Leone wrote:
GUILTERS' FEAR AND LOATHING OF AK's ECHR APPEAL....
James "Raper" wote on TJMK:
In our previous post Kermit nicely shows how, under the European Court of Human Rights’ own guidelines, Amanda Knox’s “appeal” won’t put her out of reach of the fair and painstaking Italians.
If any of the busy, hard-pressed ECHR investigators do choose to press beyond the ECHR guidelines, they will almost instantly establish that in her voluntary interview on 5 November 2007 Knox was treated with complete fairness.
Also that her false accusation of Patrick (which she never retracted) was entirely of her own doing.
And also that she is not only trying to throw sand into the wheels of Italian justice during an ongoing judicial process (a felony in Italy) but she is trying to welsh out of paying Patrick his damages award of $100,000 (a contempt of the Supreme Court) thus foolishly risking two more charges of aggravated calunnia.
This post derives from a post of mine last May. In another post, we showed that Dr Mignini was not present for the interrogation that night, and Knox maliciously invented an illegal interrogation at risk of a third aggravated calunnia charge.
In fact Dr Mignini met with Amanda Knox only briefly, later, to charge her and to warn she should say no more without a lawyer. He asked her no questions.
I will compare the various accounts of the interrogation to demonstrate that Amanda Knox is indeed lying to the ECHR, just as she did repeatedly in her book this year and also on US and European television.
There are two main bodies of truth about the interrogation: (1) all of those present at various times on that night and (2) Knox’s own testimony on the witness stand in mid 2009.
There are two main bodies of lies about the interrogation (1) The Sollecito book and (2) the Knox book, which by the way not only contradict one another but also contradict such other accounts as those of Saul Kassin and John Douglas.
The police had called her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in to the station for questioning and Knox had accompanied him because she did not want to be alone. They had already eaten at the house of a friend of Sollecito’s.
Knox’s interrogation was not tape recorded and in that sense we have no truly independent account of what transpired. The police, including the interpreter, gave evidence at her trial, but we do not yet have transcripts for that evidence other than that of the interpreter. There are accounts in books that have been written about the case but these tend to differ in the detail. The police and the interpreter maintain that she was treated well. Apart from the evidence of the interpreter all we have is what Knox says happened, and our sources for this are transcripts of her trial evidence and what she wrote in her book. I shall deal with the evidence of the interpreter towards the end of this article.
I am going to compare what she said at trial with what she wrote in her book but also there was a letter she wrote on the 9th and a recording of a meeting with her mother on the 10th November which are relevant.. What she wrote in her book is fairly extensive and contains much dialogue. She has a prodigious memory for detail now which was almost entirely lacking before. I am going to tell you to treat what she says in her book with extreme caution because she has already been found out for, well let us say, her creative writing if not outright distortion of facts. I shall paraphrase rather than quote most of it but a few direct quotes are necessary.
Knox arrived with Sollecito at the police station at about 10.30 pm (according to John Follain). The police started to question Sollecito at 10.40 pm (Follain).
In her book Knox describes being taken from the waiting area to a formal interview room in which she had already spent some time earlier. It is unclear when that formal questioning began. Probably getting on for about 11.30pm because she also refers to some questions being asked of her in the waiting room following which she did some stretches and splits. She then describes how she was questioned about the events over a period from about the time she and Sollecito left the cottage to about 9 pm on the 1st November.
Possibly there was a short break. She describes being exhausted and confused. The interpreter, Knox says, arrived at about 12.30 am. Until then she had been conversing with the police in Italian.
Almost immediately on the questioning resuming -
“Monica Napoleoni, who had been so abrupt with me about the poop and the mop at the villa, opened the door. “Raffaele says you left his apartment on Thursday night,” she said almost gleefully. “He says that you asked him to lie for you. He’s taken away your alibi.””
Knox describes how she was dumfounded and devastated by this news. She cannot believe that he would say that when they had been together all night. She feels all her reserves of energy draining away. Then -
“Where did you go? Who did you text?” Ficarra asked, sneering at me.
“I don’t remember texting anyone.”
They grabbed my cell phone up off the desk and scrolled quickly through its history.
“You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”
“My boss at Le Chic.”
Stop right there.
How were the police able to name the recipient of the text? The text Patrick had sent her had already been deleted from Knox’s mobile phone by Knox herself and Knox hasn’t yet named Patrick. In fact she couldn’t remember texting anyone.
It is of course probable that the police already had a log of her calls and possibly had already traced and identified the owner of the receiving number for her text, though the last step would have been fast work.
