Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [20]
Amanda also told both Amy and Meredith’s friend Robyn Butterworth that she had seen Meredith’s body inside the closet and covered with her duvet. Amanda “kept talking about how she had found Meredith,” Robyn recalled. “She sounded proud that she had been the first to find her.” Robyn soon quit speaking to Amanda. Meredith’s friends validated what the police were already thinking. They had also been observing the young American’s curious behavior. She was, to them, so detached from the situation around her that they wondered, at times, if she was perhaps psychologically disturbed or in shock from the murder. They decided to tap her and Raffaele’s phones and heard Amanda say on November 4, just three days after the murder, “I can’t take it anymore.”
On November 4, Amanda was called back to the police station. They were hungry, so eventually Amanda sent Raffaele out for pizza, which they ate at the station while they waited to be questioned. The police, now suspicious of the pair, had set up a surveillance camera and taped their conversation in the waiting room.
“What are you thinking?” Raffaele asked Amanda, who looked concerned.
“I don’t want to be here. I want all of this to be over,” she said.
Then she started talking to Raffaele about a man without naming him. “I want to know who his friends are because he doesn’t have very many friends. He didn’t leave the house much. He didn’t talk much.”
The police were convinced that Amanda was talking about the killer. They were sure that she was protecting someone.
On November 5, the police decided to call Raffaele in for questioning one more time. They had a lot of information that didn’t make sense. Phone records showed that Amanda and Raffaele had turned off their cell phones at 8:30 P.M. November 1. According to the records, it was the first time Amanda had ever turned off her phone for the night. The same records showed that they then turned the phones on again the next morning just after 6, although they had told police they slept until midmorning. The police didn’t want to tip them off, so neither Amanda nor Raffaele had been asked about the phones yet.
Raffaele, the police felt, was the weaker of the two; if he knew anything, they thought they might get it out of him first. Raffaele arrived at the police station at 10:40 P.M. Amanda had not been called in for questioning, but she did not have any other friends in Perugia and she did not feel comfortable staying at Raffaele’s alone, so she came along. She brought her homework and sat in the waiting room studying while Raffaele was questioned. The chairs were stiff and uncomfortable. At one point, she got up to stretch her back. She did a back bend and then she bent forward and did a cart-wheel and splits. Two of the police officers on duty told Amanda to stop. They told her that it wasn’t the right behavior for the situation.
While Amanda was performing gymnastics in the waiting room, Raffaele was destroying her alibi in a tiny room down the hall. His version of events of November 1 jibed with hers for most of the day; they slept in after a late night on Halloween, then spent the afternoon at via della Pergola, napping, smoking joints, playing the guitar in Amanda’s room. Then they went for a walk around town for a couple of hours and split up near the basketball courts so that Amanda could go to work at Le Chic. Later, they would change their story to say that they had both stopped by Raffaele’s house before Amanda left to go to work. But at the police station, he told a different story.
“I went home on my own. Amanda said she was going to Le Chic because she wanted to see some friends. That