• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

Status
Not open for further replies.
It therefore seems to me that the apparently conflicting positions of "considered and completed clean-up over many hours" and "blood in the bathroom, including potentially RS's footprint in Meredith's blood" needed to be reconciled somehow. And so was born the sub-theory of "deliberate leaving of blood evidence in the bathroom, in order to create an excuse for AK's escalation of the situation".

Or am I back on the loony conspiracy bandwagon again? I'd say that I'm not (but, as Mandy Rice-Davies once said, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he").

You're merely pointing out the obvious problems with the idea that a systematic cleanup took place.

Some killers do perform an extensive cleanup operation. But usually they start by getting rid of the body. Then they clean the area where the murder actually took place, because that is where the most incriminating evidence will be found.

In this case, the theory is that two of the three killers managed to clean away nearly all evidence of their involvement so skillfully and strategically that it would appear no cleanup had taken place. THAT is the domain of a conspiracy buff - imputing complex activity aimed at deception, and carried out with such stealth that only a refined intuition can see past the humdrum of the ordinary.
 
It's evidence for a clean-up. Since Rudy Guede had no reason to clean-up (the only person who would have had a motive to do so would have been someone who lived there) and since by the wealth of evidence he left he patently wasn't interested in cleaning up, it is evidence against the lone wolf scenario and against the two students.

I'd agree that if RG HAD done any clean-up himself, he patently made a pretty poor effort of removing evidence of his presence.

But I'd take issue with the first part of the second sentence above. Why would RG automatically have had no reason to clean up, just because he didn't live in the murder house? Surely he had just as much reason as AK or RS to eradicate his presence - and arguably even more reason since he would find it harder than AK/RS to explain his presence in the girls' flat in innocent terms.

It's possible to argue that (under the "lone wolf"-style scenarios, or even under joint-enterprise scenarios), RG might not have reckoned that he had the OPPORTUNITY to effect a clean-up following the murder. After all, he'd have had little knowledge of the other girls' whereabouts (including AK in this scenario). So while it would have been easy for RG to ascertain that the flat was empty except for Meredith and him immediately post-murder, he couldn't have known whether any of the other flatmates would be returning at any time during the night or the following morning. So it's arguable that RG might have sought to get as far away from the murder house as quickly as possible. But that doesn't remove or reduce the very real REASON that he would still have had to clean up the scene
 
I personally CAN reconcile a disorganized frenzy of violence at, say, 22.00 on the 1st with a calmer, more organised attempt to clean up the crime scene between - say - 05.00 and 11.30 on the 2nd. I'm not saying by any stretch that I believe these two things DID happen, but I do think that one doesn't automatically rule out the possibility of the other.

Sure. "My god, what have we done! We must destroy the evidence!"

But that takes us back to the central problem of this whole case: what could possibly precipitate this mad impulse? Why would Amanda and Raffaele depart from a quiet evening alone together, in the first stages of a fresh love affair, and team up with Rudy to kill Amanda's housemate? The answer is that they wouldn't, and they didn't.
 
Sure. "My god, what have we done! We must destroy the evidence!"

But that takes us back to the central problem of this whole case: what could possibly precipitate this mad impulse? Why would Amanda and Raffaele depart from a quiet evening alone together, in the first stages of a fresh love affair, and team up with Rudy to kill Amanda's housemate? The answer is that they wouldn't, and they didn't.

Nobody has ever suggested that they teamed up with Rudy with the intention of murdering Meredith. That's really a straw man.
 
There is something I have wondered about concerning Meredith alone in the flat - had any of the roommates stayed there by themselves prior to her murder?

Meredith would have been totally alone - Laura and Filomena were away, the boys downstairs gone and Amanda would probably be spending the night with Raffaele as she had been doing recently.

If the other roommates had stayed alone at other times I see no reason for Meredith not to, however, I seem to recall a discussion about someone advising the roommates not to be in the flat alone but my recall is very vague concerning that discussion.
 
'Some' of the blood had to be cleaned...too much blood in the bathroom and Amanda would have been expected to call Filomena and/or the police immediately on entering the bathroom and seeing it. At the same time, some blood, not too much needed to to be left, in order to give Amanda cause to 'begin' to become concerned.

I don't see it was necessary to eliminate the bath mat.

If we look at it from your perspective then the print on the bathmat belongs to Raffaele. Are you saying that Raffaele would have left that print and not noticed it?

You believe that they did an elaborate clean up to remove everything that pointed to them but you feel there was no need to remove the bathmat.

