Saturday, November 30, 2013
Note For Strasbourg Court & State Department: Knox Herself Proves She Lies About Her Interrogation
Posted by James Raper
In our previous post Kermit nicely shows how, under the European Court of Human Rights’ own guidelines, Amanda Knox’s “appeal” won’t put her out of reach of the fair and painstaking Italians.
If any of the busy, hard-pressed ECHR investigators do choose to press beyond the ECHR guidelines, they will almost instantly establish that in her voluntary interview on 5 November 2007 Knox was treated with complete fairness.
Also that her false accusation of Patrick (which she never retracted) was entirely of her own doing.
And also that she is not only trying to throw sand into the wheels of Italian justice during an ongoing judicial process (a felony in Italy) but she is trying to welsh out of paying Patrick his damages award of $100,000 (a contempt of the Supreme Court) thus foolishly risking two more charges of aggravated calunnia.
This post derives from a post of mine last May. In another post, we showed that Dr Mignini was not present for the interrogation that night, and Knox maliciously invented an illegal interrogation at risk of a third aggravated calunnia charge.
In fact Dr Mignini met with Amanda Knox only briefly, later, to charge her and to warn she should say no more without a lawyer. He asked her no questions.
I will compare the various accounts of the interrogation to demonstrate that Amanda Knox is indeed lying to the ECHR, just as she did repeatedly in her book this year and also on US and European television.
- There are two main bodies of truth about the interrogation: (1) all of those present at various times on that night and (2) Knox’s own testimony on the witness stand in mid 2009.
- There are two main bodies of lies about the interrogation (1) The Sollecito book and (2) the Knox book, which by the way not only contradict one another but also contradict such other accounts as those of Saul Kassin and John Douglas.
The police had called her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in to the station for questioning and Knox had accompanied him because she did not want to be alone. They had already eaten at the house of a friend of Sollecito’s.
Knox’s interrogation was not tape recorded and in that sense we have no truly independent account of what transpired. The police, including the interpreter, gave evidence at her trial, but we do not yet have transcripts for that evidence other than that of the interpreter. There are accounts in books that have been written about the case but these tend to differ in the detail. The police and the interpreter maintain that she was treated well. Apart from the evidence of the interpreter all we have is what Knox says happened, and our sources for this are transcripts of her trial evidence and what she wrote in her book. I shall deal with the evidence of the interpreter towards the end of this article.
I am going to compare what she said at trial with what she wrote in her book but also there was a letter she wrote on the 9th and a recording of a meeting with her mother on the 10th November which are relevant.. What she wrote in her book is fairly extensive and contains much dialogue. She has a prodigious memory for detail now which was almost entirely lacking before. I am going to tell you to treat what she says in her book with extreme caution because she has already been found out for, well let us say, her creative writing if not outright distortion of facts. I shall paraphrase rather than quote most of it but a few direct quotes are necessary.
Knox arrived with Sollecito at the police station at about 10.30 pm (according to John Follain). The police started to question Sollecito at 10.40 pm (Follain).
In her book Knox describes being taken from the waiting area to a formal interview room in which she had already spent some time earlier. It is unclear when that formal questioning began. Probably getting on for about 11.30pm because she also refers to some questions being asked of her in the waiting room following which she did some stretches and splits. She then describes how she was questioned about the events over a period from about the time she and Sollecito left the cottage to about 9 pm on the 1st November.
Possibly there was a short break. She describes being exhausted and confused. The interpreter, Knox says, arrived at about 12.30 am. Until then she had been conversing with the police in Italian.
Almost immediately on the questioning resuming -
“Monica Napoleoni, who had been so abrupt with me about the poop and the mop at the villa, opened the door. “Raffaele says you left his apartment on Thursday night,” she said almost gleefully. “He says that you asked him to lie for you. He’s taken away your alibi.””
Knox describes how she was dumfounded and devastated by this news. She cannot believe that he would say that when they had been together all night. She feels all her reserves of energy draining away. Then -
“Where did you go? Who did you text?” Ficarra asked, sneering at me.
“I don’t remember texting anyone.”
They grabbed my cell phone up off the desk and scrolled quickly through its history.
“You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”
“My boss at Le Chic.”
Stop right there.
How were the police able to name the recipient of the text? The text Patrick had sent her had already been deleted from Knox’s mobile phone by Knox herself and Knox hasn’t yet named Patrick. In fact she couldn’t remember texting anyone.
It is of course probable that the police already had a log of her calls and possibly had already traced and identified the owner of the receiving number for her text, though the last step would have been fast work.
In her trial testimony Knox did a lot of “the police suggested this and suggestd that” though it is never crystal clear whether she is accusing the police of having suggested his name. But she is doing it here in her book and of course the Knox groupies have always maintained that it was the police who suggested his name to her.
The following extract from her trial testimony should clear things up. GCM is Judge Giancarlo Massei.
GCM: In this message, was there the name of the person it was meant for?
AK: No, it was the message I wrote to my boss. The one that said “Va bene. Ci vediamo piu tardi. Buona serata.”
GCM: But it could have been a message to anyone. Could you see from the message to whom it was written?
AK: Actually, I don’t know if that information is in the telephone”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦..
GCM : But they didn’t literally say it was him!
AK : No. They didn’t say it was him, but they said “We know who it is, we know who it is. You were with him, you met him.”
GCM : Now what happened next? You, confronted with the message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?”
AK : Well, first I started to cry…....
And having implied that it was the police who suggested Patrick’s name to her, she adds”¦.. that quote again -
“You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”
“My boss at Le Chic.”
Here she is telling the Perugian cops straight out exactly to whom the text was sent. “My boss at Le Chic”.
But that does not quite gel with her trial testimony -
And they told me that I knew, and that I didn’t want to tell. And that I didn’t want to tell because I didn’t remember or because I was a stupid liar. Then they kept on about this message, that they were literally shoving in my face saying “Look what a stupid liar you are, you don’t even remember this!”
At first, I didn’t even remember writing that message. But there was this interpreter next to me who kept saying “Maybe you don’t remember, maybe you don’t remember, but try,” and other people were saying “Try, try, try to remember that you met someone, and I was there hearing “Remember, remember, remember…..
Doesn’t the above quote make it clear that the police were having considerable trouble getting Knox to tell them to whom her text message was sent? It would also explain their growing frustration with her.
But perhaps the above quote relates not to whom the text was sent but, that having been ascertained, whether Knox met up with that person later? Knox has a habit of conflating the two issues. However there is also the following quote from her trial testimony -
Well there were lots of people who were asking me questions, but the person who had started talking with me was a policewoman with long hair, chestnut brown hair, but I don’t know her. Then in the circle of people who were around me, certain people asked me questions, for example there was a man holding my telephone, and who was literally shoving the telephone into my face, shouting “Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?”
Then there were others, for instance this woman who was leading, was the same person who at one point was standing behind me, because they kept moving, they were really surrounding me and on top of me. I was on a chair, then the interpreter was also sitting on a chair, and everyone else was standing around me, so I didn’t see who gave me the first blow because it was someone behind me, but then I turned around and saw that woman and she gave me another blow to the head.
The woman with the long hair, chestnut brown hair, Knox identifies in her book as Ficarra. Ficarra is the policewoman who started the questioning particularly, as Knox has confirmed, about the texted message. “Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?” Again, surely this is to get Knox to identify the recipient of the text, not about whether she met up with him?
In the book though, it is all different.
In the book, the police having told her that the text is to someone called Patrick, Knox is a model of co-operation as, having already told them that he is her boss at Le Chic, she then gives a description of him and answers their questions as to whether he knew Meredith, whether he liked her etc. No reluctance to co-operate, no memory difficulties here.
Notwithstanding this, her book says the questions and insinuations keep raining down on her. The police insist that she had left Sollecito’s to meet up with - and again the police name him - Patrick.
“Who did you meet up with? Who are you protecting? Why are you lying? Who’s this person? Who’s Patrick?”
Remember again, according to her trial testimony the police did not mention Patrick’s name and Knox still hasn’t mentioned his name. But wait, she does in the next line -
“I said “Patrick is my boss.””
So now, at any rate, the police have a positive ID from Knox regarding the text message and something to work with. Patrick - boss - Le Chic.
Knox then refers to the differing interpretations as to what “See you later” meant and denies that she had ever met up with Patrick that evening. She recalls the interpreter suggesting that she was traumatized and suffering from amnesia.
The police continue to try to draw an admission from Knox that she had met up with Patrick that evening - which again she repeatedly denies. And why shouldn’t she? After all, she denies that she’s suffering from amnesia, or that there is a problem with her memory. The only problem is that Sollecito had said she had gone out but that does not mean she had met with Patrick.
Knox then writes, oddly, as it is completely out of sequence considering the above -
“They pushed my cell phone, with the message to Patrick, in my face and screamed,
“You’re lying. You sent a message to Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”
That’s when Ficarra slapped me on my head.”
