commentary by patrick H. Moore
The psychological torture that Amanda Knox has endured since that fateful day in 2007 when someone or several someones brutally murdered Meredith Kercher is now in the mid-point of its seventh year. For four of these years, both Knox and her boyfriend at the time of the murder, Raffaele Sollecito, were languishing (poor choice of words) in Italian prisons.
Now although I don’t believe that Knox or Sollecito played any part in the slaying of poor Meredith, unlike large numbers of self-styled experts, I don’t know for sure. How could I? I wasn’t there in the Perugia flat where the killing took place. (And it’s a damned good thing I wasn’t there, for if I had been, I might have been fingered as part of the alleged murder team.)
Inasmuch as the Florence court once again found Knox and Sollecito guilty in January of this year, it was required by law to disclose its rationale for the verdict in writing within 90 days of its ruling. And disclose its rationale it has in a 337 page document. (Wow! I’ll be glad to read the court’s voluminous tome but I will need to be hypnotized to keep my mind from wandering as I undertake the arduous task.)
Colleen Barry of the AP writes:
An Italian court that convicted Amanda Knox in her roommate’s 2007 murder said in lengthy reasoning made public Tuesday that the victim’s wounds indicate multiple aggressors, and that the two exchange students fought over money on the night of the murder.
The appellate court in Florence explained the January guilty verdicts against the American student and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in a 337-page document that examined both the evidence and the motive.
The court said that a third person convicted in the murder, Rudy Hermann Guede, did not act alone, and cited the nature of the victim’s wounds. It noted that at least two knives were used to attack 21-year-old Meredith Kercher and that there were also finger imprints on her body, indicating she had been restrained.
First, I’ve never been totally convinced that Rudy Guede operated alone based on the many knife wounds, both deep and superficial, and the fact that based on the size and contour of the wounds, it is entirely possible that two different knives were used. Guede himself claimed at some point that when he emerged from his famous bathroom escapade (his renowned turd-letting), he saw the killer run from the premises. Of course, like everyone else involved, Guede has changed his story several times and his statements should be taken with a grain of salt.
Yet, in claiming that there was ample evidence of a bad relationship between the two roommates, despite Knox’s attempts to play down differences in court, the Nencini court relied on and cited statements made by Guede while under police questioning. According to Guede, Kercher had blamed Knox for taking money from the British student’s room.
“It is a matter of fact that at a certain point in the evening events accelerated; the English girl was attacked by Amanda Marie Knox, by Raffaele Sollecito, who was backing up his girlfriend, and by Rudy Hermann Guede, and constrained within her own room,” the court document states.
The court also said it was not necessary for all of the assailants to have the same motive, and that the murder was not attributable to a sex game gone awry, as it was out of Kercher’s character to have ever consented to such activity.
Based on the Nencini court’s strange reasoning, the time has come, for the first time in All Things Crime Blog’s brief but checkered history, for a Freudian analysis. Although not a Freudian, I studied Literature and Psychoanalysis in graduate school and am somewhat familiar with The Bearded One’s basic ideas.
Freud combines sex, money, and turds in a rather smelly and not necessarily convincing triumvirate. He also adds babies and penises. Using Freudian logic, the fact that Guede left a large well-shaped turd in the toilet in one of the bathrooms is indicative of the fact that he was anally expulsive. An anally expulsive person is like the guy who carries his money balled up in his pocket in a big wad and loves to whip it out and hand it out to all and sundry.
On the other hand, assuming she really was a clean-nik, poor Meredith Kercher would fall under the rubric of the anally retentive. These are the folks who flush twice or even thrice while pooping and not just because they are afraid of stuffing up the W.C.
The alleged battle between Knox and Kercher over cleanliness at the flat suggests that the messy Knox was anally expulsive, thus the exact opposite of the retentive Kercher.
If we examine the three theories propounded in the various trials we discover that although three distinct theories have been introduced, they are all interconnected based on Freudian (il)logic. At the first trial, the prosecution suggested Kercher’s murder resulted from sex-game gone horribly wrong. Whatever one thinks about sex games, we all know that the spectre of sex is at the center of Freud’s theory.
The second theory, the turd theory, is also Freudian. In Freud’s rather tortured logic, through symbolic substitution at the unconscious level, a turd equals a penis which equals a baby which somehow connects to Freud’s Oedipal theory — the notion that the male child wants to kill the father and sleep with the mother. If I’ve misrepresented Freud’s theory, I’m sure our new resident shrink, The Starks Shrink, will set me straight. Or if he doesn’t, perhaps our friend Pitchforks will.
In the Nencini court’s 337 page rationale, the turd theory presented at the Florence trial has somehow been converted into the money theory. (Apparently evidence was introduced at some point during the Florence trial that Knox and Kercher had argued vehemently over greenbacks.)
Sex games, turds, and money. You replace one with the next and then substitute the third for the second and, inevitably, we end up with DEATH. If we put turds and money aside for the moment, we end up with a simple and tragic equation: Sex (or rather the lack of sex) = Death. Which makes me wonder, if Meredith Kercher had willingly slept with Rudy Guede, would she still be alive today? This question cannot be definitively answered but it’s certainly a possibility.
In any event, as long as the Italian court is stuck in the Freudian paradigm, they will never get to the truth of this case and will always appear somewhat whimsical, just as Freud’s elaborate set of substitutions appears rather frivolous to a modern reader.
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Meanwhile, as Amanda Knox digests the Nencini court’s tortured theory of the case, I’m sure that she must feel she is being tortured afresh.
All she can do now is wait for the Court of Cassation to rule on the appeal that will be forthcoming based on the request of her defense team. This decision will apparently be rendered sometime in September which means she has several torturous months to endure before she knows what the court’s final verdict is.
And, of course, this interminable waiting is also essentially Freudian. You see, the male child is not allowed sleep with his mother, nor can he kill his father. Instead he must wait and wait and wait until he is old enough to find a lover of his own. Only then is he allowed to experience sex and death on terms acceptable to society.
Had Amanda Knox also waited and waited and waited, eschewing sex, perhaps until she had finished her time in Perugia, it is entirely possible that although she might still have been charged, she probably would not have been convicted of murdering Kercher. But she didn’t wait but rather engaged in a few dalliances with a few different young men, which, as a young unmarried woman in Italy, makes her somehow evil in the eyes of certain powerful people and forces, which, quite incomprehensibly in my mind, somehow makes her a likely murderess.