Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Chris C]

The one side of the window is about sixteen inches wide. It may sound plausible to you, somehow, that a normally sized adult male could easily negotiate over a space that wide during a second story break-in, but it doesn't to me. Sixteen inches isn't very much. For an average person it is less than the distance from their elbow to their fingertips. Sure, it could be done, but it would be far more difficult, and it would have to be done deliberately, and with great care.

More importantly, why would a burglar even bother. It would be infinitely easier just to brush the glass out of the way, and use the whole width of the window.

Efforts to portray it otherwise are transparent attempts at rationalization.

Or he could have been wearing a long sleeve shirt and not had to worry about it, or a jacket, or a sweater.

 

[quadraginta]

You can assert this until you are blue in the face, but it isn't going to magically start making sense.

Magic isn't required, only reason. That isn't sufficient in the face of your compulsive disbelief, but it isn't important enough to me to get blue over. I'll leave that to you.

What evidence do you have that there was even enough glass on the outside of the sill to worry about when Rudy climbed up? The glass I can see in these photos looks mostly like larger chunks which have been deliberately removed and put down on the sill after the ascent, not glass that fell there when the rock was thrown through the window.

It doesn't really make much difference if the glass got there as a result of the rock being thrown, or it being removed by hand, or both. The simple fact is that it was still there after someone allegedly crawled through the window.

I'd expect most of the glass to go inwards, not outwards, when hit by a rock. So why should there be so much glass there that Rudy had to shovel large amounts of glass on to the ground below before ascending?

Why do you constantly use this technique of exaggeration as if it lent some extra persuasion to your rhetoric? It doesn't. It is nothing but misrepresentation, an unsubtle form of straw man. It only makes you sound silly.

Nothing needed to be "shoveled", and we don't need to be considering "large amounts". How much glass would you willingly crawl through if a moment's gesture could eliminate any problem?

I doubt you'll do it, because I doubt that you have any sincere interest in studying the topic, only in discounting it, but here's an experiment you could try.

Find a ground floor window somewhere and mark off sixteen inches from one side. Sprinkle some flour on the remaining side and try and climb through it without disturbing the flour.

Then imagine the same traverse if you had started by hanging from your fingertips. Imagine if the flour had razor sharp edges. You know, like a pile of glass.

Then come back and tell me that you honestly believe you wouldn't just brush it out of the way.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Magic isn't required, only reason. That isn't sufficient in the face of your compulsive disbelief, but it isn't important enough to me to get blue over. I'll leave that to you.

It doesn't really make much difference if the glass got there as a result of the rock being thrown, or it being removed by hand, or both. The simple fact is that it was still there after someone allegedly crawled through the window.

Why do you constantly use this technique of exaggeration as if it lent some extra persuasion to your rhetoric? It doesn't. It is nothing but misrepresentation, an unsubtle form of straw man. It only makes you sound silly.

Nothing needed to be "shoveled", and we don't need to be considering "large amounts". How much glass would you willingly crawl through if a moment's gesture could eliminate any problem?

I doubt you'll do it, because I doubt that you have any sincere interest in studying the topic, only in discounting it, but here's an experiment you could try.

Find a ground floor window somewhere and mark off sixteen inches from one side. Sprinkle some flour on the remaining side and try and climb through it without disturbing the flour.

Then imagine the same traverse if you had started by hanging from your fingertips. Imagine if the flour had razor sharp edges. You know, like a pile of glass.

Then come back and tell me that you honestly believe you wouldn't just brush it out of the way.

You've been offered multiple perfectly reasonable explanations for the observable data, not to mention that you could have come up with more yourself with a moment's thought, so sticking to this talking point is getting increasingly silly.

There might well have been no glass on the sill when Rudy climbed up. He could easily have seen this while standing on top of the bars.

There might well have been small pieces of glass, but if Rudy was wearing a jacket and gloves (for example) he might not have cared since he was presumably interested in getting inside and getting the shutters closed as soon as possible to minimise the time he spent engaging in obviously felonious activities in an exposed position.

