Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[RoseMontague]

I am a little confused with Massei's reasoning on the changing times of the dinner. Massei is saying she is pushing the time of the dinner up to give her a later alibi. How would staying at Raffaele's all night or having dinner at a certain time give her anymore of an alibi if it could not even be proven she was at Raffaele's during the time of the murder much less having dinner at that time. Maybe you can explain this line of reasoning to me because I don't see any difference in saying I was watching TV or washing dishes (with water) or taking a shower (with water) or cleaning up a spill (water as well) at Raffaele's at the time of the murder or I was having dinner at Raffaele's at the time of the murder.

 

[loverofzion]

That's kind of how it works here. (Of course, you can't be expected to know that as you have only posted in this one thread.) On this forum you are expected to present evidence - your unsupported word is, sadly, not considered sufficient.

So, got any evidence of this alleged sexual liaison on a train or not?

Well none of us were there but if you believe AK then she wrote it on her facebook page.

 

[Chris C]

Excuse me? Are you referring to my reasoning or to Massei's? If it's the former, I think that verbiage is out of place in this forum.



What are you arguing here?

Are you asserting that Meredith Kercher was not murdered??

There was ample physical evidence left at the scene. Much of it was easily found by the Perugian authorities, some of it was found only using investigative techniques (i.e. Luminol) that served to incriminate AK & RS in a poorly executed attempt at crime scene staging, or "cleaning up", and some of it was never found (i.e. Meredith's keys). Again, I do not understand what are you trying to assert here.

There was never any real evidence presented that supported a clean up theory. The fact that they COULDN"T find evidence of someone walking out of the room to the bathroom is their evidence to support the clean up theory. There was no evidence on the floor to support a clean up theory. There was no evidence on the floor, on the wall, or on Meredith that suggests there was more than 1 person in that room when she was killed. If knox's footprints had so much blood on them that they couldn't remove the traces off the floor from when she left the bathroom after cleaning up. Then how on earth did they remove the traces of her walking to the bathroom when she would have had even more blood on her. Thats cave man logic. They found footprints in luminol that wasn't blood leading away from the bathroom. They have no evidence to prove it was blood. So since they couldn't find evidence of blood going to the bathroom then whoever left the footprints leading away from the bathroom must have been the guilty party. Only problem is the only bloody footprint in the bathroom doesn't match the person leaving the bathroom. The only bloody shoeprint doesn't match the person leaving the bathroom. The luminol footprints could match anyone person with close to the same footsize as Knox. Knox's DNA wasn't found in those footprints they tried to pin on her. Meredith's DNA wasn't found in those footprints they tried to pin on knox. The logic doesn't fit, yet they make that leap anyway.
Thats caveman logic. Girl Dead. She was murdered. No evidence to pin it on the person we think killed her. She must have cleaned it and put someone elses dna at the scene to cover up the clean up.
I'm not making this up. This is the reason they believe a clean up took place. They have refused to accept the evidence they have collected and have instead engineered a theory the evidence doesn't support and convicted 2 people on it.

Now I'm open to the possibility that Knox, Sollecito or both help Rudy. I'm just waiting on the evidence. Because nothing they have presented supports the charges they killed her. They only have 2 pieces of physical evidence.
A bra clasp that doesn't even prove Sollecito was there. For many reason in the appeal, if you have bothered to read the appeal, there are reasons to doubt the dna is even Sollecito's, and there are reasons to believe its contaminated. Since you have 5 dna profiles on it. Thats 5 individual dna profiles without using LCN. There are enough alleles to make 5 profiles. Yet even after enough alleles for 5 profiles the best they could come up with is a partial profile for sollecito. So if the best they could come up with is a partial profile with enough evidence to make 5 individual profiles. Why didn't they test the clasp using LCN to see if they could get a full profile of Sollecito. They did it on the knife when they couldn't get what they wanted. That means the clasp is still missing more dna alleles. Which would lead to believe there are more than 5 dna profiles on the clasp. Since they are missing dna.
A knife that doesn't even match the wounds on the neck and the prosecution/Judge would have you believe that Knox switched knives after stabbing her twice to cut her throat with another knife.

