And you'd be very welcome! We also claim
credit for being home to the guy who started Starbucks.
I'm pretty shocked, to tell you the truth, that someone with Machiavelli's reputation for intellect and sharp commentary is so sloppy, oblivious to his own prejudice, and willing to distort random bits of trivia into defamatory claims.
Credit..... shame..... what's the difference?!
I'm also going to be predictably pedantic here and restate once again that what people know (or think they know) about Knox, Seattle, Perugia, students in general, Sollecito, Knox's relationship with Sollecito, Lumumba, Le Chic, Guede's childhood, Meredith's relationship with the boys downstairs, the other girls' drug-taking habits.......
........ is all of virtually no importance when trying to assess the ONLY two relevant questions to this discussion:
1) Is there sufficient evidence to prove Knox's (and Sollecito's) guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? (A supplementary question is how much credible, reliable evidence of their guilt even exists at all, regardless of the reasonable doubt standard)
2) What is the closest educated guess we can get to the actual truth of what happened to Meredith Kercher in that cottage on that night, based on the available evidence (and lack of evidence)?
I repeat once more that every one of the "soft" factors in my list above is of absolutely no relevance to answering the first question, and can only be of very limited relevance to trying to answer the second question. Take, for instance, the relationship between Knox and Sollecito. Now, it's very true to say that it's pretty much totally unheard of for two well-educated people who've only known each other and been in a romantic relationship for six days to participate in a joint murder of a third person (or even to carry out some sort of assault on a third person which escalates to murder). But there's a chance - no matter how small - that this MIGHT happen, and that this might have been that one instance that it did happen.
So no matter whether you rate the chances as a 100:1 shot or even a 10,000:1 shot, occasionally that "1" is going to happen. You simply cannot, therefore, say rationally that the sort length of Knox's/Sollecito's relationship in any way "proves" that they couldn't have teamed up to murder Meredith. What you CAN say, however, is that all the known evidence indicates that it's massively unlikely that two people who'd only been together for under a week would commit murder together, and that this therefore tends to strongly support the notion that Knox and Sollecito were, at the very least, not jointly involved in the murder.
And you can treat every other "soft" factor in this way. But in terms of the judicial guilt/non-guilt of Knox and Sollecito, the ONLY thing that matters is evidence directly related to their involvement in the murder itself - or, in this case, the complete lack of credible, reliable evidence pointing in that direction.
In trying to answer the second question (what is the closest we can guess to the truth?) soft factors have a slightly larger role to play, but again you have to go back to the actual evidence directly pertaining to the crime for the vast majority of the answer. And in this case, the answer is this:
Guede broke into the deserted cottage, hoping to steal valuables to sell for cash; Meredith came home unexpectedly at 9pm; there was, for some reason, a confrontation between Guede and Meredith (very possibly because Guede found he could not exit stealthily through the now-locked front door); Guede ended up stabbing and sexually assaulting (and/or raping) Meredith; Guede cleaned blood from his skin and trousers in the small bathroom, and mopped up some of the blood in Meredith's room with towels; Guede went towards the front door to exit, but turned back - probably because he realised that he did not have the key he needed; Guede returned to Meredith's room, took her keys, cash and bank cards, took her phones and tried to turn them both off (pressing random dialled numbers in the process); Guede left Meredith's room, locked her door behind him, unlocked the front door, and exited the cottage without bothering to re-lock the door behind him; Guede took the quieter, darker route home outside the city wall, throwing away Meredith's phones on the way; he returned to his apartment, met some friends, and went dancing in the city-centre clubs into the small hours; he fled to Germany some 36 hours later.
