Free Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir by Amanda Knox Page B

into Meredith’s room at all. “Raffaele,” I said. He was standing beside me. “What’s going on? What’s going on?”
    One of the guys shouted, “ Sangue! Dio mio! ”—“Blood! My God!”
    Filomena was crying, hysterical. Her screams sounded wild, animal-like.
    The police boomed, “Everyone out of the house. Now!” They called for reinforcements from the Perugian town police.
    Raffaele grabbed my hands and pulled me toward the front door.
    Sitting outside on the front stoop, I heard someone exclaim, “ Armadio ”—“armoire.” They found a foot in the closet , I thought. Then, “ Corpo! ” — “A body!” A body inside the wardrobe with a foot sticking out? I couldn’t make the words make sense. Filomena was wailing, “Meredith! Meredith! Oh, God!” Over and over, “Meredith! Oh, God!”
    My mind worked in slow motion. I could not scream or speak. I just kept saying in my head, What’s happening? What’s happening?
    It was only over the course of the next several days that I was able to piece together what Filomena and the others in the doorway had seen: a naked, blue-tinged foot poking out from beneath Meredith’s comforter, blood splattered over the walls and streaked across the floor.
    But at that moment, sitting outside my villa, the image I had was of a faceless body stuffed in the armoire, a foot sticking out.
    Maybe that’s why Filomena cried, and I didn’t. In that instant, she’d seen enough to grasp the terrible scope of what had happened. All I got was confusion and words and, later, question after question about Meredith and her life in Perugia. There was nothing I could say about what her body was like in its devastation.
    But even with all these blanks, I was still shaken—in shock, I’d guess. Waiting in the driveway, while two policemen guarded the front door, I clung to Raffaele. My legs wobbled. The weather was sunny, but it was still a cold November day, and suddenly I was freezing. Since I’d left the house without my jacket, Raffaele took off his gray one with faux-fur lining and put it on me.
    Paramedics, investigators, and white-suited forensic scientists arrived in waves. The police wouldn’t tell us anything, but Luca and Paola stayed close, trying to read lips and overhear. At one point, Luca told Raffaele what the police had said: “The victim’s throat has been slashed.”
    I didn’t find out until the months leading up to my trial—and during the trial itself—how sadistic her killer had been. When the police lifted up the corner of Meredith’s beige duvet they found her lying on the floor, stripped naked from the waist down. Her arms and neck were bruised. She had struggled to remain alive. Her bra had been sliced off and left next to her body. Her cotton T-shirt, yanked up to expose her breasts, was saturated with blood. The worst report was that Meredith, stabbed multiple times in the neck, had choked to death on her own blood and was found lying in a pool of it, her head turned toward the window, eyes open.
    In the first hours after the police came, standing outside the villa that had been the happy center of my life in Perugia—my refuge thousands of miles from home—I mercifully didn’t know any of this. I was slowly absorbing and rejecting the fractured news that Meredith was dead.
    I felt as if I were underwater. Each movement—my own and everyone else’s—seemed thick, slow, surreal. I willed the police to be wrong. I wanted Meredith to walk down the driveway, to be alive. What if she’d spent the night with one of her British girlfriends? Or gotten up early to meet friends? I held the near-impossible idea that somehow the person in Meredith’s room was a stranger.
    Nothing felt real except Raffaele’s arms, holding me, keeping me from collapsing. I clung to him. Unable to understand most of what was being said, I felt cast adrift. My grasp of Italian lessened under the extraordinary stress. Catching words and translating in my head felt