1. At 20:56 she attempted to call home. The attempt failed because either no one answered, or she wasn't in a good zone, or the network was congested. What is surprising is that she didn't try to call home again, although she usually spoke to her family before going to bed, and even several times a day. This fact together with the absence of her usual text messages seem to indicate that the events leading to the murder started around this time.
2. There are three other actions registered on Meredith's phone which lead them to believe that the phone was not in her possession at this time. (Before describing them I note that Massei attributes all of them to Meredith's having been lying on her bed, playing around or fiddling with her phone.)
3. The first was an unsuccessful call to her voicemail 901. This appeal states that this activity is totally anomalous in respect to Meredith's usual phone habits and do not believe the call was initiated by her. In particular, if she were home alone with her phone in working order, why would she have interrupted that call before the end of the voice message? (I recall Massei as guessing that she changed her mind because it would be expensive and mentions this as being typical of her frugal habits, whereas the appeal says that Massei says that the phone buttons may have simply been pressed by accident.)
In any case, they say that if Meredith had really connected with the voicemail message even partially, the call would have appeared on the cellphone registers (and cost something), whereas in fact it appears nowhere except within the phone itself, so that it was made and shut off almost instantaneously. They attribute this to a movement on the part of someone else holding or touching the phone.
4. Just two minutes later, at 22:00, a similar unsuccessful attempt to call a contact, the bank “Abbey”. The appeal quotes Massei as erroneously writing that this call appeared in the cell phone records but not in the phone, whereas in fact the contrary is true, indicating that the call, like the previous one, was really just the almost instant pressing of a button. Furthermore, the call was made without the international prefix 0044 and they add that Meredith knew perfectly well that you have to do 0044 before a call to England and also that you cannot call a bank at night. Massei's explanation for this, again, is that she was playing around with her phone. The appeal suggests that someone else was handling an unfamiliar phone “in a convulsive way”. They suggest that at 22:00 the murder had already been done and the two calls indicate impulsive and frenetic movements.
5. The third call was the 22:13 “GPRS” connection (reception of mms or connection to internet or involuntary movement). This one lasted 9 seconds and was detected by a cell tower which can actually cover via della Pergola and also the place where the cell phones were found. The appeal quotes Massei as stating in one place (p. 337) that this tower does not cover the garden in via Sperandio and in another place (p. 352) that it does; they confirm that the tower covers via Sperandio very well. Their interpretation is that the murderer was rushing along holding the phones when suddenly one of them rang because of the reception of this mms message, to which the murderer reacted by flinging the phones away. They furthermore note that the only other calls Meredith ever made which were caught by that particular cell tower were at 12:11 (Amanda's) and 16:22 (?), no other calls that she ever made from home. Massei explains the absence of this incoming mms message in Meredith's phone by the fact that she deleted it without opening it, confirming the fact that she was at home with her phone at 22:13. But the appeal raises the interesting point that in fact Meredith's phone received an mms message the following day, Nov. 2 at 20:30 and that message itself did not remain in the phone even though no one actually deleted it and the police looked for it. So, there is no proof that Meredith was handling the phone at 22:13. They quote Massei as saying that if the murderer had been holding the phone at 22:13, he would have had no reason to throw the phone away, just turn it off or remove the SIM card, even less reason to throw the other phone away. The appeal responds that this behavior might be normal for a thief but that after a murder in a panic situation one is not thinking like that.