Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

[RWVBWL]

Good evening, Kevin. I have read and this has been posted before, and has not been refuted, if memory serves correctly, that one or some of the wounds could not have been made with just one knife. Perhaps some one else on this thread can give the exact references.

Hi capealladin,
I can't give you the references you ask of,
but I do hope that you don't mind if I chime in with my 2 cents also.
I like to keep an open mind, and so have read some, but not all of the back and forth arguments regarding the 1 or 2 knife theory.
In my opininion, which doesn't really matter much except to give me my own conclussions, the knife wounds could have come from 1 or 2, but I tend to believe that it was a single folding pocket or tool knife that caused the stabbing of Miss Kercher, due to other evidence considerations.

I say this, especially because if the killer was a newbee, when they were stabbing Miss Kercher in the neck, and did it again, and again, they would have stabbed her to the hilt to kill her fast, since she most likely yelped, screamed, or tried to shout out as it happened, even with her mouth covered I bet. And if it was Amnada Knox with that big ol' kitchen knife doing the stabbing, the damage, I believe, would have been A LOT more severe.

Let me ask you something: Do you like to hunt?
I don't and the only time I shot a blackbird, when I was a teenager playing around with my old BB gun, I was so shocked that it didn't die immediately when it fell to the ground that I fired many, many BB's into it to make it stop squaking, end it's suffering, and not have my Mom come outside and yell at me. I did not wanna get caught, and I did not like watching the bird suffer, nor hear it's pain, which I couldn't do anything about since I had crossed the line by shooting it now, so I fired again and again...

I bet that whomever did stab Miss Kercher,
did so by stabbing the knife in as far as it would go, again and again.
And it seems like there is a bruise on at least 1 of Miss Kercher's neck wounds that could have been caused by the knife's hilt hitting her skin hard as the person tried to finish the attack brutally and quickly, ending her screaming, suffering, and at the same time trying to not bring attention to himself.
Hmmm...
RWVBWL

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Good evening, Kevin. I have read and this has been posted before, and has not been refuted, if memory serves correctly, that one or some of the wounds could not have been made with just one knife. Perhaps some one else on this thread can give the exact references.

It's true that the two-knife claim has been posted. It's also true that it has not been refuted, in that it has not been conclusively proven to be false.

Meredith had three knife wounds. Two of them were relatively minor stab wounds, entirely consistent with the blood-print of a small knife which was left on the sheets. To my knowledge nobody contests that those two wounds were made with that knife.

The prosecution story is that Raffaele inflicted these wounds, although how they pretend to know that is very unclear to me, and it looks to me as if they were reaching for a way to make him a core part of the murder. The fact that Rudy had a wound on his hand which was entirely consistent with someone stabbing a small knife with no hand guard into someone, but slipping and cutting themselves on the blade as they did so, to me makes it far, far more plausible that whatever else happened Rudy inflicted those two wounds on Meredith.

(If the Amanda-is-guilty crowd have any answer to that point I'd be interested in seeing it, since they seem to snip it and forget it every time it is mentioned).

The third and fatal wound is the one that the prosecution claims was not made with the small knife that left a blood-print on the sheets. However there's nothing but the prosecution's assertion to back up the claim that it was not made with the same knife as the other two wounds, and the defence experts (as I understand it) maintain that it could perfectly well have been made with the same knife.

The significance of this is that there's strong reason to believe that Rudy inflicted at least two of the stab wounds, and no reason to believe that anyone in particular but Rudy inflicted the third either. The prosecution story that Rudy held Meredith while Raffaele and Amanda stabbed her has no evidentiary basis - even if you adamantly believe that the three of them were in on a murder plot, there's no evidence that Raffalae and Amanda weren't standing there with their hands in their pockets while Rudy did all the stabbing.

Of course once you've admitted that Rudy could have done all the stabbing himself, you start to wonder why Amanda and Raffaele need to be involved in any way at all.

The only thing that puts Amanda and Raffaele back into the frame is the alleged positive DNA result from a kitchen knife plucked out of Raffaele's kitchen by "police intuition", which then on the tenth try (or something of that sort) they say showed a tiny trace of Meredith's DNA, but the sample was so small that they could neither replicate the finding nor test to see whether it was in fact blood. When you stack together the fact that it makes no sense for an impulsive killing at Amanda's place to be committed with a kitchen knife from Raffaele's place, that it makes little sense for the criminals to successfully dispose of the small knife so that it was never found but keep the actual murder weapon, the curious circumstances under which the police decided that it was a potential murder weapon in the first place and the sheer persistence with which they tested it, and I think it's not implausible to think that the DNA result was erroneous or falsified.

