TJMKShills http:/truejustice.org/ee/index.php/mafiapoodles/ en CARRDIOL@aol.com Copyright 2008 2008-12-10T01:51:00+00:00 Was A Vulnerable John Douglas Hijacked By ‘First Generation Crackpots’ To Lie About The Case? https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/was_a_vulnerable_john_douglas_hijacked_by_first_generation_crackpots https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/was_a_vulnerable_john_douglas_hijacked_by_first_generation_crackpots#When:15:44:00Z {summary} First-generation crackpots Doug Preston, Michael Heavey, and Steve Moore 1. Overview Of This Post In these four magnificent posts the Machine shows in devastating detail HOW John Douglas mis-stated the case. Click for Post:  How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #1 Click for Post:  How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #2 Click for Post:  How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #3 Click for Post:  How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #4 Here I would like to examine one good possible reason WHY he mis-stated the case. In this context, please take special note in Posts 2 and 3 of how the Knox PR shills and to a lesser extent the Sollecito PR shills increasingly misled in 2007-2010 about AK and RS and the evidence against them. This helped to drown out genuine news of what was a very fair and decisive trial and the blatant corruption of the 2011 appeal court that came next. Who were those shills? The list became very long but Doug Preston and Michael Heavey began large-scale lying from 2007 (to such an extent that even the defense counsel complained) and Steve Moore noisily picked up the load from 2009.  2. John Douglas: The Public Persona We Already Knew Douglas was born on June 18, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York City, so he is now aged 73. In 1995 John Douglas turned in his FBI badge and he retired at the tellingly early age of 49. In the subsequent 23 years he wrote some books on past profiling cases which won some respect, even though not everybody marvels at the science of profiling and its so-so results and some even consider them something of a fraud. He gained a loyal readership and saw his alter ego repeatedly recreated in crime shows on TV. But since 2004 Douglas does not seem to have written any books exclusively by himself. Much of what he wrote since was recycled, and he adopted some seemingly dogmatic and badly argued positions, for example on the JonBenet Ramsey and West Memphis Three cases. In 2011-2013 John Douglas first wrote about Meredith’s case and, with Heavey, Moore and others, entered into a major lobbying campaign in the US. To quote from the Machine’s third post: Douglas came late to the case and the “beautiful” Amanda Knox seems to have turned him into something of a whirling dervish. He has made false claims in several books, in postings on his own and other websites, in interviews, in a pitch to a near-empty room at the Congress, and in one or two forays into the State Department. Peaking in 2013 before the Nencini appeal (the repeat of the annulled Hellman appeal), they were seemingly made to (1) poison the jury pool of an ongoing legal process and (2) inflame American public opinion to create pushbacks at the political level. In his four posts so far, the Machine has meticulously demonstrated how John Douglas became detached from the realities of the case. He has been misleading millions on a grand scale. Literally dozens and dozens of his findings are flat-out wrong. And Douglas did this with a remarkably angry and inflammatory contempt for the Italian investigators and judiciary. In what the Machine examined John Douglas comes across as defamatory (against especially Dr Mignini), racist (against Rudy Guede), and xenophobic (against Italy in general) and utterly callous toward Meredith’s long-suffering family. 3. John Douglas: Telling Mental Signs In Public Domain On October 13, 2017 an article by Ed Power about John Douglas’s mental health appeared in the British newspaper The Telegraph: The real Mindhunter: inside the head of FBI ‘serial killer whisperer’ John E Douglas. The article was never questioned or rebutted. The sourcing is specific. The Telegraph, a respected source in itself, published this Article 10 months ago & it has apparently not been challenged since then even by his family. And there is independent corroboration in an already-screened movie series, that addressed the subject of Douglas’s mental health, which was offered on Netflix beginning in December 2015. The Telegraph article is well worth reading in its entirety and includes the following passage: “...the ghoulish nature of the job eventually wore Douglas down. Nightmares and sleepless nights were increasingly frequent and he found it hard to communicate with his family…. Under immense pressure at work, he contracted viral encephalitis ““ a fever which doctors said “fried his brain”. His family were warned he would likely be left in a vegetative stage. He recovered however,.........but the psychological trauma never quite lifted and he turned in his badge for good in 1995 aged just 49.” So he was not aged more than 49 when he contracted viral encephalitis at least 23 years ago. Complete recovery from viral encephalitis of this severity is unusual.  Any implication that it was “immense pressure at work” that caused his viral encephalitis is misleading. Only a virus could have caused viral encephalitis. However, stress could have lowered his physiological resistance. To size him up with confidence we really need to know more about this viral episode, but the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) will almost certainly be enlisted to hinder fulfillment of that need. Common sense tells us that Douglas’s fall from his former excellence into his current incompetence and gross negligence is probably a late consequence of his viral encephalitis, This late consequence is analogous to Shingles as a late consequence of Chickenpox. 4. John Douglas: Was He Hijacked By The Knox PR? The evidence for this seems pretty clear. The last book with Douglas as sole author was in 2004. The AK Book “The Forgotten Killer” was published in 2013. His chapter was co-written with Mark Olshaker. The co-authors of other chapters were the PR shills Douglas Preston, Michael Heavey, Steve Moore, and Jim Lovering. All have been exposed by us here over the years. The Introduction was by Thomas Lee Wright, and the malicious grandstander Bruce Fischer introduced at least some of this team to one another; his fingerprints seem on the book as well as those of Marriott and the Knox-Mellases. Let us allow a few of our past exposures to show how they originated almost all of Douglas’s false claims . 1. Doug Preston Click for Post:  Doug Preston’s Nasty Ant-Italy Anti-Mignini Campaign To Stir Bigotry Hits A Wall Click for Post:  New Mignini Interview Makes Doug Preston Look Increasingly Incompetent And Vindictive Click for Post:  How Doug Preston’s Wrong Claims In His MOF Afterword Were Often Contradicted In The Past 2. Michael Heavey Click for Post:  Why Prominent Knox Supporter Judge Heavey Faces An Uphill Task Click for Post:  Prominent Seattle Knox PR Puppet Michael Heavey Might Be About To Take A Fall Click for Post:  FOA’s Michael Heavey Sends A Pretentious Dishonest Letter To President Obama Copied To Congress 3. Steve Moore Click for Post:  How With Myriad False Claims Steve Moore Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots 4. Thomas Lee Wright Click for Post:  Fervent Knox Supporter Tom Wright Seemingly Strongarms Knox High School Into “Honoring” Her 5. Bruce Fischer Click for Post:  Disarray And Decay In The Pro-Knox Parade: Bruce Fischer’s Epidemic Of Malicious Claims 5. My Own Conclusion It will be easy for the media to take this further. John Douglas needs to speak up. In shilling for Knox… did he jump, or, was he pushed? 2018-09-18T15:44:00+00:00 How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #4 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_4 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_4#When:09:18:00Z {summary} Muddled mindhunters Mark Olshaker, John Douglas, and Jim Clemente [Long post. Click here to go straight to Comments] 1. Post And Series Overview In the previous posts, I used the official court reports and court testimonies to prove John Douglas has made numerous demonstrably false claims. They addressed false claims about (1) Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s questioning on 5-6 November 2007;  (2) the personas and backgrounds of Knox and Sollecito and some of the evidence against them; and (3) the persona and background of Rudy Guede and some of the evidence against him. In this post, I will analyse a number of specific claims that John Douglas makes in his analysis of the crime scene in The Forgotten Killer. Note that the police processed the whole of the apartment for evidence and as it was distributed throughout they defined that as the crimescene. All the courts accepted that, and the witness testimony and the judges’ reports make that overwhelmingly obvious. But bizarrely without any attempt at an explanation John Douglas redefines it as merely Meredith’s bedroom, and so all evidence elsewhere is ignored by him. For ex-FBI he sure adopts very strange methods. Further reading:  TJMK/Wiki Evidence Points Masterlist: 400 points In 25 Parts Further reading:  Totality of Evidence Suggests Knox And Sollecito Guilty Just As Charged 2. Some False Claims On Crimescene Evidence, Rebutted Douglas’s claims incessantly contradict the definitive judgments of the Italian Supreme Court here. Examples of his overarching claims include (1) there was proof of only one attacker and no proof of multiple attackers, (2) there is no indication of a female attacker, and (3) the break-in at the cottage was genuine and not staged to mislead investigators. I will focus on rebutting these overarching claims in this post. Devastatingly convincing closed-court recreation ignored by Douglas 1. False Claims By Douglas On Number Of Attackers Involved “Had there been any specific indication of a female offender or multiple offenders, the pronouns would have been adjusted accordingly.” But there were multiple indication of multiple offenders. Many hours at trial were devoted to this evidence, and in Post #3 in this series I explained how even the defenses had to fall back to accepting and trying to explain this. . John Douglas clearly hasn’t read the official court reports, court testimonies or any of experts’ reports and he wasn’t in the court to hear the prosecution’s experts explain why they believe there were multiple assailants. So he’s in no position to flatly claim Meredith killed by a lone attacker or address let alone refute the evidence for multiple attackers. In fact, leaving aside the annulled Hellman, all courts up to and including the Supreme Court definitively ascertained that there were indeed multiple attackers, and that it’s a proven fact Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith was killed and the break-in was staged. All the judges involved in the case from 2007 through 2015 concluded this after examining the medical reports and listening to the testimonies and cross-examinations of numerous forensic experts, including those who actually examined Meredith’s body and those who recreated the pack attack. The fine journalist Barbie Nadeau was in the courtroom when these experts testified at trial in 2009 and explained why they concluded there were multiple attackers. “Countless forensic experts, including those who performed the autopsies on Kercher’s body, have testified that more than one person killed her based on the size and location of her injuries and the fact that she didn’t fight back””no hair or skin was found under her fingernails.” And here is more testimony on the certainty of multiple attackers. “countless prosecution witnesses, including two coroners who did examine Kercher’s body, testified that the 47 cuts and bruises indicated that “more than two hands” were at work.” Further reading:  Supreme Court Confirms All Three Were There And Lied, RS & AK Apologists Desperate To Downplay That Further reading:  Why Final AK & RS Appeal Against Guilty Verdict May Fail: Multiple Wounds = Multiple Attackers One of many exhibits on the knives not mentioned by Douglas 2. False Claims By Douglas Denying Multiple Knives Involved One of the main reasons why these forensic experts believe there were multiple attackers is there were different-sized knife wounds on Meredith’s neck. The fine journalist Andrea Vogt who was also in court reported more details about this evidence. “Injuries on Kercher’s body ‘consistent with attack by more than one person….  Wounds were from two different knives, Perugia courtroom is told…. Professor Gianaristide Norelli testified that the multiple lesions on Ms Kercher’s body were consistent with being held and attacked by more than one person. He said she died of suffocation and interpreted her stab wounds as having been inflicted as threats during a struggle. The wounds, mostly on the side of her neck, were possibly inflicted by two different knives, he said, but noted that one of the stab wounds was compatible with the alleged murder weapon.” It’s worth noting the credentials of some of these forensic experts whom are about the best Italy has to offer and certainly on a par with any American expert: Professor Norelli is the Chief of Legal Medicine at Firenze University and the President of the Italian Conference of Professors of Legal Medicine;  Mauro Bacci is a Professor of Forensic Science and Director of Forensic Medicine at the University of Perugia. Giuseppe Codispoti is the Assistant Chief of the Scientific Police. The Italian Supreme Court has repeatedly acknowledged the certainty of two knives having been used in the attack on Meredith. “expert results that because of the morphology of the injuries, attribute them to two different cutting weapons used by different individuals” (Judge Giordano’s Supreme Court report). “the numerous wounds inflicted on the unfortunate victim, very probably with two knives.” (Judge Chieffi’s Supreme Court report). “Firstly, testifying in this direction are the two main wounds observed on the victim’s neck, on each side, with a diversified path and features, attributable most likely (even if the data is contested by the defense) to two different cutting weapons.” (Judge Marasca’s Supreme Court report). Judge Chieffi in his report presents a concise summary of why the Supreme Court ascertained from the wounds that there were multiple attackers. “From the examination of the stab wounds and the bruises found on the victim, a picture of massive injury in terms of number, distribution, and diversity emerged, especially with regard to the injuries inflicted on the face and neck (where the wounds were 4”8 centimetres deep), a picture which contrasted with the absence of defensive wounds; [7] a circumstance that was at odds with the fact that the young British student was equipped with a strong physique, trained in self”defence through a course in karate which she had taken; all of which led to the conclusion that the criminal action was necessarily carried out by several people acting together against the victim, who was placed in the position of being unable to defend herself or shield herself with her hands to avoid the repeated striking of vital parts such as the neck. Also considering the type of activity undertaken by the attacker, it turned out to be very difficult to hypothesize an isolated and individual action, because it included acts aimed at disrobing the victim (who was unquestionably dressed when the attacker appeared), violating her private parts, and stabbing her with a knife; the victim was certainly seized by her wrists to prevent a reaction, so that Guedeʹs DNA was found on the cuff of the young English woman’s sweatshirt; but the diverse morphology of the wounds, their number, and their distribution led to the conclusion that there was more than one attacker. In particular, it was found that many injuries were caused by activities of grasping, others by a pointed and cutting weapon; they were extremely different in size and degree of injury, and had reached the victim sometimes from the right and sometimes from the left. All of which led to the conclusion that more than one attacker, together, held the girl, limited her movements, and struck her from the right and from the left, depending on their position with respect to her, but above all they covered her mouth in order to prevent her from repeating the scream that was heard and reported by the two witnesses mentioned above.” (Judge Chieffi’s Supreme Court report). John Douglas doesn’t address any of this evidence on multiple attackers presented at great length in great detail in court. Further reading:  Strong Proof That Raffaele Sollecito Also Stabbed Meredith Kercher Causing The Lesser Wound. Further reading:  Multiple Attackers and the Compatibility of the Double DNA Knife (Exhibit 36) Knox DNA profile outside bedroom not mentioned by Douglas 3. False Claims By Douglas On Locations And Implications Of DNA Douglas erroneously claims that is scientifically impossible for the other attackers to have left none of their DNA at the crime scene - which he wrongly defines as merely Meredith’s bedroom. “It is scientifically impossible for one offender to leave extensive DNA evidence and for others involved in the same assault to leave none. But as I’ve already pointed out in the previous posts, Rudy Guede did NOT leave many DNA samples in Meredith’s room - he left just four samples. And it is flat-out wrong that the other two left none at the rest of the real crime scene: the complete apartment. . It’s an indisputable fact that Raffaele Sollecito’s DNA was found on Meredith’s bra clasp. Of the 17 loci tested in the sample, Sollecito’s profile matched 17 out of 17. Sollecito’s DNA was identified by two separate DNA tests. “Both by the quantity of DNA analyzed and by the fact of having performed the analysis at 17 loci with unambiguous results, not to mention the fact that the results of the analysis were confirmed by the attribution of the Y haplotype to the defendant, it is possible to say that it has been judicially ascertained that Raffaele Sollecito’s DNA was present on the exhibit; an exhibit that was therefore handled by the defendant on the night of the murder.” (The Nencini report, page 267). John Douglas is entitled to make the far-fetched claim that Sollecito’s DNA on Meredith might have been due to contamination. However, it is deeply dishonest of him to pretend that Sollecito’s DNA was not found on Meredith’s bra clasp in the first place. Douglas is not a forensic biologist and he has no special expertise in DNA evidence. He seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that DNA is like wet paint and that if the forensic police swabbing does not provide evidence of someone in a room, that is definitive proof they haven’t been in that room. But no DNA expert ever claimed this. For one thing the priority given to the processing of Meredith’s room was for fingerprints, and not for DNA Professor Peter Gill contradicts John Douglas with the following observation. “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.” Meredith had bruises around her neck, but the Scientific Police didn’t find any DNA of her attacker on her neck. If one adopts John Douglas’s strange logic, does he mean that nobody strangled Meredith? The Scientific Police didn’t find any of Raffaele Sollecito’s DNA in his car. Does the strange logic of Douglas mean that Sollecito never drove his car or was even inside it at all? Many, many crimes and many many crimescenes come up short on DNA. In a UK Crime Ian Huntley admitted killing Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in his house. However, there were no traces of them in his house. Further reading:  Omitted - How The DNA Processes And Evidence Points Were Deliberately Misrepresented Further reading:  Ways To Rebut The Drive-By Critics Of The Case On The DNA Dimension Mixed Knox and Meredith DNA’s not mentioned by Douglas 4. False Claims By Douglas On Presence Of A Female Attacker John Douglas’s claim there is no specific indication of a female offender at the cottage is contradicted by multiple pieces of evidence implicating Knox. The Italian Supreme noted that it’s a proven fact Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith was killed because (1) she herself repeatedly admitted she was; (2) she knew specific details about the murder; and (3) the DNA evidence in the small bathroom provided “eloquent proof” that she washed Meredith’s blood off. Explaining this further: (1) The Italian Supreme Court noted that Amanda Knox repeatedly admitted she was at the cottage when Meredith was killed. “Given this, we now