Continuation Part Six: Discussion of the Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito case

[Dan O.]

Here is a picture of how the "back" deck at the cottage was open to the road, fully visible, with the street lamp in the foreground illuminating it...

This question apparently will never go away. Here is my answer from July 2010 which still stands:

The balcony is infinitely more plausible to me and less visible allowing a much quicker entry.

Only an idiot would choose to enter a potentially occupied cottage by way of the "exposed from all directions" balcony. When Rudy breaks the window and the occupant wakes and turns on the lights, where is Rudy going to hide on that balcony?

 

[Bill Williams]

This question apparently will never go away. Here is my answer from July 2010 which still stands:

Only an idiot would choose to enter a potentially occupied cottage by way of the "exposed from all directions" balcony. When Rudy breaks the window and the occupant wakes and turns on the lights, where is Rudy going to hide on that balcony?

Isn't it something? A multiyear game of whack a mole.

A guilter named Kermit did a powerpoint some years ago on "the impossibility of the break-in through Filomena's window." I was neither here no there on guilt at the time, just thought of this as a fascinating "whodunit". The friend used to work at the local courthouse and knew such things....

Basically he said that whoever did that powerpoint was "overthinking" this. To his eye Filomena's window was an obvious point of entry, particularly for someone who knew what they were doing. (This was two years before the Channel 5 demonstration in 2013 which demonstrated in spades what he was talking about.)

On the issue of the deck at the back, he noted that being on a deck means unnecessary exposure, and I cannot remember if he knew about the streetlamp. Basically he said that no experienced burglar would use the deck because, as you point out, there's no place to go if discovered. From Filomena's window all one had to to was jump down into the deep shadow below....

He also said that even if it was easy to gain access through the deck, it was equally easy for Filomena's window... the way he put it was that why go for a 95% chance of success on the deck, when there's a 94% chance of success through F.'s window? The extra 1% is not worth the walk around the cottage.

Again, all this is predicated in assessing someone who knew their way around second-storey break-ins. My guy recommended heartily that whoever Kermit was, that Kermit keep his day-job because he knew nothing about break-ins.

So whether right or wrong, the people who seem to know the lay of the land for these things are all agreed... it's doable through Filomena's and arguably preferable for many reasons.

Enter Judge Massei. Even the convicting judge thought it was doable... he just argued that Rudy would not have gone up and down to Filomena's window three times.....

..... and the Channel 5 guy demonstrated that a climber would only have to go up once to accomplish the tasks Massei thought was so complicated....

..... talk about elements of wrongful conviction! And this mole is still being whacked in Dec 2013. None of it is real justice for Meredith.

 

[davefoc]

I wonder if anybody did a careful search of the rock for signs of the paint that might have attached to it as it struck the white interior shutter where Hendry thinks it did. Hendry seems to discount the possibility that the rock hit the interior side of the exterior shutter but there is some damage there that he shows in the pictures in his article. If green pain could be found on the rock that would almost eliminate any possibility that the rock was thrown from the inside.

I think you mean if green paint is found on the rock then that would confirm the rock was thrown from inside. Which is good logic. But someone should ask the police and prosecutor when they plan to enter that evidence into the case then since so far they have done no such thing.

You fail to explain the shard of glass that is embedded into the white inner shutter. This OTOH is easily explained by Hendrys conclusion which can only be the correct one.

...

There are three possibilities and I was only thinking about two and it seems you were only thinking about two of them.
1. The rock was thrown from the inside hitting the interior side of the window and perhaps striking the closed shutter. - this is the one I wasn't thinking about.
2. The rock was thrown from the inside hitting the exterior side of the glass first. This would have been easy to accomplish because it is an inward opening casement window. - this is the one you perhaps weren't thinking about
3. The rock was thrown from the outside probably hitting the glass first, then the interior shutter (where it left a small ding in the shutter) and then ricocheted over to the location it was found in.

My thought was that if green paint was found on the rock the only possible explanation was that it was thrown from the outside, bounced off the inside of the partially open exterior shutter into the glass, after breaking the glass it bounced off the interior shutter when it made the little ding in it and landed where it was found. You have made me realize that green paint on the rock would also not eliminate possibility one.

Altogether this is a bit frustrating. I can imagine that the appropriate expert could have sorted this all out and proved definitively which possibility was correct. As it is Hendry's arguments are just short of definitive it looks to me, but the use of this evidence that points to a break in to argue the opposite only because that can't be ruled out because of a less than thorough police investigation is sleazy to say the least.