The prosecution story smells significantly post hoc to me, in that it looks very much like they were trying to make up a story where all three were equally guilty and bending the facts to fit the theory. There's no direct evidence anyone but Rudy held a blade at all, but the prosecution ignored the evidence that Rudy stabbed Meredith. The prosecution instead made up a story where Rudy held Meredith and then Raffaele and Amanda stabbed her - but why not say Raffaele stabbed her with two different knives while Amanda watched, or vice versa? Or say Rudy stabbed Meredith with the small knife while only one of the other two stabbed her with the supposed larger knife? The only reason I can see for going with the prosecution story is so as to stick the most serious charges possible on as many people as possible.

 

[stilicho]

Originally Posted by stilicho
3] Your problem here is that RG is both brilliant and stupid at the same time. He did nothing to remove his handprints or footprints and didn't even quickly check to make sure he'd flushed the toilet. Yet he locked the door.

It's amusing that you are trying to appropriate one of our arguments and use it yourself, but locking a door on the way out or washing your hands (while leaving other evidence everywhere) is not brilliance. Nor has anybody attributed brilliance to Rudy. So you could call this a straw man, or just call it more evidence of confirmation bias since you're clutching at straws to come up with new ways of fitting Knox and Solecito up for the crime and new ways to exonerate Rudy.

Believing that someone from the cottage also locked the door is hardly clutching at straws. And who is exonerating Rudy? He was there. He would not have had his sentence reduced if he hadn't chosen the fast track option.

Originally Posted by stilicho
I tried it several times and it's not credible.

The fact that three different (Amanda-is-guilty) posters all claim this is impossible just staggers me. I just tried it myself and it's a perfectly natural motion, and in fact I'm sure I've shut my own bedroom door that way in the past.

You really need to take a step back when you realise that you're arguing that a perfectly normal way of closing a door is in fact "not credible" or likely to injure a ballet dancer or whatever, just because you're clinging to a talking point that you think incriminates Knox. Especially when the talking point is just inane - the fact that the door was locked proves bugger all either way. Rudy could have locked it just as easily as Amanda and Raffaele, because there's nothing special about locking an ordinary door.

Let me repeat this: Making the door an issue is stupid.

To your last point first. You're absolutely wrong. The locked door will be shown to be a part of the judges' deliberations and included in their logical processes. Not stupid at all.

To your prior point, Mary said she locked her door like that all the time. I called shenanigans. There is a difference between saying that it's a normal, everyday way to lock a door and merely saying it's possible. If you want me to agree that it's possible then that's easy to do.

The locked door, regardless of who actually did it, would be the first thing to draw police attention to someone who lived at the cottage. It's interesting that the FOA types aren't even addressing that point. Why?

Originally Posted by stilicho

Common sense notwithstanding, the evidence tells us that they called other people before they phoned the police. This, in itself, is not terribly suspicious. But it is suspicious that they waited so long to call the Carabinieri after knowing Filomena's original reaction.

....

Then, still according to her, she went to get Raffaele and he, too, saw nothing disturbing enough to spring into action. It stretches credibility to accept that both of them were that dull.

This is pure armchair psychology, and you can make up your own stories from your armchair all night without it turning into evidence they committed a murder. For someone who pretends to know something about youth crime you also seem not to realise that youths who are drug users tend to avoid calling the authorities over to their house if they can possibly avoid it. More than one drug overdose victim has died just because their friends didn't want to call emergency services for fear that trouble with the police would result - in a case where Amanda and Raffaele didn't know that someone was dead or dying, I'm not particularly surprised that they didn't leap to call the police at the first sign of something amiss.

I thought AK and RS were student lovers and not druggies. Which is it?

Both Filomena and Raffaele's sister wanted them to phone the Carabinieri and they didn't even see the state of the cottage. What prompted them ultimately to phone the cops?

Quote:
As for the bathmat print, I'm willing to accept that it was not sufficiently well-lit in the bathroom for either of them to notice it when they staged the scene. The version we have appears to have been photographed under bright light and possibly after a reagent had been applied to it so it stood out. They just didn't notice it during the cleanup.

The claim "they could have missed the footprint on the bathmat because it was dark" is plausible. The claim that "they could have missed the footprint on the bathmat while deliberately cleaning up a whole lot of other bloody footprints nearby" is very silly. Rudy's footprint on the bathmat was pretty obvious, it's not credible that anybody looking for evidence would miss it if they were cleaning up other evidence right next to it.

The bathmat was not riveted in place to the bathroom floor. There are a number of possible reasons that it was not washed and the print's visibility is the most obvious one. We will never know why they left the bathroom the way they did. Amanda put a great deal of care into her explanation for the blood and the bathmat in both her alibi email and her court testimony. She could have said she didn't notice anything unusual but she didn't.

The only other explanation I can think of is that RS and AK also thought (as you do) that the print and the blood was Rudy's rather than Raffaele's or Amanda's. Another rookie mistake?

