Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox by Raffaele Sollecito Page B
Authors: Raffaele Sollecito
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my experiences should have taught me otherwise.) “I’m in solitary confinement, I am scared and sad. . . . I don’t know what to do, everything seems unreal. I’m so sorry, I love you.”
My father didn’t receive the telegram for days because I sent it to his home in Bisceglie, and he was in Perugia. I was right to think he was the person to lean on in my hour of need. I just had no idea when or how I might hear from him. And neither did he.
* * *
Amanda recovered her lucidity faster than I did. The day we were arrested, she wrote a statement in English that all but retracted what she had signed the night before. “In regards to this ‘confession,’ ” she wrote, “I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion.” She was still conjuring up images of Patrick as the murderer, but she added, “These things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened or just dreams in my head.”
The next day, she wrote a second, more confident statement: “I DID NOT KILL MY FRIEND . . . But I’m very confused, because the police tell me that they know I was at my house when she was murdered, which I don’t remember. They tell me a lot of things I don’t remember.” Then she gave a substantially more accurate account of the night of November 1 than I was coming up with at the time.
Amanda’s statements were given to Mignini before the preliminary hearing, which might explain why Matteini went relatively easy on her and reserved the greatest venom for me.
I didn’t get to see Amanda, not even in Matteini’s courtroom, because our hearings were conducted one after the other. I became aware that Patrick was being held in the isolation cell next to mine, but I made no attempt to communicate with him. Avoiding any appearance of collusion between us seemed more important than exchanging notes on our experiences.
Very slowly, I was learning.
* * *
The confusion in my head brought back jarring memories of my first big scare about mind-altering substances. It happened during my Erasmus year in Munich, at a party I attended with two girls who were among my closest friends during my time in Germany.
I was drinking beer, but everyone else was ladling out cups of what looked like sangria from a big cocktail bowl. It’s funny, given all the media gossip about my being addicted to just about every intoxicating substance on the planet, but I’m not a big drinker at all. Like my father, I don’t like feeling out of control, so I usually have just a few sips of beer or wine and steer clear of spirits altogether. That night, my caution was my salvation.
From one moment to the next, the mood in the room changed abruptly. People started pawing and fondling each other, as though they had lost all inhibitions. It was freaky, not sexy at all, and I went looking for my friends to talk about it. But they were as out of it as the rest of the party. The two girls both turned and kissed me on the mouth, one after the other. They had glazed, vacant expressions in their eyes. Some people, I realize, might think this was a fantasycome true. But these weren’t the girls I knew—warm, charming, funny, like sisters to each other, and to me. It was as if robots had overtaken their bodies and were now trying to overtake mine.
The next day, I asked the girls what had got into them, and they couldn’t say. They remembered nothing.
I have no idea what was in that cocktail, but the episode taught me how swiftly drinks or drugs can change our perceptions and our personalities. Or rather, it should have taught me. For some reason, I continued to indulge my occasional marijuana habit, perhaps because it did nothing more harmful than put me to sleep and scramble my short-term memory, which is usually pretty scrambled to begin with.
Now I knew I should have been smarter. I
My father didn’t receive the telegram for days because I sent it to his home in Bisceglie, and he was in Perugia. I was right to think he was the person to lean on in my hour of need. I just had no idea when or how I might hear from him. And neither did he.
* * *
Amanda recovered her lucidity faster than I did. The day we were arrested, she wrote a statement in English that all but retracted what she had signed the night before. “In regards to this ‘confession,’ ” she wrote, “I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion.” She was still conjuring up images of Patrick as the murderer, but she added, “These things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened or just dreams in my head.”
The next day, she wrote a second, more confident statement: “I DID NOT KILL MY FRIEND . . . But I’m very confused, because the police tell me that they know I was at my house when she was murdered, which I don’t remember. They tell me a lot of things I don’t remember.” Then she gave a substantially more accurate account of the night of November 1 than I was coming up with at the time.
Amanda’s statements were given to Mignini before the preliminary hearing, which might explain why Matteini went relatively easy on her and reserved the greatest venom for me.
I didn’t get to see Amanda, not even in Matteini’s courtroom, because our hearings were conducted one after the other. I became aware that Patrick was being held in the isolation cell next to mine, but I made no attempt to communicate with him. Avoiding any appearance of collusion between us seemed more important than exchanging notes on our experiences.
Very slowly, I was learning.
* * *
The confusion in my head brought back jarring memories of my first big scare about mind-altering substances. It happened during my Erasmus year in Munich, at a party I attended with two girls who were among my closest friends during my time in Germany.
I was drinking beer, but everyone else was ladling out cups of what looked like sangria from a big cocktail bowl. It’s funny, given all the media gossip about my being addicted to just about every intoxicating substance on the planet, but I’m not a big drinker at all. Like my father, I don’t like feeling out of control, so I usually have just a few sips of beer or wine and steer clear of spirits altogether. That night, my caution was my salvation.
From one moment to the next, the mood in the room changed abruptly. People started pawing and fondling each other, as though they had lost all inhibitions. It was freaky, not sexy at all, and I went looking for my friends to talk about it. But they were as out of it as the rest of the party. The two girls both turned and kissed me on the mouth, one after the other. They had glazed, vacant expressions in their eyes. Some people, I realize, might think this was a fantasycome true. But these weren’t the girls I knew—warm, charming, funny, like sisters to each other, and to me. It was as if robots had overtaken their bodies and were now trying to overtake mine.
The next day, I asked the girls what had got into them, and they couldn’t say. They remembered nothing.
I have no idea what was in that cocktail, but the episode taught me how swiftly drinks or drugs can change our perceptions and our personalities. Or rather, it should have taught me. For some reason, I continued to indulge my occasional marijuana habit, perhaps because it did nothing more harmful than put me to sleep and scramble my short-term memory, which is usually pretty scrambled to begin with.
Now I knew I should have been smarter. I
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