Or he might have swept some pieces across the sill to make a clear space to ascend, instead of grandly sweeping them all off the sill and on to the ground as you insist he absolutely had to have done.

If he crouched on the sill then there would be no need to remove any glass on the sill before jumping down to the floor of the room. For that matter the glass, as you can see, was mostly in large, flat pieces lying on the sill which would present no serious hazard to someone who was careful or who was wearing gloves. The "pile of glass" is entirely your own invention: the photographs on the page I just linked to clearly show that there was no "pile of glass". That's assuming that he didn't just enter the room via the side of the window which had no glass on it.

Seriously, this argument from incredulity looks worse the more it is examined.

Do you have anything better, or is this the extent of your case for Knox and Sollecito's guilt?

 

[Justinian2]

As I said earlier, it's your choice how you express yourself. You can say whatever you want.

However attacking an entire nation based on snippets of history and a single court case strikes me as irrational. You can express your contempt with the Kercher verdict without irrationally generalising that contempt to the entire nation just because you know almost nothing else about Italy.

Mind you it's not a matter of huge concern to me what you think on this issue. I mention it mostly so that a certain subset of the guilters don't have a legitimate basis to pretend that those who believe Knox is innocent only do so because they have it in for Italy.

I'd also prefer not to see the thread dragged into a tiresome and irrelevant round of "Boo Italy!"/"Yay Italy!", which would only be a distraction from the relevant facts of the case.

I am not swayed by emotional arguments. In fact, I am not swayed by any argument. I am, however, swayed by fact. One fact can change my decisions on something.

OK, perhaps arguments that use no logical fallacies can align facts into a believable story and sway me also.

Lawyers - at social gatherings - have explained to me why engineers such as myself are not usually selected to juries. We are too logical. We can't be easily deceived. We cannot be controlled by emotional displays. We cannot be controlled by logical fallacies as easily as other groups.

Generalizations are OK. Can't win a game of chess without them. When I generalize about lawyers or engineers, it has merit. At the same time, we all have to be careful to understand that we are all different individuals and that no two lawyers and no two engineers are the same.

However, emotion is huge part of all of us. So is the "Hidden Mind". To ignore how we feel about issues such as this is perhaps short sighted. My emotion was entered into the docket and needs not to be revisited or revised. I will not apologize for expressing my emotion. Emotions should be expressed but not argued or obsessed over. This case angers me like no other in which I have no direct involvement.

Anybody know about the key words to use in a search of the Massei report? Sex Orgy isn't used, for example. However, "erotic-*‐‑sexual nature" is used.

 

[Dan O.]

Anybody know about the key words to use in a search of the Massei report? Sex Orgy isn't used, for example. However, "erotic-*‐‑sexual nature" is used.

I would suggest Italian words.

If you are searching in the English translation, the specific words used were chosen by the translators. It's too bad you can't just search by concept.

Eta: Perhaps there is a tool that creates a word frequency list. Such a list shouldn't be too long and you could just scan it for the words you are looking for.

[search for "word frequency counter" to find several]

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

If he crouched on the sill then there would be no need to remove any glass on the sill before jumping down to the floor of the room. For that matter the glass, as you can see, was mostly in large, flat pieces lying on the sill which would present no serious hazard to someone who was careful or who was wearing gloves.

Since the glass was "mostly in large, flat pieces lying on the sill", I think we can safely rule out crouching on the window sill. The large, flat pieces would have broken under his weight.

 

[LondonJohn]

Since the glass was "mostly in large, flat pieces lying on the sill", I think we can safely rule out crouching on the window sill. The large, flat pieces would have broken under his weight.

Have you actually seen a photograph of the window sill? The large pieces of glass were all on one side of the sill - the right side as viewed from the outside. There would have been plenty of room on the other half of the sill to sit or crouch. And for a right-handed person, the left side of the sill would have been the logical place to sit or crouch, since the right hand could then be easily used to reach through the broken right-hand window pane and unlatch the window.

 

[LondonJohn]

That's exactly what I would expect if these were random variations in the surface on the wall. There is an easy scientific way to settle this. Scan the rest of the wall and find all such blemishes. Then compute the probability that such blemishes are correlated with being under the window where scuff marks would be caused by someone scrambling up the wall to enter through the window.