 

[RWVBWL]

It is also surprising that there was hardly any of Amanda's normal amount of dna in a house she lived in. A fingerprint on a glass where she and Raffaele had eaten lunch. And if she had taken a shower, changed clothes, don't you think there would have been fresh dna? It is also the lack of normal dna that confounds me.

Hi once again capealladin,
What you speak of has interested me somewhat also, and I just chalk it up to some people shedding more DNA than others and having heavier body oils that leave fingerprints better. Don't know what the statistics would be comparing different genetic nationalities, like the Mediterranean skinned Italian girls vs. the pasty NW American girls.

For some reason, maybe because an Italian gal pal, Elisa G, (who just went back to Italy the other day after finishing another month long surf visit to L.A.), seems to have an oilier, heavier Mediterranean complexion than mostly lighter-skinned American gals from up north I have met, I believe this to be true...
But hey, I'm not a scientist, just a guy who likes to read, so who knows?
Hmmm...
RWVBWL

 

[Fiona]

I have not had time to catch up with this thread but I noticed that there was some discussion of audit in Italian labs and I am not sure if it was resolved. I cannot answer definitively but I would like to draw people's attention to an earlier post in which I mentioned that there is an Italian member of ENFSI: as such I do not think it is reasonable to assert, without evidence, that a lab he is closely associated with is not well aware of best practice and international standards and protocols: and committed to implementing those. One of those best practices is presumably audit. If it is not then perhaps someone can show that?

I also happened upon this:

http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a0632/intro.htm

It is not directly relevant but it does seem to show that there is a high level of international cooperation and, indeed, standardisation with regard to dna testing. It appears that

The FBI has distributed CODIS software free of charge to state or local law enforcement laboratory performing DNA analysis. Before a laboratory is allowed to participate at the national level and upload DNA profiles to NDIS, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) must be signed between the FBI and the applicable state’s SDIS laboratory. The MOU defines the responsibilities of each party, includes a sublicense for the use of CODIS software, and delineates the standards that laboratories must meet in order to utilize NDIS. Although officials from LDIS laboratories do not sign an MOU, LDIS laboratories that upload DNA profiles to an SDIS laboratory are required to adhere to the MOU signed by the SDIS laboratory.

<snip>

The FBI also provides CODIS software to foreign law enforcement agencies with DNA capabilities to aid in criminal justice investigations. As of November 2005, 39 sites in 24 countries had received CODIS software.(9)

<snip>

9.The 24 countries are Belgium, Botswana, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

While there is no definitive evidence that the audit arrangements applied to those labs using CODIS in America are adopted in other countries which use the software, it does seem likely, in view of the fact that Italy has a member in ENFSI and the audit arrangements are an integral part of the CODIS system as a whole.

Perhaps someone else can search for more specific information in Italian ?



http://www.enfsi.eu/page.php?uid=175

 

[RWVBWL]

Hi stilicho,
With regards to this:
"Both Filomena and Raffaele's sister wanted them to phone the Carabinieri and they didn't even see the state of the cottage. What prompted them ultimately to phone the cops?"

I would speculate that someone such as Raffaele Sollecito's sister, who worked for the cops, would suggest that he call them, since she would have appraised the evidence that Raffaele spoke to her about and possibly been more suspicious.
And Filomena, if I recall correctlly, was kind of the head of the household,
the one wearin' the pants, so to speak, so it's easy to see her more worried, in my opinion.
Both women, one working for the police, one working in a lawyers office, might be a little more cautiously concerned then either Amanda or Raffaele were, who as I mentioned earlier, were planning to go on a daytime date shortly...
Hmmm...
RWVBWL

 

[RWVBWL]

Welcome back Fiona!
Glad to see your avatar again after your brief hiatus...
Though we don't agree on many aspects of this case, I do enjoy reading your posts...
RWVBWL

 

[stilicho]

Of course once you've admitted that Rudy could have done all the stabbing himself, you start to wonder why Amanda and Raffaele need to be involved in any way at all.

This is why you cannot put each element of the crimes committed at the cottage that night into a sealed compartment. The lone-wolf scenario was only partially refuted by the wounds on Meredith's body.

The only thing that puts Amanda and Raffaele back into the frame is the alleged positive DNA result from a kitchen knife plucked out of Raffaele's kitchen by "police intuition", which then on the tenth try (or something of that sort) they say showed a tiny trace of Meredith's DNA, but the sample was so small that they could neither replicate the finding nor test to see whether it was in fact blood. When you stack together the fact that it makes no sense for an impulsive killing at Amanda's place to be committed with a kitchen knife from Raffaele's place, that it makes little sense for the criminals to successfully dispose of the small knife so that it was never found but keep the actual murder weapon, the curious circumstances under which the police decided that it was a potential murder weapon in the first place and the sheer persistence with which they tested it, and I think it's not implausible to think that the DNA result was erroneous or falsified.

