Free Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox by Raffaele Sollecito Page A

they were behaving more like gangsters.
    Then came a sound that chilled my bones: Amanda’s voice, yowling for help in the next room. She was screaming in Italian, “Aiuto! Aiuto!”
    I asked what was going on, and Moscatelli told me there was nothing to worry about. But that was absurd. I could hear police officers yelling, and Amanda sobbing and crying out another three or four times.
    What was this? When would it ever end?
    *  *  *
    Something was exciting the police more than my pocketknife, and that was the pattern they had detected on the bottom of my shoes. By sheer bad luck, I was wearing Nikes that night, and the pattern of concentric circles on the soles instantly reminded my interrogators of the bloody shoe prints at the scene of the crime, which were made by Nikes too.
    I had no idea of any of this. All I knew was, the rest of the interrogation team piled back into the room and told me to take off my shoes.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “We need them,” came the answer.
    I did as I was told. “Socks too?”
    “No, you can keep your socks on.”
    The rounds of questioning began all over again: “Tell us what happened! Did Amanda go out on the night of the murder? Why are you holding out on us? You’ve lost your head per una vacca —for a cow!”
    They wanted me to sign a statement they had prepared. The first part was a big mash up of the events of October 31 and November 1, most of which, I have to admit, was the result of my own confusion. The account began with the lunch at Via della Pergola, Meredith going out, and the two of us leaving in the later afternoon. But then it described me going home alone and working at the computer while Amanda headed to the center of town.
    The statement had my father calling around eleven o’clock, which is what he almost always did, and Amanda returning to my house at around one in the morning.
    By the time I read what the police had prepared, it was deep into the night, I was exhausted and scared, and I could no longer think straight. Absurd as it sounds, the statement struck me as accurate enough up to this point. I simply missed the fact that I was—from the investigators’ point of view—cutting Amanda loose for the entire evening and depriving her of the only alibi she had.
    I objected to just one paragraph. It was a logical continuation of what the police already had me saying, but I missed the connection; I just knew this part was not right. It read, “In my last statement I told you a lot of crap because she [Amanda] talked me into her version of events, and I didn’t think about the inconsistencies.”
    I told my interrogators this part needed to be changed, but they wouldn’t back down. Instead, they unexpectedly became much friendlier and said I shouldn’t worry about this paragraph. It was just something they needed and it wouldn’t affect my position oneway or the other. Essentially, they were asking me to trust them. Part of me still wanted to. I wanted to believe this was a world in which the police did their jobs responsibly. And part of me just couldn’t wait for the hellish night to be over.
    At three thirty, after five hours of relentless interrogation, I signed.
    *  *  *
    At this point, Amanda herself had already cracked. As she later told it, her interrogators insisted they had concrete proof she was at the house on Via della Pergola the night Meredith was killed. When she said she had no recollection of this, they threatened her with thirty years in prison and hit her repeatedly on the head. (The police denied threatening her in any way.)
    They asked her over and over about the text message she had sent Patrick, her boss at Le Chic, and said it showed she had arranged to meet him even after he told her she didn’t need to come into work that night. But this was clearly a distorted interpretation. Yes, she had written ci vediamo più tardi —see you later—but in both Italian and English that can simply mean “see you around.” The