Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 31

"Okay," I said.

But I wasn't good at censoring myself. I had only two hours a week with my mom and dad, and they were the only people I could open up to. It made me feel better to vent, and my parents needed to know what I was thinking. I couldn't see the danger in discussing with them my day-to-day prison life, my interactions with my cellmates and guards, or my case. Since I hadn't been involved in the murder, I figured that anything I said would only help prove my innocence.

I hadn't considered that the prosecution would twist my words. I didn't think they would be capable of taking anything I said and turning it into something incriminating, because everything I said was about my innocence and how I wanted to go home. I was saying the same thing again and again.

On their first visit after the knife story came out, Dad and Mom were telling me my lawyers' theory-that the police could be using the knife as a scare tactic to get me to incriminate myself. "The police have nothing at all on you," Mom said. "So they are trying ... to see if you['ll] say something more."

"It's stupid," I said. "I can't say anything but the truth, because I know I was there. I mean, I can't lie about this, there is no reason to do it."

What I meant by "I was there" was that I was at Raffaele's apartment the night of Meredith's murder, that I couldn't possibly implicate myself. I hadn't been at the villa. I wasn't going to slip up, because I wasn't hiding anything.

Sitting next to me at the table in the room where we'd been reunited a few weeks earlier-the same room where I met with my lawyers-Mom held my hands in hers, nodding in agreement at me. Then we moved on to other topics, such as how we each were getting through this and what friends and family at home were doing to try to help.

The police did not move on. They seized on my comment, which they had on tape. A couple of weeks later, in early December, a convoluted version of what I'd said made international headlines, including the London Telegraph's "Tape 'Puts Knox at Meredith's Murder' Scene."

The article began, "Dramatic new evidence has emerged that may help prove that Amanda Knox, the American girl accused of murdering Meredith Kercher, was present when the British student died."

The police had leaked the false but enticing tale to the press.

Luciano and Carlo understood what I hadn't yet grasped: that the prosecution was so fixated on proving my guilt, they saw only what they wanted to see, heard only what they wanted to hear, found only what they wanted to find. Facts be d.a.m.ned.

I was indignant. "How can they do that?" I asked. "It's straight-up false!"

"Don't worry," Carlo said. "We'll be able to prove it's wrong once the prosecution gives us the transcripts. But please use this as a lesson, Amanda. The prosecution will pounce on anything they believe will serve their purposes. Please remember the room where you and your parents visit is bugged."

Being more careful in the future wouldn't immediately resolve this serious misunderstanding. A few days later the judge considered those words when deciding if I could be moved to house arrest. In another crushing blow that characterized my early months in prison, my request was denied. I was stuck alone behind bars.

Calling the intercepted conversation a "clue," the judge wrote, "it can certainly be read as a confirmation of the girl's presence in her home at the moment of the crime."

He went on to describe me as "crafty and cunning," saying that I was "a multifaced personality, unattached to reality with an elevated ... fatal, capacity to kill again."

It wasn't until my pretrial, the following September, that a different judge agreed with my defense that it was obvious I was talking about Raffaele's apartment, not the villa, and removed this "evidence" from the record.

Just as Carlo had told me not to discuss my case, he'd also warned me to write down as little as possible, caution that I thought was borderline paranoid. I'd started keeping a journal as soon as I learned to write complete sentences, and I didn't see why I should stop now, when I needed that outlet the most. Even after my prison diary was confiscated, I didn't worry about anything I'd written. I wasn't guilty. I didn't think about what could happen once my words were out of my hands.

Not even my lawyers understood my journal musings on Raffaele and the knife that made their way into the newspapers. I'd written a hyperbolic explanation about him taking the knife from his apartment behind my back. I had to explain to Carlo and Luciano that I'd concocted it because the possibility of a knife with Meredith's DNA coming out of Raffaele's apartment had struck me as so preposterous:

Unless Raffaele decided to get up after I fell asleep, grabbed said knife, went over to my house, used it to kill Meredith, came home, cleaned it off, rubbed my fingerprints all over it, put it away, then tucked himself back into bed, and then pretended really well the next couple of days, well, I just highly doubt all of that.

But I didn't have the luxury of explaining what I'd written to everyone who read it. After my pa.s.sage was translated into Italian and then retranslated back into English, it bore little resemblance to the original-and a great resemblance to the prosecution's theories about what had happened the night of November 1:

That night I smoked a lot of marijuana and I fell asleep at my boyfriend's house. I don't remember anything. But I think it's possible that Raffaele went to Meredith's house, raped her and then killed her. And then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he put my fingerprints on the knife. But I don't understand why Raffaele would do that.

