The Murder of Meredith Kercher Read Online Free PDF Page B

drug dealer, himself an addict, had been seen a few hours prior to the discovery of Meredith’s body, covered with blood and bearing a large cut to one of his hands. He wasreportedly seen washing himself off in a public water fountain where he was heard screaming on a telephone, ‘ I killed her. I killed her. ’ Although a television reporter had successfully substantiated the reports about the addict, and had found a number of witnesses – including an ambulance driver and an emergency medical technician who had been dispatched to the piazza to treat the man’s injury and whisk him off to a hospital – the incident was ultimately dismissed by the police and prosecutor Mignini.
    Mignini went to great lengths to get the reporter to back away from her story, largely by charging her with attempting to inflame fear and panic throughout the community by writing and publishing bogus information. Mignini’s team and the police, it seemed, had ascertained that the young man had been screaming at his girlfriend over the telephone, but they failed to adequately explain why he had thought that he had killed a woman, or even who he thought he had killed. Although the paramedics had removed him from the piazza and had taken him to a hospital, he was later transferred to a facility for drug addicts where he was kept under near-constant observation.
    It appeared that Mignini and the police were far more intrigued with Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, especially after learning that Sollecito, a wealthy doctor’s son from the southern Italian city of Bari, on the Adriatic coast, allegedly liked to carryknives on his person, and perhaps because investigators had found a number of violent comic books, such as Japanese manga comics, as well as other violent reading material, in Raffaele’s apartment. Some of the comics had featured illustrated stories about killing female vampires on Halloween night, prompting recollections of how Meredith had dressed up as a vampire for Halloween and had attended a number of parties prior to her murder and how, police would later contend, some of the comics’ illustrations and descriptions were in some ways similar to the murder scene in Meredith’s bedroom.
    As the weekend came to a close, as Mignini and the police continued to look for ways to solve and build their case, local residents who had known Meredith planned a candlelight vigil outside Perugia cathedral, and had draped a banner bearing her name from the nearby town hall. Several people handed out flyers announcing the vigil, which read: ‘With greatest love from all your friends in Perugia. Addio, Meredith.’
    The fact that Meredith was so well-loved by people in a country so far from her own only served to add to the mystique surrounding why anyone would want to kill her with such unleashed savagery. It just did not make any sense.

C HAPTER 5
    A lthough many of the participants in the case did not know it yet, by the afternoon of Monday November 5, 2007, the Meredith Kercher murder case was on the verge of taking a dramatic turn. Amanda Knox, dressed in the typical vintage-style clothing that she liked so much, along with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were hauled into a Perugia police station for what the two starry-eyed lovers thought would be simply another round of routine questioning. This time, however, was different. They were each placed in separate rooms, and the questioning lasted throughout the night. Amanda’s mother, Edda Mellas, had been in the Italian city for only a few hours and as the evening wore on she was increasingly aghast at what was happening to her daughter. In the midst of an aura of disbelief, she had not yet found a lawyer for Amandaand probably would not be able to do so until the following day.
    Since they had been placed in separate interrogation rooms, Amanda and Raffaele could neither see nor hear each other during the questioning by police, who were speaking in Italian and utilizing typical