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A Death in Italy

The Definitive Account of the Amanda Knox Case

St. Martins Press

Surrounded by hills in the heart of Umbria, a region known as Italy's 'green lung' for its unspoilt landscape, the beauty of Perugia has long attracted both tourists and students from overseas. The narrow, cobbled streets of the hilltop city, which lies roughly halfway between Rome and Florence, trace crooked paths through charming squares with ornate fountains, past austere palaces and frescoed churches. Far above the intricate maze of streets, and mostly invisible to the visitors strolling through them, terraces are draped with jasmine and wisteria.

Perugians are fiercely proud of their city – which since its foundation by Etruscans in the sixth century BC has been besieged, conquered and looted by ancient Romans, barbarians, Byzantines and most recently Austrians – but they are also notorious for being rather parochial. An Italian actor performing there for the first time was upset by the lukewarm applause of his audience and joked that it was because the locals saw nothing but hills day in, day out. 'If only they could see the sea, or a flat horizon, they'd be more receptive to the world around them and have more open minds,' he said.

At the city's University for Foreigners, founded under the dictator Benito Mussolini to spread Italy's language and culture abroad, no fewer than 350 different ethnic groups coexist peacefully, making Perugia the most cosmopolitan city of its size – it has a population of 160,000 – in Italy. But in recent years the city's growing prosperity and its student population have attracted drug dealers who skulk in its dark alleys as they wait for customers. In 2007, twenty-five people died of a drug overdose in the province of Perugia, the highest number of such deaths in any Italian province.

A student in languages and politics, Meredith Kercher was at first torn between Milan and Perugia for her year's study abroad. She worried that Perugia might be too small; so few of her friends had heard of the place. But in the end she chose Perugia, attracted by the city's beauty, and she put her name down for the university's Italian language course. She had first fallen in love with Italy as a child, when her parents John, a London-born freelance journalist, and Arline, who was from Lahore in India, took her there on family holidays. Meredith grew so fond of Italy she also went on school exchange trips as a teenager. She loved everything from the Italian way of life to the country's art treasures and its food, especially pasta and pizza.

Almost a Christmas baby – she was born on 28 December 1985 in Southwark, London – Meredith was a pretty, cheerful and studious girl. Brought up in Coulsdon, Surrey, she had two brothers, Lyle and John, but she was closest of all to her sister Stephanie, three years her senior.

'Mez [Meredith's nickname] and I were friends as well as sisters,' Stephanie recalled. They had the same sense of humour and used to charge around the house singing, dancing and laughing for all they were worth. When they were little, the girls went to ballet and gym classes together. Later on, Meredith played football and when she was seventeen she took a year's karate lessons, reaching her third belt.

Meredith's parents divorced when she was eleven. The two girls stayed with their mother but Meredith talked to her father on the phone almost every day, going to see him at his home in London once or twice a week. She won a scholarship to the Old Palace School, an independent private school for girls in Croydon. Gifted in languages, she took Latin and French for her A-levels and went on to study European politics and Italian at Leeds University, which often sent students for a year abroad as part of their course through Erasmus, the European student exchange programme. Her heart was set on Italy. Meredith loved reading, and wrote poems and stories. She had no definite career plans – she thought of becoming a teacher, or a journalist like her father, or using her languages at the European Parliament in the French city of Strasbourg.

In the summer of 2007, Meredith won a university grant worth some £2,600 towards her year abroad and worked for three months as a guide on tourist buses in London to raise more money for it. She was excited about the course, which started with a month of intensive Italian, after which she would study both Italian and European politics. However, Meredith's plans were almost ruined when she was mistakenly enrolled on a course which had no year abroad. Meredith didn't give up and helped to resolve the problem. 'She fought so hard to come to Perugia,' Stephanie said later.

Meredith hated leaving her sixty-one-year-old mother Arline. But she left England in high spirits, promising Stephanie that after her year in Italy they would travel around the country together.

'We laughed about making sure she would have lots of Italian friends for us to stay with,' Stephanie remembered.

Late that August, a twenty-one-year-old Meredith arrived in Perugia and went first to a hotel near the majestic Cathedral of St Lawrence, where the most highly worshipped relic is an agate ring which according to legend was slipped on to the Virgin Mary's finger at her wedding. One evening, a couple of days later, Meredith went out for a pizza in a restaurant behind the cathedral with two new friends, Sophie Purton and Amy Frost, who had also just arrived in Perugia as exchange students. Like Meredith, Amy was studying languages at Leeds University, and the two had emailed each other a few weeks earlier and arranged to meet in Perugia.

