Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [8]
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“Here Is the List of People I’ve Had Sex With”
TWO MONTHS BEFORE Meredith Kercher moved to Perugia, she made a sultry appearance in a music video, sauntering down a dark spiral stairway as Kristian Leontiou sings “Some Say.” The song is bubblegum pop, and the video, in which a number of pretty young women dance under falling petals, is amateurish and low-budget. But the lyrics are haunting, given that the video was released on October 24, 2007, one week before Meredith was murdered. “No more trouble in my soul, no more time to make me whole.”
Leontiou was not well known, and the video went largely unnoticed until two years later, when Meredith’s parents drew press attention to it during her murder trial. This was part of a calculated effort to remind the public, judge, and jury that their daughter was a vibrant, beautiful young woman, not a one-dimensional crime victim. Up to then, Meredith had been known primarily through two photos—one in a gray tank top with a smiling face, the other made up as a vampire for Halloween the night before her death, with fake blood on her chin. In the fourteen months between her death and the murder trial, public attention focused almost exclusively on the accused, Amanda Knox, the enigmatic All-American beauty who seemed such an unlikely killer.
The music video momentarily turned the spotlight back onto Meredith. (When the video became popular online, Amanda’s most ardent supporters tried to discredit it by claiming that the girl in the clip was not Meredith; Leontiou eventually confirmed that it was.) But the release of the video also highlighted a sensual side of her at odds with the prosecution’s theory of the case. She had, since her murder, been portrayed as a somewhat prissy British girl who was scandalized and intimidated by her roommate’s aggressive sexuality. In reality, though, Meredith was hardly a prude.
“She was no angel,” her family’s lawyer, Francesco Maresca, fifty, once told me at his office in Florence. “She was simply a young woman of her time. She had more than one boyfriend. She was normal.”
When she arrived in Perugia, Meredith behaved like most of the other students, reveling in the freedom of being so far from home. She hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend back at Leeds University, Patrick Cronin, then twenty-three, and in fact was wearing a pair of his blue jeans when she was killed. But they had decided to loosen their ties while they both studied abroad, and she quickly became interested in a young man who lived in the basement apartment on via della Pergola. Giacomo Silenzi, twenty-two, was a long-haired, earring-wearing student from the Marche region in eastern Italy. He played guitar in a band and was well known around town as a party guy. Meredith met him in early September, when she first moved into the house, and both she and Amanda had been to his apartment to smoke pot on more than one occasion. It was in the downstairs apartment that both girls met Rudy Guede, twenty-three, an Ivory Coast immigrant who had come to Italy as a child. Whenever the guys downstairs needed hashish or marijuana, they called Rudy, who often stayed on to enjoy the party. Rudy had once gotten so high that he fell asleep on the toilet. Giacomo’s roommate found him there with his pants around his ankles in the morning.
Giacomo and Meredith began sleeping together about ten days before her death, and Giacomo admitted that they had gone as far as experimenting with anal sex, which