Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox by Raffaele Sollecito Page A
Authors: Raffaele Sollecito
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theorized, and Amanda and I tagged along to experience something new and different. From my testimony at the hearing, Matteini concluded I was “bored by the same old evenings” and wanted to experience some “strong emotions.” (She moved my blog entry from October 2006, the date marked on the document, to October 2007, just weeks before the murder, which bolstered the argument.) She didn’t ascribe a specific motive to Amanda, assuming only that she must have felt the same way I did. The bloody footprints “proved” I was present at the scene of the murder, and my three-inch flick knife was “compatible with the possible murder weapon.” The house, she wrote, was “smeared with blood everywhere.”
Matteini’s full-throated language guaranteed banner headlines, but it did not stand up to scrutiny. If the three of us had been in Meredith’s room when she died, we would have left traces of ourselves all over the place—DNA, hair, skin, maybe blood. Such a crowded murder scene would have caused far more turmoil than was left in Meredith’s room. My knife would have had blood traces on it, and the prosecution knew full well at this stage that it was clean. The description of “blood everywhere” can only have been a misinterpretation of crime-scene photos taken after the forensics teams had painted the house with cyanoacrylate, a chemical used to capture latent prints that makes everything glow pinkish red. In reality, except for the ghastly mess in Meredith’s room, there were just a few small bloodstains that a reasonable person could easily have missed.
Even leaving aside the tortured logic of the staged break-in, Matteini had to twist herself into a pretzel to explain how, in her account, Patrick could tell Amanda he was closing his bar so they’d befree to meet, but was somehow seen at his bar later the same night. Presumably, she wrote, he opened back up after the murder to give himself a plausible alibi.
Naturally, Matteini dwelled on the most convenient phrase in Amanda’s text message to Patrick, ci vediamo più tardi— see you later—while omitting the buona serata, which would have made nonsense of her theory that they were arranging a rendezvous. Later in the story, she insisted that we had called the carabinieri only after the Polizia Postale showed up. It was, in other words, another piece of staging to look as if we were raising the alarm.
The biggest disaster was that Matteini ordered us kept behind bars for up to a year while the investigation continued. Under Italian law, there can be only three valid reasons to do such a thing: if there are grounds to fear that another crime may be committed, if evidence risks being compromised or contaminated, or if the defendants are deemed a flight risk. Even Matteini did not subscribe to Mignini’s arguments on the first two. But, she said, Patrick and Amanda were foreigners and could easily leave the country. And I, as Amanda’s boyfriend, might be motivated to run away with her. Apparently, it did not occur to her to confiscate our passports or put us under house arrest.
The ruling came down one day after the hearing. Tedeschi was no longer in town; he said he had business to attend to in Bari and drove back with Giuseppe. I, meanwhile, was back in solitary, staring at the walls and wondering how much longer this insanity would continue. I sat down and wrote a telegram to my father urging him, among other things, to recommend another lawyer. I hadn’t talked to Papà in four days, and now I needed him desperately. In the telegram, I recovered much of the lucidity that had eluded me earlier, explaining succinctly that I couldn’t remember some specifics aboutthe night of the crime, and that my version and Amanda’s differed on whether she had gone out, and for how long.
“The Squadra [Mobile] understands I’m innocent, but now I need to prove it to the magistrate,” I wrote. (Clearly I still had some residual faith in the police, even if
Matteini’s full-throated language guaranteed banner headlines, but it did not stand up to scrutiny. If the three of us had been in Meredith’s room when she died, we would have left traces of ourselves all over the place—DNA, hair, skin, maybe blood. Such a crowded murder scene would have caused far more turmoil than was left in Meredith’s room. My knife would have had blood traces on it, and the prosecution knew full well at this stage that it was clean. The description of “blood everywhere” can only have been a misinterpretation of crime-scene photos taken after the forensics teams had painted the house with cyanoacrylate, a chemical used to capture latent prints that makes everything glow pinkish red. In reality, except for the ghastly mess in Meredith’s room, there were just a few small bloodstains that a reasonable person could easily have missed.
Even leaving aside the tortured logic of the staged break-in, Matteini had to twist herself into a pretzel to explain how, in her account, Patrick could tell Amanda he was closing his bar so they’d befree to meet, but was somehow seen at his bar later the same night. Presumably, she wrote, he opened back up after the murder to give himself a plausible alibi.
Naturally, Matteini dwelled on the most convenient phrase in Amanda’s text message to Patrick, ci vediamo più tardi— see you later—while omitting the buona serata, which would have made nonsense of her theory that they were arranging a rendezvous. Later in the story, she insisted that we had called the carabinieri only after the Polizia Postale showed up. It was, in other words, another piece of staging to look as if we were raising the alarm.
The biggest disaster was that Matteini ordered us kept behind bars for up to a year while the investigation continued. Under Italian law, there can be only three valid reasons to do such a thing: if there are grounds to fear that another crime may be committed, if evidence risks being compromised or contaminated, or if the defendants are deemed a flight risk. Even Matteini did not subscribe to Mignini’s arguments on the first two. But, she said, Patrick and Amanda were foreigners and could easily leave the country. And I, as Amanda’s boyfriend, might be motivated to run away with her. Apparently, it did not occur to her to confiscate our passports or put us under house arrest.
The ruling came down one day after the hearing. Tedeschi was no longer in town; he said he had business to attend to in Bari and drove back with Giuseppe. I, meanwhile, was back in solitary, staring at the walls and wondering how much longer this insanity would continue. I sat down and wrote a telegram to my father urging him, among other things, to recommend another lawyer. I hadn’t talked to Papà in four days, and now I needed him desperately. In the telegram, I recovered much of the lucidity that had eluded me earlier, explaining succinctly that I couldn’t remember some specifics aboutthe night of the crime, and that my version and Amanda’s differed on whether she had gone out, and for how long.
“The Squadra [Mobile] understands I’m innocent, but now I need to prove it to the magistrate,” I wrote. (Clearly I still had some residual faith in the police, even if
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