Continuation Part 14: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Bill Williams]

Why turn the phones off? How does it help? Phones left on at the flat are evidence they were there, which would have helped them if they really were out to murder.

This is connected to the issue of the whole thing being "suspect-centric". Apparently, the 2015 version of the ISC saw through this and set the matter right.

But back in the 2013 version of the ISC, "susect-centrism" was supreme. After all, the 2013 ISC said it was a judicial truth generated from Rudy's process that it was multiple attackers, and they all-but named those attackers as AK and RS. The issue in a suspect-centric investigation/prosecution is not how turning off the phones would or wouldn't benefit the commission of the crime.....

It is this: can this factoid be considered osmotically with all the other factoids and still not destroy the presumption of guilt?

 

[Strozzi]

I agree completely and have for many years. It makes no sense whatsoever. If you are going out to commit a crime and you don't want to be traced then why even bring your phone with you? You're not going to turn it on. Leave it at home pinging so that you can at least feign an alibi. Bring a burner if you think you really need one. (Not that I have any experience in these matters. )

If you've just watched a romantic movie at home with your 8 day new lover, turn your phones off before you jump in the sack so that nothing interrupts you. It makes all the sense in the world.

And by the way, accepting that they turned their phones off so that they couldn't be traced implies premeditation and not a heated fight turned bad over rent money or poo in the toilet...

Vixen, have you considered the possibility that Amanda, herself, gave Rudi the bad kabob? Where would that lead? Run with it . . .

 

[LondonJohn]

Question:

Am I being dim, or is there a totally different second bloody knife imprint on the bedsheet in Kercher's room?

Take a look at this crime scene video, specifically the part between 4:26 and 4:35:



At 4:26 there appears (to me) to be a second imprint of the knife on a totally different part of the sheet. The camera lingers on it for a split second, then pans across to the other imprint - the one we're all more familiar with.

Does anyone have more information on this? Has this other imprint always been known about? It seems to be that this other imprint is even more definitive in determining the shape and size of the knife (it appears clear to be that the imprint shows the blade pointing downwards (from the POV of the camera), with the most blood down at the tip of the blade - as one would expect, and consistent with the other imprint).

 

[sept79]

You could theorise that suppose two perps decide to simultaneously turn off their phones, in order to commit a crime in peace, then it is quite feasible they will put on an anodyne movie before going out, as an "alibi" for later.

Just sayin'.

Wow! It's this kind of reasoning that gives Mensa a bad name.

Just sayin' . . .

 

[Bill Williams]

I still say that when the Postals arrived with news of the phones' discovery in Lana's garden, this totally changed the game.......

.... for Filomena.

Now everyone suddenly knew not only that were things suspicious in the cottage and Kercher could not be located or contacted, but also that Kercher's two mobile handsets had been found - apparently thrown away - in a random garden on the outskirts of the city. This new fact could not be reasonably ascribed to Kercher simply having gone out and staying over at a friend's house. Therefore, the new fact, when added to the existing facts, led to the clear conclusion that Kercher had - to some degree - been the victim of foul play......

........ to Filomena.

And I maintain that it's this which caused the swift escalation in the situation.......

... for Filomena; and "escalation" that everyone else, including the postals, did not share. Remember, the postals refused to break down the door.

leading to the forcible breaking down of Kercher's door.......

..... at Filomena's insistence. And her insistence alone, which some at the scene - mainly the postals - backed away from.

It also explains why it's reasonable to suppose that while Knox and Sollecito might have been getting concerned about Kercher prior to the Postals' arrival, they could/would not have been sufficiently alarmed as to forcibly break down the door. On that matter, I actually think that Knox has herself undergone a degree of ex post facto rationalisation when she uses words such as "panic" in her recollection (since she now knows exactly what was behind that door all that time......).

Who knows. The point for me is that Knox's reaction was only a little more "escalated" than the postals, but it was only Filomena who knew what Meredith being without her phones meant.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You could theorise that suppose two perps decide to simultaneously turn off their phones, in order to commit a crime in peace, then it is quite feasible they will put on an anodyne movie before going out, as an "alibi" for later.

Just sayin'.

You don't want to go there.

If you make it a premeditated crime it just gets awkward. You need a motive, you need to explain how Amanda, Rudy and Raffaele organised it all despite the language barrier, you need to explain how they knew when Meredith was going to get home, you need to explain why they didn't nick off to Gubbio to let the crime scene cool off, you need to explain why they didn't get lawyers, it all gets really awkward.

In particular you have to constantly swap between "and then Amanda being a hardened criminal genius brilliantly did X" and "and then Amanda being a total nincompoop did Y" to try to explain all the evidence and lack of evidence, so you have this criminal genius cleaning up all the DNA in the murder room but missing her own in the sink, making two knives vanish and putting the third back in her boyfriend's flat unbleached and so on.

