Knox was arrested on 6 November 2007 but not formally charged. She spent nearly two years in custody waiting for her trial which did not begin until 16 January 2009. It’s simply a statement of fact to say that wherever your sympathies lie, she was tried by the media in the interim.The ways of this West Coast American student were put under as much forensic examination as the murder scene of Meredith Kercher. CCTV evidence of her and Sollecito reportedly buying sexy underwear two days after the murder entered the Italian press. The press adds that the amount of men she’s slept with is approaching double figures. This amount of premarital sex is rare in a country where extra partners are frowned on before marriage. And in Italy, very few women would keep their condoms and rabbit vibrator in a transparent wash-bag like Knox did. It’s also revealed that her creative writing included a rape story where the victim is drugged.Her mother, Edda Mellas, and her father, Curt Knox, telephone her once a week for ten minutes.In total, they would make two dozen trips to Italy to be by their daughter’s side and spend over a million dollars in an ultimately doomed PR and legal campaign. As their daughter’s character is endlessly assassinated, Amanda Knox turns 21 in an Italian cell that she shares with three others.The American media parade an equal number of friendly counter witnesses who all agree that Knox hasn’t a ‘harmful bone in her body’. An American’s commentator’s view that ‘This is a lynching and it’s happening to an American girl’ summarised most US sentiment. Her family, however, didn’t always help her case. Her mother and sister took part in a dubious photo- shoot for a woman’s magazine where two of Knox’s sister posed by the house where Kercher was murdered.As media networks battled with each other (essentially, Italy and the UK versus the US) there was an actual judicial process occurring. The third suspect, Guede, had been arrested in Germany when he was caught on a train without a ticket. The police had been after him after finding a bloody handprint on Kercher’s pillow that didn’t match either Knox or Sollecito’s. It had matched a fingerprint of Guede’s entered in an immigrant register. After being extradited, he went for a fast track trial behind closed doors fearing that he would be singled out as the killer by Knox and Sollecito in a group trial. He admitted he was in Kercher’s home but like the Knox/Lumumba confession, Guede said he heard the murder from another room.In October 2008, he was sentenced to 30 years. Damningly, the judge in the his case explained in a 106 page verdict that he believed that Guede acted with Knox and Sollecito. In December 2009, his sentence was nearly halved on appeal. The reduction was due to his youth at the time of the crime, his lack of a previous criminal record, and the fact that he had opted for the fast track trial which both saved money and the suffering of the Kercher family.Despite being a fellow suspect, the far less photogenic Sollecito received little attention and he and Knox separate. A leak of her alleged prison diary suggests the separation isn’t just about the end of a romance. "I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith's house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife."Before the trial even started, most interested people had been exposed to a lot of evidence making a fair trial, in the sense of jurors being unaware of a case, and considering the evidence for the first time, an unlikely possibility. In 2008, an Italian online poll rated Amanda Knox the most well known person in Italy.

