Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (3 page)

By the time I did talk about Amanda, she and I were more or less inseparable. We shopped together, cooked together, strolled around the town’s center, and unfailingly slept at my apartment every night. We were apart only when she had to go to class or I had an appointment with my thesis director. Such instant closeness felt right to me. We didn’t have a plan; we just took care of each other and lived in the moment. I would climb in the shower and help her get clean, and afterward I would comb out the knots in her long, straight hair.

When I told my father about this, he said I treated her more like a doll than a girlfriend, and he had a point. I did not have
much experience being in a relationship, but playing with dolls was something that came naturally. When I was a kid, Vanessa was not remotely interested in her Barbie collection—she was too much of a tomboy—so I played with them instead. I was an unusual child that way. Barbie and I went on adventures together, faced down monsters, and had our romantic moments. A little odd, I will admit. But as a child I had a limitless imagination and didn’t see much difference between Barbies and superheroes and the fantasy characters I encountered in video games.

Papà was not hugely enthusiastic about Amanda, but neither was he entirely negative. He was touched that I had found someone who made me happy, but he also wanted to make sure I was getting on with my work. “You need to finish your thesis,” he admonished, “and, remember, you’re going to Milan.” I had not forgotten. Vanessa, being Vanessa, was much blunter. “What do you think you are doing?” she railed. “You’re going crazy for someone who is going to go back to America, and you’ll never see her again.”

She would keep up a similar barrage against Amanda for the next four years.

*  *  *

I visited Amanda’s house at number 7, Via della Pergola the day after I met her and went back twice more over the next week. It was just a few minutes’ walk from me, down Corso Garibaldi to Piazza Grimana and the University for Foreigners, then around a corner to the left where the city walls gave way to a large ravine and a dramatic vista. The house felt a little isolated, perched on the edge of the wilderness across the street from a large city parking lot. Inside, though, it was a typical student dwelling, filled with books and computers and cheap furniture. Everyone went about their business
and talked mostly when they ran into each other. The four women occupied the upper floor of the house; downstairs were four male students, who were quite a bit rowdier and kept pot plants in one of their bathrooms.

Laura and Filomena, Amanda’s Italian roommates, welcomed me warmly, and we often chatted together in our native language. Once or twice, I brought food and cooked them lunch. Laura was the more cynical of the two, all skin and bones and nervous energy and ear piercings; I remember her wondering aloud whether love and sex could really coexist. Could a man be relied upon to commit to a relationship, she asked, or was it better to look for a friend with benefits? I didn’t have a whole lot to say on the subject and suspected she was poking fun, however gently, at the way Amanda and I were joined at the hip.
Piccioncini
was how she later characterized us in court. Little lovebirds.

Amanda and Meredith, meanwhile, talked in English—at a speed I couldn’t have kept up with even if I tried. Still, I didn’t get much of an impression of Meredith the few times I saw her at the apartment. She was well-mannered but a little distant, as English people can often be. The one time I offered her food, she had already eaten and politely turned it down. I noticed one day that she was wearing men’s jeans, and she told me they belonged to a boyfriend she had left behind at home. I found that oddly endearing.

Mostly, I craved time alone with Amanda, and for that reason we were much more often at my house. My father reminded me that when I first moved to Perugia, he and my stepmother, Mara, and I had toured some of the hill towns in the area. “Why don’t you take Amanda to some of the same places?” he suggested.

Right, a date,
I thought. I was more than happy to take him up on the suggestion. A month earlier, I had bought a brand-new,
black Audi A3, half of it an early graduation present from my father and the other half paid out of the rental income I received from my mother’s estate. I was proud of my new car and loved the idea of touring Amanda around in it. Our first stop was to be Assisi, the spiritual home of St. Francis.

This was maybe three or four days into our relationship. The night before we left, I noticed she was chatting on Facebook with an American friend. I asked who he was. Right away, she explained that she, like Meredith, had left behind a boyfriend when she came to Italy. His name was David Johnsrud, known as D.J., and they were still in regular contact. In fact, they chatted or e-mailed almost every day. D.J. was spending his junior year in China, and given the distance, it hadn’t made sense for them to stay together as a couple.

