Tag Archives: Wrongful Conviction

WAS AMANDA KNOX REALLY INNOCENT OF KILLING MEREDITH KERCHER?

The Amanda Knox story captured worldwide attention during the years she passed through the Italian legal system and was convicted—twice—of complicity in murdering her college roommate, Meredith Kercher. Now, the international spotlight is again upon Amanda Knox with the new Matt Damon movie Stillwater being based on her case. In Stillwater, Matt Damon’s fictional character pursues justice for his daughter who is wrongfully accused and falsely imprisoned for murder. It leads to questioning if this was the truth in the real Amanda Knox story and that Knox was really innocent of killing Meredith Kercher.

There’s a lot of internet information on the Amanda Knox murder case. Some of it’s factual. Much is sensational tabloid junk about “Foxy Knoxy”—the “Ice Lady”—disseminated by socially dysfunctional trolls operating from surplus metal sea-cans converted into dwellings via an extension cord hooked to one bare light bulb. To find out the truth, it’s necessary to first look at the overall facts and then examine how the Italian legal system handled the case through a dragged-out, eight-year-long process.

In 2007, Amanda Knox was a 20-year-old student from Seattle, Washington. She moved to Perugia in central Italy (slightly north of Rome) to further her journalism studies as Perugia was well-known for outstanding universities and educational opportunities—a popular place for foreign students. Here, Knox met a British exchange student, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, and they shared a ground-floor, four-bedroom apartment with two other young ladies.

Quickly, Knox became romantically involved with a young Italian man, Raffaele Sollecito, and Kercher did the same with Giacomo Silenzi. At the time, Knox also worked part-time in a nightclub run by Patrick Lumumba. It was this pentagon of five that the Italian prosecutors would present as a sex game gone wrong that resulted in Meredith Kercher’s death.

Meredith Kercher

On the evening of November 1, 2007, Knox, Sollecito, Silenzi, and Kercher socialized with others at Sollecito’s apartment near to where the ladies roomed. Present was a man named Rudy Guede who was invited by one of the group but who was unknown to Knox and Kercher. Around 9 pm, Kercher excused herself from the gathering and walked back to her residence alone. Bit by bit, the gathering broke up leaving Knox and Sollecito to overnight there together.

At midday on November 2, Knox repeatedly tried to phone Meredith Kercher. She got no answer and became concerned so Knox and Sollecito went to the co-habitation and found Kercher’s bedroom door locked. Knox tapped on the door and called out but Kercher didn’t answer. Then Knox and Sollecito noticed some bloodstains, including a bloody footprint, in the bathroom.

Being alarmed, Knox called her mother in America who directed Knox to call the Italian police. She did so. However, there was a significant delay which was advanced as part of the prosecution’s later case against Knox and was supported by a timeline presented through cell phone records.

The first attending police officers were not homicide detectives. They were an Italian version of postal inspectors crossed with communication fraud investigators. There hadn’t been a murder in Perugia in over twenty years, so it was a considerable time before “competent” scene processors and trained murder cops arrived. Naturally, the scene was contaminated and the ensuing DNA evidence used in convicting Amanda Knox of murdering Meredith Kecher was compromised.

What the scene processing showed was Kercher had been attacked, raped, and had her throat cut in her bedroom. Her official cause of death was exsanguination (bleeding out) after being injured with a sharp-edged weapon. Kercher’s bedroom window was open and the investigators deduced that to mean that a break-in had been staged with the real killer setting the crime up to appear that a stranger was involved.

Police initially treated Amanda Knox as a witness. She was questioned on different occasions, but the homicide investigators slowly formulated a theory that Knox was lying to protect the actual murderer. They also developed a motive theory that Kercher was killed because she refused to take part in a multi-person sexual trist. An orgy.

On November 6, the Italian homicide detectives again brought Knox in for questioning. This time it turned into a full-on, hard-core interrogation that lasted hours. This is a complex and controversial part of the Amanda Knox story and precise details—at least as precise as possible because the authorities did not audio or video record it (rather they elicited a written confession from Knox)—can be read on the website amandaknoxcase.com under The Interrogation of Amanda Knox.

In Amanda Knox’s written confession, she states to have been present while her nightclub boss, Patrick Lumbumba, raped and murdered Meredith Kercher. Knox did not supply any motive or any details which only an involved person would know. Lumbuba was arrested on the strength of Knox’s statement and it was shortly proven, beyond all doubt, that Lumbumba had an air-tight alibi and he was flat-out innocent.

