Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [45]
The defense did a better job trying to prove that the break-in in Filomena Romanelli’s room was not staged but the work of an ill-intentioned intruder. The lawyers explained that broken glass might have ended up on top of the scattered clothes because Filomena was allowed to enter the room to check for missing items and may have disturbed things. Still, since Rudy was no stranger to the house, he would have surely known that there was a much easier way into the upper apartment via a back balcony; he didn’t have to throw a rock and scale a thirteen-foot wall.
THE PROSECUTION’S CASE might have been defeated had the defense lawyers been more unified. After all, there was no solid confession, no real murder weapon, no convincing motive, and not much evidence. But the lawyers rarely seemed to be on the same page. Bongiorno could not carry the team alone, although she was able to knock down the crucial evidence of the knife through her expert cross-examination. In the last months of the trial, however, Bongiorno rarely even showed up, and when she did, she rarely stayed for the entire hearing. Her state-funded driver in his black Mercedes was always waiting outside the courthouse to whisk her back to the parliament hall in Rome. Meanwhile, Luca Maori, Raffaele’s other lawyer, was on trial himself for involuntary manslaughter because he accidentally killed a motorcyclist in a car crash.
Overall, the defense was simply too disjointed. Forensic expert Vincenzo Pascali quit in May, leaving a big hole in the Sollecito team—and a 50,000-euro bill for services rendered. He had been hired to discredit the bra-clasp evidence. But when he started hinting that in his own findings, the sample also contained Knox’s DNA, Bongiorno objected. Introducing Amanda’s DNA on the specimen would only make things worse, tying both defendants to the crime scene. Instead, she wanted Pascali to focus on contamination, even though it was unlikely that the clasp could have been contaminated with Raffaele’s DNA just because it wasn’t collected in a timely manner. Unwilling to testify according to the lawyers’ script, Pascali walked off the case. He was replaced by Francesco Introna, a close friend of Raffaele’s father and a brilliant Pugliese scholar who spoke English to the foreign press. During his testimony, Introna dramatically plunged a knife into the neck of a mannequin to prove his point to the jury. He testified that Meredith was killed by just one person, Rudy Guede, who grabbed her from behind and stabbed her in the neck. A month later, Amanda’s own forensic expert, Carlo Torre, told the court that, yes, Meredith had been killed by one person, Rudy Guede, but that she had been stabbed from the front. If the defense experts could not even agree on the details of the murder, what hope was there for the jury to take their side?
Torre is a well-known expert who has authored a string of criminal science textbooks and is a favorite on the international forensic science lecture circuit. With his Albert Einstein hair and frumpy jacket, he was expected to be the highlight of Amanda’s defense when he took the stand midway through the trial. But his testimony lacked impact, perhaps because he took such a detached, clinical approach to the evidence, addressing the jurors as if they were pupils who would be tested later.
“You see the wounds on the subject’s neck,” he said using a red laser pointer on giant autopsy photos of Meredith. “The larger wound was made by the sawing motion of a smaller knife, not with Exhibit 36,” he explained, referring to the knife with Amanda’s DNA on the handle. He used a Styrofoam mannequin’s head and a knife the same size as Exhibit 36 to demonstrate that point.
“It would have come through the other side,” he said, coldly stabbing the mannequin so that the knife blade exited on the far side of her neck. “There is no mystery here. It is not