Free Angel Face by Barbie Latza Nadeau

requested was that the nude photos of her battered body not be released to the press. It would take nearly two years to get any sort of answers about what had happened to Meredith that
night, and even then, the day after the verdict, they still did not know exactly how or why she had been killed. Three people had been convicted, yet her murder remained a mystery.

5
    “The Worst Part Was I Still Couldn’t Remember Exactly What I Had Been Doing”
    F ROM THE MOMENT they were arrested, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were a circulation bonanza for the Italian media and a front-page staple of the British tabloids. The Italian press funneled leaks from the lawyers and prosecutors to embellish the crime story and quickly dubbed Knox “Angel Face,” fostering a cult of morbid fascination with this most unlikely killer. The tabloids in the United Kingdom, eager to defend the honor of a British victim, mined the saucy details Amanda had inadvertently provided on the Internet, beginning with her MySpace screen name:
“Foxy Knoxy.” Calls to teachers and friends in Seattle routinely produced descriptions of an all-American kid, studious, smart, and athletic. But the social networking sites told a somewhat different story. A YouTube video of Amanda drunk spawned the image of a party girl, although, in truth, nearly every coed in America has posted a similar clip. But other entries suggested a darker, more enigmatic personality. “Baby Brother,” a short story Amanda posted on MySpace, is not too unsettling overall, but it includes a rather cavalier reference to rape:
    Kyle laughed deep in his throat. “Icky Vicky, huh? Jeez, Edgar. You had me going there.” He picked up his calculus book and flicked with his thumb to find his page, shook his head side to side with his smile still confident on his face. “A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don’t know what they want.” Kyle winked his eye. “You have to show it to them. Trust me. In any case,” He cocked his eyebrows up and one side of his mouth rose into a grin. “I think we both know hard A is hardly a drug.”
    (“Hard A” is Seattle slang for hard alcohol and usually refers to a toxic cocktail of vodka, whiskey, and
schnapps. Amanda and her friends often partied with pot and hard A rather than beer for maximum inebriation.)
    Whether or not Amanda meant to condone sexual violence, prosecutors took this story as proof that she had at least fantasized about it. It was there in her mind. Add drugs and alcohol, they reasoned, and it wouldn’t take long for such hidden thoughts to lead to action. And other MySpace entries, including this one, titled “The Model,” posted a few weeks before the murder, seemed to compound this picture of a young woman with a vivid, vaguely lurid imagination:
    Small, cold fingers curled around my open hand and I gasped, ripping my hand away. Aislin, narrowed hazel eyes and immobile pink lips, flipped on the light of the stairway and stared at me. She was quiet, and the hand that had reached for mine hung limp in the space between us like the wrist was broken. I grabbed her hand back and held it to my lips, kissing the little fingers. It drew her closer to me and she pulled weakly for her hand back. “What are you doing?” I didn’t let her go, but grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the front window. “Did you lock the back door when you came home from school?” I searched the dark space in
front of our lot. “You’re late, again.” Her voice was earthy and slightly bitter, like red wine.
    A picture was forming of Amanda as a vixen with dark impulses, and her family struggled to control the firestorm. They insisted that “Foxy Knoxy” was a nickname Amanda earned for her junior soccer moves, not her sexual magnetism. Time and again, they denied that she ever used the moniker as an adult, despite the fact that it was her MySpace ID. (Among the thirty-nine social networking friends on her stepfather Chris