I think the whole "scuff marks" issue is a bit of a red herring. If someone like Guede entered the house through that window, he could (in my view) quite easily use upper body strength - combined with a leg push upwards from a foothold on the grating of the window below - to get straight up onto the ledge without his feet even needing to scrape against the wall.

In contrast, some seem to be suggesting that any intruder would have been scraping his feet against the wall during the ascent to the sill, and that an absence of scrape marks or mud/grass deposits from shoes on the wall surface (as well as the famous nail) show that no such ascent was made. I disagree, and believe that an intruder could scale the wall without making any significant marks or scuffs on the wall surface (or disturbing any nails).

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Since the glass was "mostly in large, flat pieces lying on the sill", I think we can safely rule out crouching on the window sill. The large, flat pieces would have broken under his weight.

It didn't look to me like the whole sill was covered in such flat pieces, just the area under the broken pane. That leaves the rest of the sill clear. Not to mention that most of the pieces were lying flush against the sill, so they would not have broken if someone stood on them. (Some were on top of other pieces, and would have broken in my estimation if they had been trodden on).

 

[Katody Matrass]

... did not even include the idea that someone could stand in the room, open one side of the window, and swing a rock at the closed side. I can think of no perfect way to exclude the physics of this scenario from one of a thrown rock. This is not a complicated scenario for someone to conceive.

That's quite unusual I would say.

It has a few problems, too. One of the biggest is that you can't close window sides independently. Take a close look on how the window latch operates. Do you still want to defend that position ?



A lot of catching up after the weekend, I see
I'm glad the the window entering is discussed - a topic simple enough for me. And it is surprisingly essential - if one of the hairs the prosecution's case hangs by is the ToD, then the other is the "fake" break-in. Any of them snaps and it's finito.

 

[Dan O.]

I think the whole "scuff marks" issue is a bit of a red herring. If someone like Guede entered the house through that window, he could (in my view) quite easily use upper body strength - combined with a leg push upwards from a foothold on the grating of the window below - to get straight up onto the ledge without his feet even needing to scrape against the wall.

In contrast, some seem to be suggesting that any intruder would have been scraping his feet against the wall during the ascent to the sill, and that an absence of scrape marks or mud/grass deposits from shoes on the wall surface (as well as the famous nail) show that no such ascent was made. I disagree, and believe that an intruder could scale the wall without making any significant marks or scuffs on the wall surface (or disturbing any nails).

Sure, scraping the wall would not be necessary. But don't forget that there are also marks on the clothes on Filomena's floor that look like they could be from the plaster from the wall. This was a crime scene, one would think they would have done an investigation.


In the Massei Report we find:

witness Gioia Brocci mentioned above declared that she had observed the exterior of the house, paying particular attention to the wall underneath the window with the broken pane, the window of the room then occupied by Filomena Romanelli. She said: "We observed both the wall...underneath the window and all of the vegetation underneath the window, and we noted that there were no traces on the wall, no traces of earth, of grass, nothing, no streaks, nothing at all...

The missing nail and the apparent scuff on the top right are definitely not "nothing at all" (they are best viewed in the full resolution photo of the lawyer scaling the wall). One has to wonder if Gloria actually looked at the wall.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

That's quite unusual I would say.

It has a few problems, too. One of the biggest is that you can't close window sides independently. Take a close look on how the window latch operates. Do you still want to defend that position ?

Is there some reason you couldn't hold the window in place with one hand (or have an accomplice do that) while you leaned out and chucked a rock at it with the other? It seems like a pretty dumb thing to do, with obvious risk of injury to the people doing it, but people have done stupider things.

Mind you, the Massei theory is that Amanda and Raffaele broke the window by throwing a rock out the window with the shutters closed to catch it, and then putting the rock down in the room. That's his story for why there is a pile of large pieces of glass directly outside the hole on the sill, but none on the ground below. Of course, Hendry's thesis that Rudy removed those pieces of glass from the frame manually and put them there also explains this, along with explaining much better the spray of glass into the room, which Massei's theory simply doesn't account for properly.

