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

[Bill Williams]

And, by the way, it's probably time to revisit the issue of who first brought up Lumumba's name.
For me, the evidence clearly indicates that Knox had not saved Lumumba's number on her handset as a contact number. In other words, when she received calls or texts from Lumumba, what showed on her handset screen was nothing more than his mobile number - since she had not assigned a name to that number.

However, it's also clear to me that Knox recognised Lumumba's number as belonging to him - in other words, if she got a call or a text, and it just showed the number of the sender/caller (e.g. 01234 567890), she was familiar enough with the number to know immediately that it was Lumumba calling/texting. Indeed, it was very possibly this level of familiarity with the number that resulted in Knox not going to the trouble of assigning Lumumba's name to this number and saving the details as a contact.

And therefore, when the police found these messages on Knox's mobile phone, all they would have seen was the number of the sender/recipient. Not the name "Patrick" or "Lumumba" or "Bar" or "Le Chic" or anything. So it would have been entirely natural and obvious for the police to ask for the identity of the person whos number that was. And consequently it was almost axiomatic that Knox would have replied "Patrick Lumumba", and that therefore she would by definition have been the first person to actually say Lumumba's name.
But that's entirely different from the suggestion that Knox might have plucked Lumumba's name out of nowhere. It's totally clear to me that the police had decided that the sender/recipient of those text messages was a participant in the crime - it's just that they couldn't know exactly who that person was until Knox told them. Lumumba's phone was a pay-as-you-go SIM, and (by the sounds of it) it was procured in a somewhat dodgy manner. Both of those factors would almost certainly mean that nobody - whether the mobile operator or the police - would have been able to know the identity of the person who owned/used that SIM card.

So yes: Knox was the first person to say Lumumba's name in that 5th/6th November interrogation. But only because the police didn't - and couldn't - know the identity of the person whom they (the police) had already concluded (from their reading of the text messages) had interacted with Knox via text that night. So if Knox had had an identical exchange of texts with a totally different person on the night of the murder*, it's my belief that the police would have jumped to the belief that that person was involved in the murder.


* Say, for example, Knox had had the following text exchange with a female friend:

Friend to Knox: "Can't do anything tonight - having dinner with friends then might do some coursework. Some other time perhaps?"

Knox to Friend: "OK. No problem. Have a good evening. See you later"

If the Friend was not stored as a contact in Knox's phone, I believe that the police would have rushed to exactly the same sort of misguided conclusion that they did regarding Lumumba.

I'd made a point similar to this once I dropped the idea that Knox was guilty of calunnia. The belief in guilt on that charge is almost solely based on Knox's "motive" for blurting out Lumumba's name. After considerable review, and after considerable "debate" on IIP when I was on the dark side of this....

.... and after considering that this "conversation about Lumumba" was either...

1) BEFORE Anna Donnino arrived, therefore it was a non-English speaker trying to get informaiton out of someone who barely spoke Italian, or

2) AFTER Donnino arrived, and by her own admission she arrived into a scene so chaotic that she described herself more as a mediator than as a translator...​

And particularly after reading Drew Griffin's CNN interview with Mignini (who's describing what happens next, after the PLE had hard-wired a wrong interpretaiton of the SMS-text into their theory.... The phrase I had used was "who brought Lumumba into the room"? Perhaps then that phrase is not precise enough., as you imply above.

On this reconstrucyion around the "dance of the SMS-text" everything turns. IMO.

One has to be aware of the second-by-second dynamics of the scene as you describe it above... which led police to believe that Knox "named" Lumumba, but it was in actual fact a comedy of errors, borne not only out of Knox's fatigue... this second by second analysis shows how the police are reponsible fore criminalizing this, not Knox, regardless of who used the word "Lumumba" fist.

..... (side note: Machiavelli claims she could choose not to sleep, therefore was rested at this moment and herself purposely named Lumumba out of the blue to throw off the interrogation)....

.... but out of Ficarra's, et al., fatigue added to the pressure to solve this high profile, internationally covered case, they were in a hurry to criminalize this innocent exchange of messages. This is not the New York Police Department with murders every half day, this is a one-off for all these provincial cops, and out of fatigue and our confirmation bias (investigative myopia) they made a mountain out of a non-existent hill..

