The Massei/Mignini Conspiracy Theory

[Dan O.]

So that means there is film from Raf's apartment that is also worth minute study.

[correction, the video of Raf's place is dated Nov. 16, 2007. The same day that Rudy is positively identified as the 4th suspect.]

It's a very fine video that has answers to many questions such as which German eddition Harry Potter book did Amanda and Raffaele read in Raffaele's appartment on the night Meredith was murdered. It also contains intrigue such as when the rubber gloves are discovered in the kitchen trash. And the calamity of finding the crime scene seal from the front door under those gloves proving an earlier undocumented entry. This video also shows the complete unedited sequence of discovering the bleach reciept and putting it back in the bag and discovering it again and putting the reciept back in the bag and putting the bag back in the drawer and discovering the bag in the drawer containing a reciept for bleach (which incidentally is dated several months before the crime but that's a minor detail).

 

[anglolawyer]

[correction, the video of Raf's place is dated Nov. 16, 2007. The same day that Rudy is positively identified as the 4th suspect.]

It's a very fine video that has answers to many questions such as which German eddition Harry Potter book did Amanda and Raffaele read in Raffaele's appartment on the night Meredith was murdered. It also contains intrigue such as when the rubber gloves are discovered in the kitchen trash. And the calamity of finding the crime scene seal from the front door under those gloves proving an earlier undocumented entry. This video also shows the complete unedited sequence of discovering the bleach reciept and putting it back in the bag and discovering it again and putting the reciept back in the bag and putting the bag back in the drawer and discovering the bag in the drawer containing a reciept for bleach (which incidentally is dated several months before the crime but that's a minor detail).

Thanks. Sounds riveting. But not the 06 Nov vid we are looking for. It is in Conti-Vechiotti that the knife is said to have been retrieved on that date, and they are probably quoting from Stef's own report to the court (the RTGIF?)

ETA it was on 17 or 18 Nov that the Times (London) ran with a story that timed and dated bleach receipts had been found for the morning of 01 Nov (IIRC 7.30 and 8.15 but the story definitely gave precise times).

 

[Kaosium]

Kaosium

That is very well argued. I am still unsure though whether you think they became suspicious of Amanda within the first few hours or retrospectively painted themselves as having been on her trail from the get go, thus keeping relatively open minds at the outset. I incline to the former view, based on my deep understanding of human nature and, I am forced to say it again, Amanda's odd behaviour that morning.

You make all the excellent points which show that, in fact, all those things can be rationalised, as indeed they must be if our two are not to be guilty (and we are not allowing that!) but those are not a good representation of how first impressions work and human brains work.

By the time Napoleoni shows up, with people milling about, the press hanging over the railings, a very complicated crime scene (burglary + corpse + locked door + unlocked door + faeces + nothing stolen + stolen phones + bomb threat hoax) the smaller number of oddities which presented themselves to Amanda cannot easily be reconstructed as a self-contained set. To them has been added a broken window, two stolen phones and a corpse and I am not sure how easy it will have been psychologically to deconstruct the scene so as to reconstruct how Amanda perceived it.

I'm not disagreeing that Napoleoni might well have been suspicious for these reasons, (alone) merely that by being so she displayed incompetence as a Head of Homicide. However, in her defense, soon into it they might well have had reason to believe that Raffaele had called the Carabinieri after the Postal Police arrived. The Postal Police would estimate their time of arrival at 12:35, (which would be reflected in Matteini) the CCTV camera, the time discrepancy polarity of which they have reversed the moment they announce it, ~November 11th, might also be in their possession, just because they didn't announce it to the press or submit it before Matteini doesn't mean they weren't already looking at it days before, and due to the dubious nature of the picture that they'd want to pretend was 'clear cut,' I don't think it unlikely they might have chosen not to present it before Matteini in order to preserve its potential for forcing a confession. Look at it this way, it was a camera pointing directly at the beginning of the driveway of the murder site, if there had been a purse-snatching it would have been the first thing they checked. I don't think it unlikely they had it soon after the murder and before the arrests of Amanda, Raffaele and Patrick, but chose not to present it before Matteini in order to conceal how undefined the image was.

At any rate, with them possibly assuming the time discrepancy meant the time stamp on the camera was 12 minutes fast instead of slow, perhaps because that correlated almost perfectly with the estimation of the Postal Police which was in fact 25 minutes off (for their arrival to the cottage, they putzed around for ~10 minutes before going in--they were returning phones having no idea about the murder at this point) they have reason to believe that Raffaele did in fact call the Carabinieri after the Postal Police arrived, which would remove the (generally) exculpatory circumstances of calling the police to the scene, and in fact make it look like they were lying about that. In fact what we know of Raffaele's statement of 10:40 on the Fifth, as reflected in Matteini, it leaves open the possibility he called the Carabinieri after the arrival of the Postal Police as well, by using a word for 'meanwhile' which can be interpreted to suggest the Postal Police arrived as he was about to call the Carabinieri.

