Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Mines by Leonardo English.
The show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things
about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alistair Bunch and today we are going to be talking about the trial of Amanda Knox.
It is the story of a young woman who studied a broad programme went horribly wrong, but
it is also the story of the Italian justice system, the power of the media, and at the centre
of it all, a British woman who was violently murdered.
It is also a personal story for reasons which I will reveal shortly.
And on a quick admin note, this episode will be talking about quite a nasty murder investigation,
so if you would prefer not to listen to this then I'd advise to press pause now.
Ok then, let's talk about the trial of Amanda Knox.
Peruja is a hilltop city in Italy.
It is a beautiful place, narrow old streets, a trusskin arches, fantastic views that stretch
for miles.
It is also a student city with a very good university, university at the Listo di, as well as
a university for foreigners to learn Italian, the Universita del Stranieri.
Every year thousands of foreigners flock to the city, whether that's for a short Italian
course or a longer exchange programme.
And they have a lot of fun.
And it is cheap, there are lots of bars, restaurants, parties, lots of people to meet and
make friends with, lots of cultural activities for hedonistic activities, if that's more
your vibe.
It's great.
And if you are wondering why I know this, and I'm saying this with such certainty, it's
because I was one of those foreigners.
At the start of 2006, I went to the Universita del Stranieri for an Italian course.
I lived in Peruja and went to the same university where today's story all took place.
But this isn't about me.
A year and a half after I left, two young women arrived in Peruja, no doubt full of expectation
and excitement.
The first was called Meredith Kurcher, and she was from England.
She was a student at the University of Leeds, and like many of her peers, she had chosen
to spend a third year abroad studying at a foreign university.
The second was Amanda Knox, who was a linguistic student at the University of Washington.
She had decided to spend a year abroad.
She thought Florence was two full of Americans, which it is, and had settled on Peruja
as her destination.
And the way in which you found accommodation in Peruja back then was by little posters
that people would put up all over the city.
Room available, or flat chair wanted.
You would tear off a little phone number, call up, and take a look at the room.
Know that you like the look of it, or move on to the next one.
For Kurcher and Knox, they found themselves living together in this way, sharing a small
house with two young Italian women.
They were different characters, Kurcher and Knox, but they got along.
They went out for pizza, they did things together.
They were friendly but not best friends.
Kurcher would reportedly spend more time with English friends, while Knox was happy to
mingle with Italians.
And they were different people.
Kurcher was a more studious young woman, keen to get good grades, whereas Knox was less
focused on her studies.
And in late October, a month and a half after arriving in Italy, Amanda Knox saw a man
who caught her eye, and would end up distracting her from class.
His name was at a faele solichito, and he was a shy looking computer science student.
Knox would later say that he reminded her of Harry Potter.
The pair got talking, and swiftly became romantically involved with one another.
She would stay over his house, which was a five minute walk away from hers.
They would watch movies together and smoke marijuana.
And that's what they did on the evening of November 1, 2007.
They watched Amily smoke marijuana and have sex, or social related record.
The following morning, Knox went back to her house for a shower.
Solichito was a 23 year old male computer science student, and perhaps as you could imagine,
his bathroom wasn't a particularly pleasant place to take a shower.
She returned home, and saw that the front door of her house was open.
This was unusual, kind of strange, but she didn't think too much about it, as it had been
faulty for a while.
She got into the shower, and it was only when she got out that she noticed that there were
spots, small drops of blood on the bathroom floor.
She knocked on Kuchya's door, but there was no answer.
She then tried to open it, but it was locked.
What's more, Kuchya, her housemate, wasn't answering her phone.
And she always answered her phone.
Worried, Knox returned to Solichito's house, and the pair tried to figure out what to
do.
They returned to the house, and found Kuchya's phone had been dumped behind the house,
and saw that one of the windows had been smashed.
They called the police, who came to investigate, but refused to smash Kuchya's door, on
the grounds that it would be damaged to private property.
By this point, one of Kuchya and Knox's Italian housemates had arrived, along with
a friend.
They decided the situation was serious, and the friend kicked open Meredith Kuchya's
door.
They were confronted by a horrific sight, a bloody duvet which covered the lifeless body
of Meredith Kuchya.
The police pushed past to survey the scene, and Knox and Solichito were ushered out of
the house.