Rudy Guede

Amanda Knox was held in custody while the prosecution put an indictable case together. Meanwhile, the scene forensic evidence identified a DNA profile from semen on Kercher’s body. They conclusively linked it to Rudy Guede who had been at the social gathering on the evening when Kercher was last seen alive. Guede was arrested in Germany where he confessed and indicated that Amanda Knox had nothing to do with Kercher’s murder.

By now, the Italian legal system had a freight train rolling along the justice track. Instead of applying the brakes, the police, prosecutors, and judges threw more coal on the fire and kept on persecuting Amanda Knox. This was due to the archaic inquisitional system Italy was trying to gentrify into a western adversarial legal framework.

The common US-style evidence rules didn’t apply in the Italian arena. Despite Amanda Knox being hardline interrogated for hours without legal representation, being informed of her rights, denied food, water, and toilet facilities, slapped around, and breaking down in the middle of the night, the Italian court accepted Knox’s coerced confession as solid evidence that had to be admitted under their law structure. It didn’t matter that the prosecution’s perceived motive—some kinky sex game—had no factual basis, and it didn’t matter that Knox’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, provided Knox with her air-tight alibi. No, the Italian legal machine went right on persecuting Amanda Knox.

Knox stood trial through the summer and fall of 2009. Her case received massive public attention and the British tabloids sensationalized it like nothing ever seen. This was now the day of the emerging internet where chatrooms and social media made a spectacle of the trial and a massive mess of Amanda Knox’s life.

Amanda Knox was convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder on December 4, 2009. She was sentenced to 26 years in jail. She appealed and had her murder conviction overturned on October 3, 2011, now having served nearly two years in an Italian prison.

In March of 2013, Italy’s Court of Cassation ordered a new trial and on January 30, 2014, she was once again convicted for killing Meredith Kercher. By now, Amanda Knox was back in America and was not returned to Italy during her new appeal. On March 27, 2015, Italy’s highest court again overturned her conviction and her legal persecution was over.

Any rational person would have to ask how this miscarriage of justice could possibly happen. The answer to that is as complicated as the Amanda Knox story, if that’s possible to fully tell. It’s a murky mix of systematic incompetence and utter lack of regard for the truth. In the high court final ruling, the judge cited “sensational failures”, “glaring errors”, “investigative amnesia”, “guilty and culpable omissions”, “ignorance of expert forensic testimony that demonstrated contamination of evidence”, “outright falsification of forensic evidence”, and “a case without any foundation”.

The horrific Amanda Knox wrongful conviction story is best told by Amanda, herself. In a recent interview with The Atlantic titled Who Owns Amanda Knox? , Amanda says:

Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions again and again because others continue to profit off my identity, and my trauma, without my consent. Most recently, there is the film Stillwater, directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Matt Damon and Abigail Breslin, which was, in McCarthy’s words, “directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga.” How did we get here?

In the fall of 2007, a British student named Meredith Kercher was studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. She moved into a little cottage with three roommates—two Italian law interns, and an American girl. Less than two months into her stay, a young man named Rudy Guede, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast, broke into the apartment and found Meredith alone. Guede had a history of breaking and entering. A week prior, he had been arrested in Milan while burglarizing a nursery school, and was found carrying a 16-inch knife. He was released. A week later, he raped Meredith and stabbed her in the throat, killing her. In the process, he left his DNA in Meredith’s body and throughout the crime scene. He left his fingerprints and footprints in her blood. He fled to Germany immediately afterward, and later admitted to being at the scene.

I am the American girl in that story, and if the Italian authorities had been more competent, I would have been nothing more than a footnote in a tragic story. But as in many wrongful convictions, the authorities formed a theory before the forensic evidence came in, and when that evidence indicated a sole perpetrator, Guede, ego and reputation led them to contort their theory to maintain that I was still somehow involved. Guede was quietly convicted for participating in the murder in a separate fast-track trial, and then I became the main event for eight long years.

While I was on trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, from 2007 to 2015, the prosecution and the media crafted a story, and a doppelgänger version of me, onto which people could affix all their uncertainties, fears, and moral judgments. People liked that story: the psychotic man-eater, the dirty ice queen, Foxy Knoxy. A jury convicted my doppelgänger, and sentenced her to 26 years in prison. But the guards couldn’t handcuff that invented person. They couldn’t escort that fiction into a cell. That was me, the real me, who returned to that windowless prison van, to those high cement walls topped with barbed wire, to those cold, echoing hallways and barred windows, to that all-consuming loneliness.

Ten years ago, at the age of 24, I was acquitted, and I tumbled into a kind of purgatory. I left one cell and immediately entered another: the quiet of my childhood bedroom. Outside, the telephoto lenses were fixed on my closed blinds. Prison had given me an appreciation for all the freedoms I’d taken for granted. Freedom showed me how many I still lacked.

