Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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christianahannah said:
Don't say never mind Rose. I am glad we can discuss possibilities.

There are legitimate questions about this case on both sides. It helps to discuss those questions and determine what is possible and what is not.
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Same here.

Hendry brings up the possibility of transfer of DNA from the forensics team into play, pointing out numerous other possibilities. The fact that Raffaele had visited there means his DNA is most likely in the flat somewhere and anyone handling an item in one room and then handling the bra clasp may be transferring the DNA.

Hendry seems to be assuming that this team hardly ever changes gloves and just does not address this fully , in my opinion.
 
I have a question for anyone that can help me, as I do not have some of my notes with me at this moment.

Meredith borrowed a history book - (to read and give back the next morning) - from 1 of her English gal pals and fellow schoolmate the night she was killed.
If I recall correctly, this book was found in her bedroom the next day, no?
If so, that would probably mean she came inside her house and put that book down in her room before the assault happened. So the assault did not take place right as she came to the door or just as she entered the house, correct?

Thanks for the help,
RWVBWL
 
christianahannah said:
The bra clasp was found under the pillow which was under Meredith so it is doubtful that Battistelli picked it up.
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If you look closely at the first photograph of the bra clasp discovery you should see that it cannot have been in the same position where it spent the night. Whether it only moved a short distance as a result of the pillow being lifted or it was planted there for the purpose of the photograph I have not determined. A close examination of the photos of the entire floor area under the pillow might discover the actual resting place of the clasp.
 
christianahannah said:
I have to admit I would think it strange if someone didn't at least step into the room upon finding Meredith.

I have doubts, (if he did indeed step into the room), that he went as far as the wardrobe to lift up the duvet. It would have been difficult not to have stepped in blood around Meredith and track it outside.

I am not exactly sure how far up or down the duvet was covering Meredith or the view from the door. It is very possible the officer was able to view the situation adequately from his position (right inside the door).
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Hi ChristianaHannah,
Yesterday I wrote a post on this, for I STILL find it odd that this police officer says that he DID NOT enter Miss Kercher's bedroom to check on her.

There are a 2 links to Perugia Shock, where a while back I had read of this:
""Paola and Luca saw Battistelli entering the room. He denies.
Paola's testimony at the end is not very effective because she can't say she really sees him in the room, and gets reduced to the sole deduction that the inspector must have entered.
(And who wouldn't enter a room when there's a girl under a duvet?)
But Luca saw him very clearly. And doesn't have any problem in recalling again, quiet and easy, those 3 steps towards Meredith. What's more simple than that? He saw him stepping inside and going to lift the end of the duvet."

Link here:
http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009/02/stranger.html

And this too from Perugia Shock:
"Paola and Luca see Battistelli stepping in the room. Paola goes out and Luca stays some seconds just in time to see Battistelli lifting the duvet to see Meredith's face."

Link here also:
http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009/02/falling-legends.html

I would like to think that if a person, especially a police officer, was going to check up on a person lying on the floor under a blanket -( who might be barely alive or dead), they would go and lift up the part covering that persons face, as Luca Altieri says he saw Officer Battistelli do.

From the photographs that I have seen, Miss Kercher was covered completely with a duvet, except for her foot sticking out. I just tried a test and stood in a doorway, walked 3 steps, and went about the same distance where someone's face might be if they were lying dead on the floor...

Why was Officer Battistelli lying about this?
Hmmm...
RWVBWL
 
Danceme said:
I disagree they are weird and weirder. I thought Fine came up with a perfectly simple workable scenario which takes into account how the inner shutter would get damaged exactly in that spot and how the glass can land on both the inner and outer portions of the sill. The only thing left was to explain was how glass ended up on the blue mat in this scenario which as well can be very simply answered by suggesting someone shook an item with glass on it or picked up a few pieces and tossed them, hardly fantasizing. I don't see this as weird at all if you believe the broken window was staged. You don't so I guess it can seem weird to you.
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I have real trouble visualising how the window can be open far enough for a rock thrown from inside to hit the far corner of the shutter, yet substantial amounts of glass still ended up on the sill. A limited amount of glass going backwards from the impact point is one thing, but a large number of big chunks seems implausible to me.

Since Massei's theory involves them manually rearranging the glass to achieve the final effect anyway, anything goes. They could just have picked pieces up and put them on the sill to create that effect, under this theory. However once you've gone that far you've basically got an unfalsifiable theory, and no possible arrangement of glass could prove Massei wrong even in principle.

As such, while we can't prove it wrong, it's absolutely no evidence for a staged break-in either. If it explained the evidence better than the defence theory that would give it some weight, but it doesn't.

I think Fine's scenario explains it best. The impact mark in the corner of the blind is not consistent with a rock thrown from outside unless the thrower is to the left of the window aiming toward the right (as seen from the exterior). The jamb is simply too deep to ever get this mark from a vantage point anywhere near the driveway or front of the house.
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It looks to me like someone standing on top of the elevated bit just across from the window has a very short, easy shot to hit the window right there.
 
