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a park bench next to the basketball courts, was wheeled into the courtroom wearing his usual stocking cap and blanket for a coat, which gave the defense ample ammunition to brand him unreliable, in light of his peculiarities. Yet his testimony was surprisingly credible. Curatolo is obviously educated; he was the most politically correct witness at the Knox trial, referring to Rudy as a “man of North African descent” instead of il nero—the black guy. He knew Rudy from watching him play basketball and complimented his athletic skill. Curatolo was lucid in his descriptions of the area near the crime scene and convincing when he placed Amanda and Raffaele there, testifying that the two stood at the gate and watched the house around 9:30 P.M. and again at around 10:30 P.M. on November 1.

AS GUEDE’S APPEALS JURY was deliberating on December 22, Valter Biscotti made his usual passeggiata, looking for reporters, but many of the foreign press had left town after the Knox verdict. He eventually ducked into the Sandri sandwich shop and saw me. He ordered his lunch and brought it to my table to predict exactly what was going to happen next and explain how he planned to defend Rudy in the third and final stage of his appeal, to the high court.

“This time, they will not absolve him,” he said between bites of polenta. “Rudy has promised to cooperate even more with the investigators, so they will cut his sentence first down to twenty-four years and then by one-third.” (A fast-track defendant automatically gets a one-third sentence reduction on appeal.)

“So he’s going to admit they all killed her together?” I asked.

“Rudy didn’t kill her, as I’ve told you many times,” he said. “Rudy is going to tell them what Amanda said to them both that night.”

“She told them to kill Meredith?”

“Directed Raffaele,” he said. “She orchestrated it all.”

“And he did whatever she said in exchange for what?”

“Sex,” he said. “Promises and enticements. Raffaele is weak.”

“And Rudy?”

“Rudy was in the bathroom; he came out and it was all over,” he said, repeating Rudy’s usual line. “Rudy has never changed his story.”

Biscotti paid for my lunch, and then, a couple hours later, his prediction came true. Rudy’s sentence was cut to sixteen years. At first, the innocentisti thought this might be good news; if Rudy’s sentence was knocked down that much, perhaps Amanda and Raffaele would be set free on appeal. But it soon emerged that the appeals judge agreed that Rudy killed Meredith with Amanda and Raffaele—not alone. Not only had one more judge endorsed their guilty verdicts, but he may have reduced Rudy’s sentence in return for helping the prosecution strengthen its case against the other two on appeal. But Rudy’s lighter sentence is also more in line with those routinely meted out in Italy for manslaughter, not premeditated murder. So it may also reflect that even in the far more exhaustive trial of Knox and Sollecito, prosecutors never conclusively established a motive for the killing of Meredith Kercher. Very early in the case, investigators suggested that the murder was the product of a Satanic ritual, because of the Halloween paraphernalia found in the villa and at Raffaele’s apartment. Then they theorized that a drug-fueled sex game had gone terribly wrong before settling on the hypothesis that Amanda had encouraged the assault on Meredith to punish her prudish disapproval of Amanda’s lifestyle. In Mignini’s eyes, Amanda’s narcissistic personality fueled a growing anger, and finally her jealousy of Meredith was too much to bear. She killed Meredith in an unstoppable rage.

But the prosecutors could never make any of these scenarios entirely convincing, although they would spend eleven months trying.

7

“DNA Doesn’t Fly”

“MEREDITH WAS MY FRIEND. I did not hate her,” Amanda Knox tells the jury at her trial, after the prosecution finishes two days of fiery closing arguments, describing Knox as an angry young woman who was motivated by hate and fueled by drugs and who killed in a sexual frenzy. “To say that I wanted to take revenge against