Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Knox Lie-A-Thon #1: Nailing In Advance Expected Lies At 10 April Retrial #1

Posted by Peter Quennell


Perugia Central Police Station at night (left-center)

Overview

Right now, Amanda Knox is a convicted felon who served three years.

Knox still owes damages of about $100,000 as well. This award over a decade ago was to Patrick because Knox had framed him for murder when under no pressure (as all courts agreed).

Because of an absurd mistake by the bungling European Court of Human Rights - falsely concluding from “evidence” that one of Knox’s lawyers made up that Knox was (1) a formal suspect (2) under extreme police pressure, and (3) should have had a lawyer present (4) when she was “interrogated” - Knox is being given a chance to annul her felony.

She will present her evidence if any before an appeal court starting in Florence on April 10. 

Knox’s endemic false claims and smears that make up this interrogation hoax took a team of more than 30 of us three years, with extensive document gathering and translation, and over 20 posts (see all links below) to definitively put to bed. This text below was our final overview, first posted here in 2014.

1. Masterlist Of Posts In The Pre-Trial Series

The Interrogation Hoax pre-trial series consists of a total of 20 posts. Numbering of posts is not chronological. It represents the original order of postings.

These posts quote from a large number of transcripts only recently acquired and translated. There are no serious conflicts, no gray areas. One can assume with total certainty that this is the real thing (see Part 3 below), and that any other versions (see Part 4 below) are fabricated.

1. What Happened At AK & RS Q&A Prior To 6 Nov

Click for Post: #19: ALL Knox Q&A Sessions 2-6 November 2007 WERE Recorded #1

Click for Post: #20: ALL Knox Q&A Sessions 2-6 November 2007 WERE Recorded #2

2. What Happened At Knox Q&A 6 Nov Ending 1:45 AM

Click for Post: #2: Trial Testimony From Rita Ficcara On Realities 5-6 Nov

Click for Post: #3: More Defense Pussyfooting Toward Rita Ficcara, Key Witness

Click for Post: #4: More Hard Realities From Rita Ficcara, More Nervousness From Defense

Click for Post: #12: Ficarra & Knox Notes PROVE Knox Merely Worked On Visitors Names List

Click for Post: #5: Key Witness Monica Napoleoni Confirms Knox Self-Imploded 5-6 Nov

Click for Post: #7: Testimony Of Witness Lorena Zugarini On The Knox Conniption 5-6 Nov

Click for Post: #8: Testimony Of Interpreter Donnino On Events Night Of 5 November

3. What Happened At Sollecito Q&A 6 Nov Ending 3:30 AM

Click for Post: #6: Sollecito Transcript & Actions Further Damage Knox Version

Click for Post: #9: Officer Moscatelli’s Recap/Summary Session With Sollecito 5-6 Nov

4. What Happened At Knox-Rights Session Ending 5:45am

Click for Post: #15: Knox Is Told Her Rights And Repeats Fake Murder Charge

5. What Of Relevance Happened In Ensuing Months

Click for Post: #13: The First Two Pre-Trial Opportunities Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #14: The Third Pre-Trial Opportunity Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #16: The Fourth Pre-Trial Opportunity Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #17: Sollecito April 2008 Before Supreme Court Again Coldshoulders Knox

Click for Post:#18: The Final Pre-Trial Opportunities Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #21: Illustrating How Batshit Crazy The Interrogation Hoax Has Become

6. Why Investigators’ Version Won Hands-Down At Trial

Click for Post: #10: Why Prosecution And Defenses Never Believed Knox’s Version #1

Click for Post: #11: Why Prosecution And Defenses Never Believed Knox’s Version #2

2. Explaining Overall Arc Of Events

Much of the testimony listed above was about events at the central police station pre-arrest in early November 2007 and subsequent court attempts to achieve some believability and relief.

Early in 2009 at trial Knox and Sollecito sat glumly through all of the investigators’ pre-arrest testimony and cross-examination at trial. They were downhearted and apprehensive, and there were no smiles and few interruptions.

Subsequently Sollecito chose not to get on the stand, so from his team there really was never a rebuttal.

But Knox HAD to get on the stand, in July, for two days. She had no other way to defend herself against the serious felony crime of falsely framing Patrick for murder.

It was her word against theirs. It contradicted in many places what she had heard months earlier in sworn testimony from many investigators.

