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tried hard to find evidence against him. The only thing they could come up with was the presence of his cell phone in the area around via della Pergola the night of the murder. But that ping was later determined to be a technical anomaly. As the police eliminated evidence against Patrick, however, they became ever-more sure that another person was involved in the crime. The fingerprints in Meredith’s room did not belong to Patrick, Amanda, or Raffaele. They ran a cross-check and quickly matched them to Rudy Guede, who, like all immigrants in Italy, had been digitally fingerprinted as part of his legal alien residency status. After a further DNA match was made to Rudy, he was found and arrested in Germany, and Patrick was released from prison. The day’s headline read simply: “One Black for Another.”

AMANDA’S MOTHER, Edda Mellas, arrived in town November 6, the day of her daughter’s arrest. Edda had already made plans to come, at Amanda’s request, to help her resettle after the murder. By the time she arrived, Amanda was in prison, and Edda found herself scrambling to put together a legal team and battling the reporters who had gathered outside Capanne prison. It would be her first taste of the media circus, and she proved to be a producer’s dream; she slammed the car door and wept in plain view of the camera. The court had already assigned Amanda a local attorney, Luciano Ghirga, a grandfatherly man who was well known and respected in Perugia. A former soccer star and communist politician, Ghirga is friends with all the judges and prosecutors in town, which is certainly an advantage, but he doesn’t speak English. So Edda also asked the U.S. Embassy for recommendations and selected Carlo Dalla Vedova from its alphabetical list. Dalla Vedova is a well-known civil lawyer in Rome, whose clients include some of the big multinational firms and U.N. agencies, but he had never tried a criminal case.

Before the attorneys had a chance to meet each other or their new client, Amanda asked her prison guards for paper and a pen. Then she wrote a five-page memorandum that would seal her fate by essentially confirming the statements in her late-night interrogation:

I also know that the fact that I can’t fully recall the events that I claim took place at Raffaele’s home during the time that Meredith was murdered is incriminating. And I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrick, but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me [than] what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele’s house.

I’m very confused at this time. My head is full of contrasting ideas and I know I can be frustrating to work with for this reason. But I also want to tell the truth as best I can. Everything I have said in regards to my involvement in Meredith’s death, even though it is contrasting, are the best truth that I have been able to think.

In this spontaneous statement, Amanda placed herself at the scene of the crime, and she was never able to convincingly remove herself in further testimony. Amanda had always been a prolific writer, and she continued this habit in prison, rambling on, incoherently at times, in what she called “My Prison Diary—Il mio diario del prigione.” The police took every page and used it against her, painting a picture of a disturbed, sometimes delusional young woman. Among other things, Amanda wrote:

I only know I’m safe when I’m with the police or alone, although this is only the kind of safety I feel for my body. Alone, and with the police, I fear my mind. Alone I imagine the horrors my friend must have gone through in her final moments. My imaginations become more and more precise the more the police ask me questions. For instance, I know my friend was raped before she was murdered. I can only imagine how she must have felt at these moments, scared, hurt, violated. But even more I have to imagine what it must have felt like when she felt the blood flowing out of her. What must have she thought? About her mom? Regret?

By November 7,