 

[Antony]

I don't presume that Rudy could toss a 4 kg rock as fast as a bullet. The glass was pressed between the rock and the inner shutter forcing the glass into the wood.

Generally, when a rock is thrown through a window, the glass will enter the room about as far as the rock. We can see this in the defense demo video. However, in this case the rock transfers most of it's forward momentum to the inner shutter. The shutter being lighter than the rock and the impact point being near the hinge results in a reverse leverage that causes the shutter to open much faster and the resulting suction behind it is what propels the glass fragments further into the room. The rock after having given up most of it's momentum falls close to the wall where it lands in the bag with just enough forward momentum to topple the bag.

Yes, and this kind of random outcome of the event of throwing the rock through the window is exactly what would be extremely difficult to simulate. The place where the rock fell, combined with the impact marks on the shutter, allow us to analyse a genuine trajectory.

No stager would be able to do this convincingly. Any lack of randomness would be a clear sign of actual staging.

 

[Antony]

I already made my argument and nobody by now was able to refute it.

What argument? "Knox and Sollecito allegedly behaved suspiciously in unspecified ways that are also consistent with extreme stress, confusion and grief". That's about it - you have no argument.

You are now just attempting a low-level rhetoric game (definitions etc.) to divert attention from the particular point, because your side lost it.

The lack of self-awareness is spectacular.

 

[acbytesla]

Originally Posted by Machiavelli View Post
She is supposed to pay all damaged that she caused.
If found guilty of murder, she also has to pay the whole monetary damage to the house owner, Mrs. Tattanelli.
She also has to pay for the video animation

This in a nutshell is what this whole persecution is about. Money. Maresca, Mignini and their gang are really thieves and this is a shakedown. An attempt at some Italian Legal Kidnap for Ransom scheme.

 

[acbytesla]

Why is Machiavelli going on about Knox not showing "urgency" when if it hadn't have been for her, poor Meredith wouldn't have been found, perhaps for days? The reason Filomena was called and the reason the PP were invited in were because of Knox.

Sheesh.

I know, I pointed this out earlier, but of course Machiavelli waved it away just declaring that they were stagers trying to control everything.

 

[acbytesla]

The classical clues, as I know them, are: overly cooperative, or overly distressed. (over a more general period of time around discovery, not specifically before the finding of the body).

Overplaying of details may be present of this case. However, the suspicious behaviour of both Knox and Sollecito was perceived immediately, even by people who were not investigators (Luca, Filomena (I think it was them but might be Marco) for example, became so suspicious that they checked their car after they carried Knox and Sollecito on the back seat, thinking that they might have dumped some evidence item).

Classical? Who says it is classical? Morons?? Saying their behavior is suspicious is nonsense circular logic.

 

[Samson]

I don't presume that Rudy could toss a 4 kg rock as fast as a bullet. The glass was pressed between the rock and the inner shutter forcing the glass into the wood.
Generally, when a rock is thrown through a window, the glass will enter the room about as far as the rock. We can see this in the defense demo video. However, in this case the rock transfers most of it's forward momentum to the inner shutter. The shutter being lighter than the rock and the impact point being near the hinge results in a reverse leverage that causes the shutter to open much faster and the resulting suction behind it is what propels the glass fragments further into the room. The rock after having given up most of it's momentum falls close to the wall where it lands in the bag with just enough forward momentum to topple the bag.

This is the most vital point I believe besides the duodenum evidence. The glass shard was not pressed, there is pulverised glass Hendry does cite in the small crater, but the shard is in a quite independent part of the shutter. I did not mean with the speed of a bullet, this was merely to emphasise velocity, which would clearly be close to that of the rock. If one imagines throwing glass shards at hardwood, and I admit I have not done the experiment, it seems unlikely they would impale often, and certainly without tremendous velocity. If Rudy was standing on the car park, level with the shutter window complex, he would use maximum velocity for accuracy and certainty of effect.
It is my contention that the impaled shard is extremely unlikely, and extremely lucky for the pair IF the defence spend maximum time with a visual presentation. From day one of reading Hendry I have seen it as completely conclusive evidence against staging, and thus of innocence. Hendry states this in the simplest of terms, though only mentioning the shard, not developing the substantial implication behind it.

 

[LondonJohn]

Thanks for the complement but it was neither, in part because it made me sick at heart to have to write it and because I could only cover two instances as it was too damn long already.

