Amanda Knox's Email Sent to Friends (November 4, 2007--two days after the murder of Meredith Kercher)
Amanda and Raffaele after the discovery of Meredith's body on Nov. 2, 2007
This is an email for everyone, because id like to get it all out and not have to repeat myself a hundred times like ive been having to do at the police station. some of you already know some things, some of you know nothing. what im about to say i cant say to journalists or newspapers, and i require that of anone receiving this information as well. this is m account of how i found my roommate murdered the morning of friday, november 2nd.
The last time i saw meredith, 22, english, beautiful, funny, was when i came home from spending the night at a friends house. It was the day after halloween, thursday. I got home and she was still asleep, but after i had taken a shower and was fumbling around the kitchen she emerged from her room with the blood of her costume (vampire) still dripping down her chin. We talked for a while in the kitchen, how the night went, what our plans were for the day. Nothing out of the ordinary. then she went to take a shower and i began to start eating a little while i waited for my friend (Raffaele-at whose house i stayed over) to arrive at my house. He came right after i started eating and he made himself some pasta. as we were eating together meredith came out of the shower and grabbed some laundry or put some laundry in, one or the other and returned into her room after saying hi to raffael.
after lunch i began to play guitar with raffael and meredith came out of her room and went to the door. she said bye and left for the day. it was the last time i saw her alive.
after a little while of playing guitar me and raffael went to his house to watch movies and after to eat dinner and generally spend the evening and night indoors. we didnt go out. the next morning i woke up around 1030 and after grabbing my few things i left raffael's appartment and walked the five minute walk back to my house to once again take a shower and grab a chane of clothes. i also needed to grab a mop because after dinner raffael had spilled a lot of water on the floor of his kitchen by accident and didnt have a mop to clean it up.
so i arrived home and the first abnormal thing i noticed was the door was wide open. here's the thingabout the door to our house: its broken, in such a way that you have to use the keys to keep it closed. if we dont have the door locked, it is really easy for the wind to blow the door open, and so, my roommates and i always have the door locked unless we are running really quickley to bring the garbage out or to get something from the neighbors who live below us. (another important piece of imformation: for those who dont know, i inhabit a house of two stories, of which my three roommates and i share the second story appartment. there are four italian guys of our age between 22 and 26 who live below us. we are all wuite good friends and we talk often. giacomo is especially welcome because he plays guitar with me and laura, one of my roommates, and is, or was dating meredith. the other three are marco, stefano, and ricardo.) anyway, so the door was wide open. strange, yes, but not so strange that i really thought anything about it. i assumed someone in the house was doing exactly what i just said, taking out the trash or talking really uickley to the neighbors downstairs. so i closed the door behind me but i didnt lock it, assuming that the person who left the door open would like to come back in. when i entered i called out if anyone was there, but no one responded and i assumed that if anyone was there, they were still asleep. lauras door was open which meant she wasnt home, and filomenas door was also closed. my door was open like always and meredith door was closed, which to me weant she was sleeping. i undressed in my room and took a quick shower in one of the two bathrooms in my house, the one that is right next to meredith and my bedrooms (situated right next to one another). it was after i stepped out of the shower and onto the mat that i noticed the blood in the bathroom. it was on the mat i was using to dry my feet and there were drops of blood in the sink. at first i thought the blood might have come from my ears which i had pierced extrensively not too long ago, but then immediately i know it wasnt mine becaus the stains on the mat were too big for just droplets form my ear, and when i touched the blood in the sink it was caked on already. there was also blood smeered on the faucet. again, however, i thought it was strange, because my roommates and i are very clean and we wouldnt leave blood int he bathroom, but i assumed that perhaps meredith was having menstral issues and hadnt cleaned up yet. ew, but nothing to worry about. i left the bathroom and got dressed in my room. after i got dressed i went to the other bathroom in my house, the one that filomena dn laura use, and used their hairdryer to obviously dry my hair and it was after i was putting back the dryer that i noticed the shit that was left in the toilet, something that definately no one in out house would do. i started feeling a little uncomfortable and so i grabbed the mop from out closet and lef the house, closing and locking the door that no one had come back through while i was in the shower, a d i returned to raffael's place.