In her trial testimony Knox did a lot of “the police suggested this and suggestd that” though it is never crystal clear whether she is accusing the police of having suggested his name. But she is doing it here in her book and of course the Knox groupies have always maintained that it was the police who suggested his name to her.
The following extract from her trial testimony should clear things up. GCM is Judge Giancarlo Massei.
GCM: In this message, was there the name of the person it was meant for?
AK: No, it was the message I wrote to my boss. The one that said “Va bene. Ci vediamo piu tardi. Buona serata.”
GCM: But it could have been a message to anyone. Could you see from the message to whom it was written?
AK: Actually, I don’t know if that information is in the telephone…………………..
GCM : But they didn’t literally say it was him!
AK : No. They didn’t say it was him, but they said “We know who it is, we know who it is. You were with him, you met him.”
GCM : Now what happened next? You, confronted with the message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?”
AK : Well, first I started to cry…....
And having implied that it was the police who suggested Patrick’s name to her, she adds….. that quote again -
“You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”
“My boss at Le Chic.”
Here she is telling the Perugian cops straight out exactly to whom the text was sent. “My boss at Le Chic”.
But that does not quite gel with her trial testimony -
And they told me that I knew, and that I didn’t want to tell. And that I didn’t want to tell because I didn’t remember or because I was a stupid liar. Then they kept on about this message, that they were literally shoving in my face saying “Look what a stupid liar you are, you don’t even remember this!”
At first, I didn’t even remember writing that message. But there was this interpreter next to me who kept saying “Maybe you don’t remember, maybe you don’t remember, but try,” and other people were saying “Try, try, try to remember that you met someone, and I was there hearing “Remember, remember, remember…..
Doesn’t the above quote make it clear that the police were having considerable trouble getting Knox to tell them to whom her text message was sent? It would also explain their growing frustration with her.
But perhaps the above quote relates not to whom the text was sent but, that having been ascertained, whether Knox met up with that person later? Knox has a habit of conflating the two issues. However there is also the following quote from her trial testimony -
Well there were lots of people who were asking me questions, but the person who had started talking with me was a policewoman with long hair, chestnut brown hair, but I don’t know her. Then in the circle of people who were around me, certain people asked me questions, for example there was a man holding my telephone, and who was literally shoving the telephone into my face, shouting “Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?”
Then there were others, for instance this woman who was leading, was the same person who at one point was standing behind me, because they kept moving, they were really surrounding me and on top of me. I was on a chair, then the interpreter was also sitting on a chair, and everyone else was standing around me, so I didn’t see who gave me the first blow because it was someone behind me, but then I turned around and saw that woman and she gave me another blow to the head.
The woman with the long hair, chestnut brown hair, Knox identifies in her book as Ficarra. Ficarra is the policewoman who started the questioning particularly, as Knox has confirmed, about the texted message. “Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?” Again, surely this is to get Knox to identify the recipient of the text, not about whether she met up with him?
In the book though, it is all different.
In the book, the police having told her that the text is to someone called Patrick, Knox is a model of co-operation as, having already told them that he is her boss at Le Chic, she then gives a description of him and answers their questions as to whether he knew Meredith, whether he liked her etc. No reluctance to co-operate, no memory difficulties here.
Notwithstanding this, her book says the questions and insinuations keep raining down on her. The police insist that she had left Sollecito’s to meet up with - and again the police name him - Patrick.
“Who did you meet up with? Who are you protecting? Why are you lying? Who’s this person? Who’s Patrick?”
Remember again, according to her trial testimony the police did not mention Patrick’s name and Knox still hasn’t mentioned his name. But wait, she does in the next line -
“I said “Patrick is my boss.””
So now, at any rate, the police have a positive ID from Knox regarding the text message and something to work with. Patrick - boss - Le Chic.
Knox then refers to the differing interpretations as to what “See you later” meant and denies that she had ever met up with Patrick that evening. She recalls the interpreter suggesting that she was traumatized and suffering from amnesia.
The police continue to try to draw an admission from Knox that she had met up with Patrick that evening - which again she repeatedly denies. And why shouldn’t she? After all, she denies that she’s suffering from amnesia, or that there is a problem with her memory. The only problem is that Sollecito had said she had gone out but that does not mean she had met with Patrick.
Knox then writes, oddly, as it is completely out of sequence considering the above -
“They pushed my cell phone, with the message to Patrick, in my face and screamed,
“You’re lying. You sent a message to Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”
That’s when Ficarra slapped me on my head.”
