Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox Read Online Free PDF Page A

lapels and sneakers with white trim. He had his back to the camera and his head was covered with a woolen cap, making him difficult to identify. But his height, gait, coat, and shoes were all a plausible match for Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old drifter of Ivorian origin who often shot hoops at the basketball court next to the University for Foreigners and was acquainted with the boys who lived downstairs from Meredith and Amanda.
    Guede had an extraordinary past: an abusive childhood; a mother who abandoned him as a baby and a father who abandoned him as a teenager; an improbably idyllic period under the protection of one of Perugia’s richest families, who sent him to private school in a chauffeur-driven limousine; and, more recently, a budding career as a cat burglar. According to eyewitnesses and police reports, Guede liked to break into houses by smashing a window with a rock and using his considerable athletic skills to scale the wall and climb inside. Often, his victims said, he would help himself to food and drink from the kitchen before looting the electronics and hard cash.
    The previous Saturday, the director of an English kindergarten in Milan had caught Rudy red-handed sitting at her office computer and making the place his own. When the police searched his backpack, they found a knife he had lifted from the kitchen, a woman’s gold watch, and a laptop and cell phone later traced to a lawyer’s office in Perugia that had been burgled two weeks earlier. Guede was taken to police headquarters and questioned for four hours.
    All indications were that he was about to be arrested. That is,until a call was placed to the Perugia police and the interrogation stopped. Instead of facing charges, Guede was put on a train back to Perugia, no more questions asked. To many independent observers in law enforcement, the only explanation for this was that Guede was working as a police informant; the Perugia authorities were apparently more interested in continuing his services than in prosecuting him for just a few hundred euros’ worth of stolen items. It’s a supposition officials in Perugia have never confirmed but it goes a long way to explain their behavior in the weeks and months to come.
    On the time-stamped surveillance tape, Guede—or his doppelgänger—vanished into the night just moments after he appeared. But the camera picked up a pair of similar shoes crossing the street toward Meredith and Amanda’s house about half an hour later. My defense team would later conclude he must have spent the intervening time formulating a plan to break into the house and making sure he was unseen.
    It was a propitious moment to strike. First, Guede could reasonably assume that the occupants of the house were either out for the night or away for the long weekend. Second, he had previously stayed over in the boys’ apartment downstairs—he fell asleep on the toilet one night in early October and ended up sprawled on the couch—so he knew the lay of the land. He had even met Meredith and Amanda briefly. And, third, since it was the first of the month, chances were good that the accumulated rent money for November was sitting in a pile somewhere in the house.
    In the upstairs apartment, Filomena took responsibility for gathering everyone’s cash and handing it over to the landlady. And it was Filomena’s bedroom window that would soon be smashedwith a large rock—most likely a few minutes after those white-rimmed sneakers were captured loping across the street around eight thirty.
    Meredith, meanwhile, was finishing up an evening with her British friends, Amy Frost, Robyn Butterworth, and Sophie Purton. They had met early, tucked into a pizza at Amy and Robyn’s house, watched a movie, and snacked on ice cream and apple crumble. Meredith announced that she was tired from the previous night’s partying. She asked to borrow a history book and headed home.
    Just moments before nine o’clock, the video surveillance camera at