Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (32 page)

My head pounded as I shot from excitement to terror and back again—and again. My brain bounced between
Please, please, please
and
Finally, finally, finally—THE END.

Besides my cellmates, Laura was the only person I could stand to see. She came during
socialità
and made chicken with mushrooms for dinner. I ate one bite.

I planned to give my pans, pots, and clothes to Fanta and Tanya.

I told Laura, “I want you to have my bedsheets.”

“That will be great, Amanda,” she said, “but don’t promise me anything until we know what’s going to happen.”

“I’m going to write you, Laura,” I told her.

“I hope so,” she said. “But let’s just wait and see.”

After dinner Tanya turned on the TV. Every channel was talking about my case: The big day! The world is hanging on, waiting to see what the decision will be in the “Italian trial of the century.” Raffaele and Amanda have been charged with six counts. Meredith’s family will be there to hear the verdict. Amanda’s family is waiting in the hotel. The Americans believe there’s no case, but the prosecution insists that Meredith’s DNA is on the murder weapon and Raffaele’s DNA is on Meredith’s bra clasp. The prosecution has condemned the American media for taking an incorrect view of the case.

The people on TV dramatized it: the lives of two individuals—will they walk free or spend the rest of their lives in prison? And on another channel: It’s a question of whether Amanda goes free or gets
ergastalo
—“life imprisonment.”

Tanya gasped. “What do they mean?” she asked.

Manuela Comodi, the co-prosecutor, had called for a life sentence, but it was as if I didn’t understand how that related to me. I said, “Yeah, they asked for life.”

“They’re going to try to do that?” Far more than I, Tanya realized what was at stake. She was fidgeting.

In Italy, a life sentence means no parole. The next-lowest option, thirty years, offers the possibility of parole after twenty years.

“It’s going to be okay!” I said. “Just calm down!”

A life sentence couldn’t happen.
I have to be acquitted!

The guards stopped by from time to time to see how I was doing.

I kept going back and forth from my bed to my locker to do an inventory of my things. Were the books, clothes, and papers I wanted to take out with me ready? Were all my letters organized in a folder?

Night fell, leaving the air outside damp and cold. Hours passed. I felt tingly, buzzing beneath my own skin. The verdict had to be coming soon.

Finally, I climbed into bed wearing everything but my shoes. I lay in the dark cell, which was illuminated only by the TV still talking about me and my future.

Chapter 29

December 4, 2009

I
t was just after 11
P.M.
I lay in my cot thinking,
Maybe it won’t even happen tonight
, when a guard came by. “Amanda, are you ready?” she called, putting her key in the lock.

I jumped out of bed and started to smooth my sheets. “No!” Tanya and Fanta shouted. “Don’t do that! You have to leave your bed unmade. It’s good luck! It means you’re not coming back.”

I put on my shoes, took a quick look around, and walked out, leaving my cellmates standing at the
cancello
—the cell’s gatelike door—watching me walk down the hall.

It was surreal to go outside at this hour. Since my arrest, the only time I’d been out later than 3
P.M
.—the end of
passeggio
—was on court days. Even then I was usually back in my cell before dark. I’d only felt the night air and seen the moon through my window.

It was damp and frigid, the full moon obscured by fog.

This is the last time
, I thought as I climbed into the van, waiting for the guards to slam first the bars and then the double doors in back. After dozens of these trips, I no longer paid attention to the routine. But tonight I felt I had to take it in.
This is it! Never again!
I’d be coming back to Capanne to gather my things in a squad car.

My heart was thudding, and the only thought looping through my mind was the same one I’d been saying to the universe all day.
Please, please, please, please.
I was shaky with nerves and cold. But underneath the anxiety was a hard kernel of certainty. It was almost as if I were in on a secret that no one else knew.
I’m getting out! I’m going home!

Usually the drive into town made me nauseated, but this time I didn’t focus on the van’s swaying. I had a physical memory of every curve in the road. I got frustrated when the guard closed the shade between the prisoners’ compartment and the front seat, so I couldn’t see out. I always strained to see farmers working green fields or the stretch of road where sunflowers grew—a world saturated with color and filled with hope instead of the beige-and-gray universe I inhabited at Capanne.