 

[Malkmus]

Well none of us were there but if you believe AK then she wrote it on her facebook page.

Yeah, but that line of reasoning went out the window when, faced with the prospect of a life-threatening disease, she wrote a list of all her sexual liaisons but failed to put "man on train' as one of them. Can you think of any reason she wouldn't have included him on that list?

 

[katy_did]

You and Fulcanelli appear to have swallowed one of the more embarrassing PMFer whoppers. Their preferred shoe sizes were quite different, but their bare feet differed in size by only three millimetres, as stated on page 348 of the Massei report among other places.

The guilters have managed to convince themselves that there was a huge a difference, and in their echo chambers you never hear any different.

Yes, it does seem like a couple of people may not have gotten to that part of the report yet. For their benefit, here again is what Massei says on the subject:

− a different length of the foot (which measures 247mm [Guede's], compared to the 245mm of finding 2 [luminol print], Sollecito’s foot being 244mm long)

 

[quadraginta]

Where is the inventory list of cleaning products? They have nothing in the apartment containing bleach or a similar chemical compound that might cause a luminol reaction? Four women without a single product containing bleach that is contained in a lot of cleaning products. That is hard to believe. They never used bleach when they washed their whites even?

<snip>

Why is that hard to believe? Walk down any cleaning products aisle in any grocery store and one of the more prominent claims you will see is "Contains No Bleach".

I've lived in more than a few households over multiple decades. I've shared almost all of them with women. I know that cleaning products without bleach have been the norm in those households because I purchased (and yes, even used ) most of them.

Half the laundering instruction tags on women's clothes include the caution "Use No Bleach". I know this because even though I'm a guy I'm not allergic to laundry. I can even sort loads by color.

Except for a brief period when we were experimenting with fabric diapers without a diaper service, I haven't used products containing bleach in the washing machine for thirty years. Currently I prefer OxiClean.

Same way with other cleaning products. I just did a quick inventory under our sink, and products with bleach are conspicuously absent.

There has, I confess, usually been a bottle of Clorox floating around the house wherever I have lived, but that has been for out-of-the-ordinary disinfecting, and the times it might have been opened in any given year could be counted on the fingers of one hand with change left over.

 

[Malkmus]

I see, so you never said this?



http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6272251&postcount=4810

There's no mention of 'easy' in that line. And funnily, the caveats which can be used for Rudy's evidence which you have now claimed are 'easy' are the ones that have been made for Raffaele and Amanda. And now also, you claim you never agreed with those caveats? So, you don't agree that the bra clasp being collected 47 days later means it was contaminated and/or fabricated? You don't believe that Amanda and Raffaele telling lies is NOT an indicator of guilt? You don't believe that if an alternate explanation is 'possible', that is reasonable doubt? You don't believe that aside from the clasp, the absence of forensic evidence of Amanda and Raffaele proves innocence?

What then, ARE your caveats to explain their evidence away? Just so we're all clear, you understand.

How are the caveats for Amanda and Raffaele not subjective when they are made only in isolation and in regard to the context? Why should context only be applicable to Rudy?

In the case of Raffaele and Amanda, the 'context' is that a range of evidence places multiple persons at the scene, a range of evidence places Raffaele and Amanda at the scene along with Rudy, including but not limited to, witness testimony forensic evidence, their behaviour, their lack of and conflicting alibis and multiple lies...that is the context.