Knox was arrested on 6 November 2007 but not formally charged. She spent nearly two years in custody waiting for her trial which did not begin until 16 January 2009. It’s simply a statement of fact to say that wherever your sympathies lie, she was tried by the media in the interim.The ways of this West Coast American student were put under as much forensic examination as the murder scene of Meredith Kercher. CCTV evidence of her and Sollecito reportedly buying sexy underwear two days after the murder entered the Italian press. The press adds that the amount of men she’s slept with is approaching double figures. This amount of premarital sex is rare in a country where extra partners are frowned on before marriage. And in Italy, very few women would keep their condoms and rabbit vibrator in a transparent wash-bag like Knox did. It’s also revealed that her creative writing included a rape story where the victim is drugged.Her mother, Edda Mellas, and her father, Curt Knox, telephone her once a week for ten minutes.In total, they would make two dozen trips to Italy to be by their daughter’s side and spend over a million dollars in an ultimately doomed PR and legal campaign. As their daughter’s character is endlessly assassinated, Amanda Knox turns 21 in an Italian cell that she shares with three others.The American media parade an equal number of friendly counter witnesses who all agree that Knox hasn’t a ‘harmful bone in her body’. An American’s commentator’s view that ‘This is a lynching and it’s happening to an American girl’ summarised most US sentiment. Her family, however, didn’t always help her case. Her mother and sister took part in a dubious photo- shoot for a woman’s magazine where two of Knox’s sister posed by the house where Kercher was murdered.As media networks battled with each other (essentially, Italy and the UK versus the US) there was an actual judicial process occurring. The third suspect, Guede, had been arrested in Germany when he was caught on a train without a ticket. The police had been after him after finding a bloody handprint on Kercher’s pillow that didn’t match either Knox or Sollecito’s. It had matched a fingerprint of Guede’s entered in an immigrant register. After being extradited, he went for a fast track trial behind closed doors fearing that he would be singled out as the killer by Knox and Sollecito in a group trial. He admitted he was in Kercher’s home but like the Knox/Lumumba confession, Guede said he heard the murder from another room.In October 2008, he was sentenced to 30 years. Damningly, the judge in the his case explained in a 106 page verdict that he believed that Guede acted with Knox and Sollecito. In December 2009, his sentence was nearly halved on appeal. The reduction was due to his youth at the time of the crime, his lack of a previous criminal record, and the fact that he had opted for the fast track trial which both saved money and the suffering of the Kercher family.Despite being a fellow suspect, the far less photogenic Sollecito received little attention and he and Knox separate. A leak of her alleged prison diary suggests the separation isn’t just about the end of a romance. "I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith's house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife."Before the trial even started, most interested people had been exposed to a lot of evidence making a fair trial, in the sense of jurors being unaware of a case, and considering the evidence for the first time, an unlikely possibility. In 2008, an Italian online poll rated Amanda Knox the most well known person in Italy. 

August 2007 Meredith Kercher leaves England for Italy.25 October 2007 Kercher’s American flatmate, Amanda Knox begins a ‘romantic’ relationship with the Italian, Raffaele Sollecito .1 November 2007 Meredith Kercher is murdered.2 November 2007 Kercher body found. Knox states she was with Sollecito.4 November 2007 The post-mortem examination suggests some sexual activity before Kercher is killed, but no conclusion of rape.6 November 2007 Police arrest Amanda Knox, 20, and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 23.7 November 2007 Knox identifies her boss, Diya ‘Patrick’ Lumumba , as the killer.15 November 2007 Knox DNA reported to be on kitchen knife handle with Kercher DNA on blade. The suspected murder weapon is found at flat of Sollecito.19 November 2007 Rudy Gued, now on the run, is named as another suspect in killing.20 November 2007 Guede is arrested in Germany as Lumumba is released.27 November 2007 It’s revealed that Knox left a bloody fingerprint in the bathroom.16 September 2008 Knox, Sollecito and Guede appear for first pre-trial hearing. The judge allows Guede to have a fast track trial.28 October 2008 Guede is found guilty of murder.16 January 2009 Trial of Knox and Sollecito begins.4 December 2009 Knox and Sollecito found guilty of murder.22 December 2009 Guede's sentence is cut to 16 years, with the court later reasoning that he was the only one of the three defendants to apologise to the Kercher family for his "failure to come to her rescue"24 November 2010 Knox and Sollecito's appeals get under way.11 December 2010 Knox makes an emotional plea for mercy in court and calls her conviction an 'enormous mistake'.18 December 2010 A review of the DNA evidence used to convict Knox and Sollecito is granted.25 July 2011 The court hears from experts who claim that the DNA evidence may have been contaminated, suggesting that police failed to wear the correct protective equipment.3 October 2011 Knox and Sollecito address the court in a bid to appeal their convictions ahead of the jury's verdict. Later that evening, Presiding Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann announces that the jury has acquitted the pair of Kercher's murder.26 March 2013 Italy’s highest court reverses the acquittals and orders Knox and Sollecito to stand trial again in the Court of Assizes of Appeal in Florence.30 September 2013 Retrial of Knox and Sollecito begins in Italy.31 January 2014 Knox and Sollecito's guilty verdicts are reinstated and they are sentenced to 28 years and six months and 25 years respectively and ordered to pay damages to the Kercher family. Both Knox, who was in Seattle at the time of the verdict, and Sollecito, who was in Italy for the trial but left the court before the verdicts were delivered, will appeal to the supreme Court of Cassation.