But tonight it didn’t matter. I was lost in my thoughts.
The jury must have gone over all the evidence and seen that it doesn’t fit. Raffaele and I couldn’t have killed Meredith. The judge would read the counts and announce “
assolta
”—“acquitted.” Anything but “
colpevole
”
—
“guilty.”

Some days it had seemed I waited in the van forever before being taken inside the courthouse, but everything was happening quickly now. I was whisked inside and up the stairs. My sisters Ashley and Delaney were standing by the double doors as the guards propelled me past. They each called out, “I love you, Amanda!” in heartbreakingly sweet voices.

I could have touched them if the guards had let me. I was that close.

The Hall of Frescoes had been transformed. All the chairs had been taken out, and hundreds of people were standing jammed together. The room was as quiet as it was packed. No journalists called out to me. Everyone was silent. Expectant.

I’d just seen Mom, Dad, Chris, Cassandra, my aunt Christina, and Deanna that morning, and here they were again, standing in a line, smiling, everyone mouthing the same words: “I love you, I love you.”

I took my place between Carlo and Luciano, squeezing Luciano’s bearlike hand. “
Coraggio
,” he whispered, squeezing back.

It was four minutes past midnight. The court bell rang once. The secretary announced, “
La corte
,” for the last time. As the judges and jurors filed in, it was as though everyone in the courtroom strained forward, all the energy and nervousness and anticipation driving to the same point in time and space.

Each of the six counts against me—murder, carrying a weapon, rape, theft, simulating a burglary, and slander—had been assigned letters A through F, in that order.

In the seconds before the judge started reading, I felt both a downward tug in my stomach and wooziness in my head that made me feel as if my body were being pulled apart. It was all going to be over.
Please, please, please.

“On the counts of A, B, C, E, and partially for count D”—Judge Massei began reading Raffaele’s and my verdicts simultaneously, his voice flat and so quiet that I struggled to hear, willing him to say “
assolta
”—“the defendants Sollecito, Raffaele, and Knox, Amanda, are found
. . .”

“No!” someone behind me wailed.

“
Colpevole
,” Judge Massei said. “Defendant Knox, Amanda, is also found
colpevole
for count F.”

Flattened by the words, I could no longer stand. I fell against Luciano, burying my head against his chest, moaning, “No, no, no!”

I didn’t hear the judge say, “I’m granting the
attenuanti
”
—
“extenuating circumstances,” meaning a lower sentence. “I’m sentencing Knox, Amanda, to twenty-six years and Sollecito, Raffaele, to twenty-five years. This court is adjourned.”

My life cleaved in two. Before the verdict, I’d been a wrongly accused college student about to walk free. I was about to start my life over after two years.

Now everything I’d thought I’d been promised had been ripped away.

I was a convicted murderer.

I was less than nothing.

I didn’t hear people cheering or jeering. Some were calling me an assassin. Others were calling for my freedom. The only sounds I picked up, above the chaos, were my mom’s and Deanna’s sobs rising up behind me and smothering me in pain.

Then the guards on either side of me lifted me under my arms and carried me out of the room. Ashley and Delaney must have been standing in the same spot I’d seen them before, waiting to hug and kiss me in celebration, but I could not see through my tears.

Carlo stopped us just before we started down the stairs. He was breathless. “I’m so sorry! We’re going to win! We’re going to win. Amanda, we’re going to save you. Be strong.”

It was only a second. And then we were gone. Instead of putting me in the tiny holding cell where I usually ate lunch or waited for the van, the guards sat me in a chair. I was moaning, “No, no, no,” hysterically. Raffaele was beside me, saying, “Amanda, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

One of the guards kept saying, “Come on. Be a good girl. Hold on. It’s going to be okay.”

I kept crying, “It’s impossible, it’s not fair, it wasn’t true, I need to go home.”

They led me outside to the van and slammed the barred door.

As we were pulling out, I took one look outside. The guard driving the van hadn’t pulled down the shade, and I could see the cameras flashing. Then I slumped over in my seat and wailed, gasping for breath.

My sentence was all over the news.