The detectives on the scene questioned Knox and Solichito, but they were free to go
while the police gathered evidence.
On November 5, just three days after the gruesome discovery of Kuchya's dead body, Knox
went again to the police station to give evidence.
She was a valuable witness, she was the housemate of the victim, it was her who had first seen
the blood, raised the alarm, and led to the gruesome discovery.
She told the police what she knew, going over and over the events of that evening.
She was with Solichito, she returned to the house the following morning, took a shower,
and it was only afterwards that she noticed that something seemed odd.
She was told that she was being questioned as a witness, so she didn't need a lawyer.
What's more, she was told that things would be worse for her if she had asked for a lawyer,
it would suggest some kind of guilt.
And Knox, so she insisted, was innocent.
She wasn't provided with an interpreter, so this was all in Italian.
The Italian of someone who had only been in the country for a few weeks, and in her own
words, she had the Italian of a 10-year-old child.
There she was, speaking in broken Italian, not really understanding what she was being
asked, knowing nothing about the Italian legal system, thousands of miles away from home,
and only 20 years old at the time.
She was interrogated for hours, and on November the 6th, the Italian police proudly announced
that Knox was not just a witness.
She had signed a written statement, admitting that her original story, the one I just told
you, was a lie.
She confessed to her role in the grizzly murder.
According to the written statement, the killer was the owner of the bar in which Amanda
Knox worked, a Congolese man called Patrick Lemumba.
"'Lumumba' had come to the house,' so Knox said, and murdered Kutcher while Knox was
in another room.
Knox even went to the length of telling the police that she put her hands over her ears,
not to hear her housemate's screams.
Lemumba was promptly arrested, but he seemed confused, insisting that he had nothing to
do with it.
He was no murderer, he was working in his bar or leaving, just asked the half-dozen people
who were there with him.
And it wasn't just Lemumba who was insisting that he was innocent.
The morning after the signed confession, Amanda Knox wrote a lengthy letter in which
she said that she retracted the confession, and she was forced to sign it under serious
duress, with the police officers heating her over the head, and telling her that they
had evidence linking her to the crime scene.
She was confused, she had been interrogated for 50 hours without adequate food or water.
She was in shock.
She couldn't remember exactly what happened.
She had been smoking drugs with her boyfriend the night before.
It was all a bit of a blur, but she certainly did not kill Merriff, or know who did.
It wasn't Lemumba.
She had tried to pin the blame on him, inventing the story to divert attention away from her.
It didn't matter, the police were not buying it.
On November the 9th, a week after the murder, an Italian judge ruled that the three suspects,
Lemumba, Knox and Soleditor, could be detained for up to a year while the police gathered
the evidence to either convict or release them.
Then on November the 15th, almost two weeks after the murder, the police made another big
announcement.
They had found a knife at Raphaelis Soleditor's apartment, and on the knife's handle was the
DNA of both Soleditor and Knox.
And on the blade, traces of Merriff's Kirchert's DNA, traces of the murder victim.
It didn't look good for the young couple, for Raphaelis Soleditor and his American girlfriend,
Amanda Knox.
But then, a matter of days later, there was another suspect named in the murder, a young
man called Rudy Guerde.
He was originally from the Ivory Coast, but had lived in Pidolja since he was a young
boy.
He was well known to the police for petty crimes, drug dealing and more recently burglaries.
He was also known to carry a knife.
The day after he was named as a suspect, the German police announced that they had arrested
him after he had tried to board a train without a ticket, and he was extradited, brought back
to Italy.
The very same day, Patrick Lemumba, the man who Knox had initially said committed the
murder, was released.
It turned out that yes, Lemumba's surprise and protest of innocence were justified.
He was at his bar all night, and a Swiss professor came forward and testified they had been
talking to Lemumba all evening.
He even had the receipt from the bar to prove it.
For Rudy Guerde, on the other hand, things did not look good.
He had fled to Germany immediately after the murder, and the police would announce that
they had found his fingerprints and other DNA evidence of him all over the crime scene,
including his semen inside the victim.
When questioned, he admitted to the police that he was in Meredith's house during the
night of the murder, but he did not kill her.
His account of what happened went as far as.
He had been asked to come to the house by Meredith.