I don't know how you didn't understand from my last post that I consider the evidence against Raf and Amanda to be riddled with caveats that cast a lot of doubt upon it, whereas all the evidence against Rudy is rock solid because it is corroborated by his own proclamation of being there that night as well as the most condemning piece of evidence - a bloody fingerprint. No, I don't think the late collection of evidence is reason alone to doubt it. If that's all there was against Rudy was that then I would have reason to doubt his guilt as well. If Rudy never claimed to be there that night, hadn't left a bloody fingerprint, a palm print, and fled the country, and didn't have an m.o. of breaking and entering second floor windows with rocks, then I would definitely give him the same benefit of the doubt as Amanda and Raf. I don't think what you consider are lies on the behalf of Amanda and Raf are incriminating for the same reason I don't consider Filomena's conflicting testimony with Paola and Batistelli's conflicting testimony with Luca to be incriminating either.

 

[Chris C]

Why is that hard to believe? Walk down any cleaning products aisle in any grocery store and one of the more prominent claims you will see is "Contains No Bleach".

I've lived in more than a few households over multiple decades. I've shared almost all of them with women. I know that cleaning products without bleach have been the norm in those households because I purchased (and yes, even used ) most of them.

Half the laundering instruction tags on women's clothes include the caution "Use No Bleach". I know this because even though I'm a guy I'm not allergic to laundry. I can even sort loads by color.

Except for a brief period when we were experimenting with fabric diapers without a diaper service, I haven't used products containing bleach in the washing machine for thirty years. Currently I prefer OxiClean.

Same way with other cleaning products. I just did a quick inventory under our sink, and products with bleach are conspicuously absent.

There has, I confess, usually been a bottle of Clorox floating around the house wherever I have lived, but that has been for out-of-the-ordinary disinfecting, and the times it might have been opened in any given year could be counted on the fingers of one hand with change left over.

The problem with the clean up theory. No matter how you look at it. If they attempted to clean up there would have been smear stains. The luminol would have either detected the bleach being smeared or the blood being smeared. There is no way around that. They would have detected the fingerprints being smeared. There was no evidence of smeared fingerprints. The bleach theory is the prosecutions attempt to make one believe the lack of DNA evidence in the footprints. Since the footprints where not smeared, they where not cleaned up.

Of all the retarded ideas TV comes up with. Even the CSI(tv shows) have enough common sense to know that if someone tries to clean up blood it will show up as smear marks when detected by Luminol.

 

[Matthew Best]

Well none of us were there but if you believe AK then she wrote it on her facebook page.

Sorry, lover, that's not evidence either - just your blank assertion. Care to do better?

 

[quadraginta]

The problem with the clean up theory. No matter how you look at it. If they attempted to clean up there would have been smear stains. The luminol would have either detected the bleach being smeared or the blood being smeared. There is no way around that. They would have detected the fingerprints being smeared. There was no evidence of smeared fingerprints. The bleach theory is the prosecutions attempt to make one believe the lack of DNA evidence in the footprints. Since the footprints where not smeared, they where not cleaned up.

Of all the retarded ideas TV comes up with. Even the CSI(tv shows) have enough common sense to know that if someone tries to clean up blood it will show up as smear marks when detected by Luminol.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to the claim that Filomena and Laura were not credible when they both "testified the cottage was never cleaned with products containing bleach."

 

[RoseMontague]

Why is that hard to believe? Walk down any cleaning products aisle in any grocery store and one of the more prominent claims you will see is "Contains No Bleach".

I've lived in more than a few households over multiple decades. I've shared almost all of them with women. I know that cleaning products without bleach have been the norm in those households because I purchased (and yes, even used ) most of them.

Half the laundering instruction tags on women's clothes include the caution "Use No Bleach". I know this because even though I'm a guy I'm not allergic to laundry. I can even sort loads by color.

Except for a brief period when we were experimenting with fabric diapers without a diaper service, I haven't used products containing bleach in the washing machine for thirty years. Currently I prefer OxiClean.

Same way with other cleaning products. I just did a quick inventory under our sink, and products with bleach are conspicuously absent.

There has, I confess, usually been a bottle of Clorox floating around the house wherever I have lived, but that has been for out-of-the-ordinary disinfecting, and the times it might have been opened in any given year could be counted on the fingers of one hand with change left over.

