Murder in Italy: Amanda Knox, Meredith Kercher, and the Murder Trial that Shocked the World - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Candace Dempsey is an award-winning Italian-American journalist, travel writer, and author of Murder in Italy, the true story of Amanda Knox, the American college student wrongly convicted of killing her British roommate. Based in Seattle, Dempsey has written for the New York Times, Slate, MSN, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Phoenix, Art & Antiques, and many other outlets. Her staff positions include magazine editor; newspaper editor; staff writer; and producer, editor, and writer for MSN. Her travel tales have been published in numerous Travelers' Tales and Seal Press anthologies. She holds a master's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, where she was a graduate teaching fellow.

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MURDER
IN ITALY

Amanda Knox,
Meredith Kercher,
and the Murder Trial
That Shocked the World

Candace Dempsey

MURDER
IN ITALY

Amanda Knox,
Meredith Kercher,
and the Murder Trial
That Shocked the World

Candace Dempsey

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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MURDER IN ITALY

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

PART ONE - THE MEREDITH MYSTERY BEGINS

CHAPTER ONE - AN ITALIAN HALLOWEEN

CHAPTER TWO - HALLOWEEN NIGHT

CHAPTER THREE - ALL SAINTS’ DAY: FINAL GOOD-BYES

CHAPTER FOUR - ALL SOULS’ DAY WHERE IS MEREDITH KERCHER?

CHAPTER FIVE - BAD NIGHT AT THE QUESTURA

CHAPTER SIX - STUDENTS FLEE, THE PAPARAZZI RUSH IN

CHAPTER SEVEN - TOO MANY MEN, THE ITALIANS SAY

CHAPTER EIGHT - INTERROGATIONS, HIS AND HERS

CHAPTER NINE - AMANDA NAILS PATRICK THREE PEOPLE IN DEEP WATER

PART TWO - UNDER LOCK AND KEY

CHAPTER TEN - FROM PERP WALK TO PRISON

CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE MYSPACE KILLERS

CHAPTER TWELVE - DEAR DIARIES

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - FIRST HEARING, NEW SUSPECT EMERGES

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - SEX AS A GATEWAY CRIME TO MURDER

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - WHERE IS RUDY GUEDE? AMANDA FACES MIGNINI

PART THREE - TRIAL AND PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE SUPREME COURT: LAST CHANCE TO AVOID TRIAL

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - PRETRIAL: THE AMANDA SHOW

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE PROSECUTION SPEAKS

CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE DEFENSE SPEAKS

CHAPTER TWENTY - CLOSING ARGUMENTS AND VERDICT A VERY PUBLIC STONING

AFTERWORD

EPILOGUE

TIMELINE

Acknowledgements

Photographs

To my mother, Carmela Scarcello Dempsey. And to the dearly departed: my father, Curran Dempsey; sister, Carole Dempsey; uncles, Henry, Sam, and Arthur Scarcello; aunts, Amelia Scarcello Garcea, Ann Scarcello, and Esther Scarcello Travis; and cousins, Kevin Scarcello, Effie Leonetti, and Virginia Mantese. Thank you for the stories and the love. And to my irreplaceable grandparents, Josephina Esposito Scarcello and Antonio Scarcello, and my great-aunt Angelina DeLuca Scarcello and great-uncle Francesco Scarcello, for bringing your songs, tasty dishes, quick wit, strength, and gaiety from Calabria to America all those years ago.

Che noi possiamo ancora una volta incontrarci per il pranzo domenicale in Idaho!

May we all meet again for Sunday dinner in Idaho!

NOTABLE PEOPLE

THE VICTIM

Meredith Kercher: a British Erasmus scholar from Coulsdon, South London, UK

THE ACCUSED

Amanda Knox: Meredith’s roommate, an honor student from Seattle, Washington, United States

Raffaele Sollecito: Amanda’s wealthy Italian boyfriend, from Bari, Italy

Rudy Guede: a young drifter and Perugia resident originally from the Ivory Coast

Patrick Lumumba: Amanda’s boss at the Le Chic bar, a Perugia resident originally from the Congo

THE FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS

Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti: Meredith and Amanda’s Italian roommates

Giacomo Silenzi, Stefano Bonassi, Marco Marzan, and Riccardo Luciano: their downstairs neighbors

Marco Zaroli: Filomena’s boyfriend

Paola Grande and Luca Altieri: Filomena’s best friend and her boyfriend

Robyn Butterworth, Amy Frost, Sophie Purton, Jade Bidwell, Helen Powell, Samantha Rodenhurst, and Natalie Hayward: Meredith’s British friends in Perugia

Spyros Gatsios and Louerguioui (Juve) Juba: Amanda’s friends in Perugia

David Johnsrud (DJ) and Madison Paxton: Amanda’s friends in Seattle

Jovanna Popovic: Serbian medical student and friend of Raffaele’s

Alexander Caudo, Giacomo Benedetti, and Gabriele Mancini: Rudy’s friends

Hicham Khiri, aka Shaky: Tunisian pizza chef and friend of the British girls

Pasquale (Pisco) Alessi and Pietro Campolongo: co-owner and bartender respectively of Merlin’s, a popular Perugia pub, and friends of the British girls

Esteban Garcia Pascual and Lucy Rigby: owners of La Tana Dell’Orso, a wine bar popular with the British girls

Elisabetta Lana, Alessandro Biscarini, and Fiametta Biscarini: the family that found Meredith’s cell phones

THE FAMILIES

Arline and John Kercher: Meredith’s parents

Stephanie, Lyle, and John Jr. Kercher: Meredith’s siblings

Edda and Chris Mellas: Amanda’s mother and stepfather

Curt and Cassandra Knox: Amanda’s father and stepmother

Deanna, Ashley, and Delaney Knox: Amanda’s siblings

Janet Huff and Christina Hagge: Amanda’s aunts

Dorothy Craft Najir: Amanda’s German cousin

Francesco and Marta Sollecito: Raffaele’s father and stepmother

Vanessa Sollecito: Raffaele’s sister

Giuseppe, Sara, and Annamaria Sollecito: Raffaele’s uncle, aunt, and cousin

Roger Guede: Rudy’s father, a resident of the Ivory Coast

Paolo Caporali: Rudy’s adoptive father in Perugia

Aleksandra Kania and Davide: Patrick’s common-law Polish wife and infant son

THE POLICE

Arturo De Felice: police chief, and commander of the Perugia police force

Domenico Giacinto Profazio: director of the Flying Squad in Perugia

Marco Chiacchiera: vice director of the Flying Squad

Monica Napoleoni: homicide chief, Flying Squad

Lorena Zugarini, Rita Ficarra, Oreste Volturno, Mauro Bigini, Stefano Gubbiotti, Stefano Buratti, Mauro Barbidori, and Armando Finzi: Flying Squad officers

Anna Donnino, Aida Colantone, and Assistant Fabio D’Astolto: Flying Squad interpreters

