by Michael Mills
In my earlier post, as part of a discussion of Rudy Guede’s interview with the German Police upon being arrested after fleeing Italy, I analyzed Guede’s motive for murdering Meredith Kercher and hypothesized as to what Guede did and why. In this follow-up, I would now like to offer a hypothesis to explain the complex actions of Sollecito and Knox in the period between the murder of Kercher and the official discovery of her body by the Italian police early in the afternoon on the following day. I will also discuss Knox and Sollecito’s subsequent actions following law enforcement’s discovery of the body.
According to the Prosecution, the various actions of Sollecito and Knox that first aroused the suspicion of the police and other observers resulted from their having been involved in the murder of Meredith Kercher together with another person, initially thought to be Lumumba but then found to be Guede.
However, that explanation lacks credibility for two reasons:
In the first place, while there is physical evidence tying Sollecito and Knox to the crime scene, which also supports the inference that they tampered with that crime scene, there is no indisputable physical evidence connecting them to the murder itself.
The only such item of physical evidence produced by the Prosecution was the knife belonging to Sollecito which was found to have Knox’s DNA on the handle, and alleged to have a tiny trace of Kercher’s DNA on the blade. However, at the first appeal independent experts showed that the trace found on the blade was too small to provide a reliable identification of the DNA. Thus, if Kercher’s DNA cannot reliably be shown to be present on the blade, then the presence of Knox’s DNA on the handle has no inculpatory value.
Furthermore, the Prosecution claimed that Sollecito’s knife caused only the large wounds on Kercher’s neck, since it was too big to have caused the 40 plus much smaller wounds that were found on Kercher’s body. The Prosecution claimed that those smaller wounds were caused by a second, smaller knife used in the assault, a knife that has never been located.
The Prosecution’s theory of two knives having been used to murder Kercher fails to explain why one knife, that owned by Sollecito, and allegedly used to inflict the actual fatal wound, was retained in the possession of one of the alleged perpetrators, whereas the other knife, used to inflict the lesser wounds, was disposed of so thoroughly that it has never been found.
A more logical explanation is that only one knife was used in the assault on Kercher, that that knife was not Sollecito’s but a smaller knife used to inflict all the wounds found on the victim, including the large wounds on her neck (since a small knife can inflict a wound much larger than its own dimensions, but not the reverse), and that after the murder the perpetrator disposed of it, which is precisely what one would expect a perpetrator to do.
If Sollecito’s knife was not the murder weapon, which on the basis of reliable physical evidence it almost certainly was not, then there is no physical evidence to connect Sollecito and Knox to the murder itself.
Apart from the lack of physical evidence, there is no witness evidence of any association of Sollecito and Knox with Guede in the period immediately before the murder, as there would have to have been if they had come together to commit an assault on Kercher in concert. No credible witness has claimed to have seen the three of them together on the evening of the murder; one witness claims to have seen Sollecito and Knox in a public place that evening, but not in the company of Guede.
The only witness who claimed to have seen the three of them together on the street on that evening was a mentally ill person who told a sensational and quite incredible story of seeing the three of them carrying knives, and of Knox threatening him with one of those knives. That story can be dismissed as an obvious fabrication.
Finally, there is a very marked divergence between the alleged actions of Guede on the one hand and Sollecito and Knox on the other. The Prosecution maintains that the three of them entered the house together and attacked and murdered Kercher, and that their actions then followed entirely separate courses, with Guede running out of the house leaving a trail of bloody footprints before spending the rest of the night in a disco and bar, finally leaving for Germany the next morning, while Sollecito and Knox remained behind to spend several hours cleaning up the mess and attempting to cover up their involvement in the crime by staging a break-in.
A more logical explanation is that there were two entirely separate courses of action pursued by two separate groups of people, Guede on the one hand, and Sollecito and Knox on the other, with no connection between them. One course of action occurred first, and consisted of the entry of the murderer to the house, the commission of the murder, and the departure of the murderer via the front door. The second course of action began at some later time, and consisted of Sollecito and Knox arriving at the crime scene and carrying out a number of actions that tampered with that scene, perhaps including a staged break-in.
My hypothesis is that the first course of action involved Guede alone, for the reasons given in my prior post. The second course of action began with Sollecito and Knox, or perhaps Knox alone, returning to the house at some time during the night and finding the front door open, blood everywhere, and finally the body of Kercher lying in her bedroom.
The obvious question is why Knox, or Sollecito and Knox, did not immediately call the police and/or medical emergency services. In order to answer that question, we have to try to reconstruct the probable thought processes of those two persons.
A clue to what those thought processes must have been is provided by the actions of the other residents of the house when they returned the next morning and learned of the murder that had been committed in their residence; they immediately engaged legal representation to safeguard their interests. That is a clear indication that those persons, who had solid alibis, having been absent from Perugia during the night, nevertheless had some fear that being residents of the house and having a connection to the victim and possibly also to the perpetrator, they might become implicated, and therefore needed to protect themselves against that possibility.
Such a fear must have been even greater for Sollecito and Knox, since they had no alibi of comparable solidity, having been present in Perugia throughout the night, and also present in the house for part of that night. It may well have made them very reluctant to call the authorities without first seeking the advice of family and friends, which they apparently tried to do.
The discovery of the crime scene and Kercher’s body must have initially caused profound shock to Knox, or to both Sollecito and Knox, depending on how their discovery of the murder took place, something that we cannot know for sure. After the initial shock wore off, they must have begun to ponder how this brutal crime could have been committed, and who might have committed it.
