In this follow-up episode, we'll explore some of the deeper questions posed by the trial of Amanda Knox.
We'll look at the role of the media, the biases of the lead prosecutor, and ask ourselves why this case attracted so much attention.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to continue talking about The Trial of Amanda Knox, or rather, the murder of Meredith Kercher.
[00:00:29] This is very much a follow up episode, so if you haven’t listened to part one of this story, the episode before this, then now is the time to press pause and go back and listen to that one.
[00:00:41] And, like the last one, this episode does come with the same parental guidance warning, as we are going to be talking about the murder of a young woman.
[00:00:51] OK then, the Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:00:56] As we heard in the last episode, Meredith Kercher was found brutally murdered in her house in Perugia.
[00:01:03] She was 21 years old, and the police soon honed in on Kercher’s housemate, Amanda Knox, and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
[00:01:13] Knox was American, on a study abroad programme, and Sollecito was Italian, from a city called Bari in southern Italy.
[00:01:24] Not to recap too much on what we already covered in the last episode, but Knox and Sollecito were arrested days after the murder, they were found guilty in court not once but twice, but they were finally declared innocent of all charges in 2015, 8 years after the murder.
[00:01:47] And during those 8 years, their names and the most intimate details of their lives were splashed all over the newspapers in Italy and the United States, where they were from, but also in the UK, where Kercher was from.
[00:02:04] This is the first area to discuss in more detail.
[00:02:09] The sheer amount of media coverage and attention on the trial was unprecedented. 130 different newspapers and TV channels applied for press passes to the courtroom, to report on the trial.
[00:02:24] The grim reality of this, given that a young woman had been brutally killed, was that this case was of huge public interest.
[00:02:33] And depending on the media outlet, and what country it was from, the coverage was very different.
[00:02:42] The US press tended to be supportive of Amanda Knox, pointing at holes or inconsistencies in the Italian justice system. She was our girl, she is a victim here, she is unjustly accused.
[00:02:59] The Italian press tended to be highly critical of Knox, focussing on her sexual history and painting her as a sort of classic young American who comes to Italy, behaves in a very non-traditional and unacceptable way, having multiple sexual partners and taking drugs.
[00:03:20] And the British press, especially the tabloid press, was relentless in its pursuit of saucy stories about Knox. As you may know, or you might remember from the couple of episodes we made last year on the British tabloids, the British press is one of the most invasive in the world.
[00:03:41] There are basically no limits, and in the case of someone who has been accused of such a heinous crime, especially when the victim was a young British girl, every intimate detail of Knox’s life was made available to the public.
[00:03:58] And according to the British tabloid press, Knox was guilty.
[00:04:03] So, you had this sort of bizarre situation of the press from three different countries all having different agendas, picking sides and defending their fellow citizens in the trial.
[00:04:18] And under Italian law, newspapers were allowed to continue publishing these stories full of theories about why Knox and Sollecito might have committed the murder while the trial was ongoing.
[00:04:33] In the UK, for example, there are very strict laws about what the media can publish when there is a trial, in order for the people on the jury not to be swayed, their opinions changed, by evidence from outside the courtroom. And in the UK, jurors are told that they are not allowed to read about the case or do any kind of external research.
[00:04:59] In Italy there are some similar laws, but they are a lot less strict, and given the scale of the media coverage, unless a juror went to live in a cave for a year, it was practically impossible for them not to have read or watched stories about the two people being accused.
[00:05:21] Now, why was there so much interest?
[00:05:25] People, unfortunately, get murdered all the time, but there was something about this case that meant it was orders of magnitude of more public interest than practically any other murder case in the past 20 years.
[00:05:40] When looking through all of the coverage, and trying to understand why people were and still are so fascinated by it, my main conclusion is that it has all of the elements of what people are used to seeing in TV murder mysteries or detective shows, so it was like watching a murder mystery in real life, or at least that’s how it was reported in the press.
[00:06:06] In a murder mystery you have the victim, of course, and there is the obvious suspect, the person who has the criminal record, who was there at the time, and looks to have been caught red handed.
[00:06:21] But then, something doesn’t quite add up, and the talented but slightly unhinged detective comes along and says “aha, it was actually this other, completely unlikely person, someone who nobody would have thought could have done it, but did it because of some very unusual motive that nobody would have expected”.
[00:06:45] The detective is celebrated as a hero, the wrongly accused person is freed, and the unlikely suspect is put in handcuffs and sent away. And of course, this all takes place in an unlikely setting, a peaceful and happy place, like a hotel or a village…or an Italian hilltop town.
[00:07:09] It is a familiar theme to us all.
[00:07:12] And the case of Meredith Kercher was no different.
[00:07:16] The obvious candidate was Rudy Guede. He was a well-known criminal, he was known to carry a knife, and he had been caught breaking into houses in the weeks leading up to the murder. He fled the country, and signs of his presence were all over the murder scene.
[00:07:34] There was the DNA evidence, his semen inside poor Meredith Kercher, his handprints all over the bedroom, a bloody footprint in the bathroom. And, sorry for the scatalogical reference here, but he also left a large poo in the toilet.
[00:07:50] He was clearly at the murder scene while Meredith was murdered, there is no question of this.