Edgardo Giobbi: head of SCO (Rome’s Central Service Organization)

Daniele Moscatelli and Ivano Ruffo: SCO officers

Michele Battistelli, Fabio Marzi: Postal Police

THE SCIENTISTS

Patrizia Stefanoni and Renato Biondi: DNA analysts, Forensic Genetics Section, Forensic Police Service, Rome

Carlo Torre and Dr. Sarah Gino: DNA analysts for the defense

Professor Stefano Conti and Professor Carla Vecchiotti: neutral experts appointed by Appeal Court Judge Hellmann, from University of Rome–La Sapienza

Luca Lalli: coroner and pathologist who performed Meredith’s autopsy

THE LAWYERS

Claudia Matteini, Paolo Micheli, Giancarlo Massei, Beatrice Cristiani, Claudio Pratillo Hellmann, and Massimo Zanetti: judges

Giuliano Mignini, Manuela Comodi, and Giancarlo Costagliola: Perugia prosecutors

Francesco Paolo Maresca and Serena Perna: Kercher family lawyers

Luciano Ghirga, Carlo Dalla Vedova, and Maria del Grosso: Amanda’s lawyers

Giulia Bongiorno, Marco Brusco, Luca Maori, Delfo Berretti, Daniela Rocchi, and Donatella Donati: Raffaele’s lawyers

Nicodemo Gentile and Valter Biscotti: Rudy’s lawyers

Carlo Pacelli and Giuseppe Sereni: Patrick’s lawyers

THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA

Francesco “Frank Sfarzo” Sforza: Perugia-based investigative journalist and creator of the Perugia Shock blog

Zach Nowak: expat American writer, translator, and author of Peril in Perugia, a detective novel

Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi: American and Italian coauthors of the nonfiction bestseller The Monster of Florence

Meo Ponte: Italian crime reporter for La Repubblica

Elio Bertoldi: crime reporter for Corriere dell’Umbria

Richard Owen: reporter for the Times of London

Alessandro Capponi: crime reporter for Corriere della Sera

Fiorenza Sarzanini: reporter for Corriere della Sera and author of Amanda e Gli Altri: Vite Perdute Intorno al Delitto di Perugia (“Amanda and the Others: Lives Lost Around the Murder in Perugia”)

Maria D’Elia: reporter for Oggi, author of Il Delitto di Perugia L’Altra Verita (The Crime of Perugia, Another Truth)

Garfield Kennedy: director of Eye Films’ The Trials of Amanda Knox

PART ONE

THE MEREDITH MYSTERY BEGINS

CHAPTER ONE

AN ITALIAN HALLOWEEN

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

—Giuseppe Verdi

NIGHT fell over the thick stone walls of Perugia, an Italian college town balanced atop one of Umbria’s celebrated hills. Students wrapped in thick winter coats and blue jeans snapped up the last Count Dracula capes and Spider-Man masks left in the shops; soon the students would gather on the cobblestones along elegant Corso Vannucci, ready for a long night of Halloween costume parties and pub crawls. Too sophisticated for dolcetto o scherzetto, “trick or treat,” they would instead descend steep staircases to underground bars and discos carved into medieval buildings as atmospheric as those from an Edgar Allan Poe horror tale.

On this chilly Italian night, twenty-one-year-old British exchange student Meredith Kercher was happy and excited. Called “Mez” by her friends and family, she planned to disguise herself as a vampire and celebrate with classmates in the centro storico, the walled “old town.” A lovely girl with olive skin, big brown eyes, and long black hair, Meredith was a Londoner known for her intelligence, sense of humor, and dazzling smile. She looked charming in her Facebook photos, always beautifully turned out in smart little dresses or pastel sweaters over jeans, posing with friends in her favorite local bars, Merlin’s Pub or La Tana Dell’Orso (“The Bear’s Den”).

What are you doing tonight? Want to meet up later? Got a costume?

Meredith received a couple of text messages on Halloween night from Amanda Knox, her twenty-year-old American roommate, a third-year honor student from the University of Washington in Seattle. Amanda was a striking girl, momentarily blond, with startlingly blue eyes and an Ivory Soap complexion. Friends described her as energetic, athletic, and kind. She was a “pacifist hippie,” they said, a maker of cakes and jam, a lover of soccer, yoga, rock climbing, bicycling, and guitar playing.

Perugia had nearly 40,000 college students, making up a quarter of its 160,000 residents. Over a long, rocky history, the old town had survived Romans, Goths, papal overlords, Napoleon’s troops, and other intruders. By 2007 an ever-changing army of young people had turned the acropolis into a sort of college campus, a place to meet up, strum guitars, shop, drink beer, and act like university students anywhere. Many of the old families now lived in apartment towers outside the Etruscan walls, preferring modernity to the costly, cramped, and noisy lodgings in the silvery center where church bells rang all day and karaoke blasted all night. Students could find whatever they needed to keep the fun—and learning—going on Corso Vannucci, the grand pedestrian boulevard that offered everything from gelato shops, bars, boutiques, and movie theaters to bookstores, restaurants, and art museums. The Corso ran from the chic hotels on Piazza Italia to Piazza IV Novembre, Perugia’s “living room,” where many-tiered Fontana Maggiore sprayed steely water into the sky.

Italian scholars ruled the hilltop, vastly outnumbering the foreign invaders. In the fall of 2007, Italians accounted for nearly all of the 34,000 scholars enrolled in the Università degli Studi di Perugia, the University of Perugia, a public institution created before the discovery of the New World and housed in frescoed brick buildings located just behind and slightly downhill from Piazza Grimana, where 5,300 exchange students of innumerable nationalities studied at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, the University for Foreigners.

While outwardly friendly, the Italian students tended to shun the here-today, gone-tomorrow foreigners when handing out party invitations. In places where people are just passing through, Italians lose their legendary affability, noted Tim Parks, author of Italian Neighbors: “A person they will never see again is not a person but a chore.”

Created after World War I to showcase Italian language and culture, the Stranieri was a Tower of Babel occupying the gloriously weathered eighteenth-century Palazzo Gallenga, once home to the exiled House of Stuart, pretenders to the English throne. Stranieri scholars recited Italian grammar in the Baroque, frescoed rooms of the original palazzo, learned to roll their Rs in the unadorned fascist-era addition, and took classes on a modern campus of lemon-colored buildings set among pines outside the city walls.

Unlike the many foreigners who flitted in and out of Perugia like migrating butterflies, Meredith had signed on for a full school year in the prestigious Erasmus Project, an exchange program open only to Europeans. A love of Italy had brought her from Coulsdon, South London, to the Umbrian capital in late August. Like other Erasmus scholars, Meredith initially buffed up her Italian at the Stranieri, but then took courses at the University of Perugia. As she told friends on Facebook:

I have been trying to go to uni. am taking modern history, modern political theories and cinema history. It’s all mostly about the French revolution which i know nothing about, would say it’s going well!! Miss u, especially dancing xx.