Sophie, who was studying chemistry and Italian at Bristol University, met Meredith for the first time that evening. Sophie usually found meeting new people difficult and was a year and a half younger than Meredith, but she immediately felt comfortable with her. She found Meredith fun, bubbly and quick witted; it was as if she'd known her for years.

Over their pizzas, the three students talked about their families. Meredith's parents, like Sophie's, were divorced, but Sophie's had separated when she was only six years old. Meredith talked about her sick mother, and how close she was to her sister Stephanie. When Sophie fondly praised her teenage brother Joe and pulled out a picture of him, Meredith and Amy burst out laughing. 'You're just like a proud mum!' Meredith joked.

Soon after her arrival, Meredith saw a note on a university student noticeboard about a room for rent in a nearby cottage. She called the mobile phone number and went to see the cottage as quickly as she could.

Filomena Romanelli, a lively, fast-talking blonde, and Laura Mezzetti, a keen guitar player, both in their late twenties, were old friends and worked as trainee lawyers. They made Meredith feel very welcome in their home. Although it was only a two-minute walk from the university and the old Etruscan Arch, along a steep street leading to the city centre, the cottage felt as if it was in the middle of the countryside. An old farmhouse, it used to belong to a man known simply as 'the market gardener' in the neighbourhood because he grew fruit and vegetables on its sloping land. The current owner, an elderly banker who lived in Rome, had fully renovated it a decade earlier and divided it into two flats.

Olive, fig, pear, cherry, chestnut and magnolia trees grew in the sloping, unfenced garden, which fell steeply away from the cottage down the hillside, stretching a fair distance down into the valley. Filomena had once walked around it trying to find out how big it was but had given up because the slope was too steep.

Filomena and Laura showed Meredith round, careful to explain that the front door didn't close properly unless it was locked shut. Both their rooms were off the sitting room, which had a small kitchen in one corner. Four male students lived in the semi-basement flat. The two bedrooms they wanted to let were just down the corridor, and Meredith was enchanted when she saw the view from the square window in the end room. She loved art history, and the gentle, serene landscape framed by the window was straight out of a Renaissance painting. It plunged down the wooded hillside below her, stretching over hills of varying shades of brown and green, with rows of cypress trees on their crests, as far as the Apennine Mountains on the horizon to the east.

Meredith followed the two friends out through a glass door on the other side of the corridor. She found herself on a big terrace from where she had a 360-degree view of the old churches, houses and walls that marked the edge of Perugia's historic centre, only a stone's throw away to the south, and of the countryside.

The rent was £270 a month, with a deposit of two months' rent. Meredith worried about having to pay so much upfront before even moving in, and mentioned it to her friend Sophie.

But Meredith was in a hurry to leave the hotel which was eating into her funds. She decided to take the end room partly because the cottage was so close to the university but above all because the view enchanted her. She told Filomena and Laura that she would like to stay there until the university year ended in June. The two women were both delighted with Meredith; she was good-looking, clearly wellbrought-up and reliable. Besides, they looked forward to practising their English with her just as Meredith wanted to practise her Italian.

A week after first arriving in Perugia, Meredith checked out of her hotel and moved into the cottage. On some mornings she would wake to see the bottom of the valley shrouded in banks of mist that the sun soon dispelled.

A couple of weeks after she moved in, Meredith's new flatmates told her, another student would be coming to live in the room next door to hers – an American girl called Amanda.

The blue-eyed Amanda Knox was only five when someone invented the nickname that was to become famous, or infamous, worldwide many years later. In her hometown of Seattle – a rainy, hardworking city on America's north-west coast, best known as the birthplace of Bill Gates, Boeing and Starbucks – Amanda started playing soccer at a very young age and spent hours kicking a ball around the backyard of her house with her sister Deanna, her junior by a year and a half.

It was on the playing field that she earned the nickname 'Foxy Knoxy'. There was nothing sinister behind the name, according to Amanda's German-born mother Edda Mellas, a maths teacher.

'Amanda was like a fox. She played as a defender and she was so intense, so focused; she was short and she'd crouch down and she'd stop people out of nowhere. I don't know how she did it,' Edda recalled.

In all the sports she took up – gymnastics, swimming, softball or whatever it was – Amanda was always fiercely competitive. 'She just liked the thrill of the competition. She was going to do it and do it well. That's Amanda,' Edda said.

Edda and her husband Curt Knox, a vice-president of the local Macy's department store, broke up when Amanda was a year old and Edda was pregnant with Deanna.

'We divorced when Amanda was fairly young. Her dad was there for games and things but for a long time afterwards it was just the three of us,' Edda recalled.

