Page 79 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

CHAPTER SEVEN

A (Short) Explanation of the
Amanda Knox Case

1.

On the night of November 1, 2007, Meredith Kercher was murdered by Rudy Guede. After a
mountain of argumentation, speculation, and controversy, his guilt is a certainty. Guede was a shady
character who had been hanging around the house in the Italian city of Perugia, where Kercher, a
college student, was living during a year abroad. Guede had a criminal history. He admitted to being
in Kercher’s house the night of her murder—and could give only the most implausible reasons for
why. The crime scene was covered in his DNA. After her body was discovered, he immediately fled
Italy for Germany.
But Rudy Guede was not the exclusive focus of the police investigation—nor anything more than
an afterthought in the tsunami of media attention that followed the discovery of Kercher’s body. The
focus was instead on Kercher’s roommate. Her name was Amanda Knox. She came home one
morning and found blood in the bathroom. She and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, called the
police. The police came and found Kercher dead in her bedroom; within hours they added Knox and
Sollecito to their list of suspects. The crime, the police believed, was a drug- and alcohol-fueled sex
game gone awry, featuring Guede, Sollecito, and Knox. The three were arrested, charged, convicted,
and sent to prison—with every step of the way chronicled obsessively by the tabloid press.
“A murder always gets people going. Bit of intrigue. Bit of mystery. A whodunit,” British
journalist Nick Pisa says in the documentary Amanda Knox—one of a vast library of books,
academic essays, magazine articles, movies, and news shows spawned by the case. “And we have
here this beautiful, picturesque hilltop town in the middle of Italy. It was a particularly gruesome
murder. Throat slit, semi-naked, blood everywhere. I mean, what more do you want in a story?”
Other signature crime stories, such as the O. J. Simpson and JonBenét Ramsey cases, are just as
enthralling when you rediscover them five or ten years later. The Amanda Knox case is not. It is
completely inexplicable in hindsight. There was never any physical evidence linking either Knox or
her boyfriend to the crime. Nor was there ever a plausible explanation for why Knox—an immature,
sheltered, middle-class girl from Seattle—would be interested in engaging in murderous sex games
with a troubled drifter she barely knew. The police investigation against her was revealed as
shockingly inept. The analysis of the DNA evidence supposedly linking her and Sollecito to the
crime was completely botched. Her prosecutor was wildly irresponsible, obsessed with fantasies
about elaborate sex crimes. Yet it took a ruling by the Italian Supreme Court, eight years after the
crime, for Knox to be finally declared innocent. Even then, many otherwise intelligent, thoughtful
people disagreed. When Knox was freed from prison, a large angry crowd gathered in the Perugia
town square to protest her release. The Amanda Knox case makes no sense.
I could give you a point-by-point analysis of what was wrong with the investigation of Kercher’s
murder. It could easily be the length of this book. I could also refer you to some of the most
comprehensive scholarly analyses of the investigation’s legal shortcomings, such as Peter Gill’s
meticulous “Analysis and Implications of the Miscarriages of Justice of Amanda Knox and Raffaele
Sollecito” in the July 2016 issue of the criminology journal Forensic Science International, which
includes paragraphs like this: