Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [19]
Amanda woke up in Raffaele’s bed on the corso Garibaldi, about a ten-minute walk from via della Pergola, around 11 A.M. They had breakfast, had sex, and then, around midday, went out to the newsstand by the basketball courts and scanned the headlines. At 5 P.M., Meredith’s friends began gathering in Piazza IV Novembre on the steps of the duomo for a memorial. A giant color poster of her smiling face had been erected, and red votive candles glowed on the church steps, lighting the late afternoon sky. Amanda and Raffaele did not go to the vigil. Instead, they waited until it was over before visiting a boutique near the duomo to buy underwear for Amanda. Her apartment had been secured as a crime scene, and except for the few things she was able to grab on the way out, she had only the clothes on her back. But instead of somberly going in to buy the items she needed, she is shown on closed-circuit TV footage kissing Raffaele and laughing with him as they hold up various G-strings. In one still shot taken from the footage, Raffaele is standing behind Amanda with his hands on her hips and his groin pressed into her. A few days after their arrest, the store owner, Carlo Maria Scotto di Rinaldi, remembered their odd behavior and turned over the tape. “They came into the shop at about 7 pm and were there for about 20 minutes,” he later testified in court. “She bought a camisole and G-string. I heard her tell him that ‘Afterwards I’m going to take you home and put this on so we can have wild sex together.’”
On the night of November 3, Rudy went out with his friends. They drank, got high, and danced. They flirted with the students, as they always did. He could block Meredith out of his mind as long as he kept busy, but the moment he closed his eyes, he saw red. He couldn’t sleep. He wandered around Perugia all night, and in the morning he packed his rucksack and got on a local train to Milan, where he would switch for the Eurostar to Austria and then to Germany. He had very little money in his pocket, but he had to get out of Perugia before someone realized that the fingerprints in Meredith’s bedroom were his.
Over the next few days, Amanda was preoccupied with finding a new place to live. Her mother’s cousin, Dorothy Craft Najir, urged Amanda to come to her house in Hamburg until things settled down. Amanda refused. Later, the court would hear that she wanted to stay and help the investigators. In fact, she could not have left Perugia without raising an alarm. Detectives were watching her every move. Instead, Amanda repeatedly called Filomena and Laura to ask if they could live together again and to inquire after a refund for the rent and deposit she had paid. The two Italian roommates were perplexed by her behavior, as was Meredith’s new boyfriend, Giacomo Silenzi, who had been out of town when Meredith was murdered. The police were questioning all of Meredith’s friends, calling them to the station in groups to iron out certain elements of the crime. On November 2, Amanda was already at the police station when Giacomo arrived by train from his parents’ house in the Marche. “I couldn’t help thinking how cool and calm Amanda was,” he told the Daily Mail. “Meredith’s other English friends were devastated and I was upset, but Amanda was as cool as anything and completely emotionless. Her eyes didn’t seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved.”
Giacomo then talked with Meredith’s British friends, who all agreed that Amanda was oddly detached from this violent murder. One by one, they told the police that Amanda’s behavior was suspicious. In fact, Meredith’s friend Amy Frost was deeply offended by Amanda’s conduct when they were together at the police station on the day of the murder,