Continuation Part Eight: Discussion of the Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito case

[Desert Fox]

The transmission is two way. There is not only a lack of DNA transmission from Sollecito and Knox to kerchief, but a lack of transmission from Kercher to Sollecito / Knox. There should also be fibre transmission. The complete lack of exchange of DNA / blood / fibres is really strong evidence against their involvement in the crime. I had previously wondered why no fibre analysis was done, but the budget constraints are presumably the explanation.

You are arguing "Budget Constraints" in dark humor I hope.
Think about it though in real terms. If they had done a proper investigation, not rushed to judgement, waited on evidence to come back and simply arrested Rudy, how much would they have saved?
Instead, there may be a trial four or five and the European Court may see this case which further cost Italy.

 

[Vibio]

However, I don't see how it is humanly possible for there not to be shoe prints or fingerprints in Meredith's blood belonging to Raffaele or Amanda.

Entirely possible. A while back I posted an example from a bloody double murder. No DNA evidence found at the crime scene (a home). No bloody footprints.

 

[Anode]

I don't think we can intelligently speak about the absence of DNA. They only found 5 samples of DNA from Rudy in that bedroom. I think anecdotally, the absence of DNA from Amanda might be significant. But maybe only marginally so. However, I don't see how it is humanly possible for there not to be shoe prints or fingerprints in Meredith's blood belonging to Raffaele or Amanda.

I understand and agree to a certain extent Tesla. The lack of fingerprints, footprints, and basically detected contact with the massive amounts of blood are hard to explain for me as well. I was just trying to make the point that RS's DNA on the bra clasp being (1) valid and (2) related to the crime would be much more believable to me if some of his DNA also showed up in the murder room and on her body as Rudy's did. If he's shedding DNA, where's the rest of it? (is my question) And Vibio answers "No, not necessarily" indicating that he/she thinks differently about RS shedding and depositing DNA. So therein lies one cause of our different conclusions I guess.

I need a little bit of corroborating evidence. Otherwise I'm forced to conclude that it must have come from somewhere else and hence I have reasonable doubt.

 

[Anode]

Entirely possible. A while back I posted an example from a bloody double murder. No DNA evidence found at the crime scene (a home). No bloody footprints.

Okay, but I would think that this would be an exception rather than the norm. Case in point, this murder scene was not void of that. It had lots of footprint, palm print, knife print and DNA evidence in it. It implicates Rudy a great deal.

 

[Desert Fox]

Entirely possible. A while back I posted an example from a bloody double murder. No DNA evidence found at the crime scene (a home). No bloody footprints.

Please provide a link to the case?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

which clothes were tested

I don't think we can intelligently speak about the absence of DNA. They only found 5 samples of DNA from Rudy in that bedroom. I think anecdotally, the absence of DNA from Amanda might be significant. But maybe only marginally so. However, I don't see how it is humanly possible for there not to be shoe prints or fingerprints in Meredith's blood belonging to Raffaele or Amanda.

I don't know how many places they sampled the jacket. I don't happen to know whether they tested other items of clothing or not, other than some light colored socks, which had Meredith's profile. It would have been worthwhile to swab the shoes, for example.

 

[acbytesla]

Entirely possible. A while back I posted an example from a bloody double murder. No DNA evidence found at the crime scene (a home). No bloody footprints.

But there are bloody footprints Vibio. Lots of them and they all belong to Meredith and Rudy..NOBODY else. It is NOT possible for there to be blood all over the floor and only the footprints of two people unless only two people were involved.

Not unless Amanda and Raffaele hovered above the ground. Is that what you are suggesting?

 

[Desert Fox]

But there are bloody footprints Vibio. Lots of them and they all belong to Meredith and Rudy..NOBODY else. It is NOT possible for there to be blood all over the floor and only the footprints of two people unless only two people were involved.

Not unless Amanda and Raffaele hovered above the ground. Is that what you are suggesting?

I woudl like him to provide the case because I suspect that there are reasons related to the crime scene that there was not physical evidence.