So it's quite possible going into the night of the Fifth that they believe that there was no actual break-in, and that instead of calling the Carabinieri to the scene and having the Postal Police show up minutes later, instead the Postal Police surprised them at the scene and they called the Carabinieri afterward and lied about it. That's when someone like Napoleoni might well have started considering Amanda and Raffaele's behavior suspicious the morning/afternoon of November 2nd, when the murder was discovered. They look at the window and they see this:

Those fat boys Mignini, Profazio and Chiacchiera aren't about to try to climb up there, so they might well dismiss the possibility of someone climbing in out of hand, which if they (or a more athletic subordinate!) had tried they'd found out it was actually pretty damned easy to get one's hands on that sill, and any athletic burglar could certainly get in once that was accomplished:

However without that image impressed upon them, they may well think (and at an appearance before Michaeli they tried to present the entrance to the window as being impossible but Michaeli refused to accept that if I recall correctly and thus it was never presented before the Massei Court) that window is an almost impossible climb, that Raffaele and Amanda were surprised about the arrival of the Postal Police and then tried to 'cover that up' by calling the Carabinieri and then them 'lying' about it, and now they might go over Amanda's 'behavior' the days after the murder and in the throes of confirmation bias see all these 'suspicious' things--and having their phones tapped might well have found something even more suspicious: Amanda had forgotten to tell them about Patrick's call at ~8:30 PM the night of the murder!

If you go back to the beginning of this thread a number of posters went looking through Italian and other newspapers which suggested the police were (before the arrests of Amanda, Patrick and Raffaele) looking for an 'African' man in connection to the murder. There's also reports from some about the legendary (and never produced in evidence as far as I can tell) 'black man's hair' that might have been found at the murder scene, and if you look at the whole CCTV video you'll see that there's a man also captured by that camera, though in that 'X-Files-like' Youtube they show the man coming after the figure (presumably Meredith but at this time they thought it Amanda) in the beginning, on the CCTV camera itself that man actually is caught on that camera a little bit before the figure in the light top they thought was Amanda at the time but which was probably Meredith. At any rate some think that male figure more likely to be of African decent, which may well be what ILE thought at the time.

Then you have Raffaele giving his 'interview' to Kate Mansey, in which this is printed:

Raffaele had spent the night at his own house on the other side of town with his girlfriend, Meredith's American flatmate Amanda Knox, 22.

He said: "Meredith had gone out with one of her English friends and Amanda and I went to party.

Not quite Raffaele, the night of the murder was not the night you'd gone out and parted at the square, it was the next night where you both stayed in. This is what can happen 'taking the edge' off with the fragrant 'pharmaceuticals!' However to the police, whom there's every reason to believe were watching the papers closely the days after the murder, (after all that's where they'd get their three 'Super-witnesses' from, and of course Mignini would be filing charges on many of them!) if they were to see this, printed on the Forth and available on the website the same day, they might well wonder why Raffaele's 'story' is that they went out that night, when Amanda (and Raffaele before with the Postal Police) has been telling them that night they stayed in all night, which is of course what they did.

So those things might well have provoked suspicion, and there's something else that I was reminded of looking for that Kate Mansey article, Amanda had of course been telling them about the mop to clean up the spill due to the 'suspicious' pipe breaking the night of the murder. You can see that reflected here in a later Mansey article:

The suspects used a mop and bucket to clean up the murder scene which Knox, an American, hid at her Sollecito's house after the killing.

Of course there wasn't actually a 'clean-up,' but at this point when their 'hypothesis' are being printed as facts, the pure coincidence that Amanda and Raffaele had need of a mop at Raffaele's becomes 'evidence' of a clean-up as the Polizia di Stato are just now getting reports from the Polizia Scientifica and as you can see they're finding evidence of someone else entirely, someone they know isn't Patrick Lumumba:

A FOURTH suspect in the gruesome Meredith Kercher murder was last night being tracked across Europe - after he was caught on CCTV leaving the scene of the crime.

Italian police have seized footage from a camera in a car park overlooking the British student's home.

Detectives know the identity of the man - a North African North Africa
musician believed to have fled to France - and are desperately hunting him down.

They believe his bloody fingerprint is on a cushion in the bedroom where the 21-year-old was stabbed in the neck three times when a horrifying sex game went wrong.

A judge has already ruled that the three other suspects - flatmate Amanda Knox, 20, her lover Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and bar owner Patrick Diya Lumumba, 37 - will held in prison for up to a year before formal charges are brought.

A police source told the Sunday Mirror last night: "We now have evidence a fourth suspect was involved and we're on his tail."

This is when they actually released their information about the CCTV camera, and at this point they're on Rudy Guede's trail. It's also becoming apparent that Patrick Lumumba probably had nothing to do with it:

Meanwhile Lumumba - Amanda's boss and a Congolese immigrant - claims he is completely innocent.

He says 16 people including a university professor support his alibi that he was in his bar Le Chic that night.

So if they did have this camera footage before this, when they released knowledge of it they were in fact starting to become aware of the possibility that Patrick had nothing to do with the murder. Of course Amanda's note on the sixth telling them how confused she was (thanks to their lies/mistakes) and that she couldn't be used as 'testimone' against him, and of course her note of the seventh where she completely withdraws it saying she now realizes she never left Raffaele's and couldn't know ought to have been a big hint as well. If they had the CCTV camera footage and as this suggests an anonymous police source...

'A police source told the Sunday Mirror last night: "We now have evidence a fourth suspect was involved and we're on his tail."

...my guess is that's Marco Chiacchiera, whom Kate Mansey had quoted in the previous week, who's actually solving the murder behind the scenes as Napoleoni, Mignini and others are chasing ghosts like 'Foxy Knoxy' and telling reporters nonsense like this:

Traces of Meredith's blood was found on Sollecito's underwear after police searched his home.

The suspects used a mop and bucket to clean up the murder scene which Knox, an American, hid at her Sollecito's house after the killing

Meredith was still alive when her attackers fled the home, leaving her to bleed to death

Knox lived for sex and drugs, was "up for anything" - and had bedded a string of men since arriving in Perugia three months ago.

COPS believe lovers Knox and Sollecito plotted the sex attack together and even went shopping for sexy underwear the day before Meredith's death.

THE man being hunted was seen in a launderette soon after the murder and is believed to have helped in the clean-up.

The sick details of the night before Meredith's death became clear yesterday after Judge Claudia Matteini gave her reasons for holding the prime suspects for up to a year. Meredith's attackers, high on drugs and drink, apparently demanded sex and tried to force her into an orgy.

Police say forensic evidence revealed Knox's fingerprints on Meredith's face when she pinned her down while others violated her.

A leaked police report reveals: "Meredith went into her room with Lumumba, after which something went wrong ... in all probability, Sollecito came in and the two tried a swap, which Meredith refused."

None of that is true, outside Amanda did need to get some underwear as she was locked out of her house due to it being a crime scene, but that happened after the murder, I think Mansey might just have gotten mixed up there as that 'story' should have been making the round right about then. The 'string of men' they were telling people about was entirely untrue, she'd been with Daniel Deluca and then Raffaele, two whole boys in two or so months. Obviously there were no fingerprints on Meredith's face, nor Meredith's blood on Raffaele's underwear, and that mop and bucket was never used on blood and the crime scene was never cleaned with a mop almost certainly.

At any rate, at this point it appears Chiacchiera is in the process of tracking down Rudy and the rest of the police and prosecutor are chasing ghosts of 'Foxy Knoxy'--a narrative they've completely invented as at this point Lalli cannot even determine if there was an actual sexual assault:

Last night an autopsy revealed Meredith had sex in the hours before she died, but was NOT raped.

I bring that article into it for this:

COPS have found fingerprints on two phones belonging to murdered language student Meredith Kercher, which they believe will lead to her killer.

The English and Italian mobiles were in undergrowth near the cottage in Italy where the 21-year-old was discovered with her throat slashed.

I wonder whatever happened to those fingerprints on the phones?

To bring this all to a conclusion, I think there were coincidental circumstances along with a healthy dollup of incompetence which led to them becoming 'suspicious' of Amanda and Raffaele, and quite possibly Patrick Lumumba instead. I don't know exactly what they all were, especially in Patrick's case as their story eventually changed to insist that was all Amanda's doing, which worked out well for them even though it didn't match the facts. The CCTV camera is a guess, if they had it and initially thought it might be Patrick (due to him swapping out the SIM card) but had changed their minds by the time they released it by which time Rudy's bloody print would have told them someone else had to be involved, I don't know for sure. What I do know is the less they actually had the stupider they look in retrospect so I'm actually trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here!

They had three days from the discovery of the murder to the fateful interrogation night and we know they'd already tapped Raffaele and Amanda's phones. The camera pointing towards the entry of the drive way is an obvious place to look, so my guess is they'd recovered it already but thought it (initially) as Patrick and Amanda meeting up the night of the murder, as opposed to (probably) being Meredith and Rudy. By the time they got around to revealing it they knew that Rudy was involved, and all of Patrick's witnesses coming forth ought to have suggested to them Patrick probably wasn't, which is also what they were getting from Amanda who was recovering from the mind-pucking they gave her. I wonder if they didn't choose to reveal that CCTV camera footage in hopes it would force Amanda to 'confess' who she really 'saw' or somesuch?

I agree with you about the English bitches virgins and believe they may have done quite a bit of nodding and winking, tutting and clucking and 'do you remember that time she broke out singing at such and such a place and didn't I tell you she was strange' to build a conducive background noise.

In fairness to them, they were back in England getting all sorts of bizarre reports like the ones above, and naturally they like everyone else would assume the police must be telling the truth and have it right. They were also being elicited by tabloid reporters who know how to get the kinds of quotes they need, and take things out of context to make them sound more tawdry and salacious. Despite that when they got to court they did admit to the truth, that Meredith and Amanda got along fine, although I think Robyn Butterworth 'imagined there was some tension' between them but that was just her 'perception' after the fact.

That the cops spent 50 hours or whatever it was with Amanda and had info on her eating pizza and tapped phone calls and buying underwear and running into Patrick on 05 Nov suggests a high degree of interest and also not solving these things probably hurts your head quite a bit.

Who else did they spend 50 hours with? What other suspects were there on whom any serious time was spent at all?

I don't disagree! I just think it was more complicated than what they tried to pretend later. Their problem was all the things that seemed so damning against Raffaele, Amanda and Patrick at the time were just coincidences or mistakes on their part, and they can't say that part later or people will realize they might have made a mistake! So instead they had to focus on Amanda's 'bizarre behavior' which wasn't really that unusual, but it did fit with the 'Foxy Knoxy' mythology, and they really didn't want people remembering they eliminated the possibility of a break-in at the start due to a hasty judgment, that they had the CCTV camera footage wrong, that Amanda forgetting about Patrick texting was meaningless, that basically everything they'd produce against them before Matteini and to the press the weeks after the murder was wrong. But they sure as hell did want people to think Amanda was a grade-A whack-a-mole!

 

[Dan O.]

A FOURTH suspect in the gruesome Meredith Kercher murder was last night being tracked across Europe - after he was caught on CCTV leaving the scene of the crime.

Italian police have seized footage from a camera in a car park overlooking the British student's home.

Detectives know the identity of the man - a North African North Africa
musician believed to have fled to France - and are desperately hunting him down.

They believe his bloody fingerprint is on a cushion in the bedroom where the 21-year-old was stabbed in the neck three times when a horrifying sex game went wrong.

A judge has already ruled that the three other suspects - flatmate Amanda Knox, 20, her lover Raffaele Sollecito, 23, and bar owner Patrick Diya Lumumba, 37 - will held in prison for up to a year before formal charges are brought.

A police source told the Sunday Mirror last night: "We now have evidence a fourth suspect was involved and we're on his tail."

This is when they actually released their information about the CCTV camera, and at this point they're on Rudy Guede's trail. It's also becoming apparent that Patrick Lumumba probably had nothing to do with it:

You may have slipped a cog here on the conspiracy train. The "forth suspect" of November 7th is later named as Patrick's friend and potential alibi, Usi. Of course, as the Perugia saying goes: "Any alibi of a murder suspect is another murder suspect". By Novembr 11, the police are disavowing that there even is a forth suspect. But then they get DNA back from the toilet paper in the other bath.

 

[anglolawyer]

$64,000 question

We all agree that it's OK to fabricate evidence against guilty people. Right? But not against people known to be innocent. It's probably not good to maintain a fabricated case against people you started out believing were guilty but somewhere along the line you realised were innocent all along.

Does anyone think this happened (and is happening) here?

 

[tsig]

We all agree that it's OK to fabricate evidence against guilty people. Right? But not against people known to be innocent. It's probably not good to maintain a fabricated case against people you started out believing were guilty but somewhere along the line you realised were innocent all along.

Does anyone think this happened (and is happening) here?

No.

 

[Matthew Best]

We all agree that it's OK to fabricate evidence against guilty people. Right?

We do?

 

[Kaosium]

You may have slipped a cog here on the conspiracy train. The "forth suspect" of November 7th is later named as Patrick's friend and potential alibi, Usi. Of course, as the Perugia saying goes: "Any alibi of a murder suspect is another murder suspect". By Novembr 11, the police are disavowing that there even is a forth suspect. But then they get DNA back from the toilet paper in the other bath.

That article is dated November 11th and must be up to date news, as it includes mention of the CCTV camera which wouldn't make the Fox/Times reporting until the following day. At this point Patrick has those other 16 people claimed by his lawyer as well as the University professor who flew in to alibi him, it wouldn't be useful for the cops to try arresting his alibi:

Meanwhile Lumumba - Amanda's boss and a Congolese immigrant - claims he is completely innocent.

He says 16 people including a university professor support his alibi that he was in his bar Le Chic that night.