A couple of blows (more like cuffs) to the head (denied by the police) is mentioned in her trial testimony but more likely, if this incident ever happened, it would have been earlier when she was struggling to remember the text and to whom it had been sent. Indeed that’s clear from the context of the above quotes.
And this, from her trial testimony -
Remember, remember, remember, and then there was this person behind me who—it’s not that she actually really physically hurt me, but she frightened me.”
In the CNN TV interview with Chris Cuomo, Knox was asked if there was anything she regretted.
Knox replied that she regretted the way this interrogation had gone, that she wished she had been aware of her rights and had stood up to the police questioning better.
Well actually, according to the account in her book, she appears to have stood up to the police questioning with a marked degree of resilience and self- certainty, and with no amnesia. There is little of her trademark “being confused”.
So why the sudden collapse? And it was a sudden collapse.
Given the trial and book accounts Knox would have us think that she was frightened, that it was due to exhaustion and the persistent and bullying tone of the questioning, mixed with threats that she would spend time in prison for failing to co-operate. She also states that -
(a) she was having a bad period and was not being allowed to attend to this, and
(b) the police told her that they had “hard evidence” that she was involved in the murder.
Knox has given us a number of accounts as to what was actually happening when this occurred.
In a letter she wrote on the 9th November she says that suddenly all the police officers left the room but one, who told her she was in serious trouble and that she should name the murderer. At this point Knox says that she asked to see the texted message again and then an image of Patrick came to mind. All she could think about was Patrick and so she named him (as the murderer).
During a recorded meeting with her mother in Capanne Prison on the 10th November she relates essentially the same story.
In her book there is sort of the same story but significantly without mention of the other officers having left the room nor mention of her having asked to see the texted message again.
If the first two accounts are correct then at least the sense of oppression from the room being crowded and questions being fired at her had lifted.
Then this is from her book -
In that instant, I snapped. I truly thought I remembered having met somebody. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I didn’t understand that I was about to implicate the wrong person. I didn’t understand what was at stake. I didn’t think I was making it up. My mind put together incoherent images. The image that came to me was Patrick’s face. I gasped. I said his name. “Patrick””it’s Patrick.
It’s her account, of course, but this “Patrick - It’s Patrick” makes no sense at this stage of it unless it’s an admission not just that she had met up with Patrick but that he was at the cottage and involved in Meredith’s death.
And this is from her trial testimony -
GCM : Now what happened next? You, confronted with the message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?
AK : Well, first I started to cry. And all the policemen, together, started saying to me, you have to tell us why, what happened? They wanted all these details that I couldn’t tell them, because in the end, what happened was this: when I said the name of Patrick I suddenly started imagining a kind of scene, but always using this idea: images that didn’t agree, that maybe could give some kind of explanation of the situation.
There is a clear difference between these two quotes.
The one from her book suggests that she was trying hard but that the police had virtually brought her to the verge of a mental breakdown.
Her trial testimony says something else; that a scene and an idea was forming in her mind brought on by her naming of Patrick.
In her book she states that a statement, typed up in Italian, was shoved under her nose and she was told to sign it. The statement was timed at 1.45 am. The statement was not long but would probably have taken about twenty minutes to prepare and type.
The statement according to Knox -
... I met Patrick immediately at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana and we went to the house together. I do not remember if Meredith was there or came shortly afterward. I have a hard time remembering those moments but Patrick had sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I cannot remember clearly whether he threatened Meredith first. I remember confusedly that he killed her.
The fact that the statement was in Italian is not important. Knox could read Italian perfectly well. However she does insinuate in the book that the details in the statement were suggested to her and that she didn’t bother to read the statement before signing.
Apart from what has been mentioned above, there are some other points and inferences to be drawn from the above analysis.
- 1. Knox’s account destroys one of Sollecito’s main tenets in his book Honour Bound. Sollecito maintains that he did nothing to damage Knox’s alibi until he signed a statement, forced on him at 3:30 am and containing the damaging admission that Knox had gone out. But Knox makes it clear that she had heard from the Head of the Murder Squad that he had made that damaging admission, at or shortly after 12.30 am. Or is Knox is accusing Napoleoni of a bare-faced lie?
2. It is valid to ask why Knox would not want to remember to whom the text had been sent. Who can see into her mind? Perhaps Knox realized that discussion of it would confirm that if she had indeed gone out then it was not to Le Chic, where she was not required. However even if she thought that could put her in the frame it’s not what an innocent person would be too worried about. Perhaps she did just have difficulty remembering?
3. If there was no fuss and she did remember and tell the police that the text was to Patrick, and the questioning then moved on to whether she met up with Patrick later that evening, what was the problem with that? She knew the fact that she hadn’t met up with him could be verified by Patrick. She could have said that and stuck to it. The next move for the police would have been to question Patrick. They would not have had grounds to arrest him.
4. Knox stated in her memorial, and re-iterates it in her book, that during her interrogation the police told her that they had hard evidence that she was involved in Meredith’s murder. She does not expand on what this evidence is, perhaps because the police did not actually tell her. However, wasn’t she the least bit curious, particularly if she was innocent? What was she thinking it might be?
5. I can sympathise with any interviewee suffering a bad period, if that’s true. However the really testy period of the interview/interrogation starts with the arrival of the interpreter, notification of Sollecito’s withdrawal of her alibi and the questioning with regard to the text to Patrick, all occurring at around 12.30 am. There has to be some critical point when she concedes, whether to the police or in her own mind, that she’d met “Patrick”, after which there was the questioning as to what had happened next. Say that additional questioning took 20 minutes. Then there would be a break whilst the statement is prepared and typed up. So the difficult period for Knox, from about 12.30 am to that critical point, looks more like about 35 to, at the outside, 50 minutes.
6. Even if, for that period, it is true that she was subjected to repeated and bullying questions, and threats, then she held up remarkably well as I have noted from her own account. It does not explain any form of mental breakdown, let alone implicating Patrick in murder. In particular, if Knox’s letter of the 9th and the recording of her meeting with her mother on the 10th are to believed, that alleged barrage of questions had stopped when she implicated Patrick. An explanation, for what it’s worth, might be that she had simply ceased to care any longer despite the consequences. But why?
7. A better and more credible explanation is that an idea had indeed formed suddenly in her mind. She would use the revelation about the text to Patrick and the consequent police line of questioning to bring the questioning to an end and divert suspicion from her true involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher. She envisaged that she would be seen by the police as a helpless witness/victim, not a suspect in a murder investigation. As indeed was the case initially. She expected, I am sure, to be released, so that she could get Sollecito’s story straight once again. If that had happened there would of course remain the problem of her having involved Patrick, but I dare say she thought that she could simply smooth that over - that it would not be a big deal once he had confirmed that there had been no meeting and that he had not been at the cottage, as the evidence was bound to confirm.
At the beginning I said that we also have a transcript now of the evidence of the interpreter, Anna Donnino. I will summarise the main points from her evidence but it will be apparent immediately that she contradicts much of what Knox and her supporters claim to have happened.
Donnino told the court that she had 22 years experience working as a translator for the police in Perugia. She was at home when she received a call from the police that her services were required and she arrived at the police station at just before 12.30 am, just as Knox said. She found Knox with Inspector Ficarra. There was also another police officer there whose first name was Ivano. At some stage Ficarra left the room and then returned and there was also another officer by the name of Zugarina who came in. Donnino remained with Knox at all times
The following points emerge from her testimony :-
- 1. Three police officers do not amount to the “lots of people” referred to in Knox’s trial testimony, let alone the dozens and the “tag teams” of which her supporters speak.
2. She makes no mention of Napoleoni and denied that anyone had entered the room to state that Sollecito had broken Knox’s alibi. (This is not to exclude that this may have happened before Donnino arrived)
3. She states that Knox was perfectly calm but there came a point when Knox was being asked how come she had not gone to work that she was shown her own text message (to Patrick). Knox had an emotional shock, put her hands to her ears and started rolling her head and saying “It’s him! It’s him! It’s him!”
4. She denied that Knox had been maltreated or that she had been hit at all or called a liar.
5. She stated that the officer called Ivano had been particularly comforting to Knox, holding her hand occasionally.
6. She stated that prior to the 1.45 am statement being presented to Knox she was asked if she wanted a lawyer but Knox said no.
7. She stated that she had read the statement over to Knox in english and Knox herself had checked the italian original having asked for clarification of specific wording.
7. She confirmed that that she had told Knox about an accident which she’d had (a leg fracture) and that she had suffered amnesia about the accident itself. She had thought Knox was suffering something similar. She had also spoken to Knox about her own daughters because she thought it was necessary to establish a rapport and trust between the two of them.