At 8:18pm on 1 November 2007 , Knox receives a text message from her boss, Lumumba, saying there’s no work that night. She’s now at a loose end. Coincidentally, her boyfriend, Sollecito, is soon told that he doesn’t have to give a lift to a friend so both are now free. They decide to meet up with Guede at Knox’s flat to buy some cannabis. They then both turn off their mobile phones. Knox is seen at Sollecito’s flat at 8.40pm.Around 9pm Meredith Kercher returns alone to the flat she shares with Knox. At some point that that evening an assailant gains access to the flat and attacks Meredith. She is sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed.The death of Meredith Kercher is slow and painful because despite the fact that her throat has been cut, the carotid artery is not severed, which would have quickly starved her brain of oxygen and so she would have lost consciousness. Instead, she slowly suffocates on her own blood as she bleeds out. Meredith dies sometime before 4am.Perhaps feeling remorseful, the murderer or murderers then cover her semi-naked body with a duvet leaving one leg sticking out from underneath. Later a neighbour finds Meredith’s mobile phone in their garden and reports it to the police. The police trace the owner of the phone and set off to return it.

At 8:18pm on 1 November 2007 , Knox receives a text message from her boss, Lumumba, saying there’s no work that night. She’s now at a loose end. Coincidentally, her boyfriend, Sollecito, is soon told that he doesn’t have to give a lift to a friend so both are now free. They decide to meet up with Guede at Knox’s flat to buy some cannabis. They then both turn off their mobile phones. Knox is seen at Sollecito’s flat at 8.40pm.Around 9pm Meredith Kercher returns alone to the flat she shares with Knox. At some point that that evening an assailant gains access to the flat and attacks Meredith. She is sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed.The death of Meredith Kercher is slow and painful because despite the fact that her throat has been cut, the carotid artery is not severed, which would have quickly starved her brain of oxygen and so she would have lost consciousness. Instead, she slowly suffocates on her own blood as she bleeds out. Meredith dies sometime before 4am.Perhaps feeling remorseful, the murderer or murderers then cover her semi-naked body with a duvet leaving one leg sticking out from underneath. Later a neighbour finds Meredith’s mobile phone in their garden and reports it to the police. The police trace the owner of the phone and set off to return it.

According to the prosecution case, Knox, Sollecito and Guede, go to Knox’s flat on the night of 1 November, probably stoned, and try to entice Meredith into a group sex game. When she refuses Sollecito allegedly holds her down from behind as Guede to sexually assaults her. It is also alleged that Knox then stabs her.The prosecution then claim that Knox and Sollecito go outside and throw a stone at Knox’s other flatmate Filomena’s window to break it and make the murder look like a burglary gone wrong. They also allegedly dispose of Meredith’s phone in a neighbour’s garden, which is later found and reported to the police.When the trial finally began in January 2009, the prosecutions’ biggest problems remained the apparent lack of motive and lack of Knox DNA in Kercher’s bedroom. They explained away the first problem by saying that Knox found Kercher prudish and was eager to humiliate her sexually in a drug fuelled sex game that turned deadly. And the damning DNA may not have been in the room, but Knox’s DNA was on the handle of a knife whose blade had Kercher’s DNA on it and which was found in Sollecito’s flat. Sollecito’s DNA is found on a bloodied bra though the length of time between the crime and the bra’s testing leaves the possibility that the evidential chain had been contaminated.Sollecito’s defence is that he was surfing the internet but his computer records don’t back him up. Both Knox and Sollecito say they were smoking marijuana which is why they cannot remember details properly. And both rely on an expert forensic witness to rebut the DNA evidence with an O.J Simpson like defence, i.e. there was a contamination of the evidential process.The relationship between the two accused was tense and when Sollecito gave a statement, Knox nervously bit at her nails. Her demeanour throughout was as analysed as her character before the murder. Photos of her beaming, even flirty smile at her lawyer was thought to be proof of her carefree innocence by defenders and damning proof of her psychopathic nature for others. When a hearing happened on Valentine’s Day, she wore the Beatles lyric, ‘All You Need is Love’ in massive red letters. Few thought it appropriate. Her drug-free, teetotal image had been exposed by her own admission of smoking marijuana on the night of the murder and by the fact that she had previously been fined for her role in a drunken party. She was labelled a ‘she-devil’ by Kercher’s family lawyer but Knox’s lawyer calls her ‘the Amelie of Seattle’, referring to the heroine of the eponymous French movie that Knox said she and her boyfriend watched on the night of the murder. (The film is about a woman who dedicates her life to doing good.)Much was made of her smiling and laughing but English speaking viewers could sympathise with some of these reactions. For example, she laughed when she gave her birth date, not because she had little respect for the proceedings but because of the inappropriate timings her rotund translator chose to start interpreting. At one point, Amanda Knox’s every sentence was so interrupted that the very sense of her answers was lost. Knox’s response was to become fluent in Italian.The 11 month trial was very Italian. Knox had to sit for five months without saying a word and her mother being a witness, wasn’t allowed to attend the first day of her daughter’s trial. And then during the summer, there was a two month break for the holidays. The trial system itself was and is different from the UK with two Italian judges joining six local residents as members of the jury, each of whom have a single vote.Before the verdict was read, Knox appealed to the jury, in fluent Italian, saying she ‘was confident my conscience is clean’ but that ‘I am afraid of having a mask of murderer forced on my skin’The 22 year old American student had spent two birthdays in jail. She was sentenced to spend a further 26 of them in prison. Her former boyfriend, Sollecito, now aged 25, was sentenced to 25 years in jail. Her lawyer comforted her as she and her family broke down.Sollecito remained impassive and ironically as calm and composed as the Kercher family.On top of the sentence, the court ordered Knox and Sollecito to pay two million Euros to Kercher’s parents, and with additional awards to her siblings, the total amounted to more than €4m. Knox was also ordered to pay €40,000 to Patrick Lumumba. It was her false testimony against him which gave her an extra year on the sentence given to Sollecito. She was sent to Capanne prison on the outskirts of Perugia to a nine metre square cell, with her family vowing to appeal.On 24 November 2010, Knox and Sollecito's appeals began amid a media furore. By now known as 'Foxy Knoxy' in newspapers and on television screens across the world, Knox made an emotional plea for mercy in court, reading in Italian from handwritten notes in which she described her conviction as 'an enormous mistake'.Meanwhile, back in the US, a controversial new film about the murder, entitled 'Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy', dramatised the harrowing last moments of Meredith Kercher's life. One particular scene, which shows the victim being held while she screams, caused particular uproar and Knox later tried to ban its wider release, calling it an 'invasion of my life'.In July 2011, the appeals court heard from experts who suggested that the DNA evidence used to convict Knox and Sollecito could have been contaminated, although Italian prosecutors deny the claims. It was also alleged that police failed to wear the correct protective clothing. With this in mind, the accused separately addressed the court for the first time in a bid to appeal their convictions ahead of the jury's verdict. Knox, who immediately began to cry, told the court that she was 'not who they say I am', while her former boyfriend and co-defendant Sollecito explained that the case had felt like a nightmare from which he could not wake. Later that evening, in a speech which elicits gasps from the courtroom, presiding judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann announced that the jury had acquitted the pair of Kercher's murder on the basis of doubts over procedures used to gather DNA evidence. Knox collapsed in tears and was escorted from the court.Although the judge upheld her conviction of slander after she accused bar owner Lumumba of the murder, the three year sentence passed down had already been served by Knox. She is now a free woman.The parents of Meredith Kercher have left her bedroom untouched, just as she left it to go to Italy in August 2007. Her mother said,“It's not a shrine to Meredith but it is a constant reminder of her. When I'm walking past with a pile of washing in my hand I get a feeling of sadness. It's almost as though she's just gone out and will be back in a while.”RetrialOn 26 March 2013 Italy’s highest