“Twenty-six years is a strange sentence,” one of the guards said. “If they wanted to get you they would have said, ‘Life.’ It’s almost like they were trying to give you hope for the future. You have such good behavior. In ten years you’ll be able to work outside the prison during the day.”

They were trying to reassure me.

But I could not be comforted.

Part Three

CAPANNE II

Chapter 30

December 2009–October 2010

A
t Capanne there were two kinds of suicide watch.

The first was for people who had previously tried to kill themselves or were mentally ill. They were put in a bare cell with a guard stationed in front of the door 24/7. The second kind was for prisoners who had no history of suicide attempts or mental health issues, just a good reason to try to kill themselves. I was in that group.

It meant a guard would look in on me every five minutes.

I wasn’t suicidal, but my insides had already died.

My first stop on arriving back at Capanne from the courthouse was an office just inside the door to the women’s prison. “You’re going to be okay,” said Lupa, the guard who came into my cell on my first day in prison and hugged me. “Your lawyers will appeal the decision, and something good will come of it. You’ll see.”

You’re wrong
, I thought,
I’ve been convicted of murder. I will never again be okay. Nothing good will come from this.

The realization of what had happened at the courthouse took the air from my lungs and the heat from my body. I shivered so much an
agente
brought me hot milk, like you’d give a baby. All I could think was,
What the fuck do I care about warm milk?
I don’t want milk, I want to go home.

Besides Lupa, a couple of other guards stayed with me. One was from the women’s ward, and the other had escorted me on some of my trips to the courthouse. Whether or not they thought I was innocent, they were trying to be nice. But I didn’t want to be consoled by them. I said, “
Grazie
,” over and over. But I was sickened, hollowed out, crushed.

I remember turning six. Waiting to turn sixteen. I thought it would be cool to turn twenty-one in Italy. I’d never thought about twenty-six years. Twenty-six was an old number. It wasn’t a measurement I ever used. My mom and Chris had been married eight years. My dad and Cassandra, twenty years. I remembered seeing a bottle of whiskey that said “Aged Twenty-Five Years.” But I’d never thought about twenty-six years. It was a year older than the whiskey and four years older than me. I’d be forty-eight when I got out of jail, one year older than my mom’s age on the day I was sentenced. I divided twenty-six by what I knew. Twenty-six years was thirteen times as long as I’d been in prison.

I couldn’t stop doing the math. Each permutation added up to the same thing: I had been convicted of murder.

“Please, don’t take me to my cell,” I pleaded.

I didn’t want to have to tell Tanya and Fanta or to cry in front of them. Two
agenti
sat with me for about an hour. Then their shift was over. They had to go home, and so did I. Only I couldn’t.

I wept until I felt I was suffocating. Thinking about my family—how much they had sacrificed and how disappointed they were—was the worst. I wanted to be with them, to hold them and be held. Instead, I sat in front of the
ispettore
’s desk lost in anguish.

“Is there anything we can do for you, Kuh-nox?” she asked. It was the same orange-haired
ispettore
who’d called me out on the local newspaper article about Cera that caused me to be treated as an
infame
by the other prisoners.

I knew I was too fragile to withstand any more hostility. I was lucky our cell had dwindled to three women, but with two empty beds, anyone could move in and anything could happen. The constant turnover of cellmates made my tiny life even smaller.

“Can you possibly put me on the list for a two-person cell instead of the five-person cell?” I asked, sniffling. “That would mean a lot to me.” It was all I had. Begging for a better cell. It had come to this. This was my new life.

I was in a position to ask. Twenty-six-year sentences were uncommon in Italy, especially at Capanne, which usually housed petty criminals and drug dealers serving sentences of a few months to a few years. After twenty-five months, not only had I earned seniority—I’d been there longer than almost everyone else—but I had a reputation as a model prisoner.

Back in my cell, Fanta and Tanya hovered near me, unsure of what to say—or whether to say anything. Tanya finally hugged me, and Fanta said, “I’m so sorry. We watched the reports on TV.”

About an hour later, a guard came to the
cancello
. “Get your things, Kuh-nox. You’re moving in with Laura.”