A couple of blows (more like cuffs) to the head (denied by the police) is mentioned in her trial testimony but more likely, if this incident ever happened, it would have been earlier when she was struggling to remember the text and to whom it had been sent. Indeed that’s clear from the context of the above quotes.
And this, from her trial testimony -
Remember, remember, remember, and then there was this person behind me who—it’s not that she actually really physically hurt me, but she frightened me.”
In the CNN TV interview with Chris Cuomo, Knox was asked if there was anything she regretted.
Knox replied that she regretted the way this interrogation had gone, that she wished she had been aware of her rights and had stood up to the police questioning better.
Well actually, according to the account in her book, she appears to have stood up to the police questioning with a marked degree of resilience and self- certainty, and with no amnesia. There is little of her trademark “being confused”.
So why the sudden collapse? And it was a sudden collapse.
Given the trial and book accounts Knox would have us think that she was frightened, that it was due to exhaustion and the persistent and bullying tone of the questioning, mixed with threats that she would spend time in prison for failing to co-operate. She also states that -
(a) she was having a bad period and was not being allowed to attend to this, and
(b) the police told her that they had “hard evidence” that she was involved in the murder.
Knox has given us a number of accounts as to what was actually happening when this occurred.
In a letter she wrote on the 9th November she says that suddenly all the police officers left the room but one, who told her she was in serious trouble and that she should name the murderer. At this point Knox says that she asked to see the texted message again and then an image of Patrick came to mind. All she could think about was Patrick and so she named him (as the murderer).
During a recorded meeting with her mother in Capanne Prison on the 10th November she relates essentially the same story.
In her book there is sort of the same story but significantly without mention of the other officers having left the room nor mention of her having asked to see the texted message again.
If the first two accounts are correct then at least the sense of oppression from the room being crowded and questions being fired at her had lifted.
Then this is from her book -
In that instant, I snapped. I truly thought I remembered having met somebody. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I didn’t understand that I was about to implicate the wrong person. I didn’t understand what was at stake. I didn’t think I was making it up. My mind put together incoherent images. The image that came to me was Patrick’s face. I gasped. I said his name. “Patrick—it’s Patrick.
It’s her account, of course, but this “Patrick - It’s Patrick” makes no sense at this stage of it unless it’s an admission not just that she had met up with Patrick but that he was at the cottage and involved in Meredith’s death.
And this is from her trial testimony -
GCM : Now what happened next? You, confronted with the message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?
AK : Well, first I started to cry. And all the policemen, together, started saying to me, you have to tell us why, what happened? They wanted all these details that I couldn’t tell them, because in the end, what happened was this: when I said the name of Patrick I suddenly started imagining a kind of scene, but always using this idea: images that didn’t agree, that maybe could give some kind of explanation of the situation.
There is a clear difference between these two quotes.
The one from her book suggests that she was trying hard but that the police had virtually brought her to the verge of a mental breakdown.
Her trial testimony says something else; that a scene and an idea was forming in her mind brought on by her naming of Patrick.
In her book she states that a statement, typed up in Italian, was shoved under her nose and she was told to sign it. The statement was timed at 1.45 am. The statement was not long but would probably have taken about twenty minutes to prepare and type.
The statement according to Knox -
... I met Patrick immediately at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana and we went to the house together. I do not remember if Meredith was there or came shortly afterward. I have a hard time remembering those moments but Patrick had sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I cannot remember clearly whether he threatened Meredith first. I remember confusedly that he killed her.
The fact that the statement was in Italian is not important. Knox could read Italian perfectly well. However she does insinuate in the book that the details in the statement were suggested to her and that she didn’t bother to read the statement before signing.
Apart from what has been mentioned above, there are some other points and inferences to be drawn from the above analysis.
1. Knox’s account destroys one of Sollecito’s main tenets in his book Honour Bound. Sollecito maintains that he did nothing to damage Knox’s alibi until he signed a statement, forced on him at 3:30 am and containing the damaging admission that Knox had gone out. But Knox makes it clear that she had heard from the Head of the Murder Squad that he had made that damaging admission, at or shortly after 12.30 am. Or is Knox is accusing Napoleoni of a bare-faced lie?
2. It is valid to ask why Knox would not want to remember to whom the text had been sent. Who can see into her mind? Perhaps Knox realized that discussion of it would confirm that if she had indeed gone out then it was not to Le Chic, where she was not required. However even if she thought that could put her in the frame it’s not what an innocent person would be too worried about. Perhaps she did just have difficulty remembering?
3. If there was no fuss and she did remember and tell the police that the text was to Patrick, and the questioning then moved on to whether she met up with Patrick later that evening, what was the problem with that? She knew the fact that she hadn’t met up with him could be verified by Patrick. She could have said that and stuck to it. The next move for the police would have been to question Patrick. They would not have had grounds to arrest him.