note, with respect to Amanda Knox, that her presence inside the house, the location of the murder, is a proven fact in the trial, in accord with her own admissions, also contained in the memoriale with her own signature, in the part where she tells that, as she was in the kitchen, while the young English woman had retired in the room of same Ms Kercher, together with another person for a sexual intercourse, she heard a harrowing scream, so piercing and unbearable that she let herself down squatting on the floor, covering her ears tight with her hands in order not to hear more of it.” Amanda Knox admitted she was at the cottage in her 1:45am witness statement, her 5:45am witness statement and her handwritten note to the police on 6 November 2007. (2) The Supreme Court concluded that it is proven fact Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith was killed as she knew specific details about the murder. “About this, the judgement of reliability expressed by the lower [a quo] judge [Nencini] with reference to this part of the suspect’s narrative, [and] about the plausible implication from the fact herself was the first person mentioning for the first time [46] a possible sexual motive for the murder, at the time when the detective still did not have the cadaver examination, nor the autopsy result, nor the witnesses’ information, which collected only subsequently, about the victim’s terrible scream and about the time when it was heard (Nara Capezalli, Antonella Monocchia and others), is certainly to be subscribed to. We make reference in particular to those declarations that the current appellant [Knox] on 11.6.2007 (p.96) inside the State Police headquarters. On the other hand, in the slanderous declaration against Lumumba, which earned her a conviction, the status of which is now protected as a final judgement [giudicato] [they] had a premise in the narrative, that is the presence of the young American woman, inside the house in via della Pergola, a circumstance which nobody at that time - except obviously the other people present in the house - could have known (quote p.96).” Judge Chieffi also highlighted the fact that Amanda Knox knew specific details about the murder in his Supreme Court report and he criticised Judge Hellmann for not addressing this evidence. “actual statements by the defendant demonstrating knowledge of details of the murder which turned out to coincide with what was later found by investigators. The court of first degree highlighted how Knox always stated that neither she nor Raffaele saw Meredithʹs room when the door was broken down, as they were both near the living room at that moment and did not enter the crime room, a fact which was confirmed by [other] testimony. It was, however, noted that, on the other hand, all the English girls testifying at the hearing of 13 February 2009, stated that Knox “ on the evening of 2 November “ had told them that she was the one who found the body of her friend, that it was in front of the closet, covered with a quilt with a foot sticking out, that her throat had been cut and that there was blood everywhere, whereas in her testimony of 13 June 2009, Knox had denied having seen anything. The fact of the multiple details given to her friends, potentially demonstrating knowledge gained prior to the intervention of the police “ even if she denied this in the interrogation “ was neglected without any explanation on why these elements were deemed irrelevant. Judge Nencini noted in his report that Amanda Knox placed herself near the basketball ball in Piazza Grimana which was corroborated by another witness. (3) The Supreme Court concluded it’s a proven fact Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith was killed because her DNA was mixed with Meredith’s blood in the small bathroom. “Another element against her [Amanda Knox] is the mixed traces, her and the victim’s one, in the “˜small bathroom’, an eloquent proof that anyway she had come into contact with the blood of the latter, which she tried to wash away from herself.” According to the Scientific Police and renowned DNA expert Luciano Garofano, there were five samples of Knox’s DNA or blood mixed with Meredith’s blood in three different locations in the cottage. Forensic police biologists testified about five spots where they had detected samples of “mixed blood” genetic material””spots of blood of both Knox and Kercher’s””in the bidet, on the sink, on the drain tap, on the Q-tip box in the bathroom and in a spot where prosecutors argued Knox and Sollecito staged a break-in. (Andrea Vogt, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 29 May 2009). The mixed-blood evidence convinced Dr Stefanoni that Amanda Knox was involved in Meredith’s murder because they both must have been bleeding at the same time. John Douglas hasn’t addressed the mixed-blood evidence, presumably because he is completely unaware of it. Further reading:  Beyond Massei: On The Seemingly Insuperable Mixed Blood Evidence By All The Expert Witnesses Further reading:  Questions For Knox: Why So Many False Claims In Accounts Of Your Visit To The House? Guede’s shoeprints in red head straight to front door, ignored by Douglas 5. False Claims By Douglas On The Footprints & Shoeprints In post #3 I quoted Douglas claiming Guede was wandering around the apartment, as if the shoeprints and footprints prove that.  But they don’t. Rudy Guede couldn’t have tracked Meredith’s blood into the small bathroom because he didn’t even go into the small bathroom after Meredith had been stabbed. His bloody footprints led straight out of Meredith’s room and out of the cottage. This something that has been noted by multiple judges and the Supreme Court. “As a consequence, the shape of the bare footprint on the sky-blue mat in the little bathroom cannot be attributed to Rudy, who, on leaving Meredith’s room (according to what the shoe prints show), directed himself towards the exit without deviating or stopping in other rooms.” (The Massei report, page 379). Judge Nencini stated it would have been impossible for Guede to leave the bare bloody footprint on the bathmat. “...the person who left the apartment without deviating from a straight path was wearing shoes on both feet, and it would thus have been objectively impossible for him to leave a bare footprint on the mat in the small bathroom.” (The Nencini report, page 76). The Supreme Court also noted there is no evidence that Rudy Guede went into the small bathroom after Meredith had been stabbed. “Not only that, but the above assumption also clashes with the available evidence regarding the bloody shoe prints which indicate that he left the room where the crime was committed to proceed directly to the exit door of the flat.” (Judge Chieffi’s Supreme Court report). The bloody footprint on the bathmat in the small bathroom completely debunks the PR lie that there was only one attacker because it couldn’t possibly belong to Rudy Guede. Judge Nencini pointed out that there were irreconcilable differences between the bloody footprint on the bathmat and Guede’s foot. “Guede’s foot presents irreconcilable differences with the bathmat imprint” (The Nencini report, page 275). Some of the individual measurements of Guede’s imprint are as much as 30% too small, but the relative proportions of length and breadth measurements are entirely wrong as well, both undershooting and overshooting by a large margin - 70% to 150%. The bloody footprint is a near-perfect match for Sollecito’s foot with seven out of twelve individual measurements having a 100% correlation to Sollecito’s foot. Andrea Vogt pointed out that the bloody footprint on the bathmat matched the precise characterisitics of Sollecito’s foot in a report for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “All the elements are compatible with Mr. Sollecito’s foot,” Rinaldi said, pointing with a red laser to a millimeter-by-millimeter analysis of Sollecito’s footprint projected onto a big-screen in the courtroom. He used similar methods to exclude that the footprint on the bath mat could possibly be Guede’s or Knox’s. “Those bare footprints cannot be mine,” said Sollecito in a spontaneous statement”¦. But the next witness, another print expert, again confirmed Rinaldi’s testimony, that the print, which only shows the top half of the foot, matches the precise characteristics of Sollecito’s foot”. Judge Giordano noted in his Supreme Court that one of the reasons why the appeal judges were convinced there were multiple attackers is there were different-sized footprints in Meredith’s room. Barbie Nadeau reported: “footprints not attributable to Guede on the floor of the room where Meredith’s body lay, convinced the appeal judges that several people acted together.” Judge Giordano’s Supreme Court report, page 19). According to two imprint experts from the Scientific Police - Rinaldi and Boemia - there was a woman’s bloody shoeprint on the pillow under Meredith’s body that matched Knox’s foot size, but was incompatible with Meredith’s foot size. Worse for Knox, when the judge asked Rinaldi the size of an unidentified bloody shoeprint found on the pillow below Kercher’s body, he responded, “Between 36 and 38.” The judge then asked Rinaldi what size shoe Knox wears. “The Skecher shoe we sequestered belonging to Amanda Knox corresponds with size 37.” Also Barbie Nadeau reported: A bloody footprint from a smaller shoe was found on the pillow beneath Kercher’s head but it could not be positively identified as a match to any of the suspects.” Forensic expert Luciano Garofano also believes there was a woman’s bloody shoe print in Meredith’s room. “Now is the question of the small shoeprint in the pillow. There is neither the heel nor the toe, so it’s hard to say the size of the shoe. You could estimate that has been made in the area of size 37 or 38, which of course, is Amanda’s size. Hard to prove, though.” (Luciano Garofano, Darkness Descending). Further reading:  The Incriminating Bathroom Evidence: Visual Analysis shows the Footprint IS Sollecito’s Further reading:  Experienced Trial Lawyer: There’s Far More Evidence Than UK/US Courts Need For Guilt No Guede DNA or prints outside or inside window, ignored by Douglas 6. False Claims By Douglas Denying Rearranged Crime Scene These are the very narrow grounds on which Douglas attempts to base his claim: “Perugia police officials believed the rock and broken window might have been indicators of staging””that is, making the crime look like something other than what it actually was. We reject this conclusion based on crime-scene photos of the exterior window. Photos reveal that prior to breaking the window, the rock first struck the inside edge of the exterior shutter, indicating it was thrown from outside. Freshly exposed wood under chipped paint and mineral fragments imbedded in the wood surface substantiate this finding. Glass-fracture examination of the window would prove this.” It’s typical of John Douglas’s simple-minded and superficial approach that he doesn’t address the Supreme Court’s specific reasons for ascertaining the break-in was staged. The only reason he puts forward for the break-in being genuine is there is allegedly a mark on the inside of the exterior shutter. Predictably, he doesn’t substantiate this claim with the crime-scene photo. One of the main reasons why multiple judges and the Supreme Court concluded the break-in was faked was that four witnesses, including two police officers, testified that there were shards of glass on top of the clothes and objects strewn on Filomena Romanelli’s floor. The courts considered that this proved the window was broken after the room had been ransacked and that the break-in was staged. “Picking up the computer I noticed that I lifted some glass, in the sense that the glass was on top of things. I remember very well [the glass] on top of the computer bag because I was careful as it was all covered with glass. We mentioned this, saying, the burglar was an idiot, he did not take anything”¦ the jewelry is here, the computer is here”¦and in addition to the fact that he didn’t take anything, the pieces of glass are all on top of the things.” (Filomena Romanelli). “The fact that the glass fragments from the window wound up on top of the strewn clothing and objects”¦ is surely incompatible with a breaking of the glass in a phase preceding the ransacking inside the room of the apartment. The window glass evidently was broken after entry into the cottage, by someone who was already inside and had already arranged the disorder that was then seen by the witnesses.” (Judge Nencini’s report). Judge Chieffi summarises the reasons why the Supreme Court ascertained the break-in was staged in his report. “The conclusion that the crime had been simulated was based on a series of facts with a high level of probative value constituting a valid inferential basis, on the strength of which the first instance statement of reasons produced a logical dissertation (pages 35”42) anchored in the facts that: (1) nothing (not even jewellery or the computer) was missing from Romanelli’s room, which was the focal point; (2) there was no evidence of climbing on the outside wall of the house over the distance of 3.5 meters from the ground to the window through which the phantom burglar supposedly entered, nor was there any trace of trampling on the grass on the ground underneath the window; (3) there were no traces of the blood of the climber on the window sill, which he would have had to grip among the glass shards in order to sneak inside the room; (4) the glass shards were found on the inside but not on the outside of the window, a sign that the rock was thrown with the outside shutters closed, forming a shield that prevented pieces of glass from spraying to the outside; (5) the shards were found in abundance on top of the clothes and objects ransacked by the alleged intruder, proving that this ransacking had occurred before the window was broken; (6) the sound of the rock, hypothetically thrown from the ground had not startled the young English woman so as to make her call for help outside the house before being attacked (given the lapse of time between the throwing the stone and the climbing up the wall).” (Judge Chieffi’s Supreme Court report, pages 63-64). Further reading:  Understanding Micheli: The Staged Scene - Who Returned To Move Meredith? Further reading:  Explaining The Massei Report: A Visual Guide To The Staged Break-In Via Filomena’s Window 3. My Conclusions On How Douglas Misleads On Hard Evidence John Douglas’ analysis of the crime scene - and I use the term “analysis”  loosely - is such a dishonest and misleading piece of work. He removes all the incriminating pieces of DNA evidence against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito from the crime scene and exaggerates the DNA evidence against Guede. He actually states “all the crime-scene DNA came from a single source: him” - which is demonstrably false. He accepts everything Amanda Knox says as the gospel truth despite the fact she is a self-confessed liar and claims her alibi was she was at Sollecito’s apartment. He doesn’t address the computer and telephone records which provide irrefutable proof that Knox and Sollecito lied repeatedly about 1 and 2 November 2007. He doesn’t say anything about Sollecito categorically stating Knox wasn’t at his apartment on the evening of the murder in his witness statement and this claim being corroborated by the mobile phone evidence. He doesn’t acknowlege that Sollecito admitted lying to the police. He doesn’t say anything about Amanda Knox repeatedly admitting she was at the cottage when Meredith was killed and this being corroborated by the mixed-blood evidence and the fact she knew specific details about the murder. He doesn’t say anything about the bloody footprint on the bathmat that matched the precise characteristics of Sollecito’s foot, but couldn’t possibly belong to Guede. The fact John Douglas has airbrushed every single piece of incriminating evidence against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito out of his analysis and pretends there is no evidence against them speaks volumes. If he had the tiniest modicum of honesty, he would at least acknowledge the fact Knox and Sollecito gave multlple false alibis. John Douglas’ so-called analysis of the crime scene in The Forgotten Killer is nothing more than PR propaganda. It’s so ridiculously biased, one-sided and dishonest that it’s almost comical. It’s something you would expect from Goebbels or Pravda - not a respected FBI profiler. It defies belief that anybody takes this dishonest charlatan seriously. 2018-09-10T09:18:00+00:00 How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #3 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_3 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_3#When:14:27:00Z {summary} [Long post. Click here to go straight to Comments] 1. Post And Series Overview My previous posts exposed John Douglas’s misrepresenation of the Amanda Knox “interrogation” and the personas of Knox and Sollecito. This post exposes Douglas’s misrepresentation of Rudy Guede, and the next post will expose Douglas’s misrepresentation of the true crime scene and the hard evidence. Douglas came late to the case and the “beautiful” Amanda Knox seems to have turned him into something of a whirling dervish. He has made false claims in several books, in postings on his own and other websites, in interviews, in a pitch to a near-empty room at the Congress, and in one or two forays into the State Department. Peaking in 2013 before the Nencini appeal (the repeat of the annulled Hellman appeal), they were seemingly made to (1) poison the jury pool of an ongoing legal process and (2) inflame American public opinion to create pushbacks at the political level. Note that Douglas again and again accused his Italian counterparts (counterparts the FBI trusts and heavily relies on) who he never once consulted or checked with. And unsurprisingly for an obvious PR shill and mafia poodle, note that Douglas never mentions the Knox & Sollecito PR or the Heavey-Bremner FOA or the several blatant attempts to bend Italian courts. 2. WHY Rudy Guede Morphed 2007-2011 This quote from my previous post starkly revealed Douglas’s illusion about the real Amanda Knox. Mark and I have spoken with many people around Amanda. It became clear to us that the Amanda Knox the prosecution and the media described did not exist in real life. She was a creation designed to serve their very specific needs and purposes. No she wasn’t. As I showed, the prosecution and media (and around 30 judges)(and the Italian public) had a very clear-eyed and accurate view of the 2007-2010 Knox and Sollecito which John Douglas sure does not. I noted that the PR had morphed Knox from loose cannon on drugs with zero work permit and zero academic intention in Perugia in 2007 to widows-weeds “I am the real victim here” Knox in 2010. It was the infatuated Douglas who swallowed a PR creation as “the real deal” (as he did Steve Moore who like Knox had been practicing a fake act for several years).  It was the same with Rudy Guede (and Giuliano Mignini which I will address later). Guede morphed - or was morphed - also. And once again Douglas swallowed a PR creation. From late 2007 to late 2008 Italians saw Guede as a mild quite popular basketball player with zero criminal record who had been enticed into a hazing of Meredith by two others whose close-ups were considerably less lovely. In 2008 both the defense lawyers, and the Knox and Sollecito public relations (led by Curt Knox and the late David Marriott), and the Friends of Amanda (led by the mafia poodles Doug Preston and Michael Heavey from very early on) set about demonizing him. The lawyers mainly demonized him in court (see below) and the PR demonized him in a huge onslaught in the American media (kept largely below the Italian radar). Here are posts providing a good picture of the incendiary Knox & Sollecito PR campaigns. Click for Post:  Knox PR Campaign: Have The Dishonest Talking Points Now Become A Trap? Click for Post:  How The Strongarm Public Relations Resulted in Most Of The Media Getting It Wrong Click for Post:  Powerpoints #16: We Now Examine The Compelling Evidence For The REAL Railroading From Hell Click for Post:  Knox Public Relations Manager Starts Premature Crowing Years Before Legal Process Ends Click for Post:  Fifty Of The Most Common Myths Still Promoted Without Restraint By The Knox PR Campaign Click for Post:  From David Marriott’s Parrot: Latest Talking Points To Be Beamed At The Unbelieving Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 3. HOW Rudy Guede Morphed 2007-2011 From late 2007 after his return from Germany Guede sat in prison and assumed a fairly low profile. In the same period both Knox and Sollecito sought far higher profiles, not so much a team as frustrated mutual accusers.  