Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Chris C]

Justinian2,

Do you have any thoughts on whether Guede could have broken into the flat via the front door? I seem to recall that Chris C suggested this some time ago.

Yes I suggested it about going in through the front door. It was one of the many possibilities. Toss a rock through window and wait a few minutes. If the person home don't respond, he could have gone in through the front door. If he is experienced enough at picking or popping locks he could have done it in just about the same time as it would have required him to climb through the window. Considering the front door lock was already damaged I'm not sure exactly what evidence would have been left behind from an entry through the front door.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Guede and story changing

I have often thought he is a serial liar.

Curiously neither Barbie Nadeau nor Nick Pisa challenged one of Guede's lawyers who asserted that Guede never changed his story.

 

[Dan O.]

Yes I suggested it about going in through the front door. It was one of the many possibilities. Toss a rock through window and wait a few minutes. If the person home don't respond, he could have gone in through the front door. If he is experienced enough at picking or popping locks he could have done it in just about the same time as it would have required him to climb through the window. Considering the front door lock was already damaged I'm not sure exactly what evidence would have been left behind from an entry through the front door.

The damage to the front door hardware was limited to the slide latch. The result was that the door had to be locked with a key. The lock on that door is a deadbolt. You can't slip a deadbolt like it was a slide latch. When Rudy was caught in the nursery in Milan they found him in possession of tools but not lock picks. Your assumption that Rudy was experienced at picking locks has no merit.

 

[Justinian2]

The murder sounds like a typical serial murder. From what I've heard, serial murderers like to have sex with dead bodies.

The last show I saw on serial murderers suggested that it was their profile to have a relatively long lapse between the first two murders. Then they would pick up steam and turn them out with increasing frequency.

No fact here. Just a couple of TV programs. Just trying to jog some thinking...

 

[Justinian2]

The damage to the front door hardware was limited to the slide latch. The result was that the door had to be locked with a key. The lock on that door is a deadbolt. You can't slip a deadbolt like it was a slide latch. When Rudy was caught in the nursery in Milan they found him in possession of tools but not lock picks. Your assumption that Rudy was experienced at picking locks has no merit.

It doesn't take much to open a door, as I found out the hard way. Just a knife. That's all it takes.

 

[Chris C]

Yes, I can see the motive for someone to stage a break-in to distract the police. However, it makes NO sense in the Amanda Knox case. Staged break-in or no staged break-in, I can't understand any logic that would implicate a conspiracy with Guede.

You dont need to stage a break-in to distract the cops. Whats the point. You have a dead sexually assaulted naked girl that wasn't touched by Knox or Sollecito, and a front door left wide open with Guede's bloody footprints heading out the door. Why stage a break in or better yet lock Meredith's door.

Thats the whole problem with the prosecutions scenario. They want to claim Knox is the mastermind and wanted to control the crime scene. Yet breaking a window and locking Meredith's door takes that control away from Knox, she can't discover the body. Its obvious a clean up never occured no matter what the prosecution claims. So if Knox wanted to control the evidence, she would come home and find Meredith's body in her room with the door open. If she didn't want to control the crime scene, her and Sollecito would have been out of town asap and Knox would not have gone home at all that next morning. Either way, Knox would want Meredith's door unlocked so the body could be discovered by someone else or unlocked so she could discover it. The locking of the door was done so the body would go undiscovered as long as possible. Which is something that doesn't fit with Knox being guilty in this case.

 

[Chris C]

The damage to the front door hardware was limited to the slide latch. The result was that the door had to be locked with a key. The lock on that door is a deadbolt. You can't slip a deadbolt like it was a slide latch. When Rudy was caught in the nursery in Milan they found him in possession of tools but not lock picks. Your assumption that Rudy was experienced at picking locks has no merit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnS6leHfB2c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZJe23UD8wU&feature=related

Who needs experience.