As I walked back into the free world, I knew that my doppelgänger was there alongside me. I knew that everyone I would ever meet from then on would have already met, and judged, her. I had been acquitted in a court of law, but sentenced to life by the court of public opinion as, if not a killer, then at least a slut, or a nutcase, or a tabloid celebrity. Why doesn’t she just go away already? Her 15 minutes are over.

In freedom, I had become a pariah. Looking for work, going back to school, buying tampons at the pharmacy, everywhere I went I met people who already thought they knew who I was, what I’d done or not done, and what I deserved. I was threatened with abduction and torture in broad daylight; I was threatened with having Meredith’s name carved into my body. Strangers sent me lingerie and bizarre love letters. All over the world, people believed they knew me, a warped assumption that turned me into a monster to some and a saint to others. I felt like I was always standing behind that cardboard cutout, Foxy Knoxy, saying, Hey, back here, the real me! Even most of the strangers who offered kindness and support didn’t truly see me. They loved her.

It’s hard to make friends, to date, to be a regular person when everyone you meet has a preconceived notion of who you really are, whether positive or negative. I could have chosen to hide out, to change my name, to dye my hair, and hope no one recognized me ever again. Instead, I decided to embrace the world that had dehumanized me, and all those who turned me into a product.

From the moment I was arrested, my name and face and trauma became a source of profit for news organizations, filmmakers, and other artists, scrupulous and unscrupulous. The most intimate details of my life, from my sexual history to my thoughts of death and suicide in prison, were taken from my private diary and leaked to journalists. Those journalists turned my darkest fears into fodder for hundreds of articles, thousands of blog posts, and millions of hot takes. People speculated about my mental state and sexuality, they diagnosed me from afar, they used my predicament as a metaphor, they made TV movies about me, based characters in legal shows on me, and the worst of them took every opportunity they could, while I was in prison and while I’ve been out, to shame me for something I didn’t do, to shame me for living while Meredith is dead, to shame me for being in the very headlines they write, for being in the photographs they take without my consent. The hypocrisy and the cruelty are maddening. And yet, being under that microscope has given me insight into how wrong a media narrative can be, how easy it is for all of us to consume other people’s lives as if they were mere content to fill up our Twitter feeds.

This focus on me led many to complain that Meredith Kercher had been forgotten. But whom did they blame for that? Not the Italian authorities. Not the press. Somehow it was my fault that the police and media focused on me at Meredith’s expense. The result of this is that 14 years later, my name is the name associated with this tragic series of events I had no control over. Meredith’s name is often left out, as is Rudy Guede’s. When he was released from prison in late 2020, the New York Post headline read: “Man Who Killed Amanda Knox’s Roommate Freed on Community Service.” My name is the only name that shouldn’t be in that headline.

I never asked to become a public person. The Italian authorities and global media made that choice for me. And when I was acquitted and freed, the media and the public wouldn’t allow me to become a private citizen again. I have not been allowed to return to the relative anonymity I had before Perugia. I have no choice but to accept the fact that I live in a world where my life, and my reputation, are freely available for distortion by a voracious content mill.

———

There is no doubt—no doubt whatsoever—that Amanda Knox really is innocent of killing Meredith Kercher, She’s a true victim of crime, a victim of commercial tabloids, and a victim of vicious trolls.

DID A DINGO REALLY GET HER BABY?

Azaria Chamberlain—a nine-week-old infant—disappeared from her family’s campsite at Ayers Rock (now called Uluru) in the central desert of Australia’s Northern Territory on August 17, 1980. Despite a massive search, Azaria’s body was never found and the question of whether she was taken from the tent by a wild dog or whether she was killed by her mother, Lynne (Lindy) Chamberlain, lingered on.

Lindy Chamberlain was charged with Azaria’s first-degree murder and convicted of her daughter’s slaying. After thirty-two years, eight legal proceedings, and tens of millions spent in the investigation, Lindy was finally exonerated by a coroner’s inquest that declared Azaria’s death was an accident—the result of a wild animal attack, to wit—a dingo.

The case was entirely circumstantial and supported by incriminating points of forensic evidence that convinced a jury to find Lindy Chamberlain guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But how credible were these “forensic facts”? Where did the case go wrong? And what led to Lindy’s conviction being overturned?