4. Knox stated in her memorial, and re-iterates it in her book, that during her interrogation the police told her that they had hard evidence that she was involved in Meredith’s murder. She does not expand on what this evidence is, perhaps because the police did not actually tell her. However, wasn’t she the least bit curious, particularly if she was innocent? What was she thinking it might be?
5. I can sympathise with any interviewee suffering a bad period, if that’s true. However the really testy period of the interview/interrogation starts with the arrival of the interpreter, notification of Sollecito’s withdrawal of her alibi and the questioning with regard to the text to Patrick, all occurring at around 12.30 am. There has to be some critical point when she concedes, whether to the police or in her own mind, that she’d met “Patrick”, after which there was the questioning as to what had happened next. Say that additional questioning took 20 minutes. Then there would be a break whilst the statement is prepared and typed up. So the difficult period for Knox, from about 12.30 am to that critical point, looks more like about 35 to, at the outside, 50 minutes.
6. Even if, for that period, it is true that she was subjected to repeated and bullying questions, and threats, then she held up remarkably well as I have noted from her own account. It does not explain any form of mental breakdown, let alone implicating Patrick in murder. In particular, if Knox’s letter of the 9th and the recording of her meeting with her mother on the 10th are to believed, that alleged barrage of questions had stopped when she implicated Patrick. An explanation, for what it’s worth, might be that she had simply ceased to care any longer despite the consequences. But why?
7. A better and more credible explanation is that an idea had indeed formed suddenly in her mind. She would use the revelation about the text to Patrick and the consequent police line of questioning to bring the questioning to an end and divert suspicion from her true involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher. She envisaged that she would be seen by the police as a helpless witness/victim, not a suspect in a murder investigation. As indeed was the case initially. She expected, I am sure, to be released, so that she could get Sollecito’s story straight once again. If that had happened there would of course remain the problem of her having involved Patrick, but I dare say she thought that she could simply smooth that over - that it would not be a big deal once he had confirmed that there had been no meeting and that he had not been at the cottage, as the evidence was bound to confirm.
At the beginning I said that we also have a transcript now of the evidence of the interpreter, Anna Donnino. I will summarise the main points from her evidence but it will be apparent immediately that she contradicts much of what Knox and her supporters claim to have happened.
Donnino told the court that she had 22 years experience working as a translator for the police in Perugia. She was at home when she received a call from the police that her services were required and she arrived at the police station at just before 12.30 am, just as Knox said. She found Knox with Inspector Ficarra. There was also another police officer there whose first name was Ivano. At some stage Ficarra left the room and then returned and there was also another officer by the name of Zugarina who came in. Donnino remained with Knox at all times
The following points emerge from her testimony :-
1. Three police officers do not amount to the “lots of people” referred to in Knox’s trial testimony, let alone the dozens and the “tag teams” of which her supporters speak.
2. She makes no mention of Napoleoni and denied that anyone had entered the room to state that Sollecito had broken Knox’s alibi. (This is not to exclude that this may have happened before Donnino arrived)
3. She states that Knox was perfectly calm but there came a point when Knox was being asked how come she had not gone to work that she was shown her own text message (to Patrick). Knox had an emotional shock, put her hands to her ears and started rolling her head and saying “It’s him! It’s him! It’s him!”
4. She denied that Knox had been maltreated or that she had been hit at all or called a liar.
5. She stated that the officer called Ivano had been particularly comforting to Knox, holding her hand occasionally.
6. She stated that prior to the 1.45 am statement being presented to Knox she was asked if she wanted a lawyer but Knox said no.
7. She stated that she had read the statement over to Knox in english and Knox herself had checked the italian original having asked for clarification of specific wording.
7. She confirmed that that she had told Knox about an accident which she’d had (a leg fracture) and that she had suffered amnesia about the accident itself. She had thought Knox was suffering something similar. She had also spoken to Knox about her own daughters because she thought it was necessary to establish a rapport and trust between the two of them.
The account in Knox’s book is in some ways quite compelling but only if it is not compared against her trial testimony, let alone the Interpreter’s testimony: that is, up to the point when she implicates Patrick in murder. At that point no amount of whitewash works. The Italian Supreme Court also thought so, upholding Knox’s calunnia conviction, with the addition of aggravating circumstances.
Posted by James Raper on 11/30/13 at 08:50 AM
Comments
Who is the woman in the top photo looking through a glass darkly?
