Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [13]
Meanwhile, Meredith relaxed at Robyn’s house with her friends Amy Frost, then twenty-one, and Sophie Purton, then twenty. They laughed and gossiped about the night before. Then they made a pizza and an apple pie while watching The Notebook on DVD. At around 9 P.M., Meredith said she was tired. She and Sophie left together and split up on via Roscetto, each heading to her own house. No one knows exactly what happened next, although police would eventually gather these confusing details:
At 7:41 P.M., one of three closed-circuit TV cameras in the parking garage across from the girls’ villa captured the image of a man in a heavy jacket, wearing sneakers, heading toward via della Pergola. The camera caught him leaving twenty minutes later and again, after a half hour, returning in the direction of via della Pergola. The man was clearly white, not black, but defense attorneys for both Raffaele and Amanda would later insist that this was Rudy Guede. At 8:43 P.M., the same video shows a woman in a white skirt—the prosecutor would claim that the woman was Amanda—heading home. Antonio Curatolo, then fifty-one, is a homeless man who spends his time on a bench by the Piazza Grimana basketball courts near the via della Pergola. He testified that he saw Amanda and Raffaele looking down toward the gate of the house around 9:30 P.M. He said they returned to the Piazza Grimana again at 10:30 and stood looking down over the railing toward Amanda and Meredith’s house. Then, he said, he saw them again shortly after midnight.
Hekuran Kokomani, thirty-three, is an Albanian handyman who is also believed to be a drug informant for the local police. He testified that he nearly ran into a big, black garbage bag the night of either October 31 or November 1. What Kokomani at first thought was a bag, he said, turned out to be Amanda, Raffaele, and Rudy, which caused even the jury to burst into laughter. Then, he told the court, Amanda brandished a knife at him, and in self-defense he threw his cell phones and a handful of fresh olives from the floor of his car at her.
Nara Capezzali, sixty-nine, lives in an apartment above the parking garage that overlooks via della Pergola. Her husband died in July 2007, and on November 1, she went to light a candle at his grave. That evening, she was lonely and sad. She flipped through the TV channels but didn’t find anything to watch, so she took her laxative and went to bed. Around 11:00 or 11:30 P.M.—she did not look at a clock—she woke up to use the toilet. On her way back to her bedroom, she heard a scream.
“It was a woman’s scream, so blood curdling it made my skin crawl,” she would later testify. Then she heard what sounded to her like three or four people running up the metal steps to the top of the parking garage. She was upset all night. The next day, Capezzali saw police cars in the yard at 7 via della Pergola and heard the news of Meredith’s murder.
3
“I Kicked the Door in, and Then I Heard a Scream”
NOVEMBER 2, 2007, was a frigid morning in Perugia. Fog had settled on the Umbrian hills, and the damp air was bone-chilling. Around 11 A.M., the sun started to peek through the haze, and Elisabetta Lana went out to her garden on via Sperandio to check her roses. She heard a strange ringing sound under one of the bushes and decided to call her son Alessandro. The night before, a prankster had phoned to warn that there was a bomb in her toilet, and the elderly Signora Lana was quick to worry. Alessandro called the postal police, who came by Elisabetta’s just before noon. The two mobile phones they found under the roses were easily traceable. One had a foreign SIM card purchased in Leeds, England. The other belonged to Filomena Romanelli at number 7 via della Pergola nearby.
At 12:35 P.M. the postal police pulled into the yard at 7 via della Pergola looking for Filomena. Instead, they found Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito standing outside the house. Raffaele was wearing