In writing it I was reminded me of a post I saw a while back, someone said something to the effect that they wouldn't have any problem with being prosecuted by Mignini. That would mean they wouldn't mind be thrown into solitary confinement on entirely specious evidence and absurd speculations while the police seeded the press with outright lies and distortions of the evidence and the prosecutor filed charges on their family and supporters while wiretapping them and leaking embarrassing excerpts from them. Then prosecuted the real perpetrator and failing to appeal the mitigations that could be, while appealing the guilty verdict mitigations against them on the basis of 'evidence' like Daily Mail articles.

That's even before you get to things like producing bogus evidence in court because they fought tooth and nail to prevent anyone from accessing the necessary information to contest it which ought to be a regular part of the disclosure process.

Just because Peter Quenell and his minions say something doesn't mean it's true, and the ones that are true generally are only part of the story or amount to non sequiturs. Just because Mignini has gotten away with it so far doesn't mean it's permissible conduct, it's just a better indication just how untouchable prosecutors in Italy are. For crissakes I read somewhere that a court accepted that there was a double body swap in the Narducci case, to some that means it must have happened, to others it's just another indication of just how easy it is to get nonsense confirmed by the Italian system!

While I respect your opinion, I still think that Mignini himself does not currently appear to have committed misconduct to a criminal standard in the Kercher case.

I think that Mignini knows full well how to work just within the letter of the law (even if well outside the spirit and ethics of the law), and that this is what he has likely done in this case. Perhaps the most appropriate example of this is the 5.35am "notarisation" of Knox's second statement. While I would argue (and have argued) that the context and available evidence makes it pretty clear that Mignini was riding roughshod over the code in his actions, it still falls far short of meeting a criminal standard of misconduct in public office. Regrettably.

I think that Mignini was very clever and artful in his use of the police as a "plausible deniability" fashion. I do think that various senior police officers DID commit prima facie criminal misconduct, but I think that Mignini can successfully immunise himself from their actions. I think that Comodi might have a case to answer around the Stefanoni disclosure issues, and that Stefanoni herself very probably has a case to answer as well. But Mignini? Currently no, in my opinion.

However, if solid new evidence were to emerge (say,for example, tapes of the activities in the police HQ that night, or evidence of a close professional associate), my view on Mignini's potential criminal liability might change......

 

[LondonJohn]

What are you talking about? Amanda Knox did not express any urgency to enter Meredith's room. Quite the contrary, she trivialized or diminished the importance of it and offered instead reassuring explanations.
She even admitted this in her courtroom testimony.

I don't understand if you admit or you deny such fact (what does it mean "assigned a meaning inconsistant with that context"?). You are not being clear.

She trivialized, downplayed the locked door and expressed lack of urgency to enter the room. All witnesses reported that, there is no way to bring such a thing out of context.
This conflicts with her narrative and with her previous attempt of breaking down the door as she told it in her narrative.

I really don't see how you can hope to get around this.

By the way, now, after years, there is also evidence that she lied about the episode in her book. Because she places her "statement" in a situation where she is together with Filomena, she has Filomena interrupting her, starting to shout etc., but what witnesses reported was that Filomena was not there yer, she arrived later. Knox said her comment about Meredith be used to locking the door even when she was taking a shower, the first time to Luca, Marco and the police officers, they were reassured, and Filomena was not there.



Well it certainly had the effect of waiting for the arrival, first of Luca and Marco first, then for the arrival of Filomena.
Had she expresssed urgency to break down the door, Knox and Sollecito would have discovered the body alone, breaking down the door themselves, with no other witnesses except the police.



But this is irrelevant, this is no argument. I don't understand the aim of the reasoning. It's obvious that they would have broken down the door, if not immediately they would have done that within the next ten minutes or half an hour.
But the factual point that matters is that Knox felt no urgency to break it down.

So what do you suggest would be the motivation of a guilty Knox/Sollecito of feigning indifference about the breaking down of the door?

Can't you see that this makes absolutely ZERO logical sense in the context of a guilty Knox/Sollecito? Why would it possibly in to their benefit (if guilty) to act like this? Or, put another way, how can such behaviour possibly serve as a point of "evidence" of their guilt?

A common pro-guilt mantra (do you share it?) is that - for some reason - the guilty Knox and Sollecito deliberately engineered a choreographed discovery of the body. For some reason (best known to those pro-guilt commentators), they decided neither to disappear to Gubbio, nor to enact a "discovery" of the body all by themselves earlier in the morning (and thus have the clear possibility to "innocently" contaminate the crime scene and the body itself).

