Although I’ve written in these pages about murder cases before, I promise you I’m not obsessed with the subject. Maybe it’s my newspaper background, or the fact that Daughter studied abroad in the same city, but I’ve been following the case of the American college student in Perugia, Italy on trial for killing her roommate. Recently, the case was featured on the CBS News show 48 Hours.
Up until watching this program, the only real fact I knew was that a 21-year-old student from Seattle named Amanda Knox was on trial, along with her Italian boyfriend, for killing her British roommate, Meredith Kercher in 2007. It caught my interest back when it first appeared in the news because Daughter had studied in Perugia five years earlier. Hers was the first group her university sent abroad after 9/11, and Italy changed over from the lira to the euro while she was there. She felt a part of history. Husband and I visited her in the early spring and were charmed by the medieval walled city and its inhabitants. Where this murder case is concerned, ‘medieval’ may be the key word.
You can read the entire transcript from the program right here, but I will summarize the salient points quickly. Ms. Kercher was found brutally raped and murdered the day after Halloween 2007 in the apartment she shared with Ms. Knox. A 22-year-old transient with a record of violence was identified by DNA in the apartment and on the victim. He has since been convicted of the crime and is serving his 30-year sentence.
The prosecutor, Guiliano Mignini, unsatisfied with one conviction, maintained the murderer had not acted alone. It was a Satanic killing, and the roommate and her boyfriend were part of the cult. Although there was no evidence to support this theory – in fact, all evidence discredited it – Mr. Mignini managed to implicate the student and her boyfriend after a 14-hour interrogation that Ms. Knox attests became physical. She has been jailed in Perugia ever since, and the subject of extensive defamation by the Italian media.
Mr. Mignini has cited the MySpace pages of the Seattle student and her Italian boyfriend as evidence of their moral decay. He presents a videotape of the pair hugging and kissing at the crime scene after Ms. Kercher’s body was discovered, saying it screams conspiracy. His assertion of the Satanic murder theory results from having seen it on a website by a blogger whose beliefs he is devoted to. A blogger who says that Satan walks among us and is responsible for all the brutal killings attributed to man. A blogger.
We Americans are not immune to prosecutors looking to further their careers with a high profile conviction. The Duke Lacrosse team comes to mind. The kicker is that here we also try to prosecute the prosecutors if that becomes necessary. Hopefully, we do it enough. Guiliano Mignini, on the other hand, is already under indictment in Italy for abuse of office, obstruction of justice, and illegally wiretapping journalists. A big win on this American student thing could bring him vindication.
Mr. Mignini has tried before to advance his Satanic cult theory regarding crimes in Italy. American novelist Doug Preston reports being held without charge in 2006 by the same prosecutor, and Preston was only writing about a decades-old serial murder case in Florence. The author says he was interrogated aggressively for three hours, and even he, an adult professional who had been nowhere near a dead body, felt his knees shaking, unsure if he’d ever see his wife and children again.
Preston, who came home to the U.S. the day after he was released, says that after her forced confession, Amanda Knox will likely not be as lucky. In the 48 Hours segment, he said, “I mean say goodbye to Amanda. She will return from her semester abroad a 50-year-old Italian woman after her 30 years in prison.” And he was a mature family man interrogated for three hours. Do not underestimate how young the students studying abroad really are, especially in foreign surroundings.
On our visit to Daughter’s apartment in Perugia seven years ago, one of her roommates showed me to the bathroom. When she opened the door, I said, “Oh, you have a bidet.” The roommate looked across the room to where I was pointing, at the fixture that wasn’t a toilet next to the toilet. “Yeah,” she said, shrugging, “we don’t really know what that is, but it comes in handy when we mop the floor.”
That’s nineteen. I guarantee you, after 14 hours of interrogation, I could have convinced her it was an ice bucket.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos examine Verbs
bathing
bugged
swirling
ripped and falling