Maybe they didn't successfully dispose of the small knife but rather cleaned it sufficiently. We don't know. We do know they tried to clean the double-DNA knife and were nearly successful.

The prosecution story smells significantly post hoc to me, in that it looks very much like they were trying to make up a story where all three were equally guilty and bending the facts to fit the theory. There's no direct evidence anyone but Rudy held a blade at all, but the prosecution ignored the evidence that Rudy stabbed Meredith. The prosecution instead made up a story where Rudy held Meredith and then Raffaele and Amanda stabbed her - but why not say Raffaele stabbed her with two different knives while Amanda watched, or vice versa? Or say Rudy stabbed Meredith with the small knife while only one of the other two stabbed her with the supposed larger knife? The only reason I can see for going with the prosecution story is so as to stick the most serious charges possible on as many people as possible.

So the prosecution included RS and AK because they wanted to make the case more difficult than it otherwise was? Why did they do that?

The Italian system requires the prosecution to supply a narrative to fit the evidence. AFAIK, this is not necessary in Commonwealth countries.

I've asked the FOA types here, on many occasions, to supply a credible alternate narrative that fits the evidence. It's never happened. The closest you're getting is when you argue the mountain of evidence indicating AK and RS as complicit was fabricated or falsified. The mere summary of that evidence is over 400 pages. The presentation and cross-examination of the evidence took almost a full year (and would have taken over three months under the best circumstances).

 

[stilicho]

While there is no definitive evidence that the audit arrangements applied to those labs using CODIS in America are adopted in other countries which use the software, it does seem likely, in view of the fact that Italy has a member in ENFSI and the audit arrangements are an integral part of the CODIS system as a whole.

Perhaps someone else can search for more specific information in Italian ?

I'd seen some of that stuff before, Fiona, and likewise welcome back. I cannot locate anything that I would consider definitive. However, there's no doubts in my mind that the defence teams would have snagged whatever audit information they could from the department that oversees things like forensics laboratories in Italy. If I were able to write in Italian, I might just pen a note to their equivalent of the Ministry of Justice myself.

I certainly wouldn't assume there wasn't one just because we cannot find it on the interwebs.

 

[LondonJohn]

Can I just say a couple of things about my position? This is actually in response to one of the more fractious and combative of the posters on here, but I don't want to engage him in any kind of discussion (for reasons that I'd hope were obvious).

My post about Guede and the locking of the door was made to illustrate my belief that certain posters were wrong to suggest that Guede had no reason or motivation to lock the door - and IPSO FACTO Guede did not lock the door - and IPSO FACTO Amanda or Raffaele locked the door - and IPSO FACTO Amanda and/or Raffaele were involved in the murder.

So, my post was made merely to refute that illogical (in my view) line of reasoning. I therefore argued that it was perfectly rational for Guede to have had a strong motivation for locking the door, IF he were the sole assailant. I didn't even argue in my post that Guede WAS the lone assailant - although certain people seem to have rushed to that assumption. This, to me, shows strong elements of confirmation bias and willful misinterpretation on behalf of certain (easily-identifiable) posters.

I would also add that it was suggested that if Guede (in the "lone wolf" scenario) had really wanted to "make a good job of it", he could have set the house on fire. Unfortunately, I don't think that this stands up to any rational analysis whatsoever. If Guede was the lone assailant (hypothetically), and he had indeed set fire to the house at around - say - 11.30pm, this would have HAD THE OPPOSITE EFFECT in the area of delaying discovery. A fire would have quickly been seen by anyone from the street within minutes of taking hold - maybe even before Guede had left the premises. And I think that a delay in discovery would be uppermost in Guede's mind.

Of course, one can argue that setting a fire in Meredith's room might be the most logical way to deal with any potential incriminating evidence in the room (and probably the whole house). But I think that the risk of being caught setting the fire, coupled with the inevitable alarm being raised once the fire was seen, mitigated against doing this.

Also, and perhaps most interestingly, if one is arguing that setting a fire would be the best course of action, then WHY WOULDN'T AK/RS HAVE DONE THE SAME (assuming that they were involved in the murder)? After all, if one accepts that AK and RS were desperate to clean up and destroy evidence, what better way than to set a fire? The added collateral benefit to AK would have been - had she been prepared to lose some of her personal belongings - that burning down the whole house might have actually deflected attention away from her. After all, why (jurors might ask) would she burn down the very house where she lived and where most of her belongings were stored? She might additionally have realised that - prior to setting a fire - she could smuggle out from her room any items that were of value or personal importance, then she could have taken them to Raffaele's flat and pretended that they'd been there since before the murder.