court reversed the acquittals and ordered Knox and Sollecito to stand trial again in the Court of Assizes of Appeal in Florence. The retrial began on 30 September 2013.Italy had no power to summon Knox to the hearing and she remained in Seattle, where she is studying creative writing at the University of Washington. Sollecito, who remained in Italy was not required to return to jail during the retrial but did choose to attend court during the hearing.On 31 January 2014, after 12 hours of deliberation, Knox and Sollecito's guilty verdicts were reinstated and they were sentenced to 28 years and six months and 25 years respectively and ordered to pay damages to the Kercher family. Presiding judge Alessandro Nencini also ordered that Sollecito's passport be revoked.In a statement issued after the verdict was delivered, Knox said:"I am frightened and saddened by this unjust verdict."Both Knox, who was in Seattle at the time of the verdict, and Sollecito, who had left the court before the verdicts were delivered, will appeal to the supreme Court of Cassation. In Italy, the verdict will not be considered to be final until it is confirmed by the Court of Cassation. If the Court of Cassation upholds the guilty verdicts, it is likely that at this time Knox's extradition would be requested. 

According to the prosecution case, Knox, Sollecito and Guede, go to Knox’s flat on the night of 1 November, probably stoned, and try to entice Meredith into a group sex game. When she refuses Sollecito allegedly holds her down from behind as Guede to sexually assaults her. It is also alleged that Knox then stabs her.The prosecution then claim that Knox and Sollecito go outside and throw a stone at Knox’s other flatmate Filomena’s window to break it and make the murder look like a burglary gone wrong. They also allegedly dispose of Meredith’s phone in a neighbour’s garden, which is later found and reported to the police.When the trial finally began in January 2009, the prosecutions’ biggest problems remained the apparent lack of motive and lack of Knox DNA in Kercher’s bedroom. They explained away the first problem by saying that Knox found Kercher prudish and was eager to humiliate her sexually in a drug fuelled sex game that turned deadly. And the damning DNA may not have been in the room, but Knox’s DNA was on the handle of a knife whose blade had Kercher’s DNA on it and which was found in Sollecito’s flat. Sollecito’s DNA is found on a bloodied bra though the length of time between the crime and the bra’s testing leaves the possibility that the evidential chain had been contaminated.Sollecito’s defence is that he was surfing the internet but his computer records don’t back him up. Both Knox and Sollecito say they were smoking marijuana which is why they cannot remember details properly. And both rely on an expert forensic witness to rebut the DNA evidence with an O.J Simpson like defence, i.e. there was a contamination of the evidential process.The relationship between the two accused was tense and when Sollecito gave a statement, Knox nervously bit at her nails. Her demeanour throughout was as analysed as her character before the murder. Photos of her beaming, even flirty smile at her lawyer was thought to be proof of her carefree innocence by defenders and damning proof of her psychopathic nature for others. When a hearing happened on Valentine’s Day, she wore the Beatles lyric, ‘All You Need is Love’ in massive red letters. Few thought it appropriate. Her drug-free, teetotal image had been exposed by her own admission of smoking marijuana on the night of the murder and by the fact that she had previously been fined for her role in a drunken party. She was labelled a ‘she-devil’ by Kercher’s family lawyer but Knox’s lawyer calls her ‘the Amelie of Seattle’, referring to the heroine of the eponymous French movie that Knox said she and her boyfriend watched on the night of the murder. (The film is about a woman who dedicates her life to doing good.)Much was made of her smiling and laughing but English speaking viewers could sympathise with some of these reactions. For example, she laughed when she gave her birth date, not because she had little respect for the proceedings but because of the inappropriate timings her rotund translator chose to start interpreting. At one point, Amanda Knox’s every sentence was so interrupted that the very sense of her answers was lost. Knox’s response was to become fluent in Italian.The 11 month trial was very Italian. Knox had to sit for five months without saying a word and her mother being a witness, wasn’t allowed to attend the first day of her daughter’s trial. And then during the summer, there was a two month break for the holidays. The trial