Lindy Chamberlain, 34, her husband Michael, 38, son Aidan, 6, son Reagan, 4, and infant Azaria were on a family vacation and pitched their tent in the Ayers Rock public campground at the famous World Heritage site. At eight p.m. and well after dark, Lindy finished breast-feeding Azaria and took her to the tent—thirty feet from the picnic table where she placed the baby in a bassinet and covered her with blankets. She’d taken Aidan with her and Reagan was already asleep inside.

Lindy went to their car that was parked beside the tent and got a can of baked beans to give Aidan as a bed-time snack, then returned with Aidan to Michael at the picnic table. At 8:15 p.m Azaria cried out. Concerned, Lindy walked toward the darkness of the tent-site and claimed she saw a dingo at the opening of the unzipped tent door. It appeared to have something in its mouth and was violently shaking its head.

Lindy hopped a short parking barricade which made the animal flee into the night. She checked inside the tent. Azaria was gone and there were fresh blood stains on the floor, bedding, and other articles. Lindy rushed out, yelling to Michael and the other campers “Help! A dingo’s got my baby!”

The adjacent campers formed a search party which was re-enforced by authorities and local residents, eventually totaling over three hundred volunteers including Aborigine expert trackers with their dogs. Dingo paw prints were noted in the sand outside the tent and a trail was followed which showed marks indicating a dingo was partly dragging an object, periodically setting it down to possibly rest or readjust its grip. (Azaria weighed just under ten pounds.) The trail indicated its destination was toward known dingo dens at the southwest base of Ayers Rock.

By daylight, no sign of the infant was found and the search was called off. The Chamberlain family cooperated in a preliminary investigation conducted by police from the nearest town of Alice Springs, then they returned home to Mount Isa.

Initially, there was no doubting the Chamberlains’ story. A dingo was seen in the campground before dark by campers. Others heard a dog growl minutes prior to the baby’s cry. They also heard Lindy’s scream “A dingo got my baby!” Further, the park ranger had warned that the dingo population was increasing and becoming very aggressive. And young Aidan backed up his mother’s story of going to the tent and the car, being with Lindy throughout.

The police investigation stopped. But, seven days later, a hiker found some of the garments Azaria was dressed in, nearly three miles away by the dingo dens. The clothes were a snap-buttoned jumpsuit, a singlet, and pieces of plastic diaper, or “nappy” as they say in Australia. Still missing was a “matinee” coat that Azaria wore overtop.

The examination found bloodstains on the upper part of the jumpsuit which showed a jagged perforation in the left sleeve and a “V”-shaped slice in the right collar. The singlet was inside out and the diaper fragments were shredded. The police officer who retrieved the garments failed to photograph their original position as had the original police officers attending the incident failed to photograph the scene. They also failed to properly examine and photo the tent’s interior which others reported was pooled and spotted with blood.

By now the Dingo’s Got My Baby case was getting international attention and the speculative rumor mill was alive in the media. “Dingos don’t behave like that!” self-appointed experts were saying. “It’s unheard of for a dingo to do this!” “Dingos can’t run with something in their mouths!”

Bigotry was emerging because the Chamberlains were Seventh Day Adventists with Michael being a professional pastor. “They’re a cult!” “They believe in child sacrifice!” “They were at Ayers Rock for a ritual!” “They always dressed the baby in black!” “The name ‘Azaria’ means ‘Sacrifice in the Wilderness’!”

When the first inquest was held in February, 1981, the media was in a frenzy and the police were covering their butts. The coroner ruled Azaria’s death was due to a dingo attack, despite there being no physical body to examine, and was critical of shoddy police investigation and of certain government officials of the Northern Territory who failed to provide the police with resources to investigate.

This threw fuel on the media fire and caused the authorities to start damage control.

A task force was formed to re-open the case, fittingly named Operation Ochre after the red sands of Ayers. It was headed by an ambitious police Superintendent with an aggressive field detective and was overseen by a politically-protective prosecutor. Collectively, they ran the investigation with the mindset that the dingo attack was implausible and that Lindy fabricated the story because she’d killed her own kid.

On September 19, 1981, Operation Ochre did a massive round-up of the original witnesses for re-interviews and raided the Chamberlains’ home. They seized boxes of items in a search for forensic evidence and impounded their car.

The investigation theory held that Lindy took Azaria from the tent to the car where she slit her baby’s throat, then stuffed her infant’s body in a camera bag. With husband Michael’s help, and after the searchers went home, they took their daughter’s body far away to the dingo dens, buried their little girl, then planted her clothing as a decoy.

There wasn’t the slightest suggestion of motive or any consideration of how the Chamberlains were stellar in reputation.

The vehicle was forensically grid-searched over a three-day period by a laboratory technician with a biology background. Suspected bloodstains were found on the console, the floor, and under the dashboard which was described as at trial as an “arterial spray” pattern.