Posted by chami on 11/30/13 at 01:36 PM | #
Three more aggravated calunnias could attract sentences of another 12 years…. The blood money for the book could constitute another.
So who is driving the crazy Hardline Bus here? That is something of a puzzle to all of us. Amanda Knox is surely old enough to get a firm grip on the process.
But everyone seems to discount her present mental abilities and consider her a mere pawn of others. And yet when Ghirga and Vedova visited her a few weeks ago, they departed from Seattle very frustrated.
Chris Mellas and Edda Mellas are most widely pointed to by insiders as the crazy hardliners, especially as Chris Mellas is known to be putting up all the crazy hardline websites.
The only one who might come to share the common sense and grip on reality of Francesco Sollecito may be Curt Knox, though he seems to have become semi-detached from the whole affair. It must sicken him to live with the sure knowledge that Knox was a party to a murder, and that they are headed right back to zero bank balances.
******
Chami, that was the court interpreter that Knox elbowed aside mid 2009, actually to Knox’s considerable detriment - it looked mean, she had no time to think, and her own fractured Italian was less than fully understandable.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 11/30/13 at 01:44 PM | #
If the number is in your contacts list, the SMS will have a header with the remote person’s name being displayed. If the number is missing from the contacts list, i.e., there is no corresponding name, then the number will be displayed.
It is possible Amanda had already put Patrick on her contact list.
The things police must have done already on the first day itself, (i) getting the call logs from the service providers (it may take 1-2 days) (ii) putting a order for phone line taps (this was done on the same day) and (iii) getting reports of their daily activities.
Police must have already been aware of ALL the calls made by most of the people involved by this time. And this includes SMS.
Posted by chami on 11/30/13 at 01:57 PM | #
Chami, it was a spontaneous interview… if Knox’s phone records for the night had seemed as revealing as Sollecitos it would surely not have been so spontaneous.
She had already told interrogators her employer had told her not to come to work that night. She could have said “oh, that’s my employer” and moved on, denying all knowledge.
The fact that the interview was spontaneous has always been an immense problem for Knox apologists. It doesnt play to the notion of an Italy-wide frameup.
Plus to my knowledge not one Knox apologist has gone anywhere near that malicious attempt to frame Mignini, which anyone who has read the book of course believes.
But they need to do so if they are to avoid complete legal catastrophe. Will-they-wont they, will-they-wont they…..
Posted by Peter Quennell on 11/30/13 at 02:26 PM | #
“It doesnt play to the notion of an Italy-wide frameup”
According to FoA, the whole world is after the little Angel. I was originally under the mistaken notion that all angels are sex-less, but that is going on a different track…
Of course the FoA is wrong, as expected, because the volunteer army of the little Angel is clearly non-denumerable. That leaves only a small group running after her flesh and blood…
I am here because I want justice to be served. Am I asking for too much?
She accompanied the lover-boy that fateful night (of the infamous interview; now she gives interviews almost like a professional) just because she was not comfortable to leave him alone with the vultures. Just to make sure the little boy does not go astray. But fate had other plans for her…
The turning off the mobiles is a far greater and potentially interesting point. As a late bloomer, she had to make up for the lost time and I would guess that she would love to turn off her mobile EVERY night…
She underestimated others’ common sense.
Posted by chami on 11/30/13 at 03:23 PM | #
First of all, happy Thanksgiving weekend to all. This is a very insightful post of Knox’s deviations between what she said in her book and in the witness box. Her body language in court showed contempt for the interpreter. Knox didn’t trust Mrs. Donnino. Knox was arrogant enough to think she spoke Italian better than a seasoned interpreter of both languages. Hubris was ablaze and paranoia, too. Knox wanted to wrest control of all her verbiage. She wanted to make sure all her lies were imparted clearly, not subsumed in some interpreter’s slanted version, a woman she might have feared she’d already offended. Knox’s hand chop motions suggest her grabbing the reins and jabbing for intensity. Those mean hands showed what they could do and the jury saw it.
In court Knox seemed uncomfortable around Anna Donnino but straining not to show it. Anna was probably much more intelligent than Knox but Knox was too dumb or frightened to see it. Donnino was slightly overweight and a bit older than Knox. Maybe that played a part in the dislike, or Donnino’s possible resemblance to mother Edda.
Even the kindheartedness of the police officer women probably served only to raise Knox’s scorn and contempt of them during her interrogation. Warm or kindly emotions she distrusted and was not used to. She suspected a false show of sympathy was being used to manipulate her into giving them what they wanted, the goal being to trip her up and tell them about the murder which would then place Knox at the scene.