I was thinking that source might be Chiacchiera, who Mansey had specifically quoted the week before,¹ who was on the trail of Rudy. It mentions the bloody fingerprint which was what tipped them off that another man had to be there as it didn't match Raffaele, Amanda nor Patrick, and being in blood dates it to the murder or shortly afterward. The quote also has him fleeing the country, as Rudy did. At any rate at this point they know for certain someone was involved who was not one of the three they arrested, and at this juncture they're not going to be able to arrest all of his potential alibis.

A FOURTH suspect in the gruesome Meredith Kercher murder was last night being tracked across Europe - after he was caught on CCTV leaving the scene of the crime.

Italian police have seized footage from a camera in a car park overlooking the British student's home.

Detectives know the identity of the man - a North African musician believed to have fled to France - and are desperately hunting him down.

They believe his bloody fingerprint is on a cushion in the bedroom where the 21-year-old was stabbed in the neck three times when a horrifying sex game went wrong.

Mansey might well have conflated the two, getting an earlier potential suspect mixed up with this new one, as the description of a 'North African musician' doesn't really match, or the police source could have been inexact with their description, but they're looking for someone because of the bloody fingerprint, who they think has fled the country and must by definition at this point be a 'fourth man' involved. That's Rudy.

It's also possible at this point having received Amanda's two notes on the sixth and seventh completely withdrawing her 'witness statement' and with all the people coming forward for Patrick that they've realized they might have the wrong guy with Patrick, and whoever out there would be a 'third' and not a 'forth' and they play down the idea from that standpoint in preparation for blaming Amanda for the arrest of Patrick. 'She blamed the wrong guy! She accused an innocent man!' It would take them nine days after this to release Patrick, however with finding no evidence of him there, the SIMs card swap being explained, Amanda withdrawing her statements and all the people coming forward they might just be getting the hint that Patrick didn't have anything to do with it, and finding hard evidence someone else they don't have in custody must have been, it might just be sinking in despite their unwillingness to admit it to the press for another nine days.

¹

Earlier senior detective Marco Chiacchiera said: "Her T-shirt was pulled up over her breasts and she was naked but apart from the cut to her neck, there were no scratches or other wounds on her body."

 

[anglolawyer]

Defendant's right to lie

Is it a good idea for defendants in Italian trials to be allowed, by law, to lie? There are those who think it should be legal to cheat at Bridge, with nods and winks conveying information otherwise denied to one's partner by the limitations imposed by the bidding. How ridiculous. The game would lose almost all its appeal and might as well just be played with all four hands open.

But what are the effects of the Italian rule? For one thing I can imagine that it works out pretty badly for innocent defendants who become harder to differentiate from lying guilty ones and who may also be tempted to improve their chances by embellishing their stories.

When I first heard, for example, that Raffaele had claimed that Meredith had pricked herself on the knife during a visit to his apartment which she never actually made, I harboured dark thoughts about him. But in light of this pernicious rule I now attach little importance to it. If I were on the jury, I think my task would be easier if he had to stick to the truth: that he knew nothing of the matter. It's like my pet obsession - the lamp. Amanda was asked about her lamp came to be in Meredith's room and just shrugged and said she didn't know anything about it. The fool! Why didn't she say she loaned it to Meredith earlier in the day? She was allowed to lie wasn't she?

Maybe at that point in the ridiculous farce Mignini would then have produced a rabbit out of his hat and shown the jury that, in fact, he moved the lamp himself (a possibility not to be sneezed at). But, as it was, in light of her reply, he took the other option of showing the jury a film in which one or other of them (Follain does not say which) introduced the lamp to aid the clean up.

It is hard enough giving evidence in court, many times harder when faced with life in prison, without having to navigate your way through a self-made minefield of contrivance and mendacity as well.

In the UK one of the jury's tasks is the very simple one of deciding whether to believe the defendant (or any witness) a task to which, rightly or not, 12 good men and true are deemed better suited than any judge. Things must be radically different in a system in which the defendant may and, if I understand correctly, is encouraged or expected to lie.

But what of the prosecution? What effect might the rule have on its conduct of the case? As I posted on IIP today, it may have influenced the choice of the clasp as the item used to frame Raffaele. His DNA on the handbag and top, also retrieved on 18 Dec and also tested for DNA, could easily have been explained with unfalsifiable lies that he touched them on the afternoon of 01 Nov, but he could not say the same about the clasp. That may be why the bunnies had to zero in on it on that date. The same can be said for the knife. It had to be something lie-proof.

Compare and contrast. In the UK he would have been interviewed under caution and questioned extensively about the relevant events. He would be expected and required either to answer questions truthfully or to maintain silence. He could have been shown the bag and the top (with other objects so as not to have him focus on them particularly) and asked whether he saw them before. He could have been asked to describe where he was in relation to Meredith that afternoon, whether he touched her or her bag etc. and then any DNA sampled from these items could have been used against him, albeit not without some room for argument about incidental or forgotten contact.

