Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Charlie Wilkes]

Quote: I respectfully submit the Patricia Stallings case for your consideration. At least four times a clinical laboratory claimed to find ethylene glycol in Ryan Stallings' blood or in his feed bottle. His mother was sentenced to life. Trouble is, the lab work was beyond slipshod, and Ryan had a metabolic disease that mimicked some but not all of the symptoms of ethylene glycol poisoning. What are the odds that four chemical analyses would be wrong? I don't know, but they were wrong, and Ms. Stallings was eventually released from prison.

Chris,
I had actually read this, as your site is one of several I have accessed in reading about this case. I am not trying to imply it is unbelievable the lab testing could be erroneous. In fact, I believe the knife had absolutely nothing to do with the crime. What I find difficult to fathom is for all the lab/DNA evidence to be erroneous in addition to all the (credible) witnesses being mistaken, in addition to the several versions of alibis, in addition to all the other ‘happenstances’ that would have had to have occurred for those kids to be innocent.

The over-zealous prosecution is not lost on me; I know it happens (Duke, for one.) But it is the numerous other details, each of which on their own can be explained away but in toto are difficult to swallow.

Just one of those instances which troubles me is this: in Amanda’s own statement she states she noticed the feces when she put the hair dryer back in the bathroom. Who in the world would see that and NOT flush it? Why would you just leave that there… unless you wanted it to be present for a reason? It is the accumulation of all these little nagging details which bother me.

If you think this is an indicator of guilt, your premise must be that Amanda wanted the police to realize someone else was involved, so she left this evidence rather than flushing the toilet, as most people would presumably have done.

That doesn't lead to any proof, but I can understand why it may be seen as grounds for suspicion... except, we also know that Amanda told police she noticed the dirty toilet when she went into that bathroom to use the hair dryer. If she's guilty, why tell the cops she knew the toilet was dirty and invite the question of why she didn't flush it? Why not let them find it on their own, and tell them she didn't notice it because that's not the bathroom she and Meredith ordinarily use?

In fact, if Amanda and Raffaele are guilty, and they were so concerned about being suspects that they staged a forced entry, why didn't she grab enough clothes for the weekend and stay away from the place completely until someone else found the body? These kids would have had to have ice water in their veins to hang out at a place where they had just murdered someone, sound the alarm, and then play dumb while various people, including cops, arrived on the scene and eventually broke down the door to discover the body. I couldn't pull it off. I'd be shaking in my boots. How about you?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

The Massei report has notes all over it. We do not have those notes or the 10,000 pages of trial documents.

A small sample from Massei page 48:

she had closed the shutters of her window (p. 68); she had pulled them in (p. 95); "the wood was slightly swelled, so they rubbed against the windowsill" (p. 26), adding that "it was an old window...the wood rubbed". And on the day she went away, she recalled "having closed them because I knew that I would be away for a couple of days" (p. 96). She later added, when noting what she had declared on December 3, 2007, that "I had pulled the shutters together, but I don't think I closed them tight" (p. 115).

We do not have photos, video, documents of any sort that the courtroom players have.

Give me a break.

For months, people have been saying that this Motivation document, when finally translated, would provide definitive proof that the verdict is sound. But now the document is out, and its fundamental weaknesses are clear to everyone, so we're back to this mythical "10,000 pages."

You may not have photos and videos, but I do. I have studied this material in excruciating detail, and I have shared much of it on this board. There's no mystery left. Massei's document is definitive proof of one thing only: that no one can come up with a murder scenario involving Amanda and Raffaele without ignoring both the facts and common sense.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Edited by Tricky: 

Edited for moderated thread.

There is no evidence that he wore gloves, that he closed the door with his foot or slid his had off the door handle. And by the way, I'm pretty certain it was a door handle, not a door knob, making a slide off even more unlikely.

Here is a diagram that the police produced, showing the location of all the good fingerprints they found at the cottage:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/cottage_fingerprint_map.gif

 

[Chris C]

That's very sad, Chris; I'm sorry to hear it. Did you get a new puppy?

Of course.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Here is a diagram that the police produced, showing the location of all the good fingerprints they found at the cottage:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/cottage_fingerprint_map.gif

Thank you very much, Charlie!