In November 2007 Knox framed Patrick. Then Sollecito damaged Knox, not only with police and prosecution but with the supervising courts. In December 2007 Knox sought to win a major break from Dr Mignini but made no mention of Sollecito. Also in December 2007 each appealed to the Supreme Court for at minimum house arrest; in spring 2008 each appeal was rejected. Stays in prison continued. Tense relations continued. Then in September 2008 the Knox and Sollecito defense teams both turned their guns on Rudy Guede.  Claims have been made of a pact between Knox and her Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24. It is alleged their lawyers have agreed to work together to blame the murder on Rudy Guede, 21, a part-time gardener from the Ivory Coast and the third accused. Now, Guede’s lawyers are threatening to call for a separate trial for him alone - well away from the legal teams of the other two whom they fear could prejudice his case. It is a pact, says Guede’s lawyer Walter Biscotti, that can be traced back to July when Sollecito sent Knox a bouquet of yellow flowers on her 21st birthday which both celebrated in prison. “˜There is a clear desire to make Rudy the guilty party, and it’s clear they will try anything,’ Biscotti said. There were three direct effects of this shafting of Guede. (1) Rudy Guede’s team opted for the separate fast track trial in which he essentially accepted all the evidence - helpful in commiting Knox and Sollecito to trial and not helpful to their case in court as the Micheli Report was a widely-read document.  (2) Judge Micheli forcefully concluded based in part on numerous interviews (1) that Guede was not the demon he was being made out to be, and (2) that in light of dozens of items of evidence (see my next post) Meredith had been subjected to a pack attack. (3) As Guede was away serving his sentence during trial and thereafter and not in the courtroom the PR and defense teams could demonize him almost daily with zero comeback (the prosecution thought it was fruitless grandstanding, and rode it out). So much for “the forgotten killer”. How did that go again? Here is an example of the incendiary tone now adopted by the public relations (and Michael Heavey) as channeled by the PR shill Peter Popham. Two weeks after the murder, scientists found bloody fingerprints on a cushion under Mez’s body which belonged to a drug dealer and serial house-breaker called Rudy Guede, who had gone on the run right after the murder. In contrast, here is the outcome of the Guede trial late in October 2008, note the cool-headed official tone not intimidated by the PR. [Judge] Micheli agreed with prosecutors that more than one person took part in the sexual assault and murder, dismissing claims that the 47 bruises and knife wounds on Kercher’s body could have been made by a single attacker. He upheld the testimony of a neighbour who heard more than one person fleeing Kercher’s house, adding that while footprints there might not definitely belong to Knox and Sollecito, they did indicate more than one attacker. He stood by forensic evidence indicating Kercher’s and Knox’s DNA on a knife found at Sollecito’s house…. which investigators suspect is the murder weapon, and ruled Sollecito’s DNA on Kercher’s bra strap as reliable evidence. He dismissed as “fantasy”, the claim that Knox, Sollecito and Guede planned to involve Kercher in an orgy inspired by “Halloween parties” instead describing the fatal encounter as unplanned. In 2009 the prosecution laid out a vast array of evidence all of it pointing to several attackers: the autopsy, the DNA, the recreation of the attack, the obviously-adjusted crime scene, the computer and phone records. The defense portion of the trial was loaded with anti-Guede innuendo but all their attempts to prove he was a burglar and lone-wolf killer failed markedly.  The “best” shot was the attempt to tie Guede to a break-in at a lawyers’ offices. Click for Post:  The Serial-Burglar Arm Of The Rudy Guede Hoax: Testimony 2009 In Court Provided ZERO Proof Late in 2009 Judge Massei set out at more length the very clear case for a pack attack, subsequently agreed-to by the Nencini appeal court (2014), and also three times by the Supreme Court of Italy (2010, 2013, 2015). In 2010 as the previous post and this fine series by Cesare Beccaria shows, Knox and Sollecito were seemingly STILL blaming one another as much as they ever were Rudy Guede. Click for Post:  How Each of The Three Subtly But Surely Pushed The Other Two Closer to The Fire In 2010 the defenses finally split from the increasingly absurd public relations stance on Guede and they went their different ways. (1) The defense finally caved in to the overwhelming proof of a pack attack. They dropped lone-wolf arguments with Guede as sole perpetrator and attempted other tactics, not successfully.  Hellman appeal witness Aviello was a failed attempt of the defenses to prove that Guede attacked Meredith with others. Hellman appeal witness Alessi was a failed attempt of the defenses to prove the attack was by another group entirely. Neither could produce even an ounce of evidence. Never once in court 2007-2015 was the pack-attack evidence pointing to the three charged shaken. At the outer edge of my timeline (when the PR was morphing Guede more and the defenses morphing him less) Cardiol wrote of the defense headache he represented. (Read also the 44 comments that Cardiol’s inspired, complex post sparked). Click for Post:  How Much Or How Little To Blame Rudy Guede? The Defenses’ Immense Headache Coming Up That was after the Hellman appeal but before his annulment by the Supreme Court. And even later, after the Nencini appeal (and the Douglas books) but before the bent Marasca-Bruno outcome (the macho Sollecito had made his second visit to the Dominican Republic at this point) SomeAlibi picked up the threads . Click for Post:  Spitting In the Wind: Sollecito News Conference Backfires On Him AND Knox - What The Media Missed (2) Meanwhile the PR and FOA crackpots are STILL denying the pack attack, as avidly promoted by, among others, John Douglas. See Grahame Rhodes’s very telling sendup of Heavey on his quixotic mission to save his little angel, and PatAz’s Heavey expose. Click for Post:  To Create Points With More Traction For His Yawnfests, Mr Heavey Convenes A Mock Court”¦ Click for Post:  After 6 Years Heavey Is Still Heedless Of His Errors Pointed Out Again & Again & Again In their books Knox and Sollecito both demonized Guede and tried to sell him as a lonewolf killer. In these posts Marcello explains just how far short they fall, and Chimera derides Knox at greater length in the huge Knox-book series. Click for Post:  Questions For Knox and Sollecito: Why Claim Rudy Guede Did It Alone When So Much Proof Against? Click for Post:    The 518 Lies In “Waiting To Be Heard” by Amanda Knox. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 4. False Claims By Douglas Re Rudy Guede 1. False Claim By John Douglas on Guede’s Alleged Criminal Background “Guede has the history; he was an experienced criminal” John Douglas hasn’t substantiated the claims above and he can’t because Rudy Guede didn’t have any criminal convictions for breaking and entering or any other crimes at the time of Meredith’s murder. Very extensive investigations by police of Guede’s past are described at length in the Micheli report on our Case Wiki. Read those and you will know they had not heard of him before and he was not secretly working for them. They show him as mild, funny, popular, well-funded, and diligent in activities he liked.  The real Guede had zero reason to break in, steal money, deal drugs, or attack anyone.  2. False Claim By John Douglas on Guede’s Alleged Criminal Background “Rudy had committed other breaking-and-entering crimes and often used a knife.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that Guede didn’t ever break into any properties, but as Judge Micheli noted, there is no proof that he ever committed any break-ins anywhere in his life. On this Guede has been much lied-about. See more on this in Part 3 above and also this post, and this post. 3. False Claim By John Douglas on Guede’s Alleged Criminal Background “He’s a sadistic individual with a violent past.” John Douglas hasn’t substantiated his claim that Rudy Guede had a violent past. He can’t refer to any criminal convictions for violence because Guede didn’t have any at the time of the murder. Guede was only on the police radar because of a minor incident in Milan just before. 4. False Claim By John Douglas on Guede’s Actions At The Crime Scene. “He put the blanket over her because he was wandering around the apartment and didn’t want to see her.” John Douglas’ claim that Rudy Guede was wandering around the apartment is contradicted by the forensic evidence. His bloody shoe prints led straight out of Meredith’s room and out of the cottage. The Massei report, page 379: “As a consequence, the shape of the bare footprint on the sky-blue mat in the little bathroom cannot be attributed to Rudy, who, on leaving Meredith’s room (according to what the shoe prints show), directed himself towards the exit without deviating or stopping in other rooms.” 5. False Claim By John Douglas on Guede’s Alleged Criminal Background “You should be able to find other “canvases” of his like that ““ not necessarily homicide, but you should find a violent past in this person’s background. I know that he committed some robberies, but I’ll bet money there are more cases that he may have been involved in which remain unsolved. I don’t know, maybe before he came to Perugia ““ whatever he may have been escaping previously.” Sure, do foolishly bet some money. John Douglas doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact that Rudy Guede came to Perugia when he was five years old and that he clearly hadn’t been involved in unsolved crimes before his arrival at that age. John Douglas seems intent on over-egging the pudding in order to portray Guede in the worst possible light i.e. an experienced criminal with a violent past in order to persuade the public that he is the lone killer. 6. False Claim By John Douglas on Guede’s DNA At The Crime Scene “On top of everything else, his DNA was all over the crime scene.”... “Rudy’s DNA is all over the crime scene in Meredith’s bedroom and Amanda and Raffaele’s is absent” The claim that Rudy Guede’s DNA was all over the crime scene must be one of the widely-propagated PR lies in the media. In fact there was only one sample of Guede’s DNA on Meredith body and just four samples of his DNA in Meredith’s room. In total, there were only five samples of his DNA at the cottage. His DNA was found on a vaginal swab, on the sleeve of Meredith’s tracksuit, on her bra, on the zip of her purse and on some toilet paper in the bathroom that Filomena and Laura shared. Judge Giordano sentencing report, page 5: “”¦also a genetic profile, from the Y haplotype on the vaginal swab, in which no traces of semen were found; DNA on the toilet paper in the bathroom near the room of Mezzetti, where unflushed faeces were found; on the bag found on the bed; on the left cuff of the blue sweatshirt (described as a “zippered shirt” in the first inspection, discovered smeared with blood near the body and partly underneath it); and on the right side of the bra found by the foot of Kercher’s body”¦” “No-one disputes that Rudy Guede was at the cottage when Meredith was killed. However, John Douglas exaggerates the DNA evidence against him. Saying Rudy Guede’s DNA “was all over the crime scene” sounds more damning than saying the Scientific Police found five samples of Rudy Guede’s DNA at the crime scene, less than Knox’s. 5. My Conclusions On This Area The burden of proof is invariably lowered when it comes to Guede, and inevitably raised when it comes to Knox and Sollecito. John Douglas clearly isn’t interested in hard facts - he just wants to lay all the blame at Guede’s feet. As far as John Douglas and Amanda Knox’s supporters are concerned, the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply to Rudy Guede. So there is no need for him to stand trial for the crimes he has allegedly committed. Straight to prison and case closed. 2018-08-29T14:27:00+00:00 How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #2 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_2 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_2#When:05:57:00Z {summary} [Long post. Click here to go straight to Comments] 1. Post & Series Overview In Part One I used the official courts reports and court testimonies to show how John Douglas made at least a dozen demonstrably false claims about Knox’s and Sollecito’s questioning on 5-6 November 2007. It is extremely obvious that he did zero real investigation, zero real fact-checking, zero reading of the official court reports and court testimonies. Instead he mindlessly simply repeated the PR lies propagated in the media by Amanda Knox’s family and supporters. In this post, I’ll analyse the ill-researched John Douglas’s claims about the personas and backgrounds of Knox and Sollecito and the evidence against them, and I’ll compare those claims to the official court reports and accurate media reports to ascertain their accuracy, veracity, and honesty. I shall also provide a summary of how Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were portrayed in the mainstream media to see whether John Douglas’ claims have been influenced by the PR campaign. In the next post I will do the same for so-called “Forgotten Killer” and supposed lone-wolf Rudy Guede 2. WHY Knox And Sollecito Morphed 2007-2010 Both Knox and Sollecito have morphed considerably. Their families and PR and a very strong case were primary causes of this. Those who missed the 2007-2009 happenings (as John Douglas and the Netflix production team did) can get fanatically sold on a fake Knox and fake Sollecito which are really only PR designer creations. This morphing was to become quite deliberate as part of the attempt to poison public opinion against the strong case. It is well-documented (though Douglas is unaware) that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito mostly did not get along. Same wth Curt Knox and Edda Mellas. Same with Francesco Sollecito and Raffaele Sollecito. Often each pair has been close to open war. The nature of Curt Knox V Edda Mellas can be read about in this post and the nature of Francesco Sollecito V Raffaele Sollecito can be read about in this post. In both cases lots to hide. This was probably the decisive factor in going for hardline and dishonest public relations (which repeatedly irritated the defenses).  The nature of Amanda Knox V Raffaele Sollecito can be read about in this post and there is much much more in both this series and this series.  Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 3. HOW Knox And Sollecito Morphed 2007-2010 On 1 November 2007, the night Meredith died, Knox and Sollecito were essentially low-achieving druggies with few friends and limited financial resources. Knox had a drug-dealer in tow (see False Claim 5 below.) Knox is sold as an “exchange student” but as this post explains she was not even enrolled at the university - a very rare occurrence, one that left her supervisor-less and largely fund-less - a loose cannon with no way those around her could seek her control. On 5-6 November 2007, as I explained in the previous post, Knox and Sollecito each broke explosively and unexpectedly under minimal pressure at the Central Police Station. On that night Sollecito blamed Knox, and so Knox blamed Patrick.  (Thereafter for EIGHT YEARS through 2015 Sollecito never ever even once in court supported Knox’s final alibi, despite her chronic and often-obvious desperation. The nearest Sollecito ever came was this instance which of course was not in a courtroom. Knox had already aired her considerable irritation to all of Italy!)  In Nov and Dec 2007, despite the ill-researched John Douglas’s claims (see False Claim 2 below), Knox and Mignini were not at loggerheads. He had been at the house three times with her prior to 5-6 November and had concluded that with the help of drugs (probably cocaine on the night as Sollecito’s defense said at trial) a hazing of Meredith with knives was fully intended but the death blow may possibly have been spontaneous. On 6 November 2007 Mignini patiently heard her out and on 17 Dec he gave her quite a break: very unusually he acceded to her request to interrogate her - actually her first-ever interrogation - in a long session which could have resulted in her going home. Through early 2008 this relatively naive trusting Knox persisted. But then as Knox describes in her book she was taught by her lawyers and parents to actively distrust a fictionally hardline Mignini and aggressively scramble the truth. From then on through 2008 Knox tried to charm a cold, hard Sollecito remotely, and in September 2008 this truce was agreed. All blame from now on was to be Guede’s. Drugs were more or less to be denied and a bid for lesser charges went out the window. Throughout trial in 2009 all Italy observed two more Knoxes. The really daffy bubbly one and the really callous and meanspirited one. Finally from 2010 we saw the widows-weeds “I am the real victim here” Amanda Knox retooled by the PR. The one who wrote a massively dishonest book, and barked at the Nencini appeal from a distance, and makes blood-money out of killing Meredith, and encourages stalking of Meredith’s family and justice officials in Italy. The one that wails to gullible paying crowds and on TV “I am the real victim here”. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 4. False Claims By Douglas Re Knox & Sollecito 1. False Claims By Douglas On Personas Douglas was a profiler? Really? You’d never know it from his way-off-base portrayals of Knox and Sollecito. Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s high-profile supporters in the media constantly drew attention to and expressly highlighted the differences between Knox and Sollecito’s privileged middle-class backgrounds and Rudy Guede’s less fortunate background. It was often pointed out that Amanda Knox had attended a Jesuit high school in Seattle and claimed (probably falsely) that she was an honors student and her parents were professionals - Curt Knox is an accountant and her mother is a maths teacher. Mark and I have spoken with many people around Amanda. It became clear to us that the Amanda Knox the prosecution and the media described did not exist in real life. She was a creation designed to serve their very specific needs and purposes. Teachers and fellow students at Seattle Prep described Amanda with terms such as “bright,” “sweet” and “kind.” Actually the restrained prosecutors and restrained Italian media mostly got the 2007-2010 Knoxes correctly sized up. Italians could repeatedly see and judge Knox for themselves. They knew about the drugs (see False Claim 5) and saw Patrick framed. Demonization of the “beautiful” Knox (as Douglas calls her repeatedly) by jealous little people and bigoted cops is a figment of a xenophobic and ill-informed mind. Nothing else. Raffaele Sollecito’s advantaged background was also repeatedly referred to in the media. He was an IT student and the son of a wealthy urologist who had set him up with his own apartment in Perugia, and provided him with a black Audi A3, and an expensive Apple laptop. They were essentially putting forward the argument that Knox and Sollecito are innocent specifically because they were two middle-class “kids” from respectable backgrounds. In sharp contrast Rudy Guede is “clearly guilty” because he came from a disadvantaged background. He was often referred to in the media as a “drifter”, “drug dealer” and “petty criminal” with a history of breaking and entering despite the fact he had lived in Perugia since the age of five and he had zero convictions for drug dealing, breaking and entering or any other crimes (see my next post). Any inconvenient facts about Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were brushed under the carpet and were conspicuous by their absence in the PR narrative. Highlighting the privileged backgrounds of Knox and Sollecito was a proven successful strategy on the part of PR consultant David Marriott and early legal supporter Anne Bremner. Many people don’t want to believe that young people from respectable middle-class backgrounds are capable of committing horrific murders. Vincent Bugliosi - the chief prosecutor in the Charles Manson trial - pointed out that many people in killer Tex Watson’s hometown refused to believe that he could have been involved in the murders because of his background. “Tex Watson, Manson’s “˜chief lieutenant’ at the murder scene, was from Farmersville, Texas, hometown of World War II hero Audie Murphy. Watson was a football, basketball, and track star. He had almost an A average in high school. And when the people in Farmersville learned he was being charged with these murders, the general consensus was this is absolutely impossible, it must be a case of mistaken identity.” Many people in Seattle refused to believe that Amanda Knox could have been involved in Meredith’s murder because of her middle-class upbringing. Time and time again, her high-profile supporters in the media claimed she was incapable of murder because of her background. Disgraced legal talking head Anne Bremner - who was a co-creator of the Friends of Amanda - said she couldn’t accept what was being printed in the press about Amanda Knox because she had attended a Jesuit school. “Her relatives and I, who saw her grow up as a regular student at the Jesuit Seattle Prep. School couldn’t accept it.” Disgraced former CBS consultant Paul Ciolino claimed that Jesuit-educated high school girls don’t commit murder. “Jesuit-educated high school girls who are high honors students “¦ don’t participate in orgies and homicides. They don’t do it. And if you can tell me of one that does, I’d sure like to see her.” Steve Moore argued that Amanda Knox isn’t a violent person because she was an honor student (as mentioned above we have never seen proof of that.) “This was an honor student; she is not a violent person.” If someone’s guilt or innocence could be determined by their backgrounds, there would be no need for criminal trials. Lady Justice is symbolically depicted as wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents impartiality and the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power or any other status. There’s a very good reason for this - killers, sex offenders and other criminals really do come from all walks of life. Nobody with an ounce of common sense assumes someone must be innocent or guilty of murder or sexual assault because of their background, their status or their wealth.  