I could tell just by looking at Amanda that she was still attached to him. Even though we’d known each other only a few days, I had fallen for her—and it hurt.

“But we’re no longer together, Raffaele,” she said.

I had no reason to doubt her, but I also knew she wasn’t over him and wasn’t able to give her heart fully to me. As the conversation went on, I learned she had just bought a ticket to China to visit D.J. later in the year, and my suspicions were confirmed.

If I felt crushed, I was not about to admit it.
So I met a nice girl,
I told myself,
and we had fun for a few days.
Whatever. It’s not as though she was the love of my life. So what if I was just some guy to keep her company and nothing more? We had some nice moments together, but this wasn’t exactly the romance of the century. If it’s finished, I’ll get over it.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

*  *  *

I took her to Assisi anyway. The decision wasn’t destined to win the respect of my friends or family, but I followed through just the same.

If an Italian man feels there’s more than one other person in a relationship, then his pride should—in theory—lead him to turn his back and say good-bye. Right away. I was brought up to believe that a strong sense of belonging is at the heart of all relationships. It’s absolute commitment, or nothing. If the woman is looking over her shoulder or thinking about someone else, it’s tantamount to cheating. For the man to stay with her is to be branded a cuckold or a fool—which is exactly how my friends saw me.

But I knew that my days with Amanda were numbered, one way or another, and I was having far too much fun to give her up so soon. I decided I’d take it day by day and felt comfortable with that approach.
If you don’t live while you can,
I thought,
what’s the point?

In Assisi, I took particular pleasure in visiting St. Francis’s tomb, which had been closed when I was there with my parents. Amanda and I strolled around, ate pizza, and bought incense. A perfect day out.

Back in Perugia, we settled into long, carefree evenings watching movies and listening to music. Sometimes I’d work on my thesis, while Amanda strummed her guitar and sang Beatles songs or did her yoga stretches on the floor. We made elaborate dinners. When I didn’t know how to cook something, I would call my father’s house to get the recipe. Amanda called herself my sous-chef. We were both
Harry Potter
fans and read to each other from the German edition of the first book, which Amanda brought round to my house. Bizarrely, it became a significant piece of evidence at trial.
Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen.

The days began to blend into each other. We went to bed a lot, but neither of us slept well. I wasn’t used to having a woman in my bed and woke up several times a night. Amanda tended to be up at 5:00 a.m. every morning, which she chalked up to the aftereffects of jet lag. So our time together felt a little restless and blurry. That did no harm to our romance, but it was lousy preparation for witnesses in a murder case.

*  *  *

October 31 was the first day since our meeting that Amanda and I spent almost completely apart. In the morning I was invited to a friend’s graduation ceremony, and I went to another friend’s house for much of the afternoon. Amanda had class, then focused on her plans for Halloween, a big deal for Perugia’s foreign students, though it meant nothing to us Italians. She and I did not meet up until late afternoon, at which point she drew cat whiskers on her face in makeup and, knowing my passion for Japanese comics, scrawled an abstract design on me. I didn’t feel like going out, so I worked on my thesis while Amanda walked over to Le Chic to meet up with some of her friends there. She had hoped to spend the evening with Meredith, but Meredith’s British girlfriends didn’t like her—they found her too unrestrained in the way she acted and talked and burst into song whenever she felt like it—and Meredith never responded to her text suggesting they meet.

Late that night, around 1:00 a.m., Amanda called me from the fountain in Perugia’s main piazza and asked me to accompany her back to my house. She’d been out drinking with a Greek friend, Spiros, whom I greeted cautiously as I took her by the arm. He ran an Internet café near the University for Foreigners and was a little too familiar with her for my liking.

