Hi , Skwinty, LondonJohn, and others,
Life's interesting, you never know where it will lead. I find I've lived thru a lot of similair situations when comparing this murder we discuss to my own life:
In my own life's experiences, I've had a photo published of me in a surf magazine, back in the '80's when I was a young dude, with a fliped up brim on the baseball hat, lookin' tough, holding a real Uzi machine gun that a big time local drug dealer surfer that I casually knew owned. A pose for the camera, tough surfer guy image, the magagzine liked it's potrayal of me and ran it. Didn't make me a murderer though.
I've had a female friend show me a video clip of animal porn that she found amusingly, sickly find of funny, and yet neithr she nor I are murderers.
I've been to quite a few classical concerts watching the Santa Monica Symphony play, and have even been to the Hollywood Bowl, and I'm still not a murderer.
I've smoked a lotta pot before, even smoked some Lebanese blonde hash a few times, and that didn't cause me to murder anyone.
I've lived with housemates and have been scolded before for leaving dirty dishes, and not cleaning up the bathroom. Heck, I even luved 1 gal enough to visit her therapist and discuss our problems, which included me scolding her for a lack of desire to help keep the bathroom clean. And yet I didn't murder her.
I've loaned condoms to both guys and girls, and never murdered any of them.
Great post!
I'm sure there are bunnies and kittens cowering in fear of you now! A far milder post of mine in a similar vein caused Treehorn to wonder if he should be scared of me. I thought that was funny and offered him some bodybags. I think he realized I was kidding.
Incidentally, the one thing I could help but notice eventually reading through the Foxy Knoxy smear eclectically, and finally I went looking for it as it puzzled me, was where were the ones about the people she
hated? Where was the supposed
anger in this girl? Why is she making excuses for people (police in general, the one who hit her during the interrogation, Raffaele when she was told he lied for her etc.) that might well have inspired rage in a lot of people?
At the time I was still on the fence and it didn't make her innocent, but it seemed to me a lot of effort had gone into finding her every foible and the one thing distinctly missing was her showing contempt for people in just about any way, she just didn't seem threatening or make any and you'd figure they'd find that and zero in on it when making a monster of her was the goal. There were some
weird things she (supposedly in one case) said, that snappish (presumably) comment about whether bleeding to death would hurt, but it didn't seem she lost control often in a negative way.
I remember when something was being criticized here and
this (post of March 2nd) hadn't been released yet at that site and it was said that were it to be, it would make Amanda look something like a crazed maniac. I'd wondered what it was, and actually was hoping to see it some day, and eventually I wandered across it looking for something else and realized it had been made public later without uproar.
I read through it and it does come across as odd in a way, here she's been thrown in jail for murder and she writes a fairy-tale of sorts and draws pictures of happy things. Thinking about it though, it just seemed to me a sad girl trying to make the best of things and escape the misery she was enduring. At this point one might think some anger would be displayed, but not that I could see.
Some have recently been arguing that Amanda and Meredith were not friends.
I wonder, did they know that on Oct. 30, 2007, Amanda, Meredith, Laura and Filomena had gathered around the kitchen table together at lunchtime in their apartment for the last time? And when Raffaele showed up, he made them pasta for lunch?
Hours later, Meredith, with a couple of her English gal pals too, joined Amanda and Raff for some wine at La Tana Dell'Orso, one of the few above ground bars in town boasting boasting of having "Perugia's best wine selection". Meredith was said by the owner of the place to be a regular customer there, and they spent 2 hours together at the table sharing a litter of white house wine.
I might hazard a guess that if they had lunch together, and then happy hour too, well they probably enjoyed each others company. Wouldn't you agree?
I've sat at a table, with my luver, and some friends, had a bottle or two of wine and never murdered any of them.
I've read that no one in the house, either upstairs or downstairs, reported any tension between Meredith and Amanda. Nobody ever heard Amanda criticizing Meredith, raising her voice to her nor anyone else. Marco, one of the boyz downstairs, said their relationship was "idyllic". Heck, Giacomo, Meredith's luver, called it "tranquil", and makes mention "of all the people in the house, they got on best together."
Yet people still believe the prosecutions theory, which was used to convict Amanda and Raffaele, that Amanda, when told she did not have to work on that slow Thursday night, decided to bring over a
huuuge kitchen knife and with her new boyfriend of only 6 days help, and some other guy she barely even knew, physically stabbed her friend Meredith again and again in her throat, because they were not friends or had cleanliness issues.
Sure...
Thanks for the reminder of this, I had forgotten about it. Also I believe the night before the murder, on Halloween, she asked Meredith to join her and sent 'kisses' through her text, and of course they were facebook friends. Not of course that any one of those is especially significant, however when it all is added up it amounts to a 'mountain of evidence' (
) that Amanda and Meredith got along fine, and opposing that is catty gossip from the middle of a tabloid firestorm after a murder that amounted to little more than complaints loving
married couples might make sometimes.
Plus I recall an establishment where I once hung out where due to vent or something the acoustics allowed for guys in the bathroom to hear what the ladies were saying as they were washing up or waiting if you were in the back part where the ones where you sat down were. That would mean they should be able to hear too, but guys seem to talk less in the restroom especially in those comparative areas. I recall sometimes they'd say the
cattiest things about the people they seemed to be with, then go out and I'd recognize the voices and they'd be chatting away all smiles and everything. I thought that was funny, as it was not an uncommon phenomena.
Incidentally, I liked your post on sharks but I prefer dolphins. I guess I was influenced by the viscous defamation of them in "Jaws" as a kid, especially the part where Robert Shaw puts his fingernails to the chalkboard and tells the tale of the
U.S.S. Indianapolis. 'Eleven hundred men went into the water...' I forget how many came out, but it wasn't anywhere near that many!
Thank God, three pages later, someone finally uses Amanda's testimony to answer bolint's question about the toilet. It was not that Meredith complained about Amanda not flushing. It was that Amanda told the court that Meredith had once explained to her about using the brush.