So Knox rejected the whole lot of them and put up a wall of silence which was soon broken down, then fake confusion alternating with tears for pity mixed with ill-disguised defiance. The Perugian police saw right through it. She came to the end of her rope and began the visions and fantasies jungle. Ever since we have been treated to a campaign of lies and retractions.
James Raper’s point #2 about Knox stumping the police by refusing as long as she could to tell them who she texted: it seems like a clear form of obstructing justice. Knox did the liar’s squirm of halting to buy time to think up the next lie. She was probably afraid to tell the police much of anything during the first interrogation, because she had no means of knowing what the significance would be of even the slightest bit of info she gave them. She had thought about her false alibi but not enough, and it was a gamechanger when the police started lying to the liar. (Police are allowed to do so to elicit information, they’re good at it.)
Knox had never come up against this thorny challenge of having more than one person perhaps lying to her and to whom she must then answer with her life on the line. Little did she know that the police officers were all smarter and more experienced than Knox in tweezing out the truth from hardened liars. They were cannier than she expected. She was scared to death, tired and probably humiliated at how obvious her flaky story was. Then she suddenly had to contend with Raffaele jumping ship, yet she couldn’t trust the police report that he had broken her alibi.
She didn’t know whether he had or not, so she had to assume that he hadn’t flinched and that she should keep playing along to their original script agreed on in secrecy during and after the murder cleanup.
Even at Knox’s moment of greatest mental crisis, she never broke because she never named the real killers: herself, Guede, and Raffaele. She threw the police a bone by naming Patrick, and as Raper elucidates she hoped that false accusation would throw them off long enough for her to escape the Questura and return to patch things up with Raffaele or flee with Mom back to safety of the U.S. She didn’t want to tell the police ANYTHING, but she thought telling them a lie to misdirect them might save her temporarily.
James Raper makes clear that she may have frustrated the police by pretending ignorance and forgetfulness. She certainly did, and who can seriously believe that Amanda Knox did not remember texting her boss back to say “Wheeee, Patrick, thanks for the night off!” Didn’t Raffaele claim she actually jumped up and threw her arms and perhaps legs around him because she was so happy to have the night off? How does one forget that physical reaction? She had to respond by text to let Patrick know she got his message and wouldn’t come in to work that night. That series of emotions and thoughts wouldn’t be so easily forgotten. So she started lying to the police pretty fast.
Now she is trying to stiff Patrick the only guy in Perugia who truly helped her. She refuses to pay for calunnia thus refusing to admit fault of any kind in implicating him in murder. Her visions and brainwaves of him raping Meredith are somehow the police’s fault.
She’s probably lying about her application to the ECHR, too. The Perugia police can tell you she’s an inveterate liar, and the Human Rights court won’t waste their time with it. Even Raffaele says she’s a liar, said that she asked him to lie for her. Now he is locked in with her lies and doing a trial run of boarding planes in Paris that could take him far away from the results. (or boarding planes as a feint while planning to slip away by ship)
Posted by Hopeful on 11/30/13 at 03:56 PM | #
@James Raper.
A painstaking analysis which no doubt involved a lot of hard work. Thank you.
The facts speak for themselves: stating the bleeding obvious, AK is a seriously disturbed individual for whom truth is a totally nebulous concept.
What can one say other than it’s amazing how one person can cause such murderous chaos and then go on to leave behind such an enormous trail of lies, half-truths and misinformation.
The Knox and Sollecito families seem to have brass nerves and to be well beyond embarrassment by now (or, less likely, they are stupid and believe their kids are as innocent as lambs). In any event they should be entered into the Guinness Book of Records for the amount of brouhaha, and public time/expense that their two wayward offspring have set in train (one of the pathetic lost souls is now vying it seems for another inglorious record - the first murderer who has sought to create an international incident in an attempt to avoid facing justice).
We know families will generally stick together through thick and thin etc., but the unflinching degree of primitive solidarity evinced by the Knox and Sollecito families would surely even embarrass your proper, bog-standard mafia (who at least don’t pretend to be anything else). Actually few things are quite as scary as the nuclear family, even (or maybe especially) the broken nuclear family, when events peel away the suburban, bourgeois veneer.
Posted by Odysseus on 11/30/13 at 04:40 PM | #
Thank you James.
I think they told much of the story indirectly. Remember Raffy telling of one cop who told him he would kill him and leave him in a pool of blood? (Honorless bound)? That statement (lie) sent chills thru me.
Thanks again
Posted by Bettina on 11/30/13 at 07:32 PM | #
Well researched and presented article, James.