 

[LondonJohn]

Joseph Neff and Mandy Locke wrote, “Perhaps the biggest challenge facing new SBI Director Greg McLeod is changing the culture of the SBI and the laboratory. Analysts have worked to support the theories of prosecutors, instead of rendering detached scientific analysis. Training manuals, some which have been withdrawn, have coached analysts to support prosecutors and distrust defense attorneys. This bias extended down to the very way analysts reported test results. ‘They were writing reports to law enforcement,’ said Chris Swecker, the former FBI supervisor who audited the blood cases. ‘They were trying not to write any negative test results.’”
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/08/19/635629/sbi-labs-prosecutorial-slant-still.html#ixzz1LFq4Z1h4
Perhaps consciously echoing a suggestion for reform from the National Academy of Sciences, “Legislators and defense attorneys have repeatedly called for removing the lab from the SBI and making it an independent entity loyal to science, not prosecutors.” My point is that the behavior of the forensic workers with respect to this case are not unprecendented, and some of us who criticize their work are not being selective.

All of the above is highly illustrative of why it's a bad idea for forensic science laboratories to be a branch of the police service. Unfortunately, however, there's an intrinsic bias towards prosecuting authorities by whoever's doing the forensic analysis, even if they're a truly independent entity. This is because forensic science units/companies are naturally inclined to want to please their overwhelmingly-largest employer - which will always be the local police force and/or prosecuting authorities.

To me, the solution seems pretty obvious. It's time that some form of double-blind controlled procedures are set up in order to preserve the true neutrality of forensic testing. This is already done at the most basic level when dealing with, for example, witness identification. Police don't take witnesses to a room with just the suspect in it and ask "Was this the guy who you saw?". They (and the courts) know full well that this can give false results. Instead, they put the suspect in a room with five or six other, similar-looking people. In that way, the witness has to make a positive choice. I can't see why similar principles can't apply to forensic analysis.

What's particularly egregious in this particular case is that Stefanoni was seemingly "told" by her police colleagues to look for Meredith Kercher's DNA on the knife blade. Had she simply been given the knife, and asked to report whether there was any DNA material on it, she'd almost certainly only have reported Knox's (on the handle). Instead, she cranked the testing machine up way beyond its acceptable sensitivities for the laboratory conditions in which it was being used, until Meredith's profile magically came into focus.

 

[LondonJohn]

It doesn't take much to open a door, as I found out the hard way. Just a knife. That's all it takes.

You can't open a decent cylinder lock with a deadbolt using just a knife. The door to the cottage was definitely not either lock-picked or forced open from a locked position. The only possibility for Guede entering the cottage via the door is if it was already opened for him by someone with a key.

I consider it to be a viable possibility that Guede was conducting his post-window-break surveillance of the cottage from the shadows (with the intention of climbing in through the window once five minutes had passed) when Meredith unexpectedly arrived home. He could then either have approached and offered to help (assuming she'd seen the broken window) or he could have rushed her as she opened the front door.

I do not consider it to be a viable possibility that Knox let Guede into the cottage as part of some sort of "rape prank" or anything similar.

 

[LondonJohn]

You dont need to stage a break-in to distract the cops. Whats the point. You have a dead sexually assaulted naked girl that wasn't touched by Knox or Sollecito, and a front door left wide open with Guede's bloody footprints heading out the door. Why stage a break in or better yet lock Meredith's door.

Thats the whole problem with the prosecutions scenario. They want to claim Knox is the mastermind and wanted to control the crime scene. Yet breaking a window and locking Meredith's door takes that control away from Knox, she can't discover the body. Its obvious a clean up never occured no matter what the prosecution claims. So if Knox wanted to control the evidence, she would come home and find Meredith's body in her room with the door open. If she didn't want to control the crime scene, her and Sollecito would have been out of town asap and Knox would not have gone home at all that next morning. Either way, Knox would want Meredith's door unlocked so the body could be discovered by someone else or unlocked so she could discover it. The locking of the door was done so the body would go undiscovered as long as possible. Which is something that doesn't fit with Knox being guilty in this case.

I'd agree. This whole "explanation" (which many credulous minds seem to have bought wholesale) that the locked door was part of a fiendishly devious plan which involved Filomena discovering Meredith's body is contrived and ridiculous. Especially as it finesses the scenario so that Knox somehow "had" to be present when the body was found - but that she just had to engineer things so it wasn't her (or Sollecito) who found it.

