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“Patrick and Meredith were in Meredith’s bedroom while I must have stayed in the kitchen,” she told the interrogators, who at 3:30 A.M. called prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, fifty-seven. Amanda repeated her story to him. “I can’t remember how long they were together in the bedroom, but the only thing I can say is that at a certain point I heard Meredith screaming. I was scared and put my hands over my ears. I can’t remember anything else. I’m so confused.”

As Amanda described the scene once more, Mignini took notes. Later he was told that she had cried and hit her head over and over again the first time she told the story. Despite what would be reported later, Mignini was only in the room for the last ninety minutes of the four-hour interrogation. He did not conduct the questioning and was not the one who browbeat her into confessing her presence at the crime scene. During the time Mignini was present, he says, Amanda admitted to being drunk and passing out. He says she covered her ears when she described the screams. Then she said, “This has upset me, and I’m very frightened of Patrick.” Mignini says he was sympathetic to Amanda at that moment. It made sense to him that she was afraid of her boss and might be protecting him. The police immediately went out to arrest Lumumba, who was awake, preparing a bottle for his young son; they marched him out of the house as his son and his Polish wife looked on. Amanda also told the investigators that she did not remember if Raffaele was there that night, but she says she remembered waking up at his place the next day with no idea of how she had gotten there.

Detective Napoleoni agrees with Amanda about what was said that night, but she denies the police ever hit her. She says that while the interrogation was tough, there was no physical contact. When Amanda took the stand in June, the young woman repeated the accusation that she was hit. When the judge asked her to identify who hit her, she looked around the room and said she didn’t know, even though Napoleoni and all the officers present at her questioning were in the courtroom. Amanda maintains that the police badgered her until she confessed. The officers say they were firm but polite, and even offered her chamomile tea and sweets from the vending machine. Amanda and her parents would later be sued for slander for accusing the police of brutality.

Amanda’s lawyers maintain that the police either destroyed the tape of this questioning or seriously erred in not making one. Mignini says that investigators don’t usually tape interrogations of witnesses unless they are sure they are going to get something. And, because Amanda had not been officially called in as a suspect, the room they took her to wasn’t equipped for such surveillance. But if the interrogation had been taped and played in court, it could have hurt both sides. If police were heard cuffing her, they could be charged with assault. But if the jury had heard Amanda describe being in the house and hearing terrible screams, it would have been even harder to believe her later story—that she had spent the entire evening at Raf’s.

AT 5:45 A.M. on November 6, Amanda signed a written statement, in Italian, and was arrested. Because she did not have a lawyer present, that statement was never admissible in the criminal case against her. But it was used in the civil case filed by Patrick Lumumba for defamation—a case that ran in tandem with the criminal trial. His lawyers translated it back into English:

Raffaele and I had smoked a hashish cigarette and so I felt confused, as I neither use drugs nor heavy drugs frequently. I met Patrick just afterwards, at the basket place of Piazza Grimana and I went home with him. I do not remember if Meredith was there or if she came after. I have trouble remembering those moments but Patrick made sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I can’t remember well if Meredith had been threatened first. I remember confusedly he killed her.

Patrick sat in jail for two weeks while the police