A scenario of murder

A friend whose judgment I respect, and who previously had thought that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito might be innocent, the victims of a kind of Hitchcockian nightmare, has been reading further in the True Justice for Meredith Kercher site and the materials linked there, and tells me that she now thinks that they did it. From her reading of various sources, she has derived a scenario of the murder. Rudy Guede had expressed to Amanda that he was interested in Meredith. Amanda, Raffaele, and Guede decided they would make Meredith have sex with Guede. It did not start with a deliberate intent to kill. It was coercive, but also perhaps from their sick point of view half-playful. As Amanda and Raffaele held Meredith from the front, Guede held Meredith from behind. During this time, Amanda was pressing the knife harder and harder against Meredith’s throat, not to penetrate the skin, but to get her to yield. Guede reached his hands around to Meredith’s front, pushing his hand down into her pants and penetrating her vagina with his fingers. At this point Meredith screamed. And that’s when Amanda cut her throat.

Guede left, and Amanda and Raffaele left the house and observed it from a distance to see if any police came in response to the scream. When no police came, they re-entered the house and started cleaning up the bloody footprints. Maybe they left the toilet unflushed because they didn’t mind if police found signs of Guede there. They didn’t finish the job, and returned the next morning to continue the cleaning. They were there with a mop when the police arrived. At that point Amanda and Raffaele went into Amanda’s room to call their families, those false calls by which they attempted to create the impression that they had innocently come upon the murder scene and that the police weren’t there yet.

There was—contrary to what I had believed from reading media reports—no anal rape. And there was no vaginal rape. There was the forcible vaginal penetration with Guede’s hand. So Guede’s DNA that was found in such abundance on Meredith’s body was not from his semen, but just from the contact of his body with hers as he grabbed her, grappled with her, and groped her.

Another detail: Raffaele was a virgin when he met Amanda at age 23. Meaning that within two weeks of going to bed with a girl for the first time in his life, he participated in a sexual murder on her behalf.

This, I repeat, is a scenario that my friend has pieced together from the evidence, in an attempt to make sense of the evidence. She also suggests an alternative scenario, that Guede expressed interest in having sex with Meredith, Amanda favored the idea and took him to the house, Meredith resisted Guede’s advances and he killed her, and Amanda and Raffaele, afraid they would be implicated, attempted to cover up the evidence of their presence in the house.

Any way we look at it, to repeat a phrase I used in an earlier entry, Meredith Kercher’s murder was a result of “the free-flowing, sexually liberated, racially integrated environment of Perugia.”

- end of initial entry -

December 13

Daniel H. writes:

I’m perplexed too. Evidence and putative evidence has been coming out in dribs and drabs. I thought it was established that Kercher had been anally raped. Now it turns out, according to your correspondent, that this is not the case. And what happened to the evidence that Knox’s blood was found, comingled with Kercher’s, in one of the bathrooms? This “fact” has been repeated several times in the media. If blood spots containing Kercher’s and Knox’s blood were found in the bathroom this would be conclusive evidence of Knox’s guilt, more so than the trace DNA samples found on the knife and bra clasp. But does such blood evidence actually exist? Why aren’t Kercher’s people touting this one unassailable piece of evidence? [LA replies: Good question.]

Outside of Knox and Sollecito the one man who knows what happened is Guede, and he isn’t talking, and if I were in his depraved and evil shoes I wouldn’t talk either. Can Guede turn the anguish and confusion that prevails to his own advantage? This case is not going to die. Already U.S politicians are taking it up. US Senator Maria Cantwell is calling it a miscarriage of justice, asserting Knox’s innocence. There has been talk of Hilary Clinton taking up the matter. We can imagine the pressure that will be brought to bear on the Italian justice system. If I were one of these amoral lawyers whose only focus was on getting my client released, and as such if I were Guede’s lawyer, I would be thinking about making a deal with Italian Justice. I would propose a major reduction in sentence in exchange for a thorough and truthful examination by Italian prosecutors. I would vouch lie detector tests and declare that any discovered untruths on Guede’s part would invalidate the deal. In exchange I would demand five years for my client. No more. An obscenity, I know, but something like this could happen. What a mess.

My instincts tell me that Knox and Sollecito are innocent.

(Ben’s comment was sent in response to an earlier entry, “The Multiple confusions of the Knox case,” but it also seems to fit in this entry.)

Ben W. writes:

You say you aren’t sure of the particulars of the Knox situation. Is she guilty of murder?

What about the ensemble of the whole thing, the totality. A European white male, an American white female, and a black thug and drug dealer. Reading the article about Patrick Lumumba, with its portrayal of the social scene in Perugia, we can see the complex of things that led to the event. A perfect liberal situation—the whole thing reeks of guilt. All the way to the top of Italian society which led to this racial and cultural melange. When such social situations and historical circumstances happen, a legal or judicial system rarely can handle the complexity and totality of such an event. The U.S. is tending in that direction.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 12, 2009 04:17 PM | Send