The account in Knox’s book is in some ways quite compelling but only if it is not compared against her trial testimony, let alone the Interpreter’s testimony: that is, up to the point when she implicates Patrick in murder. At that point no amount of whitewash works. The Italian Supreme Court also thought so, upholding Knox’s calunnia conviction, with the addition of aggravating circumstances.
Comments
Who is the woman in the top photo looking through a glass darkly?
Three more aggravated calunnias could attract sentences of another 12 years…. The blood money for the book could constitute another.
So who is driving the crazy Hardline Bus here? That is something of a puzzle to all of us. Amanda Knox is surely old enough to get a firm grip on the process.
Everyone seems to discount her present mental abilities and consider her a mere pawn of others. But when Ghirga and Vedova visited her a few weeks ago, they departed from Seattle very frustrated. Seemingly she would not bend to their advice.
Chris Mellas and Edda Mellas are most widely pointed to by insiders as the crazy hardliners, especially as Chris Mellas is known to be putting up all the crazy hardline websites.
The only one who might come to share the common sense and grip on reality of Francesco Sollecito may be Curt Knox, though he seems to have become semi-detached from the whole affair. It must sicken him to live with the sure knowledge that Knox was a party to a murder, and that they are headed right back to zero bank balances.
******
Chami, that was the court interpreter that Knox elbowed aside mid 2009, actually to Knox’s considerable detriment - it looked mean, she had no time to think, and her own fractured Italian was less than fully understandable.
If the number is in your contacts list, the SMS will have a header with the remote person’s name being displayed. If the number is missing from the contacts list, i.e., there is no corresponding name, then the number will be displayed.
It is possible Amanda had already put Patrick on her contact list.
The things police must have done already on the first day itself, (i) getting the call logs from the service providers (it may take 1-2 days) (ii) putting a order for phone line taps (this was done on the same day) and (iii) getting reports of their daily activities.
Police must have already been aware of ALL the calls made by most of the people involved by this time. And this includes SMS.
Chami, it was a spontaneous interview… if Knox’s phone records for the night had seemed as revealing as Sollecitos it would surely not have been so spontaneous.
She had already told interrogators her employer had told her not to come to work that night. She could have said “oh, that’s my employer” and moved on, denying all knowledge of the crime.
The fact that the interview was spontaneous has always been an immense problem for Knox apologists. It doesnt play to the notion of an Italy-wide frameup.
Plus to my knowledge not one Knox apologist has gone anywhere near that malicious attempt to frame Mignini, which anyone who has read the book of course believes.
But they need to do so if they are to avoid complete legal catastrophe. Will-they-wont they, will-they-wont they…..
“It doesnt play to the notion of an Italy-wide frameup”
According to FoA, the whole world is after the little Angel. I was originally under the mistaken notion that all angels are sex-less, but that is going on a different track…
Of course the FoA is wrong, as expected, because the volunteer army of the little Angel is clearly non-denumerable. That leaves only a small group running after her flesh and blood…
I am here because I want justice to be served. Am I asking for too much?
She accompanied the lover-boy that fateful night (of the infamous interview; now she gives interviews almost like a professional) just because she was not comfortable to leave him alone with the vultures. Just to make sure the little boy does not go astray. But fate had other plans for her…
The turning off the mobiles is a far greater and potentially interesting point. As a late bloomer, she had to make up for the lost time and I would guess that she would love to turn off her mobile EVERY night…
She underestimated others’ common sense.
First of all, happy Thanksgiving weekend to all. This is a very insightful post of Knox’s deviations between what she said in her book and in the witness box. Her body language in court showed contempt for the interpreter. Knox didn’t trust Mrs. Donnino. Knox was arrogant enough to think she spoke Italian better than a seasoned interpreter of both languages. Hubris was ablaze and paranoia, too.
Knox wanted to wrest control of all her verbiage. She wanted to make sure all her lies were imparted clearly, not subsumed in some interpreter’s slanted version, a woman she might have feared she’d already offended. Knox’s hand chop motions suggest her grabbing the reins and jabbing for intensity. Those mean hands showed what they could do and the jury saw it.
In court Knox seemed uncomfortable around Anna Donnino but straining not to show it. Anna was probably much more intelligent than Knox but Knox was too dumb or frightened to see it. Donnino was slightly overweight and a bit older than Knox. Maybe that played a part in the dislike, or Donnino’s possible resemblance to mother Edda.
Even the kindheartedness of the police officer women probably served only to raise Knox’s scorn and contempt of them during her interrogation. Warm or kindly emotions she distrusted and was not used to. She suspected a false show of sympathy was being used to manipulate her into giving them what they wanted, the goal being to trip her up and tell them about the murder which would then place Knox at the scene.
So Knox rejected the whole lot of them and put up a wall of silence which was soon broken down, then fake confusion alternating with tears for pity mixed with ill-disguised defiance. The Perugian police saw right through it. She came to the end of her rope and began the visions and fantasies jungle. Ever since we have been treated to a campaign of lies and retractions.
James Raper’s point #2 about Knox stumping the police by refusing as long as she could to tell them who she texted: it seems like a clear form of obstructing justice. Knox did the liar’s squirm of halting to buy time to think up the next lie. She was probably afraid to tell the police much of anything during the first interrogation, because she had no means of knowing what the significance would be of even the slightest bit of info she gave them. She had thought about her false alibi but not enough, and it was a gamechanger when the police started lying to the liar. (Police are allowed to do so to elicit information, they’re good at it.)
Knox had never come up against this thorny challenge of having more than one person perhaps lying to her and to whom she must then answer with her life on the line. Little did she know that the police officers were all smarter and more experienced than Knox in tweezing out the truth from hardened liars. They were cannier than she expected. She was scared to death, tired and probably humiliated at how obvious her flaky story was. Then she suddenly had to contend with Raffaele jumping ship, yet she couldn’t trust the police report that he had broken her alibi.
She didn’t know whether he had or not, so she had to assume that he hadn’t flinched and that she should keep playing along to their original script agreed on in secrecy during and after the murder cleanup.
Even at Knox’s moment of greatest mental crisis, she never broke because she never named the real killers: herself, Guede, and Raffaele. She threw the police a bone by naming Patrick, and as Raper elucidates she hoped that false accusation would throw them off long enough for her to escape the Questura and return to patch things up with Raffaele or flee with Mom back to safety of the U.S. She didn’t want to tell the police ANYTHING, but she thought telling them a lie to misdirect them might save her temporarily.
James Raper makes clear that she may have frustrated the police by pretending ignorance and forgetfulness. She certainly did, and who can seriously believe that Amanda Knox did not remember texting her boss back to say “Wheeee, Patrick, thanks for the night off!” Didn’t Raffaele claim she actually jumped up and threw her arms and perhaps legs around him because she was so happy to have the night off? How does one forget that physical reaction? She had to respond by text to let Patrick know she got his message and wouldn’t come in to work that night. That series of emotions and thoughts wouldn’t be so easily forgotten. So she started lying to the police pretty fast.
Now she is trying to stiff Patrick the only guy in Perugia who truly helped her. She refuses to pay for calunnia thus refusing to admit fault of any kind in implicating him in murder. Her visions and brainwaves of him raping Meredith are somehow the police’s fault.
She’s probably lying about her application to the ECHR, too. The Perugia police can tell you she’s an inveterate liar, and the Human Rights court won’t waste their time with it. Even Raffaele says she’s a liar, said that she asked him to lie for her. Now he is locked in with her lies and doing a trial run of boarding planes in Paris that could take him far away from the results. (or boarding planes as a feint while planning to slip away by ship)
@James Raper.
A painstaking analysis which no doubt involved a lot of hard work. Thank you.
The facts speak for themselves: stating the bleeding obvious, AK is a seriously disturbed individual for whom truth is a totally nebulous concept.
What can one say other than it’s amazing how one person can cause such murderous chaos and then go on to leave behind such an enormous trail of lies, half-truths and misinformation.
The Knox and Sollecito families seem to have brass nerves and to be well beyond embarrassment by now (or, less likely, they are stupid and believe their kids are as innocent as lambs). In any event they should be entered into the Guinness Book of Records for the amount of brouhaha, and public time/expense that their two wayward offspring have set in train (one of the pathetic lost souls is now vying it seems for another inglorious record - the first murderer who has sought to create an international incident in an attempt to avoid facing justice).
We know families will generally stick together through thick and thin etc., but the unflinching degree of primitive solidarity evinced by the Knox and Sollecito families would surely even embarrass your proper, bog-standard mafia (who at least don’t pretend to be anything else). Actually few things are quite as scary as the nuclear family, even (or maybe especially) the broken nuclear family, when events peel away the suburban, bourgeois veneer.
Thank you James.
I think they told much of the story indirectly. Remember Raffy telling of one cop who told him he would kill him and leave him in a pool of blood? (Honorless bound)? That statement (lie) sent chills thru me.
Thanks again
Well researched and presented article, James.