Once I had my meeting with the prosecutor I'd correct all the confusion about me. I thought my upcoming interrogation would tie up all these loose strands.

Carlo and Luciano warned me once again that it might not be so simple. "Mignini will ask pointed questions to snare you," Carlo said, his face serious. "He will try to paint you as a liar. He wants to show that you have a connection to Rudy Guede. He'll try to prove that you lied about Patrick on purpose. Are you prepared for that, Amanda?"

"I know," I said. "I'm ready."

But I didn't-and I wasn't.

As the date for the interrogation approached, Luciano and Carlo offered me a few pointers. "Don't let him get to you. Don't say anything if you don't remember it perfectly. It's okay to say, 'I don't remember.' You don't have to be G.o.d and know everything. It's better to say, 'I don't know,' and move on."

I was a jumble of emotions-eager to set the prosecutor and the public straight on who I really was and nervous about putting myself out there. But the night before Interrogation Day, my nerves overtook my excitement. I couldn't eat much of the pizza my roommates and I made for dinner on our camp stove. I turned and tossed most of the night, thinking about what I wanted to tell the prosecutor. As I was being escorted to the prison compound's center building at 10 A.M. the next day, I was humming my prison anthem, "Let It Be," trying to calm some of my jitters.

The meeting took place in the same makeshift courtroom as my hearing to confirm my arrest five weeks earlier. The setting wasn't that much more pleasant than the questura office where Mignini had interrogated me the first time. Separate tables for the defense and the prosecution faced each other from opposite sides of the small, dim, bare room, with two barred windows set close to the ceiling so no one could see in or out.

The tension was instantly obvious. Mignini was sitting at his table with two police officers. Like Carlo and Luciano, he was wearing a black robe. The three men had come ready for a fight. I felt awkward and out of place, as though I'd stepped into the middle of a feud that had nothing to do with me.

But I was the reason for the feud-and the only person who could set things right.

I stood near Carlo and Luciano with an interpreter, waiting for Mignini to give me permission to speak. That never came. Instead of asking what I had to say, he started firing questions at me immediately.

What has stuck with me the most is that he never looked me in the eye. He stared down at the paper in his hand, on which his questions were written out. It's as if I didn't merit the effort it would have taken to look up.

"Do you have any Spanish friends?" he asked-Rudy Guede said he hung out with Spanish friends on Halloween.

I was calm and a.s.sertive. "No," I answered.

"What's the meaning behind your name Foxy Knoxy?"

"It's just a nickname," I said.

"But what is the meaning behind it?"

"There is no meaning behind it. It's a play on my last name, Knox. My soccer teammates started calling me that as a teenager."

"Why do you use it to identify yourself?"

"I don't. I don't introduce myself as 'Foxy Knoxy.' "

"Did you have problems with Meredith?"

"No. We didn't know each other long, but we were friends."

"Do you know Rudy Guede?"

"I met him," I said, "but I didn't remember his name until he was arrested."

Mignini grilled me about my drug use, the people I knew in Perugia, the friends I'd invited over to the villa. He asked me when I'd found out that Meredith had been stabbed, hoping to prove that I knew the details of her death before an innocent person would have had the chance to.

It bothered me that as I answered him as fully as I could through an interpreter, Mignini would usually repeat the question. I was afraid I wasn't making myself clear. At first, Carlo, acting as a second interpreter, spoke in measured tones. He would interrupt and say, "What she is really saying is ..." or "She's already answered that question!"

My lawyers listened intently to Mignini's wording, to his repet.i.tions, to the interpreter's translation of his questions and my responses, and jumped up to object to suggestive phrasing and misinterpretations. They came prepared to protect me from what they'd warned me against: aggressive and insidious questioning by a prosecutor whose interest wasn't to hear me out but to get me to say something incriminating. Luciano and Carlo grew less measured as the interrogation dragged on.

After five and a half hours of standing and fielding questions, I was tired, but I thought everything was going okay. During the short breaks, Luciano would put his hand on my shoulder, and Carlo would say, "You're doing well."

Then the conversation turned to my November 6, middle-of-the-night interrogation and how I could have said something without meaning to. I explained how much pressure the police put me under and how confused I was by their claims that I'd met up with someone, that I'd been to the villa that night. Mignini became defensive. "I was there," he said, referring to the questura the night of my interrogation. "I heard you saying these things."