So much for the claim that it's impossible to do anything without leaving fingerprints all over everything. We'd already established that, of course, but a picture might have the power to keep that mole down when mere words do not suffice. People just don't leave that many clear fingerprints.

Am I correct in only seeing one fingerprint from Guede? I think I may have erroneously stated once or twice in the past that he left fingerprints, and it's good to be corrected on that point.

 

[Antony]

(msg #4761)

These kids would have had to have ice water in their veins to hang out at a place where they had just murdered someone, sound the alarm, and then play dumb while various people, including cops, arrived on the scene and eventually broke down the door to discover the body. I couldn't pull it off. I'd be shaking in my boots. How about you?

Exactly. Not only that, but when police need to find a suspect quickly and aren't too bothered about the truth, they frequently focus on someone near at hand. The fact that Amanda and Raffaele were at the scene when the crime was discovered by police told me immediately that this was a stitch-up. This is a recurring theme in cases like this.

Oddly, a second class of ready suspects are people already known to police who can easily be found. Yet the Perugia police made no move on Rudy Guede until he was arrested by German police; indeed, didn't he flee the country after the murder was discovered? There are deeply disturbing questions over the police lack of action towards Guede, as well as the courts' favourable treatment of him compared with Amanda and Raffaele.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Stardust and the police

Frank Sfarzo reported:

“Amanda and Raffaele told us that on November 1 they watched Amelie and then, more or less, Stardust. Indeed the VLC reader does show the viewing of Amelie and then of Stardust, but it doesn't give a date.
The last access to Stardust is November 6. Raffaele and Amanda were in jail, so the police, while working at the computer, opened Stardust (everyone needs a break).

The problem is that access canceled the record of the previous one. So, if really Raffaele and Amanda watched that movie, instead of, for instance, going to kill Meredith, the proof was in the computer. But the police, by mistake, canceled it.
It's not that the running of a movie can really be an alibi, it can run by itself. But, for a number of reasons, it would have been a heavy clue. It would have been.

Interesting that Raffaele --along with Amanda-- was still under interrogation and the police were already using his computer, as you probably read around.
In the morning of the 6 they weren't really working on it, they were using it to surf the web. Murder of the english girl: two have been stopped. Like this the officers were reading, from the Ansa site. And they could add: and we are using their computer.”

 

[christianahannah]

Here is a diagram that the police produced, showing the location of all the good fingerprints they found at the cottage:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/cottage_fingerprint_map.gif

Charlie,

Reference the fingerprints which were not identified (in green) - did they all have the same characteristics and were attributed to one unknown person or were they partial fingerprints, and as such, could not be identified to a specific person (such as those persons listed on the diagram)?

 

[LondonJohn]

Thank you very much, Charlie!

So much for the claim that it's impossible to do anything without leaving fingerprints all over everything. We'd already established that, of course, but a picture might have the power to keep that mole down when mere words do not suffice. People just don't leave that many clear fingerprints.

Am I correct in only seeing one fingerprint from Guede? I think I may have erroneously stated once or twice in the past that he left fingerprints, and it's good to be corrected on that point.

But surely this is because Knox and Sollecito cleaned every surface in the entire cottage in their exhaustive crime scene clean-up (while not forgetting to deliberately leave blood spots in the small bathroom, and Sollecito's own foot print on the bathmat)

 

[LondonJohn]

Give me a break.

For months, people have been saying that this Motivation document, when finally translated, would provide definitive proof that the verdict is sound. But now the document is out, and its fundamental weaknesses are clear to everyone, so we're back to this mythical "10,000 pages."

You may not have photos and videos, but I do. I have studied this material in excruciating detail, and I have shared much of it on this board. There's no mystery left. Massei's document is definitive proof of one thing only: that no one can come up with a murder scenario involving Amanda and Raffaele without ignoring both the facts and common sense.

Agreed. The Massei report translation only serves to show how warped the judicial panel's reasoning was in many crucial areas. And that's where the report actually makes an attempt at reasoning in the first place - most of the report seems to be simply reporting what was presented in the trial, rather than showing how the judicial panel weighed the evidence and came to conclusions. Overall, it appears to list the prosecution's case and the defence's case, then blithely states that it prefers the prosecution's case. Nice work!