Something in your scenario just doesn't work out.
 
The truth is, The print on the bathmat is inconclusive. The most probable scenario points to Rudy.

There was no clean up. You have to imagine a very improbable scenario to suggest that a clean up was done.
 
There is no evidence that his DNA got on to the clasp because he touched it, nor any evidence that his DNA got on to the clasp because it was lying on the floor with dust containing his DNA, nor any evidence that his DNA appeared to be on the clasp because of a false positive. Given the opportunities for contamination that test also tells us nothing - a reasonable person can believe it possible either that his DNA was on the clasp for innocent reasons or that the test was a false positive.

I don't think there is such a thing as a "false positive" when it comes to DNA. Either a profile, full or partial, is produced or it is not. If it isn't, no DNA is present. Even with the amplification of LCN DNA, if no DNA were present there is nothing to amplify. If a readable profile is produced, the DNA was definitely there. Contamination is another issue altogether but still supposes DNA to be present for the test to reveal a profile at all. At least that's my understanding.

Corruption is extremely plausible. Faked lab results are common. I'm not saying it was contaminated by one of the previous DNA samples the lab already had. I'm saying Stefanoni or her pals took some test results from some of Raffaele's DNA, and said it was found on the bra clasp. Pretty simple, really.

IMO, the only two reasonable explanations for Raffaele's DNA being found on the bra clasp is (1) planted evidence as Mary suggests or (2) that it was actually there, (a) transferred by Raf himself while cutting it off or (b) by something else which, in all the scenarios I've heard over the course of this case, transference from the towel is the only one which resonates with me. Raffaele could have vigorously dried his hands and his face, getting skin cells, eye gunk (for lack of a better term) mucous from his nose, etc. onto the towel while washing up in the washroom during a visit, and this was transferred to the clasp somehow as Rudy held Meredith to staunch the blood.

Getting back to the Knox case, I think a massive conspiracy could have done a much better job of framing Knox if it existed and was inclined to do so.

I completely agree. If the conspiracy was real the case would be a slam-dunk.

For anyone interested, PMF contributor SomeAlibi did rather a nice job on Raffaele's knives:

http://perugiamurderfile.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=240

I think it's a must-read for anyone who took for granted that he just had a couple of pen knives to nock trees or cut apples. Remember, he carried one of these to go visit the cops.

Very interesting. Its hard not to speculate on the character of someone who collected, displayed, and carried around such types of knives. But that's irrelevant, right?
 
Of course there's a plausible motive. Meredith was murdered because after what had been done to her she couldn't be allowed to live and report it and then any doubts on the matter were settled because she screamed. That sounds perfectly plausible to me.

But where's the evidence that they had any motive to do something to her in the first place? If you can pile supposition on supposition then you could equally well call it plausible that anyone did it.

Why does there 'have' to physical evidence of Raffaele's presence in the room? There was no physical evidence of Amanda's presence either, yet she had lived in the cottage for two months...why would physical from the pair be a requirement simply because they'd spent a mere half hour or less in there?

Because there was a brutal struggle and someone got their throat cut. Plus there was that unspecified awful something-or-other that you reckon they did first that they had to kill her to cover up, which presumably involved someone touching her at some point.

In any case, a good explanation for the lack of it is that some of the evidence they left are some of the many partial fingerprints and footprints in the room that are too damaged to match to anyone and so remain unidentified.

I don't see how that counts as evidence for or against anything at all. I imagine there are smudged fingerprints and footprints all over my house too.

As for Guede, he only left evidence because he came into contact with fluids (both with his hands and stepping in them) and then went about touching things in the room. Had he not done so, there wouldn't have been very much evidence of him being in the room either.

Just offhand he also left multiple DNA traces on Kercher's brassiere, didn't he?

Except it wasn't 'nearly perfect'. If it was nearly perfect they wouldn't have been arrested after a mere three days, faced a whole heap of evidence against them in a trial and then been found unanimously guilty. They made a great many mistakes.

You can't have it both ways. You can't have them be superhumanly good at eliminating virtually every trace of themselves from the murder room, leaving only the traces of their accomplice, then have them be totally incompetent at covering up everything else.

What 'Satanic cult' theory? There isn't one, never has been.

Once again you are directly contradicting sourced, factual claims made by others earlier in this thread and all I can do is flag that contradiction and move on.

You could 'argue' it, but you have no evidence for it. It therefore, would be no more then an assertion.

