Oh, and just as a small aside to the toxic hard core of people who seem more interested in personalities than arguments: as I've stated very many times before, I only developed an interest in this case in around March 2010, when I bought "Darkness Descending" (funnily enough, I bought it because it was in a 3-for-2 deal in WH Smith's). The book painted a very pro-guilt picture, including a number of "facts" which I was later to discover were not actually facts at all. The "fact" in this book which most convinced me of Knox's and Sollecito's guilt (at that point in my knowledge) was the timing of the phone calls made by Knox and Sollecito to mother/sister/police on the 2nd November. Since the book stated as fact that these calls were made after the postal police officers arrived, I simply could not reconcile this with anything other than culpability. And, in addition, the book made the forensic evidence out to be very solid and clear-cut. And it stated as near-fact that the break-in was staged.
So, it's entirely true to say that in April 2010 I was a "firm guilter". However, I was niggled by the accounts of the 5th/6th November interrogations of Sollecito and Knox, and decided (for the first time, incidentally) to search out some online forums to see what others were saying about the case, and to try to get more understanding of the parts that niggled me.
Naturally, the sites which first came up in a search were PMF and TJMK. So that's where I went. I'd never even heard of JREF at that point (although I was aware of Randi, and have long been a fan of similar thinkers such as Derren Brown, Penn & Teller and Richard Dawkins). So I started posting on PMF. But the more I posted and interacted, the more I came to realise that this was a community primarily consisting of aggressive zealots, who somehow managed to blend together some interesting discussion of the case (and some very good research resources) with pack-like personal attacks on anyone who wasn't part of the clique. I almost immediately started to attract personal abuse, which made me a bit confused and somewhat defensive. And I soon began to understand that the prevailing ethos on PMF was to "circle the wagons" and defend their ideology at any cost - all under a spurious (and misleading) cloak of "ensuring justice for poor Meredith", and some sort of bizarre claim to be the "protectors" of Meredith Kercher and her memory. Needless to say, alarm bells started ringing.
During April and May, I read and learned far more about the case. I learned that the 2nd November phone calls were almost certainly made before the postal police arrived. I learned that the forensic evidence was not nearly as strong and clear-cut as I'd first been led to believe. I learned that the break-in was nowhere near proven to have been staged, and in fact was consistent in very many ways with a real break-in. I learned that the prosecutor and the first court were most likely completely wrong about the time of death, the manner of death, the veracity of key witnesses, and the way in which they treated Knox and Sollecito in November 2007. And I learned about JREF, and started posting here.
So I went from being a "firm guilter" with a couple of questions that I wanted answering, to being more and more on the fence, to being pretty convinced that the convictions of Knox and Sollecito were unsafe. It's called an iterative process. And since then, further learning and understanding has led me to think that Knox and Sollecito were likely not to have had anything to do with the murder of Meredith Kercher whatsoever.
