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years, however, for the case to finally be resolved at the highest level. Most legal observers in Italy predict that an acquittal at the high court level would be the best outcome: The presumed killers would have paid a price—in jail time and legal expenses—and the police and prosecutors would pay for their various sloppy mistakes. But the litmus test, of course, is what happens to Rudy. His murder conviction will be the first of the three to be heard by the high court. If he is acquitted, it is likely that Amanda and Raffaele also will go home, too. If he is not, then chances are that his partners in crime will stay in jail as well.

A month after the verdict, Amanda’s supporters declared that her defense team had been bolstered with Philadelphia lawyer Theodore Simon, a popular legal analyst for U.S. TV networks who specializes in Americans caught in foreign legal systems. He represented high school student Michael Fay, who was sentenced to prison and public lashings in Singapore for vandalism. Simon got the nine lashings reduced to four and won Fay a reprieve from hard prison time. He also represented Ira Einhorn—the so-called Unicorn Killer—a Philadelphia New Age guru who killed his young girlfriend and stored her in a trunk in his apartment. While Einhorn was on the lam in Europe for many years, he was convicted, in absentia, of the murder. When he was finally apprehended in France in 1997, Simon managed to block his extradition by arguing that a conviction in absentia violated Einhorn’s human rights. But in 2001, Einhorn was finally extradited to the United States and is currently serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania.

Curiously, though, Simon’s role in the Knox case appears to be limited to public relations in America, not legal strategy in Italy. Both of Amanda’s Italian lawyers deny that he has any role in the appeal process. “Simon non c’entro—Simon doesn’t enter into this,” Luciano Ghirga told me emphatically, making it clear that neither he nor Carlo Dalla Vedova were ready to take a backseat to an American interloper. No one will confirm whether Simon is working pro bono, but sources close to the family say he volunteered to help them because he felt Amanda’s lawyers weren’t up to the job. David Marriott says that he has no idea whether Simon is being paid, although Marriott consults with him regularly about PR matters. Up to now, however, the two have had very different approaches to the case. Marriott has been fiercely critical of the Italian justice system and the individuals prosecuting the case. Simon, in his role as an independent TV commentator, told Dateline last year, “Speaking from experience, you have to be very careful when you try to be persuasive but not insulting, because you can’t expect judges or jurists to receive your arguments or your evidence favorably when you’ve said terrible things about them.” Perhaps the Knox family is finally ready to hear that advice.

THROUGHOUT THIS CASE, the mantra for pro-Amanda supporters has been that this was the “railroad job from Hell.” When you consider the botched knife evidence, the shoddy police work, and the prosecutor’s questionable past, it is easy to entertain the notion that Amanda Knox did not get a fair trial. But that doesn’t mean she’s innocent. Had the police done their jobs impeccably, and had all the extenuating circumstances fallen into place, Amanda Knox would probably still have been convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder. But nothing in this case ever made sense, and no one, it seems, played by the rules. Amanda Knox will always be remembered as someone who hung in the balance between sinner and saint, good and evil. And Meredith’s murder will always be a mystery that was blurred by the headlines and lost in translation.

Acknowledgments

MEREDITH KERCHER’S MURDER was a heinous crime that robbed a young woman of her future and a unique family of their daughter. Her murder trial was a true media circus, but for those of us reporting from the center ring, it was also a profound experience. Though it is no consolation to her