If it had been Amada who returned to the cottage that night at 9 pm, Amanda would have been killed, for it did not make a difference which young woman came home that evening. There was an armed burglar in the toilet who became trapped in the flat.
Meredith would have been interrogated, manipulated, and then terrorized to confess, and would be serving 28 years in an Italian prison. Her parents and siblings would be beside themselves trying to get the court to see reason.
The prosecutor would have used Meredith's history against her. She starred in a UK rock video. She had an arrest record for drunkenness and sassing the police. She didn't have a real Erasmus scholarship. She smoked pot with guys. She was falling-down drunk at the disco and dressed like a vampire on Halloween. She was intimate with the rocker downstairs, flagrantly left her vaseline out for every visitor to see, and when Silenzi went home for the weekend and didn't invite her to meet his respectable family, Meredith teamed up with Rudy for raunchy sex and killed Amanda for money or drugs. Yes, killed Amanda, the young, studious, hardworking girl from Seattle who liked to write pretty verse and wanted to become an Italian language translator. The police chief would have gone in front of the cameras and announced "Meredith told us what we knew to be correct. Case closed."
