Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Machiavelli]

<SNIP>
By the way, in city of Perugia, at least two other cases of murder with a staged burglary occurred during the last four years.[/QUOTE]

Hi Machiavelli in Italy!
After Rudy Guede was arrested,
do you know if there have been any more break-ins and/or burglaries on the 2nd floor of any building or apartments in Perugia, Italy?

Thanks,
RWVBWL
from Venice, California, USA

I don't know how many. I know in the Province of Perugia, in the years 2005-2009 there has been an average high number of thefts in homes, between 590 and 1084 thefts per year.
Anyway I don't think any datum on this matter could have implications, in either way or another.

 

[Machiavelli]

How do we know what Raffaele said to the police? All we have are the reports they gave to the press and the little he wrote in his diary several days later.

The story of the knife was that they didn't know he was carrying it. They probably didn't find it until after he had been arrested. For no reason.

How can you say he did not say "I don't remember if we had sex" and that he admitted having told a heap of crap?
Then you are always ready providing "probably" of your guess: Raffaele had a knife, this is a fact, and they found it before he was arrested (the decree of arrest was signed at 8:00). Obviously they found it after they got suspicious and, but before the arrest. The story of the finding f the knife is described by policemen, and was never denied.
You are the onw who - in my eyes - feels entitled to make statements for no reason. Only your sens of honesty can safe guard your reasonings. I can't do much if you decide things yourself. Raffaele in his declaration didn't make any change to what is known about this points, and refused to clarify further. Therfore, we are just allowed to assume that there is nothing to change. He was arrested because they thought he lied, as obviously apears from his diaries, from the Gip interrogation, from the mninutes of police interrogation, from Mignini's and Micheli's reports, from the absence of any statement of denial by himself.

 

[Solange305]

Solange305,

From page 151 in Murder in Italy, “Alternatively, Amanda would say she was not “treated like a person” until after she’d signed on the dotted line [at 5:45]. No food, no water, no bathroom breaks or naps.” So what Steve Moore said is disputed, but it is not agreed upon to be untrue.

The more general problem with your comment is that you don’t seem to be applying the same standard to ILE. We have documented their misstatements here for 11 months. Some are doubtless honest errors, but some look like lies (not disclosing that the TMB test was negative, for instance). We have also documented examples of their mistakes; the hard drives being the most recent example to resurface in this thread. Why does their credibility not suffer among the pro-guilt commenters here and elsewhere?

Hi Halides,

I don't see how Candace's quote in any way backs up what Steve Moore said. He specifically says that Amanda recanted her accusation of Patrick as soon as she got some food. In reality, did she not back up her accusation of Patrick in a written statement made the next day, and she had already eaten?

I think in essence both sides have the same complaint about the other, people have a tendency to forgive errors made by anyone who agrees with them.

 

[Machiavelli]

I don't believe somebody is actually asking why Raffaele Sollecito was arrested. After he was found lying, and after Amanda - his alibi, and to whom he provided an alibi - had admitted having been on the murder scene.

 

[RWVBWL]

<SNIP>
By the way, in city of Perugia, at least two other cases of murder with a staged burglary occurred during the last four years.[/QUOTE]

Hi Machiavelli in Italy!
After Rudy Guede was arrested,
do you know if there have been any more break-ins and/or burglaries on the 2nd floor of any building or apartments in Perugia, Italy?

Thanks,
RWVBWL
from Venice, California, USA

I don't know how many. I know in the Province of Perugia, in the years 2005-2009 there has been an average high number of thefts in homes, between 590 and 1084 thefts per year.
Anyway I don't think any datum on this matter could have implications, in either way or another.

Hi Machiavelli!
I Thank You for that info.

But it didn't really answer my question:
Have there have been any further break-ins and burglaries from 2nd story buildings and/or apartments in Perugia, Italy
since the murder of Meredith Kercher and the arrest of Rudy Guede.

As far as any datum on this matter not having any implications,
I disagree, for we are debating on a forum, not in a court of law.
And I am simply curious...

