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

[LondonJohn]

Amidst all this talk about what might or might not have been stored on Knox's handset at the time of her 5th/6th interrogation, I once more have to look at the failures of the defence lawyers to delve into this. It was, after all, pretty central to the criminal slander charge - and the criminal slander charge turned out (improperly, but in reality) to play a significant role in the trial on the murder charges.

I think that Knox's defence team should have been able to mount a forceful line of defence to the Massei court (and thereafter in further trials) showing that the police must have become fixated on whoever the possibly-unidentified correspondent was, and convinced themselves that this person must have played some role in the murder. And that they must have reached these a priori conclusions before Knox ever sat down to be interrogated on 5th November. It must, therefore, have been the police who put Lumumba in the frame - even if they weren't certain of his identity before Knox told them. Basically, whoever Knox told them was the person with whom she'd exchanged texts that evening, the police were going to go on and suggest to Knox that she had plotted with that person in relation to the murder.

And when Knox not only told them the number belonged to Lumumba (a pretty superb candidate for a murderer in the Perugia Police's eyes, I should imagine), but gave them the contents of the messages - including the infamous "see you later" remark, the police thought they'd hit the jackpot. In their minds, all their theories were confirmed. And what's more, they could rationalise into the mix Knox's meeting with Lumumba earlier that day, by deciding that this must have been some sort of conspiratorial clandestine get-together to check the situation.

 

[anglolawyer]

Well, it's possible that Knox spoke with Lumumba via her mobile while her phone was being tapped (i.e. at some point from around 3rd November to 5th November), and the police were able to use that to match Lumumba's name to his mobile number (e.g. they overheard a call from this particular number to Knox's mobile, and hear Knox say "Hi Patrick" and perhaps discuss the bar job).

Other than that, though, I don't think there was any way they could have known that it was Lumumba with whom Knox had had that text exchange on the night of the murder. I can't think of any other mechanism - other than asking Knox - whereby the police could reliably have divined the identity of the person who used that mobile number.

I think that when Knox told them - early on in her 5th/6th November interrogation - that this number belonged to Lumumba, they employed further ex-post facto reasoning and confirmation bias to link in the meeting that they'd seen Knox and Lumumba having earlier that day, e.g: "Ahh, so now that meeting we saw them having makes sense! They must have been checking that each other was not giving anything away, and inquiring as to the amount of police interest each of them had received."

Surely they would have the number of Patrick's cell phone. All they had to do was monitor calls and texts to and from that number in the ensuing week. They could presumably locate the phone to within some narrow area and maybe check with people he had made calls to or who had made calls to him. I just don;t believe that would be beyond their wits. They could also put a tap on the line and listen to him. Don't you think they got round to that?

 

[katy_did]

I don't know. I assume that, as she was almost certainly their main suspect from the word go that it would have been sensible to put a tail on her, don't you? And yes, yes I know it's speculation. The question is whether it is reasonable speculation. What evidence would you expect there to be of something the cops were desperate to conceal since they had broken the law?

We could dismiss all speculation I suppose and say that, in the absence of concrete evidence (including, in particular, all news reports to be discounted unless corroborated) we are only entitled to conclude that neither Amanda nor Raffaele were in the least suspected when they went to the quester the night of the 5th, the cops had nothing special in mind, all those extra guys were there by coincidence, no tapes were running (why bother) and it was just a random throw of the dice that prompted them, for no reason, to start questioning whether Raffaele could vouch for her whereabouts on the 1st, removing his shoes in the process for some strange and unknowable reason that must remain in the realm of speculation.

OK, so there isn't any confirmation they were tailed, thank you.

P.S. Would it really have been against the law if they had done?

 

[LondonJohn]

But how is that an established fact? I know it's mentioned in Amanda's second statement, but that could easily have been in response to a question from the investigators, "When did you last see Patrick?" for example.

I thought it had been fairly reliably documented somewhere (can't remember where) that the police had witnessed this meeting. I'll try and look up sources later this evening. Unless anyone else can remember off the top of their heads.....

 

[GWCarver]

LondonJohn,

Can the defense attorneys in Italy suggest police were responsible for any kind of misconduct, stupidity, or procedural errors without being charged with slander?

I'm just wondering if a lot of the incompetence being assigned to the defense attorneys (not by you, just in general) is actually nothing more than limitations placed on them by their system.

 

[anglolawyer]

OK, so there isn't any confirmation they were tailed, thank you.

