Thanks for the detailed response John. I agree it seems more likely someone was fumbling around with a phone they hadn't used before considering the number dialed happened to be the first number in the address book.
It would be interesting to know if there were any fingerprints or DNA evidence on the phone if they were tested.
You're welcome
There were press reports in the week after the murder (almost certainly based on leaks from the police or prosecutors) that the police had found usable fingerprints on Meredith's phones:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article426558.ece
But there's an intriguing Times report from 6th November, which mainly deals with the arrests of Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba. However, it contains a final paragraph which is of much more interest:
Police had been thought to be closing in on the killer after examining Ms Kercher’s diary and finding fingerprints on her mobile phones, one Italian and one English. The same fingerprints were reportedly also found in her bloodstained bedroom and on the front-door handle of the student house that she shared with three female friends.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2816366.ece
This information (again, almost certainly based on police/prosecutor leaks, since the only other possibility is complete fabrication by the reporter) seems to suggest that the police had matched the fingerprints found on the phones with prints in Meredith's room and on the front door handle.
Now, we know that fingerprint evidence from the phones was never presented in court by the prosecution. So what can this mean? Well, if the paragraph above is true, then surely the only person who would not be implicated by having their prints found both on Meredith's phone(s) and in her room would be
Meredith herself. And since one has to assume that the police had taken Meredith's reference prints from her body, it's hard to understand why they wouldn't have looked to compare prints found on her phones and within her room with her own prints, as pretty much a first step.
So, the first possibility is that these prints all belonged to Meredith. But I'd argue that if this were the case, the police would have known this before they started briefing the press about it. Therefore, the police would have deliberately been leaking information to the media which they knew to be of no value to the case, but which they presumably thought would demonstrate their expertise in "solving the crime".
The second possibility is that the prints belonged to one of Knox, Sollecito or Guede. But since we know that the police found none of Knox's or Sollecito's prints in Meredith's room, we know that Guede would be the only one of the three that could possibly have his prints on the phone(s) and in Meredith's room. However, since no evidence of Guede's prints on the phone(s) was ever introduced into his trials, I discount this possibility too.
The third possibility is that the prints all belonged to some other, as-yet-unidentified individual. If so, this would clearly be massively important evidence which was withheld from the courts.
The fourth possibility is that there were indeed prints on the phone(s), but they actually belonged to either the people who found the phones in the garden (and presumably picked them up) or to the police who might have handled the phones when they were handed in. In the latter case, there's an intriguing possibility that one of the two postal police officers not only left his prints on the phone(s) when returning them to the cottage, but also inadvertently left his prints somewhere in Meredith's room (and remember that the police testified that they only fleetingly entered Meredith's room, and that they essentially touched nothing).
My guess is that the second and third possibilities listed above can be ruled out. I think the truth is either the first possibility (the prints were all Meredith's), or the fourth possibility (the prints all belonged to the same postal police officer - probably Batistelli*). Or there's another possibility: that there never were usable prints on the phones at all, and the police were "economical with the truth" when briefing the media.
* If they
were all Batistelli's prints, it's probably little wonder that this whole issue of prints on the phones was swept under the carpet by the time of the trial: it would tend to directly contradict Batistelli's testimony if it were shown that his prints were also found in Meredith's room.