Anyone else from Italy or elsewhere want to chime in?
Thanks, RWVBWL

PS-Maybe I need to ask Frank Sfarzo of Perugia Shock. He will probably know.
Unless some of the pro-Mignini folks can ask Prosecutor Mignini or someone in the "Flying Squad" that question and then share that information.
_________________________________________________________________

PSS- Yesterday,
I had read that fellow JREF poster Matthew Best had lost a sibling.
As I left JREF and drove to the beach, I realized that I had forgotten to send my condolences in my last posting...

So here's to you MB, I wish your family the best as it deals with the loss you have suffered...
Sincerely,
RW

 

[Kaosium]

I posted one last week; maybe you missed it in the daily avalanche of posts.

More or less, I didn't have any interest in the Spader butchery, I thought it was brought up as a joke comparing a poster here to one of the murderers or whatever it was so I skimmed over anything in reference to it.

Well, now I know far more than I need to about it, thank you for that engrossing experience.

The attack on Kimberly and Jamie Cates was far more brutal than that visited upon Meredith Kercher. Two assailants hacked and butchered the victims using a knife and a machete. And yet, there was no physical evidence linking the machete-wielder to the scene (Christopher Gribble, the knife-wielder, goes on trial next February - it remains to be seen what physical evidence, if any, the state will introduce at that time).

Mind you, in the Kercher case, there is at least some disputed or questionable physical evidence tying Knox and Sollecito to the crime. In regards to Spader, by contrast, it needs to be repeated: we have "the complete lack of physical evidence linking the defendant to the crime scene". As such, it is evident to me that Steve Moore and those utilizing similar reasoning are in fact employing the "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" fallacy quite liberally.

Not exactly, did you notice something when reading about that case? They were turned in the next day by one of their mothers and when the police came one of them more or less said: 'Yup, we're sociopaths--book us!' No long interrogations and possible false confessions here, no need for the New Hampshire state police to spend time and money doing much more than collecting some blood samples, looking for fingerprints, checking tire tracks and fishing the bag of gunk out of the river and taking it back to the lab.

So it isn't that there wasn't any physical evidence of Spader at the scene, they just didn't collect much there because they didn't have to. From what I was able to find it appeared they had a woman inside collecting the blood samples etc, and a guy on the outside getting the bag out of the river and checking the tire tracks. The forensics department of the New Hampshire State police isn't exactly a scientific forensics team of an entire nation not that far from its capitol. If they actually wanted to cover the scene thoroughly and sweep it down for everything they'd probably have to call in the FBI from Boston. Why bother?

There's no mystery here whodunit, there's no real case to prove, his own compatriots testified against him, he bragged about it to his cellmate, and wrote a charming poem with a poor little girl asking 'mommy is that you?' shortly before he butchered her mother with the machete. The defense lawyer has nothing to work with, except perhaps to pretend that no forensic evidence collected implies there wasn't actually any there; that he wasn't the one who did the machete-wielding, but his compatriots set him up for a fall and that prose and talk in the jail was just fantasy, and the father and husband was lying for some reason when he identified Spader as the one who killed his wife, who saved their daughter's life by protecting it as much as she could with her body.

Tough sell.

In my estimation, Steve Moore is a fool, a charlatan, or possibly both.

I disagree, violent crimes unit and anti-terrorism as well as his evaluation suggests elite. He's not the only one who says what he does either, he just says it on American TV. You'll note there's no rush of other people with forensics experience coming out to refute him either.

 

[platonov]

I don't believe somebody is actually asking why Raffaele Sollecito was arrested. After he was found lying, and after Amanda - his alibi, and to whom he provided an alibi - had admitted having been on the murder scene.

I thought he was arrested or made a suspect before her, no ??
Once he withdrew both alibis as it were.

.

 

[LondonJohn]

Sounds like the distinction between the PFoJ & the JPF to me.

Either way the modern version of scribbling graffiti on the walls wont make a difference.

Except insofar as some aspects of the campaign [references to the victim & her family for example] are distasteful to many & probably counter productive.

.

Don't worry, I'm getting all the clunking Monty Python references. But what are they intended to signify? Are you a fan of The Kinks as well....?

 

[Kaosium]

Raffaele was arrested because the police thought he was lying. Also because, he declared he had previously told them a heap of crap, because his declaration was not credible ("I don't remember if we had sex", "I don't remember what we had for dinner"), and because he changed his version and retracted Amanda's alibi. And because he was bearing a knife in a police station.

