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“But there is,” I told her, explaining the five spots and where they were found.

“Carlo says that’s wrong, and that they won’t be accepted by the court,” she said, clinging to every false hope he had given her.

Dalla Vedova was easily the most attractive lawyer in court—a tall, muscular tennis player with white spiked hair and playful eyes. But he was the butt of many jokes in the press room. His unorthodox tactics and bizarre questions during cross-examination often generated howls of laughter after hours, and even Ghirga rolled his eyes when asked about the star attorney from Rome. Dalla Vedova missed the final day of closing arguments for Amanda and moved on to a big-money deal with the Saudis while the jury was still out. He came back just in time for the verdict.

The unsung hero of Amanda’s defense team was Maria del Grosso, a striking young lawyer who took over from Dalla Vedova during the final rebuttal arguments. She gave the most heartfelt defense of the entire trial, and the jury clung to every word. The only woman on Amanda’s defense team, she was authoritative, especially when she talked about the theory that the murder resulted from a sex game gone wrong. “For sexual violence you need strong proof,” she declared. “The prosecution has not provided that to you, and for that reason you cannot convict her.”

Del Grosso was right. The evidence of rape was inconclusive—Rudy’s DNA was present, but no semen or tears or other signs of forced penetration were found. There was no proof beyond Amanda’s well-documented promiscuity that she was a sexual deviant. Amanda’s lawyers should have done more to deflate the hype around her louche habits. They sent out a dozen subpoenas for local character witnesses, but only her Greek friend Spyros Gatsios showed up. So Amanda’s character witnesses were all from Seattle, and translation inevitably lessens the emotional impact of heartfelt testimony. When her best friend, Madison Paxton, spoke about how honest and innocent Amanda really was, it came across as an emotionless staccato in Italian. Paxton’s feelings were, literally, lost in translation.

The other way to address the character issue was to control how Amanda behaved in court. Alessandra Batassa, a criminal lawyer in Rome, once told me: “The jury pays attention to much more than testimony. The lawyers should take control of the client’s complete image—including who attends court with her—not just the client’s personal behavior.” Batassa was shocked to see Amanda come to court in tight jeans and provocative T-shirts; the young woman should have worn conservative clothing, even a dark suit. But Amanda’s lawyers left the defense of her character largely to her family, who made their case to American news networks—which, of course, the jury could not see. The jurors saw only Amanda’s daily demeanor, which was ill advised.

Amanda herself was probably too honest, confessing in her diaries, which were admissible in court, that she loved sex and enjoyed drugs. During the hearings, she giggled at certain questions. She made a mockery of the judge’s court. Smiling to the cameras, blushing, and passing chocolates to Raffaele did little to help her. Bongiorno seemed reluctant to defend Amanda’s character until the end of the trial, when the attorney dismissed the theory that the young lovers were looking for new sexual experiences; she called them “love birds in the infancy of their relationship, not some old tired couple looking for new thrills.”

The defense’s other biggest mistake, according to interviews with jurors after the trial, was doing nothing to refute the mixed-blood evidence beyond noting that it is common to find mingled DNA when two people live in the same house. The jurors needed more than that. “To have mixed blood, you have to both be bleeding,” one of them remarked to me after the verdict. “It was obvious that Meredith was bleeding, but why was Amanda bleeding?” Amanda’s lawyers chose not to supply an explanation. Privately, her mother told me she was menstruating.