[meredith kercher] will she be avenged

Perugia, Italy

This piece was originally published on September 15th, as a filler and though it found its way into google search, it was not well researched at that point. Therefore it needed to be rewritten and reposted today, this time with proper research behind it, especially as the trial has been reopened. 

Update December 5th here and earlier, December 2nd here.

This link takes you to all posts on the new blog mentioning Meredith Kercher.  To save you the trouble, the best analysis, leaving my posts aside, is that of the latter commenters on Why I Think Amanda Knox is Guilty, where everyone leaves aside the infighting and starts to look again at the evidence itself.


The thing I like about this analysis of the Meredith Kercher story is that it doesn't sensationalize or take any particular stance. It presents the evidence as far as it can whilst the story unfolds.

Pretty girl turned bad

No wonder the media were going to latch onto it and play it for all it was worth, possibly to leap to the defence of the accused, as most of the reports seem to be doing now. No wonder, when the Foxy Knoxy myspace moniker came up, the media then swung round at the time and vilified her, dropping her real name and using only the moniker.

In a grotesque media circus, Italians, in a poll, voted her personality of the year – the alleged perpetrator, not the victim - and even the guards and lawyers smiled at her and she smiled her winning smile back.

The guards now call her Bambi, for her innocence and see themselves as being in the presence of a celebrity. That is plain bizarre.

Ann Coulter questions the way so many people seem to be getting behind Knox and making her into a mini-celebrity when, in fact, she is an alleged murderess in the most gruesome manner.

Call me a party pooper but Knox's irresistible charm I find eminently resistable and you'll see why below.

The story in summary

Two language majors were taking time out in Perugia, Italy to study. One, an American girl, found a place to stay, through an Italian woman. The American went away on a trip to Germany [* flag] and when she came back to Perugia, an English girl was in the house, along with two Italian girls [* flag].

It's a university town so the scene is the piazza, study, working to make ends meet, the usual thing - indiscriminate, casual sex, taking up with anyone interesting, no judgement, low self-pride. Low-lifes abounded in the town. Students call it fun.

Amanda Knox worked at a bar, which was run by a Congolese, Patrick Lumumba. He describes her as flirtatious and not looking after her customers and was about to sack her. She comes over as a person who only wanted the money for the job but wanted the pleasures of partying at the same time.

Her roommate, Meredith Kercher, of whose character nothing except the usual eulogies have come through, describes Knox as sloppy, refusing to do any chores and generally being useless. Meredith reportedly was fearful of some of the men Knox would bring back home, confronting her in the kitchen next morning, complete strangers.

This is contrasted to how her American friends describe Knox - vivacious, kind, sporty and outdoory. She's described as obedient to her mum.

Why the focus on her and not on, say, the men in the story? As Richard Owen of The Times says:

"I think, inevitably, it has come to be seen, as no doubt will be seen in future when books and films are made about this story as they inevitably will be, as Amanda’s story essentially."

Story continued

The two students began at the university in September, partying, studying and so on until Hallowe'en. Knox had met "a 23-year old-Italian computer engineering student named Raffaele Sollecito. He's a prominent doctor's son with his own apartment, a collection of exotic knives and an expensive German car." She seems to have fallen for him.

"Meredith, the roommate, had found a boyfriend, too. A guitar player in a band who lived in an apartment beneath the rental house." Seemed to be a less outgoing type than Knox, maybe more stay at home.

On Hallowe'en there was a party and next day they slept it off, next day being All Saints Day. In the evening, "Meredith went to visit her English girlfriends for a quiet evening of pizza and a video. One of the friends walked her partway home a little after 9 p.m." Knox and Sollecito had turned their mobiles off at 8.40 p.m.

Sometime the next morning, the following seems to have occurred:

Meredith's mobile had gone missing and a lady found it in her garden [*flag], contacted the police, the police had traced it and were bringing it back to her, as her supposedly stolen goods.

When they got there, Knox and Sollecito were in a deep embrace in the garden [*flag] and a window had been smashed [* flag], which the couple drew attention to. When the police went inside, the door to Meredith's room was locked. They got through and her body was on the floor, face down, a duvet was over her and her throat had been cut in three ways – one was a sharp nick under the chin, one was not mentioned other than it required a short blade and the other was right through the neck, requiring a long blade.