Curt lived five blocks away and the girls were always walking back and forth between the two homes. 'My parents decided to live very close to each other because they wanted to make me and my sister feel that we were a family, even if we were in two different houses,' Amanda said later. A few years later, Edda fell in love with Chris Mellas, an IT consultant with dual American and Mexican nationality thirteen years her junior, and he became Amanda and Deanna's stepfather.

The family turbulence didn't appear to affect Amanda's schoolwork. She was exceptionally studious and at thirteen won an award 'in recognition of an extraordinary student'. When she had to choose a high school, she told Edda: 'Find me the most academically challenging.' Edda picked the private Seattle Preparatory School, a very traditional, Jesuit-run establishment charging fees of $11,800 a year, which expected its students to give their best in both schoolwork and sport. Edda was told that as a private Catholic school, it made all applicants take an entrance test and from those with the highest scores, took first the Catholics and then 'picked the cream of the non-Catholics'.

The only advice Edda gave Amanda before the test was: 'Do your best, feel happy with what you're doing.' She didn't believe in telling her daughters they must get top marks. Amanda took the test and did so well that the school accepted her even though her family couldn't afford the full fees.

Amanda thrived at Seattle Prep. The school's head, Kent Hickey, later described her as 'a good and thoughtful girl, very talented in drama. A very strong student.' Amanda had a passion for performing, acting in a string of musicals – Annie,Guys and Dolls,Fiddler on the Roof, and Honk!, the musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's story 'The Ugly Duckling'. She preferred what she saw as the 'interesting' characters to the lead roles – the rowdy orphan Pepper in Annie and Chava, the daughter who runs away to get married in Fiddler on the Roof.

For Chris Mellas, Amanda was an easy child to raise. 'Amanda loved her school and her schoolwork; she's a nerd. All of her friends are goofy nerds; one guy is in love with biochemistry and talks only about that,' Chris said. 'Sweet as can be, dumb as a stump, and incredibly intelligent. That's Amanda.'

She led what he called 'a fairly regimental life': 'Same breakfast every day, school, homework, a break to watch The Simpsons, more homework, then bed – the same every stinking day. All you had to do was tell her to stop doing homework and go to bed. She always played lots of sport at weekends. I took her rock climbing when she was thirteen, and she even got into the US Youth Soccer Olympic Development Programme, but she dropped it because it was too much of a commitment.'

Although successful in both schoolwork and in sport, Amanda was, according to her sister Deanna, 'book smart, but not street smart. She doesn't always pick up social cues.' This could be embarrassing. Once when Amanda had eaten too much in a restaurant she suddenly got up and stretched her arms out. Everyone stared at her. Another time, when her hairdresser asked what she thought of her new shoes, Amanda replied bluntly: 'They're hideous.'

On yet another occasion, when Deanna was with some friends, Amanda walked up to them, looked Deanna up and down in disgust and asked loudly: 'What the heck are you wearing?' She often approached perfect strangers, greeting them breezily: 'Hi, I'm Amanda. How are you?' Men often thought she was flirting with them, but according to her family she just wanted to get to know people.

Edda said her eldest daughter was not only 'not street smart', she was much too trusting. 'She sees good in every person she meets; she doesn't realise that you have to kind of protect yourself. For me as a mother, it was scary,' Edda said.

Late one night when Amanda was seventeen or eighteen, she called Edda to say she was on her way home, had taken a shortcut through an alley and a man was walking close behind her. 'Keep talking to me, get out on to the main street,' Edda urged her. When Amanda got home she and Edda rowed about the risk she took and Amanda promised to be more careful in future.

It was when she was in her early teens and starting to learn Latin and the history of Ancient Rome that Amanda first got interested in Italy. At the age of fifteen, she made her first trip to the country with her family, visiting Pisa, Rome, the Amalfi Coast and the ruined city of Pompeii. She became fascinated by Italian culture and way of life. Edda gave her Under the Tuscan Sun, the best-selling, idyllic portrait of life in Tuscany by Frances Mayes. Amanda loved the book, and the film Stealing Beauty by Bernardo Bertolucci, starring Liv Tyler as an American teenager who has decided to lose her virginity during a stay in a stunning Tuscan villa.

Amanda started telling her parents: 'I wanna get out, I wanna study abroad. Italy is cool.'

After graduating with high marks from Seattle Prep, Amanda chose to study Italian, German and creative writing at the city's University of Washington. She hesitated between becoming a writer, becoming an interpreter or, as she put it later, 'doing a bit of both'. What mattered most to her was to be close to her family; she would go abroad to study, but only for a year, and then come back to live in Seattle. At university, as at school, Amanda 'ran by her own agenda', as her father Curt put it.

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Excerpted from A Death in Italy by John Follain. Copyright © 2011 John Follain. Excerpted by permission of St. Martins Press.
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