The British girl was one of a handful of exchange students in Perugia from the University of Leeds, a state-run university in Yorkshire with about thirty thousand scholars. Enrolled in the third year of a four-year European studies program, Meredith planned either to be a journalist like her father, John Kercher, or to work for the European Parliament in Brussels.

When Meredith first arrived in Perugia, she’d boarded in a hotel, but confided to her mother, Arline Kercher, that she felt lonely there and so looked about for shared lodgings. Now, two months into her Italian adventure, she had three roommates—Amanda and two Italian girls, Laura Mezzetti and Filomena Romanelli. They rented the upper story of a whitewashed villetta, a converted farmhouse cottage with a wild garden a few steps outside the city walls and close to the Stranieri.

Meredith was a serious student who burned the midnight oil, but she also loved to dance and read detective novels. Her newfound British friends, mainly from Leeds or the University of Manchester, said she was warmhearted and witty, but also cautious and a little reserved. They traveled around in a happy group, doing what foreign students have done in Perugia for generations: they threw dinner parties in tiny flats, shared fixed-price meals in restaurants, and went out for espresso, pizza, drinks, and dancing.

Meredith was never without a tiny British cell phone, because her mother had been hospitalized with kidney disease and might need to reach her. Yet she never seemed troubled, her friends said; she was always smiling and serene.

If she had any worries on her last Halloween, then she kept them to herself.

AMANDA Knox had dreamed of living in Italy since 2001, when she visited the country briefly on a family trip. Like so many other Americans, she’d fallen in love with the people, the food, and the culture. She planned to be a writer, translator, or a combination of the two. At the University of Washington (UW, pronounced “U-Dub”), she majored in Italian and German and minored in creative writing. Her mother, Edda Mellas, had been born in Germany, to a German mother who’d fallen in love with and married an American soldier. The family had moved to the United States when Edda was a young girl.

Amanda’s family had encouraged her to study abroad in Germany, where relatives could help out if anything went wrong, but her Italian needed more work than her German, and so she chose Perugia. “I got advice that instead of going to Rome, where there are so many tourists, it would be better for me to go to a smaller place where I would be surrounded by Italians instead of other Americans.”

Italians called Perugia, a sister city to Seattle, “the city of chocolate and jazz,” famed for Perugina chocolates called baci (kisses) and the Umbrian Jazz Festival hosted each spring. Perugini were a “mountain people,” liberal in politics but conservative in dress and behavior. Their windswept fortress near the sacred shrine of Assisi had always been a world apart from sunnier, more sensual Rome, about a hundred miles southwest, or arty Florence, the glamour choice for many exchange students, about a hundred miles northwest.

Month after month foreign students entered il cuore verde d’Italia, “the green heart of Italy,” to hit the books, hang out in the old town, smoke hashish, quaff the local wines, sample the draft beer, taste the shaved-truffle pasta, try out their bad Italian in the kebab shops, and just as importantly, get on a first-name basis with the pub owners. If these newcomers did not achieve fluency in Italian, then they could at least impress visiting friends by ordering gelato flavors, pizza toppings, and espresso in the language of Dante.

Just being American made Amanda Knox unusual in the hilltop town. Of the 40,000 students, only a tiny percentage came from the United States. Not only did American exchange students typically prefer Rome or Florence, but the few who chose Perugia usually enrolled in the American-run Umbra Institute, where a few hundred scholars lived, studied, and socialized together. Instead, Amanda chose the Stranieri and looked around for her own lodgings. Amanda had moved into the cottage in mid-September and told her friends on MySpace that “I’m in one of the happiest places in my life.”

If she had wanted a clean break from UW and its 43,000 students, then Perugia was the perfect choice. The giant university had placed three hundred scholars in Italy that fall, but nearly all chose the University of Washington Rome Center, housed in a palazzo on ultra-trendy Campo dei Fiori. Only three other UW students picked Perugia, but that was fine with Amanda. She told friends that she wanted a real adventure and total immersion in Italian culture. She liked the fact that Stranieri students had to speak Italian even to buy groceries, see a movie, or mail a package.

Away from home for the first time, she might also have been seeking the things many twenty-year-olds secretly desire. Freedom, change, and a roll of the dice.

“Ignorance is a pet peeve,” she wrote on Facebook. “I love new situations and I love to meet new people. The bigger and scarier the roller coaster the better.”

Amanda was also determined to spend as much time with Italians as she could. She wanted to feel Italian, she told friends, not realizing that she faced a cultural divide as broad as nearby Lago Trasimeno, Italy’s fourth largest lake.

Amanda saw herself as a free spirit, a trait perfect for the West Coast of America but jarring in the deeply Catholic Bel Paese, where rules about how to cut a bella figura (how to look and act properly) were drummed into bambini at birth. In Perugia, Amanda dressed just as she did in Seattle, where tech billionaires showed up for work in fleece jackets and hiking boots, looking like they’d just scaled Mount Rainier. Her wardrobe also reflected her fondness for Beatles music and the flower-child look of the sixties. MySpace photos from Perugia showed her decked out in athletic sweats or girlish flowered tops over light-colored jeans or shorts. She looked neat and clean, but seldom wore makeup or fussed with her hair. If she had to dress up, then she wore a bright yellow sundress over sneakers or sandals.

“Amanda doesn’t really care about clothes,” said Madison Paxton, a serious-looking, brown-haired UW student and one of Amanda’s college friends back in Seattle. Most of their “crew” of friends had met in the dorms freshman year or at the UW climbing wall, where students practiced the moves needed to scale the nearby mountains.

“Clothes are just things to wear,” Madison continued. “A blouse. Pants. Shoes. That’s how Amanda thinks. She just gets up in the morning and puts things on. She gave away lots of clothes and other things before she left Seattle. She wanted to save room in her luggage for her hiking and mountain-climbing gear. She thought she was going to take all these great side-trips in Italy. She wanted to get out into the countryside. She was excited about that.”

In her diary, Amanda listed her Toshiba laptop computer, musical equipment, and hiking gear as her most important possessions, noting that she’d worked very hard to pay for them.

She always carried a big patterned bag, inside of which she stored brightly colored notebooks, the covers stamped with cartoon characters. She scribbled down her every thought, even her sexual fantasies.

A habit she would soon regret.

AMANDA and Meredith shared the picturesque cottage with two Italian girls, Laura Mezzetti and Filomena Romanelli. It hung over the Fossa del Bulagaio, a steep ravine tangled with shrubs and vines. An unruly garden, flush with pear and chestnut trees, flowed down into the wilderness without fencing at the bottom. Tenants could see the upper reaches of the Tiber River Valley and the Umbrian hills, spiked with church steeples, terra-cotta-roofed houses, vineyards, olive trees, chipped stone structures, flowering shrubs, and pines. The rolling hills turned to purple as they rose up to the snow-dusted peaks of the Apennine Mountains, offering what American novelist Henry James called Perugia’s “infinite view.”