Hang on, I think something's amiss here. You asserted that to be consistent I would have to argue that every single case ever where forensic evidence appears late in the day to make a prosecution possible was dodgy. I explained that I had no such obligation. So now you're saying that I have no evidence for my lack of obligation and that I'm just asserting it?

Sorry, but you don't get to define other people's positions for them and I simply am not committed to making any kind of general claim about Italian investigations or any others. I'm perfectly happy to say that this case may be unusual, and if you prefer to think otherwise you can think what you please.

No, you are incorrect. Shed skin cells are dead, therefore keretinised. Whilst it's possible to extract some small segments of DNA from them, it is not possible to extract complete profiles: Telltale DNA sucked out of household dust

I'm afraid that throws out the 'dust' idea (if you read back through the thread you'll see this was done a long time ago).

I'm not sure that actually proves what you think it does but regardless, there are other reasons we've already discussed to cast serious doubt on the proposal that because Raffaele's DNA was found on the clasp that he therefore was in on the murder of Kercher.

Not when the 'Lone Wolf' theory is disproved by all the other evidence, as it is in this case.

I just don't see where it has been disproved at all. There's just a hole where the evidence that should disprove it ought to be. Either Amanda and Raffaele cleaned it up with supernatural and uncharacteristic effectiveness, or it was never there in the first place.

You don't have to 'prove' the substance, just some 'evidence' for it would be nice...like showing it's presence somewhere in the cottage and then offer a logical and plausible scenario of how it came to be on the feet of two different people and left prints only in certain areas. Evidence must be undermined with a 'plausible' alternative.

One more time for the peanut gallery: We will never know what caused the luminol result. There are many different plausible contenders, it was a long time ago, and we don't have the information needed to solve that puzzle.

However luminol is not a conclusive test for blood, as has been explained before. Followup tests must be done before you can conclude that you are looking at blood. Followup tests did not show that the substance that set off the luminol was blood. Therefore it is not rational to assume that it was blood.

It's evidence for a clean-up. Since Rudy Guede had no reason to clean-up (the only person who would have had a motive to do so would have been someone who lived there) and since by the wealth of evidence he left he patently wasn't interested in cleaning up, it is evidence against the lone wolf scenario and against the two students.

I'll see if the person I asked comes through with more details than just asserting that it's evidence of a clean-up. However as has already been stated, even if we accept it as God-given truth that it's evidence of a clean-up it's not evidence that Amanda or Rafaelle wiped off that heel-print and the claim that Rudy had no motive to clean anything up is simply baseless. He had excellent motive to clean things up, however being a disorganised killer who fled the scene he had very little time to do so.

He did other odd things too like take Kercher's phones then throw them away. He clearly wasn't pursuing a well thought out, rational plan. If the only explanation for a missing heel print is that someone deliberately wiped it up, Guede can perfectly well have been the one who wiped it up.

Only all the evidence disproves the lone wolf scenario and shows Raffaele and Amanda to be involved. There you go with this Satanism nonsense again. What trial have you been following? Certainly not this one.

Once again you are either ignoring plain facts, or other people have been posting blatant lies as fact both here and on a variety of other sites. Everyone but you seems to agree that the prosecutor was a nutter on the verge of professional collapse and that he started with a three-way conspiracy theory involving Lumumba and then switched to a three-way conspiracy theory involving Guede instead.

The three-way conspiracy theory with Lumumba was pretty stupid, because Raffaelo would have to have agreed to participate in some kind of group rape deal that led to murder after being Knox's girlfriend for only six days, which would be moving pretty damned fast, and then keep quiet about it. The three-way conspiracy theory with Guede was pants-on-head crazy because Raffaelo and Amanda didn't even know Guede.

You refer to that theory as "plausible" at the beginning of the post I'm replying to, but I simply can't see how any rational person could do so.

I also have to say that your repeated claims that "all of the evidence" proves this and that when the evidence manifestly does not are rather tiresome. If all of the evidence proved Knox's guilt we wouldn't be here at three-hundred-and-forty-something pages of discussion and counting.
 
The truth is, The print on the bathmat is inconclusive. The most probable scenario points to Rudy.

There was no clean up. You have to imagine a very improbable scenario to suggest that a clean up was done.

