Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [49]
Although they can’t remember exactly what happened the night before, obviously a dead body means trouble. If the police suspect Raf and Amanda had anything to do with it, they will surely be drug-tested, which risks not only charges for serious drugs but also the wrath of Dr. Sollecito. Not thinking clearly, they convince themselves that they can clean up the house, stage a break-in, retreat to Raf’s apartment, and claim total ignorance—which, given their blackouts, isn’t entirely a lie. At some point, Raffaele goes to shower, leaving his bloody bare footprint on the bathmat and another in the hallway. Amanda doesn’t shower at all. In the photos from that morning, her makeup is smudged, and the cops whisper about her body odor. She changes clothes and puts her bloody socks and other clothing in a plastic shopping bag to throw away. Amanda’s bare footprints, most likely left in blood, were later turned up in the hallway with Luminol. Around 7:30 A.M., the couple leaves the apartment to buy cleaning supplies. Raffaele wants to change his clothes, so he goes home while Amanda goes to the store. Marco Quintavalle, the owner of the Conad store near Raf’s house, testified that Amanda was waiting at his store when he opened at 7:45.
RETURNING TO Amanda’s apartment, Amanda and Raf start cleaning up. To simulate a break-in, Raf pulls the clothing out of Filomena’s drawers and then opens the casement window so he can throw a rock through it from inside the room. He forgets to open the shutters, which first tips off the officers to the idea of a staged break-in. Amanda, who had been cleaning the bathroom, comes into Filomena’s room at some point, leaving the incriminating drop of mixed DNA and blood on the floor. Raffaele notices it and wipes it up, but Luminol will bring it back to light. They start the washing machine, adding some of Amanda’s clothes to the pile in Meredith’s laundry basket—although Amanda would later testify that she never used the house washing machine. The machine is still warm when the police arrive after noon. Amanda and Raf do a pretty good job of wiping the house clean—police note an unusual absence of fingerprints—but in their haste, they neglect several drops of blood in the bathroom the girls shared.
When they go back to Meredith’s room, however, they are overwhelmed. They know better than to leave tracks there, so they put on shoes and stand on towels to scoot into the room, which explains the smudges on the floor. Amanda, in her testimony, actually described this ruse in response to a prosecutor’s question about why there were no bare footprints in her own bedroom even though she said she was in there after her shower. She explained that she had not wanted to get the floor wet, so she used her towel as a sort of magic carpet. The defense later maintained that the few bare footprints and sneaker prints in Meredith’s room all belonged to Rudy, without adequately explaining why he would have one shoe on and one shoe off. It makes more sense to think that Rudy had his shoes on and Raf, who was more comfortable in the house, had his off.
This may be when Amanda decides she can’t look at Meredith’s open eyes any longer. Meredith’s corpse is between Amanda and the bed. She is uneasy as she reaches over Meredith and pulls the duvet off the bed to cover her; in doing so, Amanda loses her balance and steps off the towel, putting an unstable foot on the pillow underneath Meredith’s body—how