A lurid murder in an Italian city where murders are rare continues to draw media attention from throughout Europe and the United States.
The grisly November slaying of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old student from Great Britain, lends itself to stereotypes straight out of a made-for-TV movie.
“There’s a beautiful American, a femme fatale. There’s the Italian loner (her boyfriend),” says Zachary Nowak, a writer from the U.S. who lives in Perugia, a small city north of Rome.
Police investigating the case have also arrested a native of Africa who now lives in Italy. His presence has fed into anti-immigration feelings in Italy, even though the immigrant has been in Italy for several years and was taken in by a prominent family there, Nowak adds.
Kercher, a native of London and student at the University of Leeds, was spending the year studying in Perugia under the Erasmus Student Network program. She spent a month at the University for Foreigners to get her Italian up to speed and then started taking classes at the University of Perugia.
Her body was found in her rented room on the morning of Nov. 2. Police said her throat was slit and she may have been sexually violated.
On Nov. 6, police charged Amanda Marie Knox, 20, an American student from Seattle, in the slaying.
Knox had a room next to Kercher’s. Her boyfriend of two weeks, Raffaele Sollectio, 23, an Italian studying computer science in Perugia, has also been charged in the killing.
Later, police arrested Rudy Hermann Guede, 20, a native of the Ivory Coast who has lived in Perugia for several years. He was extradited from Germany to face charges. Police also held, but then released, a fourth person, the owner of the bar where Knox worked.
Knox, Sollectio and Guede remain in custody, and a trial might not take place before November. All three deny guilt, though police say there is evidence that places them at the scene of the crime.
Initially, police theorized that Kercher may have been killed by accident after she refused sexual advances, though they have given shifting accounts of who was or wasn’t in the room when she died.
Nowak, the author of a guidebook to Perugia, has assisted journalists in covering the story and plans to do a book on the case himself.
Reporters from the major Italian and European cities began to come to Perugia the day after the killing, he says. Reporters for U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, were not far behind. Since then, CNN, Fox News, ABC News and Dateline NBC have done stories.
Knox, a student from the University of Washington also studying at the University for Foreigners, has changed her account of the evening of the murder several times.
The European media has followed every twist and turn, often referring to her as “Foxy Knoxy,” the name Knox gave herself on her MySpace profile.
In a kind of trial by website, journalists freely quote passages from that profile and from Knox’s Facebook entry. (Both have now been taken down.)
Seemingly innocent lines like “I love to meet new people. The bigger and scarier the roller coaster, the better,” have been crammed into the context of the slaying. Similarly, a short story Knox wrote about the drugging and raping of a young woman is cited often.
Sollecito had a blog on another social networking site that contained a now widely circulated picture of him wrapped head-to-toe in what look to be white bandages. He holds a meat cleaver in one hand.
Knox’s leaked prison diaries, and writings and messages from the other suspects keep showing up in Italian newspapers, Nowak says, offering new versions of events.
Nowak, a native of the Rochester, N.Y., area and a graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio, has become a kind of sidebar to the story himself.
At the time of Kercher’s death, he was just days away from the release of his first novel, a mystery called Murder in Perugia.
Even though there is no murder in his novel, despite its title, Nowak decided it would be in bad taste to publish his book now, so he’ll bring it out at a later date.
Just as the people involved in the real murder seem to have been sensationalized, Perugia itself been made to seem more decadent than it is, Nowak says. The Times of London wrote, “(Perugia) is a pretty, medieval hill town, although not without a darker side. Drugs and tensions between different communities can be a problem.”
The city of 165,000 people hosts about 40,000 Italian students and 6,000 students from other countries a year.
Before Kercher’s death, there were only four murders in Perugia in the six years he has lived there, Nowak says. A similar number might occur in some U.S. cities in a week.
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2 Comments
#1. Harry Rag 12.01.2008
There are two excellent pro-evidence, pro-victim websites about the Meredith Kercher case.
True Justice For Meredith Kercher:
http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php
Perugia Murder File:
http://perugiamurderfile.freeforums.org/index.php
ALL the judges who have been involved in the case: Judge Claudia Matteini, the judges at the Italian Supreme Court, judge Massimo Riccarelli, and judge Paolo Micheli all thought there were serious indications of Amanda Knox’s and Raffaele Sollecito’s guilt and refused to grant them bail on the grounds that they are mentally unstable, dangerous and could reoffend.
The case against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito is formidable.
There are 13 pieces of forensic evidence that link Amanda and Raffaele to the crime, including Amanda’s DNA on the handle of the knife found at Raffaele’s apartment and Meredith’s DNA on the blade, and Amanda’s bare footprints set in Meredith’s blood and Raffaele’s DNA on Meredith’s bloodied and cut bra.
Amanda and Raffaele knew precise details about Meredith’s body which they could only have known if they had been present when Meredith was murdered. Amanda herself admitted she was present when Meredith was murdered in her handwritten note to the police on 6 November.
Amanda and Raffaele not only gave conflicting witness statements, but also gave completely different accounts of where they were, who they were with and what they were doing on the night of the murder.
In the light of the judges decisions so far and the forensic evidence which was independently confirmed as accurate and reliable, it looks extremely unlikely that Amanda and Raffaele will be found not guilty.
#2. s 02.08.2009
I hope they won’t be found not guilty simply because they’re young, white and affluent. They should have the book thrown at them like it was thrown at Guede.
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