It's just a mess.

Plus you get no support from the Italian courts, who framed everything as an unpremeditated, random crime. You're throwing out most of your material.

There's a reason the major guilter tribes say it was unpremeditated. Trying to make it premeditated makes people look even crazier than trying out the unpremeditated line.

 

[Kauffer]

This is connected to the issue of the whole thing being "suspect-centric". Apparently, the 2015 version of the ISC saw through this and set the matter right.

But back in the 2013 version of the ISC, "susect-centrism" was supreme. After all, the 2013 ISC said it was a judicial truth generated from Rudy's process that it was multiple attackers, and they all-but named those attackers as AK and RS. The issue in a suspect-centric investigation/prosecution is not how turning off the phones would or wouldn't benefit the commission of the crime.....

It is this: can this factoid be considered osmotically with all the other factoids and still not destroy the presumption of guilt?

Yes, quite. The issue of the phones being left on in order to help create a false alibi, is just one of the things they could have done towards creating a false alibi but it's the easiest. And as LJ points out, Raffaele had sufficient knowledge about tower pings.

But, in saying all that, isn't Raffaele's position as from the recent Italian TV show that he did not in fact turn off his phone? Isn't that also consistent with the dodgy reception in certain areas of his flat explaining why his phone didn't ping?

But of course there are other obvious clues that the pro guilt/prosecution's conclusions from observations are deluded. If they'd been stupid enough to take a kitchen knife to the cottage and killed Kercher with it, the knife would have been tossed. The "second" knife was tossed after all! The inventory argument against this is incredibly weak.

The big one, though, is the bathmat. If Raffaele really had stepped on it with a bare dilute bloody foot, it too would have been tossed The cleanup meme involves them in not actually cleaning up the bathroom where incriminating evidence of Raffaele might have been found and that includes the mat.

 

[Kauffer]

Question:

Am I being dim, or is there a totally different second bloody knife imprint on the bedsheet in Kercher's room?

Take a look at this crime scene video, specifically the part between 4:26 and 4:35:



At 4:26 there appears (to me) to be a second imprint of the knife on a totally different part of the sheet. The camera lingers on it for a split second, then pans across to the other imprint - the one we're all more familiar with.

Does anyone have more information on this? Has this other imprint always been known about? It seems to be that this other imprint is even more definitive in determining the shape and size of the knife (it appears clear to be that the imprint shows the blade pointing downwards (from the POV of the camera), with the most blood down at the tip of the blade - as one would expect, and consistent with the other imprint).

I've frozen it 3 times, and whilst it resembles the right shape of a knife blade, it looks to me like a natural crease with a blood stain rather than an imprint. I'm not wholly certain, however. I'd say 80:20 against your hypothesis.

 

[analemma]

On the other hand Vixen is alone in this thread with the views Vixen holds and that can't be an easy thing for anybody.

As to whether Vixen posts in the style of Machiavelli: I don't see it, but apparently more than one person has posted under the name Machiavelli here and perhaps there is some similarity to the posts made by one of the alternate Machiavelli's.

On the other hand Vixen is alone in this thread with the views Vixen holds and that can't be an easy thing for anybody.
This is a labor of love for a Troll with no place else to be noticed
As to whether Vixen posts in the style of Machiavelli: I don't see it,
Mach used to obsess on the Rudy drug connection and dream up all kinds of demeaning nonsense that had no logical basis but was insulting.
Mach never stayed on a insult long enough to have to reply to its address its logical and factual failures
IGNORE THE TROLL AND IT WILL DISAPPER

 

[RWVBWL]

RIP Geoffrey...

Having just watched Amelie, Amanda and Raffaele, naturally enough, got it into their heads to act out a scene from Natural Born Killers. It happens to me all the time.

^^^^*** funny,
thanks for the laugh...
I always crack up when someone in this thread mentions Natural Born Killers,
like it pertains to Raff + Amanda.

1 of my sisters luvs that movie + had the song from it on her cell phone at 1 time.
I ain't no Hollywood kinda guy even though I'm born + raised here in L.A. and said sis + hubby work at Fox Studios. And golly gee whiz, I'd never even watched the flick or heard of Juliette Lewis, the chick starrin' in it until after I started dating my last significant girlfriend back in the early 2000's, an older sister of Juliette's. Yet still, to this day, I don't feel like killin' anyone...
RW

 

[Strozzi]

Question:

Am I being dim, or is there a totally different second bloody knife imprint on the bedsheet in Kercher's room?

Take a look at this crime scene video, specifically the part between 4:26 and 4:35:



At 4:26 there appears (to me) to be a second imprint of the knife on a totally different part of the sheet. The camera lingers on it for a split second, then pans across to the other imprint - the one we're all more familiar with.