This "choreography" "theory" appears to revolve around Knox and Sollecito slowly ramping up their concern during the morning, to rope in Filomena and persuade her to come over to the cottage, to get the police involved, and to (for some reason) be present at the discovery of the body but not directly involved themselves. And if that's the "theory", then it clearly makes no sense for a guilty Knox/Sollecito to be actively trying to dissuade the police/Filomena from breaking down the door. In fact, according to this "theory", they should have been clamouring for the door to be broken down.

This issue about the door is, I'm afraid, another classic example of two psychologically-flawed phenomena of bad thinking: ex-post-facto reasoning and confirmation bias.

 

[LondonJohn]

But it is not easilly seen at all! You seem to have no clue what you are talking about. You are maybe relying on photos taken from 80 meters or more from a building, maybe with 200mm photo lenses.
Nobody could notice a person on the balcony at night, and even if anyone saw it, that wouldn't be suspicious.
A person climbing thought a window is suspicious! And that window is something like 10 meters from the road, it's in front of the cars passing by, in front of any passer by walking out from the parking lot. And close to the street lamps.

People who make extreme claims (especially when those claims are an attempt at contradiction) should perhaps take more care to verify their claims:











All taken from the road. All with seemingly regular focal length. All clearly showing the entire balcony.

Now, back to that "You seem to have no clue what you are talking about" part........

 

[LondonJohn]

Exonerating DNA? Hiding...? What the heck are you making up now?
The scenario involving Lumumba was dismantled by investigators between Nov 13 and Nov. 20.
Mignini wrote a letter to the investigating judge on Nov. 18. saying there was no serious evidence against Lumumba.

So why was his bar kept shut by the authorities for months afterwards? How could it conceivably be considered a crime scene (any more than anywhere else that Knox of Sollecito frequented, for example the university buildings - under the same "logic", why weren't large parts of the university shut down for months.....?)?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

There are three possibilities and I was only thinking about two and it seems you were only thinking about two of them.
1. The rock was thrown from the inside hitting the interior side of the window and perhaps striking the closed shutter. - this is the one I wasn't thinking about.
2. The rock was thrown from the inside hitting the exterior side of the glass first. This would have been easy to accomplish because it is an inward opening casement window. - this is the one you perhaps weren't thinking about
3. The rock was thrown from the outside probably hitting the glass first, then the interior shutter (where it left a small ding in the shutter) and then ricocheted over to the location it was found in.

My thought was that if green paint was found on the rock the only possible explanation was that it was thrown from the outside, bounced off the inside of the partially open exterior shutter into the glass, after breaking the glass it bounced off the interior shutter when it made the little ding in it and landed where it was found. You have made me realize that green paint on the rock would also not eliminate possibility one.

Altogether this is a bit frustrating. I can imagine that the appropriate expert could have sorted this all out and proved definitively which possibility was correct. As it is Hendry's arguments are just short of definitive it looks to me, but the use of this evidence that points to a break in to argue the opposite only because that can't be ruled out because of a less than thorough police investigation is sleazy to say the least.

The pattern of glass on the floor strongly suggests the window was broken by pitching the rock from the berm on the other side of the retaining wall. But it's not necessarily possible to tell absolutely whether any break-in is real or staged. Someone who is staging the crime could do exactly what a real burglar would do.

One must evaluate the totality of the circumstances. This is a homicide with a pattern of evidence that tells a complete story, and the break-in is but one element.

If Amanda and Raffaele had been involved in this, they would have been very clever indeed. They would have staged a crime such that the evidence could most easily be explained by Guede acting alone.

And they would have been lucky as well as clever, to have such a pliant accomplice, one who left his feces in a toilet, thereby augmenting the impression that he was already there when Meredith walked in, and who also left extensive physical evidence tying him to the murder.

 

[acbytesla]

So what do you suggest would be the motivation of a guilty Knox/Sollecito of feigning indifference about the breaking down of the door?

Can't you see that this makes absolutely ZERO logical sense in the context of a guilty Knox/Sollecito? Why would it possibly in to their benefit (if guilty) to act like this? Or, put another way, how can such behaviour possibly serve as a point of "evidence" of their guilt?

A common pro-guilt mantra (do you share it?) is that - for some reason - the guilty Knox and Sollecito deliberately engineered a choreographed discovery of the body. For some reason (best known to those pro-guilt commentators), they decided neither to disappear to Gubbio, nor to enact a "discovery" of the body all by themselves earlier in the morning (and thus have the clear possibility to "innocently" contaminate the crime scene and the body itself).

