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By Root 222 0

else explain the bloody footprint on the pillow consistent with Amanda’s shoe size? There are no similar prints elsewhere in the room, only smudges on the floor. Amanda and Raf then wipe most, but not all, of the surface prints around the room—including everything on the outside door handle, which raises the question of how anyone exited the room and locked it from the outside. A few of the missed fingerprints in Meredith’s room are later matched to Rudy, but there are only a few; the remaining fourteen unidentifiable fingerprints inside the room are probably his and Amanda’s and Raf’s.

By now it is nearly noon. Amanda, feeling shaky and paranoid, calls the person she trusts most in the world—her mom—at 4 A.M. Seattle time. She says that something strange has happened in the house. Then Raf goes to dump the empty liquor bottles and cleaning bottles and bloody clothes and rags in one of the silver dumpsters in town. When he returns, Amanda has just walked out into the yard to empty the mop bucket that they generally dumped on the driveway gravel rather than down the sink. That’s why she doesn’t have a jacket on and Raf does when the postal police arrive with Meredith’s phones.

The hazy, disjointed statements about that night Amanda later makes to police suggest a genuine blackout; a purposeful lie would certainly be more coherent. Despite immense pressure, neither Amanda nor Raf has ever broken and told the “real story,” because they truly don’t remember it. Rudy, on the other hand, remembers enough to tell the appeals judge he “sees red” every time he closes his eyes. But whether he was less stoned than Amanda and Raf, an instigator of Meredith’s torture, or someone who went along, only Rudy can say.

9

“Deep Down, Curt Knows. He Knows the Truth”

AMANDA KNOX’S FAMILY has been heroic in support of their daughter. If sheer effort and blind faith were sufficient to overturn a murder charge, she would surely be a free woman by now. Her parents have driven themselves into bankruptcy to fund her legal and public relations teams. Family members camped in Perugia in shifts, staying at an inexpensive agriturismo near the prison outside town, driving a cheap Fiat, and bringing in canned soups and packaged meals from the United States to eat cheaply when they weren’t being wined and dined by the American networks. But in their disregard for appearances and local mores, they sometimes hurt Amanda’s case while trying to help her.

Edda Mellas, an elementary-school math teacher, was the most popular of Amanda’s four parents and stepparents. Her husband, Chris Mellas, an Internet consultant for a Schnitzer development company in Seattle, was the least. He spent each hearing on his BlackBerry, reading news stories and firing off vile, unsigned hate mail to journalists and bloggers. Chris rarely looked at Amanda, even when she spoke—and, unlike the other family members, he didn’t go back to the dungeon to hug her at the end of each session.

“That patrigno,” Guiliano Mignini said to me during a courtroom break, nodding toward Chris. “Qualcosa non va—Something not right about him.” Mignini liked to talk about Amanda’s family. He had analyzed their phone intercepts and their body language in the courtroom. He thought Amanda’s father, Curt Knox, who was a vice president for finance at Macy’s until he was laid off in 2009, was “the smart one.”

“He is different from the rest,” Mignini often said. “Deep down, Curt knows. He knows the truth.”

A father of three daughters himself, Mignini understood why Curt wanted to believe in Amanda. But the lawyer also saw something in Curt that only those who spent a lot of time in the courtroom had noticed. Curt was angry, his face often red as he stifled his tears. But he knew how he was expected to act. In the waning days of the trial, Curt’s wife Cassandra slipped in her high-heeled boots and fell to the ground in front of Mignini. As Mignini helped her up, Curt stammered a grazie to the man who was trying to convict his daughter of murder.

Curt may have the brains, but Edda carried the family.