If an innocent person slept all night with her boyfriend and if the boyfriend suddenly revealed that the person had actually gone out for four hours in the late evening and early morning, would not that person simply counter that the boyfriend must be mistaken?
Would not that person express surprise and outrage that the boyfriend could tell such an obscene lie?
Would not that innocent person immediately demand that the police should investigate the lying boyfriend?
NOT Knox,- she immediately panicked and fingered the innocent Patrik Lumumba.
Knox and Solliceto are guilty as charged, if for no other reason than their reactions to events and numerous, self-conflicting versions of the “truth” scream it to be so.
Posted by Mealer on 11/30/13 at 07:42 PM | #
@ Mealer
Indeed. But even before that, also think about: a woman (or a parson A) slept with a man (B) all night, having sex (as the late book claims; or she even claimed having bath together etc.), and the man (person B) when questioned about what he remembers, says “I don’t remember if we had sex”.
Don’t you think that answer itself - besides being unreasonable and idiotic as a lie - would be at least offensive to the person A?
Posted by Yummi on 11/30/13 at 07:59 PM | #
@Bettina
And the fish blood story.
Psychologically, blood is a taboo. In very few advertisements you will see that have lots of dark red that may symbolize blood.
I had wondered why advertisers use blue ink to compare performance of various women’s napkins.
Both are steeped with violence. Both are dangerous in my opinion.
Posted by chami on 11/30/13 at 10:48 PM | #
Knox had an emotional shock, put her hands to her ears and started rolling her head and saying “It’s him! It’s him! It’s him!”
We have other situations:
1. When she was taken to the murder scene to check the cutlery present…
2. When she was informed that a knife has been collected from Sollecito’ Jr flat…
3. When she was being taken for fingerprinting…
And several others that I cannot recollect…
Posted by chami on 11/30/13 at 11:14 PM | #
@ chami
I’ve never seen ‘blood on hands’ of a person in my whole life.
Actually my father was a Surgeon and since i was a child I saw a lot of blood, interiors, videos and pictures of hands cutting and rummaging in bodies organs, etc. But it was blood on gloves. On instruments.
When I visit my father he often cooks fish, he really lives cutting big fishes, and I never, never recall having seeing blood on hands.
My grandmother would slaugher pigs. That was very bloody, but I never saw blood on her hands.
I never saw in my life blood on hands, in a real-life scene. Not even animals blood, nor from cooking, or from cutting steaks.
Once at the primary school a friend of mine had injured his finger, I saw a finger covered in blood: that image remains in my mind as the thing closest to a memory of blood on hands.
Maybe I got injured in my life, I rescued somebody, but I have no memory of blood covering my hands.
The fact is, blood on hands, it is an image of *extreme* violence, as for what can be conveyed by visual language.
There is indeed a taboo about this, and it is indeed a very disturbing image, in a normal psychological context.
I believe if you really “see” an image like that in your dreams, in your imagination, any normal person would feel it as something very negative. It automatically triggers association with violence, violation, dangere, taboo, trauma. It’s not something you just happen to say casually “I saw blood on hands, it was nothing important”. Nobody would feel such visual picture as harmless, associated to innocent casual memory. Why would someone say something like that?
Posted by Yummi on 11/30/13 at 11:59 PM | #
@chami…yep. There is usually a little truth mixed with lies.
Posted by Bettina on 12/01/13 at 12:17 AM | #
The statement was:
“After dinner I noticed there was blood on Raffaele’s hand, but I was under the impression that it was blood from the fish”. Taken from
http://themurderofmeredithkercher.com/Amanda_Knox
’s_Confession
What Yummi say is factually correct and she (AK) really did not see any blood on RS hand(s). They must have bought cut and cleaned fish from the store and unless it is live fish, you will not have much blood. The blood is coming from her mind; the only impression of the murder scene.
But the blood had got in her mind and she sees now blood everywhere. Remember that she is not a professional and the blood did make an impression in her mind. She is seeing blood everywhere now.
It was doubly scaring because she had to clean up the mess she made. Most regular garden type murderers are fortunately spared that duty. RG went for a dance after the crime but both AK and RS did not even get a decent sleep that night!
Posted by chami on 12/01/13 at 01:08 AM | #
A timely reworking of what was already a very thorough and detailed post. James is absolutely right that you don’t have to look further than Knox’s own words to realise that her various narratives are absurd, self-contradictory and (as she admits herself in that spontaneous “gift”) self-incriminating.
When you compare her account side by side with Sollecito’s, both sets of absurdities become even more obvious. Anyone who has read their books and still believes them to be innocent simply hasn’t read them carefully enough - the evidence is all there in their self-penned accounts.