If you assume that nice girls from respectable backgrounds don’t commit murder a la Anne Bremner, Paul Ciolino and Steve Moore, you would be mistaken. There have been a number of high-profile murder cases where seemingly normal girls have committed horrific and senseless murders with little or no motive e.g. Laurie Ann Swank, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, Amy Bishop, Karla Homolka, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, Kelly Ellard, Anna Maria Botticelli and Mariena Sica, Erika de Nardo, Jasmine Richardson, Rachel Shoaf and Shelia Eddy. John Douglas interviewed Charles Manson and knew of his “family” mostly of girls so Douglas has no excuse for assuming that middle-class girls from respectable backgrounds are incapable of murder. Leslie Van Houten was an honors student and a homecoming queen. She came from a middle class background; her father was an auctioneer and her mother was a school teacher. She took part in the savage murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. She along with Patricia Krenwinkel attacked and stabbed Rosemary LaBianca. Van Houten tied the electrical cord from a lamp around La Bianca’s neck and put a pillow case over her head before stabbing her 16 times in the lower back. Patricia Krenwinkel came from a fairly normal background. Her father was an insurance salesman. She graduated from high school and then attended a Catholic college for a semester before moving in with her sister. Krenwinkel participated in the Tate and LaBianca murders. She stabbed Abigail Folger more than 70 times. When the police found Folger’s body, they thought she was wearing a red dress. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. One of the numerous knives in Sollecito’s collection 2. False Claims By Douglas On Motive Again and again John Douglas and colleagues repeat the PR myth that Mignini described a satanic murder, proving yet again that he has unquestioningly believed whatever he has been told by Amanda Knox’s dishonest supporters without doing any fact-checking for himself. How, in the name of all that is rational, could Amanda and Raffaele have participated in this satanic orgy of sex and murder Mignini so imaginatively described? But this team and this prosecutor came up with a bizarre criminal conspiracy involving satanic sex orgies and rituals. And this crime, according to the prosecutor, was perpetrated by people never before involved in Satanism or violence or group sex. Both [this and the West Memphis case] were rushes to judgment, prosecuted as satanic ritual murders on the basis of fear and superstition rather than solid evidence and analysis. Since there was a strong satanic component it was supposed to take place on Halloween. But since that didn’t work out, the Day of the Dead would be just as auspicious. He doesn’t substantiate his claims or refer to any of the official court reports or court testimonies. Did it not cross his mind to actually check to see whether Mignini had ever claimed Meredith had been killed in a satanic ritual? If he had bothered to have checked, he would have realised there are NO quotations from Mignini himself claiming Meredith had been killed in a satanic ritual. In fact Italy knows Mignini is a satanism skeptic and he often propounds that on TV.  He has repeatedly DENIED claiming that Meredith was killed in a sacrificial rite (a deliberate false rumor from the defense) and has strongly questioned satanism as a motive for other crimes. For example in his letter to the Seattle reporter Linda Byron: “On the “˜sacrificial rite’ question, I have never said that Meredith Kercher was the victim of a “˜sacrificial rite.’ “ For example in his interview with Drew Griffin on CNN: Drew Griffin: “You’ve never said that Meredith’s death was a satanic rite?” Mignini: “I have never said that. I have never understood who has and continues to say that. I read, there was a reporter ““ I don’t know his name; I mention it because I noticed it ““ who continues to repeat this claim that, perhaps, knowing full well that it’s not like that. “I have never said that there might have been a satanic rite. I’ve never said it, so I would like to know who made it up.” For example in his published statement in Corriere Mr. Spezi’s text says: “”¦ a strangely similar background, for two different cases, behind which the magistrate thought he could see satanic orgies on the occasion of Halloween for Amanda, and ritual blood sacrifices as a worship to the Devil in the Monster of Florence case”¦”. This is an assertion that Mr. Spezi and crime-fiction author Douglas Preston have been repeating for years, but does not find the smallest confirmation in the documentation of the two trials, nor in the scenario put forward by the prosecution in which the Meredith murder (which didn’t happen on Halloween but on the subsequent night) was the consequence of a sex hazing to which Meredith herself did not intend to take part, and, above all, it was the consequence of a climate of hostility which built up progressively between the Coulsdon girl and Amanda because of their different habits, and because of Meredith’s suspicion about alleged money thefts by Knox. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 3. False Claims By Douglas On DNA Evidence “How, in the name of all that is rational, could Amanda and Raffaele have participated in this satanic orgy of sex and murder Mignini so imaginatively described and yet not leave any of their own DNA on the scene?” It’s untrue that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s DNA wasn’t found at the crime scene. John Douglas limits the crime scene to Meredith’s room despite the fact that the Scientific Police collected significant DNA and forensic evidence from the whole cottage, including the small bathroom, the large bathroom, the hallway and Filomena’s room. There were more incriminating pieces of DNA evidence against Amanda Knox (6) than there were against Rudy Guede (5). According to the Scientific Police, there were five instances of Knox’s DNA or blood mixed with Meredith’s blood in three different locations in the cottage. After the trial, the Kerchers’ lawyer, Francesco Maresca, said the mixed blood evidence was the most damning piece of evidence against Amanda Knox. The jury agreed that it was a damning piece of evidence. Barbie Nadeau points out in Angel Face that the jurors accepted the mixed blood evidence. The defense’s other biggest mistake, according to interviews with jurors after the trial, was doing nothing to refute the mixed-blood evidence beyond noting that it is common to find mingled DNA when two people live in the same house. (Barbie Nadeau, Angel Face, page 152). It’s also untrue that Sollecito didn’t leave any of his DNA in Meredith’s room. It’s an indisputable fact that Raffaele Sollecito’s DNA was found on Meredith’s bra clasp. His DNA was identified by two separate DNA tests. I won’t address the knife, the bra clasp and the mixed-blood evidence in this post for the sake of brevity. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 4. False Claims By Douglas On Other Evidence “Suffice it to say that there is no evidence ““ repeat, NO EVIDENCE ““ to indicate that Amanda and Raffaele were even present at the crime scene” Suffice it to say? In fact there was a MOUNTAIN of evidence. See here for 400 evidence points, which between them at trial in 2008 and again at appeal in 2013 were devastating. . In final judgment even the Supreme Court disagrees with John Douglas. It noted that it’s a proven fact Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith was killed because (1) she repeatedly admitted she was (2) she knew specific details about the murder and (3) the DNA evidence in the small bathroom provided “eloquent proof” she washed Meredith’s blood off. “Given this, we now note, with respect to Amanda Knox, that her presence inside the house, the location of the murder, is a proven fact in the trial, in accord with her own admissions, also contained in the memoriale with her own signature, in the part where she tells that, as she was in the kitchen, while the young English woman had retired in the room of same Ms Kercher, together with another person for a sexual intercourse, she heard a harrowing scream, so piercing and unbearable that she let herself down squatting on the floor, covering her ears tight with her hands in order not to hear more of it. About this, the judgement of reliability expressed by the lower [a quo] judge [Nencini] with reference to this part of the suspect’s narrative, [and] about the plausible implication from the fact herself was the first person mentioning for the first time [46] a possible sexual motive for the murder, at the time when the detective still did not have the cadaver examination, nor the autopsy result, nor the witnesses’ information, which collected only subsequently, about the victim’s terrible scream and about the time when it was heard (Nara Capezalli, Antonella Monocchia and others), is certainly to be subscribed to. We make reference in particular to those declarations that the current appellant [Knox] on 11.6.2007 (p.96) inside the State Police headquarters. On the other hand, in the slanderous declaration against Lumumba, which earned her a conviction, the status of which is now protected as a final judgement [giudicato] [they] had a premise in the narrative, that is the presence of the young American woman, inside the house in via della Pergola, a circumstance which nobody at that time - except obviously the other people present in the house - could have known (quote p.96). “According to the slanderous statements of Ms. Knox, she had returned home in the company of Lumumba, whom she had met by chance in Piazza Grimana, and when Ms. Kercher arrived in the house, Knox’s companion, directed sexual attentions toward the English woman, then he went together with her to he room from which the harrowing scream came. So, it was Lumumba who killed Meredith and she could affirm this since she was on the scene of the crime herself, albeit in another room. (p.97) “Another element against her [Amanda Knox] is the mixed traces, her and the victim’s one, in the “˜small bathroom’, an eloquent proof that anyway she had come into contact with the blood of the latter, which she tried to wash away from herself (it was, it seems, diluted blood, while the biological traces belonging to her would be the consequence of epithelial rubbing). “The fact is very suspicious, but it’s not decisive, besides the known considerations about the sure nature and attribution of the traces in question.” John Douglas clearly hasn’t read any of the official court reports, so he hasn’t addressed let alone refuted the evidence the Supreme Court cited which led it to conclude that it’s a “proven fact” Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith was killed. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 5. False Claims By Douglas On Drug Use For the most part, John Douglas sticks closely to the PR narrative about Rudy Guede being an experienced criminal whilst completely ignoring the fact that Amanda Knox and Raffaele both had previous brushes with the police and other inconvenient facts that portray them in a negative light. He reluctantly acknowledges the fact Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito used marijuana. (Anne Bremner refused to go even this far. She categorically stated Amanda Knox didn’t use marijuana, despite not being in a position to make firm assurances.) “They used marijuana, but that’s not some hard core drug that will change a normal personality.” Really?! And Knox and Sollecito had both admitted they had used drugs - as part of their defense - and these admissions were widely reported in the media. It was also established in court in 2009 that they had smoked marijuana. “Both Amanda and Raffaele were using drugs; there are multiple corroborating statements to this effect (page 19, statements of Romanelli, hearing of February 7, 2009; statements of Mezzetti, hearing of February 14, 2009; page 164, hearing of March 27, 2009, statements of Antonio Galizia, Carabinieri [C.ri] station commander in Giovinazzo, who testified that in September 2003 Raffaele Sollecito was found in possession of 2.67 grams of hashish; in the tapped intercepts, Amanda had several times made reference to marijuana use).” (Massei report, page 62). However, Douglas is simply assuming with no proof that they didn’t take any hard drugs. According to Amanda Knox, Sollecito had taken heroin and cocaine. “According to Amanda’s prison diaries, Raf had been reminiscing about his incredible highs on heroin and cocaine”¦” (Barbie Nadeau, Angel Face, Kindle edition, page 163). More damning, Mignini knew Knox started sleeping with a dangerous cocaine dealer even before she arrived in Perugia. He stated at the trial that Sollecito and Knox ran with a crowd who often used stupefying drugs.  Here’s Barbie Nadeau, The Daily Beast, 20 November 2009: “He also hinted that Knox and Sollecito might have been in a drug-fueled frenzy when they allegedly killed Kercher. He outlined the effects of cocaine and acid, and told the judges and jury how Knox and Sollecito ran with a crowd that often used these “stupificante,” or stupefying drugs.” That Amanda Knox was mixing with people who used hard drugs was widely known in Italy even before the trial. According to police and trial reports from 2007-2008 and Italian media accounts, Knox had a sexual relationship with the cocaine dealer, and was in contact him in the days before and even after Meredith’s murder. (That helped to put him away.) She even invited him home and slept with him there, with Meredith in the next room. Read about it here and there’s more here.  In English the Daily Telegraph also reports. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 6. False Claims By Douglas On Prior Police Record“Amanda and Raffaele had no history of any sort of violence or sexual perversion.” If John Douglas had actually bothered to read the Massei report, he would have known Sollecito was monitored at university after being caught watching hardcore pornography featuring bestiality: “”¦and educators at the boy’s ONAOSI college were shocked by a film “˜very much hard-core”¦where there were scenes of sex with animals with animals,’ at which next they activated a monitoring on the boy to try to understand him. (Pages 130 and 131, hearing 27.3.2009, statements by Tavernesi Francesco).” (Massei report, page 61). He would have also known that Raffaele Sollecito had a previous brush with the police in 2003. “...Antonio Galizia, Carabinieri [C.ri] station commander in Giovinazzo, who testified that in September 2003 Raffaele Sollecito was found in possession of 2.67 grams of hashish.” (The Massei report, page 62). John Douglas seems to be unaware that Amanda Knox also had a previous brush with the police.  According to Andrew Malone in an article on the Mail Online website, Amanda Knox was charged with hosting a party that got seriously out of hand, with students high on drink and drugs, and throwing rocks into the road, forcing cars to swerve. He claimed the students then threw rocks at the windows of neighbours who had called the police. Knox was fined $269 (£135) at the Municipal Court after the incident (crime No: 071830624). Barbie Nadeau also reported on the same incident and claimed Knox had been arrested: ...and her only brush with the law was a disturbing-the-peace arrest for a house party she threw.” (Barbie Nadeau, Angel Face, Kindle edition, page 6). According to the police ticket written by Seattle Police officer Jason Bender, Knox was issued with an infraction for the noise violation and warned about the rock throwing: “I issued S1/Knox this infraction for the noise violation and a warning for the rock throwing. I explained how dangerous and juvenile that action was….  There’s no history or experience related to violence or mental illness in their backgrounds.” A number of judges, who presumably saw their psychological reports, commented on Knox and Sollecito’s characters and made it clear they thought they were psychologically disturbed and dangerous. Judge Massimo Riccarelli stated: [Knox was] “privy of any refraining inhibitions and could reoffend. “From the reconstruction there is the concrete possibility of reoffending and the [alleged] role of Amanda Knox was by no means secondary,” He also described her as “crafty and cunning” with a “multi-faced personality, unattached to reality with an elevated, one would say fatal capacity” to repeat her offence. Judge Claudia Matteini made the following comments about Amanda Knox: “Meredith was a girl full of life and enthusiasm, who for the sole purpose of having some pleasure and sensation during a boring day spent smoking joints, was subjected to acts of brutality and cruelty that are disgusting to any normal person. In such a situation the danger of repetition of the crime is certainly very high and can’t be considered to have diminished due to the mere passage of time, during which as a reminder you have never shown any sign of remorse or reconsideration of your life.” “Even the behaviors you mention in your motion requesting release, which are presented as being in your favor, could be read differently in the opinion of this judge…. Your conduct after the murder is symptomatic of a personality which, considering your young age, provokes no small measure of dismay and apprehension, considering how extremely easy it was for you to control your states of mind.” The Italian Supreme Court said the following to Raffaele Sollecito: “You are a flight risk because of the gravity of the charges. Your danger to society matches your weak character and your personality, which we can’t define in terms of harmless juvenile stereotypes, since the context includes the habitual use of drugs.” A number of psychologists believe Amanda Knox has exhibited the traits of a psychopath. Dr Coline Covington wrote an article Signs that suggest Amanda Knox is a psychopath in which she explained that Amanda Knox’s behaviour in the courtroom showed the signs of a psychopathic personality. Dr Covington is a highly experienced American psychotherapist. She was the former Editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology as well as the former Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council and she has also worked for the London police. Kate Mansey in The Sunday Mirror reported that Sollecito had bragged about idolising a serial killer and also hinted at his depression. Suspect’s killer idol by Kate Mansey “A PRIME suspect in the killing of British student Meredith Kercher bragged about idolising a notorious serial killer just days before her murder. “Italian Raffaele Sollecito used his online diary to praise the “Monster of Foligno”, a convict serving a life sentence for the murders of two young children. “The discovery came after Sollecito appeared in court last Monday to give prosecutors the password to his computer. “The 23-year-old student and his American girlfriend Amanda Knox are being held on suspicion of murdering Meredith, 21, a fellow student in Perugia on November 1 last year. “He read about killer Luigi Chiatti when he found out he had studied at the town’s ONAOSI college years before. On October 13 Sollecito wrote on his blog about previous students.  “The one I admire the most is the Monster of Foligno,” he said. “I know there have been salacious goings-on at the college but the one common denominator is depression.” The IT student also wrote of his interest in “extreme experiences” and hinted at his depression, saying he felt he was “entering a dark tunnel without an exit”. Profiler Douglas makes zero mention of all of this. 5. My Conclusions On This Area In his interview with Krista Erickson, John Douglas claimed he had all the information necessary to analyse the case and conclude that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are innocent. “I won’t do an analysis unless I am provided with all the information necessary. In this case, I had everything I needed. In fact, more than I’ve had in other cases.” He didn’t specify that all the information he had been given came from Amanda Knox’s supporters and it clearly didn’t include any of the official court reports or court testimonies. So far, I’ve analysed John Douglas’ claims about Knox and Sollecito’s questioning on 5 November 2007, the personas and backgrounds of Knox and Sollecito, and some of the DNA evidence and other evidence against them. Douglas hasn’t cited even ONCE any of the official court reports or court testimonies - not even once - or provided any verbatim quotations from anyone directly involved in the case. Tellingly John Douglas doesn’t cite any sources for the specific claims he makes - which suggests he knows his sources aren’t trustworthy or reliable. Unsubstantiated claims from anonymous sources are not acceptable in academia, science or law. John Douglas has just repeated many of the PR lies that have been widely propagated in the media with regard to the backgrounds of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede and some of the DNA evidence against without doing any real fact-checking at all. 2018-08-22T05:57:00+00:00 How With Myriad False Claims John Douglas Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots #1 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_1 https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_john_douglas_pushes_to_forefront_1#When:22:10:00Z {summary} Muddled mindhunters Mark Olshaker, John Douglas, and Jim Clemente [Long post. Click here to go straight to Comments] 1. Overview Of This Series This is the first in a series on the myriad claims John Douglas has made about Meredith’s case starting early in 2013. That was from after the bent Hellman appeal in 2011 to after the Supreme Court annulled Hellman’s outcome in mid 2013 but before the Nencini rerun of the appeal in 2013-14. All of the besotted Knox apologists in 2013 went from deep joy to despondence and desperation.  At that point, there were numerous court translations on our Wiki, the prosecution had given some excellent interviews, and there were several very good books out. The mafia poodles Heavey, Preston, Moore, Hampikian and Fischer had been thoroughly exposed. It really was about time the unhinged conspiracy theories were put to rest. So what happens? A new mafia poodle, John Douglas, explodes out of nowhere, with MORE fabrications, MORE defamations, and MORE condescending hate talk! Douglas has made further abusive and inaccurate claims about law enforcement (amazingly, he never contacted any of them), about the crime scene, the hard evidence, the witness evidence, the time-lines, the police and prosecution, and so on. His bizarre claims (illegal if made in Italy) were pushed hard in several books, in postings on his own and other websites, in interviews, in a pitch to a near-empty room at the Congress, and in one or two forays into the State Department. 2. Who Exactly Is John Douglas? Douglas is a former crime specialist long retired from the FBI and best known for being one of the first criminal profilers. In 1996 he published the popular Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, which inspired the popular Netflix series. The two FBI profilers - Jason Gideon and David Rossi - in the long-running TV series Criminal Minds are explicitly based on him. He has also written other books about criminal psychology. He apparently coined the term “serial killer” and is credited with helping to expand our understanding of murderous psychopathy. He was a consultant to Thomas Harris when the crime writer was researching Silence of the Lambs and to Peter Jackson on the film Lovely Bones. Most quotes will come from his long sections on the case in (1) Law and Disorder with colleague Mark Olshaker; another colleague, Jim Clemente, propagates their nonsense a lot in podcasts and YouTubes; and (2) the absurdly titled Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher, written with Knox fans Douglas Preston, Steve Moore and Michael Heavey. As Douglas was pretty wildly wrong in his takes on the hard facts and psychologies of every one of the main characters (the three charged, prosecutors and police, several others) which is supposedly his main area of expertise, I will start with that area. Then in the next several posts I will examine other Douglas claims. I’ll conclude with the amazing number of red flags Douglas ignored, going back to Knox’s time in Seattle. They may not faze a PR shill, but they should give pause to any competent, honest investigator. Obvious red flags include Knox’s reputation at high-school and college, her heavy drug use starting in Seattle, Knox’s reason for being in Perugia (hint: it was not to study), her financial situation, the chronic antagonisms between Knox and Sollecito (who Douglas barely mentions), the breaks she was given in 2007-08, her disastrous stint on the stand at trial in 2009 (touched on below), the mountain of evidence, the devastating official reconstructions, the bent appeal court in 2011, and the mid-2013 Cassation annulment report. 3. Bizarre Precursor A Year Earlier Hard to believe! But exactly one year prior to Douglas exploding himself into the case ANOTHER mafia poodle, Saul Kassin, a profiler with John Jay College of Criminal Science in New York, did the same thing. He retreated whiny and discredited. Take a look. Click for Post:  Saul Kassin: An Example Of How The Knox Campaign Is Misleading American Experts And Audiences Click for Post:  Rebutting Saul Kassin’s Substantive Claim Of Forced Confession Click for Post:  Correcting Saul Kassin’s Massively Inaccurate Description Of Amanda Knox’s So-Called Confession Click for Post:  How Saul Kassin Framed Many Fine Italian Justice Officials - And Then Played Victim When Corrected 4. AK and RS Sessions with Police On 5 November 2007 In this post I’ll analyse some of the claims (there are more) he has made about Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s questioning on 5 November 2007, which he based almost exclusively on their own misleading accounts and the absurd inventions of Steve Moore, and I’ll compare those claims to the official court reports and court testimonies to ascertain their accuracy and veracity. See here for just how well we understand this area. We finally have full knowledge of it almost minute by minute and word by word. There was zero interrogation as Italy defines it prior to arrest, her behavior had made investigators curious but not made her a witness, let alone a suspect, and she was never “targeted” before she broke under zero pressure. All four discussions are on record, and Knox signed every page of all four reports. John Douglas’s claim #1 “On the evening of November 5, police asked both Amanda and Raffaele to come to the station to discuss apparent inconsistencies in their accounts.” Untrue. This claim is demonstrably false. Neither the police nor the prosecutors brought Knox in for questioning on 5 November 2007. Amanda Knox herself testified in court that she wasn’t called to come to the police station on 5 November 2007. Carlo Pacelli: “For what reason did you go to the Questura on November 5? Were you called?” Amanda Knox: “No, I wasn’t called. I went with Raffaele because I didn’t want to be alone.” Monica Napoleoni, the head of Perugia’s homicide squad, said they told Knox she should go home to rest, but Knox insisted on staying: Amanda also came that evening, the evening of the 5th. We said to Amanda that she could go home to rest. Since, during those days, she was always saying, always complaining that she wanted to rest, wanted to eat, we said: “˜Look, you’ve eaten; you can go and rest yourself. If there’s a need, we’ll call you.’ John Douglas’s claim #2 “During that time, according to the police, he [Raffaele Sollecito] began wavering on his story that Amanda had slept over with him and that they’d been together the entire night of the murder. Maybe she had gone out for a while””around 9:00 P.M. or so””and hadn’t come back until 1:30 A.M.; he wasn’t sure.” Untrue. John Douglas presents the above comments as if they are verbatim quotations from Sollecito. They are not. He makes no reference to any sources to substantiate his claim. In fact Sollecito categorically stated Amanda Knox wasn’t with him that evening in his witness statement. “At 9pm I went home alone and Amanda said that she was going to Le Chic because she wanted to meet some friends. We said goodbye. I went home, I rolled myself a spliff and made some dinner.” “I remember Amanda wasn’t back yet. I surfed on the Internet for a couple of hours after my father’s phone call, and I stopped only when Amanda came back, about one in the morning, I think.” Sollecito’s claim that Amanda Knox wasn’t at his apartment that evening is corroborated by the mobile phone evidence. From the Nencini report, 2014, page 132. “At 8:18 pm and 12 seconds, Amanda Marie Knox received a text message sent to her by Patrick Lumumba, in which he informed her that it would not be necessary for her to go to the bar to carry out her usual work. At the time of receipt, Amanda Marie Knox’s handset connected via the sector 3 mast at Torre dell’Acquedotto, 5 dell’Aquila, as shown by phone records entered in evidence. This mast cannot be reached from the vicinity of 130 Corso Garibaldi, the home of Raffaele Sollecito. According to the findings of the judicial police entered in evidence, this mast could be reached by anyone in Via Rocchi, Piazza Cavallotti or Piazza 4 Novembre, all locations in Perugia which are intermediate between 130 Corso Garibaldi, the home of Raffaele Sollecito, and Via Alessi, where the “Le Chic” bar is located “From this set of facts established in the case, Amanda Marie Knox’s claim, according to which she received Patrick Lumumba’s text message while she was at 130 Corso Garibaldi, appears false. Given the mast connected to and the time, it is reasonable to assume that, when Amanda received the message, she had already left Raffaele Sollecito’s home and was on her way to the “˜Le Chic’ bar. Presumably, she then turned around and went back.” John Douglas’s claim #3 John Douglas talks as if RS and AK never lied and for example he doesn’t address the fact that Raffaele Sollecito admitted lying to the police and blamed Knox for his lies. Untrue. There is overwhelming proof theiy both lied. For example: “In my former statement I told you a load of rubbish because I believed Amanda’s version of what happened and did not think about the inconsistencies.” This inconvenient fact has been brushed under the carpet by Amanda Knox’s supporters for years. The fact Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito lied to the police before they were questioned on 5 November 2007 is critically important for a couple of reasons: (1) their lies can’t be attributed to police coercion or brutality and (2) it clearly indicates they were both trying to hide another inconvenient truth. This begs the question: what inconvenient truth were they trying to hide? John Douglas has never answered this question, probably because he is blissfully ignorant of all the lies Knox and Sollecito told the police and others. Amanda Knox’s high-profile supporters don’t address the lies that Knox and Sollecito told before and after 5 November 2007. For example, the filmmakers responsible for Amanda Knox on Netflix only focused on Amanda Knox’s false and malicious allegation against Diya Lumumba - not on any of the lies before and after 5 November 2007. It’s easy to understand why they don’t address these lies - there isn’t a plausible innocent explanation for them. Instead they pretend or insinuate that Knox and Sollecito only lied because they were coerced and/or beaten by the police on 5 November 2007 and that’s the approach John Douglas adopts. Judge Marasca from the Supreme Court couldn’t pretend that Knox and Sollecito didn’t lie repeatedly to the police. He had no choice but to address them because Judge Massei and Judge Nencini detailed their lies in their own reports. He acknowledges that Amanda Knox lied, and claimed she had lied to cover for Rudy Guede. Judge Marasca’s Supreme Court report: “Elements of strong suspicion are also in the inconsistencies and lies which the suspect woman [Amanda Knox] committed over the statements she released on various occasions, especially in the places where her narrative was contradicted by the telephone records which show different incoming SMS messages”. “However, the said calunnia is another circumstantial element against the appellant, insofar as it can be considered a strategy in order to cover up for Mr. Guede, whom she had an interest to protect because of fear of retaliatory accusations against her.” Guede was of course Douglas’s solitary “forgotten” lone-wolf killer. How does he explain that one? John Douglas’s claim #4 John Douglas also resorts to another common tactic used by Amanda Knox’s supporters to explain her multiple contradictory accounts of what she was doing and where she was on 1 November 2007 and her false and malicious accusation against Diya Lumumba:  he provides a detailed and categoric eyewitness account of what happened at the police station on 5 November 2007, even though he was not even present. “A policewoman called her “stupid” and a “liar” and slapped her on the back of her head. They repeated the blow every time she didn’t give them an answer. They gave her nothing to eat or drink and didn’t allow her to go to the bathroom. It was as if they were going to keep punishing her until she remembered.” Untrue. Of course, John Douglas can’t substantiate any of his claims above because he wasn’t present when Knox was questioned. Furthermore, he is contradicting what Knox testified in court -  she admitted she was given something to eat and drink. Reported by Richard Owen, in The Times, 1 March 2009: Ms Napoleoni told the court that while she was at the police station Ms Knox had been “˜treated very well. She was given water, chamomile tea and breakfast. She was given cakes from a vending machine and then taken to the canteen at the police station for something to eat.’ Reported by Richard Owen, in The Times, 15 March 2009: Ms Donnino said that Ms Knox had been “˜comforted’ by police, given food and drink, and had at no stage been hit or threatened. John Follain in his book Death in Perugia, page 134, also reports that Knox was given food and drink during her questioning: During the questioning, detectives repeatedly went to fetch her a snack, water, and hot drinks, including chamomile tea. From the relevant court transcript: Monica Napoleoni: Amanda was given something to drink several times. She was brought hot chamomile; she was taken to the bar of the Questura to eat. First she was given brioches from the little [vending] machine. Carlo Pacelli: These methods of treatment, how did they translate into practice? With what behaviour/actions [were they carried out] in actual fact? Earlier, you recalled that they actually brought her something to eat”¦ MN: It’s true. That morning, I remember that Inspector Ficarra actually took her to the bar to eat as soon as it opened. But before [that], we have little [vending] machines on the ground floor, and she was brought water, she was brought hot drinks, she was brought a snack. But also Raffaele, he was given something to drink; it’s not as though they were kept “¦ absolutely. Giuliano Mignini:  Had types of comfort been offered to her? Anna Donnino:  Well, during the evening, yes, in the sense that I remember that someone went down to the ground floor; it was the middle of the night, so in the station at that hour there are those automatic distributors; there’s nothing else; someone went to the ground floor and brought everybody something to drink, some hot drinks and something to eat. I myself had a coffee, so I believe that she also had something. John Douglas doesn’t substantiate his claim that Amanda Knox was slapped. According to the corroborative eyewitness testimony of the people who were actually present when Knox was questioned - Anna Donnino, Monica Napoleoni and Rita Ficarra - she wasn’t hit. The witnesses who were present when Knox was questioned, including her interpreter, testified under oath at the trial in 2009 that she wasn’t hit. (Under Italian law, witnesses must testify under oath, while defendants do not, so are not required by law to be truthful on the stand.) From the relevant court transcript: Giuliano Mignini: Do you recall, shall we say, that night between the 1st and then the spontaneous declarations and then the order for arrest, who and what was with her, other than you, whether there were other subjects that spoke with us, how they behaved? Did [she] undergo/experience violent [sic: NdT: “violente” in Italian, probably typo for “violenze” = “violence/force/assault”] by any chance? Rita Ficarra: Absolutely not. GM: Was she intimidated, threatened? RF: No. I, as I said earlier, I came in that evening and there were some colleagues from the Rome SCO, I was with Inspector Fausto Passeri, then I saw come out, that is come out from the entry-door to the offices of the Flying [Squad] the Assistant Zugarini and Monica Napoleoni, who appeared for an instant just outside there, then we went back in calmly, because the discussion we had with her was quite calm. Giuliano Mignini: [was there] violence “¦? Monica Napoleoni: But absolutely not! Mignini:  You remember it”¦ you’ve described it; however, I’ll ask it. Was she threatened? Did she suffer any beatings? Anna Donnino: Absolutely not. GM: She suffered maltreatments? AD:  Absolutely not. Carlo Pacelli:  In completing and consolidating in cross-examination the questions by the public prosecutor, I refer to the morning of the 6th of November, to the time when Miss Knox had made her summary information. In that circumstance, Miss Knox was struck on the head with punches and slaps? Anna Donnino:  Absolutely not. CP:  In particular, was she struck on the head by a police woman? AD:  Absolutely not! CP:  Miss Knox was, however, threatened? AD:  No, I can exclude that categorically! CP:  With thirty years of prison”¦ ? AD:  No, no, absolutely not. CP:  Was she, however, sworn at, in the sense that she was told she was a liar? AD:  I was in the room the whole night, and I saw nothing of all this. CP:  So the statements that had been made had been made spontaneously, voluntarily? AD:  Yes. Carlo Della Valla:  This”¦ Giancarlo Massei:  Pardon, but let’s ask questions”¦ if you please. CP:  You were also present then during the summary informations made at 5:45? AD:  Yes. CP:  And were they done in the same way and methods as those of 1:45? AD:  I would say yes. Absolutely yes. CP:  To remove any shadow of doubt from this whole matter, as far as the summary information provided at 5:45 Miss Knox was struck on the head with punches and slaps? AD:  No. CP:  In particular, was she struck on the head by a policewoman? AD:  No. Even Amanda Knox’s lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, distanced himself in the Italian media from these allegations, and never ever lodged any complaint which he would have been required to do under Italian law if he believed her. There were pressures from the police, but we never said she was hit. John Douglas’s claim #5 What seems to have happened is that in his fear and fatigue, Raffaele eventually confused and transposed the nights of October 31 and November 1. Untrue. Although John Douglas doesn’t specifically refer to Sollecito’s unequivocal claim that Amanda Knox wasn’t at his apartment on the evening of the murder or the fact he blamed her for his lies, he is clearly trying to account for his conflicting statements. His claim that Sollecito was suffering from fatigue is laughable - Sollecito was literally questioned