Bruce (or Charlie),
Can one of you post a side by side comparison with the bathmat print and one of the luminol footprints attributed to Raffaele please? same size and orientation etc. Is this possible?
Thanks
 
Bruce (or Charlie),
Can one of you post a side by side comparison with the bathmat print and one of the luminol footprints attributed to Raffaele please? same size and orientation etc. Is this possible?
Thanks

It would be inconclusive because you do not get an accurate footprint with luminol. I know PMF has done comparisons but they were less than convincing. It is not a possible to get a conclusive match with luminol photos.
 
I don't think there is such a thing as a "false positive" when it comes to DNA. Either a profile, full or partial, is produced or it is not. If it isn't, no DNA is present. Even with the amplification of LCN DNA, if no DNA were present there is nothing to amplify. If a readable profile is produced, the DNA was definitely there. Contamination is another issue altogether but still supposes DNA to be present for the test to reveal a profile at all. At least that's my understanding.

I'm not sure what you'd call a spurious positive result due to accidental lab contamination if not a false positive, but that was certainly my intention.

IMO, the only two reasonable explanations for Raffaele's DNA being found on the bra clasp is (1) planted evidence as Mary suggests or (2) that it was actually there, (a) transferred by Raf himself while cutting it off or (b) by something else which, in all the scenarios I've heard over the course of this case, transference from the towel is the only one which resonates with me. Raffaele could have vigorously dried his hands and his face, getting skin cells, eye gunk (for lack of a better term) mucous from his nose, etc. onto the towel while washing up in the washroom during a visit, and this was transferred to the clasp somehow as Rudy held Meredith to staunch the blood.

I believe police video shows a couple of different police handling it before it was put in an evidence bag, and there's plenty of scope for those police to have touched something Raffaele touched. Then there's potential for cross-contamination in the lab, potential for outright falsification (which cannot be ruled in or out) and so on. Since there were multiple other unidentified DNA results from the bra clasp either Meredith was killed by a team of six ninjas or the clasp was thoroughly contaminated at one stage or another.

Very interesting. Its hard not to speculate on the character of someone who collected, displayed, and carried around such types of knives. But that's irrelevant, right?

I wouldn't say irrelevant. I'd say inconclusive at best and character assassination aimed at frightened grannies at worst. The overwhelming majority of people who buy knives don't rape or murder anybody, hence the fact that a person has such a knife is not evidence they are more likely than anybody else to have committed a rape or murder.

Lots of martial arts enthusiasts own weapons like that. Possibly I'm biased in that I've known many, many law-abiding martial arts enthusiasts but I just don't see them as evidence of anything at all.

For the record I've never owned such a knife myself.
 
If we look at it from your perspective then the print on the bathmat belongs to Raffaele. Are you saying that Raffaele would have left that print and not noticed it?

You believe that they did an elaborate clean up to remove everything that pointed to them but you feel there was no need to remove the bathmat.

Something in your scenario just doesn't work out.


Who said anything about "elaborate"? That's just the straw dribbling out of your mouth.

How about a half-assed effort by two druggies coming off an all-nighter? They've made no bones about getting high, and even their defenders have jumped on that in some sort of weird attempt to turn marijuana into a blackout drug. And we have abundant evidence that their organizational skills are less than stellar. They can't even manage the same stories twice in a row by themselves, much less between them..

Why try and stipulate competence which doesn't exist as evidence of their innocence when demonstrable incompetence provides such compelling evidence that they probably aren't? Incompetent staged break-in. Incompetent crime scene tampering. Incompetent alibis. What's so strange about an incompetent clean-up?

You want to talk about "elaborate"? How elaborate is it to take two perfectly innocent cherubim and stage every detail of everything, including their own various testimonies, and create a perfect impression of two groggy kids who have just found themselves in the midst of a terrible, tragic mistake of their own creation? That isn't just elaborate. It's genius. In fact it's genius at such a level that there shouldn't have been any room left for doubt. So maybe that didn't happen, either.

Maybe they're just darned unlucky cherubim, and it's just a crushing weight of unfortunate coincidence.

That scenario has plausibility issues, too.
 
The missing heelprint

Maybe the mat was moved a few inches from where it was when the print was made, and the heel mark was faint enough so no one noticed it on the terra cotta floor. Here's a high-res picture of the scene as it appeared at the time:
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/small_bath_floor_nov2_2007.jpg

You're citing ambiguities and implying that they can only mean one thing - Amanda Knox inexplicably participated in an unplanned and disorganized frenzy of violence, and then carried out a very organized effort to eradicate evidence. To me, that's not plausible.

_________________

Thanks Charlie for addressing this issue. And thanks for posting a link to a photo of the bathmat so others can understand this issue.