I am glad you share the cleaning efforts to some degree. Bleach and similar compounds are also found in most automatic dishwashing detergents, mold and stain removers, and toilet bowl cleaners as well as the standard clorox products, some comet product lines, also a few lysol product lines as well as some teeth whiteners and who knows what other stuff we have around the house.

 

[katy_did]

Hello Rose.

I remember reading several weeks ago a post from Yummi at PMF concerning the luminol footprints (with reference to the Motivations).

http://perugiamurderfile.org/viewtopic.php?p=49586#p49586

I am not a scientist so I cannot say how accurate Yummi's assessment is, however, it is interesting and may provide answers to questions concerning the luminol prints.

Yummi's main argument seems to be that if the prints were made in blood and had dried, it would still have been possible to get such a clear reaction with luminol even if the prints had been cleaned. I'm pretty certain he's wrong about that: in one of the studies linked to earlier on the thread (the one in which they were testing what results you get from the TMB test after using luminol) the experiment was carried out by making a bloody handprint on a variety of surfaces, leaving it to dry (IIRC, I think it was even left overnight), cleaning it, then seeing what sort of reaction they obtained with luminol and then TMB. On every surface except concrete, the reaction with luminol was an overall glow around the area where the handprint had been, even after just washing it with soap and water. I've seen no evidence to support the idea that a dried bloody footprint would have survived cleaning to produce a luminol reaction, and Yummi doesn't provide any evidence to support his theory. I also think that if what he says were true, Massei would have used it to suggest that the prints had been cleaned up, especially given the lack of any solid evidence of a clean-up; instead, he's forced to say they were made in an 'invisible' way, without the person who made them having been aware of it.

Yummi also seems to rule out any possibility that the streaks around the prints could have been made at the same time as the prints were, which seems like an odd conclusion to me: surely, chances are the unclear smudges around the prints were made by the person making the footprints, but in those instances by moving their foot along the ground and perhaps sliding it, rather than standing still and therefore making a clear print? We even have evidence for that in Amanda's statement that she dragged her feet on the bathmat rather than simply walking back to her room. The luminol marks would support that (and she didn't know about them at the time she made that statement).

Ultimately I think the fact Massei doesn't argue the prints were cleaned up says a great deal: the prints couldn't have been cleaned, even in soap and water, or they simply wouldn't exist. Hence he was forced to argue the invisible theory.

 

[Malkmus]

Excuse me? Are you referring to my reasoning or to Massei's? If it's the former, I think that verbiage is out of place in this forum.



What are you arguing here?

Are you asserting that Meredith Kercher was not murdered??

There was ample physical evidence left at the scene. Much of it was easily found by the Perugian authorities, some of it was found only using investigative techniques (i.e. Luminol) that served to incriminate AK & RS in a poorly executed attempt at crime scene staging, or "cleaning up", and some of it was never found (i.e. Meredith's keys). Again, I do not understand what are you trying to assert here.

Fuji, since you seem to believe there was a clean-up, how do you ascertain that Rafaelle knew how to differentiate between Rudy's shoe prints and his own, considering they were identical patterns (just an extra "ring"), and that it would have been much safer to simply erase any shoe prints that may have been his or Rudy's.
Second, why would Rafaelle leave his own semi-bloody footprint on the bath mat, then point it out to police on the phone before they even arrived and again once they were at the cottage?
And third, why would they deliberately leave evidence of Rudy's presence but then never drop any hints of his involvement to the police at any later point, especially during Amanda's interrogation where she "buckled" and implicated Patrick instead?

 

[Fuji]

I am a little confused with Massei's reasoning on the changing times of the dinner. Massei is saying she is pushing the time of the dinner up to give her a later alibi.

Your second sentence would be more accurate if written, "Massei is saying she is pushing the time of the dinner up in a failed attempt to give her a later alibi."