I am also concerned, because I remember reading a similar case and thinking 'There really was no good evidence to convict.' Case where the judge should have dismissed the case for lack of evidence.

 

[kwill]

Entirely possible. A while back I posted an example from a bloody double murder. No DNA evidence found at the crime scene (a home). No bloody footprints.

I remember that. In that case the bloody double murderer had a strong motive and left a lot of forensic evidence elsewhere that tied him to the murder (his clothing stained with the victim's blood, as I recall). The police knew who he was, and they had evidence that he had threatened to kill the victims before he did it.

You want your example (the only one I've heard you mention, by the way) to show that it is more than theoretically possible for someone to commit a violent crime and not leave DNA.

Okay, granted.

Is it also possible for 3 people to commit a crime and only one of them leave DNA?

Isn't it probable that the 2 people who left no DNA, fingerprints, or footprints and who also have neither motive to kill nor history of violence might, you know, not have been in the room at all?

 

[Planigale]

You are arguing "Budget Constraints" in dark humor I hope.
Think about it though in real terms. If they had done a proper investigation, not rushed to judgement, waited on evidence to come back and simply arrested Rudy, how much would they have saved?
Instead, there may be a trial four or five and the European Court may see this case which further cost Italy.

As I referenced it was stated in the court case (apparently by Stefanoni) she was limited in testing by financial issues. Of course if one works in a large bureaucracy one realises that the whole issue is whose budget the costs come out of. I have always believed that the police may not have the budget to record and transcribe all interviews but the prosecutor has the budget to pay for an expensive video. Whilst the scientific police do not have the budget to do mitochondrial DNA or fibre analysis. Different budgets.

 

[Desert Fox]

As I referenced it was stated in the court case (apparently by Stefanoni) she was limited in testing by financial issues. Of course if one works in a large bureaucracy one realises that the whole issue is whose budget the costs come out of. I have always believed that the police may not have the budget to record and transcribe all interviews but the prosecutor has the budget to pay for an expensive video. Whilst the scientific police do not have the budget to do mitochondrial DNA or fibre analysis. Different budgets.

Previous, the excuse given for not recording the whole police interrogation for Amanda Knox was also budget constraints. It just gets too convenient when every piece of evidence that might clarify the case is not done due to budget constraints.

A good US judge would say "Case dismissed due to Budget Constraints." Never even get to the jury.

 

[LondonJohn]

You both miss the point. Of course DNA can last for thousands of years, but where did the clasp travel in those 46 days and to whom do the other DNAs belong. The murder room was tossed by the Flying Squad the two days after the ICSI were done. Among things found later were bloody clothing of Meredith's in a waste basket. There are pictures taken by Barbie Nadeau between the 5th and the 18th of December showing that the seal on the door was altered. It does not appear that the cottage was secure.

Personally I think that if Raf's DNA was on the bra clasp it got on there the way the other men's DNA got on there. Although the ICSI only found Raf's DNA in one place that doesn't mean it wasn't more widespread in the cottage where they didn't look.

It is notable that they found Raf's DNA on the clasp and Meredith's on the knife and would be a strong argument for guilt if so much of the CSI's work wasn't so questionable. It is hard to know what findings Stefanoni didn't report.

Yes. This ludicrous and ill-informed "argument" along the lines of "DNA from cases that happened decades ago has still been sufficiently reliable to secure convictions (or exonerations) in the present day, so the 42-day wait is hardly a barrier to reliability/validity" needs to be put to rest once and for all.

In virtually all the cold case reviews where DNA testing has played the vital part, they are sex crimes (rape and sexually-aggravated murder mainly) where the assailant has deposited semen on/in the victim and/or upon her/his clothing. Dried semen on a properly-stored item (whether a swab taken from the body or an item of clothing) preserves large quantities of spermatozoal DNA.

If these dried semen samples are tested with modern DNA testing techniques, they usually provide reliable, repeatable results and generate a detailed and accurate partial profile (partial since sperm DNA is only half the human genome). The results they provide are almost always accurate enough to rule in or out any particular person with an extremely high degree of confidence. And the main reason why they can lead to convictions is because the person identified by the DNA analysis originally claimed to have no link with the victim (ironically, if they had claimed they'd had consensual sex with the victim prior to any criminal act committed by another, they might have had some sort of defence). It's also easy to see how such DNA testing can lead to exonerations of convicted people (i.e. the DNA found doesn't match the person convicted of the crime).