after we had used the mop to clean up the kitchen i told raffael about what i had seen in the house over breakfast. the strange blood in the bathroom, the door wide open, the shit left in the toilet. he suggested i call one of my roommates, so i called filomena. filomena had been at a party the night before with her boyfriend marco (not the same marco who lives downstairs but we'll call him marco-f as in filomena and the other can be marco-n as in neighbor). she also told me that laura wasnt at home and hadnt been because she was on business in rome. which meant the only one who had spent the night at our house last night was meredith, and she was as of yet unaccounted for. filomena seemed really worried, so i told her id call meredith and then call her back. i called both of merediths phones the english one first and last and the italian one between. the first time i called the english phone is rang and then sounded as of there was disturbance, but no one answered. i then calle the italian phone and it just kept ringing, no answer. i called her english phone again and this time an english voice told me her phone was out of service. raffael and i gathered our things and went back to my house.
i unlocked the door and im going to tell this really slowly to get everything right so just have patience with me. the living room/kitchen was fine. looked perfectly normal. i was checking for signs of our things missing, should there have been a burglar in our house the night before. filomenas room was closed, but when i opned the door her room and a mess and her window was open and completely broken, but her computer was still sitting on her desk like it always was and this confused me. convinced that we had been robbed i went to lauras room and looked quickley in, but it was spottless, like it hadnt even been touced. this too, i thought was odd. i then went into the part of the house that meredith and i share and checked my room for things missing, which there werent. then i knocked on merediths room.
at first i thought she was alseep so i knocked gently, but when she didnt respond i knocked louder and louder until i was really banging on her door and shouting her name. no response. panicing, i ran out onto our terrace to see if maybe i could see over the ledge into her room from the window, but i couldnt see in. bad angle. i then went into the bathroom where i had dried my hair and looked really quickly into the toilet. in my panic i thought i hadnt seen anything there, which to me meant whoever was in my house had been there when i had been there. as it turns out the police told me later that the toilet was full and that the shit had just fallen to the bottom of the toilet, so i didnt see it. i ran outside and down to our neighbors door. the lights were out but i banged ont he door anyway. i wanted to ask them if they had heard anything the night before, but no one was home. i ran back into the house. in the living room raffael told me he wanted to see if he could break down merediths door. he tried, and cracked the door, but we couldnt open it. it was then that we decided to call the cops.
there are two types of cops in italy, carbanieri (local, dealing with traffic and domestic calls) and the police investigaters. he first called his sister for advice and then called the carbanieri. i then called filomna who said she would be on her way home immediately. while we were waiting, two ununiformed police investigaters came to our house. i showed them what i could and told them what i knew. gave them ohone numbers and explained a bit in broken italian, and then filomena arrived with her boyfriend marco-f and two other friends of hers. all together we checked the houe out, talked to the polie,a nd in a big they all opened merediths door. i was in the kitchen stadning aside, having really done my part for the situation. but when they opened merediths door and i heard filomena scream "a foot! a foot!" in italian i immedaitely tried to get to merediths room but raffael grabbed me and took me out of the house. the police told everyone to get out and not long afterward the carabinieri arrived and then soon afterward, more police investigators. they took all of our informaton and asked us the same questions over and over. at the time i had only what i was wearing and my badge, which thankfully had my passport in it and my wallet. no jacket though, and i was freezing. after sticking around at the house for a bit, the police told us to go to the station to give testimony, which i did. i was in a room for six hours straight after that without seeing anyone else, answering questions in italian for the first hour and then they brought in an interpreter and he helped my out with the details that i didnt know the words for. they asked me of course about the the morning, the last time i saw her, and because i was the closest to her, questions about her habits and her relationships.
