Via della Pergola 7 Knox had come to
Perugia for its universities and because it had fewer tourists than
Florence, a more popular destination for foreign students. Knox lived in a four-bedroom, ground-floor apartment at Via della Pergola 7 with three other women. Her flatmates were Meredith Kercher (a British
exchange student) and two Italian trainee lawyers in their late twenties, Knox was employed part-time at a bar, Le Chic, which was owned by a
Congolese-
French man, Diya Patrick Lumumba. Kercher's English female friends saw relatively little of Knox, who preferred to socialize with Italians. Giacomo Silenzi, who lived in a walk-out semi-basement apartment of the building, shared an interest in music with Kercher and Knox and often visited their apartment. Returning home at 2 a.m. one night in mid-October, Knox, Kercher, Silenzi, and another basement resident met a basketball court acquaintance of the Italians,
Rudy Guede, in the basement apartment. At 4:30 a.m. Kercher left, saying she was going to bed, and Knox followed her out. Guede spent the rest of the night in the basement. Knox recalled a second night out with Kercher and Silenzi in which Guede joined them in the basement apartment. Three weeks before her death, Kercher went with Knox to the
EuroChocolate festival. On October 20, Kercher became romantically involved with Silenzi after going to a nightclub with him as part of a small group that included Knox. Guede visited the basement later that day. On October 25, Kercher and Knox went to a concert, where Knox met Raffaele Sollecito, a 23-year-old software engineering student. Knox began spending her time at his flat, a five-minute walk from Via della Pergola 7.
Discovery of Meredith Kercher's body November 1 was a public holiday, and the Italians living in the building were away. It is believed that after watching a movie at a friend's house, Kercher returned home around 9 pm that evening and was alone in the building. Just after midday on November 2, Knox called Kercher's English phone. But contrary to her normal practice, the call was not answered. Knox then called her roommate Filomena Romanelli, and in a mixture of Italian and English said she was worried something had happened to Kercher, because upon going to the Via della Pergola 7 apartment earlier that morning, Knox had noticed an open front door, bloodstains (including a footprint) in the bathroom, and Kercher's bedroom door locked. Knox and Sollecito then went to Via della Pergola 7, and upon getting no answer from Kercher, unsuccessfully tried to break in the bedroom door, leaving it noticeably damaged. At 12:47 p.m., Knox called her mother, who advised her to contact the police. Sollecito called the
Carabinieri, the national
gendarmerie of Italy, getting through at 12:51 p.m. He was recorded telling them there had been a break-in with nothing taken, and the emergency was that Kercher's door was locked, she was not answering calls to her phone, and there were bloodstains. Police telecommunications investigators arrived to inquire about an abandoned phone, which was in fact Kercher's Italian unit. Romanelli arrived and took over, explaining the situation to the police who were informed about Kercher's English phone, which had been handed in as a result of its ringing when Knox called it. On discovering Kercher's English phone had been found dumped, Romanelli demanded that the policemen force Kercher's bedroom door open, but they did not think the circumstances warranted damaging private property. The door was then kicked in by a friend of Romanelli, and Kercher's body was discovered on the floor. She had been stabbed and had died of blood loss from neck wounds.
Investigation The first detectives on the scene were Monica Napoleoni and her superior Marco Chiacchiera. Napoleoni conducted the initial interviews and quizzed Knox about her failure to immediately raise the alarm, which was later widely seen as an anomalous feature of Knox's behavior, in fact she was completely unconcerned about the death of her roommate. Knox said that she had spent the night of 1 November with Sollecito at his flat, smoking
marijuana, watching the French film
Amélie, and having sex. Sollecito told police he could not remember if Knox was with him that evening or not. According to Knox, Napoleoni had been hostile to her from the outset. Chiacchiera discounted the signs of a break-in, deeming them clearly faked by the killer. The police were not told the extent of Kercher's relationship with Silenzi in initial interviews. On November 4, Chiacchiera was quoted as saying that someone known to Kercher might have been let into the apartment and be responsible for her murder. The same day, Guede is believed to have left Perugia.
Interviews, arrest, and arraignment Over the following days, Knox was repeatedly interviewed as a witness. She told police that on November 1, she received a text from Lumumba advising that her evening waitressing shift had been cancelled, so she had stayed over at Sollecito's apartment, only going back to the apartment she shared with Kercher on the morning the body was discovered. would not believe her. Police arrested Knox, Sollecito, and Patrick Lumumba on November 6, 2007. They were taken into custody and charged with the murder. Customers who Lumumba had been serving at his bar on the night of the murder gave him an
alibi, and Lumumba was released. Chiacchiera, who thought the arrests were premature, dropped out of the investigation soon afterward, leaving Napoleoni in charge of a major investigation for the first time in her career. Knox's first meeting with her legal counsel was on November 11. After his bloodstained fingerprints were found on bedding under Kercher's body, Guede (who had fled to
Germany) was extradited back to Italy. Guede, Knox, and Sollecito were then charged with committing the murder together. On November 30, a panel of three judges endorsed the charges and ordered Knox and Sollecito held in detention pending a trial. Knox became the subject of unprecedented pre-trial media coverage because of leaks from the prosecution, including a best-selling Italian book whose author imagined or invented incidents that were purported to have occurred in Knox's private life.