P.S. Would it really have been against the law if they had done?

Of course not. I don't understand the smiley to be honest. The cops maintain, and Mignini was at pains to repeat last night, that she was not suspect. They are hardly going to tell us they had a tail on her from the word go are they?

I think we fundamentally disagree about the two statements. In my opinion they are the product of the cops' fevered imaginations. Take this revealing snippet:

, I wish to clarify that I know and see other people who have also come to my house sometimes and who have also met Meredith and of whom I will provide the relevant mobile numbers. One of these people is Patrik

Why did she say, untruthfully, Patrik had been a social visitor to the house? Because:

A she was masterfully misdirecting them away from Guede, or
B she was simply agreeing with suggestions they were making that fit their theory that a black guy who knew Meredith socially wanted to have sex with her.

IOW, whose statements are these? Hers or theirs? Care to speculate?

 

[Grinder]

LondonJohn,

Can the defense attorneys in Italy suggest police were responsible for any kind of misconduct, stupidity, or procedural errors without being charged with slander?

I'm just wondering if a lot of the incompetence being assigned to the defense attorneys (not by you, just in general) is actually nothing more than limitations placed on them by their system.

It has long been speculated that the fear of being charged with some crime or civil action hampered the defense. Specifically the defense lawyers danced away from the head slap claims Amanda and her parents made.

In Italy there is not the same protection there is here for statements made in court. Here someone can be accused of things in court and have no recourse because it occurred in court.

 

[LondonJohn]

Surely they would have the number of Patrick's cell phone. All they had to do was monitor calls and texts to and from that number in the ensuing week. They could presumably locate the phone to within some narrow area and maybe check with people he had made calls to or who had made calls to him. I just don;t believe that would be beyond their wits. They could also put a tap on the line and listen to him. Don't you think they got round to that?

I think we need more precision of language when saying things like "Surely they would have the number of Patrick's cell phone".

Yes, they would very likely have had the number of the phone with which Knox had conducted the text exchange on the evening of the murder (from having accessed Knox's phone records from that evening). But they wouldn't have known to whom that number belonged.

I wonder whether - even in Italy, where semi-lawful phone tapping appears to be endemic - the police could order a phone tap on a particular number without even knowing the identity of the person who owned that number? If they could do this, they I'd agree that it is indeed possible that they placed a tap on this number, and through listening to calls to and from the number, they were able to ascertain the identity of its owner as Lumumba.

Regarding location analysis, incidentally, the only way of doing this in 2007 (without GPS) was via fairly crude cell-site (base station) triangulation. Such a method would only give very, very approximate location for the handset. Indeed, as you'll recall, they didn't even attempt triangulation when conducting location analysis on Knox's, Sollecito's and Meredith's phones: instead, all they did was note which base station the relative phones were connected to at various times. This, it goes without saying, is an extremely crude method of geographic location determination, with an accuracy - even in urban areas with high base station distribution - measured in mile-wide radii rather than metres.

And for that reason, it would have been extremely difficult (in fact, I'd argue that it would have been impossible) for the police to be able to identify Lumumba from conducting any sort of location analysis on that number.

 

[Grinder]

Pretty sure that we covered this before and in Italy they track phone ownership closely.

 

[anglolawyer]

I think we need more precision of language when saying things like "Surely they would have the number of Patrick's cell phone".

Yes, they would very likely have had the number of the phone with which Knox had conducted the text exchange on the evening of the murder (from having accessed Knox's phone records from that evening). But they wouldn't have known to whom that number belonged.

I wonder whether - even in Italy, where semi-lawful phone tapping appears to be endemic - the police could order a phone tap on a particular number without even knowing the identity of the person who owned that number? If they could do this, they I'd agree that it is indeed possible that they placed a tap on this number, and through listening to calls to and from the number, they were able to ascertain the identity of its owner as Lumumba.

Regarding location analysis, incidentally, the only way of doing this in 2007 (without GPS) was via fairly crude cell-site (base station) triangulation. Such a method would only give very, very approximate location for the handset. Indeed, as you'll recall, they didn't even attempt triangulation when conducting location analysis on Knox's, Sollecito's and Meredith's phones: instead, all they did was note which base station the relative phones were connected to at various times. This, it goes without saying, is an extremely crude method of geographic location determination, with an accuracy - even in urban areas with high base station distribution - measured in mile-wide radii rather than metres.