If an innocent person slept all night with her boyfriend and if the boyfriend suddenly revealed that the person had actually gone out for four hours in the late evening and early morning, would not that person simply counter that the boyfriend must be mistaken?
Would not that person express surprise and outrage that the boyfriend could tell such an obscene lie?
Would not that innocent person immediately demand that the police should investigate the lying boyfriend?
NOT Knox- she immediately panicked and fingered the innocent Patrik Lumumba.
Knox and Solliceto are guilty as charged, if for no other reason than their reactions to events and numerous, self-conflicting versions of the “truth” scream it to be so.
@ Mealer
Indeed. But even before that, also think about: a woman (or a person A) slept with a man (B) all night, having sex (as the later book claims; she even claimed having bath together etc.), and the man (person B) when questioned about what he remembers, says “I don’t remember if we had sex”.
Don’t you think that answer itself - besides being unreasonable and idiotic as a lie - would be at least offensive to the person A?
@Bettina
And the fish blood story.
Psychologically, blood is a taboo. In very few advertisements you will see that have lots of dark red that may symbolize blood.
I had wondered why advertisers use blue ink to compare performance of various women’s napkins.
Both are steeped with violence. Both are dangerous in my opinion.
Knox had an emotional shock, put her hands to her ears and started rolling her head and saying “It’s him! It’s him! It’s him!â€
We have other situations:
1. When she was taken to the murder scene to check the cutlery present…
2. When she was informed that a knife has been collected from Sollecito’ Jr flat…
3. When she was being taken for fingerprinting…
And several others that I cannot recollect…
@ chami
I’ve never seen ‘blood on hands’ of a person in my whole life.
Actually my father was a surgeon and since I was a child I saw a lot of blood, interiors, videos and pictures of hands cutting and rummaging in bodies organs, etc. But it was blood on gloves. On instruments.
When I visit my father he often cooks fish, he really likes cutting up big fishes, and I never, never recall having seeing blood on hands.
My grandmother would slaughter pigs. That was very bloody, but I never saw blood on her hands.
I never saw in my life blood on hands, in a real-life scene. Not even animals blood, nor from cooking, or from cutting steaks.
Once at the primary school a friend of mine had injured his finger, I saw a finger covered in blood: that image remains in my mind as the thing closest to a memory of blood on hands.
Maybe I got injured in my life, I rescued somebody, but I have no memory of blood covering my hands.
The fact is, blood on hands, it is an image of *extreme* violence, as for what can be conveyed by visual language.
There is indeed a taboo about this, and it is indeed a very disturbing image, in a normal psychological context.
I believe if you really “see” an image like that in your dreams, in your imagination, any normal person would feel it as something very negative.
It automatically triggers association with violence, violation, dangere, taboo, trauma. It’s not something you just happen to say casually “I saw blood on hands, it was nothing important”.
Nobody would feel such visual picture as harmless, associated to innocent casual memory. Why would someone say something like that?
@chami…yep. There is usually a little truth mixed with lies.
The statement was:
“After dinner I noticed there was blood on Raffaele’s hand, but I was under the impression that it was blood from the fish”. Taken from http://themurderofmeredithkercher.com/Amanda_Knox’s_Confession
What Yummi say is factually correct and she (AK) really did not see any blood on RS hand(s). They must have bought cut and cleaned fish from the store and unless it is live fish, you will not have much blood. The blood is coming from her mind; the only impression of the murder scene.
But the blood had got in her mind and she sees now blood everywhere. Remember that she is not a professional and the blood did make an impression in her mind. She is seeing blood everywhere now.
It was doubly scaring because she had to clean up the mess she made. Most regular garden type murderers are fortunately spared that duty. RG went for a dance after the crime but both AK and RS did not even get a decent sleep that night!
A timely reworking of what was already a very thorough and detailed post. James is absolutely right that you don’t have to look further than Knox’s own words to realise that her various narratives are absurd, self-contradictory and (as she admits herself in that spontaneous “gift”) self-incriminating.
When you compare her account side by side with Sollecito’s, both sets of absurdities become even more obvious. Anyone who has read their books and still believes them to be innocent simply hasn’t read them carefully enough - the evidence is all there in their self-penned accounts.
An excellent post and thank you for posting.
I can very well understand seasoned investigators becoming frustrated by Knox during her questioning, I would imagine they would see her as insulting their intelligence.
She is without doubt a very disturbed individual and a dyed in the wool liar.
We have all seen for ourselves her performances on TV in which she is being questioned.
The pause for effect, the mega sigh, the swallow.
She does it over and over again, what is she doing it for? what does want us to think by doing that? what does she think it means?
The tangled web of lies she has spun since forced this tragedy onto Meredith and her family will need a great deal of care to be taken in remembering everything.
Perhaps this is why she needs a team around her to function ‘normally’ without burning out and blowing the whole scam with her big mouth.
The kind of team needed for someone who finds it “confusing” and “bewildering” collecting glasses in a small and not too busy student bar.
Imaginary blood on the hand(s).
Shakespeare writes about it in Macbeth. The quoted lines are from Wikipedia.
“Lady Macbeth becomes racked with guilt from the crimes she and her husband have committed. Bemoaning the murders of Duncan, Lady Macduff, and Banquo, she tries to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, all the while speaking of the terrible things she knows she pressed her husband to do. Her belief that nothing can wash away the blood on her hands is an ironic reversal of her earlier claim to Macbeth that “[a] little water clears us of this deedâ€
Just to add a few words to my previous comment.
I would like to ask this highly intelligent honour student AK, whether she had studied Macbeth at her excellent school, and did she try to follow Lady Macbeth’s claim to her husband “[a] little water clears us of this deedâ€?
Supplementing it with bleach, of course, after all this is the 21st century.
@Babushka
It was a cold night and I was in Genoa and the room heating failed in the hotel I was staying. I could not locate where the extra blankets (they were in the top shelf in the cupboard) were kept.
When the Judge asked Amanda “what kind of heating you have in via della Pergola?” I understood the significance of the question.
Meredith’s body was covered not because of feminine compassion, but simply because she could not stand the sight of so much blood.
She talked about blood far more often that necessary. What does it mean?
Presumably the version of the interrogation the Knox forces would most like the State Department and Strasbourg court to believe is the “I was questioned for 40 hours non-stop, no lawyer present, tag teams of police attacking me all night, lots of hits, no food or water or sleep, no bathroom breaks”.
The full catastrophe version.
In James’s quotes there was no hint of the above, and Knox herself doesnt come out with all of this on the stand or in the book.
Nevertheless psychologist Saul Kassin and ex-FBI profiler John Douglas both swallowed the “full catastrophe” version whole. Then in her book Knox in turn swallows Kassin’s version! You cant make this stuff up.
We dont yet have a post analysing John Douglas’s central chapters of a book, but he goes even beyond Kassin in his scenario of the 40 hours.
Both Kassin and Douglas seem to believe Knox “confessed” in the sense that she pointed the finger at herself, not Patrick.
And both seem to believe that that was the sole incriminating evidence in the case. Kassin and Douglas both seem to think they have got her off. (Oh? Meet Greg Hampikian, Moore, Fischer, its a long line.)
We dont know yet what (if anything) was sent to Strasbourg by “my lawyers” (which? Ted Simon? Ghirga is on record as saying she wasnt badly treated - and also on record as telling her she should shut up when more and more versions kept coming out) but here’s betting it was another invention again as Knox obviously thinks no-one keeps watch.
@ the discussion above about blood, and blood on hands…
A classical interpretation of a dream ( a good source of information about what the subconscious is saying) where there is blood on hands :
‘Blood on your hands signifies that you are experiencing some kind of guilt’, and :
‘Blood stains in a dream suggests great injury or emotional pain, perhaps to someone you know’.
Having done a great deal of cooking in my life, I agree with Yummi that I cannot recall ever having blood on my hands, and also that there are only tiny amounts on/ in fish.
The scream, also, it was a major element in Crini’s analysis of Knox’s statements.
The scream played a key role in the murder in Crini’s scenario basically Meredith’s scream, the terror of being discovered that this produced in the killers’s minds, was the reason why they decided in that moment for the last, incredibly violent fatal blow.
The scream is a key point in the prosecution’s narrative, but it is also an element with two further logical values.
First, it is an element that Knox told before any other, an element of “knowledge about the crime” which she had no reason to know or talk about, nor something that the detectives could know. And it had multiple crossed corroboration, since it is the object of a double witnesses report (from Capezzali and Monacchia) and it is also an extremely emphasized element in Rudy’s narrative.
The second value of the scream is that of trauma in Knox’s mind, something that she immediately conveyed and was noticed first by detectives, then by Mignini. She had this movement of covering her ears with her hands, while detectives observed her in the police HQ waiting room. Then she made this movement again while she recalled the murder in her interrogation and in her false accusation during the subsequent spontaneous statement; and she also put it in her story. I mean she put not just the scream but also the “covering her ears” in her Lumumba-killed-her narrative.