Does anyone have more information on this? Has this other imprint always been known about? It seems to be that this other imprint is even more definitive in determining the shape and size of the knife (it appears clear to be that the imprint shows the blade pointing downwards (from the POV of the camera), with the most blood down at the tip of the blade - as one would expect, and consistent with the other imprint).

Yes, there are two imprints of a knife on the bedsheet. Is this newly noticed? Was this not discussed in the trials?

 

[Strozzi]

You don't want to go there.

If you make it a premeditated crime it just gets awkward. You need a motive, you need to explain how Amanda, Rudy and Raffaele organised it all despite the language barrier, you need to explain how they knew when Meredith was going to get home, you need to explain why they didn't nick off to Gubbio to let the crime scene cool off, you need to explain why they didn't get lawyers, it all gets really awkward.

In particular you have to constantly swap between "and then Amanda being a hardened criminal genius brilliantly did X" and "and then Amanda being a total nincompoop did Y" to try to explain all the evidence and lack of evidence, so you have this criminal genius cleaning up all the DNA in the murder room but missing her own in the sink, making two knives vanish and putting the third back in her boyfriend's flat unbleached and so on.

It's just a mess.

Plus you get no support from the Italian courts, who framed everything as an unpremeditated, random crime. You're throwing out most of your material.

There's a reason the major guilter tribes say it was unpremeditated. Trying to make it premeditated makes people look even crazier than trying out the unpremeditated line.

Go ahead and do it, Vixen. Make it a premeditated crime. I have confidence in you.

 

[LashL]

Question:

Am I being dim, or is there a totally different second bloody knife imprint on the bedsheet in Kercher's room?

Take a look at this crime scene video, specifically the part between 4:26 and 4:35:



At 4:26 there appears (to me) to be a second imprint of the knife on a totally different part of the sheet. The camera lingers on it for a split second, then pans across to the other imprint - the one we're all more familiar with.

Does anyone have more information on this? Has this other imprint always been known about? It seems to be that this other imprint is even more definitive in determining the shape and size of the knife (it appears clear to be that the imprint shows the blade pointing downwards (from the POV of the camera), with the most blood down at the tip of the blade - as one would expect, and consistent with the other imprint).

If I am not mistaken, it appears that there is a better shot of it at ~18:48 or so of that clip, at which point it has a marker "J" next to it.

 

[davefoc]

I did a screen grab from the youtube video of the blood stain that I think is being discussed:



The 18:48 that LashL refers to is the Youtube time indication and not the time indication on the video.

Is it a knife print?

 

[Dan O.]

I agree much more with acbytesla here. IMO, Vixen is more than welcome. Vixen is mostly presenting evidence that she bases her views on. And that kind of discussion is one of the principle draws of this forum.

I have been confused a bit by some of Vixen's posts in that they at times seem to be coming from a place where Vixen is arguing that AK/RS are factually guilty and were provably so beyond a reasonable doubt and at other time Vixen makes arguments that at best support the notion that there is some plausibility to the idea that they are guilty that would be irrelevant if one were arguing for guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And Vixen mixes in procedural arguments. And all of this is done while Vixen jumps from topic to topic without ever concluding any subject which I think reasonably lead to the whack a mole comparison that somebody made above. On the other hand Vixen is alone in this thread with the views Vixen holds and that can't be an easy thing for anybody.

As to whether Vixen posts in the style of Machiavelli: I don't see it, but apparently more than one person has posted under the name Machiavelli here and perhaps there is some similarity to the posts made by one of the alternate Machiavelli's.

I had high hopes for Vixen in the beginning. But she has run out of material and resorted to throwing talking points like a baboon throws its own *****.

None of those shallow arguments are going to stick here because we have already argued them to death amongst ourselves. It's not the numbers that matter here, it is the depth of the argument, it is having the sources for the evidence, it is having a consistent theory to work from that is backed by the evidence. Almost any one of us could devastate a guilter site by sticking to the evidence until they resorted to administrative procedures.

And as far as I know, Machiavelli is still a member here and can post under his own ID any time he wants. There is no benefit for Mach to return under a different name and the moderators here are very experienced in sock detection. Fulcanelli on the other hand was banned but Vixen is orders of magnitude brighter than that.

 

[Numbers]

I did a screen grab from the youtube video of the blood stain that I think is being discussed:

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_5665542e13e5836f.jpg[/qimg]

The 18:48 that LashL refers to is the Youtube time indication and not the time indication on the video.

Is it a knife print?

It looks like a stain produced by a knife point to me. The irregular border of the stain, notable at the presumed rounded edge, would be (IMO) due to seepage or wicking of the blood into the fabric.

My sole experience in this branch of forensics is an experiment with a kitchen knife covered in water-diluted tomato-based marinara spaghetti sauce and placed on a sheet of computer printer paper. I did not measure the viscosity of the simulated blood (diluted marinara sauce) in my experiment, and it did not necessarily match that of real ex vivo blood. However, in that experiment there was seepage or wicking adjacent to the knife blade.

