Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
A Note on the Sources
Cast of Characters
Chapter 1 - “Perugia Is Not for the Weak”
Chapter 2 - “Here Is the List of People I’ve Had Sex With”
Chapter 3 - “I Kicked the Door in, and Then I Heard a Scream”
Chapter 4 - “Everyone Cried Except Amanda and Raffaele”
Chapter 5 - “The Worst Part Was I Still Couldn’t Remember Exactly What I Had ...
Chapter 6 - “I Am Not the One Who Took Her Life. But I Didn’t Save Her”
Chapter 7 - “DNA Doesn’t Fly”
Chapter 8 - “She Is Not Amanda the Ripper, She Is the Amélie of Seattle”
Chapter 9 - “Deep Down, Curt Knows. He Knows the Truth”
Chapter 10 - “You Try to Be Persuasive but Not Insulting”
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
For all victims of sex crimes
Foreword
By Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Beast
“IT’S SUCH A SHOCK to send your child to school and for them to not come back.”
That was the brokenhearted testimony of the mother of Meredith Kercher, the twenty-two-year-old British student killed in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007, at the trial of her daughter’s alleged killers two years later. “We will never, never get over it.”
As the mother of a nineteen-year-old myself, I shuddered at her words.
Hers is the nightmare that haunts every parent who sends a son or daughter off to one of the “gap year” or study-abroad programs that have become a right of passage for educated Western youth. But the rapid growth of such programs can be credited, in part, to parents’ woeful—or is it willful?—ignorance about what can happen when students suddenly find themselves in a foreign land, free from parental or college oversight, and surrounded by a new set of peers, all of them eager to experiment.
The picturesque Umbrian hill town of Perugia may have seemed an idyllic setting for cultural and linguistic enhancement. But for the kids who signed up to go, its greater attraction was its reputation as Party Central. The lengthy official and unofficial investigations into the minds and mores of Meredith’s accused killers—her fun-loving American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Knox’s onetime Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito—exposed a merciless culture of sex, drugs, and alcohol that was a chilling eye-opener to parents who learned of it too late. Only with Meredith’s horrific death did it become clear that she and her roommate had been mixing with a crowd that was headed not just for trouble, but, in Amanda’s case, a descent into evil.
Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone’s definition of an all-American girl—attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul? Even when all the facts of the case seem to point so tellingly in her direction, how and why could Amanda, apparently without motive, have helped slash her roommate’s throat with the aid of her boyfriend and a seedy drug dealer—and then gone on to repeatedly lie about the events of that terrible autumn night?
These questions obsessed all those involved with this case, from the legal professionals to the journalists and spectators who packed the Perugia courtroom for the trial. To the Italian prosecutors and the British tabloid press, she was a drug- and sex-obsessed vixen. To her family and her defenders in the American press, she was a wholesome coed framed by an aggressive and incompetent prosecutor—or, at worst, led astray by a dissolute Italian boyfriend and the drug dealer Rudy Guede, who had gone on the lam in Germany immediately after the crime.
At The Daily Beast, we were fortunate, early on, to recruit the most diligent and talented English-speaking journalist covering this case.
Barbie Latza Nadeau, who has been reporting from Italy for Newsweek since 1997, arrived in Perugia the day after Meredith’s battered body was discovered in the house she shared with three other girls. A resident of Rome, fluent in Italian, Nadeau (who also happened to have been married in Knox’s hometown