Amanda Knox Continues to be Bogged Down By Floating Evidence

by Pitchforks

Prosecutor Alessandro Crini’s assertion, in the ongoing appeal against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s 2011 acquittal for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, that “bad feelings between Kercher and Knox over issues of cleanliness were what triggered the savage and fatal attack”- brought to a head by Rudy Guede’s highly inflammatory dookie dump – is just yet another example of the “make up your bloody mind” characteristics of this whole ridiculous shenanigans. The prosecution has nothing to go on other than highly manipulable and some purely invented innocuous circumstantial evidence, so they come up with these silly stories and multiple, changing theories, turning mundane niggles that may or may not have existed, and which the other flat-mates have not even supported as significant, into full-blown lethal Bravo dramas. In past hearings the judge asserted that there was in fact no household hostility, but that the crime occurred because the three casually found themselves together and because they were “high on drugs”, and that things got out of hand when Guede initiated a sexual assault on Meredith after being aroused because he saw Knox and Sollecito snogging. Seriously? This is like a bunch of script-writers haggling over the most “awesome” plot for a really dark, really bad version of American Pie. And that is exactly what it is, a script, a fiction cobbled together with various alternative plot-lines. Maybe one day we will get the director’s cut – uncut…

As I said. Make up your bloody minds!

The poop in the toilet, which turned out to be Rudy Guede’s, was in the Italian girls’ bathroom that Knox only popped into to get something. Would one necessarily linger to flush in someone else’s bathroom, or just think “Gross!”, grab what you need and retreat with crinkled nose?? This was not the same bathroom Knox shared with Meredith and in which she took her shower on the morning of November 2nd and saw some blood on the bathmat, blood that could quite easily have been Meredith’s inadvertently dripped menstrual blood. People get nose-bleeds. Finding blood in the bathroom does not immediately send girls calling the police. College girls tend to be gross and their bathrooms in particular. I speak from what I have observed directly in various dorms.

A neighbour across the street, Signora Capezzali, testified that she had gone to sleep at about 9.30pm and had reawoken after two or more hours to go to the toilet – toilet habits appear to be essential in the rolling out of the evidence in this case. Furthermore she said she heard one long scream, not a series of screams or shouts, and she could not be sure from which direction it came. Given the evidence that there was a prolonged attack with Meredith putting up a fight against her attacker, how credible is it that she emitted only one extended scream? This is just as silly as inferring from Knox having “confessed” to hearing Meredith scream as her having been there to know, as if it were extremely odd that someone should scream while they are being murdered. One single scream is more likely to be the reaction of someone being suddenly and momentarily frightened, not someone who is trying over the course of several minutes to fight off an attack and being stabbed in the hands and arms before succumbing to lethal injury.

Nara Capezzali’s testimony is rambling and full of added purple prose. She goes on about the nightly comings and goings of people leaving their cars in the car park below her flat, and how she is often awoken by “noises” and screams, some of “joy” which, when clumsily prompted by Mignini, she attributes to drug users. After she heard the scream that made her “skin crawl”, she says she felt like she was in a “house of horrors”, with the wind blustering outside, and she felt so bad that she………made herself some chamomile tea. Apparently, after hearing a woman’s blood-curdling singular death cry, brewing her particular night-cap was more important than calling the police. Emily Brontë would have been impressed by Signora Capezzali’s stoic Victorian constraint and would no doubt have set her novel in the hills of Umbria instead of the bleak Yorkshire moors had she heard of Signora Capezzali’s eerie ordeal. Signora Capezzali tells how she sleeps in the same bed with her daughter, who sleeps like a log, but who she apparently didn’t feel justified in waking up to ask for advice and reassurance after her dreadful experience.

During her testimony Capezzali is consistently interrupted and redirected by Mignini who appears irritated when she doesn’t come up clearly with the goods and wary that she will say the “wrong” thing.

Who has their windows open on a cold November night? Capezzali affirms that she didn’t open any windows. She could not have heard footsteps coming from the driveway across the street as she claimed, especially with that wind a–howling……

The elderly Capezzali claims to have been told early the next morning of the murder by some kids running by, and that when she went out to get her bread at about 11am there were already posters about it at the news-stand. Meredith’s body was not discovered till after 1pm. Clearly Signora Capezzali is making a mish-mash of undefined days when she heard various things, some of which she is in the habit of hearing anyway every night, and her reference to drogati, the “drugged”, which Mignini seemed particularly keen for her to remember to mention, appears to be just one more of those critical elements that the prosecution needed to spice up their story. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make the intended depraved connections of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito frequenting the conveniently close parking lot where drug users are wont to make extraneous noises, and there being some association between such activities and the happenings on the night of November 1^st.

Interestingly, I was unable to find an English transcript of Capezzali’s testimony, so gleaned all the above information from the original Italian transcript. The whole English-speaking world has been deprived of the farcical course of her fragmented and unsure testimony with Mignini’s constant and suspect interruptions and suggestive promptings. It is the testimony of an anxious, confused, recently bereaved obese (by her self-report) widow who has lost track of on which days what happened, who reports that her night-time rest is constantly disturbed by swollen legs, the effects of medicine on her bowels and noisy junkies slamming car doors and yelling ecstatically beneath her windows — closed double-paned windows. Out of the context in which the testimony was taken, a terrible murder, it is hilarious. Indeed, one might even say it is a mockery.