And for that reason, it would have been extremely difficult (in fact, I'd argue that it would have been impossible) for the police to be able to identify Lumumba from conducting any sort of location analysis on that number.

I defer to you on triangulation but it would be odd if tapping the numbers of unregistered phones was illegal (and, even if it were, surprising if that stopped them doing it) given the strong association between illegality and the use of such phones. Why would anonymous use give you greater rights to privacy than registered (for want of a better word) use?

 

[Diocletus]

I defer to you on triangulation but it would be odd if tapping the numbers of unregistered phones was illegal (and, even if it were, surprising if that stopped them doing it) given the strong association between illegality and the use of such phones. Why would anonymous use give you greater rights to privacy than registered (for want of a better word) use?

FWIW--The arrest warrant mentions Amanda's phone records. It does not reference phone records for Lumumba.

 

[Bill Williams]

Of course not. I don't understand the smiley to be honest. The cops maintain, and Mignini was at pains to repeat last night, that she was not suspect. They are hardly going to tell us they had a tail on her from the word go are they?

I think we fundamentally disagree about the two statements. In my opinion they are the product of the cops' fevered imaginations. Take this revealing snippet:


Why did she say, untruthfully, Patrik had been a social visitor to the house? Because:

A she was masterfully misdirecting them away from Guede, or
B she was simply agreeing with suggestions they were making that fit their theory that a black guy who knew Meredith socially wanted to have sex with her.

IOW, whose statements are these? Hers or theirs? Care to speculate?

Without going completely Machiavelli on you about this... what I'm struggling with in reading the back and forth between AL, KD, and LJ is.....

... you're making a case that all this is "compatible with" some pre-existing police conspiracy to frame/entrap Knox... what is missing is actual evidence to move this much beyond the "it's compatible with" logic that Machiavelli uses, thinking he's being compelling.

Sorry for putting it this way.

 

[katy_did]

Of course not. I don't understand the smiley to be honest. The cops maintain, and Mignini was at pains to repeat last night, that she was not suspect. They are hardly going to tell us they had a tail on her from the word go are they?

I smiled because you couched the fact we have no confirmation they were being tailed (subject to LJ tracking it down) in a lot of hyperbolic statements about how we may as well not make any deductions about anything since everything relating to human affairs is subject to some real or imaginary uncertainty, or something, as if that were the logical conclusion of my question. Instead of just saying "No". It was funny.

Why would them being tailed be any more an indication they were suspects than tapping their phones?

I think we fundamentally disagree about the two statements. In my opinion they are the product of the cops' fevered imaginations. Take this revealing snippet:


Why did she say, untruthfully, Patrik had been a social visitor to the house? Because:

A she was masterfully misdirecting them away from Guede, or
B she was simply agreeing with suggestions they were making that fit their theory that a black guy who knew Meredith socially wanted to have sex with her.

IOW, whose statements are these? Hers or theirs? Care to speculate?

What does that have to do with whether they were being tailed? Sure, they were leading her to say what they wanted her to say, but it doesn't necessarily follow this was a theory they'd fully developed prior to that evening. I think pressure and exhaustion probably affected the cops as much as Amanda, and that this led to the blunders and rush to judgment they engaged in that evening. If they'd stopped to think carefully about things they might have realized they were acting very hastily.

 

[Strozzi]

Quote:
the important thing was having a killer fit, so that when released the name of the Lumumba was recovered once a super-swift witness stated that the night of the murder managed by the local Zairean was closed. Il suo nome fu inserito nell'ordinanza d'arresto e lui fu cercato da tutti i giornalisti, giornalisti ai quali rilasciò questa dichiarazione: " Sì, mi pare che quella sera il locale fosse chiuso. Io verso le 19 sono uscito di casa e mi sembra che il portone del 'Le Chic' fosse chiuso. Fino a quando? Non so. Non mi ricordo cosa ho fatto quella sera ". His name was inserted in the order of arrest and he was sought by all journalists, to which journalists released this statement: "Yes, I think that that night the restaurant was closed. I pour the 19 I left home and I seems that the door of 'Le Chic' was closed. long? I do not know. I do not remember what I did tonight." E grazie a lui tutti a giocare al " Dagli al Lumumba ", anche perché chi aveva passato quella maledetta serata nel suo locale ad ogni interrogatorio perdeva l'uso della memoria ed anticipava gli orari di uscita. And all thanks to him play "From the Lumumba", because those who had passed the damn evening at his club lost to every interrogation memory usage times and anticipated output.