When the flatmates were home, the cottage was a cheerful, bustling place. The side balcony had a white plastic table where Amanda liked to sit, enjoying the sun and strumming a guitar. Often, Meredith would pull up a chair next to her and read mystery novels.

Meredith and Amanda’s bedrooms were in the back end of the apartment, side by side, in a modern addition that faced the ravine. The two Italian roommates had chosen bedrooms nearer to the street and next to each other. Laura and Filomena were in their late twenties, close friends, and trainee lawyers in the same local law firm. They’d found the cottage through a leasing agent in August 2007 and then run newspaper ads and posted flyers in search of additional tenants.

Amanda had responded first. She’d breezed into Perugia at the tail end of August on a two-day trip with Deanna, her much taller and blonder nineteen-year-old sister. The Seattle girls got lost their first day and wandered up and down the steep slopes of town, becoming hot and cranky, until finally locating their hotel. The next day they’d explored the old town, charmed by the chic shops on the Corso.

In a video Deanna shot around that time, Amanda fidgeted with her hair and fretted about finding lodgings for the semester, saying she could think of nothing else. So on September 2, the sisters spent a stressful day searching for a place Amanda could rent. Their search took them downhill from the center, through the much-photographed Etruscan Arch and into gritty Piazza Grimana, which had a drugstore, coffee shop, bookstore, and newsstand. Right outside the University for Foreigners, Deanna spotted a brown-haired girl putting up a flyer that advertised two rooms for rent. Deanna ran back to tell her sister.

On MySpace, Amanda described this first encounter with Laura (the skinny girl) and Molly (Filomena):

Deanna wants to shop some more, but I need to find a place to live, so I search desperately through Italian classifieds. I also buy a phone. Then when we walk down a steep road to my university, we run into a very skinny girl who looks a little older than me putting up a page with her number on the outer wall of the university. I chat it up with her, she speaks English really well, and we go immediately to her place, literally two minutes from my university. It’s a cute house that is right in the middle of this random garden in the middle of Perugia.

Around us are apartment buildings, but we enter through a gate and there it is. I’m in love. I meet her roommate Molly. The house has a kitchen, two bathrooms, and four bedrooms. Not to mention a washing machine . . . Not to mention, she owns two guitars and wants to play with me. Not to mention the view is amazing. Not to mention I have a terrace that looks over the Perugian city/countryside. Not to mention she wants me to teach her yoga. Not to mention they both smoke like chimneys and she offers me one of the open rooms after we hang out for a bit. We exchange numbers. I put down a down payment. I’m feeling sky high. These girls are awesome. Really sweet, really down to earth, funny as hell. Neither are students . . . they are desperate for roommates because the two they wanted disappeared all of a sudden. They are relieved to meet me believe it or not, because apparently everyone else they have met have been really not cool.

After Amanda signed on the dotted line, she and Deanna departed for Germany to stay with their mother’s relatives.

Not long after, Meredith Kercher also heard about the room for rent, and contacted Filomena. She showed up at the cottage to take a quick tour. She, too, liked the mesmerizing view and easy access to the universities. Indeed, the cottage was a find in a country where stand-alone houses lay outside the reach of many paychecks. The remodeled kitchen even had a tacked-on “living room”—a luxury item in Perugia, where builders chop student flats out of ancient buildings. Thus a flat may consist of little more than a long hallway with doors opening onto tiny bedrooms, plus cooking facilities and a bathroom or two.

Meredith moved in on September 10, 2007; Amanda, after returning from Germany, on September 20, 2007. Each girl put down 300 euro a month (about $450) to live in the flat.

“So Amanda actually saw the house first, but Meredith moved in before her,” said Filomena, a vivacious girl with long brown hair and little round spectacles. “I remember that, because Meredith was able to give Amanda some advice about getting around in the center and things like that.”

The friendship between the two foreign students blossomed at first, Filomena added, because both girls were students, English-speaking, and new in town. Amanda had less time to hang out at home after she started classes in early October, taking Italian grammar, culture, conversation, and pronunciation. A few weeks later, she found a part-time job at Le Chic, a local pub. Meredith was also busy, but the two girls continued to explore bookstores, run errands, go out for dinner, and hang out together in the center. When the popular, weeklong Eurochocolate Festival began in late October, they attended it together, exploring the white tents pitched on the Corso, where vendors offered everything from chocolate popcorn to Perugina chocolates. Afterward, Amanda told her parents that she’d had a great time, and described her British roommate as fun, beautiful, and smart.

“They had interests in common, at the beginning they surely had a good relationship, there was no reason not to get along,” Filomena said, noting that both were pretty girls who made friends easily. “Along the way, they didn’t really go separate ways, but they developed personal interests that they pursued individually.”

Like Meredith, Filomena found the high-spirited American girl eccentric. “She had quite a lot of interests. She liked music, sports, yoga, and languages. Sometimes she had unusual attitudes, like she would start doing yoga while we were speaking, or she would play guitar while we were watching TV.”

For Amanda, everything was perfect. She missed loved ones in Seattle, she said on her last MySpace blog post, on October 15, 2007, but had made plenty of friends and was having lots of fun:

Everything is going great.... My house is awesome.

ALTHOUGH the little cottage offered many charms, few parents would have chosen it for a daughter. Mapped at Via Pergola 7, it actually stood on busy Sant’Antonio, an arterial that spiraled upward from the valley floor. Locals called the area a brutta zona, “bad neighborhood.” Developers had built a solid wall of modern apartments right across the noisy street, plus a large beige garage. Drug dealers hung out in the parking area and on the nearby basketball court.

Isolated on the ravine, the cottage lacked the solid encircling walls, grilled windows, burglary systems, protective lighting, and BEWARE OF DOG signs that protected monied estates on the same slope (and even there, break-ins were a problem). Any athletic person could clamber over the cottage’s metal fence or simply stroll in through the never-bolted gate. Leafy trees and shrubs shrouded the cottage’s exterior walls on three sides, providing cover for intruders. Once, the tenants had found a drunk sleeping in the garden.

The house was also very dark at night, Filomena complained.

After seeing a photo of the cottage, one of Amanda’s aunts had told her to be careful and always lock her doors. And that was even before the aunt discovered that the front door had a defective lock.

“If you didn’t close the door with the key, it opened by itself,” Amanda later explained. “You couldn’t just shut it; the wind would blow it open.”

Meredith’s friend Pietro Campolongo, a Merlin’s bartender, had warned her never to spend a night alone in the cottage. “I warned her a thousand times,” he said to London’s Daily Telegraph. “Girls should never stay at home alone.”