Blood was also found on various items taken from the Chamberlains’ home, known to be present in the tent at the time Azaria disappeared. The lab-tech confirmed the blood on Azaria’s jumpsuit was not only human—it was composed of 25 % fetal hemoglobin which was consistent with an infant’s blood.

This was the forensic cornerstone of the prosecution’s circumstantial case.

A second inquest was held in February, 1982. It was run as a prosecution—an indictment with the focus on proving a theory, rather than discovering facts. The Chamberlains were not privy to the “evidence” beforehand and had no ability to defend themselves. “Information” was presented by the lab-tech that blood from the car was consistent with fetal hemoglobin and, therefore, the baby must have bled out in the car.

Another forensic expert testified the cuts and bloodstain pattern on the jumpsuit were caused by a sharp-edged weapon, probably a pair of scissors, and were in no way caused by canine teeth.

Despite all the civilian witnesses testifying consistently as before, and corroborating the Chamberlains claims, the inquest deferred judgment and referred the case to the criminal courts.

Lindy was tried for Azaria’s murder in September, 1982, and her husband was accused of being an accessory-after-the-fact. Over a hundred and fifty witnesses testified, many of those being forensic experts—some of considerable note. The Chamberlains were forced to defend themselves, funded by their church and donations by believers in their innocence. They had no access to disclosure of evidence by the prosecution and were kept on the ropes by surprise after surprise of technical evidence which they had no time nor ability to prepare a defense.

This trial was not just sensational in Australia. It was carried by all forms of world news—TV, radio, print, and tabloids. As big as the O.J. Simpson trial would become in America, the public were split on the question of Lindy’s guilt or innocence.

The jury bought the prosecution’s case that science was far more reliable that eye and ear witness testimony and the Chamberlains were convicted. Lindy was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor and Michael was given a three-year suspended sentence. A pregnant Lindy went directly to jail where their newest baby—a daughter—was born. Two appeals to Australian high courts fell on deaf ears. They found no fault in the application of law.

The Dingo Got My Baby case never faded from public interest. Many groups petitioned, calling for changes in the law and for a new, fair trial to be held. Pressure mounted on the Australian Northern Territory officials.

On February 02, 1986, a British rock climber fell to his death on Ayers Rock. During the search for his body, Azaria’s missing matinee jacket was found—partially buried in the sand outside a previously unknown dingo den. The examination found matching perforations in the coat consistent with the jumpsuit cuts.

News of this find caused a massive public outcry against the Northern Territory government and they reluctantly released Lindy from jail pending a re-investigation. A third inquest was a “paper” review that recommended the matter be sent back to the courts.

A Royal Commission of Inquiry into Lindy Chamberlain’s conviction was held from April, 1986, to June, 1987. It focused on the validity of the scientific evidence, rather than on legalities of court procedure.

The jewel of the forensic crown—the fetal hemoglobin in the family car bloodstains turned out not to be blood at all. The drops were spilled chocolate milkshake and some copper ore dust while the “arterial spray” was overspray from injected sound deadener applied at the car’s factory.

The clothing cuts became an Achilles’ Heel and toppled the case because the expert witness by now was discredited in other cases resulting in wrongful convictions. New forensic witnesses, with more advanced technological expertise, testified the cuts were entirely consistent with being mauled by a dog.

In September, 1988, the Australian High Court quashed the Chamberlains’ convictions and awarded them $1.3 million in damages—far less than their legal bills, let alone compensating their pain and suffering.

The High Court never said Lindy was innocent, though. It rightfully set aside her conviction but made no amends in publically proclaiming innocence.

It wasn’t until 2012, that Lindy’s perseverance forced the fourth inquest. The presiding coroner classified Azaria Chamberlain’s death as accidental—being taken and killed by a dingo.

Coroner Elizabeth Morris had the decency to publically apologize to Lindy on behalf of all Australian authorities for a horrific, systematic miscarriage of justice.

Coroner Morris also had the class not to single out individuals. Without her saying, it was evident the police, prosecution, and forensic people instinctively reacted as they’d been trained to react—and that was to individually find evidence to support their case interest and not to follow what didn’t fit.

And Coroner Morris was careful not to burn the media.

Lindy’s situation was a media dream, having all the elements of a thrilling novel—mystery, instinctive fears, motherhood, femininity, family, religion, politics, and an exotic location combined with courtroom and forensic drama.

And it came at the expense of an innocent human mother who’s baby girl got taken by a wild animal—probably a mother dingo instinctively trying to feed her own family.

Dying Words

Provoking Thoughts on Life, Death, and Writing