So this is how the Perugia police work. The Flying Squad in a 3-hour late night interrogation interrogates/manipulates/terrorizes a 20 year old American to confusedly remember things that the police want to believe happened, but didn't happen. Then the Flying Squad arrests Lumumba on the basis of the American's confusion. The prosecutor distorts to Judge Mattei what was said in the texts to make it appear that the bar was closed and there was a pre-agreed meeting between Lumumba and Knox. After arresting Lumumba, the prosecutor needs some kind of evidence to corroborate that the bar was closed that evening so the police find a "witness" who says I walked by the bar and it seemed the door was closed.

I doubt the police just walked up to a stranger in the street and said "Sir, by chance did you walk by here on the evening of Nov 1 and notice anything?" I'll bet the witness was known to the police - that he had a prior relationship with the police. Petty criminal? Informer? Serial professional witness like Curatolo?

So this is how it is done in Italy?

 

[MDDVS]

There is no conspiracy. This is just the usual way they investigate crimes. Rough the suspects a bit and "massage" the evidence as needed. It's normal procedure, and it can't be otherwise when you have people that shielded from repercussion, as police and the prossecution moslty are in Italy.

Is there any hard evidence it happened in this case? Not that I have seen it, but I have enough personal knowledge of these tactics to know it happens. We do have Amanda's testimony saying she was shown the text and then the text disapeared.

There is evidence of a concerted effort to hide evidence though: hard drive destruction, no recording or even written notes of the interrogation, destruction of items like towels and the bra clasp, hiding of forensic tests results, all the well known DNA tests shenanigans, refusal to perform forensis tests.

 

[katy_did]

Without going completely Machiavelli on you about this... what I'm struggling with in reading the back and forth between AL, KD, and LJ is.....

... you're making a case that all this is "compatible with" some pre-existing police conspiracy to frame/entrap Knox... what is missing is actual evidence to move this much beyond the "it's compatible with" logic that Machiavelli uses, thinking he's being compelling.

Sorry for putting it this way.

Exactly Bill. Sure, a police conspiracy is impossible to rule out - but what is there to rule out a vague suspicion which crystallized on that particular night, aided by police and witness stress and exhaustion and combined with a series of unfortunate coincidences (Amanda coming into the station when she wasn't called, Raffaele being stoned on the night of the murder and under pressure getting his dates mixed up, the "see you later" part of the text message) which led the police to rush to a conclusion they'd later find it difficult to retreat from...

I don't doubt the police suspected them, but that's different to having a fully-formed theory of the crime which included Patrick's involvement.

 

[Strozzi]

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."

Italy is much more vulnerable to international terrorism and political upheavel than is the U.S. Libya and Somalia, both in chaos, are former Italian colonies, which means that Italy still has extensive interests there. Italy benefits from the U.S. relationship as much as the U.S. does. I don't see Italy pressuring US military bases over this.

Yesterday I wrote a long post about a Knox legal challenge to extradition. The initial paragraphs are what I see happening: major legal challenge to extradition reinforced by many experts eviscerating the integrity of the Italian case, plus both serious and frivolous media coveage making the case sensational, requiring PR damage control from US political leaders. My later paragraphs in my long post were, of course, satire - although I'm still willing to offer Italy Dennis Rodman as consolation, but we keep Knox.

When 5-year old Cuban boy Eliot Goncalves was taken unilaterally by his mother from Cuba (essentially a parental abduction against the boy's father) and his mother drowned on the raft trip to Florida, the child's relatives wanted to raise him in Florida and refused to reunite him with his father in Cuba. The White House, Secretary of State, and Attorney General were in a PR crisis responding to media coverage, public outrage, and a federal court decision. In that case a federal court recognized the case really came down to the issue of parental abduction and the child was returned to his father in Cuba. In this case as regards extradition, I believe the judgement will be that human rights were violated and Knox stays here.

 

[katy_did]

I am happy with her being unreliable on all counts, actually. Guede is unreliable too but that should not prevent one from discerning some facts from what he chose to say.

Most of what both of us are saying is speculative. We don't have the phone to examine, after all.

But at least what I'm saying relies on the substance of Amanda's statements, and doesn't depend on repression and confusion (by both Amanda and Patrick, or did Patrick delete his own message?). That's not to say those things aren't possible, it's just that replying on them makes your theory sort of unfalsifiable.

