Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [9]
Meredith and Amanda were not the polar opposites later described by prosecutors. They were both smart, studious young women whose good grades came easily. They both loved to read and engage in deep, searching conversations. They were often described in the same way by their friends back home, who spoke of their beauty, sense of humor, wit, and charm. Moreover, both Amanda and Meredith liked to smoke the occasional joint, get drunk, and flirt. And both women were fully aware of their sexual power.
Their family backgrounds were also similar in some ways. The two women were children of divorce. Meredith had grown up in the heart of multicultural England, in Coulsdon, South London, and remained in contact with both parents. She and her sister Stephanie and two brothers, Lyle and John, formed a close-knit family that was protective of their mother, Arline Kercher, who suffers from diabetes-related illnesses. When she came to Perugia, Meredith kept her British cell phone active so that her mother could always reach her in an emergency; Meredith borrowed a second phone, for local calls, from her new roommate Filomena. The English student had already bought her plane ticket to be home for her mother’s birthday on December 19 and stashed a gift of Perugina chocolates in her suitcase under the bed.
Amanda was also close to her mother and younger sister Deanna. The three even got matching tattoos of a yellow flower on the backs of their necks just before Amanda left for Europe. Amanda’s parents divorced when Amanda was two years old and Edda was pregnant with Deanna. Edda eventually married Chris Mellas, a tech consultant twelve years her junior, and Amanda grew up in the lower-middle-class White Center neighborhood in West Seattle, where the neighbors’ yards are littered with rusty cars. Her father, Curt, married his mistress, Cassandra, and lived in a nicer, middle-class district about half a mile away. Amanda was close to her two younger half-sisters, Ashley and Delaney, but somewhat jealous of them, too. She called them “the replacement children.”
Amanda’s relationship with her stepfather was strained, according to friends in Seattle, who say that Amanda and Chris competed for Edda’s love. Amanda was fourteen when her thirty-nine-year-old mother fell in love with Chris, then twenty-seven—that is, about equally close in age to mother and daughter. Eventually, friends say, Chris and Amanda became drinking partners, and they often argued. On August 21, 2007, at 2:38 A.M., Amanda sent a post from Perugia to Chris’s MySpace page, “hahaha alright, does that mean we’re getting along then? happy birthday loser.”
Chris’s own entry on MySpace read:
About my life: I am married, happily, and I have two kids by marriage, Amanda and Deanna. They are both shitheads and I love them anyways. Deanna is a senior now in HS and Amanda is on her second year in college. They are both cool. They, as we all do, have their fair share of quirks . . . but we would all be white bread boring as hell if we didn’t.
The crucial difference between the new roommates on via della Pergola was that Amanda was unusually bold about her sexuality, while Meredith retained a certain modesty. There was no clothes dryer in their apartment, only a rack in the hallway, where Meredith was reluctant to hang her panties, and she was offended when Amanda left a clear plastic cosmetics case containing condoms and a vibrator in their shared bathroom. Not long after they moved in together, the two young women went out to the Red Zone discotheque, where they met up by chance with Giacomo and his friend Daniel de Luna, a twenty-two-year-old student from Rome who often came to Perugia to visit the guys downstairs. They all danced and flirted. Giacomo kissed Meredith for