The pair had sex.
Afterwards, he had gone to the bathroom as he had an upset stomach after eating a dodgy
cabab.
He sat on the toilet with his headphones on, listening to loud music.
He came out to the bathroom and saw another man who told him, black man found, guilty
found, and then ran off into the night.
And it was only then that he discovered Meredith who had been stabbed multiple times and
was dying in front of him.
He tried to save her, but when he realized that he wouldn't be able to, and fearing that
the police would never believe his account of the story, he decided to flee.
But first, he wrapped Meredith's body in a duvet, which explains his bloody handprint
that was found under the pillar.
Now, you might believe Guaire, you might not.
The police certainly didn't.
But strangely enough, they also didn't believe Knox or Soledity through his account, and
positive that all three were involved in the murder.
Guaire, Knox, and Soledity thought.
All three were held in police custody until they were formally charged with murder in
July of the following year.
Guaire interestingly enough opted to have a separate, fast track trial, during which
he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
All throughout this, despite one man already being found guilty of murder, Soledity thought
and Knox were still in jail.
And then, in January of the following year, January of 2009, their trial began.
To say it was a media circus is perhaps an understatement.
They drew huge media interest from all over the world.
In Italy, because that was where the crime took place.
In the UK, because that was where the innocent victim was from.
And from the United States, because that's where Knox was from.
And the media interest wasn't just because of where the people involved came from.
There were multiple elements of the trial that intrigued and enthralled armchair detectives.
First of all, the murder seemed unlikely.
Knox and Soledity thought didn't look or sound like your typical violent murderers.
Soledity thought was a quiet, mild-mannered computer science student with round glasses.
Knox was a young American student on her study abroad year.
The pair had only met a few weeks before.
It might have been a whirlwind romance, but for them to have gone from smoke marijuana,
having sex and watching movies together, to discussing and then committing violent murder,
seemed odd.
What's more, there was the not insignificant fact that Rudy Guerner had already been charged
and found guilty of the murder.
What part did Knox and Soledity thought play then?
For this, we must now talk about the lead prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Minini.
Minini seems to have decided almost from the outset that Knox was guilty.
He just needed to find a motive and some evidence that supported his hypothesis.
He proposed to the court that Knox had attacked her housemate, and then she and Soledity
on held her down while Guerner raped her.
Perhaps they had done this for sexual gratification, Minini suggested.
Perhaps it was because they wanted to play some kind of drug-fueled sex game, and Meredith
refused to take part.
When this was all over, Knox and Guerner stabbed her to death.
The trio had then staged a burglary, they had then broken a window to make it look like
someone had broken into the apartment.
They were guilty, the prosecution alleged.
Against the backdrop of all of this, journalists were looking for any tidbits they could find
that would give their readers more salacious gossip about Knox or Guerner.
They were delighted to find out that Amanda Knox's myspace nickname was Foxy Knoxy.
Foxy is a slang term for sexually attractive.
Any information on Amanda Knox's life would be published by Hungary journalists, the
Racia the Better.
They found people who gave details of her sex life, how she had slapped with several Italian
men shortly after arriving.
She was painted as some kind of sex-crazed young woman.
Even the BBC, which normally abstains from the worst tabloid gossip, ran articles with
headlines like Who is the Real Foxy Knoxy?
And the entire thing spun out of control, and Amanda Knox was a sex-crazed temptress.
It wasn't just her backstory, it was also her behaviour during the investigation and trial
that journalists and prosecutors pointed to as a sign of her guilt.
She seemed unmoved by the death of her housemate, and the police would report that she did
cartwheels in the police station, which she would later say were only yoga exercises.
On Valentine's Day during her trial, she wore a t-shirt with all you need is love on,
and she smiled and looked even happy when she was in court.
This wasn't the behaviour of an innocent person, the prosecution alleged, no normal person
would behave in this way.
In the courtroom, the prosecutor brought out evidence that further tied the duo to the
crime scene.
There was the bloody knife, the murder weapon, and Minini also announced that the police
had found Soletitou's DNA on the victim's bra.
It was not looking good at all.
And after almost a full year, on December 4, 2009, the trial was over.
The jury declared that Amanda Knox and the Rafale Soletitou were guilty of murder, and
they were sentenced to 26 years and 25 years respectively.
