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By Root 232 0

ripping my hand away. Aislin, narrowed hazel eyes and immobile pink lips, flipped on the light of the stairway and stared at me. She was quiet, and the hand that had reached for mine hung limp in the space between us like the wrist was broken. I grabbed her hand back and held it to my lips, kissing the little fingers. It drew her closer to me and she pulled weakly for her hand back. “What are you doing?” I didn’t let her go, but grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the front window. “Did you lock the back door when you came home from school?” I searched the dark space in front of our lot. “You’re late, again.” Her voice was earthy and slightly bitter, like red wine.

A picture was forming of Amanda as a vixen with dark impulses, and her family struggled to control the firestorm. They insisted that “Foxy Knoxy” was a nickname Amanda earned for her junior soccer moves, not her sexual magnetism. Time and again, they denied that she ever used the moniker as an adult, despite the fact that it was her MySpace ID. (Among the thirty-nine social networking friends on her stepfather Chris Mellas’s MySpace page was “Foxy Knoxy,” which linked to Amanda’s page.) The image wars proceeded with thrusts and parries: On morning TV shows, Edda would weep and show pictures of Amanda kicking a soccer ball; in the afternoon, the British tabloids would trumpet headlines about her jailhouse lesbian encounters (drawing inferences from entries in her prison diaries and letters to friends, where Amanda worried about becoming gay). Meanwhile, all sorts of people tried to make a buck off the murder. Amanda’s classmates in both Perugia and Seattle asked for cash or plane tickets in exchange for interviews. One of her teachers in Italy offered a TV producer a handwritten letter of Amanda’s—for 10,000 euros. Tidbits from the legal dossier were shopped around. Coverage of the crime began to diverge on the two sides of the Atlantic. From the vantage point of Perugia, it seemed as though the Knox family’s American supporters were simply choosing to ignore the facts that were coming to light in Italy.

Raffaele had also supplied some troubling information on his social networking sites. He was a rich kid with ready cash to fund a drug habit, and in one Web entry, he bragged about spending “80 percent of his waking hours high.” The background image on his Web pages was a marijuana leaf print, and in almost every picture, he appeared bleary-eyed and tousled. (A police wiretap later heard his father say, “Raffaele, I’ve told you, basta spinelli!—Enough with the joints!” The most damaging picture he posted would be forever etched in the minds of anyone following this case: Wrapped in surgical bandages, Raffaele brandishes a meat cleaver and a jug of alcool, a pink, alcohol-based cleaning liquid.

These were the scraps of information that stoked a media frenzy in Italy. Even before Amanda and Raffaele were officially charged with murder, they were on the front page of every newspaper in the country, usually under headlines such as “Amanda, Sangue e Sorrisi—Amanda, blood and smiles” and “Uomini e Segreti, Amanda Racconta—Men and secrets, Amanda tells all.” As Amanda’s and Raffaele’s popularity grew, so did the hunger for information about them. Amanda’s face graced the cover of Italy’s most popular grocery aisle glossies, and the murder was the subject of four quick books by Italian journalists. One of the books even came with an animation of the alleged crime on DVD.

THE AMERICAN PRESS HUNG BACK, at first objective and somewhat disbelieving that such a wholesome-seeming girl could have any connection to such a sordid foreign crime, and then, as the family stepped up its defense, increasingly divided between two camps that would become simply the innocentisti—those who believed she was blameless—and the colpevolisti—those who did not. In Perugia, these labels governed access. The prosecutors and defense lawyers all thought they knew exactly where each journalist stood, and those of us who were deemed American colpevolisti were few and far between. Of the