Free Angel Face by Barbie Latza Nadeau Page A

Mellas’s MySpace page was “Foxy Knoxy,” which linked to Amanda’s page.) The image wars proceeded with thrusts and parries: On morning TV shows, Edda would weep and show pictures of Amanda kicking a soccer ball; in the afternoon, the British tabloids would trumpet headlines about her jailhouse lesbian encounters (drawing inferences from entries in her prison diaries and letters to friends, where Amanda worried about becoming gay). Meanwhile, all sorts of people tried to make a buck off the murder. Amanda’s classmates in both Perugia and Seattle asked for cash or plane tickets in exchange for interviews. One of her teachers in Italy offered a TV producer a handwritten letter of Amanda’s—for 10,000 euros. Tidbits from the
legal dossier were shopped around. Coverage of the crime began to diverge on the two sides of the Atlantic. From the vantage point of Perugia, it seemed as though the Knox family’s American supporters were simply choosing to ignore the facts that were coming to light in Italy.
    Raffaele had also supplied some troubling information on his social networking sites. He was a rich kid with ready cash to fund a drug habit, and in one Web entry, he bragged about spending “80 percent of his waking hours high.” The background image on his Web pages was a marijuana leaf print, and in almost every picture, he appeared bleary-eyed and tousled. (A police wiretap later heard his father say, “Raffaele, I’ve told you, basta spinelli! —Enough with the joints!” The most damaging picture he posted would be forever etched in the minds of anyone following this case: Wrapped in surgical bandages, Raffaele brandishes a meat cleaver and a jug of alcool, a pink, alcohol-based cleaning liquid.
    These were the scraps of information that stoked a media frenzy in Italy. Even before Amanda and Raffaele were officially charged with murder, they were on the front page of every newspaper in the country, usually under headlines such as “Amanda, Sangue e
Sorrisi— Amanda, blood and smiles” and “Uomini e Segreti, Amanda Racconta— Men and secrets, Amanda tells all.” As Amanda’s and Raffaele’s popularity grew, so did the hunger for information about them. Amanda’s face graced the cover of Italy’s most popular grocery aisle glossies, and the murder was the subject of four quick books by Italian journalists. One of the books even came with an animation of the alleged crime on DVD.
     
     
    THE AMERICAN PRESS HUNG BACK, at first objective and somewhat disbelieving that such a wholesome-seeming girl could have any connection to such a sordid foreign crime, and then, as the family stepped up its defense, increasingly divided between two camps that would become simply the innocentisti —those who believed she was blameless—and the colpevolisti— those who did not. In Perugia, these labels governed access. The prosecutors and defense lawyers all thought they knew exactly where each journalist stood, and those of us who were deemed American colpevolisti were few and far between. Of the handful of American journalists in Perugia in late 2007 and early 2008, none got access to the Knox family without certain guarantees
about positive coverage. Within months, the family decided to speak on the record primarily to the American TV networks, often in exchange for airfare and hotel bills. Most of the print press was shut out. And the TV producers learned to be very cautious about being seen with people like me, lest the Knox family should cut them off.
    As interest in the case grew, an odd assortment of American talking heads attached their reputations to Amanda’s innocence. An aggressive support group called Friends of Amanda formed in Seattle, headed by Anne Bremner, a media-savvy criminal lawyer who had cut her teeth as a tough prosecutor in Seattle’s King County Court. She then became a defense lawyer, taking on some of America’s most outrageous cases. (For example, she represented the Des Moines,