Forensics

Forensics placed four people in that house on November 1st - the victim who came home sometime in the evening, Amanda Knox, Sollecito, strange in himself and then someone they'd picked up, "Rudy Hermann Guede, a 20-year-old Ivory Coast born Perugia street hustler and general hangabout."

For some reason, either forced or voluntarily, no one really knows, Meredith appeared to have been on her knees and someone had been having sex with her from behind. At some point, a knife went "from left to right" through her throat and she ended up sprawled on the floor, drowning in her own blood.

Later, DNA from both Meredith and Knox was found on the kitchen knife at the house - the former's on the blade, the latter's on the handle. Guede's DNA was inside Kercher but doesn't appear to have been on the handle. Guede's DNA was in a handprint under the victim's head. There were bloodied footprints of either Knox or Sollecito. Ann Couler says:

Kercher's bloody bra strap at the crime scene that had abundant amounts of Sollecito's DNA on it.

A shop manager reported, in the next two days, seeing and hearing Knox and Sollecito loudly discussing buying lingerie for Knox and they'd been laughing and joking about what they planned to do. At some point, it is reported Knox said, "I can't keep this up much longer," whatever that means.

Developments

The police arrested the two suspects but the fourth had not yet come through forensics and when this happened, he was picked up in Germany [* flag]. The theory was that there'd been some sort of orgy, it went wrong, they killed Meredith. The theory was modified to include Guede, probably having sex with the victim from behind but someone had held a knife to her throat at some point and then the stabbing was done after that. A possible torture scenario.

Knox

Her behaviour towards the police and in court was reported by all as being obnoxious, harpy-like, contrasting with her later behaviour of all smiles.

She is reported, by friends and family, as being kind and willing to help anyone, a good girl who was very outdoory, liking sport and the company of friends.

However, a different picture emerged upon investigation. The family was dysfunctional and her mother had trouble keeping it running when the husband departed the scene, she remarried a very young man and that sent Knox crazy. She began to compete for the attention of men.

Patrick Lumumba, the café owner who employed her in Perugia, described her as a "Queen Bee", needing constant attention from men.

She's reported elsewhere as not forming good relationships with other women. A video on the net shows her seemingly normal and joking and a girlfriend is taking it but in the room are all boys apart from that. Another pic shows her drunk and loose in a room full of boys.

She'd boasted herself, in an email, that she had an Italian on the train to Perugia and when the AIDS question came up – standard procedure for Italian police, she couldn't remember how many lovers she'd had but settled on seven.

She was described as not just taking drugs for recreation but "right into them" in an extreme way.

There were reports back home that she shunned the usual girly haunts and hung out where the boys were, even doing their sports with them – hence the soccer.

One incident was shortly before she left for Italy. She threw a party and late that night, police were called because the partygoers were throwing bottles and smashing neighbours' windows. The only person arrested was Knox and she was fined in court for her actions that night [* flag].

She claimed that as she was going away, it didn't matter what she did. All of this paints a different picture from the innocent abroad her family and close friends wish to portray.

Then came the Foxy Knoxy Myspace saga, the short story she wrote on a girl being raped and how a woman had to be taught what she wanted, plus the fashion pose photo which shows her as cold as ice. Personally, I think there are far more significant things in her actions than that.

Knox's stories

Her story changes as the evidence changes. At first, she claimed she was with her boyfriend at his house. Then when it was shown he had not done as he claimed that night, she said she had been at the house after all, she'd met her boss, Patrick Lumumba, at a tennis court, had brought him back to the house, he went into Meredith's room [and this bit was at least plausible because Knox had introduced the two at the bar and they'd hit it off].

Her theory was that Lumumba had locked the door, Knox heard screaming, had put her fingers to her ears and couldn't remember any more.

In court later, after it was shown that there was no DNA or other evidence of Lumumba ever having been at that house, she suddenly changed her story, said she'd made it up about Lumumba and went back to the tale of being with the boyfriend. Now she claims, he must have gone to the house, raped and killed Meredith, come back and put the hilt of the knife in her sleeping hand.

