Even though Chiacchiera thought the burglary looked staged (observing from the inside, Profazio thought the entry through Filomena's window unlikely, observing from the outside - a slightly different issue) he also suggested that things in MK's room must at least be considered as consensual, because -to him - the relative lack of evidence of a struggle. So, no struggle inside the bedroom, little evidence outside the bedroom, this begins to look like either MK was caught by surprise or knew the attacker enough to initially try a strategy of talking with the guy, rather than actively resisting. The staged burglary becomes 50-50, and no forced entry (through the front door at least) tends to focus the cops on people known to Meredith. Even Chiachierra's, "She could have been trying to talk her way out of it," suggests she was acquainted with who was inside the cottage that night.
I have seen this before. No sign of a struggle? What? What about the blood everywhere? I mean, not in one place but all over the floor, bloody hand prints in two locations, chair jammed under the desk, mattress jammed into the wall, items disturbed on the night stand, lamp toppled off the night stand (actually I believe it was already on the floor but, hey).
My bad. The "no struggle" was my imprecise, perhaps misleading way of putting it. Apologies. Point is, that to Chiacchiera's view on day one (Nov 2) even with the signs of a struggle, they were minimal signs, indicating to him that this was perhaps someone known to Meredith - so the "Check out the guys she may have met at Hallowe'en," as well as the, "This could have been someone living at the cottage," possibilities were born in his mind. He may have been (my assumption) the only one who thought the immediate scene suggested a single attacker, again (my assumption) why he may have cautioned Napoleoni to go slow at 1:45 am on the 6th, if Napoleoni was going to go to Mignini with what was essentially a multiple attacker scenario. I mean, that early in the police's thinking, could they REALLY believe Knox was only putting herelf in the kitchen with her hands over her ears? Either way, guilt or innocence, Knox's coerced imaginings did not add up.
Anyway, we seem to agree here. If the burglary was staged and there is no struggle outside the bedroom then that rules out an attacker barging his way in after she answers the front door. That narrows the field considerably.
Even though I am putting this thought into Chiacchiera's mind at 1:45 am - to him that also would seem to rule out Lumumba, not someone known to Meredith. He could have been thinking, "What? Lumumba? Really? That doesn't match the scene I saw back on the 3 1/2 days ago."
I think Chiacchiera himself doubts this as late as 1:45 am Nov 6th, the "admitted by someone else" part, and this perhaps is the reason why he counsels Napoleoni to go slower, not rush prematurely into one of the investigative lines to the point of no return back into the others.
The counseling Napoleoni to go slower source, is my interpretation of what Follain reports in his book. Everything else in that is me trying to squeeze meaning out of Follain's trace remark about what he reported Chiaccheira and Napoleoni talked about at what I am assuming is the 1:45 am mark, before they got Mignini involved. Acc. to Mignini and Napoleoni, they had to get Mignini involved because only he could sign a short term detention order.
The cops claimed to have scrutinised Amanda's telephone records. They certainly had access to them and it would be amazing if they had not focused on texts exchanged at or about 8.30 p.m. on 01 Nov. If you could point to all the other lines of enquiry which stopped them getting round to doing that, fine, but otherwise it is fanciful to believe the cops would not have looked closely at her texts.
Not only fanciful, but post-hoc admissions on their part. And it goes against what they testified to at trial, that (baiscally) Knox caught them off guard with the Lumumba thing.
I think both are bollocks in a sense. I'm probably claiming both that they had no prior-suspicion of Lumumba, but that they also found their heartrates rising when they (Ficarra, Zugarini, Raffo.... maybe it ws Raffo, he was the one thrusting the phone in Knox's face yelling, "Liar!") compared the timestamp of the "See You Later" text with Meredith's last known sighting.
This I am not so sure about. Do you imagine a scenario in which different sub-sets of the cops were each straining at the leash to go off and arrest different people and had to be restrained from above? That sounds like a strange way to run an operation like this.
It's hard NOT to imagine middle level cops straining at the leash, wanting to get some face time with a senior person (like Napoleoni or Chiacchiera) to argue their pet theory, like you and I are doing. This case would be a career case for whoever broke it wide open.
Some dangling and unnoticed thread when pulled at just might cause the whole tapestry to fall apart! Unless I don't know my Italians, I can't help but think that even arm-chair detectives, like you and me, weren't trying to get some face time with the cops in the bars at night to hawk THEIR theories.
'What!? You've arrested Lumumba? You CRETIN! We aren't anywhere near finished with framing completing our investigations into him!'
Who knows? Maybe that was good fodder for "I told you so" when they had to let Lumumba go.
Still the REAL poser here, and to which you and I should be turning our attention, is not WHEN did Lumumba come onto the scene....
.... but WHY did they not let Knox and Sollecito go when Guede came on the scene?
In both our scenarios, there's plenty of room to accuse the cops of fabricating a case against Knox and Sollecito because Knox had the nerve to actually participate in their imaginings at interrogation!
Is that worth 4 years in jail, with a possibility of 22 more?