And the answer to that question (i.e. why would AK/RS not have elected to set fire to the house) is the same as it was in the Guede "lone wolf" scenario: the risks of doing so would have outweighed the benefits in their minds.

 

[BobTheDonkey]

Kevin, you seem mighty sure of your "evidence"/facts given that your sole primary source appears to be Wikipedia.

The forensics do not match for a single knife. There must have been a large knife that made the fatal thrust and a second, smaller knife that made the other wounds.


As for your accusation that I'm Just Asking Questions - I honestly want an answer. There is zero evidence of Rudy in the bathroom. Same as Filomena's room. Every other room of the cottage that he entered showed evidence of his presence - so why do those not show evidence of his being there? Where are the footprints leading to the bathroom? If he scrubbed/washed his hands, then why is there no evidence of this?

But let me get this straight: Your presented scenario goes something like this:

Rudy breaks into the house without leaving so much of a trace of glass on the ground, nor of himself in Filomena's room, nor without actually stealing anything from her room. He immediately gets sick, uses the toilet, where he's interrupted by Meredith returning home. Somehow this not only frightens him enough to decide to murder Meredith, but also turns him on enough for him to decide to rape her. After stabbing her, he gets blood on his hands and foot (how did his foot get covered in blood to leave the mark on the bathmat - he took his shoes and socks off to rape Meredith? That's completely logical...), so he goes to the bathroom and uses the bidet to wash his foot, sink to wash his hands (why not use the shower, but whatever). Then he returns to the room (leaving no footprints - including none of the water/blood residue we see in Amanda's footprint in the hallway - so he was hopping again to keep his wet foot from touching the ground?), grabs Meredith's phones, puts his shoes back on, steps in her blood again, and hightails it out the front door, no longer caring about a bloody trail?

That makes perfectly logical sense, Kevin. Perfect.

Deny all you want, but it doesn't change that Amanda and Raffaele being there during the murder and engaging in some small kind of clean-up fits the facts far better than the lone-wolf scenario.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

To your last point first. You're absolutely wrong. The locked door will be shown to be a part of the judges' deliberations and included in their logical processes. Not stupid at all.

Appeal to authority. Since I don't think the judge involved was doing a good job of critical thinking in the first place I don't take their opinion as being relevant.

To your prior point, Mary said she locked her door like that all the time. I called shenanigans. There is a difference between saying that it's a normal, everyday way to lock a door and merely saying it's possible. If you want me to agree that it's possible then that's easy to do.

Yes, you called shenanigans and outed yourself as an irrational partisan. It's a perfectly natural way to shut a door. There's nothing suspicious about it at all as far as I can see - the arguments otherwise are of the same calibre as the arguments finding evidence of a conspiracy in moon landing videos or 9/11 videos. You'd find it evidence of conspiracy if she claimed she broke her eggs open at the big end.

The locked door, regardless of who actually did it, would be the first thing to draw police attention to someone who lived at the cottage. It's interesting that the FOA types aren't even addressing that point. Why?

I don't even understand what point you think you are making, so I'm not surprised that nobody is addressing whatever that point is.

Rudy could have locked the door, or someone who lived at the house could have locked the door. Either works.

I thought AK and RS were student lovers and not druggies. Which is it?

Now this is just pathetic. I mean, seriously? Everyone agrees they were lovers as far as I'm aware, everyone agrees that they were drug users as far as I'm aware. You're straining to find some kind of "gotcha" here, but you'd really be much better off either finding something relevant to say or not posting at all.

Both Filomena and Raffaele's sister wanted them to phone the Carabinieri and they didn't even see the state of the cottage. What prompted them ultimately to phone the cops?

I'm not playing the Texas Sharpshooter game. It's not my job to make up a detailed fairy story for you that explains absolutely everything that happened and why it happened at exactly that moment to your personal satisfaction.

The bathmat was not riveted in place to the bathroom floor. There are a number of possible reasons that it was not washed and the print's visibility is the most obvious one. We will never know why they left the bathroom the way they did. Amanda put a great deal of care into her explanation for the blood and the bathmat in both her alibi email and her court testimony. She could have said she didn't notice anything unusual but she didn't.

Once again it looks to me like you are drawing the target after the bullet hole has been made. If Amanda was guilty then she put a great deal of care into her email and testimony to make herself look innocent, using the supposed brilliant criminal mind she used to hide the DNA evidence and completely failed to use the rest of the time. If Amanda wasn't guilty then she's just being forced to account for every mundane thing she did with that bathmat because the bathmat became evidence.

The only other explanation I can think of is that RS and AK also thought (as you do) that the print and the blood was Rudy's rather than Raffaele's or Amanda's. Another rookie mistake?

The print was Rudy's. Another rookie mistake?