We slept in the next morning, which was All Saints’ Day, November 1, a national holiday. Many people were taking advantage of its being a Thursday to create a “bridge” to the weekend and take four days off. Because of the coincidence of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, they called it
il ponte dei morti,
the bridge of the dead. When Amanda headed back home midmorning to take a shower and change—she did not like the shower at my apartment, saying it was too cramped—she learned that Laura had already left for her hometown north of Rome, and Filomena was making plans to spend the weekend with her boyfriend at his place on the other side of Perugia. The boys in the downstairs apartment were all gone as well.

Amanda had to work that night, but otherwise we were looking forward to a long, lazy weekend with no plans in particular, except to drive to Gubbio, three-quarters of an hour northeast of Perugia, for a little sightseeing. By the time I showed up at her apartment for a late lunch around two, only Meredith was still in the house. Her chin still showed signs of the fake blood she had used for her Dracula costume the night before. We asked her to join us for lunch, but she had a shower instead, did some laundry, and left around 4:00 p.m. without saying where she was going.

It was the last time I ever saw her.

Amanda and I smoked a joint before leaving the house on Via della Pergola, wandered into town for some shopping before remembering we had enough for dinner already, and headed back to my place. Shortly before six, a Serbian friend of mine named Jovana Popovic rang the doorbell and asked if I’d mind driving her to the bus station at midnight to pick up a suitcase her mother was sending. I said that would be fine. When she left, Amanda and I sat down at the computer to watch a favorite movie,
Amélie.

We had to stop the film a few times as the evening wore on. First, Amanda got a text from Patrick telling her it was a slow night because of the holiday and he didn’t need her to come in after all. It was like getting an unexpected snow day—we were thrilled. Amanda texted back:
Certo ci vediamo più tardi buona serata!
Sure. See you later. Have a good evening.

Then my father called. He and Mara had just seen the Will Smith movie
The Pursuit of Happyness,
and he told me how beautifully it portrayed the relationship between a father and his son. My father was always making phone calls like this. It was sweet that he wanted to share his experiences, but he also made everything he said sound vaguely like an order, as if laying out the parameters of how I should react to things before I’d had a chance to form my own opinion. But he never stayed on the line for long—he is too nervy and impatient—so I listened calmly and the call was over in less than four minutes.

In the meantime, Jovana dropped by again and told Amanda that I didn’t need to drive her to the bus station after all. Now we didn’t have to leave the apartment. The evening was ours, and we couldn’t have been happier. We switched off our cell phones, finished watching
Amélie,
and discussed what to make for dinner.

*  *  *

Shortly before eight o’clock, a video surveillance camera in the parking structure across from Amanda’s house captured a man walking briskly past the security barrier and onto Via della Pergola. Of course I had no idea of this at the time; this was material my family gathered during the investigation and the trials. I’m mentioning it here because it was one of many facts that the prosecution and the
media chose to overlook, and because it helps make sense of what did and did not occur on that fateful evening.

The man in the video footage was wearing a black coat with high wing-tip lapels and sneakers with white trim. He had his back to the camera and his head was covered with a woolen cap, making him difficult to identify. But his height, gait, coat, and shoes were all a plausible match for Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old drifter of Ivorian origin who often shot hoops at the basketball court next to the University for Foreigners and was acquainted with the boys who lived downstairs from Meredith and Amanda.

Guede had an extraordinary past: an abusive childhood; a mother who abandoned him as a baby and a father who abandoned him as a teenager; an improbably idyllic period under the protection of one of Perugia’s richest families, who sent him to private school in a chauffeur-driven limousine; and, more recently, a budding career as a cat burglar. According to eyewitnesses and police reports, Guede liked to break into houses by smashing a window with a rock and using his considerable athletic skills to scale the wall and climb inside. Often, his victims said, he would help himself to food and drink from the kitchen before looting the electronics and hard cash.

The previous Saturday, the director of an English kindergarten in Milan had caught Rudy red-handed sitting at her office computer and making the place his own. When the police searched his backpack, they found a knife he had lifted from the kitchen, a woman’s gold watch, and a laptop and cell phone later traced to a lawyer’s office in Perugia that had been burgled two weeks earlier. Guede was taken to police headquarters and questioned for four hours.