But, as many others here - and elsewhere - have forcefully and correctly pointed out, the situation with the bra clasp in the Kercher case is manifestly different in a huge (and hugely significant) number of ways. Firstly, it was subjected to two obvious paths for potential contamination: a) it was provably moved around the bedroom on a dusty, contaminated floor at least twice during the 42-day period when it was left inside Meredith's room. We have no idea whatsoever of who was in that room over that time, what they did, what they touched, what they moved where; b) when it finally was collected, it was picked up and passed around several forensics personnel who were wearing visibly dirty gloves!. Secondly, it demonstrably was contaminated, by the mixture of male contributors who to this day remain unidentified. And thirdly, we are talking about amounts of DNA that fall clearly into the low-template level. This in itself opens the door to potential contamination, and requires that extreme care is taken with the collection, storage and testing of such samples. That was not done in this case.

 

[LondonJohn]

As I referenced it was stated in the court case (apparently by Stefanoni) she was limited in testing by financial issues. Of course if one works in a large bureaucracy one realises that the whole issue is whose budget the costs come out of. I have always believed that the police may not have the budget to record and transcribe all interviews but the prosecutor has the budget to pay for an expensive video. Whilst the scientific police do not have the budget to do mitochondrial DNA or fibre analysis. Different budgets.

Ah but the police DID have the budget to tap Knox's and Sollecito's mobile phones, and to record (apparently) some 30,000 phone calls! Those calls would have needed listening to, and a fair portion of them would have been transcribed.

In addition, of course, we need to remember that this was one of the highest-profile police cases in Perugia's modern history. It was a serious murder, and the country and the World were watching closely. The investigating police simply had to realise that they were under intense scrutiny to do a gold-standard job on this case. I could accept if budgetary restraints meant that some witness statements in (say) household burglaries were not recorded/transcribed. But I simply refuse to believe that there wouldn't have been money in the coffers for this specific case (the Kercher murder).


It simply doesn't add up one bit. Knowing what I think I do about how the police operate in Italy (reinforced by that interesting European Bar Association report on Italian skullduggery that I've quoted here many times before), I strongly suspect that something along the following lines happened:

1) The police (and PM) know that self-incriminating statements made by a person prior to arrest and formal declaration as a suspect cannot be used against them.

2) They also know that once a person is arrested and formally declared a suspect, there is an obligation to get that person a lawyer. Any half-decent lawyer will tell the person not to make any more incriminating or self-incriminating statements.

3) A well-choreographed scheme is therefore put in place to deal with a person whom the police and PM suspect of a crime. Firstly, the person is "persuaded" in a police interview (prior, of course, to being formally declared a suspect) to confess to the crime. Since underhand and unlawful methods are usually used in this phase of the scheme, the interrogation is either not recorded at all (which is what I think happened in this case), or the recording is carefully "lost".

4) The PM is then called in. It's very useful if this phase takes place in the middle of the night: it's pretty easy to persuade people not to call out lawyers in the middle of the night, and that they'll have to wait until the next day to get a lawyer.

5) The next phase is the critical one. The PM elicits a "spontaneous declaration" from the person, who's now officially declared a suspect. The ruse is along the lines of "Would you like to tell me what you've just told the police, so that I can understand your position? You've already said all this to the police, so it will help you and me if you can now repeat it to me." It's critical because the PM knows that a "spontaneous declaration" from a person declared a suspect can be used against that person in court.

6) The suspect, perhaps taken in by the seemingly-kind demeanour of the PM, readily agrees to repeat the confession. If the PM is sufficiently artful, (s)he can claim that this did not take the form of actual questioning of the suspect by the PM (which would be unlawful), but that rather the suspect simply voluntarily decided to tell everything to the PM.

7) Et voila! The PM ends up with a useable "spontaneous declaration" from the suspect which contains the full confession!


