Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [1]
And she pursued them zealously. Over the next two years, she attended almost every session of Knox’s murder trial, read the entire ten-thousand-page legal dossier in Italian, and invested countless coffees, dinners, and glasses of prosecco in cultivating cops, lawyers, judges, witnesses, jurors, friends, and families. Nadeau’s regular posts on The Daily Beast during the eleven-month trial established her as an authoritative voice on the case—with appearances on CNN, CBS, NPR, the BBC, and NBC’s Dateline. But her pieces also got her blackballed by the Knox family because she declined to toe the line they force-fed to a U.S. media eager to get them on-camera: that Amanda was a total innocent railroaded by a rogue prosecutor in a corrupt justice system.
Daily Beast readers knew otherwise, thanks to Nadeau’s thorough and balanced reporting. But her objective dispatches also earned her the enmity of ferocious pro-Knox bloggers, who hurled insults and threats, hoping to discredit her professionally. Instead, her reputation has been enhanced by her diligent pursuit of a story that most of the U.S. media, including the New York Times, badly misread.
Barbie Latza Nadeau’s sensitive, clear-eyed, and compelling examination of a perplexing case is now a book—the second in our provocative Beast Book series—that brings to American readers the first full account of this baffling case. The book finally gets behind the impassive “angel face” (as the Italian tabs sneeringly called the defendant) to find the real Amanda Knox. Mining diaries, social networking sites, exclusive interviews, and telling moments in the courtroom, Nadeau paints the first full portrait of a quirky young woman who is neither the “she-devil” presented to an Italian jury nor the blameless ingenue her parents believe her to be. What Nadeau shows is that Amanda Knox is, in fact, a twenty-first-century all-American girl—a serious student with plans and passions—but is also a thrill-seeking young woman who loves sex and enjoys drugs and who, in the wrong environment with the wrong people, develops a dark side that takes her over and tips her into the abyss.
In short, every parent’s worst fear . . .
A Note on the Sources
MOST OF THE MATERIAL in this book comes directly from official court materials, which are available only in Italian. All references to forensic evidence are based on the transcripts of court testimony and the ten-thousand-page crime dossier known as the Digital Archive. The archive includes police reports, photos, and most of the interrogation transcripts, as well as Amanda Knox’s and Raffaele Sollecito’s prison writings and intercepts of their visiting-room conversations. I also refer to PowerPoint presentations, slide shows, and other exhibits presented in court by key witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense. Rudy Guede’s testimony comes from interviews with his lawyers and official transcripts of both his fast-track and his appellate trials. The rest of the information about the trial was garnered by my attendance at every session of the eleven-month trial of Knox and Sollecito, except for two sessions in mid-June 2009. In addition, I viewed roughly ten hours of video taken during the crime scene investigation and listened to audiotapes of Amanda’s and Raffaele’s interrogations in prison and the Skype call to Rudy Guede in Germany. Amanda and Raffaele’s MySpace quotes and Amanda’s short stories come from downloads of their MySpace pages made before this material was removed from the Internet in 2007. I obtained Amanda’s personal e-mails to friends through sources in Seattle.
I first arrived in Perugia on November 3, 2007, the day after Meredith Kercher’s body was discovered. I was on assignment for Newsweek. Over the next two years, I became personally acquainted with the prosecutors and lawyers on all sides of the complex case mounted against Knox and Sollecito and the simpler fast-track prosecution of Guede. I interviewed