for a couple of hours before he stopped providing Knox with an alibi. His pathetic excuse that Sollecito seems to have confused the nights of 31 October and 1 November is ridiculous beyond words. Sollecito was clearly referring to 1 November 2007. His witness statement is a chronological account of what he claims he and Knox did on the evening of 1 November and the morning of 2 November 2007. He was being questioned specifically about the night of the murder and the following day.. John Douglas’s claim #6 “Both hinged on a questionable confession after many hours of police interrogation without a lawyer present””one by a scared and confused seventeen-year-old boy; the other by a girl just out of her teens who barely spoke the language being shouted at her.” Untrue. The only one reported shouting - wailing and beating her head - was Knox herself. And Raffaele Sollecito wasn’t 17, he was 23 years old. I don’t know how it’s possible for Douglas to get such basic facts wrong. Did it even cross his mind to actually research the case? Douglas’s intention is clear - he wants to infantilise both Knox and Sollecito by referring to them as a “boy” and “girl” in an effort to emphasize their naivety and immaturity in order to explain away their lies and inconsistent statements. John Douglas’s claim #7 Douglas seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that Amanda Knox was questioned only in Italian and all night. This is almost certainly due to the fact that Amanda Knox’s family and supporters initially claimed she wasn’t provided with an interpreter for an all-night session. Untrue. According to Barbie Nadeau in The Daily Beast, Amanda Knox’s session began at about 11:00pm. “Since Knox was already at the police station [in the company of Raffaele Sollecito], the head of the murder squad decided to ask her a few questions. Her interrogation started at about 11pm.” It was not in fact interrogation: Knox was invited merely to build a list of visitors to the house, which exists and is in evidence. There was little progress till the interpreter arrived. After Amanda Knox had made her witness statement at 1:45am, she wasn’t questioned again that evening. She herself decided to made another witness statement at 5:45am, with the same interpreter, but she wasn’t asked any questions. She herself refused a lawyer. John Douglas’s claim #8 Altogether, Amanda was interrogated over a forty-hour period (an average workweek) by twelve detectives. This is known as “tag teaming.” The interrogators remain fresh and at the top of their game while the suspect grows increasingly exhausted and isolated. Untrue. None of that happened. All four sessions as a person with possible useful information (not a witness, let alone suspect) over 4 days were quite brief, Knox signed all pages of the 4 reports, and a mere several officers were listed as present at each. On 5-6 November, according to Anna Donnino, who arrived at the police station at about 12:30am, there was a total of three people in the room with Knox: Anna Donnino: “I had been made to enter a room where in fact there was Inspector Ficarra at a small table, another colleague from SCO (I only remember his first name; he was called Ivano), a police officer, and there was Miss Knox seated. I seated myself beside her.” That makes Knox, two small Italian women, and a kindly Rome officer who was essentially an onlooker. Not exactly terrifying. John Douglas’s claim #9 “Though she said it was dreamlike and she couldn’t tell if it had actually happened, she “˜recalled’ Patrick having sex with Meredith, but she didn’t remember whether he had had to force her.” Untrue. Yet again John Douglas repeats a popular PR lie and he doesn’t substantiate his claim with a verbatim quotation from Amanda Knox. She makes no mention of a dream or vision in her two witness statements. She categorically stated that she met Diya Lumumba at Piazza Grimana and that they went to the cottage on Via della Pergola. In her first witness statement, she claims that Lumumba killed Meredith. This is from the 1:45 am statement. I responded to the message by telling him that we would see each other at once; I then left the house, telling my boyfriend that I had to go to work. In view of the fact that during the afternoon I had smoked a joint, I felt confused, since I do not frequently make use of mind-altering substances, nor of heavier substances. I met Patrik immediately afterward, at the basketball court on Piazza Grimana, and together we went [to my] home. I do not recall whether Meredith was there or arrived afterward. I struggle to remember those moments, but Patrik had sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I do not recall whether Meredith had been threatened beforehand. I recall confusedly that he killed her. This is from the 5:45 am statement. I wish to relate spontaneously what happened because these events have deeply bothered me and I am really afraid of Patrick”¦  I met him in the evening of November 1st 2007, after sending him a reply message saying “I will see you”. We met soon after at about 21.00 at the basketball court of Piazza Grimana. We went to my apartment in Via della Pergola n. 7. I do not clearly remember if Meredith was already at home or if she came later, what I can say is that Patrick and Meredith went into Meredith’s room, while I think I stayed in the kitchen. I cannot remember how long they stayed together in the room but I can only say that at a certain point I heard Meredith screaming and as I was scared I plugged up my ears. John Douglas’s claim #10 In an interview with American journalist and Amanda Knox fan Krista Ericksson, John Douglas mindlessly repeats more PR lies. KE: What about Amanda’s confessions during the interrogations? JD: To be interrogated from 10 pm until 6 am in the morning? These are not sophisticated young people ““ it would not take a dozen interrogators to break them. I know the tricks, I know what they do in there; I’ve done it. No one could hold up. I couldn’t hold up - especially over 5 days. Untrue. The PR myth that Amanda Knox was subjected to an all-night session or any arduous sessions previously was debunked a long time ago. According to Barbie Nadeau in The Daily Beast, Amanda Knox’s impromptu session began at about 11:00pm. “Since Knox was already at the police station [in the company of Raffaele Sollecito], the head of the murder squad decided to ask her a few questions. Her interrogation started at about 11pm.” Again, it was not in fact interrogation: Knox was invited merely to build a list of visitors to the house, which exists and is in evidence. After Amanda Knox had made her witness statement at 1:45am, she wasn’t questioned again that evening. She decided to made another witness statement at 5:45am, but she wasn’t asked any questions. John Douglas’s claim #11 In the same Krista Ericksson interview, yet again John Douglas alludes to Amanda Knox being tag-teamed by 12 police officers on 5 November 2007. The infamous lie that Steve Moore has tried so hard to spread very widely among the gullible. KE: Amanda, while under interrogation accused another man, Patrick Lumumba. Why would she have done that? JD: The police knew they had negroid hairs at the crime scene. Amanda exchanged texts the night before with Patrick Lumumba, who’s of African descent, like Guede (Note: Lumumba owned the bar where Amanda worked as a waitress. He told her she wasn’t needed for work that night). Because the DNA evidence had not come back yet, they jumped to the conclusion the hairs belonged to Lumumba. They interrogated her accordingly. The tactics used was to have Amanda say what the police wanted. You get people to confess under this psychological torture. Untrue. What torture? Douglas sounds dangerously deluded here and should perhaps be banned from the central police station. There is a written record entered into evidence and a signed statement Knox insisted upon. The single subject of this voluntary, spontaneous discussion (Knox building a list of visitors to the house) was described above, as were those few present (two small women and a male onlooker from Rome). There is zero proof that any of them jumped to conclusions or that they “interrogated” Knox “accordingly”. Knox simply cracked spontaneously when a message she denied sending was spotted on the cellphone she shared with the officers. There is no mention of negroid hairs in the official court reports. John Douglas’s claim #12 He repeatedly implies the interrogators had foreknowledge of the Knox-Lumumba text exchange. They brought her into an interrogation room… They had checked the records of Amanda’s mobile phone. The last exchange was a text from Patrick Lumumba saying she didn’t have to come to work that night because business was slow and a texted reply from her: Untrue. It was ascertained in court that the police didn’t know that Diya Lumumba had sent Amanda Knox a text message. Here is the relevant trial testimony/ 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. Buonata serate.” 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 the information is in telphone”¦ GCM: But they didn’t say it has him, but they said it was him! AK: No, They didn’t say it was him, but they said “We know who it is, we who it is. You were with him, you met him.” All courts of course disbelieved that last part, they had no idea who Patrick was, and Knox served three years for maliciously framing him. The Supreme Court twice ruled that all appeals were concluded. Knox is a felon for life, though Douglas never ever mentions this.  5. An Assessment Of Douglas’s Claims So Far John Douglas hasn’t substantiated any of his claims about Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s questioning on 5 November 2007. He hasn’t referred to any of the official court reports or court testimonies. He never bothered to listen to both sides of the story by speaking to the prosecutors or some of the police officers involved in the case. Instead he has mindlessly repeated the PR lies that were widely propagated in the media by Amanda Knox’s family and supporters. To say his articles and books about the Meredith Kercher case lack academic rigour would be a massive understatement. He is like a dim-witted high school student who is too lazy to do any of his own research and just copies the work of other dim-witted and lazy students. His standard of work with regard to the Meredith Kercher case isn’t acceptable for teenage high-school students let alone at undergraduates at university. It seems that he has plagiarised the work of the class dunce i.e. Steve Moore without bothering to fact-check any of his claims. It’s hard to believe that John Douglas actually went to university and has a degree and doctorate. As for Steve Moore and Michael Heavey, Douglas’s constant companions in 2013, they tried hard to use their respective backgrounds in the FBI and law to bolster their credibility and underline their expertise and trustworthiness when trying to persuade the public that Amanda Knox is innocent. However, their effect on the case was minimal. They really proved only that being a former FBI agent or a judge counts for absolutely nothing if you don’t bother to read a single page of any of the official court reports and court testimonies, and instead unquestioningly believe whatever Amanda Knox and her PR, her family and her supporters say, without bothering to do any fact-checking. This simple-minded and superficial approach is the reason why Steve Moore and Michael Heavey have got so many basic facts about the case wrong. Expecting an expert to substantiate their claims is not unreasonable. Providing proof is essential in academia, science and law. It’s one of most basic skills taught in schools. Any high school history student knows it’s important to support their points with evidence and analyse and evaluate the trustworthiness and usefulness of sources. It should be self-evident even to a half-wit that the accused, their family and supporters might not be trustworthy and reliable sources and nothing they say should be taken at face value and accepted as the gospel truth. That’s the reason why it is critical to fact-check their claims and listen to the other side of the story i.e. read the official court reports and court testimonies or speak to the prosecutors or some of the police officers involved in the case.. Knowing there are two sides to every story and being mindful of the importance of reserving judgment before hearing both sides is not some hitherto unknown truth. This piece of wisdom has been around for over two thousand years: “The first to speak in court sounds right”” until the cross-examination begins.” (Proverbs 18:17). It defies belief that so many of Amanda Knox’s high-profile supporters and journalists have accepted what Amanda Knox and her supporters say as the gospel truth, especially as she is a self-confessed liar who has been convicted of lying by all courts, including the Italian Supreme Court. 2018-08-16T22:10:00+00:00 How With Myriad False Claims Steve Moore Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_steve_moore_pushes_to_forefront https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/how_with_myriad_false_claims_steve_moore_pushes_to_forefront#When:20:52:00Z {summary} Steve Moore 1. Steve Moore’s Interrogation Hoax You can see proofs of mafia poodle Steve Moore’s multiple misstatements of the case in Part 2 below. What Moore is really, really short on is hard proofs. Instead he makes things up. No court has ever sided with him. Not even the defense teams sided with him. Some claims are at flat-out variance with what Knox herself conceded on the stand. Moore has never released his curriculum vitae, despite prodding, and we have questioned before whether he has any training or experience at investigations. Tellingly, he seems to know nothing of the extensive FBI/Italy cooperation he puts at risk. See the posts below and previously. Here is a key claim from Steve Moore.  Amanda Knox was interrogated for 8 hours.  Overnight.  Without food or water.  In a police station.  In a foreign country.  In a foreign language.  By a dozen different officers.  Without being allowed a lawyer… The Inquisition Amanda Knox experienced in Perugia was no more legally or morally defensible than the Salem Witch Trials.  No rational person should believe that the results of what she went through are reliable evidence. What 8 hours? What dozen officers? She was there against the wishes of police. She had an interpreter. She refused a lawyer.  And at trial (long before Moore wrote) she confirmed she was given refreshments, and treated well. So none of those claims is correct. Moore made them all up. To nail this hoax that Moore has propagated hardest, one of our truth promoters (we are not sure who) has kindly put together this timeline for Knox at the Questura the first week. It is now being tweeted. Greatly appreciated. However, from recent translations, we can now with great confidence go beyond that on the first week. We know more of the four session timings, and precisely what was discussed, and precisely who were the few investigators that were present at each of the four. And that Knox signed every page of the record of all four sessions, so every one of those quite short discussions of leads WAS recorded. And that Knox’s status along with that of many others was a simple “person with possible useful information”. She was not even a witness, let alone a suspect, as the defenses conceded at trial. See posts 19 to 21 here in our Interrogation Hoax series. See this post and this post by KrissyG. So, day by day, despite the numerous contradictory claims first initiated by Knox herself, this was her highly provable situation at Perugia’s central police station. Only on the first day was Knox and the others in the house asked to hang on late at the Questura until the questioning of all of them was done On the second and third days Knox was asked to be there for the questioning periods and visits to the house but at all other times she was free to leave. On the fourth day Knox was not even required. She turned up very late with Sollecito and then, contrary to police advice, insisted on remaining there. The ONLY officer in discussion with Knox when she framed Patrick was Rita Ficarra - and she is smaller than Knox (see posts 2 to 4 and 12 here). All the Italian courts had those same documents. They had THAT picture. Not one, including the Supreme Court, accepted Knox’s version or Steve Moore’s. Accordingly Knox is a convicted felon for life for maliciously framing Patrick, with no chance of reversal, and she rightly served three years. Those translated documents blow right out of the water Moore’s endless shrill promotion (see also numerous YouTubes) of “54 hours” and “tag-teams of interrogators” and “premature targeting of Knox” and “forced confession” and “no sleep” and “no bathroom breaks”. Moore always leaves out Sollecito’s arc that led to him turning against Knox on the record at least twice in the early days. Media should push him to explain that. 2. How Steve Moore Misleads These posts are in chronological order over more than seven years, pointing to how unaccepting of numerous corrections Steve Moore has been in his unsound flame wars against Italian justice. 1 Click for Post:  Steve Moore Is Baffling Informed Case Observers On Both Sides Of The Atlantic 2 Click for Post:  Steve Moore Really, Really Believes Amanda Knox’s Alibi #5! Or Was That Alibi #7? 3 Click for Post:  Newsweek Report From Italy On Damage From Knox/Marriott Campaign To Knox Interests & US Image 4 Click for Post:  Ten Examples Of How The Former Campus Cop Steve Moore Serially Mischaracterizes The Case 5 Click for Post:  Michelle Moore Lets Slip How Conspiracy Nut Bruce Fischer Brainwashed Steve Moore 6 Click for Post:  Scientific Statement Analysis: Claims Made By Steve Moore About The Investigations In Italy 7 Click for Post:  Scientific Statement Analysis #5: Analysis Of Michelle Moore Protesting Steve Moore Is Not A Phony 8 Click for Post:  The Seattle University Panel: Some Of The Ways In Which Steve Moore Got His Analysis Wrong 9 Click for Post:  Why The FOA’s Increasingly Hapless Steve Moore Should Probably Stay Well Away From TV 10 Click for Post:  “Million Dollar Campaign” To Try To Influence The Jury Is Being Widely Reported To A Startled Italy 11 Click for Post:  With Diffamazione Complaint Against False Claims In Oggi Knox’s Legal Prospects Continue To Slide 12 Click for Post:  Dr Mignini Pushes Back Against His Demonizers Trying To Ascribe Non-Existant “Satanic Theory” 13 Click for Post:  Knox Apologists Attempt To Bend Congress; But Nobody Important Turns Up 14 Click for Post:  Fifty Of The Most Common Myths Still Promoted Without Restraint By The Knox PR Campaign 15 Click for Post:  Netflixhoax 22 Omitted - State Department Monitored Knox 2007-11; Zero Ill Treatment Reported 16 Click for Post:  Why Did The Mainstream Media Enable A Takeover By The Conspiracy Nuts? 17 Click for Post:  Trashing Of Italian Justice To Bend Trial Outcomes And How The Republic Pushes Back 18 Click for Post:  With Sollecito’s First Plea For Mitigation Seen As A Flop, His Behavior Seems Extremely Suspect 19 Click for Post:  Being Reported: Significant Developments In The Sollecito Crime Family 20 Click for Post:  “Americans Are Paying Knox $10,000 A Gig To Trash Italian Cops - Smart Move Liberating Her” 2018-06-15T20:52:00+00:00 Knox & ECHR: How Abysmal Researcher Avrom Brendzel Raises False Hope In The Knox Sheep https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/knox_echr_how_abysmal_researcher_avrom_brendzel_raises_false_hope https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/knox_echr_how_abysmal_researcher_avrom_brendzel_raises_false_hope#When:21:05:00Z {summary} 1. The Real ECHR Context Our previous post explained Knox’s slim-to-zero chances of winning at the ECHR. Her lawyers, knowing how much and how inconsistently Knox lies, and with zero paper trail in support of her claim that she was forced to frame an innocent man, had really only pulled a PR stunt. As thousands of Italian lawyers are known to do every year.  But ignorant of the highly documented facts, and the ECHR’s admission rules, and Cassation’s final ruling which shut the ECHR out, the gullible Knox sheep still spend hours and hours misleading themselves into thinking their cherub is home free. And that her three-year felony conviction will be wound back. 2. Avrom Brendzel’s False Claims The non-lawyer Avrom Brendzel promotes Knox ardently on Twitter. And he has written at enormous length, very misleadingly, twice on Knox and the ECHR. 1. On the fast-fading Ground Report in mid 2016 (see header above; his fatuous co-author Nigel Scott was debunked by Kermit here.) 2. On yet another of the messianic Bruce Fischer’s serially inaccurate sites just two months ago. That second one (The Next Legal Step in the Amanda Knox Case: The European Court of Human Rights) is again riddled with rudimentary errors and PR myths. Brendzel clearly hasn’t read many or even any of the official court reports and court testimonies - as of course the ECHR will have done. Instead he has bought into the lies and misinformation by Amanda Knox’s supporters and, too lazy to do any fact-checking, has regurgitated them with bells and whistles here.  