For me, the issue of how Lumumba got into that room is key - not the "word", but the criminalizatino of that name. That the PLE would declare "caso chiuso" the next morning is proof of the pressure they were under, and probably a whole lot of fatigue. They should have listened to Chiacchiera, taken a day and slept on it, and come back on the 7th saying, "Lumumba? Really!?" And they should have released Knox and Sollecito telling them to go home....

 

[Grinder]

I have a question for everybody
I have heard an argument that the US should extradite Amanda back to Italy whether guilty or innocent.
The argument is that the US cannot have it both ways.
The problem though is that many countries, even ones which we have treaties with, will refuse to extradite defendants.
I don't see this as really being any different

Opinions?

We had a guy named Mastro, a big local builder, go to France taking gold and jewels with him to avoid paying creditors and the Frogs wouldn't return him because he was too old.

 

[RoseMontague]

I'd made a point similar to this once I dropped the idea that Knox was guilty of calunnia. The belief in guilt on that charge is almost solely based on Knox's "motive" for blurting out Lumumba's name. After considerable review, and after considerable "debate" on IIP when I was on the dark side of this....

.... and after considering that this "conversation about Lumumba" was either...

1) BEFORE Anna Donnino arrived, therefore it was a non-English speaker trying to get informaiton out of someone who barely spoke Italian, or

2) AFTER Donnino arrived, and by her own admission she arrived into a scene so chaotic that she described herself more as a mediator than as a translator...​

The phrase I used was "who brought Lumumba into the room"? Perhaps then that phrase is not precise enough.

One has to be aware of the second-by-second dynamics of the scene as you describe it above... which led police to believe that Knox "named" Lumumba, but it was in actual fact a comedy of errors, borne not only out of Knox's fatigue...

..... (side note: Machiavelli claims she could choose not to sleep, therefore was rested at this moment and herself purposely named Lumumba out of the blue to throw off the interrogation)....

.... but out of Ficarra's, et al., fatigue added to the pressure to solve this high profile, internationally covered case. This is not the New York Police Department with murders every half day, this is a one-off for all these provincial cops.

For me, the issue of how Lumumba got into that room is key. That the PLE would declare "caso chiuso" the next morning is proof of the pressure they were under, and probably a whole lot of fatigue. They should have listened to Chiacchiera, taken a day and slept on it, and come back on the 4th saying, "Lumumba? Really!?" And they should have released Knox and Sollecito telling them to go home....

The key to this is when did the cops have Amanda's phone records? If they had them prior to her 1:45AM statement then they went looking into her phone for the texts they knew she had sent/received and to/from whom.

 

[Katody Matrass]

The key to this is when did the cops have Amanda's phone records? If they had them prior to her 1:45AM statement then they went looking into her phone for the texts they knew she had sent/received and to/from whom.

I'd assume they had the phone records from the moment they started wiretapping her phone calls or even before.

 

[Bill Williams]

For me, the issue of how Lumumba got into that room is key. That the PLE would declare "caso chiuso" the next morning is proof of the pressure they were under, and probably a whole lot of fatigue. They should have listened to Chiacchiera, taken a day and slept on it, and come back on the 4th saying, "Lumumba? Really!?" And they should have released Knox and Sollecito telling them to go home....

The key to this is when did the cops have Amanda's phone records? If they had them prior to her 1:45AM statement then they went looking into her phone for the texts they knew she had sent/received and to/from whom.

Well, I could very well be wrong on my own second-by-second account of how Lumumba's name came into that room, as a "criminalized" name....

But I do agree.... the key is how a criminalized-name got into the room. You're saying that Lumumba's name was criminalized even before RS and AK showed up for the fateful 5th/6th interrogations.

What is strange here, is that 6 years later audio tapes are starting to surface. This one audio tape on BBC3 tends to absolve Knox on this issue. What else is out there?

Grinder?

 

[anglolawyer]

I'd assume they had the phone records from the moment they started wiretapping her phone calls or even before.