system itself was and is different from the UK with two Italian judges joining six local residents as members of the jury, each of whom have a single vote.Before the verdict was read, Knox appealed to the jury, in fluent Italian, saying she ‘was confident my conscience is clean’ but that ‘I am afraid of having a mask of murderer forced on my skin’The 22 year old American student had spent two birthdays in jail. She was sentenced to spend a further 26 of them in prison. Her former boyfriend, Sollecito, now aged 25, was sentenced to 25 years in jail. Her lawyer comforted her as she and her family broke down.Sollecito remained impassive and ironically as calm and composed as the Kercher family.On top of the sentence, the court ordered Knox and Sollecito to pay two million Euros to Kercher’s parents, and with additional awards to her siblings, the total amounted to more than €4m. Knox was also ordered to pay €40,000 to Patrick Lumumba. It was her false testimony against him which gave her an extra year on the sentence given to Sollecito. She was sent to Capanne prison on the outskirts of Perugia to a nine metre square cell, with her family vowing to appeal.On 24 November 2010, Knox and Sollecito's appeals began amid a media furore. By now known as 'Foxy Knoxy' in newspapers and on television screens across the world, Knox made an emotional plea for mercy in court, reading in Italian from handwritten notes in which she described her conviction as 'an enormous mistake'.Meanwhile, back in the US, a controversial new film about the murder, entitled 'Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy', dramatised the harrowing last moments of Meredith Kercher's life. One particular scene, which shows the victim being held while she screams, caused particular uproar and Knox later tried to ban its wider release, calling it an 'invasion of my life'.In July 2011, the appeals court heard from experts who suggested that the DNA evidence used to convict Knox and Sollecito could have been contaminated, although Italian prosecutors deny the claims. It was also alleged that police failed to wear the correct protective clothing. With this in mind, the accused separately addressed the court for the first time in a bid to appeal their convictions ahead of the jury's verdict. Knox, who immediately began to cry, told the court that she was 'not who they say I am', while her former boyfriend and co-defendant Sollecito explained that the case had felt like a nightmare from which he could not wake. Later that evening, in a speech which elicits gasps from the courtroom, presiding judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann announced that the jury had acquitted the pair of Kercher's murder on the basis of doubts over procedures used to gather DNA evidence. Knox collapsed in tears and was escorted from the court.Although the judge upheld her conviction of slander after she accused bar owner Lumumba of the murder, the three year sentence passed down had already been served by Knox. She is now a free woman.The parents of Meredith Kercher have left her bedroom untouched, just as she left it to go to Italy in August 2007. Her mother said,“It's not a shrine to Meredith but it is a constant reminder of her. When I'm walking past with a pile of washing in my hand I get a feeling of sadness. It's almost as though she's just gone out and will be back in a while.”RetrialOn 26 March 2013 Italy’s highest court reversed the acquittals and ordered Knox and Sollecito to stand trial again in the Court of Assizes of Appeal in Florence. The retrial began on 30 September 2013.Italy had no power to summon Knox to the hearing and she remained in Seattle, where she is studying creative writing at the University of Washington. Sollecito, who remained in Italy was not required to return to jail during the retrial but did choose to attend court during the hearing.On 31 January 2014, after 12 hours of deliberation, Knox and Sollecito's guilty verdicts were reinstated and they were sentenced to 28 years and six months and 25 years respectively and ordered to pay damages to the Kercher family. Presiding judge Alessandro Nencini also ordered that Sollecito's passport be revoked.In a statement issued after the verdict was delivered, Knox said:"I am frightened and saddened by this unjust verdict."Both Knox, who was in Seattle at the time of the verdict, and Sollecito, who had left the court before the verdicts were delivered, will appeal to the supreme Court of Cassation. In Italy, the verdict will not be considered to be final until it is confirmed by the Court of Cassation. If the Court of Cassation upholds the guilty verdicts, it is likely that at this time Knox's extradition would be requested. 