[00:07:57] And when the police presented him with this evidence, he admitted as much, but claimed that he was in the bathroom, listening to loud music, and during that period someone broke into the house and killed Meredith.
[00:08:12] And when Guede emerged from the bathroom, he saw the killer, but the killer didn’t immediately flee, nor did he attack Guede, but he took the time to say to him “black man found, guilty man found”.
[00:08:29] You would have to have quite a vivid imagination to believe that Guede was telling the truth here, and that Meredith being murdered by someone else during the time Guede was on the toilet was more likely than by Guede, a career criminal who was known to break into houses and carry a knife.
[00:08:49] But this is where we need to talk about the next character in this real-life TV drama: the man with the vivid imagination, the “brilliant but eccentric detective”, who in this case was the lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini.
[00:09:05] Mignini, by the way, has a history of inventing strange and unorthodox stories, and was already well-known in the region for reopening an investigation into the death of a wealthy doctor from Perugia. The doctor was found dead in a nearby lake, Lake Trasimeno, back in 1985, and it was initially believed that he had simply drowned.
[00:09:30] But Mignini didn’t believe it, instead deciding that this drowning must be connected to the infamous Monster of Florence serial killer, who brutally killed young couples in Tuscany between 1968 and 1985, and–importantly–was never caught.
[00:09:50] The point is, Mignini had a bit of a track record of eccentricity, of looking at a case where the answer might be simple, or a case that might not be a case at all, coming to his own fantastical conclusions about it and refusing to acknowledge any evidence that disproved his hypothesis.
[00:10:12] And, moving onto the next item on our recipe for a good murder mystery, we need our unlikely characters who at first seem completely unconnected to the crime, but who are duly unmasked as vicious, cold-blooded murderers.
[00:10:30] Knox, as you heard, was a young, attractive female student. Sollecito was a quiet, Harry Potter-esque computer science student. They had only met weeks before, and neither had a criminal record. They did not fit any kind of stereotype about what violent murderers should be.
[00:10:53] What’s more, there was very little evidence putting them at the scene of the crime, until, magically, their fingerprints were found on the murder weapon and on Meredith’s bra strap.
[00:11:05] And then, for our final element, we had the unlikely setting for the murder. The picturesque hilltop city of Perugia, just a hundred metres from an Etruscan arch dating back to the third century BC.
[00:11:20] So, to put all of these elements together, we have the unlikely setting for the crime, the very likely guilty party, in the form of Rudy Guede, the unlikely suspects, in the form of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and then the genius investigator who manages to figure out that the obvious answer is the wrong one, and in fact, the true answer is much more fantastical and bizarre than any normal person would have thought: in fact, Knox and Sollecito killed Meredith Kercher as part of some sex game or bizarre perhaps Halloween-related sexual ritual.
[00:12:01] When put like this, it's not hard to see why it was such a popular case for the media, and why it was in the media’s interest to continue pushing forward Mignini’s theories, because they were much more interesting and would sell many more newspapers than the more obvious answer.
[00:12:20] As you heard in the last episode, even the BBC got involved, doing a profile on “who is the real Foxy Knoxy?”, writing: “a pretty young victim, brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, whose murderers were both wealthy and attractive.
[00:12:37] But what fascinated us most of all”, the BBC continued, “was the beautiful young murderess, and what was really going on behind her smile.”
[00:12:48] An interesting linguistic note here is that “murderer” is not normally a word that you change depending on the gender of the person doing the murdering, but the journalist did it here to highlight the fact that, yes, Knox was a woman, she was not just a murderer, but a murderess.
[00:13:09] Now, there is one more linguistic element from this case that I’d like to draw your attention to.
[00:13:16] If you remember from part one, after 50 hours of interrogation, Knox had broken down and accused her boss, Patrick Lumumba of the murder.
[00:13:28] This was not, in fact, unprompted. The police had suggested to her that Lumumba was involved, and this all hinged on a text exchange that she had had with Lumumba.
[00:13:41] She worked in his bar, and was scheduled to work on the evening of Meredith’s murder.
[00:13:47] But the bar was quiet, not busy at all, so Lumumba had told her, in Italian, that she could have the evening off.
[00:13:57] She responded, in Italian, with “ci vediamo più tardi. Buona serata”, literally “see you later. Have a good evening”.
[00:14:07] Remember, Knox had only recently arrived in Italy, so her Italian was not very good.
[00:14:15] What she wrote was a very literal translation of what she wanted to say in English “see you later. Have a good evening”.
[00:14:23] What Knox didn’t know, however, and what the police didn’t care to acknowledge, was that she made a mistake.
[00:14:32] Not a grammatical mistake, but a contextual mistake.
[00:14:37] In English, if you say “see you later”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have plans to see that person later.
[00:14:46] I can say to a friend “see you later”, and that might mean tomorrow, it might mean next week, it might mean “whenever I next see you”.
[00:14:56] “Ci vediamo più tardi”, “see you later” in Italian, has a literal sense, it implies that there is a fixed plan to meet later on.
[00:15:07] The police interpreted this as Knox saying that she had arranged to meet Lumumba later that evening, but they should have realised that for someone who had just arrived from the United States and knew very little Italian, this was a very understandable mistake, and shouldn’t be taken at face value, let alone considered a smoking gun in the crime.
[00:15:30] Now, as you’ll remember, Lumumba had a clear alibi, and was released a couple of weeks after this, but by this time the police had already widely publicised the theory that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the murder.
[00:15:47] And here we need to underline something very important about the timeline.
[00:15:53] The DNA evidence linking Rudy Guede to the murder only came back from the laboratory a couple of weeks after the crime, after Knox and Sollecito were already the main suspects, and Mignini had been building up his theory of a sex game gone wrong.
[00:16:12] The DNA evidence of Guede’s involvement, his subsequent arrest in Germany and his completely implausible account of what happened on the evening of the murder, this should really have meant that Mignini put his hands up in the air and said, “ok, it looks like our first hypothesis was incorrect, the case now seems more clear cut”.
[00:16:35] Instead, he doubled down, assuming Knox and Sollecito’s guilt and interpreting their every move as a sign of it.
[00:16:44] Instead of Knox having to be proved guilty, she had to prove her innocence.
[00:16:50] This is an important distinction, as the only witnesses that Knox and Sollecito had that they weren’t at the scene of the crime were each other.
[00:17:00] And as they both stood accused of the murder, their witness statements weren’t considered reliable; they said they were innocent but they had no way to prove their innocence.
[00:17:13] Combined with the media circus and the impossibility for any juror to approach the case with an unbiased opinion, and the evidence that was falsely presented as true in court, it's hardly surprising that Knox and Sollecito were found guilty.
[00:17:29] They were tried and convicted by the media long before the legal system.
[00:17:35] Now, since Knox and Sollecito have been released, what has happened to the characters in this story?
[00:17:43] Sollecito is reportedly living a quiet life working in Milan, just keen to put the entire episode behind him.
[00:17:51] Knox is back in Seattle, in the United States. She has written a book about her experience, and has become a justice campaigner, standing up for people who have been forced to make confessions under duress.
[00:18:06] Rudy Guede has served his time in prison, and is now a free man, although he was back in court in 2023 for charges of raping and beating up his girlfriend.
[00:18:19] Giualiano Mignini has now retired, and is apparently spending his days writing and studying the history of Perugia. And, presumably, keeping a close eye on the local criminal news and dreaming up new and fantastical explanations for whoever the suspects might be.
[00:18:36] The family of Meredith Kercher, unfortunately, has no real closure. Yes, Rudy Guede served 16 years in prison, but he never admitted to the crime.
[00:18:49] And Meredith’s parents both died within 4 months of each other in 2020.
[00:18:56] The reality of this entire story is that, if you ask me at least, it was blown completely out of proportion, it is a lot less interesting than it was made out to be.
[00:19:07] Two innocent people were sent to prison, and if we count Patrick Lumumba’s two weeks in jail, three.
[00:19:15] And one poor young woman, who is often an afterthought in the reporting of this whole story, was brutally murdered.
[00:19:24] And to this day, looking through websites and forums analysing the case, there are still plenty of people who simply do not believe that Knox and Sollecito are innocent, mainly citing their odd behaviour and at times contradictory statements, taking these as proof of their guilt rather than two young and naive people who found themselves at the centre of a murder investigation.
[00:19:51] For these people, it’s clear that nothing Amanda Knox can ever do will prove her innocence..
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for this follow up, bonus episode on the Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:20:04] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:08] This show is particularly popular in Italy, so for the Italians among you, do you remember this trial? What do you remember about it? What do you believe happened on the night of November 1st?
[00:20:20] Is Amanda Knox innocent, or is there more to this story than has ever come to light?
[00:20:25] I would love to get your thoughts, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:29] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to continue talking about The Trial of Amanda Knox, or rather, the murder of Meredith Kercher.
[00:00:29] This is very much a follow up episode, so if you haven’t listened to part one of this story, the episode before this, then now is the time to press pause and go back and listen to that one.
[00:00:41] And, like the last one, this episode does come with the same parental guidance warning, as we are going to be talking about the murder of a young woman.
[00:00:51] OK then, the Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:00:56] As we heard in the last episode, Meredith Kercher was found brutally murdered in her house in Perugia.
[00:01:03] She was 21 years old, and the police soon honed in on Kercher’s housemate, Amanda Knox, and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
[00:01:13] Knox was American, on a study abroad programme, and Sollecito was Italian, from a city called Bari in southern Italy.
[00:01:24] Not to recap too much on what we already covered in the last episode, but Knox and Sollecito were arrested days after the murder, they were found guilty in court not once but twice, but they were finally declared innocent of all charges in 2015, 8 years after the murder.
[00:01:47] And during those 8 years, their names and the most intimate details of their lives were splashed all over the newspapers in Italy and the United States, where they were from, but also in the UK, where Kercher was from.
[00:02:04] This is the first area to discuss in more detail.
[00:02:09] The sheer amount of media coverage and attention on the trial was unprecedented. 130 different newspapers and TV channels applied for press passes to the courtroom, to report on the trial.
[00:02:24] The grim reality of this, given that a young woman had been brutally killed, was that this case was of huge public interest.
[00:02:33] And depending on the media outlet, and what country it was from, the coverage was very different.
[00:02:42] The US press tended to be supportive of Amanda Knox, pointing at holes or inconsistencies in the Italian justice system. She was our girl, she is a victim here, she is unjustly accused.
[00:02:59] The Italian press tended to be highly critical of Knox, focussing on her sexual history and painting her as a sort of classic young American who comes to Italy, behaves in a very non-traditional and unacceptable way, having multiple sexual partners and taking drugs.
[00:03:20] And the British press, especially the tabloid press, was relentless in its pursuit of saucy stories about Knox. As you may know, or you might remember from the couple of episodes we made last year on the British tabloids, the British press is one of the most invasive in the world.
[00:03:41] There are basically no limits, and in the case of someone who has been accused of such a heinous crime, especially when the victim was a young British girl, every intimate detail of Knox’s life was made available to the public.
[00:03:58] And according to the British tabloid press, Knox was guilty.
[00:04:03] So, you had this sort of bizarre situation of the press from three different countries all having different agendas, picking sides and defending their fellow citizens in the trial.
[00:04:18] And under Italian law, newspapers were allowed to continue publishing these stories full of theories about why Knox and Sollecito might have committed the murder while the trial was ongoing.
[00:04:33] In the UK, for example, there are very strict laws about what the media can publish when there is a trial, in order for the people on the jury not to be swayed, their opinions changed, by evidence from outside the courtroom. And in the UK, jurors are told that they are not allowed to read about the case or do any kind of external research.
[00:04:59] In Italy there are some similar laws, but they are a lot less strict, and given the scale of the media coverage, unless a juror went to live in a cave for a year, it was practically impossible for them not to have read or watched stories about the two people being accused.
[00:05:21] Now, why was there so much interest?
[00:05:25] People, unfortunately, get murdered all the time, but there was something about this case that meant it was orders of magnitude of more public interest than practically any other murder case in the past 20 years.
[00:05:40] When looking through all of the coverage, and trying to understand why people were and still are so fascinated by it, my main conclusion is that it has all of the elements of what people are used to seeing in TV murder mysteries or detective shows, so it was like watching a murder mystery in real life, or at least that’s how it was reported in the press.
[00:06:06] In a murder mystery you have the victim, of course, and there is the obvious suspect, the person who has the criminal record, who was there at the time, and looks to have been caught red handed.
[00:06:21] But then, something doesn’t quite add up, and the talented but slightly unhinged detective comes along and says “aha, it was actually this other, completely unlikely person, someone who nobody would have thought could have done it, but did it because of some very unusual motive that nobody would have expected”.
[00:06:45] The detective is celebrated as a hero, the wrongly accused person is freed, and the unlikely suspect is put in handcuffs and sent away. And of course, this all takes place in an unlikely setting, a peaceful and happy place, like a hotel or a village…or an Italian hilltop town.
[00:07:09] It is a familiar theme to us all.
[00:07:12] And the case of Meredith Kercher was no different.
[00:07:16] The obvious candidate was Rudy Guede. He was a well-known criminal, he was known to carry a knife, and he had been caught breaking into houses in the weeks leading up to the murder. He fled the country, and signs of his presence were all over the murder scene.
[00:07:34] There was the DNA evidence, his semen inside poor Meredith Kercher, his handprints all over the bedroom, a bloody footprint in the bathroom. And, sorry for the scatalogical reference here, but he also left a large poo in the toilet.
[00:07:50] He was clearly at the murder scene while Meredith was murdered, there is no question of this.
[00:07:57] And when the police presented him with this evidence, he admitted as much, but claimed that he was in the bathroom, listening to loud music, and during that period someone broke into the house and killed Meredith.
[00:08:12] And when Guede emerged from the bathroom, he saw the killer, but the killer didn’t immediately flee, nor did he attack Guede, but he took the time to say to him “black man found, guilty man found”.
[00:08:29] You would have to have quite a vivid imagination to believe that Guede was telling the truth here, and that Meredith being murdered by someone else during the time Guede was on the toilet was more likely than by Guede, a career criminal who was known to break into houses and carry a knife.
[00:08:49] But this is where we need to talk about the next character in this real-life TV drama: the man with the vivid imagination, the “brilliant but eccentric detective”, who in this case was the lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini.
[00:09:05] Mignini, by the way, has a history of inventing strange and unorthodox stories, and was already well-known in the region for reopening an investigation into the death of a wealthy doctor from Perugia. The doctor was found dead in a nearby lake, Lake Trasimeno, back in 1985, and it was initially believed that he had simply drowned.
[00:09:30] But Mignini didn’t believe it, instead deciding that this drowning must be connected to the infamous Monster of Florence serial killer, who brutally killed young couples in Tuscany between 1968 and 1985, and–importantly–was never caught.
[00:09:50] The point is, Mignini had a bit of a track record of eccentricity, of looking at a case where the answer might be simple, or a case that might not be a case at all, coming to his own fantastical conclusions about it and refusing to acknowledge any evidence that disproved his hypothesis.
[00:10:12] And, moving onto the next item on our recipe for a good murder mystery, we need our unlikely characters who at first seem completely unconnected to the crime, but who are duly unmasked as vicious, cold-blooded murderers.
[00:10:30] Knox, as you heard, was a young, attractive female student. Sollecito was a quiet, Harry Potter-esque computer science student. They had only met weeks before, and neither had a criminal record. They did not fit any kind of stereotype about what violent murderers should be.
[00:10:53] What’s more, there was very little evidence putting them at the scene of the crime, until, magically, their fingerprints were found on the murder weapon and on Meredith’s bra strap.
[00:11:05] And then, for our final element, we had the unlikely setting for the murder. The picturesque hilltop city of Perugia, just a hundred metres from an Etruscan arch dating back to the third century BC.
[00:11:20] So, to put all of these elements together, we have the unlikely setting for the crime, the very likely guilty party, in the form of Rudy Guede, the unlikely suspects, in the form of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and then the genius investigator who manages to figure out that the obvious answer is the wrong one, and in fact, the true answer is much more fantastical and bizarre than any normal person would have thought: in fact, Knox and Sollecito killed Meredith Kercher as part of some sex game or bizarre perhaps Halloween-related sexual ritual.
[00:12:01] When put like this, it's not hard to see why it was such a popular case for the media, and why it was in the media’s interest to continue pushing forward Mignini’s theories, because they were much more interesting and would sell many more newspapers than the more obvious answer.
[00:12:20] As you heard in the last episode, even the BBC got involved, doing a profile on “who is the real Foxy Knoxy?”, writing: “a pretty young victim, brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, whose murderers were both wealthy and attractive.
[00:12:37] But what fascinated us most of all”, the BBC continued, “was the beautiful young murderess, and what was really going on behind her smile.”
[00:12:48] An interesting linguistic note here is that “murderer” is not normally a word that you change depending on the gender of the person doing the murdering, but the journalist did it here to highlight the fact that, yes, Knox was a woman, she was not just a murderer, but a murderess.
[00:13:09] Now, there is one more linguistic element from this case that I’d like to draw your attention to.
[00:13:16] If you remember from part one, after 50 hours of interrogation, Knox had broken down and accused her boss, Patrick Lumumba of the murder.
[00:13:28] This was not, in fact, unprompted. The police had suggested to her that Lumumba was involved, and this all hinged on a text exchange that she had had with Lumumba.
[00:13:41] She worked in his bar, and was scheduled to work on the evening of Meredith’s murder.
[00:13:47] But the bar was quiet, not busy at all, so Lumumba had told her, in Italian, that she could have the evening off.
[00:13:57] She responded, in Italian, with “ci vediamo più tardi. Buona serata”, literally “see you later. Have a good evening”.
[00:14:07] Remember, Knox had only recently arrived in Italy, so her Italian was not very good.
[00:14:15] What she wrote was a very literal translation of what she wanted to say in English “see you later. Have a good evening”.
[00:14:23] What Knox didn’t know, however, and what the police didn’t care to acknowledge, was that she made a mistake.
[00:14:32] Not a grammatical mistake, but a contextual mistake.
[00:14:37] In English, if you say “see you later”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have plans to see that person later.
[00:14:46] I can say to a friend “see you later”, and that might mean tomorrow, it might mean next week, it might mean “whenever I next see you”.
[00:14:56] “Ci vediamo più tardi”, “see you later” in Italian, has a literal sense, it implies that there is a fixed plan to meet later on.
[00:15:07] The police interpreted this as Knox saying that she had arranged to meet Lumumba later that evening, but they should have realised that for someone who had just arrived from the United States and knew very little Italian, this was a very understandable mistake, and shouldn’t be taken at face value, let alone considered a smoking gun in the crime.
[00:15:30] Now, as you’ll remember, Lumumba had a clear alibi, and was released a couple of weeks after this, but by this time the police had already widely publicised the theory that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the murder.
[00:15:47] And here we need to underline something very important about the timeline.
[00:15:53] The DNA evidence linking Rudy Guede to the murder only came back from the laboratory a couple of weeks after the crime, after Knox and Sollecito were already the main suspects, and Mignini had been building up his theory of a sex game gone wrong.
[00:16:12] The DNA evidence of Guede’s involvement, his subsequent arrest in Germany and his completely implausible account of what happened on the evening of the murder, this should really have meant that Mignini put his hands up in the air and said, “ok, it looks like our first hypothesis was incorrect, the case now seems more clear cut”.
[00:16:35] Instead, he doubled down, assuming Knox and Sollecito’s guilt and interpreting their every move as a sign of it.
[00:16:44] Instead of Knox having to be proved guilty, she had to prove her innocence.
[00:16:50] This is an important distinction, as the only witnesses that Knox and Sollecito had that they weren’t at the scene of the crime were each other.
[00:17:00] And as they both stood accused of the murder, their witness statements weren’t considered reliable; they said they were innocent but they had no way to prove their innocence.
[00:17:13] Combined with the media circus and the impossibility for any juror to approach the case with an unbiased opinion, and the evidence that was falsely presented as true in court, it's hardly surprising that Knox and Sollecito were found guilty.
[00:17:29] They were tried and convicted by the media long before the legal system.
[00:17:35] Now, since Knox and Sollecito have been released, what has happened to the characters in this story?
[00:17:43] Sollecito is reportedly living a quiet life working in Milan, just keen to put the entire episode behind him.
[00:17:51] Knox is back in Seattle, in the United States. She has written a book about her experience, and has become a justice campaigner, standing up for people who have been forced to make confessions under duress.
[00:18:06] Rudy Guede has served his time in prison, and is now a free man, although he was back in court in 2023 for charges of raping and beating up his girlfriend.
[00:18:19] Giualiano Mignini has now retired, and is apparently spending his days writing and studying the history of Perugia. And, presumably, keeping a close eye on the local criminal news and dreaming up new and fantastical explanations for whoever the suspects might be.
[00:18:36] The family of Meredith Kercher, unfortunately, has no real closure. Yes, Rudy Guede served 16 years in prison, but he never admitted to the crime.
[00:18:49] And Meredith’s parents both died within 4 months of each other in 2020.
[00:18:56] The reality of this entire story is that, if you ask me at least, it was blown completely out of proportion, it is a lot less interesting than it was made out to be.
[00:19:07] Two innocent people were sent to prison, and if we count Patrick Lumumba’s two weeks in jail, three.
[00:19:15] And one poor young woman, who is often an afterthought in the reporting of this whole story, was brutally murdered.
[00:19:24] And to this day, looking through websites and forums analysing the case, there are still plenty of people who simply do not believe that Knox and Sollecito are innocent, mainly citing their odd behaviour and at times contradictory statements, taking these as proof of their guilt rather than two young and naive people who found themselves at the centre of a murder investigation.
[00:19:51] For these people, it’s clear that nothing Amanda Knox can ever do will prove her innocence..
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for this follow up, bonus episode on the Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:20:04] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:08] This show is particularly popular in Italy, so for the Italians among you, do you remember this trial? What do you remember about it? What do you believe happened on the night of November 1st?
[00:20:20] Is Amanda Knox innocent, or is there more to this story than has ever come to light?
[00:20:25] I would love to get your thoughts, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:29] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to continue talking about The Trial of Amanda Knox, or rather, the murder of Meredith Kercher.
[00:00:29] This is very much a follow up episode, so if you haven’t listened to part one of this story, the episode before this, then now is the time to press pause and go back and listen to that one.
[00:00:41] And, like the last one, this episode does come with the same parental guidance warning, as we are going to be talking about the murder of a young woman.
[00:00:51] OK then, the Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:00:56] As we heard in the last episode, Meredith Kercher was found brutally murdered in her house in Perugia.
[00:01:03] She was 21 years old, and the police soon honed in on Kercher’s housemate, Amanda Knox, and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
[00:01:13] Knox was American, on a study abroad programme, and Sollecito was Italian, from a city called Bari in southern Italy.
[00:01:24] Not to recap too much on what we already covered in the last episode, but Knox and Sollecito were arrested days after the murder, they were found guilty in court not once but twice, but they were finally declared innocent of all charges in 2015, 8 years after the murder.
[00:01:47] And during those 8 years, their names and the most intimate details of their lives were splashed all over the newspapers in Italy and the United States, where they were from, but also in the UK, where Kercher was from.
[00:02:04] This is the first area to discuss in more detail.
[00:02:09] The sheer amount of media coverage and attention on the trial was unprecedented. 130 different newspapers and TV channels applied for press passes to the courtroom, to report on the trial.
[00:02:24] The grim reality of this, given that a young woman had been brutally killed, was that this case was of huge public interest.
[00:02:33] And depending on the media outlet, and what country it was from, the coverage was very different.
[00:02:42] The US press tended to be supportive of Amanda Knox, pointing at holes or inconsistencies in the Italian justice system. She was our girl, she is a victim here, she is unjustly accused.
[00:02:59] The Italian press tended to be highly critical of Knox, focussing on her sexual history and painting her as a sort of classic young American who comes to Italy, behaves in a very non-traditional and unacceptable way, having multiple sexual partners and taking drugs.
[00:03:20] And the British press, especially the tabloid press, was relentless in its pursuit of saucy stories about Knox. As you may know, or you might remember from the couple of episodes we made last year on the British tabloids, the British press is one of the most invasive in the world.
[00:03:41] There are basically no limits, and in the case of someone who has been accused of such a heinous crime, especially when the victim was a young British girl, every intimate detail of Knox’s life was made available to the public.
[00:03:58] And according to the British tabloid press, Knox was guilty.
[00:04:03] So, you had this sort of bizarre situation of the press from three different countries all having different agendas, picking sides and defending their fellow citizens in the trial.
[00:04:18] And under Italian law, newspapers were allowed to continue publishing these stories full of theories about why Knox and Sollecito might have committed the murder while the trial was ongoing.
[00:04:33] In the UK, for example, there are very strict laws about what the media can publish when there is a trial, in order for the people on the jury not to be swayed, their opinions changed, by evidence from outside the courtroom. And in the UK, jurors are told that they are not allowed to read about the case or do any kind of external research.
[00:04:59] In Italy there are some similar laws, but they are a lot less strict, and given the scale of the media coverage, unless a juror went to live in a cave for a year, it was practically impossible for them not to have read or watched stories about the two people being accused.
[00:05:21] Now, why was there so much interest?
[00:05:25] People, unfortunately, get murdered all the time, but there was something about this case that meant it was orders of magnitude of more public interest than practically any other murder case in the past 20 years.
