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    Housekeeping was another point of conflict among the roommates. Amanda left unwashed dishes in the kitchen, her clothes and shoes were often scattered throughout the common areas, and Filomena and Laura finally resorted to a cleaning schedule in an effort to keep the house tidy. Meredith was especially disgusted by the fact that Amanda rarely flushed or scoured the toilet. But that issue may have been in part cultural. Back home in Seattle, over-flushing is an ecological faux pas. “If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown flush it down,” goes the popular West Coast mantra. That brand of eco-vigilance is not part of the British psyche, however, and Meredith felt that Amanda was leaving the toilet dirty intentionally to offend her. She complained about it to her parents.
    As is so often the case in university life, fast friendships die even more quickly than they form. Amanda and Meredith were very close when Amanda first
moved in. But the bond quickly withered, and everyone in the household soon grew wary of Amanda, who persisted in bringing home a parade of strangers even when the other girls asked her to stop. In Perugia, all sorts of young and not-so-young men lurk on the edges of the student scene, ever ready to make a drug connection or exploit some foreign girl’s romantic fantasies about life in Italy. Amanda did not always bring these men back for sex, although she did manage to bed a Greek, an Albanian, and an Italian other than Raffaele during her first few weeks in Perugia. Still, she was trusting and naive with strangers in a way that made the other roommates feel increasingly vulnerable. They worried that Amanda would bring home someone who would rape or rob them. Meredith was particularly concerned about an Argentinean man whom Amanda had met at an Internet café. He was too friendly, often touching and kissing both Amanda and Meredith against their will. Meredith told friends how uncomfortable she was about him coming to the house, and they, in turn, would tell police that the Argentinean was most likely her killer. But he was out of town when the murder occurred.
    A few days after Meredith and Giacomo started their romantic relationship, on October 25, 2007,
Amanda met Raffaele Sollecito at a classical music concert. She was drawn to him immediately because he looked like Harry Potter, with his wire-rim glasses and boyish face. Raffaele was the son of a successful urologist in the southern city of Bari. The doctor was well-connected and treated the Pugliese elite; he showed up at court with an entourage that included bodyguards and a driver for his armored car. Raf was both spoiled and dominated by his father and had ready access to money with which to bankroll a penchant for drugs. While many of the other students in Perugia shared cramped rooms and slept on floors, Raffaele’s father had set his son up with his own apartment and a regular cleaning woman.
    Raffaele’s mother died when he was young, and his father remarried a younger woman whose fur coats and coiffed hair with skunk highlights would become fodder for many pressroom jokes during the trial. Raf was a techie who spent long hours decoding difficult problems for his degree in computer studies. At one point during his trial, he was even asked to fix the prosecutor’s computer amid jokes that he might hit “delete all” when she turned her head. He also had a fascination with swords and knives. He always carried a switchblade with him and he often played with it
when he was bored. He even bragged to his father that he took a knife with him when he was called in for questioning by the police.
    On his Facebook page, Raf wrote about being stoned all day, enjoying “risky things,” and at times being “completely crazy.” He posted photos of himself in various states of a drug haze; in one, he is wrapped in surgical bandages and brandishing a meat cleaver. Although he had little experience with women for an Italian man of