Sure the bathmat could have been moved from it's original location. But judging from the amount of blood left in the remainder of the bare footprint, that on the bathmat--even after the bathmat absorbed some of the blood---one would think that the missing heelprint would be quite visible. Quite THICK blood, in fact. But it was never seen and never detected with Luminol. And if I were a cop investigating that scene I'd sure look hard for that heelprint, knowing that it would show a sharper anatomical impression than the fuzzy print on the bathmat.

In my opinion, there was no need for the culprits to dispose of the bathmat, once the heelprint (and others) had been cleaned up from the floor. The bloody print on the bathmat was fuzzy enough---they thought!---to prevent any positive identification as to its owner. Say, wasn't there a lot of debate in court about just THAT topic?

I don't know whether the amount of blood left "in place" was designed to facilitate the incremental discovery of the murder. But I know that if I'd done what LondonJohn suggested---make the whole damn cottage outside of Meredith's room spic-and-span--- that would have surely been incriminating, telling the police that something's fishy. (So....don't ever commit a murder with LondonJohn as accomplice. You'll be sorry.)

///
 
Last edited:
<snip>

Once again you are either ignoring plain facts, or other people have been posting blatant lies as fact both here and on a variety of other sites. Everyone but you seems to agree that the prosecutor was a nutter on the verge of professional collapse
<snip>

I don't think this unanimity you claim here can be supported with any substance. It certainly hasn't existed in this thread, and judging from the sources cited in this thread it doesn't exist out there in real life, either.

Perhaps you are referring to a more limited subset of "everyone"? Maybe you meant to say "Everyone but people who don't agree with Kevin_Lowe"?
 
In my opinion, there was no need for the culprits to dispose of the bathmat, once the heelprint (and others) had been cleaned up from the floor. The bloody print on the bathmat was fuzzy enough---they thought!---to prevent any positive identification as to its owner. Say, wasn't there a lot of debate in court about just THAT topic?
///

But then why destroy the heel print? It seems to me you have to follow a narrow path of reasoning that ignores some obvious problems. Moreover, this path is speculative, because no evidence of a cleanup was presented during the trial, or at least, none that I know about. Was such evidence presented?
 
It would be inconclusive because you do not get an accurate footprint with luminol. I know PMF has done comparisons but they were less than convincing. It is not a possible to get a conclusive match with luminol photos.

Bruce,
Its all fine and dandy for you to say it would be inaccurate, I get that, but in all due respect I just can't take your word for it. I'm someone who needs to see things for myself and if I want to consider overall size, shape, width, toe lengths, etc, to make my own judgement I should be allowed to do so. I would not claim it gives me a conclusive answer but it allows me some measure of analysis.

Charlie, are you then able to do this? or Fulcanelli, can you provide a link to the pages on PMF where this comparison was done? Thank you.
 
Why would the heel print still be there? Amanda dragged the bathmat to her bedroom and back again. Or was she lying about that?
 
I don't think this unanimity you claim here can be supported with any substance. It certainly hasn't existed in this thread, and judging from the sources cited in this thread it doesn't exist out there in real life, either.

Perhaps you are referring to a more limited subset of "everyone"? Maybe you meant to say "Everyone but people who don't agree with Kevin_Lowe"?

I agree. I have never heard this said about Mignini except by Douglas Preston, Tim Egan, Anne Bremner, and other American FOA specifically arguing for Amanda's innocence and using this tactic to dismiss Mignini's capacity for intelligent reasoning in this case. Even Frank Svarzo and Amanda's lawyers have never depicted him this way.
 
Bruce,
Its all fine and dandy for you to say it would be inaccurate, I get that, but in all due respect I just can't take your word for it. I'm someone who needs to see things for myself and if I want to consider overall size, shape, width, toe lengths, etc, to make my own judgement I should be allowed to do so. I would not claim it gives me a conclusive answer but it allows me some measure of analysis.

Charlie, are you then able to do this? or Fulcanelli, can you provide a link to the pages on PMF where this comparison was done? Thank you.

The prosecution's footprint expert was a guy named Rinaldi. Here are his reports:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/rinaldi1.pdf
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/rinaldi2.pdf

I agree that you need information to reach a conclusion. With that in mind, it is significant to note that Rinaldi did not get reference footprints from Meredith, from her boyfriend Giacomo, or from Laura and Filomena. Was he on a quest for truth, or was he paid to draw speculative conclusions that would help his client, the prosecutor?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom