Colonel Garofano then turned his attention to the mixed blood spots in the bathroom next to Meredith’s room. Again, he criticized the methods of collecting samples. But, he said, the presence of Amanda Knox’s DNA is decisively bad for her defence. ‘Now let’s have a look at the washbasin,’ he began.
I saw on the film the way they collected the sample in the washbasin. The fact that the sample was collected by wiping both the edge and the plughole is dangerous. You’re likely to find all sorts of stuff in the plughole. However, here is the electropherogram and you can see that the RFU value is very high, so the sample is undoubtedly blood, which is the body fluid that provides the greatest amount of DNA. In some cases you see higher peaks of Amanda’s DNA than Meredith’s. Amanda has been bleeding. Nor is it old blood, as the defence might say, because blood decays fast. We have the same result on the cotton-bud box. The light switch was over-scrubbed, but from the film the way the cotton-bud box was handled was definitely good enough. There too we have mixed blood. So that’s pretty significant for Amanda. Unfortunately for her, she bled at the same time Meredith was bleeding. That’s a lot to explain.
However, the bidet evidence is less powerful.
I would not use the bidet swab as useful evidence because the swab was again taken from the edge of the bowl to the plug-hole and this is a typical area where menstrual blood collects.
However, one has to say that an American would not use the bidet for washing herself. She may wash clothes in it, maybe knickers with menstrual blood on it, or some other item of clothing that was dirty. But the blood trail is a drip, and doesn’t appear like a residue from washed clothes, that leads from the edge of the bidet to the plughole. We’d have to ask Amanda to explain that.
Garofano cannot rule out that the mixed blood could have come from a violent confrontation between Knox and Meredith. But he plays devil’s advocate to show how Amanda could explain the clues away as totally innocent, unrelated bloodstains.
It’s just blood as far as I’m concerned and I can say no more, but the fact that the blood was mixed does indicate that Meredith and Amanda were bleeding at the same time. However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a wound, it might be that Amanda had a bloody nose, or she cut herself on the knife, or she cut her feet on the glass in the other bedroom, or even that she washed something that had her blood on it in the washbasin, squeezed it in the bidet and touched the cotton-bud box. Look at the electropherograms, there’s a lot of Amanda’s DNA there, and of course there’s a blob of Amanda’s blood on the tap.
So we have those three key pieces of DNA evidence against Amanda Knox: the tap with her blood on it; the basin with her and Meredith’s blood mixed, and the cotton-bud box with her and Meredith’s blood on them. Let’s try to explain them for Amanda. Menstrual blood? In the bidet the blood could be menstrual blood, or it could be her washing bloodstained knickers in the bidet. She could have washed them in the basin and then rinsed them again in the bidet. She would have touched them and touched the cotton-bud box.
That does not explain why Meredith’s blood is there too though. Amanda’s own bloodstain on the tap is recent. It is dry, but has not been touched or cleaned. There is no fingerprint in it. It is logical to put that bloodstain in relation with the blood in the bidet and washbasin, but let us assume for a minute that they are unrelated. For example, that the bloodstain on the tap was from a pierced ear and the blood in the bidet and washbasin was from her period. All Amanda’s blood in the small bathroom can be explained in one way or the other. How can Meredith’s blood be explained? Let’s say the assassin used the basin and the bidet to wash the knife: if you look at the electropherograms you’ll see that there seems to be more of Amanda’s blood than Meredith’s. There is a copious blood loss by Amanda. Not from a pierced ear, nor from washed underwear, but from bleeding. A bleeding nose, maybe, a cut, or two cuts because we have to consider the bloodstains in the corridor. Which is a different issue.
) did not know that one of the presiding Judges at the Italian Court of Cassation judgement in March last year who found the pair not guilty, has now been appointed President of said Court. Unanimously. Paolo Bruno. Complimenti!
