It has been 15 years since Meredith Kercher, a pretty 21-year-old British student, was
murdered in the picturesque Italian city of Perugia. Yet this week, a new documentary
entitled Who Killed Meredith Kercher? poses a question that’s somehow - despite trials,
convictions, appeals and acquittals - still never been answered definitively enough to let
our obsession with the case rest.
The two-part Paramount+ documentary examines every angle of the brutal killing of
Meredith, a student at Perugia’s University for Foreigners, on November 1, 2007. Her
body was found the following day in the whitewashed house overlooking the stunning
Umbrian countryside which she shared with other students including Amanda Knox, a
20-year-old from the US. She had knife wounds to her neck and was thought to have
been sexually assaulted – a horrible death for a young woman described by everyone
who knew her as sweet, sociable, conscientious and clever.
Seeing the programme’s footage of the small, buzzy city and the house on Via della
Pergola took me back to that day, when I arrived in Perugia to report on Meredith’s
murder for the national newspaper I worked for. Roaming around bars and cafes to speak to
people who knew her, it seemed tragically bizarre that she’d never return home from a
place which felt so safe, filled with students just like her.
I’ve thought back to my time in Perugia countless times since, because what I saw
foreshadowed the tortuous legal proceedings which were to last the next eight years. An
Italian journalist excitedly told us the police already had a suspect: ‘the American
housemate’, as they called Amanda Knox. The police were apparently convinced the burglary
which seemed to have taken place was staged and that something much more
sensational had happened.
A senior detective confirmed police were questioning Knox. Her ‘inappropriate’
behaviour after Meredith’s death – the cartwheels she apparently performed at the
police station; the kisses she and Sollecito shared – had led them to believe she must
have been involved. My main recollection is that everyone, police and journalists alike,
seemed unnervingly exhilarated at the prospect of a female killer.
I wondered how they could they have reached such a dramatic conclusion just a day
after finding Meredith’s body. It seemed strangely hasty, not to mention unlikely. But
three days later, Knox was arrested, along with her boyfriend Raffaelle Sollecito, and
both were charged with murder and sexual violence.
From that point on, as the documentary shows, barely a day went by without a new,
negative story about Knox, many leaked by the police. Reporters learned her college
nickname was ‘Foxy Knoxy’ and had a field day. She was depicted as a sexually
voracious she-devil with multiple lovers who had pinned Meredith down in a drug-
fuelled orgy which went terribly wrong.
For years, I told friends and acquaintances that I thought Knox and Sollecito were
innocent. Most of them thought I was mad. But I’d seen for myself the tunnel vision the
police and the ‘colourful’ prosecutor Giuliano Mignini had when it came to their
suspects. They came up with a lurid scenario straight out of a horror film, then tried to
find evidence to fit it. And when the pair were found guilty after their trial in 2009, they
seemed to have succeeded.
I interviewed Knox’s mother, Edda, and sister Deanna during her time in prison and
they spoke of their frustration that everyone had made up their minds about her; they
knew nothing they said would make any difference. Public opinion, once decided, is
virtually impossible to change.
The new documentary, which features interviews with several key figures including
Sollecito, Mignini and US forensic experts who worked on freeing Knox, explains why
they were eventually fully exonerated in 2015. The DNA evidence linking the pair to the
crime scene – a knife and a bra clasp – was proved to be worthless; improperly collected
and tested and probably contaminated.
Where it’s at its best, though, is in showing why the mystery over who killed Meredith
has lingered. Actually, it was likely a very straightforward crime. After Knox and
Sollecito were charged, police matched the vast amount of DNA at the scene – inside
Meredith’s body, in bloody handprints and in faeces in the toilet – to a man from the
Ivory Coast called Rudy Guede who, the documentary reveals, had a history of break-ins.
He had fled to Germany and changed his name following Meredith’s death.
But because Guede’s trial was fast-tracked, and he was never forced to testify in court,
his guilty verdict in 2008 attracted a fraction of the attention given to Knox and
Sollecito. People wondered, if Amanda Knox didn’t do it, who did? As the programme
shows, the answer is one man: Rudy Guede. The real scandal is that he was released
from prison in 2021 after serving just 13 years – and that he’s still never confessed to
what really happened, which would give the Kercher family the answers they deserve.
I’ve come to believe that, in the spotlight of the world’s media, the imaginations of the
Perugian police went into overdrive. I remember the informal press conference they
held the day after Meredith’s body had been found in which one British reporter
warned them to get the investigation right – ‘Don’t let her be another Madeleine
McCann.’ Three-year-old Madeleine had disappeared earlier the same year in Praia da
Luz, and it had been widely acknowledged that Portuguese police had botched the search.
I think the pressure to make an arrest made them act too quickly; later, when the real
culprit emerged, they may have felt they couldn’t back down.
Looking back, it seems obvious that the slew of stories about Knox’s sex life and vibrator
ownership were nothing but misogyny. An attractive young female murderer was a
tabloid dream – never mind that it was just that, a fantasy.
I’m not going to pretend I foresaw it all from the start, but I did feel something wasn’t
quite right. And although I know it won’t change the minds of those who’ll always
believe Amanda Knox is guilty, I’m glad that Who Killed Meredith Kercher? has finally
answered the question.
Who Killed Meredith Kercher is available on Paramount+ from August 25
