The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox

Prologue MezzanotteBY December 2009, the second anniversary of Meredith Kercher’s murder had come and gone and the trial of her roommate Amanda Knox and Amanda’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had reached its final act, a crescendo of argument, personal rancor, and notoriety. In the United States, Thanksgiving had been celebrated, turkeys carved and consumed, college ball games watched, as lawyers half a world away shouted and droned their final arguments, galloping along with barely a pausa. In chilly Perugia night fell a little earlier each day. Time, an element that had always seemed as dispensable in that courtroom as the sunny hours of an Italian afternoon, was finally constricting, pressing down, yielding to gravity. The hourly gonging of church bells from the gloom outside the brick walls only accentuated the strange isolation of the participants and spectators within. The spectacle possessed a life force of its own, constructed from the egos and emotions of all the people involved but now beyond the control of any individual. It was becoming clear that the Tribunale building had been gestating something, dying to be born. In the final hours, it was quickening. The frescoed medieval courtroom itself and the stairwell outside it began to stink of sweat and tension and other things. Cigarette smoke; cheap espresso from the Liomatic vending machine (the property of the wealthy Caporali family, which had disowned the third murder defendant, Rudy Guede, as a liar some years before); the never-cleaned single bathroom behind it, damp of floor, without soap or toilet paper; the exhalations of the smokers and coffee drinkers, the alkaline smell of the crumbly ancient brick walls that left white streaks of dust on the clothes of anyone careless enough to lean against them. The policewomen and female lawyers and journalists were now ferociously outdoing one another in terms of boot selections—kitten heels, cowboy boots, suedes, patent leathers, motorcycle boots, Gucci, Ferragamo, Prada—every conceivable style was banging up and down the metal steps to and from the courtroom. Nerves were frayed to breaking. Journalists and cameramen snarled at one another in a tiny pressroom piled with coats, video equipment, old newspapers, and half-broken chairs, vying for a view of the fuzzy television screen that monitored the courtroom. A British documentary filmmaker buzzing around was under threat of legal action from at least two members of the press who expected to be badly portrayed in his final product. A reporter for one of the British tabloids had nearly punched out one of the documentary’s cameramen. Rumors and threats of lawsuits involving journalists, lawyers, family, and police filled the chatter during breaks. Wandering around in this sweaty, smoky haze, the Knox family, radiating hope and that quality that so differentiates the American from the European—enthusiasm, and especially Amanda’s mother, Edda’s, persistent chirpy cheer and quivery emotions—were now grating badly, because everyone except them understood that the beast was being born and there was nothing they could do about it, their daughter was going to be convicted of murder. Only the most sadistic or ratings-desperate could hold a gaze on these fish in a barrel for long. The American television network producers, all vying for the big “get”—Amanda herself—circled incessantly, not daring to let the family out of sight for fear of missing some competitive moment, pouring money into pricy dinners with ample uncorkings of the finest limited-edition local red, the Sagrantino. Only they among the journalists were still maintaining the facade of the possibility of an acquittal. And their efforts would be for naught: the Italian judiciary would deny all reporters access to the beauty behind bars. In the end, the winner of the Amanda interview prize would be a right-wing Italian politician named Rocco Girlanda, who used his unfettered parliamentary access to prisons to enter Capanne Prison twenty times, plied Amanda with a laptop and fatherly male attention (although he admitted to having some vaguely romantic dreams about her), and eventually published a book about these encounters titled Take Me with You. After they filed their nightly stories, the anglophone press gathered to compare notes, share gossip, and quaff the cheaper local rosso at the enoteca near the Porta del Sole, a hundred yards from a postcard-perfect overlook point with a grand view of the roof of the murder house, and, in the distance, the same panorama of violet Umbrian hills the girls—one murdered, one on trial—had once enjoyed. On the morning her lawyers began to present their final arguments, Amanda shed the talismanic red Beatles hoodie she’d worn to every hearing since summertime cooled and donned a wrinkled green blazer, grass green, the color of hope, the color of the Madonna del Verde, frescoed on the wall of a strange round neo-Christian church at the highest point of Perugia, believed to have originally housed a pagan temple. A cell mate had done up her hair into a tight French braid. It was a nice gesture to la bella figura but not enough, and everyone knew it. “An American journalist observed that Amanda’s new conservative look was ‘too little, too late,’ ” reported the London Times. One of her lawyers, the white-haired, gap-toothed former local soccer star Luciano Ghirga, tried a folksy appeal to the civic pride of his fellow Perugians, imploring them not to fear that an acquittal would hurt their fair city’s image. “He has changed the motive,” Ghirga complained of Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini. “In the beginning, it was just: Sex! Now it’s not an orgy, now it’s money, and now it’s anger. Look, these girls were both in love with Italian men, they were having the time of their life here, where is the anger? . . . Come back with a sentence that reflects the prestige of this court and this city. Do not think that our beautiful city will lose with an acquittal. You must set Amanda free. Her family, you see them here, is not a ‘clan.’ ” He finished his statement in a fit of weeping. In the waning hours, as the afternoon turned dark, the legal women finally got their turn to speak. Knox’s chief attorney Carlo Dalla Vedova’s assistant, Maria Del Grosso, a girlish thirty-five-year-old with beautiful dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, gave a spirited defense, going on for hours trying to drive home the inconsistencies in the case. At the end she pointed to Amanda and implored the jury, “Is this the witch you’re going to burn?” Each lawyer concluded his or her remarks with appeals to God, as is customary in Italian trials, but really they were talking to six citizen jurors and one very human man, the deceptively genial Woody Allen look-alike in the middle of the dais, Judge Giancarlo Massei. “The judge is not God,” Sollecito’s lawyer Giulia Bongiorno proclaimed. “I would like to refer to the law of the church before you go in and decide the sentence,” Dalla Vedova concluded. “You need a moral certainty to convict. In the Church there is a law of moral certainty that has a spiritual meaning, and it is compatible with Italian law. You need a moral certainty. In your soul, you need a tranquillity, and only then can you be sure of judgment. Moral certainty is personal. Some have it, some don’t.” As the translator repeated his words to her in English, Amanda’s mother, Edda, was awash in tears. Then the civil lawyer Carlo Pacelli rose. He was a tall, brisk man with a gray crew cut, representing Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese bar owner Amanda had falsely accused of being in the murder house. Shouting, he reminded the jury of Amanda’s behavioral anomalies, the outrageous cartwheels at the police station, the kissing of her boyfriend while the corpse cooled, the blithe lack of concern, the particularly female duplicity on display before them. “She has never shown true grief for the death of Meredith. Actually, all to the contrary, she would kiss and cuddle joyfully with her boyfriend. She goes out and buys sexy lingerie at Bubble and talks about having mad sex with him. So who is Amanda Knox?” he shrieked. “Is she the angelical Santa Maria Goretti that we see here today? Or is she the diabolical Luciferina, the explosive concentrate of sex, alcohol, and drugs, dirty in her soul, just as she is dirty on the outside?”Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini got in a few final words: “I have been observing the defendants through the trial, trying to determine if violent acts are in accordance with their characters. I have had a graphologist look at their handwriting, and that man confirmed that Amanda Knox is aggressive, narcissistic, manipulative, transgressive, and has no empathy; she likes dominating people, she doesn’t like people to disagree with her, and she’s very negligent overall. Her behavior in the police station proved this. As for Sollecito, the graphologist says his handwriting indicates that he is a person who seeks approval from others.” As if in despair, he burst out, “If these kids were innocent, how could they sit here and bear listening to this?”