The scream enters the case very early on multiple levels.
Yes, thank you for that comment Yummi. Actually the scream was not the first element of knowledge about the crime which she told before any other. I am just being pedantic here. There were other elements such as her saying that Meredith’s throat had been cut. The difference between the two is that there is really no explanation one can come up with to justify her foreknowledge of Meredith’s scream which, she knows, was so loud that she had to cover her ears. And why one scream and not several?
And remember that the knife thrust (the throat cut) which finished Meredith off, and which rendered her physically incapable of screaming because the hyoid bone was broken and and a jaw muscle severed as a result, came after a non-fatal thrust to the other side of her neck.
Bloody heck, if you were being restrained at the time wouldn’t you scream the house down with that first stab!? That’s the most probable explanation for that scream. Sheer terror. But then Knox wouldn’t know about the first knife wound, would she? The autopsy results had not been released to anyone from whom she might have heard or read about this. Not unless she was there herself.
@James Raper
Exactly. What an open-and-shut case this is (as we’ve all said many times).If by foul means or fair she gets away with this horrific murder I might well let out a blood-curdling scream myself. Fortunately I fully expect my neighbours to be spared the agony.
DF2K Hello
I think the simple answer is that Knox fancies herself as a brilliant actress, Patrick Lumumba said as much as well. She is so wrapped up in her own view of herself that like all sociopaths the world just revolves around her where she is the main character in a play of her own writing. She fancies herself to be a creative writer after all.
But just like Jody Arias she is unable to conceive that people don’t love her and this confuses her. As to the sighs the pause for effect and the swallowing on cue, this is the reaction of a small child looking for both acceptance and a way out. In other words over the top in terms of acting.
Finally, and speaking of conceiving, it would not surprise me in the slightest if Knox becomes pregnant thereby getting an out from being extradited. I’m just surprised she hasn’t already tried that well worn excuse to avoid going to jail.
Wow James, what a painstaking and meticulous post, thanks so much.
Knox wrote “You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”—here we have a person who lied 6 years ago, and continues to lie.
She has a confirmed sentence of 3 years for lying against Patrick, and either because her ghost writer wrote the falsehood above about the cops (impossibly) naming “Patrick” and she didn’t check it, or because she is the author of that text, she has direct responsibility for it.
Knox just keeps digging her credibility hole deeper and deeper. I hope that this time, Justice will be Clear and Just.
@ James Raper
Yes, told before any other, sorry for my English, I mean she told that before any other (person).
By the way, she also told that Meredith suffered a sexual violence! This is what she told in her false confession.
A sexual violence would have nothing to do with the reaction of a thieve killing because he is caught stealing, feels cornered or scared and loses his head.
Crini said:
106. Meredith was the one triggering an argument because of the ‘impolite’ invasion and behavior. She accused Knox…
I do not accept this. What I feel is that the anger was only under the surface and was not strong enough to lead to a violence like this. Not even the “unflushed toilet…”
What I think is that the sequence of problems actually started with Halloween day…
AK was keen to join the party but felt slighted…
RS felt some kind of excitement when he heard /saw the fake blood on MK….
The vampire attire caused some psychological trigger in AK…
The final plan was hatched on the day after the Halloween, after MK left to meet her British friends…
RG was not in the original master plan, but was included because he could be the proverbial sacrificial goat…
RG was not told the whole plan- too risky…
The duo did not want RG to be caught… So Patrick was to take his place…
The plan was both flexible and good but there was not enough trust between the two “kids” and that was the beginning of the downfall…
But then both the kids are violence prone and you cannot explain them in terms of normal people…
Yummi,
You are quite right - Sollecito’s apparent inability to remember if he had sex with Knox on the night of the murder is both unbelievable and an insulting slap in the mouth to Knox, (boohoo!)
Most red-blooded men don’t forget sexual intercourse that readily, particularly if recalling it is a core element of support for a mutual and exculpatory alibi with the woman.
I think Sollecito is in the process of readjusting the “truth”, so that he throw Knox to the hounds, (when the opportunity arises), and thereby save his own lying ass.
Ahhh - young love….
[Ed note: Sorry to disturb the flow. Mealers long comment here on Knox’s email is hidden for the moment. It looks good for a main post, so we’ve asked for their okay.]
The thing that very few people comment on anymore is what I thought was most damning about Knox. When she testified at the first trial, she imitated, in the courtroom, the sound of Meredith choking on her own blood. How would she know what it sounded like, if she wasn’t there? And also, what kind of person would imitate someone drowning in their own blood? What purpose could that achieve? I thought that was horrifying, but I don’t know where to find that piece of information anymore. Does anyone else know?
Hi Mealer Thank you for your insights. You use the word ‘Knackered’ so therefore I know where your from, since I am from the same place myself.
Question.
Has there ever been any further inquiry into the money that was stolen from Meredith and why it was shown that Knox had made a deposit? Or am I wrong here? The consensus was that Knox had stolen it due to the expensive cost of drugs.
Also, Was Knox ever questioned as to the lamp? Sorry if this has been gone over before (which I think perhaps it has) I just would like some clarification please.
@NCKat
That is quite horrifying…I hadn’t heard of this before. I had heard it reported that AK spoke of this event, and one wonders even how she knew that ...
@ SeekingUnderstanding
Yes I recall that. She said Meredith’s death was “disgusting” and added sound effects.
@Yummi
Thank you. I am shocked and saddened but not really surprised. Imitation is a feature in certain pathologies.
According to John Follain -
“Maresca asked Amanda about what she had told Meredith’s friends about the way she had died. “You told Meredith’s friends at the police station that she had died slowly. Why on earth did you say this?”
“I heard that she’d had her throat cut, and from what I saw on CSI, these things are not quick or pleasant. So when they said: “Let’s hope that she died quickly,” I said: “But what are you saying? She had her throat slit.” But, dammit, not ........ Bleargh….....This brutality, this death…....bleargh…...it really did shock me. That’s the thing which struck me, the fact of having your throat slit, it seemed something really yucky and so I imagined it was a death that was slow and very, very scary, a really shocking death…...really yucky, disgusting, really….” Amanda said, crossing her hands repeatedly in front of her chest.
The court looked surprised at her use of expressions like “bleargh” and “yucky”, and one woman juror held her head in her hands as she listened.”
One sees a lot of things in slow motion on CSI but not of the real time in which it takes someone to die from having their throat cut. In fact I can’t recall ever having seen the detail of someone have their throat cut on CSI. That would truly shock the audience.
A bizarre allusion and once again we are supposed to believe that it is all in her imagination. The “very, very scary” bit suggests that she is placing herself at the scene as onlooker rather than as victim, but why would she want to do that? The complete lack of empathy is startling.
Has anyone got any idea what the crossing of her hands in front of her chest could have been about?
@James
‘The “very, very scary†bit suggests that she is placing herself at the scene as onlooker rather than as victim, but why would she want to do that? The complete lack of empathy is startling.’
All part and parcel of her disturbance I would say. Hands crossed over chest sounds to me like an unconscious self-protection gesture directly resulting from her mental recreation of the scene.
‘Placing herself at the scene as an onlooker….’ Not just an onlooker, but a voyeuristic onlooker. This aspect of being a voyeur, or fantasising scenarios where someone else plays things out, is a recurring theme.
On crossing arms over the chest, wiki has the following :
‘One of the most basic and powerful body-language signals is when a person crosses his or her arms across the chest.[4] This could indicate that a person is putting up an unconscious barrier between themselves and others. ...in a serious or confrontational situation, it can mean that a person is expressing opposition. This is especially so if the person is leaning away from the speaker. A harsh or blank facial expression often indicates outright hostility.’
@ James, re your Comment on 12/01/13 at 10:43 AM:
“…remember that the knife thrust (the throat cut) which finished Meredith off, and which rendered her physically incapable of screaming because the hyoid bone was broken and and a jaw muscle severed as a result…â€
Not be too pedantic either, Meredith was rendered physically incapable of screaming because the hyoid bone was actually severed [Massei, page 145], and her airway was opened to the atmosphere.
A person whose airway has been slit so wide open cannot phonate.
Meredith’s injuries [therefore] prevented her from phonating AT THAT TIME. Meredith could STILL inhale and exhale, but AT THAT TIME she could not even whisper, let alone scream, AND she could not cough, AND she could not sneeze. She could kind-of sigh, but without any sigh-phonation.
[Guede is reported to have stated that he “...leaned over her [Meredith] as she attempted to speak and [he had] written the letters “AF†on the wall because he couldn’t understand her attempted words.†Guede’s reported statement is credible to me.]
Hi Cardiol
The production of the syllable ‘K’ is impossible with the hyoid bone severed because when it is open to the air and although it above the larynx the movement for the syllable ‘K’ to be produced requires the back of the tongue to arch.
