by Michael Mills
Rudy Guede is the originator of the claim that Meredith Kercher suspected Amanda Knox of having stolen money from her desk. This important point is easily settled.
Guede first made this claim in his very first statement to police, when questioned by German investigators on 21 November 2007, after his arrest by them and before being extradited to Italy.
Thus, the claim of Knox having stolen money from Kercher predates any influence of Guede on Mignini, who, in any case, does not seem to have given any particular weight to the “money issue”, probably because he was obsessed with the sexual factor.
In his statement to the German police, Guede said that he went to 7 Via della Pergola to meet Kercher, but she was not there, so he waited. When she arrived at about 21:00, she let him in, and then went to her room, checked the drawer in her desk where she was keeping her rent money, and found that it was missing.
According to Guede, Kercher then told him that Knox must have stolen it, and went into Knox’s room to try to find it, but without success. It was at that point in his statement that Guede stated that Knox was not present in the house.
Presumably, his motivation for stressing that Knox was not present was to provide an explanation for how Kercher could allegedly have gone into Knox’s room and searched it.
The most plausible explanation for Guede’s claim that Kercher suspected Knox of having stolen her rent money is that he himself had stolen that money from Kercher’s purse after attacking and fatally wounding her; his bloody fingerprint was found inside the purse during the police investigation after the discovery of the murder.
Another crucial feature of Guede’s statement to the German police on 21 November is that nowhere in it does he claim that Knox was ever at the scene of the murder at any time while he, Guede, was present. He states specifically that in the period between when he was admitted to the house by Kercher and when he began his extended sojourn in the toilet, Knox was not present, and he also does not mention her being present after he came out of the toilet and confronted an unknown man who had killed Kercher, presumably after gaining access in some unknown way.
As I see it, Guede’s statement to German police on 21 November 2007, made before he could have come under the influence of the Perugia police or of Mignini,is proof positive that Knox was not present in the house during the murder of Kercher. He knew from the newspapers that both she and Sollecito had been arrested and charged with the murder, so if the two of them had been present there would have been no motive for him to have denied that fact.
The normal reaction of a person who has in reality committed a crime in concert with others, and is then accused of that crime, is to blame those other participants and minimise his own role. But that is precisely what Guede did not do in his initial statement; he blamed the murder on a mysterious stranger, rather than on the two persons he knew had already been arrested and charged with the crime.
Why did Guede not finger Knox and Sollecito immediately, which would have been easy to do?
The most likely reason is that he knew very well that they had not been present in the house when Kercher was murdered, and therefore there would be no hard evidence against them and they would be released, leaving him as the only perpetrator. Accordingly, he needed to invent an imaginary perpetrator in order to exculpate himself.
Most probably, it was only when Guede realised that Mignini was determined to continue with the prosecution of Knox and Sollecito, despite his having had to release Lumumba for lack of evidence, that he began to substitute Sollecito and Knox for the imaginary unknown perpetrator described in his initial statement to the German police.
Please click below to view Michael Mills’ previous posts on the Knox-Sollecito murder case:
Foxy Knoxy Is a Political Soccer Ball
How Politics Knock on Amanda Knox!
Under Pressure: A. Knox and R. Sollecito Find Meredith Kercher’s Body
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.