Massei's story on that point is this:

As for the presence of glass in Romanelli's room, the violence of the blow, the characteristics of the glass (which was rather thin as indicated by Romanelli and Pasquali), the large rock used, and finally the shield effect caused by the inner shutter hanging half-open behind the glass pane [41] (a position of the inner shutter which corresponds to the scratch on it visible in the photos) give an adequate explanation of the distribution of the glass.

In other words it was a big rock and they threw it really hard, so glass went backwards all over the room. That seems counterintuitive, to put it mildly.

Whereas the thesis that glass went all over the room because Rudy threw a big rock quite hard from outside, and the pile of glass outside the hole was put there manually by Rudy as he widened the opening, explains the distribution of glass far more intuitively.

So even if a staged break-in is possible using the Quadraginta backwards throw theory (or indeed the equally meritorious "they just went outside and chucked a rock through their window" theory) that doesn't really amount to much. The Massei story about why he thought there was a staged break-in in the first place doesn't stand much examination, and without a reason to believe the break-in was staged postulating a staged break-in is definitely multiplying entities beyond necessity.

 

[Katody Matrass]

I agree. He also says this,

"The final resting position of the rock indicated that the person throwing the rock was located somewhat to the driveway entrance side instead of directly in front of the window. The small contact zone to the inside wooden shutter relative to the size of the rock inferred that the shutter was partially open when impacted by the large rock."

If Rudy was standing more on the driveway side rather than directly in front of or even to the left of the window there's no way the trajectory would allow the rock to hit the right innermost corner of the wood blind as it impacted, recessed as it is within the jamb. Is he even talking about the same shutter because to impact anywhere near where it did, being thrown from the driveway, it would have had to have been all the way open for one thing. In trying to explain the final resting place of the rock he posits a scenario that is pure nonsense.

That's a good point. While he is right about the blind being unlatched or partially open I think most probably Rudy threw the rock from the elevated ground opposite the window. The resting point of the rock is easily explained by the fact that it bounced from the inner blind. (As in the video posted by Rose before)

As for the question of the "undisturbed" glass.
There are at least three probable ways to open that window:

• Reaching up while standing on the window grating below - no glass is touched.
  
• Reaching up while supported on the left elbow on the ledge - glass is still not a problem as the only pieces are on the right near the frame.
  
• Standing on the window ledge - no need to brush of the glass, plenty of place to stand or crouch.

So I don't see a reason why Rudy would need to purposefully remove the glass from the ledge.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Is there some reason you couldn't hold the window in place with one hand (or have an accomplice do that) while you leaned out and chucked a rock at it with the other? It seems like a pretty dumb thing to do, with obvious risk of injury to the people doing it, but people have done stupider things.

Mind you, the Massei theory is that Amanda and Raffaele broke the window by throwing a rock out the window with the shutters closed to catch it, and then putting the rock down in the room.

You're right, while the former scenario looks unnecessarily contrived and crazy, the latter is total nonsense.

It's also questionable if you could spray the whole room with glass in quadraginta 's scenario.

 

[RoseMontague]

Sure, scraping the wall would not be necessary. But don't forget that there are also marks on the clothes on Filomena's floor that look like they could be from the plaster from the wall. This was a crime scene, one would think they would have done an investigation.


The missing nail and the apparent scuff on the top right are definitely not "nothing at all" (they are best viewed in the full resolution photo of the lawyer scaling the wall). One has to wonder if Gloria actually looked at the wall.

Dan,
I have many of the same concerns that quad has and although the new series of articles has some new and helpful information and new theories I still don't think it answers the question of the remaining glass on the sill to my satisfaction. I don't think Rudy snapped off some of the larger pieces and then proceeded to place them in the path he would need to take over the sill.

I still believe he must have stepped into the room and not crawled in over the window sill. I had asked if anyone had some closeup pictures of the latch on the inner shutters as well as the part it connects to on the opposite inner shutter. I recalled seeing this at one time and am unable to find it now. Was there also a latch bolt on the bottom that connected to the sill of the window?

