Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [40]
Comodi loved props. Once, in order to prove a point about footprints, she removed her own shoe and walked around in her stocking feet to show the jury how the sole of one shoe could not be easily confused with the sole of another. During her closing arguments, she pulled a bra out of her handbag and wrapped it around her microphone stand, using a letter opener to simulate how she believed Raffaele removed the bra from Meredith’s body.
She also had a playful sense of humor. She asked Michele Battistelli, one of the first police officers on the scene, about his shoe size to refute defense claims that the size 11 prints at the villa could have been made by the investigators. A big man, he answered, “Size 13,” at which Comodi giggled and blurted out, “Complimenti!” (alluding to the old saw that shoe size correlates with penis size).
Many of the prosecution’s witnesses were called simply to refute charges of sloppy police procedures. Alberto Intini, head of the Rome forensic unit that collected the evidence, was challenged by Dalla Vedova about the presence of Raffaele’s DNA on Meredith’s bra clasp, collected weeks after the crime. Finally, frustrated by his unit’s being portrayed as keystone cops, Intini declared, “DNA doesn’t fly!”
THE MOST HEARTBREAKING WITNESS was Meredith’s sixty-three-year-old mother, Arline Kercher, who looked out at the audience to describe her daughter’s death. “It’s not just the death, but the nature of it, the violence,” she said. “It’s such a shock to send your child to school and for them to not come back. We will never, never get over it.” Meredith’s family filed a civil suit against whoever was found guilty of killing their daughter, which accomplished two things: It prevented any guilty parties from profiting from the crime through books or movies, and—because the civil suit was heard in tandem with the criminal charges—it allowed them to have their own lawyers in the courtroom, who could present witnesses and cross-examine anyone who took the stand. The Kercher’s lead lawyer was Francesco Maresca, a fit, sexy, suave Neapolitan with long brown, wavy hair and blue eyes. His suspenders, his stylish fitted suits, and the tiny handcuff key chain hanging out of his back pocket were the focus of much female attention in the press corps. His father was a famous police official in Florence, involved in many high-level investigations, including the Monster of Florence, and Maresca spent a lot of his childhood under protective police escort. Sitting at the glass table in his Florentine office one evening, he told me that he does not generally take on civil cases. He mostly represents Mafia clients and hard-core criminals. “I’m used to having clients put their pistol on the table before they sit down,” he said.
Part of Maresca’s brief was to prevent the media from molesting the memory of Meredith. At his request, images of her body were only shown in closed-doors sessions with reporters relegated to the upstairs pressroom, where the tiny television monitor was fixed on the lawyers and jury. Several of the jury members looked away at the most gruesome parts. Amanda would not look at all; she either doodled on her notebook or turned her chair away from the monitor. Raffaele stared at the screen, at times seeming mesmerized by the images in front of him.
It is not automatic in Italy that the civil lawyers for the victim agree with the prosecution’s theories, but in this case they did, and whenever Mignini’s team faltered, Kercher’s lawyer Maresca picked up the slack. To bolster the defense’s case, for example, Dalla Vedova called a witness to knock down the idea that the signs of a break-in had been staged. Retired police marshal Francesco Pasquali produced a PowerPoint presentation trying to prove how it was possible for someone of Rudy Guede’s height, weight, and athletic prowess to toss a nine-pound rock at