Looking for something else I came across this at
http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/s...9T00:29:00-08:00&max-results=20Perugia Shock:

"Raffaele Sollecito questioned:
Q: Why you still had a knife?
A: I was so smoked that when they've taken me to questura I didn't take it away from my jacket."

Is he saying he went to the police station stoned on hash?

 

[platonov]

Don't worry, I'm getting all the clunking Monty Python references. But what are they intended to signify? Are you a fan of The Kinks as well....?

All ?? That was the first.
If you don't know what they signify in the context in which they were used then you are not getting them

.

 

[Kaosium]

The hard drive has already been sent out of the country once to attempt data recovery. It would be much easier to send the drive to Japan along with a court representative if necessary than to bring all of the equipment and expertise that may be needed to Italy.

One piece of equipment that may be necessary would be the optical bed for realigning the platters. There are also specialized tools for extracting and installing the heads that the company is not going to part with. The algorithms defining the track layout may be a proprietary industrial secret that gives Toshiba an advantage in the market.

So why won't the Italian authorities allow the drive to be sent to Japan? The data on the drive is Amanda's. The cost will be covered by Amanda's family. The Italian experts have already failed to recover the data on this drive that they destroyed in the first place.

The only thing I see holding it up is the Italian's pride. But the Italian's shouldn't have any pride left in this matter. Those bumbling idiots that they called experts were absolutely stupid in the way they tried to recover the data.
* They should have known better than to experiment with the forensic copying dongle on drives with irreplaceable data. You always use a test drive first to verify that everything is setup correctly.
* They should not have continued to fry more drives after the first failure.
* They should not have attempted swapping the logic board without first getting advice from a real expert with working experience with that exact model drive and first verifying that the procedure works and is safe (a real expert would say: if the data is valuable, don't try this at home).
* They should never have opened the drive outside of a proper clean room facility.

The Italian experts acted like stupid children with bloated egos. The courts should force those experts to publicly denounce their own actions, to admit that it was their mistakes that rendered the drive unreadable and make them pay for sending the drives to Toshiba where there is the best chance for recovery of the data.

Thanks for that answer! However I thought I read it was the courts that wouldn't allow it, something about leaving the purview of the Italian court and that a representative wasn't enough 'security?'

 

[Withnail1969]

Looking for something else I came across this at
http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/s...9T00:29:00-08:00&max-results=20Perugia Shock:

"Raffaele Sollecito questioned:
Q: Why you still had a knife?
A: I was so smoked that when they've taken me to questura I didn't take it away from my jacket."

Is he saying he went to the police station stoned on hash?

persons of my acquaintance tell me that a lot of stoners start their day with a big joint and then carry on in the same vein for the whole day. It's a lot more unlikely that Raff was not stoned.

 

[LondonJohn]

Amanda did not say that three people participated in the crime. She said Patrick committed the crime, and she heard it from another room. She did not mention Raffaele at all [corrected below by christianahannah -- Amanda said she didn't remember if Raffaele was there]. Raffaele was not even questioned about whether he participated in the crime.

Yet, the day all three were taken into custody, with no evidence other than Amanda's confused, retracted statements, this announcement was made to the press:

"In a brief press conference, the Perugia police chief Arturo de Felice said the arrests followed intensive detective work since Miss Kercher, of Coulsdon, Surrey, was found dead in her apartment on Friday. "All three participated in this crime. The motive was sexual and the victim rebelled," he said, adding: "The motive appears to have been a sexual attack. However, Miss Kercher was the victim and that's all. She was morally innocent of what occurred."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ans-murder-as-two-others-are-held-399287.html

Contrary to your claim, the suspect's complete declaration was kept secret, and a completely different one was conveyed in its place.

I think that that Perugia Police's press conference on the 6th November provides a very revealing insight into the attitudes, scruples and professionalism of this group of law enforcement officials. Bear in mind that the person heading up the press conference was Chief of Police De Felice - not some junior officer who might have conceivably become star-struck in front of the assembled media throng.