He has relied only on these people for his information for way too long, and it explains why he gets so many basic facts wrong. 1. Wrong on conviction overturn His long rambling article addressed at them explains why he thinks it’s highly likely that an advisory from the ECHR will result in ...the eventual revision of Knox’s conviction for false accusation, meaning an acquittal or other dismissal of the conviction. He doesn’t seem to understand that the ECHR has zero power to reverse or quash any convictions, let alone that they will recommend that to Italy. “The Court does not act as a court of appeal in relation to national courts; it does not rehear cases, it cannot quash, vary or revise their decisions.” (The European Court of Human Rights) Judge Marasca stated in his Supreme Court report that Amanda Knox’s conviction for calunnia is protected as a final judgement: “On the other hand, in the slanderous declarations against Lumumba, which earned her [Amanda Knox] a conviction, the status of which is now protected as final judgement.” In other words, Amanda Knox’s conviction for calunnia is final and can’t be changed. 2. Wrong on rights violated Brendzel also falsely claims: ...the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation agreed that Knox’s rights under Italian law had been violated during the questioning and ruled that her statements from the questioning could not be used against her. The Italian Supreme Court has never stated that Amanda Knox’s rights were violated. That’s the reason why he is unable to substantiate his claim with a verbatim quotation from the Supreme Court. Amanda Knox’s witness statements could be used against her in the slander trial. They couldn’t be used against her at the murder trial because she wasn’t represented by a lawyer when she made them. She was warned repeatedly about that but chose to press on. That was not her rights being violated. She chose that. 3. Wrong on Knox “questioning” Brendzel also repeats the PR lie that Amanda Knox was continually questioned until about 6:00 am: “The questioning of both lasted until the morning of November 6. Knox’s statements, written out by computer printer in Italian by the police, were indicated as generated at 1:45 am and 5:45 am.” In fact she was barely questioned all night. She herself insisted on both statements, and she signed. She wasn’t ever questioned after she had made her spontaneous, unforced statement at 1:45am. She chose to make another witness statement at 5:45am, but she wasn’t questioned at that time and had even been warned she should have a lawyer present at all statements, which she chose to ignore. 4. Wrong on Knox coercion Brendzel also claims that Amanda Knox was “seemingly being subjected to some form of physically or emotionally painful coercion”. But there is no credible evidence that she was beaten or coerced. On the contrary, according to the corroborative eyewitness testimony of the two women who were present throughout (Rita Ficarra and Anna Donnino) and one who looked in (Monica Napoleoni), when Amanda Knox was helping them by listing possible perps she wasn’t hit or threatened. At trial Knox admitted this. 5. Wrong on prior suspect In line with his kneejerk blaming of the investigators, Brendzel also claims this: The Italian police and prosecutor did not disclose to Knox during the November 5/6, 2007 questioning that she had become a suspect prior to the beginning of the questioning. But no, Knox had not. The police didn’t have anywhere near enough evidence to make her an official suspect when she voluntarily showed up at the police station that evening and they were still hunting hard for others. Amanda Knox was there co-operating only as “a person with possible useful information” or possible witness - not as an official suspect - on 5 November 2007. On that night she built a list of visitors to the house at Rita Ficarra’s request. A mere list. Which is in evidence. That’s hardly a request for a suspect - and the list pointed away from her. Giobbi’s gut feelings about Amanda Knox being guilty were quite frankly irrelevant, and they conflict with every other testifier at the trial. (He was from Rome and seemingly grandstanding as Knox’s conniption had had nothing to do with him.) It wasn’t until Amanda Knox spontaneously admitted she was at the cottage when Meredith was killed and claimed she brought the killer back to the cottage that the investigators had anything to provisionally charge her for - and then only of withholding evidence, not murder or calunnia. 6. Wrong on court findings Brendzel doesn’t mention any of these damning findings of the Supreme Court: (1) she had said she went out multiple times and Sollecito repeatedly said she did; (2) there was overwhelming proof of multiple attackers, (3) it’s a proven fact Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith was killed, (4) she washed Meredith’s blood off in the small bathroom, (5) she knew specific details about the murder, (6) she provably lied to the police, and (7) the break-in was staged. Cassation also concluded Raffaele Sollecito was present when Meredith was killed. It’s not difficult to work out who Rudy Guede’s co-attackers were - there is no evidence of anyone else being at the cottage on the evening of the murder. 7. Wrong on trustworthiness The gullible Brendzel regards Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito as credible and trustworthy witnesses and quotes them a lot. That is despite the fact they have both admitted lying to the police. For felony lying Knox rightly served three years.  Knox’s numerous lies have been noted in multiple official court reports by the judges who presided over her trial in Perugia and her appeal in Florence and by the Supreme Court. Judge Massei and Judge Nencini both noted that the computer and telephone records prove that Knox and Sollecito lied repeatedly.  Judge Chieffi and Judge Marasca both noted that Amanda Knox lied in their Supreme Court reports. Judge Martuscelli comprehensively detailed Raffaele Sollecito’s numerous lies and false alibis in his report - which explained why Sollecito was denied compensation: Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s multiple false alibis and numerous lies remain an Achilles heel of their supporters. Nobody has ever provided a plausible innocent explanation for their lies. Brendzel, like Peter Gill - another unworldly academic - has chosen not to address them. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not even aware of them. 3. My Conclusions There is no justification for Brendzel’s absolute certainty that Knox and Sollecito are innocent. There is no exculpatory evidence whatsoever e.g. verified alibis or CCTV footage that proves Amanda Knox and Sollecito were not at the cottage at the time of the murder. Surely, as a scientist he should want proof of their innocence. Brendzel is clearly a good academic and intelligent. His scientific contributions are listed here, However, he clearly lacks emotional intelligence. Nobody with an ounce of common sense would unquestioningly believe and trust two self-confessed liars. This naivety and gulliblity is too common a denominator amongst the Knox sheep. 2018-05-30T21:05:00+00:00 How With Myriad False Claims Nina Burleigh Pushes To Forefront Of Pro-Knox Crackpots https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/How_With_Myriad_False_Claims_nina_burleigh https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/How_With_Myriad_False_Claims_nina_burleigh#When:01:48:00Z {summary} Nina Burleigh, over-exposed and under-informed, not a serious reporter 1. The Fatal Gift Of Superficiality This may come to be seen as the best-documented murder investigation and court process in legal history. In any country. For example the Wiki archive now exceeds 2500 documents, with a large fraction now in English, and a further 1000-plus other files, and even those will not be the final totals. In the first week of the investigation alone many dozens of reports were done. Recent posts on TJMK have started showing how, when one adopts a birds-eye view of any area of the case, evidence points now seen together as a whole become impossible to argue with. Those series are increasingly making the army of case critics nervous and quiet.  I recently found mafia poodle Nina Burleigh’s Fatal Gift of Beauty (FGOB) on the used book shelves, and decided to give it a read. This is her 2011 book with a very Pro-Knox slant. and it is a great Exhibit A of superficiality. 2. Comparing FGOB with the Knox Book To be fair, Burleigh’s book is nowhere near as excessive in making the false and malicious accusations as Knox’s did, nor is it as grotesquely illogical. So I am not going into the detail as I did with Revenge of the Knox. That 2013 book was both (1) extremely accusatory; and (2) extremely non-sensical. For comparison here are a few commentaries on the Knox/Kulman book. Click for Post:  How Knox’s Tide Of Malicious Demonization Now Threatens Real Pushback #1 Click for Post:  How Knox’s Tide Of Malicious Demonization Now Threatens Real Pushback #2 Click for Post:  How Knox’s Tide Of Malicious Demonization Now Threatens Real Pushback #3 Click for Post:  Revenge of the Knox, Series 4: Exposing The Tortured Logic That Permeates Her Book #1 Click for Post:  48 Tortured Logic Instances In Knox’s Book #21 To #48 3. TJMK Heavily Criticized Burleigh Burleigh’s amateurism and bias - she is neither a career reporter or crime expert or Italian speaker - have been rebutted repeatedly here on TJMK. The sloppy style of reporting in US weeklies and on TV of Burleigh paled in comparison with the excellent reports of the Italian-speaking Rome group of foreign reporters. Click for Post:  Knox Groupie Nina Burleigh Posting The Nastiest And Least Accurate Reports Click for Post:  How The Strongarm Public Relations Resulted in Most Of The Media Getting It Wrong Click for Post:  Nina Burleigh: View From A Broad Who Doesn’t Seem To Like Broads Or Being Abroad Click for Post:  Media Starting To Take A Closer Look At The Knox PR Shills With Nina Burleigh Exhibit One Click for Post:  What’s Nina Burleigh Got Against Women? A Bizarre Time Report Suggests Deep Problems In Her Psyche Click for Post:  More On The Ill-Considered Campaign of Vilification By The Knox Adulator Nina Burleigh Click for Post:  One Final Word On Nina Burleigh In Response To Those Still Hoaxed By Her Click for Post:  Why Claim Rudy Guede Did It Alone When So Much Proof Against? Click for Post:  Mignini And Giuttari Win Final Round In Spurious 2010 Conviction By Rogue Prosecutor And Judge Click for Post:  Much-Admired Feminist On Knox As Ice-Cold In Capanne And Media’s Mixed Performance On The Case Click for Post:  Why Smart Feminists Much Prefer To Keep Amanda Knox At Arms Length 4. General Problems With Burleigh’s Book (a) The Fatal Gift Of Beauty was actually written in 2011 True, this fact alone is not enough to discredit the book, as much did happen from 2007 to 2011.  However, so much has happened since then with zero updates that the book feels extremely incomplete. There is no mention of (I) the Hellmann/Zanetti ruling; (II) the Cassation 2013 annulment of H/Z; (III) Knox’s media campaign(s); (IV) New appeal at Florence 2013 and Nencini’s report 2014; (V) Bruno/Marasca throwing the case out against AK/RS 2015, while still placing them at the scene; (VI) Sollecito’s 2017 failed attempt at compensation; (VII) Book trial against Sollecito; (VIII) Guede’s attempts to re-open his case. (b) Despite claims, Burleigh didn’t interview authorities on the facts See FGOB, Notes, Page 307. There Burleigh claims to have consulted Italian authorities, and Italian legal experts on the matter, but does not list any of them.  Almost all the names given are American. She also claims to have listened to wiretaps and read through the ‘‘digital archive’’ but avoids specifics.  In the acknowledgment section (Page 317), AK and RS lawyers are listed as contributors, but given that they are paid to promote their innocence, they are hardly objective. Burleigh does list American books and media, and US ‘‘experts’. But what is really lacking is hard information from the Italians. Burleigh does list Mignini and Comodi, which is surprising.  However, FGOB does more to give PR-filtered background on them than to actually address Meredith’s case (c) Most of the book has nothing to do with Meredith’s case Burleigh goes on at length about the backstory of Knox, historical information about Italy, and much of the media attention.  In fact, is fair to assume that Burleigh has little to no grasp of the actual factual record.  It is flowerly and exotic, but largely irrelevant.  FGOB could have been written as a brochure and no hard facts would have been left out.  (d) Burleigh glossed over the hard truths of the case Burleigh does include bits and pieces of the case, like how the police suspected a break in, and how Knox did act differently.  However, it is lacking in the hard facts and evidence and truth that would have totally stood her slant and conclusions on their head.  Better idea would have been to dump the filler (which was most of the book), and go with some of those facts.  See Part 5 below. (e) Burleigh more or less accepts wholesale the PR version She does this without doing much in the way of critically analyzing anything.  She also promotes the myths that police and prosecutors jumped to conclusions, and suspected Knox because she was different.  Of course, if Burleigh had more hard truths, then the book would look quite different. 5. Hard Facts Missing From Burleigh’s FGOB It is difficult to whittle down a list of Burleigh’s omissions, but these in particular permitted her superficiality and bias. (1) Multiple False Alibis Click for Post:  Amanda Knox”¦ Trapped, In Her Own Words Click for Post:  Raffaele Sollecito”¦ Trapped, In His Own Words (2) False Accusation of an Innocent Man is Minimized Click for Post:  True Justice Is Rendered For Patrick Lumumba (Sort Of) (3) The ‘‘Interrogation’’ Really was a Hoax Click for Post:  The Knox Interrogation Hoax #1: Overview Of The Series - Multiple Knox Versions v One Stark Truth (4) Minimization of How Bad Knox was on Witness Stand Click for Post:  Knox Testimony Does Not Seem To Have Gained Much Traction Here In Italy Click for Post:  Italy Shrugs: Why Amanda Knox’s Testimony Seems To Have Been A Real Flop (5) The Actual Transcripts of Knox’s Questionings Click for Post:  Interrogation Hoax #19: ALL Knox Q&A Sessions 2-6 November 2007 WERE Recorded #1 Click for Post:  Interrogation Hoax #19: ALL Knox Q&A Sessions 2-6 November 2007 WERE Recorded #2 Click for Post:  Omitted - This Very Telling Knox Questioning By Dr Mignini #1 Click for Post:  Omitted - This Very Telling Knox Questioning By Dr Mignini #2 Click for Post:  Omitted - This Very Telling Knox Questioning By Dr Mignini #3 Click for Post:  Omitted - This Very Telling Knox Questioning By Dr Mignini #4 (6) How Conclusively Footprint on the Bathmat Nails Sollecito Click for Post:  The Incriminating Bathroom Evidence: Visual Analysis shows the Footprint IS Sollecito’s (7) The Break in Was in Fact Staged Click for Post:  A Visual Guide To The Staged Break-In Via Filomena’s Window (8) Staged Break In by Knox in April 2007 Just 7 Months Earlier Click for Post:  Amanda Knox Confirms She Staged A Break-In in Seattle Long A Sore Point To Previous Victims (9) Cellphone Activity Disproves What AK/RS are Saying Click for Post:  Those Pesky Certainties Cassation’s Fifth Chambers May Or May Not Convincingly Contend With #1 (10) Burleigh Subscribes to No-Evidence Claim But Ignores This Click for Post:  Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #3 (11) Knox’s Lamp Locked in Meredith’s Room, Because…. Click for Post:  How The Clean-Up And The Locked Door Contribute To The Very Strong Case For Guilt (12) Knox’s Statements Reek of Guilt Click for Post:  A More Detailed Analysis Of Knox’s Statement 6 November 2007 Points Even More Strongly Toward Guilt Click for Post:  Scientific Statement Analysis: Amanda Knox’s Statement To The Appeal Court On 11 December Click for Post:  Scientific Statement Analysis: Analysis Of Amanda Knox’s Email To Seattle Of 4 November 2007 (13) Innocent People Don’t Repeatedly Attack Each Other Click for Post:  Multiple Examples Of How RS And AK Have Tried To Apply More Blame To The Other 6. Overall Impression of FGOB Burleigh’s book is not nearly as bad as Knox’s, and in fact a bit less so than Sollecito’s. Too much is spent on irrelevant backstory of Knox, Sollecito, Italy and others, rather than discussing the actual case.  It is difficult to be harsh to a book when there is so little material to work with. While NB does ‘‘get her feet wet’’ with the facts, her coverage is so superficial that it really makes the case look light on evidence, heavy on prejudice and speculation. If Burleigh was actually to read the facts omitted in part 5 above (any of them), her views would have no choice but to adjust.  I don’t think Burleigh actually is a PR shill, but rather an extremely poor and lazy reporter. 2018-05-19T01:48:00+00:00 Why Did The Mainstream Media Enable A Takeover By The Conspiracy Nuts? https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/why_did_the_mainstream_media_enable_a_takeover_by_the_conspiracy_nuts_duplicate https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/why_did_the_mainstream_media_enable_a_takeover_by_the_conspiracy_nuts_duplicate#When:08:33:00Z {summary} How Seattle is misinformed. Exoneration? Riiiight…. Rampant Conspiracies This condemnation is written in light of the ever-growing wave of translated transcripts. They show how extremely good the investigation and case at trial really were. And how extremely wrong were too much of the press. Why did mainstream media organisations allow so many conspiracy nuts to spout their unsubstantiated and ridiculously far-fetched claims? Mainstream media organisations have known for a while that the general public has an insatiable appetite for documentaries about allegedly innocent people who have been convicted of murders they didn’t commit. A cursory glance at the selection of true crime documentaries on Netflix provides evidence of the appeal of this specific genre. Amanda Knox, West of Memphis and Making of a Murderer are all hugely popular. The Serial podcast about the Adnan Syed/Hae Mine Lee case is one the most downloaded podcast of all time. Sarah Koenig presented the case from the defence’s perspective and concluded there isn’t enough evidence to convict Adnan Syed of Hae Min Lee’s murder.  