Wow, I didn't remember how clear Massei was on the multiple attacker issue (or non-issue). Looking back on the closing arguments and the appeal in general, one of the interesting things about them is the way that the prosecution tried to shape not only the trial, but also the acquittal, once they realized it was inevitable. So Mignini introduced the idea of a multi-million dollar PR campaign (lifted straight from PMF & TJMK!) into his closing argument, not for the benefit of the jury - they knew they'd lost the case anyway - but for the media, to try and condition how the acquittal would be received. And it worked! Even a pretty reputable news organization like the BBC included the line about Amanda's parents launching a "massive PR campaign" in their coverage of the appeal verdict. And so a case which began with hugely prejudicial media coverage
against the defendants, making it impossible for them to get a fair trial in the first court, was somehow turned into an acquittal supposedly influenced by American media coverage! Utterly crazy, and yet very skilled manipulation of the facts by Mignini.
I think the multiple attacker theory is another example of the prosecution trying to shape how people see the acquittal. Rather than asking whether the police got it wrong in charging multiple people with the crime, it's assumed the police got it partly right by charging multiple people, but wrong in who those people were! (or actually, right, since underlying the question "Who were the others...?" is the implication that those others were Amanda and Raffaele, who got away with it). And yet no convincing evidence that there were multiple attackers is ever cited, often no evidence is mentioned at all: instead the usual argument is that the Supreme Court said it must be so, and so it is. Never mind that Rudy had an
abbreviated trial, and so the information the SC had access to was much more limited than the information Hellmann's court had access to. The Supreme Court said it must be so, and the Supreme Court creates reality, apparently.
Where some kind of evidence
is cited, it's usually the number of injuries, and the idea that Meredith couldn't have been restrained by the wrists and stabbed by the same person. For some reason the obvious possibility that these different injuries happened at
different times doesn't seem to be considered!
For comparison, the trial of Vincent Tabak for the murder of Jo Yeates is ongoing at the moment: she suffered 43 injuries, there were marks on her wrists suggesting she had been pinned down, and she had been strangled.
Using the logic applied to the Kercher case, we'd have to conclude that more than one person was involved here too, or else one person with six hands. How could he pin her down and strangle her at the same time, as well as causing all the other injuries? And yet only one person is charged with her murder.
No one has ever put forward any convincing case that there were multiple attackers; the argument that Meredith couldn't have been restrained by the wrists and stabbed by one person is as nonsensical as arguing that Jo Yeates couldn't have been restrained by the wrists and strangled by one person. Of course, it can't be ruled out that there
were more people present, given the poor handling of the crime scene, but no positive evidence exists to suggest there were.
I think the problem is the police had the wrong theory to begin with, and charges ("complicity to commit murder") were laid based on the faulty theory. I'm not sure how that can be resolved, but it seems more like a legal problem than anything else; the
least sensible way to resolve it would be to assume there must have been multiple people involved based on the theory these police -
these police - came up with at the very start of the case. Yet somehow, Mignini and Maresca have managed to make this the dominant view. Again, utterly crazy.