In other words if there is no air flow because of the wound then making the ‘K’ syllable is impossible whereas the syllable ‘F’ is not. Therefore with regard to Guede’s statement I agree with you that it seems credible.
Cardiol
Guede is reported to have stated that he “…leaned over her [Meredith] as she attempted to speak and [he had] written the letters “AF†on the wall because he couldn’t understand her attempted words.†Guede’s reported statement is credible to me
I think Follain also mentioned that. What AF stands for?
He MAY NOT be telling a lie in this particular case. Only problem is that she could not be able to make any kind of sound, as SeekingUnderstanding correctly states above.
This is a superb post that illuminates the problems with AK’s account of her accusation of murder against Patrick. The police were not looking for a “third man” and could not have connected a vague text message on AK’s phone to Meredith’s murder.
Knox is inconsistent in the sequence and the details leading up to her 01:45 statement for a reason. The only way the message, the murder, and Patrick’s identity fit together is if Knox told the police they were all connected.
Grahame Rhodes:
Intriguing questions indeed for Knox - no doubt, she could supply more answers than you could imagine - all of them self-conflicting, yet entirely believable to her and the brain-dead FOA alone!
@ Grahame and chami:
After the eventually fatal injury, Meredith’s inhalations and exhalations would be mainly through the sub-pharyngeal breach in her airway; probably nothing more than gurgle-sounds.
They could have been perceived as sounds similar to ‘af’s.
It is unlikely that sufficient air would be exhaled or inhaled through her mouth to create anything audible.
The ability to have created even an audible ‘F’ is questionable’
However, while she was still conscious, she may have been able to ‘bite’ her lower lip when attempting trills such as ‘F’s.
Yes Cardiol
You may be right. That aside though. It is graphic detail such as this that brings home very clearly the torture and horror that Meredith went through. Particularly her feelings of helplessness as her life drained away.
When ever I start to feel even a slight emotion for Knox (in the understanding that she is mentally sick) I am reminded of this and thereby commit myself once more to True Justice for Meredith in the hope that both of them will go to a very bad place for the vast majority of their miserable lives.
@ James Raper
You said: “One sees a lot of things in slow motion on CSI but not of the real time in which it takes someone to die from having their throat cut. In fact I can’t recall ever having seen the detail of someone have their throat cut on CSI. That would truly shock the audience. A bizarre allusion and once again we are supposed to believe that it is all in her imagination. The “very, very scary†bit suggests that she is placing herself at the scene as onlooker rather than as victim, but why would she want to do that? The complete lack of empathy is startling”.
Yes. Just putting aside for a moment the multiple things Knox said about the murder, revealing her unexplained knowledge, that we just talked about (the scream, the sexual violence, the details of death etc.), one thing that comes out certainly, as a startling feature is this one about her personality: the lack of empathy she deployed in bits like this one.
This is not evidence related to the crime, it is just manifest evidence of a narcissistic type personality style. Amanda Knox (at least in the 2007 and 2009 versions) glaringly lacks empathy, and shows all features of a narcissistic personality disorder.
@Yummi
Yes. And this being true, - as would seem irrefutable given the amount of confirming material, - it will still be true.
The narcissistic disordered person is invariably a consummate actor/actress…and, regrettably, Knox has been given opportunity to practice her performing of herself (as she wishes to be seen). I would like to see her become incognito, a non-celebrity, quietly tucked away and contained, out of the public eye.
One is used to the existence of lack of empathy. But rarely in such a chilling, defiant mode.
One of the reasons I am moved to continue to work as I can, to try for justice, is the quite dreadful thought that such a personality could erupt again, unpredictably, given certain circumstances . Strangely enough, she may even have a glimmer of this herself, and it would always make her profoundly insecure.
@ SeekingUnderstanding
I noticed there are people who are apparently disturbed by Knox’s personality performing in the public.
I have to say I am not that disturbed. I don’t see her “performing” as meaningful and somehow I don’t feel offended by people with a narcissistic personality disorder. These people are actually just suffering. They are unhappy and fragile. I’m sorry that they can suffer extreme pain because of their disease, and that they can equally cause pain to others.
But it is maybe better for the next’s security if these people are well tagged and in the open rather than hidden and “unknown”.
I also think Knox won’t go far with her performance. She unable to interact alone, not guarded by her family, or her “friendly” journalists - tucked like the ham in a sandwitch - without giving herself away.
It would actually benefit her a lot, in terms of human happiness, if she was able to get rid of her guardians and face reality.
@Yummi
Page 144, Follain mentioned that Mignini too was disturbed by Amanda’s personality. He decided to ignore it because apparently there is no provision in the law for such cases…
I seriously think that she needs intensive counseling over a long period- but then I am no psychologist. I also think that such disorders are not uncommon, although the degree can vary a lot.
I do not think she is mature enough (intellectually speaking; she has already demonstrated her biological maturity both widely and extensively) to face reality. She will fall down again and may not be able to get up next time.
And forget about happiness; she is unable to enjoy physical happiness even today and she needs to grow up and learn about intellectual happiness. Only then she will have a fulfillment in real life.
It is a long way to go.
Briefly back to the fish blood story.
One of the first rules young children learn about personal hygiene is to wash their hands before eating.
When AK is telling us that the blood from preparing dinner, would still be visible on RS’s hand after dinner, implies that RS did not wash his hands before sitting down to eat.
This is out of the question, and the entire story, including the fish blood as the source of the blood is pure fantasy.
Like so many other AK stories.
@Yummi
I am disturbed that the performing is being allowed and encouraged - because of its potential and actual affect upon naive and gullible personalities.
I myself feel deep sadness when I see her.
I observe the unhappiness and fragility you mention - her inner disturbance in fact - and find the performance transparent, and full of pathos and also almost ridiculous in a way (because she is not, in fact, a professional actress).
I think it would be better for everyone - herself included - if she were to be out of the public eye. But known and ‘tagged’, as you say, by relevant authorities, including medical ones.
@chami
It is a feature of such personalities that they frequently either reject counselling and all forms of (true) help, and/or they are so manipulative and insincere within it that they render it ineffective.
I personally feel that Ak might eventually respond… After perhaps a long period of resistance and eventually, reflection.
It would be better for her, as Yummi says, to be away from the influence of her minders who are in fact perpetuating her resistance to helping herself.
As you say, a long, long way to go.
@Babushka
A good point.
If I have ever inadvertently got a drop of two - mostly likely a very slight smear- of bloody material on a hand (not hands) whilst preparing fish….I would immediately go and wash it off thoroughly. And I mean immediately.
You may remember that in one of my posts I said that AK doesn’t even seem to know what a lie is. Often her subconscious is seen talking, straight out as it might in an (unreal) dream. That is to say the dream or nightmare is real though.
Knox does need medical help without any doubt.
Her family appear to have dismissed her previous behaviour and personality as “quirky”.
They allowed her to go to Italy knowing full well what she was like and also with her younger sister too.
I have 4 daughters myself and one of them is now the age of Knox when she first went to Perugia.
Personally I would have been terrified as a father letting my daughter go to a foreign country - if she was anything like Knox that is.
I do believe Chris Mellas (or whatever he calls himself these days) was the only one of the clan to have any reservations on the adventure.
Her biological parents were irresponsible at best.
Additionally I personally don’t buy Knox saying she received counselling (and ran out in tears) for her ‘ordeal’ suffered at the hands of the mid evil eye talians, I believe it was a belated attempt by the Knox family to give her the help she has always needed and which they swept under the carpet so irresponsibly years before.
@SeekingUnderstanding
I also think that she appears to live in a virtual reality show.
I also think the Vampire dress and fake blood on Meredith created some internal trigger. She could not take it any more. We try to explain things as if she is a normal person like most of us; we do not try to see from the inside angle that she really is.
@chami
quite right; it is good to remember to relate to everyone as they actually are. This is partly what empathy enables one to do.
Regarding the Halloween - you could well be right, especially if combined with any perceived rejection of herself (Amanda).
She would be the one to inform us -if she could but drop the ‘creative writing’ and start, albeit belatedly, to write factually…then perhaps this would prove to be the commencement of her own catharsis.
“I also think that she appears to live in a virtual reality show”
The Hellmann circus nearly put the rest of us in a virtual reality cage.
Back to justice.
Hello Everyone. Yes all very true because I am reminded of how happy Knox was in jail, in other words a controlled environment. As to people being aware of how sick she is. That would never work because people who are as psychologically damaged as she is, learn very early on to manipulate the situation to their own advantage and security, security being the operative word. That is how she conned her mother (who is the real driving force behind all of this) into letting her go to Italy in the first place..