Brooktrout said:
Perhaps someone so inclined might explain to me how Massei's reconstruction of the broken window accounts for the glass on the windowpane. If the panes were hanging open protruding into the room, with the interior shades behind them, then why wouldn't the broken glass follow the trajectory of the rock toward the closet, or straight down. Would this action really result in that much glass all over the sill?
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Surprisingly, a smashed glass pane does not in its entirety travel forward when broken. Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpTvuUwLAgY

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6092799&postcount=3214
 
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RoseMontague said:
The appeals don't make a very strong case (going by memory) regarding this. They brought up Filomena's earlier statement about glass being in the middle and under the clothes as well as on top and they also cover her different statements on the shutters (open, one closed and one open, and closed but not tight). In addition they talk about Raffaele's previous non criminal history of break-ins (but don't address how that is possible-LOL). The expert they used (the one that did the video) was pretty much trashed in court. This Hendry guy would have been a better choice (or anyone with a forensics and engineering background).
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Rose,

You probably mean Rudy's history, not Raffaele's. Which expert do you mean?
 
piktor said:
Surprisingly, a smashed glass pane does not in its entirety travel forward when broken. Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpTvuUwLAgY
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I think his point was that if the window frame was open far enough for a big rock to hit the far corner of it, then glass falling straight down (as seen in the video you linked) would not end up on the sill, it would end up on the floor.

To end up on the sill directly those large chunks of glass would have to actually fly backwards from the impact point, not just drop down from it.

The Massei narrative has the stagers picking up all the glass and putting it wherever anyway, so this doesn't falsify the Massei theory or anything like that. It just means that the Massei narrative doesn't actually explain any part of the evidence better than Hendry's story and it requires a lot more fooling about to get to the same place.

So as far as major planks of the staging theory go, we've shown that there was evidence of someone climbing the outside wall, it was perfectly possible for a person to get to the window, it was perfectly possible for a person to throw a rock from outside to hit the window at that spot, that there was glass under Filomena's clothes, and that there wasn't any particular reason to think that there would be Rudy's DNA or fingerprints in Filomena's room if he entered that way.

So what's left in terms of "evidence" that the break-in was staged? (And what will the PMFers tout next as their evidentiary showpiece, if this mole gets irretrievably flattened too?).
 
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RWVBWL said:
Hi ChristianaHannah,
I agree with you completely...
I was just reading on Seattle PI that there will be a new judge for the appeals trial.

Candace Dempsey writes:
"Judge Sergio Matteini Chiari will preside, assisted by second judge Massimo Zanetti. In an odd twist, both are civil judges, not criminal."

Link:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/dempsey/archives/221712.asp

Interesting that the judges are civil, not criminal judges...
RWVBWL
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Happy days are here again...
Amanda will get off, most likely.
But civil judges?
There will be civil suits if Amanda gets off unless there is a plea bargain.
 
RWVBWL said:
Hi LondonJohn,
I would like to add something to this theory line that you forgot to mention, for it is kinda bugging me when I think of Rudy Guede being the 1 who stabbed Miss Kercher to her death.

After stabbing her, why the heck would Rudy have gone into the bathroom and grabbed towels to try to "save her", as he has said he did, and the evidence seems to prove?
Hmmm...
RWVBWL

PS-I am starting to really, really wonder if Rudy Guede did stab Meredith Kercher to her death.
But I do know that at some point after she was stabbed, he was inside of her house...
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Hi RWVBWL. I think Rudy meant only to hold the knife against Meredith's throat to threaten and control her, but things got out of hand. There are more effective ways of killing someone, if that is your intent. You could stab them in the heart, slit their throat, or hit them on the head with a heavy object.

I think Rudy wanted to believe he was making amends when he got the towels. He also wanted to believe Meredith was still alive when he left, which is why he took the phones and locked the door -- to delay any calls for help. He seems to have been in quite a bit of denial, to have gone dancing at a nightclub after the crime.
 
RWVBWL said:
Hi ChristianaHannah,
Yesterday I wrote a post on this, for I STILL find it odd that this police officer says that he DID NOT enter Miss Kercher's bedroom to check on her.

There are a 2 links to Perugia Shock, where a while back I had read of this:
""Paola and Luca saw Battistelli entering the room. He denies.
Paola's testimony at the end is not very effective because she can't say she really sees him in the room, and gets reduced to the sole deduction that the inspector must have entered.
(And who wouldn't enter a room when there's a girl under a duvet?)
But Luca saw him very clearly. And doesn't have any problem in recalling again, quiet and easy, those 3 steps towards Meredith. What's more simple than that? He saw him stepping inside and going to lift the end of the duvet."

Link here:
http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009/02/stranger.html

And this too from Perugia Shock:
"Paola and Luca see Battistelli stepping in the room. Paola goes out and Luca stays some seconds just in time to see Battistelli lifting the duvet to see Meredith's face."