Incidentally, it's now been two and a half weeks since the release of the translation, and still there's nothing in the global media (save for a freelance piece in a Seattle online newspaper by a reporter who appears to be a friend of a PMF admin, and a couple of local Seattle media outlets reporting this freelance article....). I expect this must be because investigative journalists all over the world (and particularly in the national US and UK media) are even now fine-tuning their articles/programmes in which they will announce a new certainty in Knox/Sollecito's guilt based upon the devastating logic in the report. There can't be any other reason for the deafening media silence, can there?

 

[christianahannah]

Frank Sfarzo reported:

“Amanda and Raffaele told us that on November 1 they watched Amelie and then, more or less, Stardust. Indeed the VLC reader does show the viewing of Amelie and then of Stardust, but it doesn't give a date.
The last access to Stardust is November 6. Raffaele and Amanda were in jail, so the police, while working at the computer, opened Stardust (everyone needs a break).

The problem is that access canceled the record of the previous one. So, if really Raffaele and Amanda watched that movie, instead of, for instance, going to kill Meredith, the proof was in the computer. But the police, by mistake, canceled it.
It's not that the running of a movie can really be an alibi, it can run by itself. But, for a number of reasons, it would have been a heavy clue. It would have been.

Interesting that Raffaele --along with Amanda-- was still under interrogation and the police were already using his computer, as you probably read around.
In the morning of the 6 they weren't really working on it, they were using it to surf the web. Murder of the english girl: two have been stopped. Like this the officers were reading, from the Ansa site. And they could add: and we are using their computer.”

Is there a public record when a search warrant for the computers of Raffaele, Amanda, Meredith, Patrick, etc., was given and the time the items were collected?

 

[Chris C]

Edited by Tricky: 

Edited for moderated thread.

There is no evidence that he wore gloves, that he closed the door with his foot or slid his had off the door handle. And by the way, I'm pretty certain it was a door handle, not a door knob, making a slide off even more unlikely.

There is no evidence that knox or sollecito wore gloves. There is no evidence of a clean up. There was no dna in the footprints of either knox, sollecito or meredith. There is no evidence that Knox was ever in Merediths room and other than a bra clasp that barely has Sollecito's dna on it, along with 4 other people thats all the evidence he was ever in the apartment. So if your reasoning that since there is no proof that Guede wore gloves and he left no fingerprints in filomena's room means the break in is fake. Then the same can be true about convicting Knox and Sollecito of murder.

 

[Chris C]

If you think this is an indicator of guilt, your premise must be that Amanda wanted the police to realize someone else was involved, so she left this evidence rather than flushing the toilet, as most people would presumably have done.

That doesn't lead to any proof, but I can understand why it may be seen as grounds for suspicion... except, we also know that Amanda told police she noticed the dirty toilet when she went into that bathroom to use the hair dryer. If she's guilty, why tell the cops she knew the toilet was dirty and invite the question of why she didn't flush it? Why not let them find it on their own, and tell them she didn't notice it because that's not the bathroom she and Meredith ordinarily use?

In fact, if Amanda and Raffaele are guilty, and they were so concerned about being suspects that they staged a forced entry, why didn't she grab enough clothes for the weekend and stay away from the place completely until someone else found the body? These kids would have had to have ice water in their veins to hang out at a place where they had just murdered someone, sound the alarm, and then play dumb while various people, including cops, arrived on the scene and eventually broke down the door to discover the body. I couldn't pull it off. I'd be shaking in my boots. How about you?

So was the toilet flushed or unflushed? Was it a whole turd or was it what was left over from someone flushing once. I seen where someone posted that the roommates had to clean the toilet between flushings and flush again. There have been a few times even in my toilet where not everything flushed down on the first try.

 

[Dan O.]