Then there are people in the FOA who see only what they want to see but are too lazy to do any research in order to verify their opinion. In other words Knox and other individuals like this, being aware that this is dangerous, hide the fact. This type of personality will keep this up until it eventually explodes. I believe therefore under the right circumstances Knox will eventually kill again. This was stated by no less a person than Mignini and several others in that Knox has two personalities. (1) little Miss Goody Two Shoes. and (2) The Murderous Angry Unwashed Tart Fighting Against Convention.
Never lose sight of the fact either, that Sollicito is cut from the same unwashed cloth because he feels diminished in the real world and so therefore takes refuge in Amanda Knox, Manga comics and a knife fetish.
@Grahame Rhodes
I am not a psychologist. But…
We all have more than one personalities. The judge sentences a couple of people to death and then goes to bed and makes love to the beloved spouse. The general orders dropping a couple of bombs in a crowded village market before he goes for the breakfast. And I am not talking of the ponzi schemes. The student cheats in the exam. The girl will do anything to impress the boy (or vice versa). How we can do all these without putting a mask on our face?
We all need to regulate all these activities to a level- should I call acceptable?- we can handle or tolerate. There are good reasons for doing that. We don’t want to be like America- the prison country- with zero tolerance. The key is the tolerance.
Amanda needs counselling and treatment. But that is for the experts to decide.
Dear chami,
Before I became a counsellor, I was of the optimistic view that absolutely everybody could be helped through counselling and psychology if the level offered was good enough, and for long enough.
It has been a terribilita for me, as I have very reluctantly had to concede that not every human being is capable of change (in a meaningful way)... To be helped a person has to be willing to receive help, and they have to be willing to take the correct steps to help themselves. Alas, not everyone can or does.
But one tries to always hold out hope, and operate with faith, nevertheless. Or else one would cease to believe in humanity, ultimately.
And in the meantime, we have a duty to protect the innocent and law-abiding populace, in a proportionate way.
@SeekingUnderstanding
But you must agree that it is same for other things too..
Same medicine, given to different people, does not produce identical results. All are not same, and we all respond differently to the same stimulus.
In the class, the same lecture, i.e., the same information, is not received and processed and assimilated by all the students in the same way. Some do well and some do miserably. It is only natural.
Fist task is to make them sufficiently receptive. This is easier said than done. Then we need to administer the appropriate treatment.
And pray for success. Hope for the best.
@ chami
I see you understand . Thanks for not giving up on compassion.
Has anyone in TJMK ever noticed that Knox, despite claiming that her lack of Italian was a major reason for her “confusion” under questioning, suddenly seemed both fluent verbally in Italian at her original trial and in virtually mistake free writings from prison?
Does anyone think it strange that she seemed to easily follow and respond to the prosecutor’s Italian questions, (during the original trial), when the questions were relatively straight forward, but when every awkward question was put, Knox immediately referred to her interpreter, presumably so that she (Knox) could have a few seconds to think up a facile, but dishonest, answer?
Finally, does anyone at TJMK agree with me that the interpreter overstepped her duties at the police station interrogation by suggesting to Knox that she may have been traumatised into producing a false memory of Diya Lumumba’s involvement?
Up until then, Knox could not have explained her contradictory answers and admissions, but with the interpreter’s assistance, has consistently relied since on the “traumatic false memory” excuse to try to excuse her phoney baloney lies.
Next time, interpreter, do your job. You are not there to provide succour and excuses to suspects.
@Grahame
Quite right on the possibility of killing again under the right circumstances. I cannot help but think of Joran van der Sloot, his judge daddy in Aruba got him off, but he was a narcissistic brat who got on everyone’s nerves and lied in every direction, without anyone being able to extract the truth from him on poor Natalee Holloway’s murder/disappearance (this is very different, there is plenty of hard evidence, but unfortunately I don’t see Sollecito squealing on Knox, or the other way around).
What made Joran snap was someone digging into his past (Ms. Flores), and I am wondering what would break these two idiots (AK & RS) without anyone else getting hurt. In Joran’s case his father’s support had also disappeared from the scene (he died from a heart attack), and his own mother believed he was an inveterate liar and murderer, which is really not that different from what we have here (however, we see the overzealous but emotionally-detached support of Chris Mellas - not being really related to the killer it is probably easier on his conscience, at least he did not bear a monster himself, the woman he has sex with did, and that was a long time ago, before she had met him).
Instead of therapy and redemption (or counseling and treatment) for AK and RS (I don’t believe in that, only present-day Texas comes close to what I have in mind regarding swift justice), I am hoping for something more radical and I hope the opportunity will present itself at some point - for starters, they have to serve a lot more time in prison. I also see AK emotionally finished, one’s own conscience is a pretty tough judge. I can’t say much about RS, to me he’s a disgusting spineless worm, but no matter what, he can probably kiss goodbye his hopes of quietly programming in Java and C++ and having sex with mutants hanging upside-down from his ceiling fan.
@chami
You mention “treatment” already, making AK & RS “receptive”? Receptive to what? To be worthy of what you are suggesting one has to repent, to admit responsibility and wrongdoing, and we aren’t anywhere near that point, freely dispensing pardons doesn’t make this world a better place, quite the opposite.
I had understood that chami was generalising, probably in regard to Chami’s own students…?
I’m sure we all agree that with AK & RS there has to be admission of wrongdoing, and some attempt at responsibility before any progress at all could occur.
I agree about the possibility of recurrence. It is of concern.
I believe I have said before, but I think a (new born) baby might be substantially at risk. I do hope any man considering procreation with AK, in particular, consults professional advice.
@Bjorn
I am only a scientist but am talking in generalities…
Please do not forget that the Texan justice you are recommending is also a treatment in a formal sense (you are trying to correct some anomalies)...
A treatment is a cause and the effect is some intended change…
The relation of the cause and effect is the measure of receptiveness of the medium…
If the treatment does not produce a desired result, then the system is not receptive…
I do not want any criminal to get away with an apology, begging forgiveness, or using a high performance propaganda on the social media….
Punishment should be proportionate to the crime and must be an effective deterrent…
honesty is the best policy but insanity is a better defense…
What you are forgetting is that in every crime, the society also has a big role- even it is indirect. No crime takes place in a vacuum and we cannot ignore the role of the immediate environment in the crime.
Finally, RS is a far more complex animal. Too little attention on the kid-lover-boy.
Lastly, quick justice is same as mob-justice (IMHO). Justice must be delivered slowly so that your passion does not cloud your own judgements. Judgement must be tempered with compassion so that it is not mistaken for torture or cruelty.
@ Chami
Yes that may well be true, but in a perfect world there would be always an acceptance of responsibility for wrongs done to our fellow beings. That is not the case here.
Psychologically when we are children we do not know where our parents stop and we start. That is why rebellion usually begins at about the age of 14 or so depending on individual maturity when children start to create their own identity.
Children are like sponges though they except everything they are told as being true. Knox was abandoned by her father and in consequence spoiled rotten my her mother who told her she was brilliant which Knox really believes because the opposite would be too much to bare.
That being the case at the very best Knox is just another average to poor human being with little going for her.
This is born out by her slutty behavior and picking up strange man and having sex with them even though she has no clue who they are. She does this to prove to herself over and over again that she is attractive. She does this to cover up her psychological need for acceptance and to deny the devastation that her father rejected her.
This is the reason for Sollicito and the murder of Meredith who presented her with the truth that she really was not much good after all. That is born out with the endless strumming of one chord on the guitar and any lack of hygiene whatever. When you don’t wash you smell. When you have sex with strangers if you don’t wash then it’s the same result. She did this and I suppose still does because of her rebellion against her father and given the chance the entire male community who she secretly loathes. The only one was Sollicito because he was and still is easily manipulated.
@ Mealer,
You wrote - “Finally, does anyone at TJMK agree with me that the interpreter overstepped her duties at the police station interrogation by suggesting to Knox that she may have been traumatised into producing a false memory of Diya Lumumba’s involvement?”
I think you could have been clearer the way you put this but, basically, yes I do think the interpreter overstepped her function as an interpreter.
However I think she mentioned trauma in a genuine attempt to help both the investigators and Knox, prompted by Knox herself putting her hands to her ears and rolling her head.
The interpreter didn’t suggest anything other than amnesia could be the result of trauma. If Knox’s own book is anything to go by the question of amnesia was never an issue for her.
Seeing her cue Knox seized the opportunity to both ingratiate herself with her questioners and distract them at the same time, by incriminating Lumumba there and then, and later tried to cop out of that with the claim that her memory was unreal being the product of the trauma of the questioning. Typical of emotional rather than rational thinking. As it turned out the sword she wielded was double edged. She hadn’t, as usual, thought through the consequences.
Putting it like that is not a defence to calunnia by the way. She was still knowingly and maliciously obstructing justice.
I should be clearer. If a child is told repeatedly they are no good they will believe that.
(Adults too, if repeatedly told they are ugly, hopeless useless etc; will eventually except it as being the truth. This is called psychological abuse.)
