Inside the Amanda Knox murder investigation

Twenty-year-old Amanda Marie Knox seemed to be another cute American girl on an adventure in Italy, far from her old Jesuit high school and suburban home in Seattle. Since November 6, 2007, the European media has worked overtime to help transform Knox's gamine gaze into the cold mask of a brash killer. Knox, along with her 24-year-old Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Congolese bar owner Lumumba "Patrick" Diya, whom police reports list as 44, has been held in police custody for her possible involvement in a horrific sex crime. The alleged victim of that crime was Knox's roommate, a dark-haired Briton named Meredith Kercher.

The young women lived with two Italian roommates in a house on the Viale Sant'Antonio in Perugia, Italy, close to the center of the city. Kercher, 21, was in the third year of her four-year European studies course at Leeds University in Northern England. Her study in Perugia was under the auspices of the EU's Erasmus Exchange Program. On the first day of November, Meredith hung out with some friends who lived nearby. They watched The Notebook, then Meredith said goodnight and headed back to her place. Later, her friends could not recall anything remarkable about that evening.

Amanda Knox claimed to have discovered Meredith's half-nude, dead body the following morning, but the police were not alerted until they came to the residence to return Meredith's cell phone, which had been found in the garden of an elderly neighbor. Meredith lay in a congealed pool of blood in her bed, covered with a duvet, her throat slashed. Her death had been horribly slow. She bled out over a period of several hours.

Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were arrested four days later. Early autopsy results found no sign of rape, but they were suspected of having committed both a sexual assault and a homicide. Italian authorities believe that Meredith Kercher was murdered when she resisted joining in a "violent orgy" with the trio. Evidence found in her bedroom led them to believe that Meredith fought her attackers.

Evidence from Meredith's body allegedly indicates Knox's participation. Police think that Knox held the other woman down with enough force to leave prints on Meredith's skin. One of the two men may have cut Meredith's throat.

The salacious details of the murder—and Amanda Knox's arrest in particular—galvanized news outlets all across the European Union, but the British tabloids and Italian papers really went at the story with hammer and tongs. With her looks and a tabloid-ready MySpace screen name, "Foxy Knoxy," Knox was tailor-made for weeks of front-page coverage, every strange twist and turn in the case parsed in exhaustive detail.

CSI: PERUGIA Investigators gather at the house where Kercher was murdered

Nor were the two men who were arrested along with Amanda Knox ignored.

The Harry Potter–loving Knox's bespectacled boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, has unruly dark hair, and one widely published photograph captures him wearing a thick yellow scarf, giving him a strange resemblance to J.K. Rowling's boy wizard. Even more tantalizing is a Halloween photo of Sollecito posted on a Facebook account. He is dressed as a mad doctor, carrying a meat cleaver.

Sollecito's physician father stood up for his son from the beginning, addressing some troublesome aspects of Raffaele's lifestyle, like his penchant for collecting knives. The BBC quoted Dr. Sollecito: "[Raffaele] has a passion for knives, but nothing more. There are many forms of collections, but this doesn't imply anything."

Italian investigators believe that a knife from Sollecito's collection was used to cut Meredith's throat, and preliminary tests on a bloody shoe print found in Meredith's room match a pair of Raffaele's athletic shoes. Investigators also found DNA on the murder weapon, which matched Knox's. Raffaele Sollecito recently turned on Amanda. He said it was her fault that he was in jail at all.

Diya told people in the past that he was the grandson of one of the Congo's most storied leaders, Patrice Lumumba. By most accounts, Diya was a nice guy: a musician, devoted father, and business owner. (Amanda Knox worked part-time at Le Chic, Patrick's bar in the town center of Perugia.) When an Italian-language video featuring Diya emerged on YouTube, it revealed a cherubic fellow who seemed to be enjoying his interview in a 2003 "man on the street" segment for the show Curiosando. A stocky man of medium height, Diya came across as easygoing and cheerful.

Sollecito and Diya were certainly part of the story—after all, police initially thought that a man's hand held the knife slicing Meredith Kercher's throat—but "Foxy Knoxy" was the real draw: a Catholic schoolgirl who speaks multiple languages and wants to be a writer, a freewheeling young woman whose behavior sometimes annoyed and unsettled her roommates. There were stories of Knox bringing strange men home soon after settling into the house on Viale Sant'Antonio. These titillating tales were accompanied by reports of heavy drinking and pot smoking. Foxy Knoxy had also uploaded a "drunk chick" video to YouTube.

Shortly after her arrest, Amanda Knox's MySpace page and blog were locked. The source code for her blog was saved before the privacy restrictions were in place and the blog was copied—"mirrored"—elsewhere.

Foxy Knoxy's blog amplified the growing public fascination with the former barista. Knox had published some of her short fiction on her blog. One story is titled "Baby Brother." It's a tale of rape without redemption, about a pair of brothers, Edgar and Kyle. In one section of the story Edgar confronts Kyle:

"A girl named Victoria found me today. She went out asking especially for me." [Edgar's] voice grew quiet. "She said you drugged and raped her."

Kyle laughed deep in his throat. "Icky Vicky, huh? Jeez, Edgar. You had me going there." He picked up his calculus book and flicked with his thumb to find his page, shook his head side to side with his smile still confident on his face. "A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don't know what they want."

A story titled "The Model" precedes "Baby Brother." In "The Model," a mother named Nadya flees her home after her child Aislin tells her that the mother's ex-boyfriend, Malcolm, is "watching" her. The tale ends on a muted up-note, but not before Knox depicts the mother's worries about her child's welfare: "I was afraid of what I'd see and what it meant. If Malcolm had taken pictures of her, how far had he gone? What had he done to me and to her?"

Knox also blogged about a brief sojourn she'd taken to Germany prior to coming to Perugia. She recounted a conversation she'd had with a Berliner named Ernst about the party life in the city: "[People] are partying here from the time they can pass as 16, though nobody cares, until they get married. I indeed, fit into this catagory [sic]."

Italian law may permit Amanda Knox to be held as long as a year before charges are finalized, so she fills her idle time with words. Knox is said to be keeping a diary, writing "her side" of the story. Since her arrest, Amanda Knox has changed her account of events surrounding Meredith's murder more than once. She says she heard Kercher screaming that night, heard what sounded like loud, rough sex. Knox says she simply sat in the kitchen in the little house and plugged her ears with her fingers.

Earlier, Knox had said she wasn't there at all. But a closed-circuit security cam close to the house where the murder took place contradicts that version of events. A report about Knox's behavior when Meredith's body was found is disturbing. After meeting Knox at the Perugia police station, Meredith's friend Robyn Butterworth said that Amanda seemed "proud" of being the first person to see the victim.

Police say that blood-soaked hairs were found clenched in Meredith Kercher's fist. DNA from the hairs in the murdered woman's hand could justify or negate the rabid press interest in the alleged American killer from Seattle with the sphinxlike gaze.