But surely this is because Knox and Sollecito cleaned every surface in the entire cottage in their exhaustive crime scene clean-up (while not forgetting to deliberately leave blood spots in the small bathroom, and Sollecito's own foot print on the bathmat)

I suppose the claim will be that all the fingerprints found in the cottage and especially in Amanda's room were left after the cleanup

 

[Alt+F4]

Incidentally, it's now been two and a half weeks since the release of the translation, and still there's nothing in the global media (save for a freelance piece in a Seattle online newspaper by a reporter who appears to be a friend of a PMF admin, and a couple of local Seattle media outlets reporting this freelance article....). I expect this must be because investigative journalists all over the world (and particularly in the national US and UK media) are even now fine-tuning their articles/programmes in which they will announce a new certainty in Knox/Sollecito's guilt based upon the devastating logic in the report. There can't be any other reason for the deafening media silence, can there?

Um....maybe it's because very few people care anymore?

 

[LondonJohn]

There is no evidence that knox or sollecito wore gloves. There is no evidence of a clean up. There was no dna in the footprints of either knox, sollecito or meredith. There is no evidence that Knox was ever in Merediths room and other than a bra clasp that barely has Sollecito's dna on it, along with 4 other people thats all the evidence he was ever in the apartment. So if your reasoning that since there is no proof that Guede wore gloves and he left no fingerprints in filomena's room means the break in is fake. Then the same can be true about convicting Knox and Sollecito of murder.

Would this be the bra clasp that - according to one "expert" who happens to support the guilty verdicts - was strategically placed to be noticed outside the duvet and as the first thing to be seen on entering the room?

Or is it the bra clasp that was actually positioned underneath the pillow that Guede had placed under Meredith, and which was mysteriously moved about the room until it was found (and bagged) six weeks later mixed in with other items from the room, around 1 metre from its original position?

PS: Postal Police officer Battistelli lied in his court testimony. He lied about the time he and his colleague arrived at the cottage, and he most likely lied about whether or not he went into the murder room and interfered with the crime scene. Whether this had any impact upon the investigation is another discussion, but there's no doubt that he did lie. One important question to ask, however, is this: why did he lie? Why lie about the time of arrival? And why lie if all he did in Meredith's room was carefully enter and check whether she was still alive? The answers to the "why" question might throw some interesting light on the way in which this whole case was investigated by the police.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

morning of the 6th

ChristianaHannah,

I don't know when formal search warrants were issued. IIRC Raffaele told the police on the morning of the 6th that they could look on his computer for evidence that he was at his apartment on the night of the murder. It would seem that the police would be the only people who had access to his apartment at that time.

 

[LondonJohn]

Frank Sfarzo reported:

“Amanda and Raffaele told us that on November 1 they watched Amelie and then, more or less, Stardust. Indeed the VLC reader does show the viewing of Amelie and then of Stardust, but it doesn't give a date.
The last access to Stardust is November 6. Raffaele and Amanda were in jail, so the police, while working at the computer, opened Stardust (everyone needs a break).

The problem is that access canceled the record of the previous one. So, if really Raffaele and Amanda watched that movie, instead of, for instance, going to kill Meredith, the proof was in the computer. But the police, by mistake, canceled it.
It's not that the running of a movie can really be an alibi, it can run by itself. But, for a number of reasons, it would have been a heavy clue. It would have been.

Interesting that Raffaele --along with Amanda-- was still under interrogation and the police were already using his computer, as you probably read around.
In the morning of the 6 they weren't really working on it, they were using it to surf the web. Murder of the english girl: two have been stopped. Like this the officers were reading, from the Ansa site. And they could add: and we are using their computer.”

Oh mannnn. If Frank is correct here, then the "crack" postal police were actually watching movies on Sollecito's laptop and surfing the net for news stories about the murder, on the very day when they recovered the laptop for examination (and when Sollecito and Knox were already in police custody).

This is almost beyond belief. Quite apart from the fact that they may well have been destroying important evidence through their crass and stupid actions (e.g. whether the Stardust file may have been opened on the evening of the murder), it's extraordinarily unprofessional on so many levels. Does anyone fancy defending the police on this one???

Add it to the list..............

 

[LondonJohn]

If you think this is an indicator of guilt, your premise must be that Amanda wanted the police to realize someone else was involved, so she left this evidence rather than flushing the toilet, as most people would presumably have done.

