Mr Mignini, This Person Looks Like Bad News For The Kerchers

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Candace Dempsey managed to sneak into the Italian Supreme Court last April by pretending to be a journalist and flashing her driving licence at a guard:

“I got into the hearing room by tagging along with Doug Longhini of 48 Hours Mystery, a veteran of the Natalie Holloway and Jon Benet-Ramsay cases. We were the only Americans who showed up. I didn’t actually have a press pass, but handed the guard my driver’s license and told him I was an Italian-American journalist from Seattle. He found my cover story and accent so entertaining that he let me in.”

It’s a shame the guard didn’t ask Candace Dempsey what media organisation she worked for. He would have found the fact she only had a reader’s blog more entertaining than her cover story and accent. I’m impressed that the guard spoke English, but I hope the security is tightened at the trial.

If Doug Longhini of CBS News abetted this apparent felony at the Supreme Court, perhaps Mr Mignini should haul him in for some hard questioning too.

Now that it is looking like Capanne Prison might be getting one or two new inmates soon, maybe they should brush up on their command of Morse code.

They may be able to tap supportive messages on the bars. For example “Jeez, Amanda, I am real sorry that I irritated your prosecutors and judges so.”

I don’t know which crime was worse: smuggling a fake journalist into the Italian Supreme Court or producing that terrible CBS News documentary about the case. Doug Longhini can’t count on Paul Ciolino to bail him out either after CBS News decided to let Paul go.

This comment from the UW Daily written by Paul Ciolino is one I hadn’t seen before - in fact, I missed this entire string!

The last line, “You won’t be sorry” made me laugh a little bit.  Do you think he’s moved on, or is he watching this case closely?

Here’s the comment, and following it is the link:

“#10 Paul Ciolino
(Carol Stream, IL | Unverified Name)
on April 2, 2008 at 3:10 p.m. I am a investigator that CBS News hired to investigate the Knox matter in Italy. It is disturbing that her fellow Americans are so quick to judge her on rumor, innuendo, and nonsense. I urge all of you, no matter what your opinion to watch 48 Hours on CBS on Saturday, April 12, 2008. I believe that the show comes on at 8:00 p.m. pst, however you’d better check.

I cannot talk or answer any questions prior to that date, but I urge all of you to give Amanda the same courtesy that you would give one of your friends or family members if they were to find themselves in a similar situation.

Many of your comments to date are frankly disturbing and your sources of information have zero credibility. Please give one of your fellow students a break guy’s. You wont be sorry. Thank you.

Paul Ciolino
Chicago, IL.
http://www.pjcinvestigations.com”

http://dailyuw.com/2008/4/2/amanda-knox-remain-jail/

Frank of Perugia-Shock shots? A reader asks. Yes, we already have some, and we could maybe use more. Frank has done three things we really dont like.

1) Pulling a u-turn on Meredith, and opportunistically throwing his weight, such as it is, behind one of the defendants.

2) Attempting to make money out of this very sad case via the Google advertising on his site.

3) Maybe the worst of the three, assisting the person who we believe these shots are of to research a book on the case.

That for-profit book was never discussed with the Kercher family, and that person is probably the last on Earth they would want writing about their daughter and the case.

To our readers in Perugia: if you see ANY SIGN that Frank of Perugia-Shock is helping this person around Perugia, we’d absolutely appreciate receiving your tips.

And in particular, your shots showing the two of them together.

With her outfit, tiny camera and general “I’m not supposed to be here” shifty demenour she looks like a ghoulish tourist who’s taken time out to take some snaps of the dead girls family or a sickening blood sucking hack out for the story in true undercover tabloid style. I’m not sure which is worse, ghoulish tourist or blood sucking hack?  My only pro comments re Candy & Frank?  They have definitely brought the comic relief to an otherwise tragic and heartbreaking case about lots of young lives ruined, either by their ‘friends’ or themselves.

Thank you Fast Pete!  Why not post a Sinister Stalking Shot of of the heinous couple, Candy and Frank, each day during the trial?  It would help to keep up on the fashions of a wannabe filmttype journalist and fake food blogger.  Those sunglasses! Oh, I am sure she read somewhere that college kids wear stuff like that, and feels quite close to the fashions since she went to school, what?  three hundred years ago?  One time I cooked up noodles and threw some sauce on them, topping it off with a little merlot.  Did I mention my best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s aunt one time talkd to someone who was born in Italy?  As for Frank, he is just a pussy.  Sorry.

I regret that Mr Ciolino is unable to contribute to this case at present; he is still tracking Steve Fossett to South America and telling his widow that she is an insurance fraudster. Another great investigation from Paul Ciolino P.I. (Particularly Insulting) She probably wont sue, most of his victims have something the great gumshoe lacks; dignity and respect.

