Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [16]
Meredith’s left arm was bent, and her blood-smeared hand was still suspended in the air near her face. The tip of her long, thin index finger was soaked in blood as if she had touched her neck. But Meredith’s right hand showed not even a drop of blood except from tiny cuts on the palm of her hand—it had not been near her face or neck when she was stabbed, but the detectives determined that she had extended it in self defense. The twin bruises and identical pressure points on the insides of her elbows were consistent with her arms being held back.
“It’s blonde,” the scientific police officer said as he pulled a long hair from Meredith’s blood-soaked hand.
“She has long fingernails, doesn’t she?” asked Stefanoni, examining Meredith’s hand.
“She has medium long fingernails,” corrected the officer. He found no skin cells under the nails to show that she struggled for her life, but he put plastic bags over both hands to preserve the nails for further analysis. The police then lifted Meredith’s head to measure the knife wound in her neck.
“Mamma mia,” said Stefanoni.
“E abbastanza profondo—It’s pretty deep,” said the officer.
“Look, there are more wounds,” said Stefanoni as her assistant moved Meredith’s head. “Another cut on the other side of her neck. There must have been two knives.”
“Penso di si—it’s very likely,” said her assistant.
The police rolled Meredith’s body to its side and photographed and measured the many cuts and scrapes on her back. The top sheet from her single bed was crumpled in a ball near her body, soaked in blood. Investigators then used tiny metal scissors to cut out the bloodstained sections of Meredith’s fitted bottom sheet still on her bed. One section showed a handprint. The other was the perfect outline of a knife.
By the wardrobe, where Meredith was killed, the police identified marks on the floor from her knees. Above where her body had been, high on the wall, were three long, bloody fingerprints, as if someone had stumbled while trying to get up. Those prints were unidentifiable, though the defense would link them to Rudy Guede; another set inside the wardrobe door—where it looked as if someone had braced for leverage while moving Meredith’s body—were also too smeared to read. Although most of the fingerprints and DNA in the room would later be matched to Rudy, there were fourteen fingerprints and DNA traces that could not be identified, because they were too smeared or degraded.
After Meredith’s body was wrapped in plastic and placed in a gray metal coffin to be taken to the medical examiner, the videographer swept the room again, this time focusing on the area under her bed, noting suitcases and a Zara shopping bag. He zoomed in on a black desk lamp that witnesses would later say did not belong in Meredith’s room. Why had the killers moved the lamp to the floor of her room? Police then identified the white clasp of Meredith’s bra but somehow failed to place it in a plastic bag. Eventually, testing revealed Raffaele’s DNA on the tiny metal hook of the fastener. But it would be six weeks before investigators finally collected the clasp—ample time for the defense to argue that it had been mishandled and contaminated.
The police might have done well to stop videotaping at this point, because as they proceeded to other rooms in the apartment, they made mistakes that would hobble the prosecution and hand the defense some potentially valuable loopholes on appeal. Stefanoni and her colleagues, increasingly agitated, began to make a series of grave errors on camera. When one of her colleagues collected bloodstains from the porcelain bidet in the bathroom that Amanda and Meredith shared, she failed to change cotton swabs before collecting additional samples. In another video segment that the defense team would become fond of showing in court, it appears from the position of Stefanoni’s tennis bracelet that she failed to change her surgical gloves between one contact with