[00:05:40] When looking through all of the coverage, and trying to understand why people were and still are so fascinated by it, my main conclusion is that it has all of the elements of what people are used to seeing in TV murder mysteries or detective shows, so it was like watching a murder mystery in real life, or at least that’s how it was reported in the press.
[00:06:06] In a murder mystery you have the victim, of course, and there is the obvious suspect, the person who has the criminal record, who was there at the time, and looks to have been caught red handed.
[00:06:21] But then, something doesn’t quite add up, and the talented but slightly unhinged detective comes along and says “aha, it was actually this other, completely unlikely person, someone who nobody would have thought could have done it, but did it because of some very unusual motive that nobody would have expected”.
[00:06:45] The detective is celebrated as a hero, the wrongly accused person is freed, and the unlikely suspect is put in handcuffs and sent away. And of course, this all takes place in an unlikely setting, a peaceful and happy place, like a hotel or a village…or an Italian hilltop town.
[00:07:09] It is a familiar theme to us all.
[00:07:12] And the case of Meredith Kercher was no different.
[00:07:16] The obvious candidate was Rudy Guede. He was a well-known criminal, he was known to carry a knife, and he had been caught breaking into houses in the weeks leading up to the murder. He fled the country, and signs of his presence were all over the murder scene.
[00:07:34] There was the DNA evidence, his semen inside poor Meredith Kercher, his handprints all over the bedroom, a bloody footprint in the bathroom. And, sorry for the scatalogical reference here, but he also left a large poo in the toilet.
[00:07:50] He was clearly at the murder scene while Meredith was murdered, there is no question of this.
[00:07:57] And when the police presented him with this evidence, he admitted as much, but claimed that he was in the bathroom, listening to loud music, and during that period someone broke into the house and killed Meredith.
[00:08:12] And when Guede emerged from the bathroom, he saw the killer, but the killer didn’t immediately flee, nor did he attack Guede, but he took the time to say to him “black man found, guilty man found”.
[00:08:29] You would have to have quite a vivid imagination to believe that Guede was telling the truth here, and that Meredith being murdered by someone else during the time Guede was on the toilet was more likely than by Guede, a career criminal who was known to break into houses and carry a knife.
[00:08:49] But this is where we need to talk about the next character in this real-life TV drama: the man with the vivid imagination, the “brilliant but eccentric detective”, who in this case was the lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini.
[00:09:05] Mignini, by the way, has a history of inventing strange and unorthodox stories, and was already well-known in the region for reopening an investigation into the death of a wealthy doctor from Perugia. The doctor was found dead in a nearby lake, Lake Trasimeno, back in 1985, and it was initially believed that he had simply drowned.
[00:09:30] But Mignini didn’t believe it, instead deciding that this drowning must be connected to the infamous Monster of Florence serial killer, who brutally killed young couples in Tuscany between 1968 and 1985, and–importantly–was never caught.
[00:09:50] The point is, Mignini had a bit of a track record of eccentricity, of looking at a case where the answer might be simple, or a case that might not be a case at all, coming to his own fantastical conclusions about it and refusing to acknowledge any evidence that disproved his hypothesis.
[00:10:12] And, moving onto the next item on our recipe for a good murder mystery, we need our unlikely characters who at first seem completely unconnected to the crime, but who are duly unmasked as vicious, cold-blooded murderers.
[00:10:30] Knox, as you heard, was a young, attractive female student. Sollecito was a quiet, Harry Potter-esque computer science student. They had only met weeks before, and neither had a criminal record. They did not fit any kind of stereotype about what violent murderers should be.
[00:10:53] What’s more, there was very little evidence putting them at the scene of the crime, until, magically, their fingerprints were found on the murder weapon and on Meredith’s bra strap.
[00:11:05] And then, for our final element, we had the unlikely setting for the murder. The picturesque hilltop city of Perugia, just a hundred metres from an Etruscan arch dating back to the third century BC.
[00:11:20] So, to put all of these elements together, we have the unlikely setting for the crime, the very likely guilty party, in the form of Rudy Guede, the unlikely suspects, in the form of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and then the genius investigator who manages to figure out that the obvious answer is the wrong one, and in fact, the true answer is much more fantastical and bizarre than any normal person would have thought: in fact, Knox and Sollecito killed Meredith Kercher as part of some sex game or bizarre perhaps Halloween-related sexual ritual.
[00:12:01] When put like this, it's not hard to see why it was such a popular case for the media, and why it was in the media’s interest to continue pushing forward Mignini’s theories, because they were much more interesting and would sell many more newspapers than the more obvious answer.
[00:12:20] As you heard in the last episode, even the BBC got involved, doing a profile on “who is the real Foxy Knoxy?”, writing: “a pretty young victim, brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, whose murderers were both wealthy and attractive.
[00:12:37] But what fascinated us most of all”, the BBC continued, “was the beautiful young murderess, and what was really going on behind her smile.”
[00:12:48] An interesting linguistic note here is that “murderer” is not normally a word that you change depending on the gender of the person doing the murdering, but the journalist did it here to highlight the fact that, yes, Knox was a woman, she was not just a murderer, but a murderess.
[00:13:09] Now, there is one more linguistic element from this case that I’d like to draw your attention to.