I understand you but disagree. They were talking (you say) specifically about Patrick's missing message saying 'don't come to work' and they wanted to know whether she replied to Patrick obviously. She could not remember doing so then they showed her she had replied to Patrick. That being so, why would they go on to accuse her of protecting somebody and ask her who it was? Read the quote again:

It cannot have happened this way.

I explained this a couple times already. If they didn't have Patrick's incoming message, they can't have known for sure the message was from Patrick and that Amanda wasn't lying about that. Especially when, as far as they were concerned, she was lying about the content.

On the other hand, it makes even less sense if they actually did have Patrick's message. How does this work in your scenario - why were they asking her who the message was from and who she was protecting if they already knew?

I agree it's speculative but this does not fairly characterise my position. It was not just an exchange of texts. Off the top of my head, their theory was made up of the following:

1. an exchange of texts
2. Patrick's phone pinged near the apartment
3. A black guy did it
4. A black guy who was known to Meredith or Amanda
5. Patrick was such a black guy
6. The burglary was fake
7. Patrick called Amanda the night of the 2nd at the questura (to find out what the cops knew)
8. Patrick did not call after that (to avoid surveillance)
9. She did not go back to work (to avoid being seen together)
10. They met face to face on the 5th (to avoid surveillance)
11. She never dropped Patrick into the conversation during any of her 54 hours of questioning (or whatever it was)
12. pizza, behaviour, underwear etc etc

Most of this is quite weak. Patrick's phone pinging and his phone calls to Amanda may only have assumed significance after he was arrested and his phone records were examined in detail.

I'm sure Amanda met a lot of people in the four days after the murder and we have no confirmation the police saw that specific meeting.

We don't know that she never mentioned Patrick - in fact she did include him on a list of men she knew just before her interrogation that evening. If she'd mentioned him a lot you could argue the police suspected him because of that, too.

Prior to that night the police weren't focusing on a "black guy" so much as they were focusing on "North African men" (in fact they'd hauled one such man into the police station at 2 a.m. the night before they questioned Amanda and Raffaele). "North African" doesn't describe Patrick or Guede, but someone of lighter skin colour - see Formica's testimony where she uncomfortably explains why the man she saw being "North African" rules out Guede.

I'll give you (6) and (12) as reasons they suspected Amanda and Raffaele, but those things don't implicate Patrick.

All in all, this seems like confirmation bias: going through things which might have looked suspicious to police after they arrested Patrick and assuming they found those things suspicious before that time.

Yes, you've said all that already.

Because of confirmation bias. They had a pre-formed theory that drove them to a certain conviction that she was involved. All else was peripheral. They turned their attention from the 'buona serata' part, didn't they - and we both agree they had that, right? Did they pass that on to Matteini? Was it in her 1.45 confession, or the later one? Go ahead and take over. You explain why not.

Sure, if they didn't already know but, as I have said, I believe they did. Pure speculation, of course.

I don't know whether they passed the 'buona serata' part of the text message onto Matteini; I'd assume she had access to the raw phone information, but I don't know for sure. Yes, they did ignore that part of the message in their excitement over the 'see you later' part - of course, once they had the 'confession' they took that as confirmation they were right to do so anyway.

As I said to Bill, what you suggest is possible, it's just I can't see anything to make that situation any more likely than one where the police are incompetent and under pressure, ignorant of coerced confessions, and where they rushed to a conclusion they've been trying to justify ever since.

 

[toto]

The BBC 3 programme "Is Amanda Knox guilty?"