As Massei writes (p. 78):

"Therefore, the statements by Amanda Knox in which the hour of dinner is postponed until 10 pm or even 11 pm constitute an attempt to reduce insofar as possible the length of time devoid of activity that could be documented in some way, during the final hours of November 1, 2007, thus creating an alibi that could put her and Raffaele away from the Via della Pergola house where, precisely during that time, the murder of Meredith Kercher was being perpetrated."

How would staying at Raffaele's all night or having dinner at a certain time give her anymore of an alibi if it could not even be proven she was at Raffaele's during the time of the murder much less having dinner at that time.

It wouldn't. But the important thing for the investigation is that she lied about this in an attempt to deceive, not whether her prevarication if undetected would actually bolster her position.

Maybe you can explain this line of reasoning to me because I don't see any difference in saying I was watching TV or washing dishes (with water) or taking a shower (with water) or cleaning up a spill (water as well) at Raffaele's at the time of the murder or I was having dinner at Raffaele's at the time of the murder.

The line of reasoning is that lying to authorities investigating a murder is viewed as highly suspicious behavior by said authorities. This would seem to be a very basic principle of criminal investigation.

 

[Malkmus]

It wouldn't. But the important thing for the investigation is that she lied about this in an attempt to deceive, not whether her prevarication if undetected would actually bolster her position.

If it doesn't bolster her position, then it's not deceiving is it? It's no more a lie than Filomena incorrectly remembering she told Amanda to call the police during their first phone call, a statement contradicted by Paola and Amanda's testimony.

 

[Fuji]

Fuji,

You made the claim about Amanda's familiarity with lying. It is your job to support it, as I have repeatedly asked you to do. If you cannot, I suggest you withdraw it.

No, it is not my job to "support" it, given that I am using the same objective criteria that leads me to induce her guilt in this regard as you and others have used to promote her innocence; that is to say, none at all.

I do not demand that others modify their judgments of her veracity in deference to my opposite conclusions. I would bid you the same courtesy.

 

[Fuji]

If it doesn't bolster her position, then it's not deceiving is it?

This is akin to arguing, "If the object is worthless, then the person who took it hasn't really stolen anything, have they?"

It's no more a lie than Filomena incorrectly remembering she told Amanda to call the police during their first phone call, a statement contradicted by Paola and Amanda's testimony.

This is nonsense. A false statement by a disinterested witness exists in an entirely different context than one made by a suspect.

 

[Malkmus]

No, it is not my job to "support" it, given that I am using the same objective criteria that leads me to induce her guilt in this regard as you and others have used to promote her innocence; that is to say, none at all.

I do not demand that others modify their judgments of her veracity in deference to my opposite conclusions. I would bid you the same courtesy.

The "objective criteria" we have used to determine Amanda wasn't lying is that is that it's been proven that several others involved in this case have made the same errors in remembering details of what happened the day the body was discovered. You haven't shown any "objective criteria" other than that for some reason when Amanda succumbs to the same fallible mistakes it makes her guilty... it seems that that "reason" is confirmation bias because you're certain she is guilty of involvement in Meredith's death.

 

[Chris C]

I am glad you share the cleaning efforts to some degree. Bleach and similar compounds are also found in most automatic dishwashing detergents, mold and stain removers, and toilet bowl cleaners as well as the standard clorox products, some comet product lines, also a few lysol product lines as well as some teeth whiteners and who knows what other stuff we have around the house.

Some water treatment plants used to use chlorine.

 

[Malkmus]

This is akin to arguing, "If the object is worthless, then the person who took it hasn't really stolen anything, have they?"

This analogy implies, again, willful deceit. But if Amanda stood to gain nothing from it then what makes it a lie? You lie to gain something, not just for the hell of it.

This is nonsense. A false statement by a disinterested witness exists in an entirely different context than one made by a suspect.

Amanda was a witness, just like Filomena, at the time she made those statements. And what makes Filomena "disinterested"? Do you not think she took it seriously?