Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [24]
Meredith’s parents were not allowed to take their daughter home on this trip. Two further autopsies were ordered, and it would be six weeks before her body was released and laid to rest at the Croydon Parish Church in South London in a service attended by hundreds. A wreath of yellow chrysanthemums on her casket spelled out “Mez,” as she was known to her friends. Amanda’s family never offered any condolences to Meredith’s parents, who struggled to understand what had happened to their daughter. As headlines screamed the morbid details of her murder, Meredith’s parents became reclusive, refusing to talk to any press. Only Meredith’s sister Stephanie gave sporadic interviews, describing their faith in the Italian justice system. The Kerchers’ lawyers, Francesco Maresca and Serena Perna, drip-fed the worst details to the family in the most delicate way they could. The only thing Meredith’s family requested was that the nude photos of her battered body not be released to the press. It would take nearly two years to get any sort of answers about what had happened to Meredith that night, and even then, the day after the verdict, they still did not know exactly how or why she had been killed. Three people had been convicted, yet her murder remained a mystery.
5
“The Worst Part Was I Still Couldn’t Remember Exactly What I Had Been Doing”
FROM THE MOMENT they were arrested, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were a circulation bonanza for the Italian media and a front-page staple of the British tabloids. The Italian press funneled leaks from the lawyers and prosecutors to embellish the crime story and quickly dubbed Knox “Angel Face,” fostering a cult of morbid fascination with this most unlikely killer. The tabloids in the United Kingdom, eager to defend the honor of a British victim, mined the saucy details Amanda had inadvertently provided on the Internet, beginning with her MySpace screen name: “Foxy Knoxy.” Calls to teachers and friends in Seattle routinely produced descriptions of an all-American kid, studious, smart, and athletic. But the social networking sites told a somewhat different story. A YouTube video of Amanda drunk spawned the image of a party girl, although, in truth, nearly every coed in America has posted a similar clip. But other entries suggested a darker, more enigmatic personality. “Baby Brother,” a short story Amanda posted on MySpace, is not too unsettling overall, but it includes a rather cavalier reference to rape:
Kyle laughed deep in his throat. “Icky Vicky, huh? Jeez, Edgar. You had me going there.” He picked up his calculus book and flicked with his thumb to find his page, shook his head side to side with his smile still confident on his face. “A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don’t know what they want.” Kyle winked his eye. “You have to show it to them. Trust me. In any case,” He cocked his eyebrows up and one side of his mouth rose into a grin. “I think we both know hard A is hardly a drug.”
(“Hard A” is Seattle slang for hard alcohol and usually refers to a toxic cocktail of vodka, whiskey, and schnapps. Amanda and her friends often partied with pot and hard A rather than beer for maximum inebriation.)
Whether or not Amanda meant to condone sexual violence, prosecutors took this story as proof that she had at least fantasized about it. It was there in her mind. Add drugs and alcohol, they reasoned, and it wouldn’t take long for such hidden thoughts to lead to action. And other MySpace entries, including this one, titled “The Model,” posted a few weeks before the murder, seemed to compound this picture of a young woman with a vivid, vaguely lurid imagination:
Small, cold fingers curled around my open hand and I gasped,