Those white speckles are paint dust in my opinion, not plaster from the wall. It could have been picked up from the old white paint on the bricks or the old white paint from the impact to the inner shutter by the rock. I do not understand why it wasn't tested or if it was why no mention of it that I could find.

 

[Justinian2]

I would suggest Italian words.

If you are searching in the English translation, the specific words used were chosen by the translators. It's too bad you can't just search by concept.

Eta: Perhaps there is a tool that creates a word frequency list. Such a list shouldn't be too long and you could just scan it for the words you are looking for.

[search for "word frequency counter" to find several]

That's true. The Italian version of the Massei report should be searched.

I think I will do a search for the frequency that words are used. Might produce some valuable insights in that I am not searching for what is in the report, but what is not. Specifically, I am searching for Massei conclusions that have no basis in fact but have flown off into the never-never land of Massei's hidden mind.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Dan,
I have many of the same concerns that quad has and although the new series of articles has some new and helpful information and new theories I still don't think it answers the question of the remaining glass on the sill to my satisfaction. I don't think Rudy snapped off some of the larger pieces and then proceeded to place them in the path he would need to take over the sill.

I don't think he did that. It seems plausible that he sat on the left hand side of the sill (viewed from outside), used his right hand to widen the hole on the right side of the sill, placing the glass below the hole as he did so, and then reached through the hole to unbolt the windows.

Once the windows were unbolted he could open them and proceed straight into the house without having to climb over the glass he deposited on the right hand side of the sill.

Also, I recall reading about a white smudge on Filomena's clothes on the floor that could be compatible with the white matter on the outside of the cottage, if indeed someone scrubbed their trainer on it in the process of climbing up to the window. However I can't immediately google or otherwise find a photo of this smudge. Can anyone help me out here? I'd like to add a properly referenced summary of this discussion to my Larsen List, and that footprint/smudge deserves a link.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Also, I recall reading about a white smudge on Filomena's clothes on the floor that could be compatible with the white matter on the outside of the cottage, if indeed someone scrubbed their trainer on it in the process of climbing up to the window. However I can't immediately google or otherwise find a photo of this smudge. Can anyone help me out here? I'd like to add a properly referenced summary of this discussion to my Larsen List, and that footprint/smudge deserves a link.

The photos are here injusticeinperugia.org/RonHendry2-----a.html

The fact that neither that traces, nor the possible scuff marks Dan found were investigated is interesting. Did the police take a single photo of the outside wall or the ground below? Apparently no, yet they testified there were no traces of a break-in. Testimony not supported by evidence is a bit too little. Especially when the break-in is the key prosecution point and police were shown to be wrong so many times in that investigation.

 

[Amazer]

You're right, while the former scenario looks unnecessarily contrived and crazy, the latter is total nonsense.

I agree that the former scenario looks a little more likely then the latter. However, the location of the rock in the room effectively rules out that the rock was thrown from outside. So what other scenario can you envision that allows the rock to land where it did?

It's also questionable if you could spray the whole room with glass in quadraginta 's scenario.

Drop a glass plane on the floor and see how far and wide the glass scatters. Really, getting glass pieces throughout the room is no hassle at all, even if it's dropped straight down.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I agree that the former scenario looks a little more likely then the latter. However, the location of the rock in the room effectively rules out that the rock was thrown from outside.

Could you explain your reasoning there? How was this ruled out? The Massei report translation contains nothing relevant that I could find by searching for "rock".

So what other scenario can you envision that allows the rock to land where it did?

I'm not necessarily married to the "irregular-shaped rock goes through the window, hits the inner shutter, bounces off and falls to the floor" scenario but I'm not familiar with any other one.

Drop a glass plane on the floor and see how far and wide the glass scatters. Really, getting glass pieces throughout the room is no hassle at all, even if it's dropped straight down.

In this case it wasn't dropped straight down. In Massei's story it was smashed sideways and out towards the shutters, and quite substantial amounts of glass would have to have flown backwards from the impact point. In the defence story, rather more reasonably, the glass is smashed sideways into the building and the scattering of glass across the room needs no explanation at all.