They must have deduced that, in the absence of any sign of forced entry, the murder must have been committed by someone with access to the house, i.e., by a resident or some other person with a key, or else by a person known to Kercher and admitted to the house by her. In other words, by a person with essentially the same characteristics as themselves, which would very likely have increased their apprehension about being implicated in the crime.
It is highly possible that at this stage, Knox began to go over in her mind all the persons she knew who were also acquainted with Kercher, and it may well be that one of those persons she thought of was Lumumba. It was established by the Prosecution itself that Kercher was well acquainted with Lumumba, and that it was she who first introduced Knox to him. Accordingly, it is not at all surprising that Knox would have considered him as a possible suspect, a person that Kercher would willingly have admitted to the house.
Under the circumstances described above, it is understandable that Sollecito and Knox would want to establish a clear separation between the perpetrator and the group of people who had a connection to Kercher, including themselves. The way to do that was to make it appear that a total stranger had gained access to the house by making a forced entry. Under my hypothesis, the claim by the Prosecution that Sollecito and Knox manufactured the appearance of a break-in by breaking the window and scattering clothes around accords with objective reality; what would not accord with objective reality is the prosecution’s claim that the action of staging a break-in proves the involvement of Sollecito and Knox in the murder itself.
In the absence of any real evidence of such involvement, an action such as staging a break-in merely demonstrates that Sollecito and Knox had a real and perhaps well-justified fear of being wrongly implicated in the crime, given that they were present in the house together with the body of Kercher.
It is possible also that Sollecito and Knox attempted a partial clean-up of the crime-scene. If so, such an action was irrational, since it would not be consistent with the image of the murder being committed by an intruder who then fled leaving the crime-scene intact. However, it is likely that, given the shock of finding the murdered body of Kercher, they were simply not thinking clearly and rationally.
However, the Prosecution’s contention that Sollecito and Knox intentionally tried to remove physical traces of their own presence while leaving those of Guede is simply absurd; they could not possibly have had any way of distinguishing their traces such as blood and DNA from those left by Guede.
My hypothesis would explain a number of the behaviours noticed by observers which have been interpreted as indicating a guilty knowledge of the murder and hence involvement in it, such as the apparent lack of emotional reaction by Sollecito and Knox when Kercher’s body was “officially” found by the police, and their apparent prior knowledge of details of the body, such as its positioning. The first can be explained by their having found the body several hours before, possibly very early in the morning, such that the initial shock had worn off and been replaced by a sort of numbness, a common psychological reaction; the second by their having actually seen the body, and perhaps having carried out certain actions such as covering it with the duvet.
At this point the question may well be asked why, when Sollecito and Knox first came under suspicion by the police and then were charged with the crime, they simply did not tell the whole story, i.e., that they had returned to the house, discovered Kercher’s body, and then, fearing they would be wrongly implicated, tampered with the crime-scene in order to distance themselves from it.
A likely answer is that, in the first place the very fact of their coming under suspicion reinforced their initial fear of being implicated, and second the entirely rational consideration that if they confessed what they had done it would be taken as an admission of guilt for the murder itself, rather than just of tampering with the crime scene.
Another issue is that of why Knox initially appeared to confess to involvement in the murder, and also accused Lumumba of being involved.
Her accusation of Lumumba can be fairly readily explained. According to reports, forensic examination of Kercher’s body had found traces on it of hair of the African type, so the police already had the idea that a person of African origin had participated in the murder. Furthermore, when during the initial interrogation of Knox, they were told by her that the Patrick with whom she had exchanged the messages found on her mobile phone was Lumumba, an African, they must have linked that identification to the traces of an African person they had found on Kercher’s body.
That suggests that it was the police themselves who first put it to Knox that Lumumba may have been the killer, which would have been consistent with her own belief that the person who murdered Kercher must have been known to her, a category that applied to Lumumba. In that case, Knox’s accusation against Lumumba would simply be a matter of echoing back to the police an idea that they already held, and which they had suggested to her.
As for Knox’s alleged confession, careful examination of her actual words shows that she did not claim to have been in the house during the commission of the murder, but rather imagined being there and hearing Kercher’s screams. Imagining oneself to have been present during a horrible incident, and what one might have felt in that situation, is a common psychological reaction to becoming aware of such an incident, and is a form of empathy with the victims or observers of the incident, i.e., trying to feel in one’s imagination what the victims or observers must have felt.
The hypothesis I have outlined above is just that, a hypothesis, but it does explain a lot of the seeming anomalies of the case which have been taken by the Prosecution and sections of the media and the public as proof of the complicity of Sollecito and Knox in the murder of Kercher. I see those anomalies as having arisen from the fact that there were two separate courses of action on the night of the murder, the first that of Guede, consisting of the murder and robbery and his subsequent flight to Germany, the second that of Sollecito and Knox, consisting of finding the body of Kercher, realising that the perpetrator must have been a person known to her and possibly themselves, and then trying to alter the crime-scene to make it appear that the perpetrator had been a total stranger who had broken in, thereby seeking to protect themselves against the possibility of being implicated as persons with access to the house who were known to the victim.
Please click below to view Michael Mills’ previous post on Rudy Guede:
How and Why Rudy Guede Was a Lone Wolf Assailant in the Murder of Meredith Kercher
Michael Mills is a retired Australian Public Servant. He is 66 years old, has a keen interest in history and current affairs, and posts regularly on online history forums. Like many, he was appalled by the recent re-conviction of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and after substantial intensive research, he has developed the theory of the case that he sets forth herein.