Anyone with any common sense can easily figure out that if Knox/Sollecito had indeed been complicit in killing Meredith, they'd have chosen one of two options:

1) They'd have had Knox (possibly plus Sollecito) find the scene first thing the following morning. They already had a very good reason for Knox to go back to the cottage early on the 2nd (the planned trip to Gubbio), so she could have ensured she was the first housemate to arrive at the cottage that morning. By "discovering" the body, she would have known that she would compromise the crime scene - she and Sollecito could have taken the opportunity to walk all over the crime scene and to handle Meredith's body, thereby masking or eradicating their presence there at the time of the murder.

2) They'd simply have either disappeared to Gubbio as planned for the whole day, or just holed themselves up in Sollecito's apartment. They would then have waited for the first phone call from Filomena (or the police) to inform them of the grisly discovery, at which point they could rush back, shocked, and claim to have not been at the cottage since the afternoon of the 1st.

 

[Rolfe]

If the convicted female murderer were even halfway attractive, I might understand the fascination, and yet we have a woman who walks like a football player, sports a visible herpes sore on her lip and has been shown to tell lies more than the truth. Forgive me if I ask, where is the charm and who the hell cares what happens to her?

This is the sort of post that really angers me in all these miscarriage of justice threads. The accused was a bad or unappealling character in some way or other. Therefore he/she is guilty, even if the evidence is a crock of nonsense. Or at least, who cares if the conviction was unsound, the person in jail is not worth caring about.

It's not unheard-of for someone with a decently clean background to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, I'll present Sion Jenkins and Sally Clark in that context. But even there, scurrilous character-blackening was a major part of the accusation process. Sion Jenkins "sexed-up" his CV in a job application six years earlier - so he must have battered his foster-daughter to death in an instantaneous fit of rage without any motive (despite being a teacher in a boys school, with no history of losing his temper with a pupil, which rather suggests positively superhuman self-control). Sally Clark had rather too many empty wine bottles in her rubbish bin, or so some people thought - so she must have smothered two of her babies.

But far far more often the accused is someone it is easy to believe might have done it. The Maguire Seven were petty criminals living in a squat. Barry George was a malajusted weirdo with a stalking habit, a fascination with firearms, and a previous conviction for sexual assault. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was (probably) a Libyan security officer. Michael Stone was a scary nutcase who is probably better off the streets anyway. The West Memphis Three were.... oh, do I need to go on?

So what's the problem? The problem is that the people who carried out the Guildford pub bombings never stood trial for the crime. We have no idea at all who killed Jill Dando, or the Russell family, but the people who did it are still walking around out there. Whoever planted the bomb that killed 270 people at Lockerbie has never been brought to justice and is almost certainly laughing himself sick.

And there are people in jail for crimes they did not commit. Unappealling people, certainly. People who may well have done other stuff that isn't exactly sweetness and light, probably. But these are still wrongful convictions.

So Amanda Knox behaves like she's stoned a lot of the time, and told a bunch of ridiculous lies, and hey, some people think she's ugly to boot. That makes her guilty, how, exactly?

Maybe it doesn't matter in quite the same way in this case, because we know the real murderer was indeed convicted for the crime and is behind bars for it. Nevertheless, the principle remains. Declaring oneself content with a false or highly questionable conviction just because one finds the convicted person unappealling is a rejection of all that justice and indeed civilisation ought to stand for.

How appealling and attractive are you, and how squeaky-clean is your record (never thrown away a dozen wine bottles at once? everything on your CV completely true? Never said anything a bit unwise on the internet?) that you can be confident you might not find yourself on the wrong side of this argument?

Rolfe.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Judging by the heated arguments, that doesn't seem too settled.

What heated arguments? I'd say the discussion rather cooled down. I think it's because there's no sensible argument to make against the obvious:

Guede broke in. Meredith walked into a burglary in progress. Guede killed and raped her leaving heaps of traces then fled to another country.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

it's instinctive

What heated arguments? I'd say the discussion rather cooled down. I think it's because there's no sensible argument to make against the obvious:

Guede broke in. Meredith walked into a burglary in progress. Guede killed and raped her leaving heaps of traces then fled to another country.

Katody Matrass,

Who needs evidence, when you have statement analysis^TM to guide you? From the link I gave last night, "Pronouns can solve 80% plus of crimes...Amanda's admission via use of instinctive pronoun is reliable."

 

[Dan O.]

You can't open a decent cylinder lock with a deadbolt using just a knife. The door to the cottage was definitely not either lock-picked or forced open from a locked position. The only possibility for Guede entering the cottage via the door is if it was already opened for him by someone with a key.