Knox’s version inevitably weakened a lot under cross-examination, and was ultimately a fail at trial and several appeals, even the annulled one.

Knox ended up serving three years. While on the stand she confirmed that she had been treated well, stiffing thousands of supporters duped into believing she had not been.

3. Explaining Court-Accepted Narrative For 6 Nov

This is an overview of Knox’s so-called “interrogation” at Perugia’s central police station, the subject of the first ten posts.

It led to her arrest and three years served. To make this picture really firm we will quote a lot of the testimony at trial. The Case Wiki carries all of these transcripts, many in English translation, and more. 

Senior Inspector Rita Ficarra testified that she arrived back at the police station late on 5 November, and finds her way blocked by a cartwheeling Knox.

She rebukes Knox, who testily responds that she is tired of the investigation. Rita Ficarra tells Knox to go home and get some sleep. Knox testily refuses, and remains there.

Shortly after, Ficarra suggests to Knox that if she really wants to help, she could add to the list of possible perps - men who Meredith knew and who might have visited the house.

This was a recap/summary, a simple checking of facts with someone who might or might not be of help. This could have been done on a street corner or in a house by a single officer. It was not a witness or suspect interrogation. From the transcript:

Ghirga: “While this interrogation - let’s call it thus - was in progress, some colleagues arrive…”  Ficarra: “It was not an interrogation, Attorney.” Ghirga: “They are called recaps/summaries.

Knox eagerly agrees. So they begin on the list.

This goes slowly because of language problems, until an interpreter, Anna Donnino, arrives. In total only Knox and four others (three of them women) are present.

Knox builds a list of seven people and adds maps and phone numbers (placed in evidence) in a calm proceeding. These were the names: Peter Svizzero, Patrick, Ardak, Juve, Spiros, Shaki and “a South African [Guede]” who played basketball near the house.

At several points in the evening Knox is provided with refreshments. No voices are ever raised, no bathroom breaks are refused.

In a separate wing Inspector Napoleoni and a couple of colleagues are seeking facts from Sollecito. Shown conflicts between what he has said and what his phone records show, Sollecito backtracks, and declares that Knox went out alone on the night, and made him lie.

Napoleoni moves through the questura to suggest to Ficarra to discuss the night of the attack with Knox in more detail and clarify who might have been present. Knox is not informed of Sollecito’s backtrack. She is asked for more names and spontaneously shares her phone. There is an outgoing to Patrick but no prior incoming. Knox is asked who Patrick is.

Suddenly, to the considerable surprise of others present, Knox has a yelling, head-clutching conniption (the first of several that night) and says “It’s him, it’s him, it was him, he killed her”. The session is halted.

Despite warnings she should not do so without a lawyer, Knox insists on a recorded statement which says she headed out to meet Patrick that night after he texted her. She accuses Patrick of killing Meredith. 

Efforts are made throughout the next several hours to try to help Knox to calm down. Knox is put on hold, given more refreshments, and made comfortable on some chairs so she might try to get some sleep.

A second session ending at 5:45 is intended as merely a formal reading of Knox’s legal status and her right to a lawyer, with Dr Mignini presiding. She is to be held as a material witness and for her own protection.

Again warned that she should not speak without a lawyer, and no questions can be asked, Knox still insists on a second spontaneous accusation culminating in a second recorded statement.

This also says she went out to meet Patrick that night, also accuses Patrick of killing Meredith, and now also hints that Sollecito may have been there. 

Just before noon, now under arrest and about to be taken to Capanne Prison, Knox insists on writing out at length a third statement this time in English.

She gleefully hands it to Rita Ficcara who cannot read it as she as no English. In the statement, Knox included this damning remark, without any mention of having been coerced: “The questions that need answering, at least for how I’m thinking are… 2. Why did I think of Patrik?”

Knox’s lawyers never ever substantially challenge this version. At trial they accept that there was no interrogation, leave standing that Knox insisted on all three statements, and dont ever pursue Knox’s claims that she was coerced.

Courts all noted that there is no mention in that third note of Knox having been coerced, although this note was her idea and she could put in it anything she liked. From this there never was any going back.

In July 2009 at trial, in face of days and days of prior investigator testimony, Knox brashly tried to substitute this scenario above with the one below. Of course she was disbelieved.