Still, the girls felt safe most nights, because the cottage came with their “protectors,” four Italian male students who lived in the downstairs flat. Giacomo Silenzi, Stefano Bonassi, Marco Marzan, and Riccardo Luciani. The girls enjoyed going out for pizza or a beer with these neighbors, and for nearly three weeks, the British girl had been seeing Giacomo, a good-looking, muscular twenty-two-year-old with a shaved head and gold-studded ears, who was in the second year of an international communications program.

“Meredith moved into the flat above mine at the end of the summer and we would pop into each other’s places just to say hello or have a cup of coffee, the things that neighbors do,” he told the UK’s Daily Mail. “She was very pretty and I was also impressed with her Italian. We would share CDs and play music together.”

THE bartenders kicked off “Crawloween” each year in Perugia’s center, the perfect place to observe the town’s day/night split, its willingness to serve the sacred and the profane. In the daytime, students and tourists alike perched on the steps of the Duomo, a thirteen-century cathedral on Piazza Novembre, directly across from Fontana Maggiore. The church steps were the place to meet friends, people-watch, search for romance, or be on the lookout for a casual hookup. Students showed up with sketch pads, trying to capture the stunning Palazzo dei Priori, the Gothic town hall honeycombed with staircases, porticos, balconies, and a bell tower. Adorned with a lion and a griffin, the city symbols, the palazzo also offered a vaulted entrance into the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, one of Central Italy’s best collections of provincial art.

Come nightfall, bats circled the old stone towers and the scent of burning marijuana replaced that of baking bread. The cobblestones reeked of spilled beer. Darkly clad students flowed out of the crooked alleyways and onto the white-lit Corso. They settled on the church steps in Piazza Novembre like the crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Near a set of columns in the shadows of the Duomo, drug dealers peddled their wares. A student could get high for less than $20.

“The dealers are there for the students,” said a prominent Perugia official. “They know what their customers like and they give it to them.” He raised his arms and spread them apart to demonstrate the enormity of Perugia’s drug problem. Indeed, a lawless mix of Mafiosi and foreign gangs was feeding the town’s growing reputation as the hashish capital of central Italy, conveniently located on the drug highway between North African suppliers and Northern Italian customers. Heroin was also a concern, flowing into Italy from Afghanistan, while marijuana came in from Albania and other places. Students could also get cocaine and amphetamines.

The same drug-peddling scenes played out in university districts around the globe, because dealers followed the money and students had the cash. But only a shrewd observer could tell if Perugia’s students were drunk on life or illegal substances. Their names seldom appeared in the felony reports. They may never have noticed the large and up-to-date questura (police station) at the bottom of the hill. They were more likely to have their pockets picked or hearts broken than to be shoved into a cop car.

Meanwhile, it was good to be young in the old town. Hip tunes blasted from the neon-lit pubs, pumping up the energy level on the twisting streets. Students who couldn’t get into U.S. bars, where the legal drinking age was twenty-one, made merry in the clubs, many of which featured all-you-can-drink specials during Happy Hour. Students also huddled outside Merlin’s, Joyce’s Pub, the Shamrock, and other favorites at night, smoking cigarettes and chugging beer from plastic cups, even when the air was so cold that they could see their breath. They thought nothing of hanging out until 3 A.M., talking and laughing, oblivious to the drifters and petty thieves, the heroin addicts and derelicts who stumbled past them, bent on one grim errand or another.

YES, Meredith texted to Amanda on Halloween, she did have a costume. She and her friend Sophie Purton, another Erasmus scholar from Britain, were going as vampires. Many older people in Perugia cast suspicious eyes on the “night of the witches,” seeing it as a pagan American ritual with occult undertones. But the holiday had a long history in the United Kingdom, where it began as All Hallows’ Eve, a night when the dead mingled with the living, when fairies, witches, and demons played their most mischievous pranks.

Meredith adored Halloween. Her father remembered her as a little girl, constructing a costume out of garbage sacks. Then she put a lighted candle inside a carved pumpkin, mounted on a stick, and went out to call on the neighbors.

Halloween was also starting to catch on in Italy’s larger cities, fueled by the Italian fondness for dressing up, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and “vampire chic”—a look inspired by American television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and best-selling books like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series of vampire romance novels.

On Halloween night Meredith came out of her bedroom to show off her newly bought Count Dracula cape, black choker, and fake teeth to Filomena, one of her Italian roommates. The two girls happily discussed the difficulty of achieving vampire chic through makeup. Meredith was a careful girl, who liked to get things just right. She spoke to Filomena in the Perugia patois, a confusing mix of English, Italian, and abundant hand gestures.

Then the British girl went into the white-tiled bathroom she shared with Amanda. The builder had barely managed to squeeze a bidet, sink, and shower stall into the closet-size space.

On the tiled floor, the girls had spread a very ordinary-looking blue bath mat.

Meredith brushed her thick black hair, letting it fall straight down around her shoulders. Then she changed into her costume. Before she left the house, she texted her American roommate to let her know that she couldn’t join her because she had already been invited to a dinner party. As girlfriends do, she signed off with a little “x,” a kiss.

When Amanda received the text, she was at the nearby flat of Raffaele Sollecito, her wealthy Italian boyfriend, whom she’d been seeing less than a week. He was a tall, awkward Harry Potter look-alike with light brown hair and green eyes, who wore rimless glasses and a wardrobe of thick scarves, designer shirts, wool sweaters, blazers, and trench coats. His mother had died of natural causes (not by suicide, as the press would later claim) when he was in his teens, and he got along fine with Mara, his father’s second wife, a striking blonde who wore oversize black sunglasses and couture wool coats with fur collars, like an Italian movie star. Raffaele had many loyal friends and a close relationship with his father, Francesco Sollecito, a well-known urologist, and with his sister, Vanessa.

Amanda had bought Halloween makeup for Raffaele and suggested they go to a disco, but he told her that he hadn’t celebrated the holiday since he was fifteen and preferred a quiet evening at home. Besides, he had many things on his plate, including a thesis to write and a hovering father who kept asking when it would be done.

At 8:30 P.M., Amanda replied to Meredith’s text, saying she was headed for Le Chic, where she worked two days a week:

Maybe we’ll see each other. Call me.

MEREDITH turned up the collar on her Count Dracula cape and said good-bye to Filomena for the last time. Then she left the cottage. She climbed the stone stairs on Via della Pergola and kept going up until she got to the flat of Robyn Butterworth and Amy Frost on Via Bontempi, about a fifteen-minute walk. There she joined Sophie Purton and other British guests for a dinner-and-drinks party.

According to Robyn, a tall, black-haired Leeds student from Northampton, Amanda was most certainly not invited to share in their fun. She said that Meredith felt bad about refusing Amanda’s invitations because “she was trying to work on the friendship,” which Robyn characterized as “at times a bit awkward. It wasn’t always smooth.”

The breezy American had never been Robyn’s cup of tea. She found Amanda “strange,” her actions “inappropriate.” On Amanda’s first night in the cottage, Meredith had invited her to meet Robyn and several other British friends in Il Bacio, an underground pizzeria in the center. The Seattle girl had managed to scandalize the entire table.