The rule seems to me to be corrosive of both prosecution and defence. I would be interested to hear a justification for it.

 

[Kaosium]

I
The rule seems to me to be corrosive of both prosecution and defence. I would be interested to hear a justification for it.

I dunno, I think it's more along the lines (in practice) that they don't go after a defendant for 'perjury' as well if they're found guilty of the crime. In other words they're free to tell their story unencumbered by possibly being prosecuted for additional things as well.

However it might also lead to the possibility that the jury is less likely to believe their tale, however true it may be, because they know the defendant is allowed to lie without fear of additional prosecution. Note this doesn't work in regards to lying about someone else--that's still a stiff charge prosecuted moreso in Italy than common law judicial systems from what I've come across.

 

[anglolawyer]

I dunno, I think it's more along the lines (in practice) that they don't go after a defendant for 'perjury' as well if they're found guilty of the crime. In other words they're free to tell their story unencumbered by possibly being prosecuted for additional things as well.

However it might also lead to the possibility that the jury is less likely to believe their tale, however true it may be, because they know the defendant is allowed to lie without fear of additional prosecution. Note this doesn't work in regards to lying about someone else--that's still a stiff charge prosecuted moreso in Italy than common law judicial systems from what I've come across.

I though of that but it's a bad reason imho. We don't do this either but just deny the defendant the credit he would have got for pleading guilty. Think about it: every convicted defendant who denied involvement would face a second trial for perjury. It strikes me as a bad law for the reasons I tried to set out.

The thing about lies told about someone else probably throws up some very fine arguments about which side of the line any particular lie falls.

 

[Supernaut]

...... This video also shows the complete unedited sequence of discovering the bleach reciept and putting it back in the bag and discovering it again and putting the reciept back in the bag and putting the bag back in the drawer and discovering the bag in the drawer containing a reciept for bleach (which incidentally is dated several months before the crime but that's a minor detail).

"Minor detail" - don't overdo it Dan O., it'll be lost on a lot of casual readers.

Someone explicitly said the receipt was dated 02/11/07, and was therefore "circumstantial" evidence of a "clean up" by AK/RS. It was a lie, period.

ETA>>

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/myths.html

On November 19, 2007, Richard Owen reported for the UK Times that police had found receipts showing purchases of bleach on the morning after the murder. The information was specific: one alleged purchase was made at 8:30, and a second was made at 9:15. No receipts were ever found. Then, in a November 25, 2007, report, Owen quoted an apparently official source as saying that the entire cottage, except for Meredith's room and the bathroom she shared with Amanda, had been "thoroughly cleaned with bleach."

SOmething like this doesn't end up printed in The Times unless someone has made a serious effort to get it "out there".

 

[anglolawyer]

"Minor detail" - don't overdo it Dan O., it'll be lost on a lot of casual readers.

Someone explicitly said the receipt was dated 02/11/07, and was therefore "circumstantial" evidence of a "clean up" by AK/RS. It was a lie, period.

ETA>>

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/myths.html



SOmething like this doesn't end up printed in The Times unless someone has made a serious effort to get it "out there".

Agreed. It was this outrageous lie which lodged in my brain for four years and dragged me back to the case following the acquittal because it seemed so odd that she would be up at the crack of dawn desperately buying bleach if she hadn't been involved in the crime. My recollection is that the times of the purchases were 7.30 and 8.15 but I could be mistaken.

 

[Dan O.]

Agreed. It was this outrageous lie which lodged in my brain for four years and dragged me back to the case following the acquittal because it seemed so odd that she would be up at the crack of dawn desperately buying bleach if she hadn't been involved in the crime. My recollection is that the times of the purchases were 7.30 and 8.15 but I could be mistaken.

From Times Online -http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2894139.ece November 19, 2007 Suspect ‘bought bleach to clean murder weapon after Meredith Kercher’s death’

Till receipts found at the flat of Raffaele Sollecito, one of three people suspected of being involved in killing Meredith Kercher, show that he bought two bottles of bleach allegedly used to clean the murder weapon at a time when he claimed to be asleep.
Police said that further evidence against Mr Sollecito had come to light in the form of receipts from a shop near his flat for bleach, bought on the morning after the murder and allegedly used to clean an 8in kitchen knife and Mr Sollecito’s Nike trainers. The first receipt was timed at 8.30am on November 2, and the second 45 minutes later, suggesting that the first container of bleach had not been sufficient. The bleach was also used to clean up the flat itself.​

 

[anglolawyer]

From Times Online -http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2894139.ece November 19, 2007 Suspect ‘bought bleach to clean murder weapon after Meredith Kercher’s death’

Till receipts found at the flat of Raffaele Sollecito, one of three people suspected of being involved in killing Meredith Kercher, show that he bought two bottles of bleach allegedly used to clean the murder weapon at a time when he claimed to be asleep.
Police said that further evidence against Mr Sollecito had come to light in the form of receipts from a shop near his flat for bleach, bought on the morning after the murder and allegedly used to clean an 8in kitchen knife and Mr Sollecito’s Nike trainers. The first receipt was timed at 8.30am on November 2, and the second 45 minutes later, suggesting that the first container of bleach had not been sufficient. The bleach was also used to clean up the flat itself.​

Thanks for the correction. The precise pathway by which these lies reached the press would be of enormous interest but is very unlikely ever to come to light.