The most likely future for abused children therefore, when they grow up, is to underscore this belief by getting into situations which reinforce this belief. If children are abused and hit and come from an abusive family then they will, most likely, become abusers later on themselves.
Most likely Knox was told by her father that she was just a financial drain upon his finances (See Child Support) then she would believe that since it was true. And yet little girls will try almost anything to be excepted by their fathers, just the same as little boys who cleave to their mothers (Look at me Look at Me Mum) Little girls sooner or later psychologically wish to attract their fathers and compete with their mothers. This has it’s basis in sexual feeling of course and if little girls feel rejected then that feeling is only made the stronger. Both boys and girls, men and woman are hard wired to do this by the way because we are in competition with others whether we like it or not.
That is the propagation of the species after all which is to pick the best possible mate which all starts when we are children and in this case psychologically is why Knox is the way she is. I am not offering any excuse for what she did incidentally. She should go to jail or a very long time.
@chami
Thank you for elaborating.
There is nothing quick about justice here, this particular process has been very slow and deliberate, and I do not accept the notion that society has a *big* role - it’s like blaming the air for the flu, not the virus itself that is present in the air and is causing the flu.
Before we talk compassion, rehabilitation, or execution for that matter, we still need to pass the huge hurdle of re-establishing guilt in a court of law, something that has become increasingly difficult (people corrupt/incompetent enough pulling the compassion trigger among other things - the “bravi ragazzi” argument).
There was a post on this very board a few *years* back (a measure of how “quick” justice really is) about how insulting compassion is to the victims of a crime, it was a book written by an Italian woman, I forget what her name is. People focus on rehabilitating the perpetrators more than they do on the forgotten victims.
True compassion is subtle, difficult or sometimes challenging to achieve, and, I would suggest, comparatively rare.
If someone was referring to compassion being insulting then it wasn’t compassion. It could have been pity, expediency, political correctness,indulgence, or even weakness…or any mixture of these.
I happen to think it’s appalling - the view that ‘nice kids couldn’t have done such and such’. This is akin to prejudice, an assumption, perhaps mental laziness. Or even just simple ignorance.
There is plenty of material to show that those with ruthless psychopathy are frequently attractive, charming, manipulative and often intelligent in a specific way, articulate.
Moreover, they can ruthlessly exploit the ‘rehabilitation’ offered - it just becomes a further food for the narcissism - known sometimes as ‘narcissistic supply’.
True compassion requires strength - both mental and spiritual strength, as well as what is often called detachment. (Hence it is associated with wisdom). To practise it, it is essential to utilize the facility of discernment, - put bluntly,- to know what one is dealing with.
Thank you SeekingUnderstanding for putting it so crisply. I was trying to say the same.
@Bjorn
“a measure of how “quick†justice really is…”
Justice must wait till passions die down.
We cannot think while the mob screams eye for an eye.
You are right when you say it does not become easier “with people corrupt/incompetent enough pulling the compassion trigger among other things…”
But there is nothing called the perfect perfection. We all are imperfect but we all try to do our best. But some people do fail and we need to have a balance: pull up some by holding their hands or lock some of them up.
But then I am happy that I am not a judge nor a lawyer. I am not defending anyone here, but myself.
Hey, Chami,
If justice is done quickly, passions do not take form—I say justice, and not something else, it has to be, well, just and proper.
Laws exist precisely for speeding up the process of making the right decisions - if we have to assemble the Council of Elders and have a debate every time a kid breaks a window, that’s not good. Just read the law, execute it (read: spank him), and let’s move on.
If justice is done quickly, there is no mob screaming - the mob assembles when justice is denied/delayed and more and more people feel something is wrong and nothing has been done about it, or whatever has been done is not good enough.
Of course, these are only my opinions, but I am willing to defend them 😊
When people are bereaved and grieving, they often seek solace and perhaps counselling.
Many are bothered by ‘how long will it take’ ?
Some feel under pressure from less empathetic people to ‘get over it’.
So they ask, how long is ‘normal’? What is quick, what is slow?
There is only one correct answer : it takes as long as it takes.
It is following the process in an unforced way that matters…working through each stage (which isn’t necessarily consecutive), and reaching the end of the long road. Many feel it will never, ever end. And then suddenly, one day, it does…out of the blue. It has taken the time it needed to take.
And so with justice. Perhaps resolution can be found very speedily. Or, regrettably, there may be persistent and determined obstruction to justice. So those seeking it have to also be persistent, and patient, and methodical.
But justice, and the process leading to it, is so important that it takes the time it takes.
i prey every night that justice = knox and sollecito locked up for 30yrs…
shes a liar… a hateful nasty person.
he is just awful, i dont have the words really…
beats the life out of me how they came to be released in the first place.
The kerchers are kind loving people. why did they do this awful hateful thing to them.
its Merediths birthday at xmas..poor poor girl.
James Raper.
Thanks for your reply. I agree with your comments, which are, as usual, well observed and expressed.
@Bjorn
I agree with Chami & SeekingUnderstanding but I know how you feel - I am impatient and frustrated too sometimes with the process in this case. If I’m honest though I suspect I’m impatient for my unsettling doubts about the outcome to be over quickly rather than impatient that any “justice” be done. Nobody likes uncertainty, as insurance companies will testify!
It’s similar (as SeekingUnderstanding says) with grief following the loss of a loved one. It’s the uncertainty with regard to one’s new life situation that can be difficult to come to terms with for a time - and I agree that takes as long as it takes. Emotions don’t seem too impressed with our linear logic in these things.
“Swift justice” is almost an oxymoron, though beloved of fundamentalists who notably can’t abide uncertainty (but claim their God ordains the quick resolution ). They would do well to consider that our higher/better nature (the only god we should recognise, in my view) always seems to take time to manifest.
Act in haste repent at leisure etc., etc.
@mollythecat
Thank you for the reminder regarding Meredith’s upcoming birthday on the 28th.
Let’s hope the court processes this month point towards a just outcome.
Mealer
Your analysis of AK’s e-mail is absolutely brilliant. Congratulations!
Where has it been moved to? Where could add my own comments to it, please?
Hi Babushka
Mealer’s comment on the email is coming up as a main post.
Odysseus
You remark that “...their God ordains the quick resolution”.
I seem to remember the adage, “The wheels of God grind slow, but they grind exceeding small”.
Let’s hope that the upcoming court Judgement, borne of slow and careful deliberation, will grind the sickening lies of Knox and Sollecito down to the finest dust.
@Mealer
If the god is really so just and honourable, then why we have so much of suffering and so much of sorrows everywhere?
Why we see the powerful always get away from the justice? Why the poor always have to pay?
Why the god allowed so much of inequality and injustice to breed in the first place? Why he allowed the crook and the corrupt to be always the most powerful?
Why the justice is mostly inaccessible?
So much of violence and so little of justice- the backlog is growing and he needs to hurry.
I haven’t read through the entire post or comments, so apologies if this is repetitive. I don’t believe the translator pictured is Anna Donnino. Donnino testified as a witness at the trial and it’s very unlikely the court would have assigned her. The court translator seemed young to me and, yes, was treated disrespectfully by Knox. Again, I may have misunderstood the comments (entirely possible!).
In reading Knox’s testimony in English, she essentially used the same words repeatedly. She doesn’t have an extensive English vocabulary as it is, so it wouldn’t have been difficult to rehearse her limited story (read: lies) in Italian. Although her answers were lengthy, she typically wasted time by re-asking the question to the lawyers (a technique used by liars to stall for time while thinking up their response), then she repeated the same lies about interrogation etc without ever answering the question. It drove Carlo Pacelli mad although Mignini typically maintained composure.
So my point is her testimony was limited and rehearsed in my view, not stretching her Italian much. Comprehending the lawyers’ questions required I’m guessing an intermediate level grasp? It was not varied in topic making it easier.
Also about Knox and Sollecito’s knowledge of Meredith’s Halloween costume, they would not have seen her that afternoon, night or getting ready. They did see her the following morning where Knox remarked on her makeup still being in place as Meredith had problems removing the fake blood. Did they see the online pics next day I wonder? Meredith’s friends had uploaded party photos. As Knox was obsessed with Meredith, this is entirely likely and a sinister aspect I’d not considered previously.
@ CaliDeeva,
From the Massei Report -
“Knox had been provided with the assistance of an American English interpreter in the person of Dr Anna Baldelli Fronticelli.”
That’s the lady pictured above.
@Chami,
For the answer as to why “God” allows so much evil in the world, how long have you got?
Where next:
Click here to return to The Top Of The Front PageOr to next entry A Second Analysis Of Amanda Knox’s Email To Family And Friends Of 4 November 2007 DRAFT
Or to previous entry Amanda Knox Lies Again To Get Herself Into Another European Court “But Really, Judge, Its Only PR”