afterward, when they were taking my fingerprints, i met two of merediths english friends, two girls she goes out with, including the lat one who saw her alive that night she was murdered. they also had their prints taken. after that, this was around 9 at night by this time, i was taken into the waiting room where there was various other people who i all knew from varous places who all knew meredith. her friends from england, my oommates, even the owner of the pub she most frequented. after a while my neighbors were taken in too, having just arived home from a weeklong vacation in their home town, which eplained why they werent home when i banged on their door. later than that another guy showed up and was taken in for questioning, a guy i dont like but who both meredith and i knew from different occasions, a morracan guy that i only know by his nickname amongst the girls "shaky". then i sat around in this waiting room wthout having the chance to leave or eat anything besides vending maschine food (whcih gave me a hell of a stomache ache) until 530 in the morning. during this time i received calls from a lot of different people, family mostly of course, and i also talked with the rest. especially to find out what exactly was in merediths room whent hey opened it. apparently her body was laying under a sheet, and with her foot sticking out and there was a lot of blood. whoever had did this had slit her throat. they told me to be back in at 11am. i went home to raffael's place and ate something substantial, and passed out.
in the morning raffael drove me bck to the police station but had to leave me when they said they wantrd to take me back to the house for quesioning. before i go on, id like to ssay that i was strictly told not to speak about this, but im speaking with you people who are not involved and who cant do anything bad except talk to journalists, which i hope you wont do. i have to get this off my chest because its pressing down on me and it helps to know that someone besides me knows something, and that im not the one who knows the most out of everyone. at the house they asked me very personal questions about meredith's life and also about the personalities of our neighbors. how well did i know them? pretty well, we are friends. was meredith sexually active? yeah, she borrowed a few of my condoms. does she like anal? wtf? i dont know. does she use vaseline? for her lips? what kind of person is stefano? nice guy, has a really pretty girlfriend. hmmm...very interesting....we'd like to how you something, and tell us if this is out of normal.
they took me into the nieghbors house. the had breaken the door open to get in, but they told me to ingonore that. the rooms were all open. giacomo and marco-n's room was spotless which made since becaus the guys had thoroughly cleaned the whole house before they left on vacation. stefano's room however, well, his bed was strpped of linens, which was odd, and the comfoter he used was shoved up at the top of his bed, with blood on it. i obviously told then that the blood was definatley out of normal and also that he usually has his bed made. they took note of it and ussred me out. when i left the house to go back to the police station they told me to put my jacket over my head and duck down below the window so the reporters wouldnt try to talk to me. at the station i just had to repeat the answers that i had given at the house do they could type them up and after a good 5 and a half hour day with the police again raffael picked me up and took me out for some well-deserved pizza. i was starving. i then bought some underwear because as it turns out i wont be able to leave italy for a while as well as enter my house. i only had the clothes i was wearing the day it bagan, so i bought some underwear and borrwed a pair of pants from raffael.
Spoke with my remaining roommates that night (last night) and it was a hurricane of emotions and stress but we needed it anyway. What we have been discussing is bascially what to do next. We are trying to keep our heads on straight. First things first though, my roommates both work for lawyers, and they are going to try to send a request through on monday to retrieve important documents of ours that are still in the house. Secondly, we are going to talk to the agency that we used to find our house and obviously request to move out. It kind of sucks that we have to pay the next months rent, but the owner has protection within the contract. After that, I guess I'll go back to class on monday, although im not sure what im going to do about people asking me questions, because i really dont want to talk again about what happened. Ive been talking an awful lot lately and im pretty tired of it. After that, Its like im trying to remember what i was doing before all this happened. I still need to figure out who i need to talk to and what i need to do to continue studying in perugia, because its what i want to do.
Anyway, thats the update, feeling okay, hope you all are well,
amanda
[Published in the Daily Telegraph, London, 8 November 2007]