“She burst into song loudly during the meal—it was very out of place and very odd,” Robyn complained.

Asked about this singing incident a year later, Il Bacio’s manager shrugged, fingered the cash register keys wearily, and said he didn’t remember the American girl with the loud voice. How could he?

“Yes, yes, the students, they like to sing. Why do you want to know this?”

Indeed, large groups of Italian students singing loudly in unison, and even banging on the tables, are as typical of Perugia as truffles in the fall. Perhaps Amanda thought she was back in the States, where strolling troubadours of varying talent warble “O Sole Mio” in Italian cafés. In countercultural Seattle, she sang while driving, on the street, wherever she felt like it. She was especially fond of Broadway show tunes and anything by the Beatles: “Oh! Darling,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Let It Be.”

“If she felt like singing in a restaurant, then she would,” said Amanda’s friend Madison. “Maybe she felt really happy that night because she was in Italy. Amanda is one of the least judgmental people I’ve met, so sometimes it’s hard for her to understand that even if she doesn’t overanalyze every little thing, like others do, people will still do that to her. It wouldn’t cross her mind that her singing would bother people, because it would never bother her if others did that.”

Only a few members of Meredith’s British social set had actually met Amanda, but they all knew about the singing. At their dinner parties, they often dished about the brash UW student. Meredith shared a laundry list of grievances, saying Amanda skimped out on the cleaning, neglected to flush the toilet, annoyed her by speaking Italian at every opportunity, and strummed the same chord on the guitar over and over again. Meredith also considered Amanda overly admiring of Laura, one of their Italian roommates. Not only did Amanda have too many ear piercings, according to Meredith, but she’d only gotten them because she wanted to imitate Laura, who had at least four in each ear.

“Meredith would tell us about things Amanda did that got on her nerves, but she didn’t necessarily think these things were bad. Just strange,” said Amy, Meredith’s best friend in Perugia, a blond student from Derby with blue eyes and a small upturned nose.

Indeed, differences between roommates about noise, cleanliness, and visitors are the stuff of which college handbooks are made. Communication is said to be the key to resolving differences, but Meredith couldn’t quite bring herself to talk to Amanda about the issues. Friends blamed her reluctance on British reserve. Criticizing somebody else’s bathroom habits was bound to make one feel uncomfortable.

“It was a bit awkward,” Robyn said. “Meredith didn’t know quite how to proceed. She talked to us about the best way to go about it.”

Meredith also expressed surprise at how quickly Amanda had found romance, mentioning to her father, “Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a boyfriend.”

Amanda did have a boyfriend, but not from her first week in Perugia. She’d met Raffaele Sollecito on October 25 during a classical music concert at the Stranieri. She’d gone there with Meredith, but the British girl went home during the intermission.

“Then Raffaele came and sat near me,” Amanda said later, noting that she’d already picked him out of the crowd, because he looked like “an Italian Harry Potter.” He was just Amanda’s type, said her friends: quiet, shy, intelligent, geeky.

“You have weird taste in men,” a Seattle friend had once told her.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

After the concert Amanda told Raffaele that she had to wait tables at Le Chic that night and suggested he drop by for a chat. Then she went back to her flat to prepare for work.

“I told Meredith that I had met someone and we had talked,” she said later. “Then after talking to her, I went to work and he came, and I also told her that.”

Raffaele wrote to his father:

My first impression was that this was an interesting girl, she looked at me over and over again and seemed to be searching for something in my eyes, like a particular interest. Then I sat near her to talk and I noticed that her opinions on the music were odd because she didn’t concentrate on the emotions it provoked but on only the rhythm—slow, fast, slow.

Raffaele and a few friends did show up at Le Chic that night. He had a beer, waited until the bar closed, and then took Amanda back to his monolocale (studio apartment) at Corso Garibaldi 110, only about a ten-minute walk from the girls’ house. Few students could afford to live alone in the expensive old town, but Raffaele not only had his own place but also weekly maid service. He kept a black Audi parked outside, a major status symbol.

Amanda slept with him that night and every night after that, Raffaele later said in his diary. In fact, they were all but inseparable. The American girl did, however, return to the cottage each morning to shower, change clothes, and catch up with her roommates.

In addition to her new boyfriend and her classes at the Stranieri, Amanda had the job at Le Chic, a pub in the center owned by Diya Patrick Lumumba, a popular local who’d emigrated to Italy from the Congo decades earlier. He’d hired Amanda to hand out flyers in the daytime and bring customers their drinks at night. She’d worked every day at first, but by late October, they had “organized” (as she put it) a two-day schedule, Tuesday and Thursdays, from 10:30 P.M. to 1:30 A.M. She called those days “pretty full” and felt lucky to have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons to play her guitar, walk around, hang out with friends, and study.

As she wrote in her MySpace blog, on October 15, 2007, in her idiosyncratic syntax, complete with typical typos and misspellings:

I really like the italian lifestyle. everything shuts down in the middle of the day so everyone can have a 3 hour lunch break. i love it. i wish we had that in america. i think americans work to much and dont live. Having that time in the middle of the day reminds you that life really isnt all about going to work and making money. its about who you are and what you choose to do and who you choose to spend your time with.

Living la dolce vita is, of course, a popular American fantasy, fed by such delicious books as Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun. In these bestsellers, readers enter a fabulous world where the most enchanting dreams come true. British literature offers a similar Eden. Is a trip to Italy promised at the beginning of an English romance novel? Then a happy ending hovers on the horizon.

And why not? A vacation in Italy promises—and might actually deliver—Latin lovers, succulent food, splendid ruins, a colorful history, spirituality, healing, fresh starts, and a slowed-down lifestyle. Snow never falls in this Italy, cars don’t break down, and the euro never drops. Four-course meals magically appear. Graffiti never stains ancient monuments, nor does traffic choke potholed roads. Prisons, hospitals, police stations, and cemeteries hardly seem necessary. Italians are seldom fat, wrinkled, or stressed.

Authors were far more jaded in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when Italy was a must-do on the Grand Tour. American heiresses saw the Bel Paese through rose-colored lenses at their peril in Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever” and Henry James’s novel Daisy Miller. The writers pitted their heroines’ openness and optimism against the unfamiliar restraints of an antique Catholic culture. They used “Roman fever” to refer not only to influenza, but also to a sort of willful blindness about the dangers of the world.

The flirtatious Daisy Miller, for instance, makes an ill-advised nighttime visit to the Roman Colosseum, notoriously germ-ridden during that era. Later, she tells Winterbourne, one of many suitors, that she never saw anything so pretty as Rome after dark.

“I am afraid that you would not think Roman fever very pretty,” he replies. “This is the way people catch it.”