But Paul, don’t worry about those back-stabbers at CBS, there’s a job for you here at National Enquirer any time you want it. Come to think of it, we’re working on something big that is just up your street right now. Turns out that that Galileo feller never believed the world was a sphere or went round the sun at all. It was all that Copernicus guy, a lone wolf who fled to Germany. But the Italian prosecutors needed a scapegoat so they hauled in Galileo just because he once bunked with Copernicus. Fourteen hours later and Galileo confesses to heresy. Well wouldn’t you?  These guys were hard core Italian Inquisition scary types so naturally Galileo just pointed the finger at the first person whose name came into his head as an accomplice. BUT IT WAS A FALSE CONFESSION PAUL!! Is that justice Paul, I ask you, is that justice? And hey quess what, once the prosecutors realised their mistake they just carried right on rather than own up. Old starry eyes wrote a diary to set the record straight and the prosecutors just leaked PARTS of it to make it look like a retraction of heresy when actually he was demonstrating his innocence. You can prove this in 40 minutes flat Paul, I’m sure of it. After that you can prove that Copernicus was wrong anyway and we’ve got film of Armstrong in a big hanger filmset in Nevada when he was supposed to be on the moon. But no need to rush. You need to take it just one story at a time Paul. One story at a time.

The woman there looks like Mark David Chapman, the way she is sneaking about behind the Kercher family’s backs.

She really is scary, her type of mind, the danger comes from her impersonal approach though pretending to care she has done enough to show she must be insane to imagine people will be taken in by her awful manners and her pure bread-headed motivation for having anything at all to do with the murder case.

I curse that person for her adding to the pain, her undermining of the case, her trying to profit from Meredith’s awful death and using underhanded ways in everything she doe in relation to this case.

Pete are you really saying you want Mignini to take time off from preparing for the case of his life to investigate someone taking pictures of the victim’s family in public places ? (I’m taking a wild guess that in the country which gave us the word “paparazzi” this is not actually a crime.) Mignini is a public servant working for the Italian justice system not a personal bodyguard for the Kercher family. In brutal terms he only needs one of them to take the stand and say Meredith was a nice girl who wouldn’t have gone along with any sexual shenanigans.

I think that even if the Kerchers were aware of who Candace Dempsey was (which I doubt; in their position trawling the internet for comment/discussion of the case is the last thing I would want to do) her “crimes” would have the same impact as a flea bite on someone whose leg was hanging off.

For starters, the person we drew attention to has a history of being obsessively pro one of the defendants, and she ran the one website in the world ever to allow hate speech against the Kerchers to remain up.

Her location in those shots alone behind the Kerchers and her appearance caused a LOT of eyebrows to go up when the shots first came out. Try to find any similar shots with any other commenter on the case. Several professional reporters ridiculed her for ever allowing herself to get in those shots, and she will probably respect other peoples’ space a lot more in future.

Our guess is that the Kerchers know full well who she is - Meredith’s friends certainly do, and we hear that they are pretty resolutely against ever talking with her. She is writing an unauthorized book which was kept very secret, and may even now have been secret if we had not unearthed it. We dont like the notion of the book and will not be helpful to its progress here. And what you would do in the Kerchers’ position in following or not following the case on the internet is utterly immaterial.

Mr Mignini does have the overview function over the Kerchers when they are in Perugia. Nobody suggested he was their personal bodyguard; you invented that. He meets with them when they are in Perugia, and he is known for his great concerns over the families of all victims. If he thinks any person is acting peculiar around the Kerchers, he will take whatever action he thinks appropriate. Nobody suggested anyone is committing any crimes; you invented that too.

I think Pete was being a bit facetious, Mike, while making a larger point that is more serious. Nobody seriously expects Mignini to bother with this individual. On the other hand, she has been one of his most consistent and vocal critics throughout the investigation process.

It is unfortunate that this particular journalist from Seattle was caught in the same frame as the Kerchers by cameras not once but several times last September, because she runs a reader blog that has been pro-defendent and anti-Mignini and that, until recently, allowed comments offensive to the Kerchers to stand while also posting negative comments about Maresca, the lawyer who speaks for the Kercher family. This is simply not objective journalism, and someone who criticizes the prosecution and the victim’s lawyer—both of whom the family has repeatedly expressed its faith in—simply has no business pretending that it is.

If you visit her blog, you will probably not find many of the offensive comments. A lot of clean-up work has been going on in the last couple of weeks over there. Fortunately, many people who have been following this case and who have seen the modus operandi in action were astute enough to make copies of all these comments. It may be harder to revise history than it appears.

On a related subject, the letter that Judge Mike Heavey wrote on official letterhead in Italian, which requested a change in venue for the trial and contained numerous false claims, has now been removed from the website that once proudly displayed it (Anne Bremner’s). The two were widely criticized, to the point of ridicule, in Italy. Their response: vanish the evidence and pretend it never happened. The same modus operandi used by the blogger. Does this seem right to you? I think most journalists would find the practice unethical and dishonest.

Where next:

Or to next entry Doug Preston’s Nasty Ant-Italy Anti-Mignini Campaign To Stir Bigotry Hits A Wall

Or to previous entry To Our Readers In Perugia: Please Help Us Identify The Person At Back?