Very true about not slipping deadbolts. A slide bolt is just held in position by a spring and can be pushed back using any suitable implement such as a knife, bent wire or credit card. I've had some doors where it was much easier to just slip the latch with a card than trying to use the key. A deadbolt however is locked in place and not going anywhere until it is unlocked. Sometimes doors with short deadbolts can be jimmied with a screwdriver or pry bar by forcing the door jam past the throw of the deadbolt but this will leave tell tail marks on the jam and door.

Picking a lock is a possibility. The simplicity of a pin cylinder makes it reliable but also easy to pick. Commercial locks in the US have a special indicator pin that leaves a tell if the lock has been picked. I don't know if this is standard on the euro cylinders of even if the Perugia cops had the lock checked.

I consider it to be a viable possibility that Guede was conducting his post-window-break surveillance of the cottage from the shadows (with the intention of climbing in through the window once five minutes had passed) when Meredith unexpectedly arrived home. He could then either have approached and offered to help (assuming she'd seen the broken window) or he could have rushed her as she opened the front door.

This only works for Guede if he cannot avoid being seen at the cottage. If he is hiding in the shadows along the drive he would be suitably protected from an occupant inside spotting him but he would be unavoidably suspicious to anyone walking down the drive. In this case, his best option is to claim he was just checking in on his friends downstairs and was off to find a phone.

If there was no sign of anyone entering through the window, I would entertain such a scenario. But we have the scuff marks on the wall, the glass removed from the window suitable for reaching the latch and debris on the cloths on the floor consistent with the coating on the exterior wall. There are also elements from Rudy's story such as meredith discovering the missing money that are incompatible with Rudy entering with Meredith.

I do not consider it to be a viable possibility that Knox let Guede into the cottage as part of some sort of "rape prank" or anything similar.

Ah, but bringing her boss home to meet her roommate is a different story.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

the police posited a clean-up pretty early on

From the Times, via Fox News, "Police said that Knox's room at the cottage must have been 'thoroughly cleaned' after the crime, as no traces of her fingerprints had been found in the room."
There must have been a cover-up; there is no evidence.

 

[Dan O.]

From the Times, via Fox News, "Police said that Knox's room at the cottage must have been 'thoroughly cleaned' after the crime, as no traces of her fingerprints had been found in the room."
There must have been a cover-up; there is no evidence.

Do they happen to mention that after her room was 'thoroughly cleaned', the victim walked into that room and left a fingerprint.


Do we have any photographs of the areas that were fingerprinted in Amanda's room? I'd bet there are plenty of partial prints proving there was no cleanup and the police are simply lying yet again. Do the photos exist or do the police claim the didn't think to collect the evidence.

 

[babycondor]

From the Times, via Fox News, "Police said that Knox's room at the cottage must have been 'thoroughly cleaned' after the crime, as no traces of her fingerprints had been found in the room."
There must have been a cover-up; there is no evidence.

I can think of several explanations for this Fox New statement:

1. The police did not test her room for fingerprints.
2. They were unable to get a clear set of anyone's prints from her room.
3. The police made the story up and fed it to the press.
4. The story's author misquoted it.
5. Amanda, the brilliant criminal, wiped her own room of her own fingerprints to fool the police into thinking she didn't live there.

 

[babycondor]

I have often thought he is a serial liar.

I wonder if he has a book deal waiting for him when he gets released.

 

[Bob001]

CNN report

Just an observation here: CNN is promoting an hour-long look at the Amanda Knox case to be broadcast Sunday at 8 p.m. (ET), presumably to be repeated during the week. I'd be interested in reading comments/responses.

 

[Katody Matrass]

I can think of several explanations for this Fox New statement:

1. The police did not test her room for fingerprints.
2. They were unable to get a clear set of anyone's prints from her room.
3. The police made the story up and fed it to the press.
4. The story's author misquoted it.
5. Amanda, the brilliant criminal, wiped her own room of her own fingerprints to fool the police into thinking she didn't live there.

As Dan O. wrote, there was Meredith's fingerprint in Amanda's room - so it would be 3. I also suspect they didn't dust Amanda's room (or any other rooms) so thoroughly for prints - after all they knew who is guilty by observing hip swivels.