And for the Chief of Police of Perugia to have made such extraordinary statements in an official press conference as:

"All three participated in this crime. The motive was sexual and the victim rebelled", and

"Initially the American (Knox) gave a version of events we knew was not correct. She buckled and made an admission of facts we knew were correct and from that we were able to bring them in. They all participated but had different roles."

is little short of unbelievable. This was, remember, on 6th November - less than four days after the discovery of the murder, and before any of the forensic or autopsy results were available. Oh, and of course an innocent man with a cast-iron alibi (Lumumba) was one of the three "known" by De Felice to have taken part in the murder, in one of the three "roles".

I think it's very germane to the situation that the Perugia Police had come under a good deal of criticism for their handling of the Sonia Marra case over the previous 12 months. And that many of the international students in Perugia were considering their ongoing presence in the city. There are therefore certainly compelling reasons why the Perugia police and prosecutors would want to announce this case "solved" as soon as possible.....

 

[LondonJohn]

All ?? That was the first.
If you don't know what they signify in the context in which they were used then you are not getting them

.

Oh I'm getting them. The other was "Norwegian Blue".

.

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.

.

.

 

[platonov]

Oh I'm getting them. The other was "Norwegian Blue".


.

So why ask so

But you are right - I had forgotten "Norwegian Blue" , it was an edit.

You really got me.

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[Withnail1969]

Oh I'm getting them. The other was "Norwegian Blue".

.

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.

.

.

Dead parrot sketch.

People's Front of Judea and Judean People's Front.

 

[LondonJohn]

Dead parrot sketch.

People's Front of Judea and Judean People's Front.

Indeed. Although I'm rather fond of the "Cheese Shop" sketch for its inate silliness. "I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse".

And the "Argument" sketch stands alone as a sublimely skillful piece of comedy writing and performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y

Now, where were we......?

 

[Withnail1969]

Indeed. Although I'm rather fond of the "Cheese Shop" sketch for its inate silliness. "I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse".

And the "Argument" sketch stands alone as a sublimely skillful piece of comedy writing and performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y

Now, where were we......?

The 'Argument' sketch you posted seems strangely familiar. i can't think why. Now, as you said, where were we?

 

[Machiavelli]

I think that that Perugia Police's press conference on the 6th November provides a very revealing insight into the attitudes, scruples and professionalism of this group of law enforcement officials. Bear in mind that the person heading up the press conference was Chief of Police De Felice - not some junior officer who might have conceivably become star-struck in front of the assembled media throng.

And for the Chief of Police of Perugia to have made such extraordinary statements in an official press conference as:

"All three participated in this crime. The motive was sexual and the victim rebelled", and

"Initially the American (Knox) gave a version of events we knew was not correct. She buckled and made an admission of facts we knew were correct and from that we were able to bring them in. They all participated but had different roles."

is little short of unbelievable. This was, remember, on 6th November - less than four days after the discovery of the murder, and before any of the forensic or autopsy results were available. Oh, and of course an innocent man with a cast-iron alibi (Lumumba) was one of the three "known" by De Felice to have taken part in the murder, in one of the three "roles".

I think it's very germane to the situation that the Perugia Police had come under a good deal of criticism for their handling of the Sonia Marra case over the previous 12 months. And that many of the international students in Perugia were considering their ongoing presence in the city. There are therefore certainly compelling reasons why the Perugia police and prosecutors would want to announce this case "solved" as soon as possible.....

I see nothing expecially unbelievable, and nothing actually meaningful in relation to the indictment and trial.
We know there people who don't like the media attitude by the questore De Felice. We all know you don't like it since it has been three years the innocentisti repeat this point. Now we know you don't like the questore De Felice. And this means nothing in terms of innocence of guilt. This episode says nothing to me. I don't understand what you claim from this. This is not an argument to make assertions on what Mignini and Comodi did during the investigation, about how they worked, what they thought or whether someone fabricated evidence, how judges worked, even less to say whether the defendants are innocent.

 

[Fuji]

This must be the only murder case in the world where they caught a murderer that didn't live at the murder address AND the murder was staged!

No, this is incorrect. One notable case involving both aspects you mention in your post would be that of Christopher Porco, who drove 200 miles to attack his parents with an axe, and subsequently staged the scene to resemble a random burglary.