Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [42]
Amanda simply brushed off questions that she thought were below her. And when Comodi aggressively pressed her about the phone calls to her mother, she was belligerent.
“During the conversation you had with her in prison, even your mother was amazed that you called her at midday, which is three or four o’clock in the morning, to tell her that nothing happened,” said Comodi.
“I don’t know what had happened,” stammered Amanda. “I just called my mother to say we had been told to leave the house and that I had heard something.”
Comodi pressed on: “But at midday nothing had happened yet, the door had not been broken down yet.”
Amanda was cocky. “OK. I don’t remember that phone call. I remember that I called her to tell her what we had heard about a foot. Maybe I did call before, but I don’t remember.”
“You did do it,” whispered Comodi, smiling. A hush fell over the courtroom.
“Ok, fine, I did then,” said Amanda sarcastically. “But I don’t remember.”
Like so many moments during the trial, the tension in the courtroom began to rise. Amanda’s lawyers were fidgeting, and Mignini leaned back in his chair. At that point, Judge Massei interrupted the testimony to bring order back to his courtroom. He softly patted the air with outstretched hands to calm things down. “Scusata, scusata, per favore, per favore—excuse me, excuse me, please, please,” he said, smiling gently. Then he turned a serious face to Amanda.
“You don’t remember, but the prosecutor just pointed out to you a phone call that your mother received in the night. So, it must have been true. It happened. Did you usually call her at that time? Did it happen on other occasions? At midday in Italy? At that time in Seattle? People don’t usually call each other in the middle of the night.”
Amanda nodded. “Yes, yes, of course.”
“So either you had a particular motive, or it was a habit,” said the judge.
Amanda’s two days on the stand heralded the beginning of the defense’s case. Her appearance did little to dispel the image that had been put forward by the prosecution of a disturbed young woman who might be capable of heinous acts. The defense had a lot of work to do.
8
“She Is Not Amanda the Ripper, She Is the Amélie of Seattle”
WHEN THE PROSECUTION RESTED its case, the lawyers for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito had a choice to make. They could either work at cross-purposes, each group to save its own client, or the lawyers could stay united and risk a joint conviction. Thanks to his father’s money and powerful connections, Raffaele had the more experienced defense team. His lead lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, was easily the most powerful person in the courtroom, and Amanda’s attorneys never waivered from their strategy to ride her coattails.
Bongiorno is a small, birdlike woman who pecks at her sandwich and takes quick sips of her coffee during the lunch breaks. Her head darts back and forth as she speaks, and her eyes seem to look everywhere at once. But she is a powerhouse. A prominent member of parliament for the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s own party, she is a household name in Italy—a sort of Italian Johnnie Cochran often involved in the flashiest legal cases. She made her reputation defending former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on Mafia charges when she was in her twenties. The prospect of losing this high-profile case was not something she took lightly.
During the preliminary hearings, Bongiorno had clearly wanted to defend Raffaele without carrying Amanda as extra baggage. Amanda noted in her prison diary on November 23, 2007: “I’m waiting on Raffaele also apparantely,[sic] because he’s my alibi. His lawyers, however, are convinced that I’m evil and want to have him express this. However, Raffaele apparently