The juries in the respective cases above listened to the prosecution and defence present their cases in court. They weighed the testimonies of the experts and witnesses for both sides and they were all convinced that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, Damian Echols, Jesse Misskelley and Jason Baldwin and Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey and Adnan Syed were all involved in exceptionally brutal murders. There is damning evidence against all the people mentioned above. But many journalists don’t want the facts to get in the way of a good story. Among The Worst Paul Ciolino admitted in a question-and-answer session about the Meredith Kercher case at Seattle University that CBS News didn’t care whether someone was innocent. The only thing they care about is the story. I work for CBS News. I want to tell you one thing about CBS. We don’t care if you did it. We don’t care if you’re innocent. We like a story. We want to do a story. That’s all we care about. It was recognised as far back as 1999 in the legal profession that journalists have an inclination to slant their reports in favour of the defendants. P. Cassell, “The guilty and the ‘innocent’: An examination of alleged cases of wrongful conviction from false confessions”, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 1999: ...academic research on miscarriages should not rely on media descriptions of the evidence against defendants. Journalists will all too often slant their reports in the direction of discovering “news” by finding that an innocent person has been wrongfully convicted. The default position of mainstream media organisations in the US was that Amanda Knox is innocent despite the fact that the vast majority of journalists who covered the case weren’t in a position to know this - they hadn’t regularly attended the court hearings or read a single page of any of the official court reports. The news organizations in Seattle was so partisan in their support of Amanda Knox that they were effectively just mouthpieces for the PR firm of David Marriott that was hired by Curt Knox to influence a credulous and naive local audience who felt duty-bound to support the hometown girl. Lawyer Anne Bremner couldn’t resist the temptation to use the case to promote herself in the media. Judge Michael Heavey was recruited so he could use his position as a judge to sway the public. The vast majority of people in Seattle were kept completely ignorant of the basic facts of the case by all their newspapers and all their TV news, so they were not in a position to realize that both Bremner and Heavey got basic facts wrong. Many American journalists who reported on the case hold the ridiculous belief that the US legal system is the only competent and just one in the world, and that no US citizen charged by a foreign court with any crime can possibly be guilty of it or ever receive a fair trial. The claim that Amanda Knox was being framed for a murder she didn’t commit by corrupt officials in a foreign country by her supporters was manna from heaven for mainstream media organizations in America. It was a sensational story that was guaranteed to enrage and entertain a gullible American public in equal measure. It’s not possible to ascertain precisely who originated the story that Amanda Knox was being framed for a murder she didn’t commit by a corrupt legal system. But it almost certainly came from someone within or very close to Amanda Knox’s family. Jan Goodwin was one of the first journalists to make the claim after interviewing Edda Mellas for Marie Claire in 2008. Studying abroad should have been a grand adventure. Instead, Amanda Knox has spent a year in jail, accused by a corrupt legal system of murdering her roommate. Goodwin didn’t offer any evidence to substantiate her claim that the Italy legal system is corrupt, presumably the word of Edda Mellas was good enough for her. It transpired that the word of Edda Mellas and ex-husband Curt and Amanda Knox’s supporters was good enough for the vast majority of journalists who covered the case on both sides of Atlantic. They unquestiongly accepted everything they heard without bothering to do any fact-checking whatsoever. Time and again not a single investigator or court official in Perugia was interviewed. This explains the reason why so many articles about the case are riddled with factual errors and well-known PR lies. Other media organisations wanted to get in on the act and claim there was dastardly plot to frame Amanda Knox for Meredith’s murder. CBS News allowed a couple of zany conspiracy nuts to spout their nonsense without providing any evidence to support their wild-eyed claims. Here’s Paul Ciolino again: This is a lynching ... this is a lynching that is happening in modern day Europe right now and it’s happening to an American girl who has no business being charged with anything. (Paul Ciolino, CBS News.) Here is Peter van Sant. We have concluded that Amanda Knox is being railroaded… I promise you’re going to want to send the 82nd Airborne Division over to Italy to get this girl out of jail. (Peter Van Sant, CBS News.) The reporting was invariably tinged with xenophobic sentiments. Italy was portrayed as some backward Third World country whose police force was comically incompetent. Here’s CBS’s Doug Longhini. But in the case of Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of murder in Italy last December, the Via Tuscolana apparently failed to separate fantasy from truth. Too many Italian investigators rivaled Fellini as they interpreted, and reinterpreted facts, to suit their own, surrealistic script.” (Doug Longhini, CBS News). WHERE in all the transcripts is that proved?  Doug Longhini’s pompous and pseudo-intellectual comments are meaningless and lack any substance, although he was no doubt very pleased himself for his “clever” reference to Fellini. Ironically Longhini was unable to separate fantasy from truth when he produced the error-ridden American Girl, Italian Nightmare for CBS News. The documentary includes the familiar PR lies about satanic rituals, the 14-hour interrogation sessions, and Knox not knowing Rudy Guede. Lawyer John Q Kelly seemingly forgot the Latin maxim “semper necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit” - “he who asserts must prove” - when he claimed that Knox and Sollecito were being railroaded and evidence against them had been manipulated. My thoughts, Larry, it’s probably the most egregious international railroading of two innocent young people that I have ever seen. This is actually a public lynching based on rank speculation, and vindictiveness. It’s just a nightmare what these parents are going through and what these young adults are going through also. “There’s been injustice here. There’s been injustice in other countries but this is just beyond the pale. The manipulation of evidence; the most unfavorable inferences drawn from the most common of circumstances and conduct was just a gross injustice here.” (John Q Kelly, CNN). Judy Bachrach was also allowed to claim there was a conspiracy to Amanda Knox on CNN. Everyone knew from the beginning that the prosecutor had it in for Amanda Knox, that the charges are pretty much trumped up… From the beginning this was carefully choreographed, they wanted to find her guilty, they’ve kept her in jail for two years even before trial and they did find her guilty. This is the way Italian justice is done. If you’re accused, you’re guilty. There isn’t an ounce of hard evidence against her and all of Italy should be ashamed actually.” (Judy Bachrach, CNN). Arguably the craziest conspiracy nut - and the competition is fierce - is the former FBI agent Steve Moore in early retirement. Steve Moore claimed the Perugian police, Guilano Mignini, Dr Patrizia Stefanoni, Edgardo Giobbi the head of the Violent Crimes Unit in Rome, Judge Massei, and the Italian Supreme Court were all part of a dastardly plot to frame Amanda Knox. Moore claimed the following on his blog. For this to happen, though, pompous prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, forensic perjurer Patrizia Stefanoni, and mind-reading detective Edgardo Giobbi (and others), must be prosecuted for their corruption. The judge who rubber stamped the lies in the first trial, Massei, must be also called to the bar of justice-or back to law school. In a discussion with lawyer Paul Callan on CNN Moore actually claimed the Supreme Court was involved in the conspiracy. Paul Callan: “And now “¦ and they (the Perugian police) got the Supreme Court of Italy involved in this conspiracy? You know, that’s like saying that “¦ [Steve Moore interrupts]” Steve Moore: “Yes, they do. Yes, they do. You are being naive. You don’t understand the Italian system. You don’t understand it. You are defending something you don’t understand.” Barbie Nadeau reported Moore’s claim that evidence was manipulated for The Daily Beast. The evidence that was presented in trial was flawed, it was manipulated. Steve Moore has never provided any evidence to support his wild-eyed hysterical claims there was a huge conspiracy involving a prosecutor, different police departments, Judge Massei and judges at the Italian Supreme Court to frame Amanda Knox for Meredith’s murder. It’s no wonder TV legal analyst Paul Callan was smiling, desperately trying not to burst out laughing, when he discussed the case with Moore on CNN. Moore provided irrefutable proof in the short time he was on CNN that he is ignorant of the basic facts of the case, and that he hasn’t read any of the official court reports. He falsely claimed “the DNA that they said was Raffaele’s was actually a woman’s DNA.” No expert claimed this at the trial. Sollecito’s DNA was identified by two separate DNA tests. Of the 17 loci tested in the sample, Sollecito’s profile matched 17 out of 17. David Balding, a professor of Statistical Genetics at University College London, analysed the DNA evidence against Sollecito and concluded it was “very strong”. Moore told Erin Burnett: “The second trial proved with independent experts that the DNA that they claim was the victim’s was not on the knife.” A number of forensic experts - Dr Stefanoni, Dr Biondo, Professor Novelli, Professor Torricelli, and Luciano Garofano - have all confirmed that sample 36B which was extracted from the blade of the knife WAS Meredith’s DNA. The independent experts did not carry out a test on this sample.  In England there were deranged conspiracy nuts claiming Amanda Knox was framed too. Amy Jenkins bizarrely claimed in The Independent that Knox and Sollecito were the victims of a miscarriage of justice because Knox was a young woman, the Italians didn’t like the fact Knox snogged her boyfriend and someone needed to save face or something. The truth is, Amanda Knox’s great crime was to be a young woman ““ but mainly it was to be a young woman who didn’t know how to behave. She was 20 years old, she was suffering from shock, and she was in a foreign country. She was interrogated with no lawyer and no translator present. She made a phony confession. Clearly no saint, she wasn’t a Madonna either. That’ll make her a whore then. She snogged her boyfriend; she was slightly provocative on Facebook; she turned an inappropriate cartwheel. In a Catholic country, it’s clearly not such a leap to go from there to stabbing your room-mate in the neck during a violent sexual assault ““ because that’s the leap the prosecution made. To save face, Knox and her poor boyfriend had to be somehow levered into the frame. As the whole juggernaut of injustice chugged on it became harder and harder for the six lay judges who acted as a jury to destroy a case that had been constructed over two years by prosecutors who were their close working colleagues.” (Amy Jenkins, The Independent). Conclusion: READ THE DOCUMENTS More and more the translated documents prove that all of them have been wrong. The conspiracy theorists predictably haven’t provided one iota of evidence that there was ever any conspiracy to frame Amanda Knox for Meredith’s murder. I suspect the producers at mainstream media organisations like CBS News and CNN knew there never was any conspiracy to frame Amanda Knox all along, but they didn’t get care because they wanted a sensational story.  Too many people within the media perversely see murder as entertainment. Rather than providing balanced and factually accurate coverage of murder cases they want to outrage and entertain the masses with melodramatic stories of conspiracies involving corrupt prosecutors and cops who want to frame innocent people for murders they didn’t commit instead. We shouldn’t be surprised by the popularity of Making of a Murderer on Netflix. It filled a vacuum after Knox and Sollecito were acquitted in 2015. I have no doubts that journalists from mainstream media organisations are currently looking for the next alleged case of someone being framed or railroaded for a murder they didn’t commit. 2017-12-30T08:33:00+00:00 How Saul Kassin Hoaxed The American Psychology Law Society https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/interrogation_hoax_how_the_american_psychology_law_society https://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php/site/interrogation_hoax_how_the_american_psychology_law_society#When:03:31:00Z {summary} Knox and Kassin at the American Psychology Law Society Conference 2017 1. Post Overview Serial misrepresenter of the Knox “interrogation” Saul Kassin has made yet another false claim, once again to a large audience. This time it was to the American Psychology Law Society Conference in Seattle, Washington, March 16th-18th, and it suggests he simply cannot count. 2. Kassin Already Shown A Fraud SIX prior posts correct numerous Kassin “mistakes”. 1. Claims Amanda Knox’s Confessions Resemble “False Confessions” Not Backed Up By Any Criminal Research 2. Saul Kassin: An Example Of How The Knox Campaign Is Misleading American Experts And Audiences 3. Correcting Saul Kassin’s Massively Inaccurate Description Of Amanda Knox’s So-Called Confession 4. Questions For Knox: Do You Really Think “False Memories” Claim Framing Italians Yet Again Will Help? 5. On Saul Kassin: Our Letter To Dr Douglas Starr Who Wrote An Effusive Profile In The “New Yorker” 6. How Saul Kassin Framed Many Fine Italian Justice Officials - And Then Played Victim When Corrected 3. Interrogation Already Shown A Hoax EIGHTEEN prior posts on the Knox interrogation hoax describe what actually took place. It is very important to understand that as the defenses conceded in court under the strict Italian legal definition of “interrogation” Knox was really only ever interrogated twice. Both times this was by Dr Mignini (Dec 2007 and June 2009) and both times it was at Knox’s own request. All of her other discussions with investigators early in November 2007 were merely “verbale di sommarie informazioni” or written-up discussion with a person with possible useful information. Notes exist in the record of all these discussions - none remotely coercive - and they were summarised by prosecution witnesses at trial. See my quote below of the defense lawyers in Italian, where they use the correct Italian legal term. These written-up discussions with Knox carry precisely the same status as the “verbale di sommarie informazioni” with Sophie Purton and numerous others in the records of the case. Accordingly I use “interrogation” a couple of times in quotes below in rebutting Kassin’s wrong claims. 4. The 45-50-55 Hours Hoax Quoting Amanda Knox and Saul Kassin at the American Psychology Law Society Conference in Seattle in March 2017: Kassin: “Knox was questioned for over 50 hours but none was recorded”. Kassin: “I’ve never seen a case more steeped in misinformation than Amanda Knox’s”. So, where did the magical 50 hourrs interrogation in 5 days that ‘inevitably lead to false confessions’ first appear? Professor Kassin will not say, or provide background information to the crowded rooms of trainee law psychologists to which he and Amanda Knox have been repeating this claim. So, here’s some vital background Kassin seems to have missed which spirals in to the truth. 1. Injustice in Perugia Steve Moore: “In the five days after the murder of Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox was interrogated by detectives for 43 hours. 2. CBS News-48 Hrs Amanda’s focus was the appeal - and she soon had a world-renown ally. “This case horrifies me. I’d like to say it shocks me. But I’ve seen others like it,” said psychologist and professor Saul Kassin, an expert on police interrogations. On his own initiative, Kassin filed a report with the Italian (appeals) court on Amanda’s behalf. It outlines some of the psychological reasons why Amanda could have confessed to a murder she did not commit. “Amanda Knox, like everybody, has a breaking point. She reached her breaking point,” he explained. “Eight or 10 or 12 police officials in a tag team-manner come in and interrogate her… Their goal is a confession and they’re not leaving that room without it.” Er no, there’s no record of any report by Kassin in the Hellmann court files, and Amanda Knox never released one either. But regardless, Judge Hellmann ruled Knox should have known Patrick Lumumba was innocent and upheld her 3 year conviction for criminal defamation (calunnia) anyway. 3. American Psychologist/Innocence Project From “Why Confessions Trump Innocence” by Saul M. Kassin, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, April 2012 Armed with a prejudgment of Knox’s guilt, several police officials interrogated the girl on and off for four days. Her final interrogation started on November 5 at 10 p.m. and lasted until November 6 at 6 a.m., during which time she was alone, without an attorney, tag-teamed by a dozen police, and did not break for food or sleep. 4. CNN Transcripts CNN May 8, 2011 CURT KNOX, FATHER: Between the time that they actually found Meredith and when Amanda was arrested, there was roughly a 90-hour timeframe. And I’m ball parking the numbers there. During that time, Amanda was in the police station for questioning for—I believe it was 52 hours. Now we’re getting a little closer to the truth. Knox was possibly at the police station for maybe 52 hours. But actually she wasn’t ‘interrogated’ for that long. Then going back to when those figures first came out: 5. King 5 News Amanda Knox’s family says confession coerced By LINDA BYRON / KING 5 News Posted on November 13, 2009 at 12:16 PM She was just flat scared to be alone,” Curt said. “So she went down to the police station with him and they were split into two rooms and then they started going at them. With physical and mental abuse for 14 hours. No food, water, no official interpreter.” Prosecutors say Amanda’s accounts swung wildly: She wasn’t at the cottage the night of the murder. She was there, but drunk in another room. But her parents say she was coerced by police. “(They said) you know, you’re never going to see your family again,” Curt said. “You’re going to jail for 30 years. You need to come up with something for us, you’re a liar. Come up with something for us. Envision something; throw something out there.” 6. Della Vedova/Ghirga appeal to Hellmann There’s a summary of a defense analysis of the discussions here - note the “verbale di sommarie informazioni” which is NOT the Italian for “interrogation”. (p.12) Amanda Knox è stata sottoposta ad esame ed attività  investigative e tra il 2 e il 6 novembre 2007, fino al momento del fermo, ha fornito sommarie informazioni e risposto a domande della A.G. come segue: 2 novembre 2007, ore 15.30 VENERDI’: totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦..12,00 Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox, senza indicazione della chiusura. Testimoni fino alle 3.00 am del 3 novembre 2007 3 novembre 2007, ore 14.45 SABATO totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦8,00 Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox, senza indicazione della chiusura. Testimoni indicano fino alle 22,00. 4 novembre 2007, ore 14.45 DOMENICA: totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦.12,00 Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox, ed accesso alla villetta di Via della Pergola dalle ore 14.45 alle ore 21. Telefonata di Amanda alla zia dice 5 ore di interrogatorio in questura 5/6 novembre 2007, ore 01.45 LUNEDI’/MARTEDI’: totale ore “¦”¦.5,00 Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox inizio alle ore 22.00 del 5 novembre 2009. 6 novembre 2007, ore 05.45 MARTEDI’: totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦.3,45 Verbale di “spontanee dichiarazioni” della Knox con successivo breve memoriale. Dalle ore 1,45 alle 5,45 e memoriale alle ore 14,00. In 5 giorni la Knox è stata sentita per un totale di circa 53,45 h. Except, here above I count a total of 40.45 hrs, hmm, not all of which was spent being “interrogated”. She was in the waiting room with the others, as confirmed by her own phone records, e-mails home, texts, etc. Not to forget headstands, cartwheels, yoga poses and general faffing around with Sollecito. The defense realized their math was off so they included an additional 13.0 hrs. to the time of her memoriale though they counted their own figures twice, Lol.  Keep in mind her attorneys never argued the time was unreasonable, only that the accusation should not be considered for the calunnia charge. Their summary was only to show how long she had been ‘present for examination’ in that time she was at the Questura till her arrest. And even then, their figures were wrong.. 7. From Rita Ficarra’s Testimony Knox was let go by the evening of the first day so the 12 hours interrogation figure is incorrect. She also had an official interpreter by 12:30, was fed and allowed to rest in between, wasn’t slapped, and there were only two detectives present. 8. Case follower Soletrader4U analyzed her phone records and case files and came up with a more realistic figure of 17.45 hrs of actual “interrogation”. 5. My Conclusions It looks like Kassin is still spinning his hoaxes. I invite Professor Kassin to correct his figures and explain how, according to his research, Amanda Knox could have produced a “False Confession” over the span of 17.45 hours of “interrogation” over 5 days? [Everything in this post applies equally to the ludicrously inaccurate claims of ex FBI “mindhunter” John Douglas in his books and lobbying at the State Department.] Defendants in court, Amanda Knox, Hoaxes against Italy, 2 Italian mileu hoax, 9 Mignini v Knox hoax, Hoaxes Knox & team, 16 Interrogation hoax, 17 Fake memory hoax, Hoaxers from 2007, Knox-Marriott PR, Hoaxers from 2009, Saul Kassin, Hoaxers from 2011, John Douglas, Hoaxers: media groups, CNN Network, 2017-04-11T03:31:00+00:00