their theory of a s.e.x game gone wrong. They provided descriptions of Raffaele's and my public displays of affection at the questura and witness statements that portrayed me as a girl who brought home strange men. Whatever the sources, the details made for a juicy story: attractive college students, s.e.x, violence, mystery.

I became the embodiment of everyone's worst fears of, or fantasies about, a s.e.xually aggressive woman. I could't deny that I'd hooked up with a couple of guys in Perugia whom I hadn't known well. But I hadn't sought out men because I was obsessed with s.e.x. I was experimenting with my s.e.xuality. My reaction to being characterized as a femme fatale was Me? Really? Of all people!

Along with my exaggerated s.e.xual history, people found it tantalizing that I didn't look like a depraved murderer. The press said that I had "the face of an angel but the eyes of a killer" or "an angel's face and a demon's soul." Suddenly I had a "secret side."

Soon after I got to Capanne, I started getting fan mail-some from people who thought I was innocent, and some from strangers who said they were in love with me. I appreciated the encouraging letters and was shocked, and baffled, by the others. It seemed to me that these men-often prisoners themselves-had written me by mistake. Their pa.s.sionate, sometimes p.o.r.nographic scribbling had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the media's creepy, hypers.e.xual creation. I'd never imagined that I would be bombarded with such perverted attention. And if I was drop-dead s.e.xy, it was news to me.

Vice-Comandante Argir always made a production out of opening my mail, winking and chattering about how many admirers I had. But I got at least as much hate mail as I did supportive and provocative letters combined. Some of it terrified me, especially the chicken-scratch notes with no return address that said they knew where my parents were staying and planned to cut up their faces. What if they followed through? I warned Mom to be careful, to close her windows at night. And after one particularly threatening letter, I told Argir, hoping he'd alert my mom right away. "Forget about it," he said, dismissively. "They're just words."

I felt terrible that my mom and dad had abandoned their regular lives to come to Italy, and that their spouses back home were being hounded by journalists and paparazzi, who staked out their houses, waiting for them to come or go, knocking on the door and phoning them incessantly. The people who hated me couldn't get to me in prison, but there was nothing I could do to protect my family.

Nor could I deflect the overpowering attention being given to "the Wicked Fox." The real me had been lost. It seemed as though people were putting me in a costume that trapped me even more than the iron bars I lived behind.

The portrait the prosecution and media created of me as s.e.x-charged led some people to make sure that everything Raffaele and I had done in the days following the murder, every errand we ran, appeared s.e.xual. Soon after the first few Foxy Knoxy stories showed up, the owner of Bubble, the cheap teen shop where Raffaele and I had stopped the night after Meredith's body was found, told journalists that I'd bought a red G-string. Stories ran under headlines such as "Pictures of the Moment Foxy Knoxy Went Shopping for s.e.xy Lingerie the Day After Meredith's Murder," quoting Raffaele supposedly saying, "I'm going to take you home so we can have wild s.e.x together."

As usual Luciano and Carlo filled me in on this story. "But I didn't buy s.e.xy underwear!" I protested. "And Raffaele didn't say that. It was red, but it's a pair of bikini briefs with a cartoon cow on it. I was locked out of my house and had only the clothes I was wearing."

"I'm sorry to even ask you about it, Amanda," Carlo said gently. "We just needed to know what to make of the claim."

Carlo and Luciano urged my family and me to ignore the media. They organized a short press conference at which my parents read a statement saying that I was innocent. After that, the lawyers refused to allow my family to answer any questions from journalists. We'd learned that anything could be turned around and used against us.

"The media are about as evil as you can get," Carlo would say. "They're going to do whatever makes money. Anyone who meets you will see you're not the girl the prosecution and press are portraying, but journalists aren't interested in hearing that you're a good girl. We have to do that in the courtroom. Don't worry. We'll have our chance."

I didn't know that my parents were debating this approach with the lawyers. Mom and Dad wanted to stand up to the media. They understood that once damaging words are unleashed, they stick. To protect one another from added pain, there was a lot Mom, Dad, and I didn't say during our visits.

Besides all the lies about my out-of-control s.e.x life, people started pitting Meredith and me against each other. It had never been that way when she was alive. Meredith's British girlfriend Robyn b.u.t.terworth gave a witness statement after my arrest claiming that Meredith had complained about my loud singing and poor toilet hygiene. Police leaked parts of the testimony to the press, and like so many other things, normal moments in the lives of housemates were refas.h.i.+oned into a motive for murder. I do sing loudly and often. And I knew Meredith had been embarra.s.sed to tell me that the toilet needed to be brushed after each use. I'm embarra.s.sed to think that she may have put off bringing it up with me until it happened a few times. Still, I thought she probably hadn't complained as much as mentioned it to friends or family to ask how to handle it so she wouldn't hurt my feelings.

The idea that Meredith and I had been at odds ramped up quickly in the press. A couple of weeks after Robyn's statement came out, investigators announced they'd found my blood on the faucet in the bathroom that Meredith and I had shared. Prosecutor Mignini hypothesized that the two of us had gotten into a fistfight and I'd wound up with a b.l.o.o.d.y nose. The truth was far less dramatic-and less interesting. I'd just gotten multiple piercings in both ears, and I took out all eleven earrings so that I could wipe my ears each morning while the shower water heated up. When I noticed the tiny droplets of blood in the sink the day Meredith's body was discovered, I thought the blood had come from my ears, as it had on another day, until I scratched the porcelain and realized the blood was dry. That must have been what was on the faucet.

Meredith had been dead for just three weeks. I still could barely process the loss of my friend. It infuriated me that the media were rewriting our relations.h.i.+p to fit their storyline. I was a monster. Meredith was a saint. The truth was that we were very much alike. She was more contained than I was, but we were both young girls who studied seriously and wanted to do well, who wanted to make friends, and who'd had a few casual s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps.

Raffaele didn't demonize me, but he did publicly renounce me. Answering questions through his lawyer, he told one journalist, "If I am here it's her fault above all. I am conscious that contrary to what I thought, our paths have diverged profoundly."

When asked what he'd like to say to me, his answer was "Nothing. I have absolutely nothing to say to her."

I didn't know what to think about Raffaele. Hearing that he'd destroyed my alibi was as baffling as it was incensing. Saying I'd put him up to lying was inexcusable and painful. And now this, I thought. Did I misjudge him? I didn't think so, but I wasn't at all sure what to make of him. One day we were really close, and the next he announced that he'd dropped me. Had this come from him? His lawyers? Journalists? I rationalized that I wasn't the Italian girl he needed. I tried to be forgiving. If Raffaele doesn't want to talk to me again, I'll understand. This has been traumatic for everyone. But sometimes I was just angry.

I was nursing these hurts when I got news so shattering that it blotted out almost everything else. I was at my nightly infirmary appointment, where I was meeting with a doctor I'd never seen before. Dressed in a white lab coat, my medical file in hand, he said, "We got the results of your blood test." His bedside manner was as warm as gelato. "You tested positive for HIV."

I was so shocked I couldn't think. I couldn't make sense of what he was saying.