Capezzali is just another of the prosecution’s grab-anyone-you-can-to-say-anything coterie of eccentric witnesses, like Antonio Curatolo, the down-and-out who supposedly saw Knox and Sollecito after the murder. He has been used to “testify” about just happening to be in the right place at the right time in another of Mignini’s trials. Convenient that, isn’t it, to have a wandering vagrant of no fixed address who shows up in places just when you need him, and might be in need of a bit of pocket money…..?? This vagrant seems to have a lot of familiar acquaintanceship with people who just happen to be indicted by Signor Mignini.

Right at the outset of Curatolo’s testimony, after answering general questions about his lifestyle, he suddenly precedes his answer to the first question about what he “saw” on the night of November 1st with a formal-sounding statement about his motivation for testifying:

“Before anything, I would like to make clear that that to which I testify is conscientious, in other words that it comes from me. I do not like to take advantage of/profit from others’ lives nor do them harm. In any case, that night I was on a bench on Piazza Grimana reading a copy of L’Espresso magazine.”

“At what time?”

“At about nine-thirty, or ten.”

“And then?”

“I was on the bench reading some articles that interested me in L’Espresso, every so often I would smoke a cigarette and look up from my reading to look at the people in Piazza Grimana or in the immediate vicinity of it, above….”

Curatolo then goes on to describe how he saw Knox and Sollecito arguing on the basketball court around midnight. He claims to know them by sight.

One wonders why Signor Curatolo feels the need to make such an introductory statement, and whether it may have been a spontaneous regurgitation of what had been drilled in him by someone else before he appeared in court. Indeed, as has already been mentioned, Signor’s “conscientiousness” extends to his being available on a repeated basis to do his noble duty. His mention of L’Espresso, which he seems keen to reiterate, indicates that he wants it to be known he is a literate and intelligent man. L’Espresso is a glossy but serious news magazine with no particular political allegiance. This detail has no significance to the evidence, except in its rather insistent tone of portraying Curatolo as a man who is not stupid. I wonder if he really was reading L’Espresso or if this was a little prop inserted at the suggestion of someone else. This is not to suggest that a vagrant cannot possibly be educated, but that he seemed to be at pains, for some reason, to make sure everyone knew the name of the magazine he was reading, just as he was at pains to insist that he had no ulterior motive for giving his testimony. Interesting.

Quintavalle, the storekeeper claiming Knox bought cleaning products from him the morning after the murder may have known Knox by sight as a regular customer of everything from snacks to toilet cleaners – those turds, they keep popping up – or she may have popped in there one time and not been near the cleaning section. Given that Sollecito had a broken sink that night she could have gone in to buy bleach – if we can even believe this man’s precise memory without cash-till printouts to support it (no, there are none – interesting), buying cleaning products is not a sign of having committed a murder. Why are there no till receipts showing time and the codes or exact prices for the ostensibly bought items on Signor Quintavalle’s roll? This would be very easy to produce – unless Mr. Quintavalle didn’t happen to pass the cash through the register.

By law a person has to retain a receipt for a certain distance after leaving a store to prove the payment has been registered, so assuming Signor Quintavalle doesn’t want la Guardia di Finanza dropping in after breakfast there should be a record on his roll….. As a customer you are just as liable as an under-the-table shoving store-keeper for prosecution if you have been seen to purchase items not registered and been complicit in coming away without a receipt. People sometimes get stopped after leaving a bar after grabbing their routine coffee and pastry before work. La Guardia di Finanza officers only have to join the standing crowds in popular bars to catch people out. Interesting that the issue of the receipt or till roll copy has not come up. We saw in the Jodi Arias case how straightforward it is to prove or disprove that someone bought or did not buy specific items at a specific time on a certain date.

Even if after “excessive washing” - another piece of creative surmising brought up by the prosecution – Knox’s DNA were on a knife in Sollecito’s kitchen drawer, this would be innocuous. She hung out and cooked at his flat for a week, no doubt using the knife to chop vegetables, and maybe even brushing it in the drawer after it was clean as she searched for a wooden spoon. The knife was picked from several in the drawer “on a hunch” by one of the investigators, not because he had any concrete reason to choose it. It was a large, sharp, murderous-looking knife, like several others there and like one with which you no doubt were cleaving the big bird, on Thanksgiving day! It is surprising we didn’t hear that some of Guede’s DNA is on the point of the knife because Knox prodded the turd in the toilet with it while reflecting on whether or not to flush. To flush, or not to flush, that was the question. I can see Knox now, pacing and reflecting on the advantageous implications of the floater in the bog, wondering if the blood and prints and semen in the bedroom are going to be enough to implicate Guede after she has finely tweezered out only her own and Sollecito’s DNA from the scene – or maybe she used the knife to scrape away hers and Raff’s DNA from the bedroom, meanwhile using the point to flick Guede’s DNA a little closer to Meredith’s body, just to make sure…….

The mind boggles.

Turd in the Toilet just about sums up this whole revolting and codswallop-laden affair.

Pitchforks’ next piece will be about the psychological implications of toilet seats being left up, from a Jungian perspective. It seems mostly male members of the population are afflicted with this particular form of passive-aggressive sociopathy.

Pitchforks is a child and adolescent development and mental health specialist based near Washington DC who writes about the American criminal justice system and its juxtaposition with the media, runs the website Pitchforks, and produces the blogtalkradio show Routing Out.