This was an unheard-of kindness. It meant they’d moved my friend Laura’s cellmate out just to accommodate me.

After so much had gone against me, Laura was the right cellmate at the right time.

When we first met, we’d entertained each other making light of prison’s darkest aspects—being subjected to daily strip searches by
agenti
—and joked endlessly about the ordinary things we missed most from real life. My answer? Sushi. We sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” together each morning in a show of patriotism and homesickness.

Laura grew up in Ecuador in an American military family. She was years older than my mother, and I was younger than her two daughters, but we’d become friends. Besides Don Saulo, she was the only person at Capanne whom I trusted.

In Quito, where she lived, Laura had dated an Italian who invited her to Naples for vacation and bought her a new suitcase. When she landed at the Aeroporto Internazionale di Napoli, it was not her boyfriend who met her plane but the customs police. They arrested her for the cocaine they found sewn into the luggage’s lining. The boyfriend, it turned out, had not only turned her into a drug mule, but had lied about his name. He was untraceable. She was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.

Laura held herself as erect as a flagpole and seemed aristocratic even in her sweatpants. She respected the guards but didn’t lower herself. She had a job in the kitchen, but as the economy, and the prison pay, shrank, she politely said, “My service is worth more, and I won’t work for this little.”

They promoted her from scullery maid to chef, and gave her a raise.

Laura was the perfect person to teach me how to stand up for myself.

“You come first, second, and third, then everyone else,” she told me when I agonized over whether I was writing my family and friends enough or whether I was treating other prisoners with the right balance of generosity and restraint.

She reminded me, “Amanda, it’s okay to say no. Prisoners are asking you to do them favors they know jeopardize you.”

The prison was divided into different sections, and we were forbidden to pass things—coffee, cigarettes, anything—from one section to another. If I got caught, it would cost me months I could otherwise take off my sentence for good behavior. “They can go without coffee,” Laura said. “You’re thinking too much about other people at your own expense, and you’re stretching yourself too thin.”

When I’d beat myself up over past mistakes, she reminded me, “You’re a much better person than you give yourself credit for.”

And when I obsessed over whether certain prisoners might pick a fight with me, she scoffed and said, “If they bark, they won’t bite.”

Laura’s approach was brilliant—if you aren’t afraid, it’s less likely someone will attack you. “They can smell your fear,” she said. “You see how no one messes with me? It’s because I’m not afraid of them.”

I was never as bold as Laura, but her tough-love encouragement helped me gain self-confidence. She helped me realize that despite my mistakes and unmet expectations, I was a good person.

And while I learned a lot from her, this wasn’t a one-way relationship. I made her laugh, a real coup, because she didn’t suffer fools. She said I spoke my own goofy language; she called it “Amandish.” When I started acting too chipper and silly—impersonating people or making up stories like you’d tell a child at bedtime—she’d tap an imaginary “weirdness gauge” on the wall above her head and say, “You’re off the scale, Amanda!”

Laura’s friendship and a few others held me together.

Rocco Girlanda and Corrado Daclon came to visit me on the Sunday after my conviction. As the president and vice president, respectively, of the Italy-USA Foundation, they said they wanted to help me. Rocco was a middle-aged conservative politician with a boyish face and smile. Corrado was a talkative professor of economics. Initially, I was suspicious of them. I received, and threw away, plenty of mail from the morbidly curious. Later, the two men told me that they had arrived with trepidations of their own. They were relieved to find that I wasn’t as I’d been billed.

Their friendship uplifted me. They visited at least once a month and sent me books once a week. They gave me a Mac computer and bought me an iPod as a birthday present—and somehow they managed to convince the director of the prison to let me use both.

B
esides Laura and Don Saulo, there was one other prison friendship I prized. It was with a toddler named Mina, whose mother, Gregora, was at Capanne for stealing.

Completely uneducated, Gregora couldn’t name the year, date, or time. She couldn’t read, write, add, or subtract. She didn’t know how old Mina was, only that she’d been born when it was cold outside.

Fanta had introduced us. “Gregora needs someone to write letters for her,” she said. I laid down the same rules with her as I did with everyone I helped write letters: “I won’t think up the words, but I’ll take down what you want to say. You talk, I write.”