I have been watching the BBC3 programme “ Is Amanda Knox Guilty” and if I did not know anything about the case would find the physical evidence put forward troubling and would have doubts about Amanda’s and Raffaele’s innocence. I would wonder about Meredith’s “miniscule” DNA on the knife especially with Stefanoni’s declaration that it was “absolutely reliable”. I would be concerned with David Balding’s findings that the bra clasp could be judged “extremely strong evidence” and would be concerned about Amanda’s bare footprints and her DNA mixed with Meredith’s blood in five stains in the flat.
However, it was quite interesting to me that the programme made a point of focussing on this DNA evidence, (mentioning the eyewitnesses in a single sentence) and yet it was the Hellmann appeal which found Amanda and Raffaele innocent by focussing on this evidence. And yet again the Hellman appeal was very much criticised for focussing too much on this evidence, according to the programme. The programme would have made me wonder why the latest appeal only added the detail of Amanda’s DNA on the knife which would not have advanced the argument for me at all.
I like to think I would have felt uneasy assuming their guilt when listening to the audio of Amanda’s interview in which she said “I was stressed. I was scared. It was after long hours in the middle of the night. I was innocent and they were telling me I was guilty”. I would have thought that breaking down at 1.45 in the morning would have led weight to this unease. I would also have paused the recording when they had a voice over reading Amanda’s English written statement composed the day she was about to go to jail. The programme was fair in including the bit where she says “I want to make it clear that I am very doubtful of the veracity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion” but on the screen as this voice over was saying these words were other words Amanda wrote which referred to worry about being put in jail for 30 years and being hit when she didn’t remember something. For the programme to then say “But despite her uncertainty she doesn’t retract her accusation” seems to me to be missing the point.
I would have assumed the point about Sollicito ringing the carabinieri after the postal police arrived to be true and the fact about the rock not being able to get through the small crack between the shutters to be plausible.
I would have found interesting Mignini’s assertion that it was all about an erotic game in which Amanda wanted to make Meredith pay for judging her, which she found offensive, but would wonder why they thus both went to a classical concert together. I might wonder why they also went to the chocolate festival together but that wasn’t mentioned.
I would also assume that an appeal to the ECHR would be pointless because the programme said categorically that she was afforded an interpreter but no legal counsel because she was a witness and not a suspect, and that Mignini made it clear that the fact of Amanda placing herself in the cottage on the night of the murder “pushed the police to suspend the audition (sic) in order to protect her rights”.
I think the BBC tried to ensure some balance by careful phrasing, but other things that I have not discussed here made it fairly clear where its point of view lay. But then BBC2 also showed The Guardian’s interview with Amanda Knox so I am not knocking them particularly (though I did put in a complaint about the postal police story).

 

[anglolawyer]

I smiled because you couched the fact we have no confirmation they were being tailed (subject to LJ tracking it down) in a lot of hyperbolic statements about how we may as well not make any deductions about anything since everything relating to human affairs is subject to some real or imaginary uncertainty, or something, as if that were the logical conclusion of my question. Instead of just saying "No". It was funny.

Why would them being tailed be any more an indication they were suspects than tapping their phones?



What does that have to do with whether they were being tailed? Sure, they were leading her to say what they wanted her to say, but it doesn't necessarily follow this was a theory they'd fully developed prior to that evening. I think pressure and exhaustion probably affected the cops as much as Amanda, and that this led to the blunders and rush to judgment they engaged in that evening. If they'd stopped to think carefully about things they might have realized they were acting very hastily.

I am constructing a Theory of Everything that makes sense. I don't know what you are doing other than to point out, rather tritely I think, that we don't know everything. So what? I already know that.

I did not notice the conversation lurch over to the single issue of whether she was being tailed. Sorry. I am not just talking about that. I am reconstructing what the cops already knew from the signs that are available. I am doing what Grinder only ever does enigmatically, trying to say what De Felice's utterances actually mean. And don't forget the bit about cell phone evidence being crucial.

The content of the statements is part and parcel of the exercise. I take it as an axiom that the two of them are wholly innocent of murder since we solved that ages ago. I think it can also be posited that she certainly, Raf maybe also, was already a suspect that night. Even Machiavelli has conceded that. Right, work backwards from there. How and why did she become a suspect? And what was their theory? I already listed 12 elements likely to have played a part in their thinking. I think their pre-existing theory was approximately as set out in her 1.45 statement. She told them what they already knew to be true (assuming we are allowed to believe whichever journo jotted that down).

The theory may be good or bad. New points will come up that confirm it or otherwise. Amanda saying on 17 Dec 2007 that she was shown Patrick's message is yet another confirmation of the overall picture of stupid, corrupt, lying thugs framing someone they had moronically concluded was guilty. It's not as if it's the only instance of them destroying evidence after all.

What I don't buy is the idea that everything was above board until they discovered their blunder over Patrick and only then did they start bending the rules to save face. Or that they somehow stumbled on a crime theory by accident in the small hours of the 6th.

I recall our discussion of when Mignini interviewed John Kercher and you doubted whether that was before the 6th. I eventually found a news paper article that showed it was before (Il Matino or something IIRC) and that Mignini was therefore particularly interested in Amanda at that interview. That's another piece in the jigsaw. Why wouldn't they be following her if she was the centre of their enquiry? Let's see if LJ can come up with a reference for that. The theory predicts he will.