Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 45

I said no.

At the end, the judge asked what I thought of as a few inconsequential questions, such as, Did I turn up the heat when I got to the villa that Friday morning? Did we have heat in the bathroom, or was it cold? Rather, the judge was trying to catch me in an inconsistency. Why would I come home to a cold house when I could have showered at Raffaele's?

Then it was over.

In the past I hadn't been great at standing up for myself. I was proud that this time was different.

When the hearing ended, I got two minutes to talk to my lawyers before the guards led me out of the courtroom. "I was nervous when you first spoke," Luciano admitted, "but by the end I was proud of you."

Carlo said, "Amanda, you nailed it. You came across as a nice, intelligent, sincere girl. You left a good impression."

I took this to mean that I didn't come across as "Foxy Knoxy."

For a while during the trial, the guards would let my parents say h.e.l.lo and good-bye to me in the stairwell just before I left the courthouse for the day. My mom, my dad, Deanna, Aunt Christina, and Uncle Kevin were waiting for me there that day. They hugged me tightly. "We're so proud of you," they said.

I hadn't felt this good since before Meredith was murdered.

After another few days in court, the judge called a two-month summer break.

Chapter 27

September 1October 9, 2009

The court-ordered summer vacation seemed as endless as the summers of my childhood. But in those days, summer meant freedom; now summer meant confinement. Two wasted months in captivity. At the end I would be no closer to getting out than I was on the first day.

In early September Luciano, Carlo, and another lawyer in Carlo's office, Maria Del Grosso, drove to Capanne to see me.

Carlo leaned across the table in the visitors' room. "Amanda," he said. "They're wrong!"

His customary pessimism had vanished. "There was no blood on the knife," he said. "And there was so little DNA present they didn't have enough to get valid results. We have everything we need to overturn the case!"

I leapt up. Bouncing around on the b.a.l.l.s of my feet, I had so much to say that the words tangled in my mouth. "Thank you!" I said. "You did it! Tell me! How did you figure it out?"

The proof, he said, was in the papers.

We'd been asking to see the prosecution's notes and test results since before the pretrial. Only by following in the Polizia Scientifica's footsteps could we understand how the prosecution's DNA a.n.a.lyst, Patrizia Stefanoni, had come up with her information.

The prosecution was legally required to share the evidence, but even on the pretrial judge's orders they hadn't released all of it.

That had been in September 2008. By then it was July 2009. Ten months had pa.s.sed. On the day the court recessed for the summer, Judge Ma.s.sei ordered the prosecution to give us the data.

They still held back some information, but within the papers they did give us, our forensic experts found the prosecution had failed to disclose a fact that should have prevented us from ever being charged. There was no way to tie this knife-and therefore, me-to Meredith's murder. I'd always known that it was impossible for Meredith's DNA to be on the knife, and I'd long known that the prosecution had leaked a.s.sumed evidence to the media. Now I knew that these mistakes weren't missteps. Stefanoni and her team had made giant, intentionally misleading leaps, to come up with results designed to confirm our guilt.

I was both ecstatic and furious. Thrilled to know I could reclaim my life. Furious that they would have imprisoned me knowing full well that there was evidence that exonerated me. "How could they have done this?" I asked my lawyers. "Please, please explain that to me."

Carlo, who'd never sugarcoated my situation, said, "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 for Mignini, appearing to be right superseded everything else. As I found out that summer, the determined prosecutor had a bizarre past, was being tried for abuse of office, and had a history of coming up with peculiar stories to prove his cases. His own case is currently pending on appeal.

In 2002, on the advice of a psychic, he reopened a decades-old cold case. The Monster of Florence was a serial killer who attacked courting couples in the 1970s and '80s. After murdering them he would take the women's body parts with him. Mignini exhumed the body of Dr. Francesco Narducci after the psychic told him that Narducci, who died in 1985, was the Monster and that he hadn't committed suicide, as had been supposed. Instead, Mignini believed that Narducci had been murdered by members of a satanic sect, who feared the Monster would expose them. He charged twenty people, including government officials, with being members of the same secret sect as the Monster.

Mignini had a habit of taking revenge on anyone who disagreed with him, including politicians, journalists, and officials. His usual tactic was to tap their telephones and sue or jail them. The most famous instance was the arrest of Italian journalist Mario Spezi, and the interrogation of Spezi's American a.s.sociate Douglas Preston, a writer looking into the Narducci case, who subsequently fled Italy.