[00:13:16] If you remember from part one, after 50 hours of interrogation, Knox had broken down and accused her boss, Patrick Lumumba of the murder.
[00:13:28] This was not, in fact, unprompted. The police had suggested to her that Lumumba was involved, and this all hinged on a text exchange that she had had with Lumumba.
[00:13:41] She worked in his bar, and was scheduled to work on the evening of Meredith’s murder.
[00:13:47] But the bar was quiet, not busy at all, so Lumumba had told her, in Italian, that she could have the evening off.
[00:13:57] She responded, in Italian, with “ci vediamo più tardi. Buona serata”, literally “see you later. Have a good evening”.
[00:14:07] Remember, Knox had only recently arrived in Italy, so her Italian was not very good.
[00:14:15] What she wrote was a very literal translation of what she wanted to say in English “see you later. Have a good evening”.
[00:14:23] What Knox didn’t know, however, and what the police didn’t care to acknowledge, was that she made a mistake.
[00:14:32] Not a grammatical mistake, but a contextual mistake.
[00:14:37] In English, if you say “see you later”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have plans to see that person later.
[00:14:46] I can say to a friend “see you later”, and that might mean tomorrow, it might mean next week, it might mean “whenever I next see you”.
[00:14:56] “Ci vediamo più tardi”, “see you later” in Italian, has a literal sense, it implies that there is a fixed plan to meet later on.
[00:15:07] The police interpreted this as Knox saying that she had arranged to meet Lumumba later that evening, but they should have realised that for someone who had just arrived from the United States and knew very little Italian, this was a very understandable mistake, and shouldn’t be taken at face value, let alone considered a smoking gun in the crime.
[00:15:30] Now, as you’ll remember, Lumumba had a clear alibi, and was released a couple of weeks after this, but by this time the police had already widely publicised the theory that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the murder.
[00:15:47] And here we need to underline something very important about the timeline.
[00:15:53] The DNA evidence linking Rudy Guede to the murder only came back from the laboratory a couple of weeks after the crime, after Knox and Sollecito were already the main suspects, and Mignini had been building up his theory of a sex game gone wrong.
[00:16:12] The DNA evidence of Guede’s involvement, his subsequent arrest in Germany and his completely implausible account of what happened on the evening of the murder, this should really have meant that Mignini put his hands up in the air and said, “ok, it looks like our first hypothesis was incorrect, the case now seems more clear cut”.
[00:16:35] Instead, he doubled down, assuming Knox and Sollecito’s guilt and interpreting their every move as a sign of it.
[00:16:44] Instead of Knox having to be proved guilty, she had to prove her innocence.
[00:16:50] This is an important distinction, as the only witnesses that Knox and Sollecito had that they weren’t at the scene of the crime were each other.
[00:17:00] And as they both stood accused of the murder, their witness statements weren’t considered reliable; they said they were innocent but they had no way to prove their innocence.
[00:17:13] Combined with the media circus and the impossibility for any juror to approach the case with an unbiased opinion, and the evidence that was falsely presented as true in court, it's hardly surprising that Knox and Sollecito were found guilty.
[00:17:29] They were tried and convicted by the media long before the legal system.
[00:17:35] Now, since Knox and Sollecito have been released, what has happened to the characters in this story?
[00:17:43] Sollecito is reportedly living a quiet life working in Milan, just keen to put the entire episode behind him.
[00:17:51] Knox is back in Seattle, in the United States. She has written a book about her experience, and has become a justice campaigner, standing up for people who have been forced to make confessions under duress.
[00:18:06] Rudy Guede has served his time in prison, and is now a free man, although he was back in court in 2023 for charges of raping and beating up his girlfriend.
[00:18:19] Giualiano Mignini has now retired, and is apparently spending his days writing and studying the history of Perugia. And, presumably, keeping a close eye on the local criminal news and dreaming up new and fantastical explanations for whoever the suspects might be.
[00:18:36] The family of Meredith Kercher, unfortunately, has no real closure. Yes, Rudy Guede served 16 years in prison, but he never admitted to the crime.
[00:18:49] And Meredith’s parents both died within 4 months of each other in 2020.
[00:18:56] The reality of this entire story is that, if you ask me at least, it was blown completely out of proportion, it is a lot less interesting than it was made out to be.
[00:19:07] Two innocent people were sent to prison, and if we count Patrick Lumumba’s two weeks in jail, three.
[00:19:15] And one poor young woman, who is often an afterthought in the reporting of this whole story, was brutally murdered.
[00:19:24] And to this day, looking through websites and forums analysing the case, there are still plenty of people who simply do not believe that Knox and Sollecito are innocent, mainly citing their odd behaviour and at times contradictory statements, taking these as proof of their guilt rather than two young and naive people who found themselves at the centre of a murder investigation.
[00:19:51] For these people, it’s clear that nothing Amanda Knox can ever do will prove her innocence..
[00:19:59] OK then, that is it for this follow up, bonus episode on the Trial of Amanda Knox.
[00:20:04] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:20:08] This show is particularly popular in Italy, so for the Italians among you, do you remember this trial? What do you remember about it? What do you believe happened on the night of November 1st?
[00:20:20] Is Amanda Knox innocent, or is there more to this story than has ever come to light?
[00:20:25] I would love to get your thoughts, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:29] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