This "choreography" "theory" appears to revolve around Knox and Sollecito slowly ramping up their concern during the morning, to rope in Filomena and persuade her to come over to the cottage, to get the police involved, and to (for some reason) be present at the discovery of the body but not directly involved themselves. And if that's the "theory", then it clearly makes no sense for a guilty Knox/Sollecito to be actively trying to dissuade the police/Filomena from breaking down the door. In fact, according to this "theory", they should have been clamouring for the door to be broken down.

This issue about the door is, I'm afraid, another classic example of two psychologically-flawed phenomena of bad thinking: ex-post-facto reasoning and confirmation bias.

I have to agree with you LJ. This is the bull that really drives me crazy. This reading of their behavior through a backwards guilty lens. Every action they take is supposed to be some sign of their guilt if we would only just look. That those of us who can't see this must be blind.

This so called deliberate controlling the show by Amanda and Raffaele. That is the evidence of guilt? Clearly Yummi, doesn't really know what guilty behavior looks like. Guilty behavior is what Rudy did. That is classic guilty behavior. Guilty is leaving the country without anyone chasing. Amanda and Raffaele did the opposite and through these morons' eyes this is guilty and suspicious behavior.

Why is it suspicious that Amanda and Raffaele called for the police twice pointed out the strangely locked door, and then waited for the police and then pointed out the blood and the poop etc and then took a back seat to the person who was leasing the home, effectively Amanda's landlord and the police?

The answer is it isn't.

 

[Supernaut]

This is the most vital point I believe besides the duodenum evidence. The glass shard was not pressed, there is pulverised glass Hendry does cite in the small crater, but the shard is in a quite independent part of the shutter. I did not mean with the speed of a bullet, this was merely to emphasise velocity, which would clearly be close to that of the rock. If one imagines throwing glass shards at hardwood, and I admit I have not done the experiment, it seems unlikely they would impale often, and certainly without tremendous velocity. If Rudy was standing on the car park, level with the shutter window complex, he would use maximum velocity for accuracy and certainty of effect.
It is my contention that the impaled shard is extremely unlikely, and extremely lucky for the pair IF the defence spend maximum time with a visual presentation. From day one of reading Hendry I have seen it as completely conclusive evidence against staging, and thus of innocence. Hendry states this in the simplest of terms, though only mentioning the shard, not developing the substantial implication behind it.

Glass (in fact all solids) are elastic to some extent.

For a millisecond or so, as the rock struck the pane, the glass would have bulged, storing energy, before shattering and releasing this stored energy. Much of the glass would have dispersed at MUCH higher speed than that the rock itself was travelling at.

Throw a rock perpendicularly through any plain window, and some of it will be projected way beyond where the rock lands.

 

[katy_did]

Another problem with the balcony as an entry point is that Guede would have had to climb up there carrying the rock, or find some way of getting the rock up there before he climbed up (or, I suppose, find some other way of breaking the window, but using a rock has to be preferable to sticking your hand through it). In contrast, breaking Filomena's window just took a basketball throw, which might make it a more attractive entry point for Guede given that he played basketball...

 

[acbytesla]

Here is the real question that makes this crime absurd.

Would Amanda or anyone really commit a murder with two people that they barely knew?
Would Amanda or anyone really commit a murder with two people she/they could barely communicate with?
It's important to remember that Amanda barely said two sentences to Rudy at the little pot party only two weeks before the murder. Amanda's command of the Italian language is minimal at this point and maybe someone could confirm whether Rudy speaks English? I didn't think he did.

And while Amanda and Raffaele were having fun with each other, they had still only known each other for precisely one week and neither was proficient in the other''s native tongue. Yummi the moron, would like us to believe that there wasn't any problems with communications. But he's an idiot. In fact, this story is all about miscommunications.

Raffaele is supposed to be this shy naive insecure guy. Yet he was a rock through all the intimidation and coercion. Amanda caved and gave the police Patrick who the police thought was the killer, then they turn around and just insert Rudy?

If there is word for moronic in Italian, it must be Perugian.

 

[acbytesla]

Delete

 

[andreajo]

Actually it's quite the contrary; the perception that the break in was staged preceeded all narrative about the crime. Actually it even preceeded the discovery of the body. Battistelli and Marzi suspected it was staged even before they discovered the murder.

And, of course, they revisited this perception that the break-in was staged when they learned that the man whose DNA and prints were found on the scene was an athletic burglar who had a history of breaking in by throwing rocks through windows.

Oh wait. They didn't.