Absolutely! This is what De Felice's other remark actually means. They formed a whole theory out of studying the telephone records.

 

[Bill Williams]

One thing an Andrea Vogt documentary is going to do is to soft-peddle Rudy Guede, the poor fellow he is. But you can bet your boots that Andrea Vogt is alos going to present Giuliano Mignini with an "aw shucks" attitude.

The fact is that once Mignini arrived at the Questura (if he hadn't witnessed the whole interrogation), his notoriety rest solely on his own abuse of a suspect's rights... where he acted "as if a notary" to further entrap an innocent, when she needed a competent translator...

...... and a lawyer!

 

[Bill Williams]

I'd assume they had the phone records from the moment they started wiretapping her phone calls or even before.

Absolutely! This is what De Felice's other remark actually means. They formed a whole theory out of studying the telephone records.

I don't want to go all Grinder on you, but what is lacking with this is actual evidence.

 

[Dan O.]

In that case there would have been no need for Patrick to testify (as he did) that he had delete sent messages to make room for new ones. Where do you get it from that one of his phones was not found?

When did Patrick testify? Are you thinking of Amanda's testimony?

There is never any mention of finding two phones programmed with the same number. Had they known that there were two phones they would not be able to present the claim that Patrick changed his SIM after the murder to inhibit tracing (unless of course they were incredibly stupid).

Then again, we do have in Matteini that Patrick was using two SIMS with nearely sequential numbers: 354548014227980 and 354548014227987. That this did not even trigger a curiosity is a testament to their stupidity.

 

[Grinder]

In that case there would have been no need for Patrick to testify (as he did) that he had delete sent messages to make room for new ones. Where do you get it from that one of his phones was not found?

Thought that Amanda that claimed she deleted for room.

Well, take a pew alongside Grinder and Leila and others who find things hard to believe even after all the evidence has been laid out. Three times now, we find Amanda saying she was shown Lumumba's message. De Felice blurts out they found messages from him fixing a meeting (the bit Grinder dismisses because the journalist was sent to China).

I added the reporter to Amanda's voice to bolster the text history not diminish it. Leila - new low blow

The cops knew about the exchange of texts but not the content. They knew they meant something. They forced her to admit to a meeting they knew had taken place at around the time Meredith got home (Amanda was not sure whether Meredith was at home when she and Lumumba got there) and they had a message that said 'see you later'. They blotted out what did not fit. As you can't delete half a text, they only told Matteini about half of Amanda's message. It took a long time before the rest of it (have a good evening) was put in the record.

They lost/destroyed the tape too.

I don't see that the PL outgoing message doesn't fit if the attack/sex prank were planned.

You think that they had the message but felt that if they presented that the bar was open but slow that the judge wouldn't have accepted her statements of 1:45 or 5:45 and set them free. Is that correct?

 

[katy_did]

The whole thing makes no sense. You quote from the letter to the lawyer:

The police are told she got a message from Patrick. They want to know about her reply. Therefore they knew who she was replying to, right? Patrick. She does not remember replying, though, so they confront her with her reply. All good. But why then would they suggest she was protecting 'someone - who was it?'. They knew it was Patrick! She is conflating things and she is also writing this after the Matteini hearing when her recollection has been influenced by what must have seemed very confusing to her - the fact that Patrick's message to her was said to be not available.

Hmmm, well now you seem to be saying Amanda imagined the police yelling at her asking who she sent the message to and who she was protecting. Of course, those are questions which would be especially puzzling if they actually did have Patrick's message in front of them. If they didn't, then arguably they couldn't be sure the message had been sent to Patrick, since they only had Amanda's word for that.

At any rate, the bit I quoted does show clearly that Amanda said she told the police about Patrick's message, which is the claim you wanted me to provide evidence for...

If I am wrong it means that on three separate occasions she expressed herself in terms suggesting she was shown Patrick's message and that De Felice (or somebody else at the press conference if not him) said they found messages from Patrick fixing a meeting, when nothing of the kind had ever happened.