Trial of Guede Guede fled to Germany shortly after the murder. During a November 19, 2007
Skype conversation with his friend Giacomo Benedetti, Guede did not mention Knox or Sollecito as being in the building on the night of the murder. Later his account changed and he indirectly implicated them in the murder, which he denied involvement in. Guede was arrested in Germany on November 20, then extradited to Italy on December 6. Guede opted to be tried in a special fast-track procedure by Judge Micheli. He was not charged with having had a knife. He did not testify and was not questioned about his statements, which he had changed compared to what he originally said.
First trial of Knox and Sollecito In 2009, Knox and Sollecito pleaded not guilty at a
corte d'assise on charges of murder,
sexual assault, carrying a knife (which Guede had not been charged with), simulating a burglary, and theft of €300, two credit cards, and two mobile phones. There was no charge in relation to Kercher's missing keys to the entry door and her bedroom door, although Guede's trial judgement said he had not stolen anything. There was a separate but concurrent trial of Knox with the same jury as her murder trial, in which she was accused of falsely denouncing her employer for the murder. Knox's police interrogation was deemed improper and ruled inadmissible for the murder trial, but was heard in her nominally separate trial for false denunciation.
Prosecution case According to the prosecution, Knox's first call of November 2, to Kercher's English phone, was to ascertain if Kercher's phones had been found, and Sollecito had tried to break in the bedroom door because after he and Knox locked it behind them, they realized they had left something that might incriminate them. Knox's call to her mother in Seattle, 15 minutes before the discovery of the body, was said by prosecutors to show Knox was acting as if something serious might have happened before the point in time when an innocent person would have such concern. A prosecution witness, homeless man Antonio Curatolo, said Knox and Sollecito were in a nearby square on the night of the murder. Prosecutors advanced a single piece of forensic evidence linking Sollecito to Kercher's bedroom, where the murder had taken place: fragments of his DNA on Kercher's bra clasp. Giulia Bongiorno, leading Sollecito's defence, questioned how Sollecito's DNA could have gotten on the small metal clasp of the bra, but not on the fabric of the bra back strap from which it was torn. "How can you touch the hook without touching the cloth?" Bongiorno asked. The back strap of the bra had multiple traces of DNA belonging to Guede. The prosecution alleged that all forensic traces in the room that would have incriminated Knox had been wiped away by her and Sollecito. Knox's lawyers said it would have been impossible to selectively remove her traces, and emphasized that Guede's shoe prints, fingerprints, and DNA were found in Kercher's bedroom. Guede's DNA was on the strap of Kercher's bra, which had been torn off, and his DNA was found on a vaginal swab taken from her body. Both sets of defence lawyers requested the judges to order independent reviews of evidence including DNA and the compatibility of the wounds with the alleged murder weapon; the request was denied. In final pleas to the court, Sollecito's lawyer described Knox as "a weak and fragile girl" who had been "duped by the police". Knox's lawyer pointed to text messages between Knox and Kercher as showing that they had been friends.
Verdict and controversy On December 5, 2009, Knox, by then 22, was convicted on charges of faking a break-in, defamation, sexual violence, and murder, and was sentenced to 26 years imprisonment. Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years. In Italy, opinion was not generally favorable toward Knox, and an Italian law professor remarked: "This is the simplest and fairest criminal trial one could possibly think of in terms of evidence." Although acknowledging that Knox might have been a person of interest for American police in similar circumstances, journalist
Nina Burleigh, who had spent months in Perugia during the trial while researching a book on the case, said the conviction had not been based on solid proof, and there had been resentment toward the Knox family that amounted to "anti-Americanism". A number of US experts spoke out against DNA evidence used by the prosecution. According to consultant
Greg Hampikian, director of the
Idaho Innocence Project, the Italian forensic police could not replicate the key result, claimed to have successfully identified DNA at levels below those an American laboratory would attempt to analyze, and never supplied validation of their methods. Knox was indicted in 2010 on charges of defamation against the police for saying she had been struck across her head during the interview in which she incriminated herself. In May 2011,
Hampikian said forensic results from the crime scene pointed to
Guede as the killer and to his having acted on his own. ==Acquittal and release==