THE cottage’s Italian tenants had a far different take on the two foreign girls and their relationship than did Meredith’s friends. None of the lodgers, upstairs or downstairs, reported any tension between the two girls. Nobody ever heard Amanda criticize Meredith or raise her voice to anyone at any time. In fact, Marco Marzan, one of the boys downstairs, said the relationship was “idyllic.” Laura called it “normale.”

Giacomo, Meredith’s boyfriend, used the word tranquilla (tranquil). “Of all the people in the house, they got on best together,” he said, calling the girls natural allies and good friends. “Amanda was always outgoing. She started coming down to our flat almost from the start when we hardly knew each other. Sometimes she brought us cakes she had made. Other times she asked me to play music with her. I play bass and she had just begun playing the guitar. She loved music, especially the Beatles.”

Neither girl enjoyed confrontations. According to Amanda’s friends and family, she fell apart when people yelled at her, losing her self-confident façade. She turned red and burst into tears. When someone made her angry, she left the room and wrote them a letter, outlining her grievances, trying to understand them herself.

Another habit Amanda would regret.

As for housework, according to the boys downstairs Filomena and Laura complained that they did more scrubbing than the two foreign girls combined. Meredith did a bit, the Italian roommates said, Amanda did none. For that reason, Filomena had installed a cleaning chart only days before Halloween. Amanda had already missed a cleaning session. If she kept up that pattern, Filomena could not imagine how many infractions she would tally up by year’s end. Laura believed in vigorous bathroom scouring and floor mopping, but wondered if she herself was perhaps too meticulous.

Cleaning aside, the foreign girls caused few problems. They had cash. They paid the rent. They were studious. Neither of them made scenes or even threw a single party.

“The way Amanda described it, the two Italian roommates hung out together,” said Amanda’s friend Madison. “They were older. They had the same job. Then there was Meredith, who already had a group of friends. Amanda was running in and out, saying, ‘Hi.’ She would kind of scoot by them and try to get along with everybody.”

“I felt very comfortable with Meredith,” Amanda said later. “I trusted her, I often asked her for advice.” In fact, she found the Londoner glamorously European, admiring the multicultural good looks that Meredith shared with her sister, Stephanie, and two brothers, Lyle and John Jr. (courtesy of their mother, who was of Indian descent, and their Caucasian father).

No doubt Amanda and Meredith had wildly different personalities, yet on paper they made a good match. Amanda also had three siblings: her sister Deanna and two half sisters, Ashley and Delaney. Both Meredith and Amanda were English-speaking, book smart, and middle-class. They had gone to pricey prep schools—Amanda to the Jesuit-run Seattle Preparatory Academy; Meredith, to the all-girls Old Palace School of John Whitgift. They were both enrolled in giant public universities. Their parents were divorced, but the families were close and loving. The girls adored their mothers, loved Italy, longed to master the language, and had worked hard to make their Italian dreams come true. Meredith was on scholarship in Perugia. While carrying a full load of classes at the UW, Amanda had managed to simultaneously hold down two part-time jobs, including a barista gig at World Cup, a coffee shop in Seattle’s raffish University District.

Later, when Amanda became infamous around the world, a former customer would leave a rare compliment on the Web site of the University of Washington Daily:

I don’t really know Amanda Knox personally, but I met/talked to her a few times when she worked at the espresso place.... She took my orders a few times and made my sandwiches and got my soup. She seemed really nice, bubbly. Sometimes I would walk in there and she would be at the table studying Italian.

I hope she didn’t do it.

CHAPTER TWO

HALLOWEEN NIGHT

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

—Corriere dell’Umbria

ON Halloween night, Meredith and her friends lingered at the supper table, talking and drinking punch until about 10:30 P.M. At some point Meredith worked on her vampire look with Sophie Purton, a twenty-one-year-old Leeds student with a pert face, blue eyes, and long brown hair. They dabbed white makeup on their cheeks to create a ghostly pallor, brushed on smoky eye shadow, and rubbed fake blood around their mouths.

Then the happy group climbed uphill toward the nightspots in the center, a perfect backdrop for “Crawloween.” They followed the steep passageways that writers over the ages have compared to caves, because of the arches that sometimes ran their entire length, darkening the route. Shafts of garish light played off the medieval façades at the top of the hill, barely penetrating the dusky alleyways. The eerie white cityscape looked impossibly old. A Villanovan tribe had first settled on the hilltop in the ninth century B.C. Three centuries later, the mysterious Etruscans began crafting the impregnable walls and stone acropolis. Even London, Meredith’s hometown, was young compared to Perugia, and the first European settlers didn’t drop anchor in the area that is now Seattle until the 1850s. The land was so wild and the forests so thick that the women sobbed as they left the safety of the boats.

On Halloween, Meredith, Robyn, Amy, Sophie, and other friends headed straight for Merlin’s, a popular pub for British students, where they could order drinks in English, eat pizza, dance, and, of course, drink beer.

The bartenders at Merlin’s knew just how to pull in Erasmus scholars. Orientation parties upon arrival. Flyers handed out on the Corso and at the universities between classes. Theme parties, birthday shindigs, two-for-one-beer specials, and drinks with sexy names like “Blo-Job” shots. Happy Hour from 8:30 to 11:30 every night.

In fact, Merlin’s was a rite of passage for foreign students, so essential to Perugia’s study-abroad experience that it formed the backdrop for Zachary Nowak’s Peril in Perugia, a detective novel in which nobody dies. An American author, translator, and tour guide, Zach had come to the hilltop town as a student and even bartended a few times at Merlin’s, where he observed the club dynamics.

Groups of eye-catching girls got red-carpet treatment in all the nightspots, Zach said, because of their drawing power. The bartenders courted them and memorized their names. As he wrote in his detective novel:

Merlin’s, like a lot of Perugia’s pubs, was subterranean. The entrance was all but hidden in this back alley just off the main street, and you walked down steep steps to get to the bar. To your right was the largish dance floor and DJ console, while off to the left was the dining area where locals ate pizzas and then started their pub crawls with a few beers. . . . The one disadvantage of this layout was that, coming down the stairs at the entrance, you could see instantly how full the place was. As with every bar, Merlin’s needed a certain number of people out there grooving, or at least at the bar, to be critical mass, to be a magnet for others coming in the door. If it looked empty, the gaggle of Belgians or what have you might move on to another bar in search of a better party.

On Halloween night, thirty-seven-year-old Pasquale (aka “Pisco”) Alessi, the pub’s co-owner, greeted the English girls from behind the bar. One of Perugia’s most recognizable citizens, Pisco was slim and charismatic, of medium height, and dressed perennially in black. He wore his long black hair tied back and sported a neatly clipped goatee. Raised in Reggio di Calabria, far south in the boot of Italy, Pisco had come to Perugia as a student and never looked back. His understanding of the club culture was second to none. To the English girls, he was a confidant and what Amy called “a friend, a very good friend, and nothing more.”