 

[RandyN]

Thanks for the correction. The precise pathway by which these lies reached the press would be of enormous interest but is very unlikely ever to come to light.

Wont help much but whoever (Mignini) leaked this lie to the Times also leaked the same thing to Nadeau who gave it the same UN-crosschecked inclusion in her novel.

Not sure how that fits into when they started to make a wrong case.
I seem to recall Chiacchiera having some early input on Nov 2 when he was the first to speculate that the break-in might be faked since he thought the toss between the 11" opening of the shutters would be tough given the large size of the rock... Ignoring the obvious possibility that wind or someone may have adjusted the position of these outer shutters seems an amateurish oversight in hindsight but which we learn later is exactly taken from the handbook of these Keystone Kops.

This is where the investigation starts down the wrong path. And then Mignini suggests that since the break-in is staged then the murderer is someone with a key. This was all Nov 2 yet.

Usi was definitely the fourth suspect. I don't think the police had a clue about a 5th suspect until Rudys friend went to police and told them that he suspected his friend Rudy might be involved in the Kercher murder.

They try to claim they discovered Rudy from his fingerprint. I think they lie about this claim to make themselves seem less incompetent. Rudys recorded Skype conversation is his second or third contact with his pal who quickly understood that Rudy was guilty and that he was running and who very soon went to them to rat out his friend.

Ill answer your 64 thousand dollar question. I think in Italy it is quite common for the police to do whatever is necessary to get a conviction. With no system of internal controls and no type of checks and balances they simply have blurred the lines between right and wrong. I think this case clearly illustrates how far they are willing to take an absurd proposition. One backed with no evidence and highly dubious scientific data propped up by the most unlikely eye witnesses seriously brought into a court...its as if they found them on the street...oh wait......

 

[anglolawyer]

Wont help much but whoever (Mignini) leaked this lie to the Times also leaked the same thing to Nadeau who gave it the same UN-crosschecked inclusion in her novel. Not sure how that fits into when they started to make a wrong case.

According to Follain, whose book is somehow written from inside the actors' heads, Mignini was exasperated by the false stories leaked to the press.

I seem to recall Chiacchiera having some early input on Nov 2 when he was the first to speculate that the break-in might be faked since he thought the toss between the 11" opening of the shutters would be tough given the large size of the rock... Ignoring the obvious possibility that wind or someone may have adjusted the position of these outer shutters seems an amateurish oversight in hindsight but which we learn later is exactly taken from the handbook of these Keystone Kops. This is where the investigation starts down the wrong path. And then Mignini suggests that since the break-in is staged then the murderer is someone with a key. This was all Nov 2 yet.

I had the same thought and recollection as you. Follain mentions this. The 11 inches thing is simply ridiculous, as if the shutters were frozen, rock-solid in semi-open position throughout a November night. Never mind the rock getting through that 11 inch gap, how about the burglar himself?

Ill answer your 64 thousand dollar question. I think in Italy it is quite common for the police to do whatever is necessary to get a conviction. With no system of internal controls and no type of checks and balances they simply have blurred the lines between right and wrong. I think this case clearly illustrates how far they are willing to take an absurd proposition. One backed with no evidence and highly dubious scientific data propped up by the most unlikely eye witnesses seriously brought into a court...its as if they found them on the street...oh wait......

Another answer might be that they sort of stumble along from one thing to another, without a fully formed plan made at the beginning and played out over the ensuing years. At 06 Nov (post 'confession') they may only have been thinking about getting them locked up without charge for a year to see what pressure that might exert. Fabricating the knife evidence would be part of applying pressure and also surmounting the hurdle of ensuring they had enough evidence to argue for prolonged detention. At some point one of the authors, probably Follain, has Mignini baffled that they still haven't cracked. This would be about Dec 07 and nothing more than Mignini's version for Follain's benefit (if that).

In other words they might be thinking little more than that there was something fishy about the three of them, enough to lock them up, throw away the key and sit back to see what happened next. What happened next was Rudy. I believe this is known as 'coming from left field' on your side of the pond and it may have thrown them rather.

