Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [52]
But after Curt lost his job at Macy’s, he started to show up more. Even though they were divorced, Edda and Curt did their best to present a unified front in supporting Amanda, but it was hard on their spouses to see the former couple together so often. Countless rumors circulated in Perugia about how Curt and Chris had to keep their wives apart when they were all in town for the verdict. When any of the four parents came to Perugia alone, they often brought a friend of Amanda’s. Chris Mellas came with Amanda’s Seattle boyfriend, DJ, and the two men spent most of their time chewing tobacco and drinking beer with Frank the blogger. Edda often brought Madison and Deanna. During the summer, she also brought one of Curt and Cassandra’s daughters, fourteen-year-old Ashley Knox. (Their youngest daughter, eleven-year-old Delaney, stayed in Seattle.) It was a hot summer, and the Seattle girls spent their time at the agriturismo swimming pool when they weren’t at hearings or visiting Amanda. They were courted by the local press, and at one point promised favorable coverage in an Italian weekly women’s magazine in exchange for access. Trusting the friendly gesture, the girls made a serious error in judgment: They posed around Perugia for a photo spread in Gente, the Italian version of People magazine. The most damning photo—of Deanna and Ashley in short-shorts, leaning on a metal fence outside “the house of horrors”—was seen as a slap in the face to the Kerchers, and they were lambasted in the British press for treating the scene of Meredith’s murder as a tourist attraction.
Edda also misread the intentions of a media suitor when the family granted blanket access to a documentary film crew from Britain’s Channel 4. The producer, Garfield Kennedy, and his crew became the family’s personal entourage, accompanying them to each prison meeting and press interview during the trial. At one point, the documentary was to be called Making a Killing—about how the press created the hype around Meredith’s murder—and Edda told me that Garfield was doing “a real nice documentary about us.” But when the one-hour show aired in January 2010, it confirmed what a strange young woman Amanda was. “She’s a very quirky person. She’s not normal,” her best friend Madison said on camera. “She is a little bit odd,” Amanda’s Seattle boyfriend, DJ, agreed. “She’s really not conventional at all,” he said. “She’s not tied down by social standards.” It also showed how media-hungry the family had become. In the opening segment, in the Mellas home in Seattle, the camera shows Edda directing Deanna to turn on the big-screen television. The mother’s eyes light up as Deanna shouts from the TV room, “Amanda’s on GMA!”
The Knoxes are honest people who did what any parents would. But they couldn’t help getting caught up in their sudden fame; by the end of the trial, they were skilled at attaching their own mics, counting for the technicians in New York, and then speaking in sound bites. Edda was a guaranteed on-camera crier—always good TV. Chris was not allowed to give interviews, and the producers knew that even if he volunteered, he was not to be put on camera—strict orders from PR adviser David Marriott in Seattle. Curt, on the other hand, gave seamless answers, and he, too, could tear up on demand. Marriott brokered the on-camera appearances and tried desperately to control the message by meting out access according to which networks painted Amanda in the best light. To a large extent, he was successful; Knox was always referred to in TV reports as “honor student Amanda Knox” (true), and correspondents frequently mentioned that there was “no evidence linking her to the crime scene” (only true if you limit the crime scene to Meredith’s room and demand a 100 percent