How an American coed was framed for murder

This article is from the October/November issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here.

UPDATE: This month, American coed Amanda Knox is expected to learn whether she will ultimately stand trial for Kercher's murder. Though pretrial hearings on the case began in mid-September, Perugian judge Paolo Micheli will not announce the fate of the three suspects until the end of this month, at the earliest. Should a trial take place, because of the nature of the Italian justice system, it could drag on for more than a year.

On the cloudy morning of November 6, 2007, Amanda Knox—a 20-year-old American languages student spending her junior year abroad in the sleepy Italian hill town of Perugia—was led from the town's police headquarters in handcuffs, her pretty, makeup-free face shielded by a pale gray wool hat as photographers swarmed around her.

Just hours later, Perugia's chief of police, Arturo de Felice, held a press conference that would become the story of the evening on Italian news broadcasts and shock people around the world. Five days earlier, de Felice claimed, this previously unremarkable young girl had been the ringleader in a brutal sexual assault on her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher, culminating in multiple knife slashings to Kercher's neck. She may have taken several hours to die, alone, choking on her own blood.

Knox, he said—along with her boyfriend, a wealthy 23-year-old Italian student named Raffaele Sollecito, and an acquaintance, 44-year-old Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba—had killed Kercher because she had refused to participate in the drug-fueled orgy they were having. De Felice lauded his investigators' "magnificent work" and declared the case closed. "The city needed a result quickly," he said, so he and his team had "worked around the clock."

With Amanda Knox, a winsome coed with dark blonde hair and blue eyes, at the center of this gruesome international drama, the story took on a larger-than-life feel. The headlines, pitting a merciless American nymphomaniac against her ill-fated British roommate, wrote themselves. Almost a year later, Giuliano Mignini, the Perugian chief prosecutor, is sticking to the explosive claims about Knox that his team made that morning. While the official case against her is under segretto istruttorio (judicial seal), and requests from journalists to review evidence are regularly denied, details about Knox and the case are frequently leaked to certain Italian news outlets.

Meanwhile, Knox awaits trial in Capanne prison, a squat, ugly structure on the outskirts of Perugia. But as more information comes to light, it appears that the case against her is disturbingly thin—and that an overzealous prosecutor with a weakness for conspiracy theories may be unfairly targeting her.

Edda Mellas, Knox's mother, is a vivacious 46-year-old math teacher with shiny, shoulder-length brown hair. Divorced from Amanda's father, Curt Knox, when Amanda was two years old, she married Christopher Mellas in 2002. She phones from Perugia in mid-August and recalls for me that night in November when her world turned upside down. Mellas awoke in her yellow clapboard house in West Seattle to the sound of a ringing phone. It was 4 a.m. on the morning of November 2. On the other end of the line was Amanda, who normally e-mailed to keep in touch, assuring her mother that she was okay. "But," her mother remembers her saying, "I think somebody might have been in my house."

Over the next few minutes, Knox explained how she had come home to shower after spending the night at Sollecito's flat. Upon arriving back at her own seemingly empty residence, the upper floor of a charmingly dilapidated cottage, she noticed that the door was open; inside some things were out of place. Nothing too alarming, really, "just odd," she said. For instance: Somebody had left a bowel movement in the toilet.

Knox later told investigators that she had also noticed some flecks of blood in the bathroom when she took a shower and had figured one of her roommates was having "menstrual problems." She lived with two Italian women and Kercher, a slim brunette with olive skin from the outskirts of London. None of them was anywhere to be found.

Knox cut short that call to her mother so that she could return to Sollecito's
apartment—the couple had been all but inseparable since they met at a classical music concert two weeks before. A bespectacled doctor's son who was completing the final year of his computer science degree in Perugia, Sollecito had reminded Knox of Harry Potter.

Over the course of the morning, after trying three times to reach Kercher on her cell phone, Knox and Sollecito went over to the cottage. Kercher's bedroom door was locked, and Knox phoned her mother again to ask what she should do. "Call the police," said Mellas, now seriously worried.