2 November 2007 The police arrive at the student flat to find Knox and Sollecito outside. The couple tell them that that there’s been a burglary. But when the Italian flatmate, Filomena, enters her room she notices that the broken glass is on top of the clothes strewn around her room. As she left the room tidy, the clothes must have been chucked on the floor after the entry and then the glass smashed onto them, meaning that entry came first, the stone through the window, second.The door to Meredith’s room is forced open.The murder scene looks less like a human being has been murdered and more like an animal has been messily slaughtered.The police initially think it’s a heroin addict robbery gone wrong as the place wasn’t far from a known dealing spot. The lead investigator arrives but doesn’t enter the crime scene till after the forensic team finish (four days later) because he’s worried his hair was too dirty and it might contaminate the scene. There is indeed blood everywhere that needs to be examined including blood on the door handles and a bloody footprint on the bathroom mat. Knox later says she never noticed this blood which is why when she went to wash, she touched the blood and left a bloody fingerprint in the bathroom.The media descend and one of the first images they seize upon is film of Knox and Sollecito kissing. They’re questioned but give conflicting statements. Knox says they were both at his place watching the French film, ‘Amelie’. Sollecito says that he was there, and on his computer, but is unsure if Knox was there all night or not. Knox says she’s shocked to be a suspect but not as shocked as a detective who sees her doing a cartwheel and splits. This is later explained away as a Yoga stress relief exercise but, combined with her inappropriate kiss, many are starting to draw conclusions about the American abroad.Knox then claims that Italian police mistreat her over 41 hours of questioning which culminates in a 14 hour interrogation. She alleges that a policewoman hit her twice on the head during interrogation, a claim that leads to a defamation case being taken by the Italian Police. The result of the interview is that she changes her story at 1:45am and at 5:45am and now indicates that Lumumba is the murderer. She says he killed her when Knox was in the kitchen. He’s soon cleared with an alibi by a customer and joins the police in seeking a defamation case.

2 November 2007 The police arrive at the student flat to find Knox and Sollecito outside. The couple tell them that that there’s been a burglary. But when the Italian flatmate, Filomena, enters her room she notices that the broken glass is on top of the clothes strewn around her room. As she left the room tidy, the clothes must have been chucked on the floor after the entry and then the glass smashed onto them, meaning that entry came first, the stone through the window, second.The door to Meredith’s room is forced open.The murder scene looks less like a human being has been murdered and more like an animal has been messily slaughtered.The police initially think it’s a heroin addict robbery gone wrong as the place wasn’t far from a known dealing spot. The lead investigator arrives but doesn’t enter the crime scene till after the forensic team finish (four days later) because he’s worried his hair was too dirty and it might contaminate the scene. There is indeed blood everywhere that needs to be examined including blood on the door handles and a bloody footprint on the bathroom mat. Knox later says she never noticed this blood which is why when she went to wash, she touched the blood and left a bloody fingerprint in the bathroom.The media descend and one of the first images they seize upon is film of Knox and Sollecito kissing. They’re questioned but give conflicting statements. Knox says they were both at his place watching the French film, ‘Amelie’. Sollecito says that he was there, and on his computer, but is unsure if Knox was there all night or not. Knox says she’s shocked to be a suspect but not as shocked as a detective who sees her doing a cartwheel and splits. This is later explained away as a Yoga stress relief exercise but, combined with her inappropriate kiss, many are starting to draw conclusions about the American abroad.Knox then claims that Italian police mistreat her over 41 hours of questioning which culminates in a 14 hour interrogation. She alleges that a policewoman hit her twice on the head during interrogation, a claim that leads to a defamation case being taken by the Italian Police. The result of the interview is that she changes her story at 1:45am and at 5:45am and now indicates that Lumumba is the murderer. She says he killed her when Knox was in the kitchen. He’s soon cleared with an alibi by a customer and joins the police in seeking a defamation case.