A sensational story out of Italy that involves, murder, drugs and sex returned to the media with energy last week with the testimony of one of the accused murders.
After more than 1 1/2 years in prison, Amanda Marie Knox, 21, of Seattle, a visiting student in Italy from the University of Washington, took the stand.
She denied that she had any part in the murder of her housemate, Meredith Kercher, 21, a native of England who was also studying in Italy.
Speaking in Italian, Knox said that she was at her boyfriend’s house the evening of Nov. 1, 2007, the night of the murder. The two smoked marijuana, had sex and watched a movie, she said.
When they returned to her house the next day they found Kercher’s body, her throat slit.
Knox also said that police had hit her during her interrogation and pressured her to implicate an innocent man.
Both Kercher and Knox had been studying in Perugia, a small Italian city north of Rome that annually hosts thousands of students from Europe and abroad.
One man, Rudy Hermann Guede, a native of the Ivory Coast living in Italy, has already been convicted of murder and sexual assault in the case.
Guede’s DNA was found on Kercher’s body, and his fingerprints were in her apartment. He fled Italy after the slaying. He said he did so because he was frightened and he is appealing his conviction.
Raffaele Sollecito, 25, Knox’s former boyfriend, is also charged with murder and is standing trial with her in a proceeding that began in January.
A fourth man, Patrick Lumumba, who owned a bar where Knox worked part-time, was arrested a few days after the slaying based on statements Knox gave police. Lumumba was subsequently freed and is now suing Knox for defamation.
Since she was charged on Nov. 6, 2007, Knox has been depicted negatively in some of the European press.
Headlines refer to her as “Foxy Knoxy,” picking up a nickname she had given herself on her MySpace page. And, according to CNN.com, Italian media have called her a “devil with an angel’s face.”
To counter some of these depictions, Knox’s parents have launched a PR campaign guided by David M. Marriott, a former Seattle television news reporter and now a specialist in crisis management.
Knox’s supporters have also created a website, Friends of Amanda Knox, that includes everything from childhood photos of Knox to a media kit.
Timothy Egan, a former New York Times reporter who writes occasional columns for the Times from his vantage point in Seattle, took up Knox’s cause last week in a column headlined, An Innocent Abroad.
“The case against Knox has so many holes in it, and is so tied to the career of a powerful Italian prosecutor who is under indictment for professional misconduct, that any fair-minded jury would have thrown it out months ago,” Egan wrote.
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