In the hour we had each week to discuss my case, my lawyers had never thought there was a reason for us to talk about Mignini's outlandish history. Carlo and Luciano told me only when it became apparent that, for Mignini, winning his case against Raffaele and me was a Hail Mary to save his career and reputation.

"The whole story is insane!" I said. I couldn't take it in. It struck me that I was being tried by a madman who valued his career more than my freedom or the truth about Meredith's murder!

I felt calmer when we returned to the courtroom in mid-September. I imagine Raffaele did, too. The prosecution's forensic doc.u.ments had answered our lawyers' questions.

Standing confidently in front of the judge, Raffaele's lawyer Giulia Bongiorno made a speech that gave me even more cause for optimism. Keeping the raw data from us until July 30 had violated our rights as defendants. If we'd had it earlier-when we first requested it-it would have altered the trial from the beginning. "The question for the court," Bongiorno said, "is the DNA evidence decisive or not? If you believe it's not, then there hasn't been an injury to the rights of the defense. But if the DNA is decisive, you have to ask yourselves: Did the defense have the possibility to examine the data to be able to counter the conclusions? Did the defense have the diagrams, the electropheragrams, the quant.i.ty of DNA, the procedures? You have the answer.

"If you maintain that the missing doc.u.ments are decisive for the defense, you must nullify the order to stand trial."

Carlo picked up where Bongiorno stopped. "It's evident that the rights of the defense were not fulfilled," he said in a firm manner that presumed the judge and jury would agree. "If I'd had this data, I would have laid out a different defensive strategy from the beginning."

Our lawyers' arguments stirred up all my outrage. The prosecution had kept Raffaele and me in jail for twenty-one months for no reason. If the judges and jury were fair, they'd see that the prosecution had tried to thwart us.

After Carlo and Bongiorno pet.i.tioned to end the trial, the prosecution and civil lawyers fired back. They a.s.sured the judges and jury that the forensic evidence had been collected and interpreted 100 percent correctly, adding that there was a "mountain of evidence" proving our guilt.

Carlo had cautioned me that Judge Ma.s.sei would almost certainly not abort the trial. Too much media attention and controversy surrounded it. "That's okay," Carlo said. "Our motion puts the court on notice. They now know that we can and will refute each of the prosecution's arguments."

Even with Carlo's warning that I should not expect a quick end, I let my hopes rise. I'd already spent two frigid winters and two stifling summers behind bars. I'd missed two Christmases and two of my birthdays at home, two years of what should have been carefree college days. I'd missed out on my younger sisters' girlhoods. My mind spun with hopeful possibilities. What if they lose-today? What if the court accepts our pet.i.tion to abort the trial? Could this be it? Maybe I'll walk out of Capanne this afternoon!

That daydream lasted ten minutes. Everyone in the Hall of Frescoes stood for the second time that day. The judge and jury returned to their places. My heart was banging so hard I could hear it pound. Please, please. Say the trial is over!

Adjusting his gla.s.ses, Judge Ma.s.sei droned in his una.s.suming voice, "There will be no annulment. We'll hear both sides discuss the forensic evidence."

I swallowed hard and closed my eyes, willing my tears back in their ducts.

"We're hearing Dr. Gino first today, is it?" Judge Ma.s.sei asked.

Going or not going to these hearings was the single choice I was allowed to make. I chose to go. I took my seat and started listening.

No one was contesting the brutality of Meredith's death-only how it had happened and who was responsible.

Everyone believed that Rudy Guede had been there and that he had killed Meredith. He was already serving a thirty-year sentence for her s.e.xual a.s.sault and murder.

The goal of the prosecution was to prove that I had been there, too.

During the testimony phase, from January to July, witnesses discussed everything from my housekeeping habits to my character and s.e.xual activity. It was intensely personal, and sometimes mortifying.

Picking up after the summer break, the forensics phase lasted only three and a half weeks, but it was still interminable: hour after hour of examination and cross-examination. Witnesses were called to talk about the knife, the bra clasp, my "b.l.o.o.d.y" footprints, how my DNA could have mixed with Meredith's blood in the bathroom, and our alleged cleanup of the villa. Each expert explained how the evidence was found and doc.u.mented, how results were calculated and interpreted. They were dissecting a crime I hadn't committed, blaming me using terminology I didn't know. I felt like an observer at someone else's trial. The experts would say things like "Amanda's DNA was on the knife handle," and I would think, Who is this Amanda?