That doesn't lead to any proof, but I can understand why it may be seen as grounds for suspicion... except, we also know that Amanda told police she noticed the dirty toilet when she went into that bathroom to use the hair dryer. If she's guilty, why tell the cops she knew the toilet was dirty and invite the question of why she didn't flush it? Why not let them find it on their own, and tell them she didn't notice it because that's not the bathroom she and Meredith ordinarily use?

In fact, if Amanda and Raffaele are guilty, and they were so concerned about being suspects that they staged a forced entry, why didn't she grab enough clothes for the weekend and stay away from the place completely until someone else found the body? These kids would have had to have ice water in their veins to hang out at a place where they had just murdered someone, sound the alarm, and then play dumb while various people, including cops, arrived on the scene and eventually broke down the door to discover the body. I couldn't pull it off. I'd be shaking in my boots. How about you?

This is yet another excellent example of how tunnel vision can lead people towards bogus inferences to support a prior belief in guilt.

When people commit a serious crime such as a murder, they usually either flee the scene and take their chances on any evidence of themselves that they may have left behind, or they make a concerted effort at concealing their crime*.

In this case, Knox and Sollecito would have had all night to clean up the crime scene - one might expect a full cleaning of the bathrooms and the hallways, and a careful cleaning of Meredith's room itself. Instead, there is no evidence of any floor cleaning, no evidence of wiping/cleaning in Meredith's room, areas of visible blood in the small bathroom, a partial footprint in blood/water on a bathmat in the small bathroom, and faeces in the toilet in the large bathroom.

None of this makes any sense, when viewed objectively. For instance, regarding the "deliberate" leaving of Guede's faeces in the toilet and his bloody shoe prints in the hallway: as others have pointed out, why would Knox and Sollecito want to deliberately set up a black guy who Knox knew (but not very well), and who is alleged to have been part of their "murder trio"? Why would they want to actively lead the police towards a man who could (and would) easily incriminate them as co-murderers? Why wouldn't the obvious strategy be to get rid of evidence of all three of them?

Equally baffling (to me) is this whole notion that Knox and Sollecito somehow deliberately wanted to leave some blood evidence in the small bathroom - apparently to provide a legitimate reason for heightened concern, calling Filomena etc. Somebody please explain to me why two people (assuming, for a moment, that they had been intimately involved in the bloody stabbing of Meredith) would actually want to leave potentially-incriminating blood evidence, when they would have had ample opportunity to completely clean up the bathroom. Most irrationally of all, why would they choose to leave Sollecito's blood/water partial footprint on the bathmat, as one of these "deliberate" clues?

I strongly suspect that the truth is far, far simpler. I suspect that the truth is that Guede alone committed these crimes. I suspect that he made some effort to clean himself up before leaving the house (it's rather incriminating to be seen walking through Perugia with blood all over your hands/arms, and probably also your trousers), but made little or no attempt to clean up inside the house. I suspect that the print on the bathmat is from Guede's foot, made as he cleaned himself using the bidet (or possibly the shower). I suspect that Guede deposited Meredith's blood from his hands onto the lightswitch and the sink taps (faucets) in the small bathroom, before he realised that the sink was not big enough (and was too high up) for him to clean off all the blood. Occam's razor, anyone?


* Incidentally, in the case of a murder, this often involves hiding/disposing of the body, since this is - by definition - the single most important piece of evidence. In this case, Sollecito and Knox - if they were indeed involved in the murder - had the means (Sollecito's car) and opportunity (all night) to get Meredith's body out of the house. It would not have been difficult for Sollecito to back his car right down to the front door of the cottage (below the road level, and therefore partially concealed), and for Knox and Sollecito to place Meredith's body in the boot (trunk) at the quietest time of night (say, 4-5am) and drive to a remote canyon well outside the city.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

So was the toilet flushed or unflushed? Was it a whole turd or was it what was left over from someone flushing once. I seen where someone posted that the roommates had to clean the toilet between flushings and flush again. There have been a few times even in my toilet where not everything flushed down on the first try.

The full contents were present, and no attempt had been made to flush them away.