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

[Samson]

I know all of us operate with some cognitive dissonance but I just have trouble with the pro guilt crowd on this issue (and other issues) when they go completely against the evidence. Not those directly involved but those with no real skin in the game. I don't know if they consider everybody guilty always?

I wonder in the Sarah Scazzi case, which has a good blow by blow thread on IIP. Mach supported the verdict, but I wonder about the other fundamentalist Italianophiles. The party line on IIP is that it is worse than this case as a miscarriage of justice.
I agree on the cognitive dissonance, because if A and R confessed now, I would assume they were wasting police time.

 

[acbytesla]

If that was all the evidence, I would be skeptical as well.
There is however reasonable decent physical evidence.
One reason why I am extremely skeptical with the Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood case because all you have is she said/she said. . . .

Physical evidence is usually the best. I'd tend to believe for the most part what this person described what happened but not necessarily an ID unless they knew this person on sight as if they knew them before the incident.

 

[Desert Fox]

I wonder in the Sarah Scazzi case, which has a good blow by blow thread on IIP. Mach supported the verdict, but I wonder about the other fundamentalist Italianophiles. The party line on IIP is that it is worse than this case as a miscarriage of justice.
I agree on the cognitive dissonance, because if A and R confessed now, I would assume they were wasting police time.

They better have one hell of a story

 

[acbytesla]

If you listen / read James Randi, coincidences are actually pretty common.
Maybe there was a domestic argument somewhere or even just a car alarm that will not shut up. Would be nice if there had been follow up.

I agree with James Randi on this. You have to be very careful about what the coincidences mean. For example the PGP would say in this case that the odds of what they see as coincidences in this case make it unreasonable that Knox and Sollecito aren't guilty.

 

[Bill Williams]

This is what you get on PMF when you ask for the latest DVD be addressed, and suggest it might trump Nara.

Please, just stop with your ********. Nara took diuretics, which is why she woke up every two hours. Please adjust your post accordingly and again, stop spouting ******** here or I will ban you. I loathe bull ********.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point; on le sait en mille choses.

Skeptical Bystander

Asterixes inserted by this site editor. This woman has devoted a good portion of her life to placing Meredith first, yet has this amount of appetite for debating the evidence. The conclusion is she is wedded to an 11 30pm time of death, five hours after dinner. This is medically completely impossible. She must be totally opposed to science.

I could only find one post of Peggy's which explains why she does this, banning people. She claimed that her website was not really for discussion - that "debate" that included opposing points of view was "distracting". She gets pissed of by distractions....

To this day, I do not have a clue what she meant. But, man oh man, has she been consistent. That French-language adage she closes with is perhaps the closest there is to explaining her motives....

 

[Samson]

I could only find one post of Peggy's which explains why she does this, banning people. She claimed that her website was not really for discussion - that "debate" that included opposing points of view was "distracting". She gets pissed of by distractions....

To this day, I do not have a clue what she meant. But, man oh man, has she been consistent. That French-language adage she closes with is perhaps the closest there is to explaining her motives....

The heart has its reasons that reason knows not the point; we know a thousand things.

That's google, looks like a poor job. Maybe the high priestess could explain better what this means, but it looks like an Italianism that has staggered drunkenly across the border.

ETA google suggests adding two accents for Peggy and comes up with this

Le coeur à ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point; on le sait en mille choses.

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing; we know a thousand things.

More poetic, but still completely unscientific, and perilous for our victims.

 

[katy_did]

All of these people should have been questioned as to what they may have seen that night. And they all are very likely to be identified easily given that their automobile license plates were recorded.

Totally agree. On those crime reconstruction programs they often ask people who were in the area to come forward even if they don't think they heard or saw anything important... Many of those people probably walked through Piazza Grimana and the steps next to the basketball court to get to the car park. Did any of them see Amanda and Raffaele hanging out there? Contacting these people would've been a great way to confirm or refute Curatolo's story. I seriously doubt the police contacted any of them, though.

 

[js202]

This is what you get on PMF when you ask for the latest DVD be addressed, and suggest it might trump Nara.

Please, just stop with your ********. Nara took diuretics, which is why she woke up every two hours. Please adjust your post accordingly and again, stop spouting ******** here or I will ban you. I loathe bull ********.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point; on le sait en mille choses.

Skeptical Bystander

Asterixes inserted by this site editor. This woman has devoted a good portion of her life to placing Meredith first, yet has this amount of appetite for debating the evidence. The conclusion is she is wedded to an 11 30pm time of death, five hours after dinner. This is medically completely impossible. She must be totally opposed to science.

What a hideous, husk of a human being this woman is.

 

[katy_did]

I am sorry, I don't think there was any sort of 25 minute confrontational.
I suspect that whatever happened, it was pretty quick. Most likely just a few minutes.

I think there could easily have been a 25 minute confrontation if Guede threatened Meredith prior to the stabbing to keep her quiet, to force her to comply or whatever. In some ways that seems quite likely because it explains Guede still being in or near the house at 10 p.m. I'm skeptical about 25 minutes of screaming, though (actually I'm quite skeptical about there being a scream audible outside the cottage at all, let alone the movie-like "bloodcurdling" one Nara supposedly heard).

 

[Bill Williams]

I think there could easily have been a 25 minute confrontation if Guede threatened Meredith prior to the stabbing to keep her quiet, to force her to comply or whatever. In some ways that seems quite likely because it explains Guede still being in or near the house at 10 p.m. I'm skeptical about 25 minutes of screaming, though (actually I'm quite skeptical about there being a scream audible outside the cottage at all, let alone the movie-like "bloodcurdling" one Nara supposedly heard).