As I said, the couple of occasions where she's talked about Patrick's message just seem like slips to me - "the message I was sent" instead of "the message I sent" - and there's no detailed account from her of being shown Patrick's message. That's very different to her account of being shown her own message, where her memory is vivid. If you're right, then it means the police were calling Amanda a stupid liar while showing her Patrick's message telling her not to come into work, which doesn't make any sense to me.

Agreed, not verbatim, but paraphrase and, as I have said, I have put it to him he could have got this wrong and he is quite sure he didn't. He is trained journalist, fluent in Italian and was taking a contemporaneous note of the conference. Maybe there is an Italian source backing this up.

He's still a source at several removes from what happened, so not especially reliable for me.

Besides which, aren't you arguing the police deleted the message to hide the fact there was no meeting? So how does it make sense for the police to announce publicly that they found Patrick's message in Amanda's phone arranging a meeting with her...?

So you concede now that Amanda did not fix this meeting. Thank you. That was one of your weird reasons for rejecting the De Felice statement and I see it has now gone. All you have now is you don't believe the accuracy of Moore's reporting. Well, I do and I bet someone can turn up footage of that press conference to settle the point.

By the way, where is the full text of that letter to the lawyers please? I should appreciate a link.

By Amanda fixing the meeting, I meant only that her text message was the one to indicate to the police a meeting had been arranged. Patrick's obviously didn't, whether they deleted it or not (again, a serious problem with your theory is that you're saying the police deleted the message to hide the fact there was no meeting, all the while publicly claiming there was a message and it proved there was a meeting).

I was viewing the letter on the guilter wiki (yet another reason I agree with Dan_O's suggestion that a neutral wiki would be a good idea!).

 

[anglolawyer]

When did Patrick testify? Are you thinking of Amanda's testimony?

There is never any mention of finding two phones programmed with the same number. Had they known that there were two phones they would not be able to present the claim that Patrick changed his SIM after the murder to inhibit tracing (unless of course they were incredibly stupid).

Then again, we do have in Matteini that Patrick was using two SIMS with nearely sequential numbers: 354548014227980 and 354548014227987. That this did not even trigger a curiosity is a testament to their stupidity.

He most certainly did give evidence, Dan. She describes it in her book. Frank reported him saying he had to delete sent messages to send out new ones.

 

[anglolawyer]

I don't want to go all Grinder on you, but what is lacking with this is actual evidence.

The evidence is largely inferential. Mach will explain it to you.

 

[anglolawyer]

Thought that Amanda that claimed she deleted for room.

She did. yes.

I added the reporter to Amanda's voice to bolster the text history not diminish it. Leila - new low blow

Oh, didn't notice. Sorry.

I don't see that the PL outgoing message doesn't fit if the attack/sex prank were planned

.
That's because you buy into the far-fetched Mafia code theory. Why would they be expecting their messages to be read at some future time when texting between 8 and 9 p.m. on 1st Nov? Why not just text and delete? They had 5 days to do it.

You think that they had the message but felt that if they presented that the bar was open but slow that the judge wouldn't have accepted her statements of 1:45 or 5:45 and set them free. Is that correct?

Not quite as simplistic as that but sort of, yeah. They may have thought their chances diminished if the judge wanted to know why Lumumba's message concerned not going to work and hers said 'buona serata'. So they fixed it so she didn't have to worry about it.

 

[LondonJohn]

Absolutely! This is what De Felice's other remark actually means. They formed a whole theory out of studying the telephone records.

Yes. I agree that it's highly likely that the police had Knox's phone records from 1st/2nd November in their possession well before the 5th/6th interrogations.

And therefore - as you and Rose suggest - I believe that the police knew that Knox had received a text at 8.18 and had sent a reply text at 8.42 (timings from memory), and I think that they had therefore pre-formed the opinion that whoever was on the other end of this text exchange might well have something to do with the murder.

HOWEVER..... the important thing is that I don't think the police could have known at that point the identity of the person with whom Knox had this text exchange - and nor can they have known the contents of the texts at that point either. The reason why they couldn't have known the person's identity is that this number was from a PAYG SIM card that was obtainable over-the-counter with no ID required. Neither the mobile operator nor the police can therefore have known who had bought that SIM. Only people with contract accounts ("pay monthly") are known by name to the network operators and service providers.

