Free The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single) by Douglas Preston, John Douglas, Mark Olshaker, Steve Moore, Judge Michael Heavey, Jim Lovering, Thomas Lee Wright Page A

to deliver test results, local police questioned the people who were closest to the victim. In particular, they focused on the young woman who stumbled upon the crime scene. Something about her made them suspicious. They played a hunch, and they turned up the heat in a late-night interrogation until she was frightened out of her wits. They got her to sign two vaguely worded statements incriminating herself and the man she worked for, Patrick Lumumba.
    This was all they thought they needed. They stopped asking questions. They thought they could guess the rest of the story. They hauled their suspects into custody and convened a press conference at which they made a dramatic announcement. The murder arose from a “sex game” that turned deadly, and it was all centered on Amanda Knox, the pretty American girl from Seattle.
    Reporters loved it. The police handed them the script for a gripping narrative, which took shape in the tabloid media over the next several weeks: Knox was a reckless thrill seeker with a boundless sense of entitlement. She ruthlessly exploited her sex appeal to manipulate and control men, to the point where they would do anything to please her. Meredith Kercher, in contrast, was a virtuous British girl who had the bad luck to end up sharing quarters with Knox. The result was a spiral of tension that exploded into violence on the night of November 1, 2007.
    None of this, aside from Meredith Kercher’s good character, was true. It was pure speculation. But reporters did not notice that, because it made for such a fine story. They did not ponder the implications when Lumumba turned up an ironclad alibi and was replaced by Guede. Nor did they seem concerned that a trail of physical evidence pointed to Guede and no one else. Guede’s involvement in the crime was taken for granted, butnobody found him particularly interesting. Amanda Knox—“Foxy Knoxy”—was the suspect they cared about.
    Knox was also who the authorities cared about. Over time, facts slowly gained precedence over rumor and speculation. Reporters began to see that the sex-game story, beguiling though it was, did not match what was found at the crime scene or what was known about the suspects. They finally asked the hard questions they should have posed from the start, and when they did, the official answers were far from convincing. By the time of the initial verdict, in 2009, the tone of the media coverage had become skeptical. The reputations of police and prosecutors hung in the balance. Their professional interests hinged on sustaining a case against Knox.
    Court reports reflect the conflict between this priority and the facts of the murder. Judge Giancarlo Massei, who convicted Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, presided over a trial that lasted almost a year. He listened to a string of forensic experts who described the nature of Meredith Kercher’s injuries and what was found at the crime scene. This evidence pointed not to a sex game but to a single killer armed with a small knife. Massei watched as drug-addled prosecution witnesses imploded on the stand. He followed along as the prosecution advanced one hazy theory after another, struggling to explain why two young lovers would interrupt a quiet evening to help a small-time criminal commit murder. The ideas ranged from petty theft to a dispute over housekeeping. All of them centered on Knox and presumed her complete control over Guede as well as Sollecito. In his closing argument, the prosecutor took a final shot at the intractable problem of motive:
    “Amanda nurtured her hate for Meredith, but that night, that hate could explode.For Amanda, the moment had come to take revenge on that prissy girl. That is what she must have thought. And in a crescendo of threats and increasing violence, Meredith’s ordeal begins.”
    After sitting through the long trial, Massei must have understood how ridiculous this sounded. The profile of Knox that emerged through witness