 

[BobTheDonkey]

Can I just say a couple of things about my position? This is actually in response to one of the more fractious and combative of the posters on here, but I don't want to engage him in any kind of discussion (for reasons that I'd hope were obvious).

...rubbish snip...

If you do not wish to engage in a discussion with Fulcanelli, then do not do so.

You're attempting to set yourself up so that your post cannot be refuted - from here, it's a simple "I already said I won't debate this with you, Fulcanelli" rather than having to actually respond to the content of his post.

Again, if you do not wish to engage with another poster, then do not do so - this is a silly little game you're playing, LJ.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Kevin, you seem mighty sure of your "evidence"/facts given that your sole primary source appears to be Wikipedia.

The forensics do not match for a single knife. There must have been a large knife that made the fatal thrust and a second, smaller knife that made the other wounds.

You seem mighty sure of your "evidence"/facts given that your cite no sources at all, and I suspect that your source is Fulcanelli's PGF echo chamber.

The forensics are consistent with one or two knives. Ockham's Razor says that until evidence of a second knife arrives then one knife is a more conservative hypothesis.

As for your accusation that I'm Just Asking Questions - I honestly want an answer. There is zero evidence of Rudy in the bathroom. Same as Filomena's room. Every other room of the cottage that he entered showed evidence of his presence - so why do those not show evidence of his being there? Where are the footprints leading to the bathroom? If he scrubbed/washed his hands, then why is there no evidence of this?

Hang on, this is getting farcical. Rudy left a bloody footprint on the bathmat in the bathroom, so the claim that he left no evidence of his presence in the bathroom is nonsense. He had to have been in the bathroom after stabbing Meredith.

As to why there is no evidence of his washing his hands, exactly what evidence did you expect that to leave and why did you expect it to be there?

But let me get this straight: Your presented scenario goes something like this:

Rudy breaks into the house without leaving so much of a trace of glass on the ground, nor of himself in Filomena's room, nor without actually stealing anything from her room. He immediately gets sick, uses the toilet, where he's interrupted by Meredith returning home.

So far nothing unusual for a dumb and disorganised housebreaker with a history of breaking into buildings by throwing a rock through the window. (I don't know what this talking point about glass on the ground is supposed to be about, the distribution of glass would be the same whether Rudy chucked the rock to break in or someone else chucked the rock to fake it).

Somehow this not only frightens him enough to decide to murder Meredith, but also turns him on enough for him to decide to rape her.

There's anecdotal evidence of Rudy harassing women before, and of Rudy carrying knives while breaking into buildings before. I don't think it makes much sense for a perfectly normal person to just up and decide to rape and murder someone, but then again that's your straw man. I think the evidence says Rudy did it, and it follows from that conclusion that he was sick in the head long beforehand and he had almost certainly thought about using his knife on a woman while breaking into her house before.

After stabbing her, he gets blood on his hands and foot (how did his foot get covered in blood to leave the mark on the bathmat - he took his shoes and socks off to rape Meredith? That's completely logical...), so he goes to the bathroom and uses the bidet to wash his foot, sink to wash his hands (why not use the shower, but whatever).

More nonsense on the level of moon hoaxers - he was going to walk away in public, so he'd want his hands and feet to be clean but not to have the rest of his clothes soaked in water from the shower because that would show something was up.

Who knows why he took his shoes off.

Then he returns to the room (leaving no footprints - including none of the water/blood residue we see in Amanda's footprint in the hallway - so he was hopping again to keep his wet foot from touching the ground?),

Sure, why not? It's not like that's a crazy idea.

grabs Meredith's phones, puts his shoes back on, steps in her blood again, and hightails it out the front door, no longer caring about a bloody trail?

Possibly blood on his shoes was why he took them off in the first place, I don't know. I wasn't there. It's consistent with the evidence that Rudy was worried mostly about how he would look getting away and how the flat would look once he locked Meredith's door and got out, and since he clearly didn't leave such a blood trail on the way out that it was immediate cause for panic I don't see why he would have been worried about the exit trail he ended up leaving.

That makes perfectly logical sense, Kevin. Perfect.

Deny all you want, but it doesn't change that Amanda and Raffaele being there during the murder and engaging in some small kind of clean-up fits the facts far better than the lone-wolf scenario.

Not as far as you've just established. There's no evidence of a clean-up at all, and no evidence of Rudy doing anything impossible. The lone wolf scenario works just fine as far as those pieces of evidence go. The fact that you've worked yourself up into ridiculing the idea the same way the 9/11 deniers ridicule the idea that planes could have brought down the WTC buildings just shows that you're out of touch with rationality.

 

[Fiona]

Appeal to authority. Since I don't think the judge involved was doing a good job of critical thinking in the first place I don't take their opinion as being relevant.