 

[Bill Williams]

In other words they might be thinking little more than that there was something fishy about the three of them, enough to lock them up, throw away the key and sit back to see what happened next. What happened next was Rudy. I believe this is known as 'coming from left field' on your side of the pond and it may have thrown them rather.

Aha! Caught you! You are dangerously flirting with the idea that the cops were making this up as they went along. It's plausible and perhaps likely that the cops went to Knox at 11 pm on the 5th out in the hall, not knowing even what they were looking for when Ficarra asked to see her phone - for the umpteenth time.

As mentioned elsewhere, I think it was a series on unpredictable, but unfortunate events, and the cops simply did not have a check or balance to get them off the escalating series of mishappenstances.

As much as I'd like to present Mignini as a demon here, I think it was just that, a series of happenstances that the ILE mistook for fire, when it was evident that there wasn't even smoke.

 

[Kaosium]

Usi was definitely the fourth suspect. I don't think the police had a clue about a 5th suspect until Rudys friend went to police and told them that he suspected his friend Rudy might be involved in the Kercher murder.

They try to claim they discovered Rudy from his fingerprint. I think they lie about this claim to make themselves seem less incompetent. Rudys recorded Skype conversation is his second or third contact with his pal who quickly understood that Rudy was guilty and that he was running and who very soon went to them to rat out his friend.

What I'm getting at is whether they knew the fingerprint belonged to Rudy, what they did know is someone who wasn't Patrick, Amanda or Raffaele was involved in the murder. They knew this for certain by November 11th, as per the Kate Mansey story in the Sunday Mirror dated the same day:

A FOURTH suspect in the gruesome Meredith Kercher murder was last night being tracked across Europe - after he was caught on CCTV leaving the scene of the crime.

Italian police have seized footage from a camera in a car park overlooking the British student's home.

Detectives know the identity of the man - a North African musician believed to have fled to France - and are desperately hunting him down.

They believe his bloody fingerprint is on a cushion in the bedroom where the 21-year-old was stabbed in the neck three times when a horrifying sex game went wrong.

No police anywhere are incompetent enough not to realize that a fingerprint in blood that doesn't match any of the three they have in custody by definition means there was someone else involved. Blood dries fairly quickly, that mark left at the scene means someone was there when Meredith was bleeding or shortly thereafter. That's also the best kind of evidence you can have in a murder case, they'd definitely need to talk to that man!

Ill answer your 64 thousand dollar question. I think in Italy it is quite common for the police to do whatever is necessary to get a conviction. With no system of internal controls and no type of checks and balances they simply have blurred the lines between right and wrong. I think this case clearly illustrates how far they are willing to take an absurd proposition. One backed with no evidence and highly dubious scientific data propped up by the most unlikely eye witnesses seriously brought into a court...its as if they found them on the street...oh wait......

Lol! I've noticed a few times Mignini's 'witness integrity' standards would impress Jim Garrison.

The Italian at the IIP site, 'Broken_English,' described it as them all wanting to be like 'Dirty Harry:' They fight the mob, they fight the criminals, they fight the rules, which they make up as they go along anyway!

 

[Supernaut]

Agreed. It was this outrageous lie which lodged in my brain for four years and dragged me back to the case following the acquittal because it seemed so odd that she would be up at the crack of dawn desperately buying bleach if she hadn't been involved in the crime. My recollection is that the times of the purchases were 7.30 and 8.15 but I could be mistaken.

In England (and all judiciaries that are based on it, which after the expansion of British colonial power includes a great many) the principle of 'habeas corpus' (no imprisonment without charge) has been a principle in law since the Magna Carta. No such equivalent exists in Italy.

Perhaps more critically (and extraordinarily) the principle of 'sub judice' doesn't exist there either. The police and prosecutors appear to be able to say whatever ever they want, to release any information they please to the media with practically no restraints at all.

The combination is toxic.

The Italian authorites essentially have carte blanche to hold suspects for up to a year without bringing any specific charges while they "build" (or manufacture) a case and at the same willfully taint and prejudice public perception ahead of the trial.

In AK's and RS's case it extended to disseminating many bare-faced lies. In fact anything they 'leaked' to the media that was incriminating had to be a lie - they had NOTHING (and it's hard to believe this was an aberration).

Hence the reason for the "bleach receipt" lie - by late November (a couple of weeks after the arrests) the investigation (including the forensics) had yielded no sign whatsoever of either of them at the murder scene (Meredith's bedroom), literally not a speck of evidence, so they wanted to prime the public for their "cleanup" theory, that this absence of evidence was evidence itself!

It's almost beyond belief. I've said before; watching the antics of Mignini, Commodi, Stephony and all their other cronies was like being confronted with small children telling huge fibs while blissfully unware of how transparent they are to the grown-ups (only those with similarly infantile mentalities were and remain convinced by these absurdities, people like the denizens of the PMF "communities").