Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [38]
Amy Frost had her own complaints. “Amanda would play the guitar, but sometimes she would play the same chord over and over.”
All of the British friends concurred that Amanda seemed strangely unaffected by the murder in the days after Meredith’s body was discovered. “I found it difficult to be with her because she showed no emotion when everyone else was really upset. We were all crying, but I didn’t see Amanda cry,” said Robyn Butterworth. “She and Raffaele were kissing and joking together, there was laughter at some point. I remember Amanda stuck her tongue out at Raffaele. She put her feet up on his lap and they were kissing and cuddling and talking.”
In Italian court cases, defendants can make spontaneous declarations at any moment, although there is usually nothing spontaneous about it. Whenever Raf or Amanda were going to speak, their lawyers tipped the press to make sure everyone was present. You could see the defendants rehearsing beforehand, reading notes and mouthing the words. Amanda first spoke on February 13 after listening to Meredith’s British friends. Breaking a silence of fifteen months since her arrest, she tried to explain the vibrator and reclaim her image.
“It was a gift, a joke,” she said, laughing. Then she showed the judge how long it was—about four inches—by spreading her thumb and forefinger. She ended her three-minute interjection with “I am innocent. I have faith that the truth will come out.”
Raffaele also intervened on three occasions. But each time he opened his mouth, he sounded like a spoiled rich kid. He complained that the trial was a “terrible mistake” and that he “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He complained about being cold in his jail cell and about how, during the investigation, the police took his shoes and left him in stocking feet on marble floors in the November cold. Barely mentioned in the testimony about Amanda for months on end, he declared at one point that he was not her “dog on a leash.” Yet minutes later, he would be staring and smiling at her across the table. Raffaele was the odd character at the trial, at times looking more like a pimply teenager than a twenty-four-year-old university graduate accused of a sex crime. His moment of glory came when Prosecutor Manuela Comodi’s computer froze as she tried to show a video of the crime scene. Raf, who had just completed his computer technology degree in prison, got up and expertly fixed the problem, his every move broadcast on the giant monitor in the courtroom.
THE PROSECUTION’S strongest forensic witness was Patrizia Stefanoni, the pretty, dark-haired specialist from Rome who collected most of the key pieces of evidence from the crime scene and then personally tested them in her lab. She was on the stand for two days and proved unflappable despite the fact that much of what she was presenting was open to challenge.
The most solid evidence came first. Five spots of mixed DNA and blood were found around the house.
Because the girls lived together, it was not so surprising to find their DNA mixed. But in the bathroom the girls shared, there was a spot of Amanda’s blood mixed with Meredith’s blood on the tap, on the edge of the sink and again on the side of a cotton-swab box and the drain of the bidet. The most damning spot was in Filomena Romanelli’s room, where there had been an attempt to suggest a break-in. There, investigators again found a spot of Meredith’s blood mixed with Amanda’s DNA. As Stefanoni noted, the spots on the sink and in Filomena’s room were found only after the application of Luminol, which can reveal stains that have been wiped clean.
“Isn’t it logical that two people who share a house would have mixed DNA in the house?” asked Amanda’s lead lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, on cross-examination.
“Not in the context of a homicide,” replied Stefanoni, later adding, “although we may never know exactly what happened that night, the