So I believe that at the moment Knox and Sollecito arrived at the police HQ on 5th November, the police knew of the text exchange, but they didn't know with whom Knox had had the exchange, and they did not know the content of the exchange. I believe that a) once they saw the content - especially the "see you later" remark which they were clearly overeager to misinterpret as "I'll see you when we meet up later this evening" (since they had already, in my opinion, formed the thesis that the other party was involved in the crime) - and b) once Knox had informed them of the identity of the person, it became a slam-dunk certainty in their (the police's) minds that their prior theory (that the text sender/recipient was involved) was correct.

In fact, my personal opinion is that since the police (in my view) thought, by the afternoon of 5th November, that they'd snared Knox on account of this text exchange, they had already come to the firm conclusion that Knox was definitely involved in the murder to some degree. I think that at this point they possibly thought that Sollecito might have been doing no more than lying to protect Knox (a serious crime in itself of course, but not directly related to the murder).

And I think that this is why they originally intended to bring Sollecito in on his own. I think the plan was to get him to break and admit that he was lyhing to protect Knox - that Knox had in fact gone out from his apartment during the crucial hours on the night of the murder. They would then have arrested Sollecito, and would have sent the "lights and sirens" brigade - who appear to have been on standby - to have picked up Knox very visibly and publicly from Sollecito's apartment (or wherever she was - I'd imagine that the plan would have been to have her under surveillance).

I think that once Knox was brought in, she would have been confronted with the fact that Sollecito had admitted he'd lied to protect her. But before that, it was important for the police to ascertain the identity of the person in the text exchange and the content of the texts. So that's why they needed to do this first, before they really started turning the screw - they didn't want Knox to clam up and refuse to tell them the identity of the person if she had already been pushed into a corner.

Of course, in the event, Knox accompanied Sollecito to the station. I believe that this only mattered to the police in that it prevented them from the "glory" of the public arrest of Knox. But with that disappointment in hand, the police nevertheless set about carrying out their plan as described above.

And in their minds, it all went almost-perfectly. OK, so Sollecito had to be cajoled and bullied into admitting that it was at least possible that Knox might have left his apartment that night. So, not the full "I was lying, she left for two hours that night; I was trying to protect her" mea culpa they were hoping for. But no matter. They could work with what they had.

So, next in, Knox. And first off, identify the person in the text exchange, and the content of the messages. And..... BINGO! The person was Lumumba, and (with a confirmation bias/tunnel vision hat firmly on) the contents of the messages - particularly Knox's last message to Lumumba - was electrifying to the police! "See you later"!!!! How much more obvious could it have been?!

Caso chiuso...........

 

[Dan O.]

Personally speaking, I would then periodically (perhaps every couple of weeks) go through the laborious process of deleting all of these messages in order to free up capacity.

With all that in mind, I find it entirely feasible that Knox might have engaged in exactly the same sort of system. And if she had, then there's every chance that Lumumba's "Don't come in because the bar is empty" text would still have been present in her inbox folder, since she had indisputably chosen to reply to that message (with the acknowledgement of it and the "see you later" sign-off) rather than to read it and then delete it straight away.

If Amanda had done as you, there is a 6 in 14 chance that she had been through the periodic purge and deleted the excess incomming texts. There is also the chance that Amanda is not like you and deletes each incomming text after reading them and starts the reply from the address book.

 

[Dan O.]

And, by the way, it's probably time to revisit the issue of who first brought up Lumumba's name.

For me, the evidence clearly indicates that Knox had not saved Lumumba's number on her handset as a contact number. In other words, when she received calls or texts from Lumumba, what showed on her handset screen was nothing more than his mobile number - since she had not assigned a name to that number.

I thought there was testimony that what came up in conjunction with that text was the name "Patrick". The testimony also says that a photograph of the screen was taken. Has this photo ever surfaced?

 

[Bob001]

Something like that. She will never go back to Italy to face jail time. It will never happen.