..... that she did not report for a year!!!!

 

[acbytesla]

Totally agree. On those crime reconstruction programs they often ask people who were in the area to come forward even if they don't think they heard or saw anything important... Many of those people probably walked through Piazza Grimana and the steps next to the basketball court to get to the car park. Did any of them see Amanda and Raffaele hanging out there? Contacting these people would've been a great way to confirm or refute Curatolo's story. I seriously doubt the police contacted any of them, though.

I'm not sure you can go that far. The fact that no one else saw what Toto saw doesn't mean that he didn't see it. There are other reasons to doubt Toto.

Still, every car owner who's car left through that gate between 8 PM and later should have been contacted and then the owners should be asked who all these individuals were in the images and then everyone of them should have been questioned.

 

[acbytesla]

The heart has its reasons that reason knows not the point; we know a thousand things.

That's google, looks like a poor job. Maybe the high priestess could explain better what this means, but it looks like an Italianism that has staggered drunkenly across the border.

ETA google suggests adding two accents for Peggy and comes up with this

Le coeur à ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point; on le sait en mille choses.

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing; we know a thousand things.

More poetic, but still completely unscientific, and perilous for our victims.

It really is an amazingly arrogant thing to say. Particularly when other people's lives are at stake.

It really is insisting that "they just know and they don't have to explain or justify their position.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Pascal loved triangles

The quote is from Pascal, but I agree that applying it to this case is dubious, at best.

 

[Strozzi]

I think anything is possible...but we well never know. The time has past and I have to think if anyone remembers anything from that evening today, there is no way to know if they created it in in their own mind or not.

I don't believe people saw or heard anything related to the crime that occurred inside the house. Whatever it was that caught people's eye, or actual attention, once it became known the next afternoon that a murder had been committed, some, I repeat, some of the many people would have come forward immediately and said "I saw something". No one did.

If one takes a jaundiced view of people, given the excellent memory recovery of four Perugian witnesses who suddenly decided months later that they had heard a scream or saw the blue-eye blond hanging around or looking for cleaning supplies, there would have been a dozen Italian witnesses swearing under oath that they each had seen Amanda near the garage picking her gapped-teeth with a large kitchen knife. As it was, the apprentice journalist only found a few witnesses.

 

[Strozzi]

I'm not sure you can go that far. The fact that no one else saw what Toto saw doesn't mean that he didn't see it. There are other reasons to doubt Toto.

Still, every car owner who's car left through that gate between 8 PM and later should have been contacted and then the owners should be asked who all these individuals were in the images and then everyone of them should have been questioned.

What you suggest sounds like a good investigatory technique. But it wasn't needed because on day 1 the prosecutor running the investigation concluded the break-in was fake and that it was an inside job. Before long their detectives were suspicious of Amanda. The whiz inspector from Rome, Giobbi, said they relied on investigator intuition rather than other forms of evidence to know that Amanda did it.

 

[acbytesla]

I don't believe people saw or heard anything related to the crime that occurred inside the house. Whatever it was that caught people's eye, or actual attention, once it became known the next afternoon that a murder had been committed, some, I repeat, some of the many people would have come forward immediately and said "I saw something". No one did.

I don't either actually Strozzi and agree 100 percent

If one takes a jaundiced view of people, given the excellent memory recovery of four Perugian witnesses who suddenly decided months later that they had heard a scream or saw the blue-eye blond hanging around or looking for cleaning supplies, there would have been a dozen Italian witnesses swearing under oath that they each had seen Amanda near the garage picking her gapped-teeth with a large kitchen knife. As it was, the apprentice journalist only found a few witnesses.

It's too easy to have one's mind tainted by the media. A totally cynical view is that these people absolutely knew they were lying and did it anyway. But I really think that people convinced themselves of something over time.

 

[whoanellie]

A standoff maybe, but chasing her around the apartment screaming for 25 minutes?? I can run over 3 miles in 25 minutes. And I have to assume that realistically 25 minutes of death screams would have surely brought the police. One would hope anyway.

Yet it has to be something of interest. People are purposely turning and looking. I wish we had a photo of what exactly their view was. Does everyone stop and look regardless of day/time? Is it a beautiful view of the canyon? Or can you just see the street and cottage indicating some remarkable activity?

Again, here I am with more questions than answers...

ETA: I brought up Google Maps and they are indeed looking right at the area where the broken window was and Meredith's room.

Any chance everyone was just looking for oncoming traffic?

 

[xinonix]

Let's consider the simplest explanation. A thief set of a car alarm, got scared and ran away.
He had left before those people got there so there was nothing to see, but something to hear.
When you live in Perugia, you learn to keep your nose out of other people's business.

So ,does anybody have a reason why that could not have happened?

 

[Strozzi]

Let's consider the simplest explanation. A thief set of a car alarm, got scared and ran away.
He had left before those people got there so there was nothing to see, but something to hear.
When you live in Perugia, you learn to keep your nose out of other people's business.

So ,does anybody have a reason why that could not have happened?

Very good suggestion, xinonix, about what it could have been. Or a dog. Or a drunk/addict passed out on the ground (where was Curatolo during this time period).

 

[anglolawyer]

Any chance everyone was just looking for oncoming traffic?

No.