Since Gregora and Mina were in the nursery ward, I saw them during
passeggio
. A high wall of bars was all that divided our outside areas. Gregora would slip me pen and paper, and I’d dedicate the first half hour of our afternoon outdoor time to her. I’d pause to talk to Mina, who always played by herself. She toddled around in what seemed to be self-imposed silence, gesturing to communicate. Having spent most of her life in prison, Mina never stepped through a doorway without permission, turning her hand to signify a key in a lock. Serious and suspicious of strangers, she seemed to have an ancient soul—weary, alert, and wise. Sometimes she’d bring over a timeworn doll and cradle it for me, nodding her head and meeting my eyes, as though I could pour out my heart to her and she’d understand.

Mothers and their children were also allowed to attend Don Saulo’s group activity time. Mina sat on my lap during movies, let me carry her around the room, and chose me as her dance partner when Don Saulo played religious music. She liked to switch shoes with me. She’d hang her own tiny, red plastic ones on my toes and clomp around in mine.

One afternoon Gregora ran up to the bars outside, calling, “Amanda! Amanda!”

I came over, expecting Gregora to hand me the latest letter from her husband, a prisoner on the men’s side. Instead she whispered, “Listen!”

I looked around to see Mina playing by herself in the middle of the yard.

“It’s the song you sing in church!” Gregora cried.

“
Ave-sha-om-ahem
. . .”

I could hear a tinny, high-pitched voice squeaking out a melody.

“
Hevenu shalom alechem
”—“May peace be with you.” It was one of the prisoners’ favorite songs during Mass, which I accompanied on guitar.

It can’t be Mina!
I’d always imagined that if she ever talked, or sang, her voice would be husky and deep, like an old woman’s. That’s how she carried herself. Hearing her peep out a song in a tiny baby voice clutched at my heart.

I
kept my promise to myself. After my conviction, I got the first appointment I could with the volunteer hairdresser. “Cut it off,” I said.

The woman next to me, her hair wrapped in tin foil, gasped, “You’re crazy.” The hairdresser met my eyes worriedly in the mirror.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes, just do it,” I said more forcefully than I’d meant to.

I ended up with a crude, boyish cap of a cut. I’d fallen into magical thinking, believing that short hair would transform me, that this protest in a teacup would somehow make me feel better about my conviction or turn me into someone else.

What it did was earn me a trip to the psychiatrist’s office. “You know, people make drastic alterations only when they’re asking for attention,” she chided.

“That’s not true for me,” I responded, irritated. “I just want to be left alone. What I do with my hair is my business.”

“Have you thought any more about taking an antidepressant?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I said curtly.

“When you eventually get out of here, you’re going to need a lot of help—psychologists at the very least,” she said.

I hated people lecturing me as if they had a clue about how I felt now and would feel in the future.
No one can understand what I think.
Even the people who love me best can’t completely identify with me.

But talking to them was holding me together. I lived for prison visits and my once-a-week Saturday-night-at-seven phone call to friends and family in Seattle. For those who couldn’t visit me in Perugia, it was my only connection to their voices. On Saturdays I’d count down in my head, and at exactly ten minutes before seven o’clock, I’d shout, “
Agente
, phone call!” One night I yelled and no one came. My call would be connected at seven on the dot. “
Agente!
Phone call!” No answer. “
Agente
, phone call!” No answer.

I crumpled onto the floor and rolled into a ball, weeping and screaming. I felt like a dog in a kennel, behind bars, howling for help. I was crying out for someone, and no one came. My family was waiting on the line, and the phone was only a few paces away. It was as close as I have ever come to a breakdown.

I was still screaming when the guard came at 7:30.

“I was downstairs,” the
agente
said. “Sorry.”

I didn’t know then that the prison budget had been cut and that guards who used to cover one floor now had to cover two. I was so angry I doubt I would have cared. I didn’t get my hopes up for anything in prison. I didn’t expect anyone to do anything nice for me. But I counted on my phone call. I stayed out of trouble. I helped wherever I could. And now fourteen days would have passed before I could talk to my family in Seattle again. I couldn’t count on justice, and I couldn’t count on people.