Totally unrelated to this case, but the parallels are interesting... has anyone watched American Nightmare on Netflix? It's a three part documentary on the case of Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn. Anyone who thinks cops don't suffer from confirmation bias, tunnel vision, and who will lie through their teeth seriously needs to watch this.
The parallels with the Kercher case were unnerving.
Aaron went into the 'interview' willingly, thinking that all he was doing was helping the cops search for his girlfriend. What does this remind you of? They tell him, in essence, he's just someone 'informed of the facts', that this is not an interrogation. What does this remind you of?
Let's face it, Aaron tells a story of a kidnapping which is, on the face of it, an unbelievable narrative. It's then that the 'interview' turns overtly into an interrogation, without the cops telling Aaron that.
They flat out lie to him. They say that blood was found at the scene of the 'kidnapping'. They omit to say what that 'find' had to do with anything, they press him to explain what they've just claimed. What does this remind you of? He's supposed to have the answers, which he obviously did not.
But they press. At one time he specifically asks for a lawyer. his request is briefly ignored as they press on. What does this remind you of?
Eventually they do grant him his rights as a suspect - but even that was forced onto the cops once a lawyer came on the scene. The lawyer said one of the first things he did was tell the cops, 'me and my client are leaving. If you want to stop us, you'll have to arrest him.' IIRC the cops did not arrest Aaron at that point, even as they had given him prison garb, to replace the clothes that Aaron had earlier voluntarily surrendered as 'evidence', and as Aaron had also done a lie detector test, as well as surrendered mouth swabs - all thinking at the time, that he was helping the cops in a search for his girlfriend.
At the conclusion of the lie detector test, he was grilled by the FBI operator who said (leaning accusingly into his face) that Aaron had failed, and had failed miserably. With what the documentary showed, the operator was not specific about the things Aaron was supposed to have got wrong, leaving Aaron confused and muddled. Aaron was forcefully asked to explain why he'd failed, when in fact he had no idea why. In fact, the cop had not even told him the technical details which showed he had lied. Aaron himself had not been competent to judge that - the FBI guy just unhooked him and pressed forcefully with accusations!
When in fact it was not Aaron's job to explain why the Lie Detector machine had **allegedly** called him a liar - the burden of proof should have been somewhere else.
What does this remind you of? He was then asked to fill in the blanks that the cops themselves could not fill in - the equivalent of Knox being asked to imagine how Kercher could have been killed by Lumumba. As if a 20-year-old's sleep deprived imaginings was going to make up for hard evidence.
SPOILER ALERT - DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU HATE SPOILERS.
It was a jaw dropper when Denise Huskins returned, saying that she had, in fact, been kidnapped - and had walked into her home in Huntington Beach, that return caught on security camera. So much for the lie detector test, and the immediate accusations which had followed it.
The police theory that Aaron had killed Denise turned out to be wrong, and galactically wring - and until that time, Aaron seemed dangerously close to simply confessing that he'd killed her. He was grilled so much, while not being charged, that he sometimes was found in the fetal position in the interview room.
What does that remind you of? It reminds me of the two decade old case in Saskatchewan in Canada, where a young man was being grilled/accused of a rape that later evidence excluded him from.
But the complication was that he'd eventually confessed, under pressure at interrogation. He'd 'buckled and told us what we already knew'. When asked why he would do that, he said, "I'm not sure why, at the time it just seemed that they would not let up until I did, so I thought, 'why not', at least this interrogation would be over. It was like an out of body experience, there I was looking at myself, confessing to something I knew I hadn't done."
Or words to that effect.
Who does that remind you of?
The in episode two of American Nightmare, the police come up with an even more bizarre theory of a fake-kidnapping gone wrong. While not an exact parallel to the Kercher investigation what that reminded me of was how once the police are exposed of having had a completely wrong theory, how easy it is to turn to an equally wrong, second theory.
How many theories did the Perugian cops/courts/Florence courts throw at the Kercher case? From sex-games gone wrong, to Satanic rite murders, to disputes over rent money.... you name it.
All of which, sequentially, Knox was asked to explain for them - when she couldn't, they just called her a liar. When one 'theory collapsed' they then blamed that, too, on her for not being forthcoming, and then moved to the next theory - where the whole thing was repeated.