They were cheers outside the courtroom, as justice had finally been served.
This young woman, who might look sweet and innocent, had been proved to be a violent
and cruel murderer.
Knox and Soletitou's families said they would immediately appeal the verdict, and the
next two years were characterised by appeals, second and third opinions.
As the appeals continued, more and more evidence came to light.
Or rather, it came to light that more and more evidence wasn't actually evidence at all.
The supposed murder knife was a reexamined, and it was found that it couldn't have been
the knife that killed Meredith.
It was too big, and the traces of Meredith's DNA that were found on the knife could have
been from anyone or anything.
It was a knife from Soletitou's kitchen, so of course his fingerprints were on it, as
he used it for cooking.
And given how much time Knox spent in his apartment, preparing and cooking food together,
it's perfectly reasonable that her fingerprints would be on there too.
And the other main piece of evidence for the prosecution was Soletitou's DNA on the
victim's bra.
When experts were consulted on the matter, they concluded that the manner in which the
forensic investigators searched the house was so unprofessional, the evidence would
almost certainly have been contaminated, and nothing could be considered valid legal evidence.
With these two pieces of evidence being completely discounted, there was nothing tying Soletitou
and Knox to the scene.
The only evidence of their guilt was Knox's unusual behaviour.
And of course you don't need to be an expert in Italian law to know that behaving in an
unusual way isn't enough to be convicted of murder.
Finally, on October 3rd 2011, almost four years after the murder, Knox and Soletitou
were acquitted, they were released from prison.
Knox was found guilty of perjury, of lying to the police that Patrick Lamumba was involved,
and she was sentenced to three years, but because she had already served almost four, she
was released straight away, and she was able to return to the United States.
This however wasn't the end of it.
In 2013, the Italian Supreme Court ruled that the pair should stand trial again.
Knox refused to return to Italy for the trial, but she was found guilty by another court,
and faced the possibility of spending the rest of her life in an Italian prison.
There was some diplomatic ping-pong, as the US government faced the very real possibility
that it might receive an extra edition request for one of its own citizens.
Clearly, extraditing Amanda Knox to Italy would have been a pretty unpopular move domestically,
but if the US didn't extradite a citizen that had been found guilty in a court of law,
it couldn't really continue to make extradition requests to other countries if it wouldn't
uphold its part in the bargain, and extradite one of its own.
Fortunately, the case never went this far, and a year later, on March 27, 2015, 2,702 days
after Meredith was found brutally murdered, and Amanda Knox and the Raphael Esuletito were
fully exonerated, acquitted of all charges.
Importantly, Knox was declared innocent, not simply declared not guilty.
This being said, there are plenty of people not just on internet forums, but also influential
journalists, especially in Italy, who have never acquitted the pair, who continue to put
forward this image of Foxy Knoxie, the American sexual deviant who murdered her housemate.
This would make for a much more theatrical and interesting tale, but the reality is almost
certainly less mysterious.
Rudy Gueddie broke into the house, like he had done to several other houses in the days
leading up to the murder.
He was confronted by Meredith.
There was a struggle, he raped and killed her, and then fled.
A horrible crime indeed, but one with a simple explanation than the one suggested during
the trial of Amanda Knox.
Gueddie, it should be said, maintains that he was innocent, and says that Knox was involved.
He is now a free man, after having served 16 years in prison, and being released early
for good behaviour.
However, he ever comes clean and reveals what really happened, remains to be said.
OK, then, that is it for the trial of Amanda Knox.
As you may have gathered, we've only really scratched the surface in this episode.
There is a lot more to it, and it really is a fascinating story of police ineptitude,
international diplomacy, the power of the media, and how the Italian legal system works.
So we're actually going to be following up this episode with another bonus episode, where
we're going to go into all of this in much greater detail.
So on that note, if you enjoyed this episode, and you would like to unlock our almost 250
bonus episodes, plus the interactive transcripts, subtitles, Hebrew capri and study packs,
then I'd love for you to check out our membership.
The place to go for that is www.leanadoenglish.com, and not only will you get all this wonderful
stuff that will help you improve your English, but you will also be supporting the work
that my team and I do.
You've been listening to your English learning for Curious Mines by Leonardo English.
I'm Alistair Bunch, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