ETA: Image of the experiment knife simulated blood stain; curved side of blade is up. The approximately rectangular stain on the left is from the handle. Note the lack of stain in the area immediately to the right of the handle; this is due to the lack of contact (that is, distance above the paper) of the blade near the handle. The curved section of the handle facing upward on the right is from the finger guard on the handle.

 

[Dan O.]

I did a screen grab from the youtube video of the blood stain that I think is being discussed:

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_5665542e13e5836f.jpg[/qimg]

The 18:48 that LashL refers to is the Youtube time indication and not the time indication on the video.

Is it a knife print?

The crime scene photo from Nov. 2: dsc_0172.jpg shows this in high resolution from directly overhead. The point gives the impression of being a knife. But if that is so, the missing connection between the point and the main splotch indicated it could be from rudy's hand holding the knife with only the point touching the sheet.. The best I can make this fit is if the knife is held loosely in the right hand and the blood is flowing off the index finger. The blood is pressed through the sheet where the finger makes contact and is thicker around the edges.



Given the thickness of this stain, it might be the first mark made after the murder. (The knife is only for demonstration and not to be an indication of the type of knife used)

I'm not sure what to make of the adjacent diluted drops. This could be sweat coming off Rudy's hand. If so, It would have a higher probability of containing Rudy's DNA than the red stuff that Stefie was focused on.

 

[Numbers]

The crime scene photo from Nov. 2: dsc_0172.jpg shows this in high resolution from directly overhead. The point gives the impression of being a knife. But if that is so, the missing connection between the point and the main splotch indicated it could be from rudy's hand holding the knife with only the point touching the sheet.. The best I can make this fit is if the knife is held loosely in the right hand and the blood is flowing off the index finger. The blood is pressed through the sheet where the finger makes contact and is thicker around the edges.

View attachment 33026

Given the thickness of this stain, it might be the first mark made after the murder. (The knife is only for demonstration and not to be an indication of the type of knife used)

I'm not sure what to make of the adjacent diluted drops. This could be sweat coming off Rudy's hand. If so, It would have a higher probability of containing Rudy's DNA than the red stuff that Stefie was focused on.

I believe this is also a good explanation for the stains, as seen from this perspective.

Do we know if these stains were tested for DNA profiles, and if so were the results provided to the court and the defense? I would guess that the profiles would be from Meredith, or a mixture of Meredith and Guede, and that they would have been suppressed if actually tested.

Your idea about the possible sweat-blood drops is interesting. I have read (in Butler's text, I think) that efforts to detect and profile DNA in sweat have met with some success.

 

[Dan O.]

...
But everything changed the moment the Postal Police arrived. As far as the Postals themselves were concerned as they walked up the drive to the cottage, they were just returning a handset to an Italian woman. When they talked with Knox and Sollecito, however, it quickly became clear to all that this was a hugely worrying (and ominous) development. The Postals, plus Knox/Sollecito/Romanelli, now knew that the two mobile phones belonging to Kercher - who was missing, and whose bedroom door was locked - had somehow found their way into a random woman's garden on the outskirts of the city: somewhere where Kercher herself was very unlikely to even have been, far less to have abandoned/dropped her phones there.

When did Amanda actually learn that Meredith was without her phones? The prosecutions claim is that the postals did not bring the phones with them and in fact left the station before the second phone was brought in. Amanda in her e-mail home says only:

"while we were waiting, two ununiformed police
investigaters came to our house. i showed them what i could and told
them what i knew. gave them [p]hone numbers and explained a bit in
broken italian, and then filomena arrived with her boyfriend marco-f
and two other friends of hers."​

It's only when Filomena arrives and can converse with the postal police that all of the pieces can be assembled.

 

[Dan O.]

...
In other words, I believe that Sollecito would have well been capable of breaking the door down (causing damage in the process), but that he and Knox consciously decided not to do so, since they really had no idea what might or might not be behind that door.

It is also precisely at this point that Amanda would be getting off the phone with her first call to her mom and would be relaying the advice she received: "Call the police".

• 12:47:23 Knox calls her mother, Edda Mellas. (88 seconds)
  From Knox phone records.
  (cell cell Piazza Lupattelli week. 7) Massei Report pg 348
  The call was made at 04:47 Seattle time (World Clock)
• 12:50:34 Raffaele Sollecito calls his sister Vanessa Sollecito (39 seconds).
  Source phone records on Raffaele Sollecito page. Vanessa, a lieutenant in the Carabinieri, tells RS to dial 112.
  (cell Square Lupattelli week. 7)
• 12:51:40 Raffaele Sollecito calls 112, Italian emergency number. (169 seconds)