For the calunnia framing of Patrick Lumumba Judge Massei in 2009 sentenced her to a year more than Sollecito, amended by Judge Hellmann in 2011 to three years served.

The Supreme Court definitively overruled her calunnia appeal so for her false framing of Patrick she is a felon for life.

4. Explaining Knox Family & PR Alternative

Knox’s Italian lawyers were not a part of this; in contrast the American PR lawyer Ted Simon sought to introduce major confusion.

In Italy, lawyers are REQUIRED to report tales of abuse of their clients or face possible criminal charges. Contrariwise, if they knowingly report false charges they can face similar charges. So what they do is a strong indicator of truth. 

Amanda Knox’s lawyers not only did not ever report any abuse. They even announced publicly, in face of incessant claims of abuse by Knox, family, and PR forces, that they had seen no evidence of abuse and so would not be reporting. 

Though her precise claims vary and often contradict one another, Knox herself has on and off ever since November 2007 tried to put the investigators on trial - tried to blame the police for causing her conniption and her false accusation of Patrick for the death of Meredith.

Her fail rate has been spectacular.

Knox failed to convince (1) Supervising Magistrate Matteini and (2) the Ricciarelli review panel in November 2007, (3) failed to convince Prosecutor Mignini in December 2007, (4) failed to convince the Supreme Court in April 2008, (5) failed to convince the Micheli court in late 2008, (6) failed to convince the judges and jury at trial 2009, (7) failed at annulled appeal 2011, (8) failed at repeat appeal 2013, (9) failed to convince the Supreme Court in 2012 and (10) failed again in 2015.

As Knox’s team simply did not ever believe her, they may not have given this their hardest shot. It was not part of their largely spurious complaint to the EC HR.

And yet despite all of these failures, the huge and very nasty Knox PR effort went full-bore ahead with the abuse allegations anyway.

Read this post of 11 February 2009 which was about two weeks before the Knox “interrogators” were cross-examined at trial, and several months before Knox herself took the stand. Dozens of media reports repeated the Knox claims as if true.

Knox repeated them in her April 2013 book, and her December 2013 email to Judge Nencini, and her appeal to EHCR Strasbourg, and in some TV and newspaper interviews, including one with the Italian weekly Oggi which caused that paper legal harm.

This version has been blown up by Knox PR shills in internet posts, articles, TV interviews, and books. Among others propagating it have been mafioso wannabes Raffaele Sollecito (in his book), Doug Preston, Saul Kassin, Steve Moore (especially), John Douglas, Jim Clemente, Paul Ciolino, Michael Heavey, Greg Hampikian, Chris Halkidis, Mark Waterbury, Doug Bremner, Candace Dempsey, Nina Burleigh, Bruce Fischer, and many posters on the Knox sites and Fischer sites and on Ground Report.

Main claims included 50-plus hours of “interrogation”, numerous officers in teams, no food or drink, no sleep, no bathroom breaks, no lawyer, no recording, and much abuse and yelling and suggestions and threats. Way beyond anything even Knox herself and notably her own lawyers ever claimed. 

  • Here is Steve Moore claiming that around a dozen cops in rotating tag teams of two assaulted a starving and sleepless Knox over 20/30/40 hours, threatened her, and refused her a lawyer throughout.

  • Here is Saul Kassin claiming that Knox was interrogated over the entire night of 5-6 November, until she was finally broken and a coerced “confession” emerged - even though the “false confession” actually framed Patrick and was in reality a false accusation. That Kassin ignores.

  • Here are several former FBI profilers blatantly embellishing the same claims in a book, with (today) 60 five-star reviews.

And yet Knox’s own Italian lawyers specifically denied her accusations! No complaint against the police was ever lodged. All courts disbelieved her. Knox served her three years. But still the PR-driven hoax keeps resounding.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/14/24 at 02:05 PM in Hoaxes Sollecito etc

Comments

A second major overview-and-links post on the Interrogation Hoax will follow mid-March.

It will take us through the 2009 trial to the several appeals and so up to today. It will link to all our relevant posts 2009-24 including (1) trial & appeal court outcomes, (2) how the ECHR got its nose under the tent, and (3) fabrications by the Knox crime gang.