I have not yet the judge's detailed account of his reasoning and so I cannot say whether he was doing a "good job of critical thinking": but I do not think there is any appeal to authority in stating that consideration of the locked door will be a part of that reasoning. From what I saw of the previous motivations report it is very likely that this will be considered, because there is a great deal of detail in these reports if the last one is anything to go by

Yes, you called shenanigans and outed yourself as an irrational partisan. It's a perfectly natural way to shut a door.

I cannot agree with this. It is possible to pull a door shut in this way and it is probably possible to lock it too. But perfectly natural? Are you sure?

<snip>

Rudy could have locked the door, or someone who lived at the house could have locked the door. Either works.

Well if you think that it is perfectly natural to lock a door with a key while facing away from it then you are right that Guede could have done this just as easily as anyone else: but I cannot accept that initial premise and it follows that from my perspective it is not plausible that Guede did this. I think we will just have to differ about that

<snip>

The print was Rudy's. Another rookie mistake?

Not sure what you are claiming here? I read it that you were talking about the bathmat print, and if so then I am not sure why you think it was Guede's (if that is what you do think). Perhaps there has been something in the pages I have only skimmed?

 

[LondonJohn]

Locking the door: What a genious plan to fool the cops. That single action would throw them for a loop.Assuming he's off to meet and greet, why bother?

OK. Let's contrast your opinion (expressed in lovely terms of sarcasm, by the way) with the other two possible alternative scenarios:

Let's first of all suppose that Guede committed the crime alone (since that's a pre-requisite to discussing the why-would-Guede-have-locked-the-door issue). Guede would not have known when or if any of the other girls would be returning to the house, and neither would he likely have known whether Meredith had any other plans that were broken (horribly) by her murder.

So, Guede's now standing in the murder room, evaluating his options. Scenario 1: he could choose to flee, leaving Meredith's door wide open. Since many people seem to argue that the time (and manner) of discovery of the body would have been of no consequence to Guede, this scenario bears discussion.

If he'd chosen this option, imagine if one of the other housemates had returned 15 minutes* (say) after he'd left - especially if the housemate was AK, whose room was right next door to Meredith's. Any of the returning housemates might reasonably have had a quick spin round the house to see who was in, and they would inevitably have made the grisly discovery through the open door. So let's suppose for a minute that the murder was committed at 11pm**, that Guede left the flat (leaving Meredith's door wide open) at 11.05pm, and that one of the girls returned at 11.20pm. This would have narrowed the time of death right down, and would also have given Guede no opportunity to create diversion through his post-murder clubbing activities. Police sirens would have been screaming through the Perugia air by midnight at the latest. All of this would be bad news for Guede.

So, let's now look at Scenario 2. In this scenario, Guede elects to close Meredith's door, but not to lock it. And again, let's suppose that a flatmate returns home some 15 minutes after Guede leaves the scene. Guede would most likely not have known whether Meredith had missed an appointment to meet up in a bar etc, and he would also not have known whether the girls were in the habit of opening the closed bedroom doors of their housemates (either to chat, or to borrow items such as hairdryers, makeup, books etc). So a returning housemate might very reasonably have opened Meredith's door (with or without knocking) - either to check whether she was in, or to borrow something from her room. And, of course, her body would then have been discovered in the same way as in "Scenario 1".

So, again, I'd argue that IF Guede were the sole assailant, it wouldn't take much depth of reasoning for him to conclude - as he was standing there with blood on his hands (literally) - that his best option was to lock Meredith's door. And yes, the fact that he left a large amount of forensic evidence of his presence DOES show a lack of appreciation of such evidence on his part. But the issue of locking the door goes far beyond even a rudimentary knowledge of DNA evidence, as I hope I've illustrated above.

* It bears repeating at this point that Guede would have had no idea whether a housemate might have returned 5 minutes after the crime, or 10 hours after the crime. He would have had no idea when anyone might return, so had to assume a worst-case scenario of a relatively early return.

** 11pm is a purely arbitrary time - I'm not suggesting that the murder WAS committed at that time, it's just used here to illustrate relative timings.

 

[Bob001]