It should never happen. But international diplomacy is neither logical nor humane. If Italy chooses to make it an issue that affects treaty obligations, trade etc., the U.S. could choose to sacrifice Amanda. The U.S. has seven military bases in Italy. Suppose the Italian government started restricting service members to their bases, or squeezing them in other ways? Suppose Italy imposes conditions on U.S. companies doing business in Italy? It would be easy for the U.S. to say "This is a matter between Italy and a private party. The U.S. government has no role here."

 

[Bill Williams]

I don't want to go all Grinder on you, but what is lacking with this is actual evidence.

The evidence is largely inferential. Mach will explain it to you.

I don't want to go all Benedict Arnold on you, but you're also appealing to my favourite logician... at least you're being compatible with Machiavelli's method.

 

[anglolawyer]

Hmmm, well now you seem to be saying Amanda imagined the police yelling at her asking who she sent the message to and who she was protecting. Of course, those are questions which would be especially puzzling if they actually did have Patrick's message in front of them. If they didn't, then arguably they couldn't be sure the message had been sent to Patrick, since they only had Amanda's word for that.

Remember the problem of conflation and the further problem that, by the 9th, she had been through the Matteini hearing and heard the claim that she had deleted Patrick's message. We know she was confused, don't we? After all, she spent some time trying to unscramble what had been put to her about murdering Meredith. She doubted the verity of her statements. She was in a highly suggestible state.

Her letter to her lawyer makes no sense the way I read it. I can imagine scenarios that work better but they are purely speculative. The cops might have spends some time putting it to her that she was covering for somebody, then asked her for her phone and then showed her Patrick's message, for example. This is the conflation problem. She has several times tried to describe something that went on for hours, not just a couple of minutes.

At any rate, the bit I quoted does show clearly that Amanda said she told the police about Patrick's message, which is the claim you wanted me to provide evidence for...

True and I will factor it in to my thinking. Thank you. I still do not regard it as determinative because, on the 9th, her recollection was infected by the Matteini hearing. I have quoted what she said the very next day when speaking with her mother.

As I said, the couple of occasions where she's talked about Patrick's message just seem like slips to me - "the message I was sent" instead of "the message I sent" - and there's no detailed account from her of being shown Patrick's message. That's very different to her account of being shown her own message, where her memory is vivid. If you're right, then it means the police were calling Amanda a stupid liar while showing her Patrick's message telling her not to come into work, which doesn't make any sense to me.

That is because you are collapsing the time. If they knew about this exchange already, having monitored the phones, then when they brought her in to the room they likely planned to pout her under pressure to admit she met Patrick and became more and more suspicious when his name did not pop out. They knew she had texted with him and interpreted her lapsed memory as something it wasn't. She was sure she had not met anybody but when they showed her the message (and it may not even have been the text of the message, just Patrick's name) that's when she says she broke down and 'saw Patrick'.

He's still a source at several removes from what happened, so not especially reliable for me.

He is a direct, first-hand, professionally trained and/or qualified source for what was said at the press conference. That's all I rely on him for.

Besides which, aren't you arguing the police deleted the message to hide the fact there was no meeting? So how does it make sense for the police to announce publicly that they found Patrick's message in Amanda's phone arranging a meeting with her...?

I am arguing that De Felice blurted out something stupid. Just as stupid as his remark that they told us what we already knew to be true (uh-oh, they weren't suspects yet Arturo). You assume that, in the short time available, every body was on message. That is not a self-evidently correct assumption.

By Amanda fixing the meeting, I meant only that her text message was the one to indicate to the police a meeting had been arranged. Patrick's obviously didn't, whether they deleted it or not (again, a serious problem with your theory is that you're saying the police deleted the message to hide the fact there was no meeting, all the while publicly claiming there was a message and it proved there was a meeting).

No, they deleted it because it was inconvenient. It did not make sense. They knew there was a meeting alright but they wanted a neat case to take before Matteini. That hearing was the primary goal. De Felice's statement (about the text messages) was an error and one that no one picked up on for years. Not until I did, actually. That's how you work these things out, Katy. People make mistakes. If they don't then they get away with it.

I was viewing the letter on the guilter wiki (yet another reason I agree with Dan_O's suggestion that a neutral wiki would be a good idea!).

I am obliged.