In all this, she never mentions Guede although he was clearly at the house. In one of the flags above, he fled to Germany. She went to Germany too in the early days, for some unstated reason. Had they met and was her silence over him to protect him? Yet she seemed infatuated with Sollecito or at least under his spell, as far as her character would allow love.

Knox describes Meredith's death as "yukky".

In a bizarre twist, her own family came over for the hearing, her younger sister wearing inappropriate attire for something so sombre and the family posing for photos in fornt of the murder house, along with statements of "Amanda will be home by Christmas, once all this has been cleared up."

One other snippets which might be relevant - it came out that her story was that they had got to the house, had seen Meredith's door locked and had turned and gone out again.

State of play

Guede has already gone down for 30 years. The other two are still in custody and the trial has resumed this September, after a two month hiatus.

My thoughts

I don't like her one little bit, this Knox, for much the same reason as a law enforcement officer who commented on one of the news stories that he knew that type [Knox] very well from his 30 years or so in the force – appearing to be an angel, to be plausible and using the little girl smile to maximum effect but actually cold blooded and with a disconnect between her thoughts and her actions.

He said that this is the classic profile of the psychopath – the inability to distinguish between what is appropriate and what is not, the inability to see consequences for her actions.

It's this disconnect which is the most troublesome part. In her prison cell, she pretends to rock climb up the bars and sings at the top of her voice, then, when the guards come to take her to court, she turns on the Foxy Knoxy [her own construct from her website] and charms the men. It was noted that she'd always make a beeline for the men, supposedly her main means of defence, in her eyes.

And yet it is a woman coroner who has drawn attention to problems with the DNA on the knife. I've read this up and it seems that it's a Defence ploy, that the evidence seemed straightforward enough. She has just come into court dressed in white as the little hometown girl, which drew a stinging response from the family of Meredith.

My own bona fides are that I've been in the business of character assessment in RL for more decades than I care to say. From a distance and with the mind uncluttered by things like romance and love, nothing much impresses me and I most certainly do not trust disconnects and anomalies.

The support or distrust of millions does not constitute Knox's guilt – that will have to be established or not in court. However, one thing which strikes me is how this was a fairly open and shut case, except for one thing – it centred, from beginning to end, around Knox.

It was her changes of story which dragged it out to the second year, her making eyes at all the men, including the judge who was reported to have smiled back at the smile she gave him and which one reporter described as "disturbing", which occupies centre stage; it was her story all the way along. It's she who is "personality of the year" in Italy, not Guede, not Sollecito, both of whom have been placed at the scene and might well have done it all themselves.

This is all about Amanda Knox, centre-stage and Queen Bee.

And the flags above – where were the Italian housemates in all this? Why were the two lovers in an embrace in the garden when the police got there next morning, instead of seeking help and announcing that they'd found her housemate murdered? Where is Meredith's own boyfriend in this, the one who lived below the house in a flat?

The mobiles – how had Meredith's mobile found its way into that woman's garden and why did the couple switch off their mobiles at the same time that night, even though Meredith did not return for another hour?

Knox's conviction in Seattle for that wild party and her overall demeanour are a flag. That sort of thing would normally get a stern warning but she was arrested and taken to court. This suggests to me that she went at the police with a torrent of abuse and they decided to go for due process in return.

In the end, she's certainly not a nice person, she didn't "suddenly change" when she got to Italy – that sex on the train there was significant. In fact, she comes over as a particularly nasty piece of work but that still doesn't make her a murderess.

The trial goes on.

Meredith Kercher

I find it sickening that that other girl should have hogged all the limelight because of an alleged criminal action when the victim herself is the one whose name should stay in the memory. She should have been "little Bambi", not the other one. She should have her photo all over the net and be spoken of in connection with the case.

Saint? Who knows? Who cares? She was a student who had her life snuffed out in a gruesome way. Her killer[s] need to be punished and not sympathized with because she happens to be pretty.

End of story.

Meredith Kercher - may she find peace and her people find closure as soon as possible.