I strongly believe that this is exactly what happened to Knox on the 5th/6th November 2007. I think that the police and Mignini knew exactly what they were doing, and what their end goal was. And they partially got away with it.

 

[anglolawyer]

They spent €189,000 on a cartoon ....

 

[acbytesla]

I understand and agree to a certain extent Tesla. The lack of fingerprints, footprints, and basically detected contact with the massive amounts of blood are hard to explain for me as well. I was just trying to make the point that RS's DNA on the bra clasp being (1) valid and (2) related to the crime would be much more believable to me if some of his DNA also showed up in the murder room and on her body as Rudy's did. If he's shedding DNA, where's the rest of it? (is my question) And Vibio answers "No, not necessarily" indicating that he/she thinks differently about RS shedding and depositing DNA. So therein lies one cause of our different conclusions I guess.

I need a little bit of corroborating evidence. Otherwise I'm forced to conclude that it must have come from somewhere else and hence I have reasonable doubt.

The problem for me Anode...is just how much DNA do we shed and how many tests do we need to perform to find it? I have no idea...since it is invisible to the naked eye. You would think that they would have found something from Amanda in that room..I mean she lived in the room next door for crying out loud.

I've always said that they could have found Amanda's DNA all over that Meredith's bedroom and it would have had little probative value. If they had taken twice as many samples, would they have been able to find Amanda's DNA? My guess is that the answer is yes.

Yet, our feet in particular, in a struggle in a room where there is that much blood on the floor is going to leave foot/shoe prints.

In fact, I'm thoroughly convinced if the moronic police had figured out that those shoe prints were Rudy much earlier and hadn't declared to the world "Case closed"...they would have let both Amanda and Raffaele go.

But after a month of patting themselves on the back, giving interviews etc. they were locked into going after Amanda and Raffaele or risk looking like fools.

 

[kwill]

They spent €189,000 on a cartoon ....

And from their POV, it probably seems like a great investment.

 

[anglolawyer]

And from their POV, it probably seems like a great investment.

A relatively minor but interesting line of enquiry would be to follow that money and see where it ended up.

 

[NancyS]

But there are bloody footprints Vibio. Lots of them and they all belong to Meredith and Rudy..NOBODY else. It is NOT possible for there to be blood all over the floor and only the footprints of two people unless only two people were involved.

Not unless Amanda and Raffaele hovered above the ground. Is that what you are suggesting?

And you can only imagine the kind of chaos that would have occurred in such a small space following the murder, if three people had been involved. Guede left footprints in the corridor, which indicated he had stepped in fresh blood - if two other people were running around the corridor at the same time, you would expect this would have been evident - instead there is only evidence of Guede being present.

And PGP argue that Raffaele left a bloody footprint on the bathmat, yet there is no evidence in Meredith's room that he ever stepped in blood and no trace of blood was ever found on his clothes/belongings - you can't have it both ways

This lack of evidence, surely has to at least suggest reasonable doubt.

 

[acbytesla]

And you can only imagine the kind of chaos that would have occurred in such a small space following the murder, if three people had been involved. Guede left footprints in the corridor, which indicated he had stepped in fresh blood - if two other people were running around the corridor at the same time, you would expect this would have been evident - instead there is only evidence of Guede being present.

And PGP argue that Raffaele left a bloody footprint on the bathmat, yet there is no evidence in Meredith's room that he ever stepped in blood and no trace of blood was ever found on his clothes/belongings - you can't have it both ways

This lack of evidence, surely has to at least suggest reasonable doubt.

For me, it does more than that. It proves that ONLY ONE person killed Meredith. Not Koko, not Amanda, Not Raffaele. Just Rudy. And when you combine this with all the other evidence that shows that Amanda and Raffaele weren't involved, it is more than reasonable doubt it's total innocence.

 

[carbonjam72]

smiles

Carbonjam72
I so agree with your words that describe this surreal injustice and the need "to reverse this injustice".
I think of this case as the "Dreyfus Affair of the 21st Century".
Analemma

Thanks Analemma. Much appreciated.