Pisco worked the bar that night in a big black vampire cape. Earlier that day, he and Meredith had been thrilled to score the last set of vampire fangs in the shops. Pisco said it was typical of the English student to work out a sharing arrangement. He flaunted the upper choppers, the better part of the deal, while she made do with the lower.

“Meredith was tiny,” Pisco recalled. “Just a really nice girl. She liked to go out with her friends, but I never see her with problems, never see her drunk. She liked to dance, and those girls sometimes they would get up and dance on the tables.” He laughed. “I have a picture of Meredith up on a table like that.... She always liked to go out with Sophie and Robyn and have fun, but she would watch out for them. She was the careful one. ‘Now we have to go home,’ she would say. ‘We have to get up tomorrow and go to class.’ ”

The DJ at Merlin’s kept the Halloween party running far into the night with top-of-the-charts tunes mixed in with the occasional Madonna hit from the 1980s. Amid the crush of masked students, Meredith posed with two buddies for a striking photo: she leaned in from the left, her lips outlined with fake blood, the collar on her Count Dracula coat covering her neck. In the center stood her friend Pietro Campolongo, a Merlin’s bartender in a garish white mask from the movie Scream. To the right, another friend was disguised in a polizia uniform, wearing a shiny helmet with the visor pulled down and pointing a plastic assault rifle in Meredith’s direction.

She looked happy, self-confident, fun. “A lover of life,” as her aunt called her.

“We were having a great time,” said Pietro later to a British tabloid reporter, “but there were lots of people we didn’t know, especially because they were masked.”

A few evenings later, police would come into Merlin’s and other bars, trying to match names to the masks, wondering if Meredith could have met someone on Halloween who showed up on her doorstep the next night.

INDEED, a gregarious young man named Rudy Guede would make that very claim. An Italian resident from the Ivory Coast, he was a music lover of uncertain occupation, a fantastic dancer, a skinny twenty-year-old black man in a white country, estranged from his family in a culture where family is everything. He often shot hoops on the court in Piazza Grimana, a five-minute walk from the girls’ cottage, and had played for a while on a local team. He dressed like a basketball star, too, in team jerseys and baggy shorts even in chilly weather, or in a T-shirt over athletic pants.

Rudy had a tiny monolocale just around the corner from Raffaele’s, but unlike the wealthy students’ place, Rudy’s didn’t offer much; just a bed, a hot plate, and a bathroom. Rudy didn’t mind, because he was a boulevardier, always out on the streets, looking for fun. Indeed, he was in constant motion, drinking in the bars, hanging out on the church steps, chatting with friends on the Corso. Rudy lived for the disco and the festa (party). He was a fixture at the Domus, a late-night disco club in the center where foreign students rocked to loud music until dawn.

Rudy knew many people. He fit in everywhere without really fitting in anywhere. Although he would later be characterized as a drifter, he’d lived in Perugia since he was five years old and wasn’t completely rootless. In fact, he palled around with quite respectable friends from his school days and also with newly met college students. He would often engage in afternoon chats with the two Spanish Erasmus scholars, Marta Fernandez and Carolina Espinilla, who shared the flat above him.

Rudy knew the boys from the cottage, because they shot hoops with him on the basketball court. He’d even been over to their place and met the two pretty foreign girls in mid-October. He’d been hanging out by the church steps in the center that day, talking to the boys, when Amanda came up to them, just to say hello. The boys introduced her to Rudy. As she described this meeting:

“They said, ‘Amanda this is Rudy. Rudy, this is Amanda.’ That’s all.”

Then the whole group walked back to the cottage together. Rudy went into the downstairs flat to hang around with the boys. Amanda joined them eventually and then Meredith showed up. Rudy stayed on after the girls returned to their apartment. He socialized with the boys, drinking and/or smoking a spinello, a hand-rolled joint commonly made with hashish or marijuana mixed with tobacco.

At some point he became too wasted to leave, so he went into the bathroom, forgetting even to close the door, sat on the toilet, and fell asleep. Stefano found him there later that night and let him sack out on the couch.

Not long before Halloween, Rudy came over, uninvited, to watch the Grand Prix on TV with the boys. He’d asked whether Amanda was single the first time he came over, but now he didn’t mention her all night. He wasn’t a pest, just a guy who liked to drink and be sociable, the boys said. Laura Mezzetti, from the upstairs flat, happened to drop by, and she also met Rudy; so only Filomena did not.

Even though he’d once pretended to be Count Dracula in a homemade video he’d posted on Facebook, on this Halloween he didn’t slip into a disguise. He hung out with the Spanish girls all night, the two who lived upstairs from him, and would later claim that he’d encountered Meredith at a party. He said he hadn’t recognized her right away because she was dressed like a vampire. “When I recognized her, I said, ‘Do you want to suck my blood because you lost the Cup?’ ”

Meredith had laughed, Rudy claimed, because South Africa had recently defeated Britain in a rugby final.

He also said they flirted and he stole a kiss, whereupon she asked him to stop by the next night at 8:30, the idea being only to talk.

ON Halloween night Amanda painted cat whiskers on her face and left Raffaele to his quiet evening.

“Amanda is American,” he said later. “For her Halloween is a very important night.”

The truth was that he’d already had a very full day. First he’d gone to a graduation party for his friend Francesco, then he’d hung out at his buddy Paolo’s place, and finally he’d whiled away the afternoon with Amanda and shared supper with her. They were suspended blissfully in that honeymoon phase so annoying to outsiders, when lovers make up pet names, find each other perfect, and indulge in public displays of affection.

All of Amanda’s flatmates had met her new boyfriend, to mixed reviews. On October 26, Amanda had introduced him to Filomena, who thought he treated her “sweetly.” Laura met him on the 30th, also at the cottage. She found the courtship a bit much. Cloying, in fact.

“Piccioncini,” she called them. Little lovebirds.

“He followed her every footstep,” she said. “He was very affectionate with her, almost obsessive.”

The British roommate had also met him, because he stopped by in the afternoons to make lunch for his new girlfriend.

“Meredith was complaining that they spent quite a lot of time in the kitchen,” said Robyn.

For his part, Raffaele found Meredith a nice, intelligent girl, but his lack of English prevented them from having a true conversation. When the foreign girls had moved into the cottage, they’d tried speaking only in Italian, just to get in some practice, but they were unable to voice deeper thoughts than “Would you like mozzarella on that panini?” So now Amanda and Meredith spoke exclusively in rapid English.

Raffaele didn’t try to keep up. He was content to eat lunch at the table, basking in Amanda’s presence, while she enjoyed the gossip.

In any case, the lovers were usually over at his little flat, which offered a tiny kitchen and bathroom, plus a main room with a bed and desk. Only a half block up from the Stranieri, the flat was on twisting Corso Garibaldi, a colorful street with several good bars and restaurants, plus a church, kebab shop, and pocket park. Besides an Internet Point, a shop where customers could surf the Web and make international phone calls, Garibaldi also boasted a Laundromat and two Conad grocery stores.