Main poster KrissyG in particular followed the ins-and-outs of the Strasbourg Court and its nonsense outcomes, and posted below what immediately led to the 10 April retrial.

http://tinyurl.com/bddve332

High stakes stuff. Will Knox, or wont she? Be in court? Knox blinked at showing up the previous Florence appeal in 2014, claiming she was scared.

But of who? Sollecito was there mostly throughout. He didnt seem scared, except twice when he took off like a rabbit: once alone to the Caribbean where his unsavory relatives hang out; and once to the Swiss border with his girlfriend, where he chose to turn back.

Unlike Sollecito, Knox never appealed for a damages award, as she could have done from 2015. Sollecito’s damages appeal was shot down in Florence and then Rome with some very sharp language about his time-wasting & lies.

Knox would likely encounter the same retorts.

Will there be witnesses in Florence? We have asked Dr Mignini and he has not yet been informed. If there are, that will be a minefield for Knox & her crime gang for sure. Especially if Patrick Lumumba and his tiger of a lawyer Pacelli show up.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/14/24 at 03:32 PM | #

Instead of actual day-jobs, the increasingly forgotten and flustered Ma and Pa Robinson have been pumping out a lot of nonsense YouTubes on their new channel. Most still have less than 100 views.

https://www.youtube.com/@knoxrobinsonproductions/videos

Useful comments posted below any of the videos disappear in the blink of an eye, on some sort of auto-delete. Seems a bit mean. They leave so many gaps we can fill.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/16/24 at 03:23 PM | #

Perhaps we should take bets on whether Knox will be a show or a no-show in court on 10 April.

She is really her only witness. As it’s her trial attendance would seem to be mandatory.

She chickened out of the Nencini appeal in Florence in 2013 but then popped up in Modena with her mom a couple of years ago so without obvious concern for her safety.

On the panel in Modena she bawled her eyes out while peeping through her fingers. The mother of all hams.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/17/24 at 12:11 PM | #

Interest is considerable on who the judge will be. Nencini? The excellent manager of the 2013 appeal?

Perugia investigators are still angry that Judge Boninsegna in Florence got the verdict of Knox’s Calunnia #2 trial wrong - and then their lawyer “forgot” to appeal, maybe not wanting a shiv in his back. They could all want to turn up and talk here.

Judge Giampaolo Boninsegna declared Knox not guilty of Calunnia II (smearing the cops) after making it very difficult for those cops to testify - they would each need a lawyer and have to take days off to travel to Florence and pay their way. And the calunnia charge was not even their lawsuit! It was initiated by prosecutors, under automatic rules to protect law enforcement. (Sollecito lost at precisely such a trial, also in Florence, for smearing Dr Mignini.)

Although CRIMINAL charges were dropped against Judge Boninsegna years ago in Salerno for giving seeming breaks to Ndrangheta lawyers, he was sent to Florence for punishment. He’s now in Verona and remains perverse, a wild card. He is still under a black cloud, and a couple of years ago a key semi-automatic promotion was denied to him.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/17/24 at 12:33 PM | #

Claim by one of the (seemingly shrinking) army of the duped on YouTube: “both Knox and, initially, Lumumba had recounted highly inappropriate and questionable interrogation practices.” Quick response: 

Pure myth. Patrick wound back his claim 100% and Knox made hers up months later. Go read the Magistrate Matteini hearing transcript several days later; no complaint. Go read the transcript of her REAL interrogation in December 2007 by Dr Mignini at her own request; no claim of “questionable interrogation”. Go read her own lawyers’ public denial of pressure in early 2008. Go read her own denial on the stand at trial! Plus all of her Q&A sessions prior to arrest were recorded on paper (they are translated so you can read them) and she signed every page. They are mundane. Plus on the night of arrest she herself insisted under no pressure on two signed statements which were not actually required; no complaint. On the night of arrest she was merely happily writing out a list of names of visitors to the house; it is in evidence.

Dr Mignini explained to a rather rabid Seattle media (Linda Byron) that at the 5.45 am session on 6 December he wanted to get on with the reading of Knox’s rights (in US the Miranda warning) but she kind of insisted first on having her statement recorded and Dr Mignini and the others present just had to sit there. Then Dr Mignini read her Miranda warning in which for the second time in the wee hours Knox was warned she need not say anything without a lawyer.