Posted by FinnMacCool on 12/01/13 at 04:06 AM | #
An excellent post and thank you for posting.
I can very well understand seasoned investigators becoming frustrated by Knox during her questioning, I would imagine they would see her as insulting their intelligence.
She is without doubt a very disturbed individual and a dyed in the wool liar.
We have all seen for ourselves her performances on TV in which she is being questioned.
The pause for effect, the mega sigh, the swallow.
She does it over and over again, what is she doing it for? what does want us to think by doing that? what does she think it means?
The tangled web of lies she has spun since forced this tragedy onto Meredith and her family will need a great deal of care to be taken in remembering everything.
Perhaps this is why she needs a team around her to function ‘normally’ without burning out and blowing the whole scam with her big mouth.
The kind of team needed for someone who finds it “confusing” and “bewildering” collecting glasses in a small and not too busy student bar.
Posted by DF2K on 12/01/13 at 04:09 AM | #
Imaginary blood on the hand(s).
Shakespeare writes about it in Macbeth.
The quoted lines are from Wikipedia.
Lady Macbeth becomes racked with guilt from the crimes she and her husband have committed. Bemoaning the murders of Duncan, Lady Macduff, and Banquo, she tries to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, all the while speaking of the terrible things she knows she pressed her husband to do. Her belief that nothing can wash away the blood on her hands is an ironic reversal of her earlier claim to Macbeth that “[a] little water clears us of this deed”
Posted by Babushka on 12/01/13 at 04:36 AM | #
Just to add a few words to my previous comment.
I would like to ask this highly intelligent honour student AK, whether she had studied Macbeth at her excellent school, and did she try to follow Lady Macbeth’s claim to her husband “[a] little water clears us of this deed”? Supplementing it with bleach, of course, after all this is the 21st century.
Posted by Babushka on 12/01/13 at 05:05 AM | #
@Babushka
It was a cold night and I was in Genoa and the room heating failed in the hotel I was staying. I could not locate where the extra blankets (they were in the top shelf in the cupboard) were kept.
When the Judge asked Amanda “what kind of heating you have in via della Pergola?” I understood the significance of the question.
Meredith’s body was covered not because of feminine compassion, but simply because she could not stand the sight of so much blood.
She talked about blood far more often that necessary. What does it mean?
Posted by chami on 12/01/13 at 05:42 AM | #
Presumably the version of the interrogation the Knox forces would most like the State Department and Strasbourg court to believe is the “I was questioned for 40 hours non-stop, no lawyer present, tag teams of police attacking me all night, lots of hits, no food or water or sleep, no bathroom breaks”.
The full catastrophe version.
In James’s quotes there was no hint of the above, and Knox herself doesnt come out with all of this on the stand or in the book.
Nevertheless psychologist Saul Kassin and ex-FBI profiler John Douglas both swallowed the “full catastrophe” version whole. Then in her book Knox in turn swallows Kassin’s version! You cant make this stuff up.
http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tj ... out_of_th/
We dont yet have a post analysing John Douglas’s central chapters of a book, but he goes even beyond Kassin in his scenario of the 40 hours.
Both Kassin and Douglas seem to believe Knox “confessed” in the sense that she pointed the finger at herself, not Patrick.
And both seem to believe that that was the sole incriminating evidence in the case. Kassin and Douglas both seem to think they have got her off. (Oh? Meet Greg Hampikian, Moore, Fischer, its a long line.)
We dont know yet what (if anything) was sent to Strasbourg by “my lawyers” (which? Ted Simon? Ghirga is on record as saying she wasnt badly treated - and also on record as telling her she should shut up when more and more versions kept coming out) but here’s betting it was another invention again as Knox obviously thinks no-one keeps watch.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 12/01/13 at 07:01 AM | #
@ the discussion above about blood, and blood on hands…
A classical interpretation of a dream ( a good source of information about what the subconscious is saying) where there is blood on hands :
‘Blood on your hands signifies that you are experiencing some kind of guilt’, and :
‘Blood stains in a dream suggests great injury or emotional pain, perhaps to someone you know’.
Having done a great deal of cooking in my life, I agree with Yummi that I cannot recall ever having blood on my hands, and also that there are only tiny amounts on/ in fish.
Posted by SeekingUnderstanding on 12/01/13 at 08:14 AM | #
That's it? That's all you've got? 
Just came across this old post and feel it is pertinent right now, as well as entertaining. 
Statistics: Posted by Annella — Fri Jan 15, 2016 1:09 am