Get the facts

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]I haven't read the whole history here, but in case no one has mentioned it CBS's "48 Hours" devoted a full hour to the Amanda Knox case after a lengthy independent investigation. The woman was framed. The Italian prosecutor has a long history of bizarre behavior, including finding Satanic murder cults behind every tree, and was himself under indictment for misconduct when he tried Knox. At other times he tried to intimidate other Americans, including a well-known American author. Knox was interrogated for many hours without a lawyer, during which she says she was hit and threatened, and no recording or transcript of the interrogation exists; in other words, nobody knows what she said, only what the cops claim she said. Apart from all other issues, at the time of her interrogation she didn't speak Italian very well and some of her interrogators weren't fluent in English, so even if the cops weren't deliberately lying no one really knows who said what and what they meant. The Italian legal system is dramatically different from America's in many ways, to a defendant's detriment. CBS reporters proved that it was impossible for a "witness" to hear what she claimed she heard. Experts stated that the "murder weapon" couldn't have made the wounds that the prosecutor claimed. A prime suspect in the murder, a man with a record of violent crimes, fled Italy immediately after the murder and was captured on a train in Germany. He subsequently was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. And that's just the beginning. Amanda Knox pretty clearly was a flaky, flighty coed at the time of the crime, and her attitude rubbed a lot of the locals the wrong way, but there is no substantial evidence that she had anything to do with any murder, let alone killing her roommate in their own home during some bizarre sex game, and plenty that she is innocent. [/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]First link (of six) to the "48 Hours" report (I can't post full link, but it would look like this:[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]w w w.youtube.com/watch?v=atWyYFIPYtM[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Numerous other reports from responsible media sources are also easy to find.


[/FONT]

 

[Sherlock Holmes]

I’ve now read at least 3 different scenario’s to how Rudy could have locked the door all by himself. Bruce Fisher – Mary H and Katy did. And each one has said to try it their way, it works.
Well, you know, they are all possible, so is walking out the door, do a hand stand, remove your shoes, and with your right foot, pull the door closed. Now for the tricky part..........
OK, I’m not going any further, I hope you see what I’m getting at, heck, I think it was even on this site, I saw a monkey, doing a handstand on a goat, while walking on a tightrope.
Yes it is possible, but a murder was just committed, they guy who did it, if he locked that door, would not do it any different than anyone else on this planet.
Walk out a door, and then lock it just normally and see how easy it is, that’s the way Rudy would have done it too, now pay attention to your shoe steps, but that’s not what Rudy’s shoeprints indicate.
So he locked Meredith’s door, close Filomena’s door, but left the front door open. Sorry, but no way, I just don't see that happening.

 

[Mary_H]

To your prior point, Mary said she locked her door like that all the time. I called shenanigans. There is a difference between saying that it's a normal, everyday way to lock a door and merely saying it's possible. If you want me to agree that it's possible then that's easy to do.

Yes, you called shenanigans at least twice and I corrected you on it at least twice. Here we go again.

When I began my argument about the door, I started out by saying it is not impossible to stop in one's tracks on the way out a door, let go of the handle and reach around to the inside and flip the switch on the inside doorknob without moving one's feet. I said I do that all the time. I made this claim because people had been saying that it was impossible for Rudy to have locked the bedroom door while his shoeprint was facing toward the front door.

As we delved more deeply into the discussion, it turned out that one objection was that Rudy's shoeprint was on the hinge end of the door, which led people to claim he would not have been able to reach the handle of the door and turn a key in the lock because of the distance he was standing from the handle. I tested this and found it very doable, then suggested other people try it, too. Some did, some REFUSED TO EVEN TRY IT. You know who you are.

To make a long story short, the conclusion of my point was that while I often stop in my tracks to reach inside to lock my front door, I am indeed closer to the handle of the door when I do it. That doesn't mean it's not impossible to stand at the hinge end of the door and lock, it; but that is not something I do all the time, and I never claimed it was. (Rudy, on the other hand, could have done it very easily.)

In the end, the whole discussion turned out to be moot, because Rudy probably did leave a print right in front of Meredith's bedroom door when he paused to lock it, but that footprint was cleaned up by police. The whole argument had started because SOMEONE claimed there was no evidence of Rudy having stood in front of the bedroom door; there was only evidence of the one shoeprint at the hinge end of the door.

As we have seen before, that claim was very likely not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Well if you think that it is perfectly natural to lock a door with a key while facing away from it then you are right that Guede could have done this just as easily as anyone else: but I cannot accept that initial premise and it follows that from my perspective it is not plausible that Guede did this. I think we will just have to differ about that

One of us is badly confused: I thought the story was that Rudy locked the door while facing mostly towards it in a perfectly ordinary manner.

Not sure what you are claiming here? I read it that you were talking about the bathmat print, and if so then I am not sure why you think it was Guede's (if that is what you do think). Perhaps there has been something in the pages I have only skimmed?

My understanding was that while the prosecution initially claimed to have positively identified the print as Raffaele's, the defence proved that it was unlikely to be Raffaele's since Raffaele's second toe didn't touch the ground, his foot being a bit of an odd shape.

The same "footprint expert" that claimed that the mat print was Raffaele's also claimed to have positively identified some luminol footprints as Raffaele's, which was questionable even in principle since luminol does not give high resolution and Raffaele's and Rudy's feet differed in size by only 3mm.

Those two pieces of evidence in particular look very much like the prosecution overselling highly ambiguous "evidence" as proof positive of their theory.