Knox and Dr Mignini kind of had a meeting of the minds in coming weeks that it had been a drug-fueled hazing taken too far and the charge might have been of manslaughter. But it was her angry father in visitor sessions at Capanne Prison and her remaining lawyers (one quit, the best of them) that hardened and turned her - she actually describes this brainwashing in her book - and from then on it was “put the Italian system and its officers on trial”. It never worked in Italy, but generated many millions in the US for the Knoxes, the parasites, and much of the media.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/19/24 at 10:58 AM | #

.
To restate the very obvious about Knox & Guede….  Knox was just as desperate NOT to finger Guede in the early days as she is so desperate now to finger him.

We know the precise date when that changed, and why it changed.

September 2008. Read about why here:  http://tinyurl.com/33mucw9n

The Knox crime family now make a huge thing out of Guede not fingering Knox as soon as he was arrested.

Well guess what? It took TEN MONTHS for Knox to start fingering Guede.

For ten months from the night of arrest all appearances had been that Knox and Sollecito were blaming one another, or at least Sollecito was blaming Knox: “I never want to see Amanda again. Above all, it is her fault we are here.”

The September 2008 facade of an alliance against him forced Guede to take the fast-track trial, and made him a prime target at the Knox-Sollecito trial, though the vast hard evidence ruled and they lost the jury anyway.

(Of the three Guede is still the only one that Italians have much sympathy for. Right now, an ex girlfriend is accusing Guede of unwanted visits and possible violence. There is a lot of cynicism about that. The Sollecito crime family have been running a subversive campaign to force him out of Italy. Was the poor girl paid-off, or leaned-upon?)

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/19/24 at 12:29 PM | #

The Breaking News box at the top for several weeks is reposted here, in light of the new breaking news, about Knox chickening out of her new calunnia trial because of a lack-of-evidence thing.

Headsup: The Knox crime gang are working feverishly to make the gullible and xenophobic believe she was forced into framing Patrick. But they are also all over the Internet and in crackpot books claiming Guede killed Meredith alone. NO COURT EVER CONCLUDED THAT. Read this set of 100% conclusive reasons for why. And this.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/20/24 at 01:58 PM | #

The day after Knox had been removed from the Questura to prison she wrote two pages about how at first she could not remember but that now, finally, she could. She was innocent and could account for what she and Sollecito were doing the night Meredith was murdered.

She apologised for her actions –

“I’m sorry I didn’t remember before and I’m sorry I said that I could have been at the house when it happened. I was very stressed at the time and I really did think he was the murderer. I said these things because I was confused and scared. But now I remember that I can’t know who was the murderer because I didn’t return back to the house.”

The pages were handed to a guard to be given to Mignini.

The issue, for Knox, would therefore seem to have been that she had not been able to remember whether or not she had really met up with Patrick at the cottage. Would being “confused” and “scared” really bring on a sudden bout of amnesia that was only to dissipate some time after making two statements fingering Patrick as the murderer, interspersed by about 4 hours, to the police?

One would think, would one not, that not being at the cottage at the time of the murder would be an essential recollection from the outset if she was completely uninvolved in the murder?

It would hardly be surprising if Mignini were to consider that there had been genuine flashbacks and that there was more to come.

If she was at the cottage at the time of the murder then she knew her allegation about Patrick was not true. If she was not, then clearly she was aware that she was fabricating evidence and hence guilty as charged.

Posted by James Raper on 03/25/24 at 05:28 AM | #

Short and very sharp. James, Knox should send you a check for saving her a last-minute hail-Mary flight.

Wasn’t she pinged? Suggesting she got halfway from the house to Patrick’s bar and then turned back? I seem to remember she seemed to take a surprising route - that if there was a ping, it was not on any of the three main routes, more to the west.

(Two of the routes are up and over the massif, the third is round the east slope of the massif, the route Meredith used on the fatal night.)

The judge (we have no name yet) is calling the shots and may not call any witnesses at all. Dr Mignini and co have concerns about that.

On the other hand, Sollecito may be relieved…

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/29/24 at 09:44 AM | #
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Where next:

Click here to return to The Top Of The Front Page

Or to next entry Knox Lie-A-Thon #2: Nailing In Advance Expected Lies At 10 April Retrial #2

Or to previous entry Explaining The New Attempt To Annul Knox’s Calunnia Conviction & ECHR’s Role