Link here also:
http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009/02/falling-legends.html

I would like to think that if a person, especially a police officer, was going to check up on a person lying on the floor under a blanket -( who might be barely alive or dead), they would go and lift up the part covering that persons face, as Luca Altieri says he saw Officer Battistelli do.

From the photographs that I have seen, Miss Kercher was covered completely with a duvet, except for her foot sticking out. I just tried a test and stood in a doorway, walked 3 steps, and went about the same distance where someone's face might be if they were lying dead on the floor...

Why was Officer Battistelli lying about this?
Hmmm...
RWVBWL
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I can't say whether Officer Battistelli or Luca Altieri were lying, mistaken, blocking out a horrific image, etc. Their stories conflict and, as such, the motivations makes no determination either way.

On page 109 of the motivations there is this paragraph of what Dr. Lalli observed when he arrived at the cottage:

At the hearing of July 3, 2009, Dr. Lalli explained, in substance, what he had already written in the consultancy report dated December 12, 2008, made on behalf of the Public Prosecutor. He arrived at Via della Pergola 7 around 14:00/14:40 pm, where the corpse of a female subject had been found and identified as Meredith Kercher. He was wearing single-use protective gloves and shoe-covers. He entered the room in which the dead girl was lying on the floor, almost entirely covered by a duvet, leaving visible only "a part of the head stained with blood and the left foot, which was sticking out from the lower edge of the duvet" (page 2 of the report). He did not do any tests, as he had been asked to preserve the crime scene as perfectly as possible in order to allow the scientific police to carry out their work.
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If Officer Battistelli were able to see this description from the doorway he may have been able to determine that Meredith was indeed dead.

It is possible that the photos that have been public may have been photographed in a way so that Meredith's head was not visible out of respect for her family.
 
christianahannah said:
If Officer Battistelli were able to see this description from the doorway he may have been able to determine that Meredith was indeed dead.

It is possible that the photos that have been public may have been photographed in a way so that Meredith's head was not visible out of respect for her family.
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I have a feeling Battistelli said he knew Meredith was dead because he could see the neck wounds... (I'll have to dig out the link, but I think it may have been one of Frank's court reports).
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
I think his point was that if the window frame was open far enough for a big rock to hit the far corner of it, then glass falling straight down (as seen in the video you linked) would not end up on the sill, it would end up on the floor.

To end up on the sill directly those large chunks of glass would have to actually fly backwards from the impact point, not just drop down from it.
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Glass does fly :shocked: backwards :shocked: when struck by a projectile:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYnY5OQV3hA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZkXQu19-KI​

RoseMontague said:
Whole bunch of studies on this:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q...a:en-US:official&ndsp=18&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=vs
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RoseMontague said:
Very nice video demonstrations of the backward fragmentation of glass, piktor. The non-technical term was once referred to as backscatter.
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The first video nicely shows how much more glass travels forward then back.

The second is an obvious CGI 3d animation. Unfortunately not of the "physics simulation" kind.
 
piktor said:
Glass does fly backwards when struck by a projectile:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYnY5OQV3hA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZkXQu19-KI​
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Oh, I didn't realise that Filomena's window was actually shot by an airgun pellet or bullet. You learn a new thing every day.

Of course glass panes will react in different ways if they are being struck by a small projectile moving at very high speed. Filomena's window, by contrast, was struck with a large, blunt object, moving at relatively low speed.

And, thankfully for all of us, there have been many academic studies on the distribution of glass from windows broken with exactly these sorts of blunt objects travelling at these sorts of speeds. The studies are very useful in helping to establish what sort of glass evidence might travel backwards onto someone breaking a window in the course of committing a burglary.

Rose posted a link to some of these studies a few posts up. You might want to read some of the papers cited in that link. They all demonstrate that all of the larger pieces of broken glass would either fall forward or vertically downward, and that the only pieces propelled backwards by more than a foot or so would be well below 1mm in size (that's around 1/32 inch for you imperially-minded colonials...).

So, in fact, the glass distribution in this case is very consistent with a window being broken from the outside with a rock. One would expect sub-1mm pieces of glass to have projected backwards beyond the window sill and onto the grass below, but unfortunately the Perugia police don't seem to have conducted a sufficiently thorough search of the ground below the window. Shame, that.
 
Katody Matrass said:
The first video nicely shows how much more glass travels forward then back.

The second is an obvious CGI 3d animation. Unfortunately not of the "physics simulation" kind.
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I'm sure Piktor is aware that the side view in that first video has the projectile (which in any case isn't analogous to a thrown rock) travelling from right to left, as opposed to the more conventional left to right.....
 
RoseMontague said:
Very nice video demonstrations of the backward fragmentation of glass, piktor. The non-technical term was once referred to as backscatter.
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Thank you, Rose.

A lot of what "does not make sense" when I read it, makes sense when I see it.

Same goes for police investigators: they have seen in their experience so many things. But to a newcomer, reading about it "just doesn't make sense".
 
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