Meredith Kercher, a year-old from Surrey, England, had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death, with her year-old American roommate, Amanda Knox , and Knox's boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, emerging as primary suspects.
Although all conclusive physical evidence pointed elsewhere, Italian prosecutors focused on the alleged wrongdoings of the University of Washington student, whose MySpace nickname of "Foxy Knoxy" spawned countless stories of her being a promiscuous man-eater.
Knox and Sollecito were eventually acquitted, but only after they were twice convicted and spent years in jail over a nightmare of a case that covered the better part of a decade and failed to satisfy the families of both the accused and the victim.
The cottage, already occupied by Kercher and two Italian women in the upstairs apartment and four male students in the one below , is said to be in a " bad neighborhood ," with drug dealers lingering at the nearby basketball court. Following Kercher's early departure, Knox begins talking to the shy, year-old computer science student she described as an "Italian Harry Potter. After Knox returns to the cottage in the late morning to find her roommate's door locked and an unflushed toilet in a bloody bathroom, Italian postal police break down the door to discover a semi-naked Kercher under a blanket, her throat slashed.
Following a night of grueling interrogation, Knox signs a confession which she admits to being in another room of the cottage while her Le Chic boss, Lumumba, killed her roommate. Along with the confession, Knox and Sollecito's problems are complicated by their changing accounts of the night in question — at first they claimed they were together all night, then they said they were apart for a few hours, then they couldn't remember — and the seemingly carefree attitude they displayed in the murder's aftermath by going lingerie shopping.
November 15, An incriminating kitchen knife is reported to have been found at Sollecito's home. Sollecito later writes that he had once "accidentally pricked [Kercher's] hand" while the three of them were cooking.
Guede, a year-old student Perugia, is pulled from a train in Germany after investigators find his DNA on bloody prints at the crime scene and inside Kercher's body. Guede says that he had consensual sex with the victim that night and that he was in the bathroom when an unidentified man entered and killed Kercher. Meanwhile, Lumumba is released from custody, though he remains a suspect. The clasp , retrieved from Kercher's room nearly seven weeks after the murder, bolsters the prosecution's assertion that the suspects engaged in a dangerous sex game with the victim, though it also supports the defense's criticisms of a sloppy investigation and contaminated crime scene.
October 28, Guede is sentenced to 30 years in prison; Knox and Sollecito are ordered to stand trial. Guede had elected to undergo a "fast-track" trial separate from the other defendants. That same day, a judge determines that there is enough evidence for Knox and Sollecito to stand full trial on murder charges. Last year, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, confirmed an earlier ruling that Knox's defense rights had been violated in during police questioning about the murder of Kercher.
We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Comments 0. Top Stories. CEO who threw chair inside Capitol on Jan. Knox received a year prison sentence, while her year-old Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, who also was convicted in the slaying, was sentenced to 25 years behind bars. The sensational, high-profile case raised questions in the United States about whether Knox, who always maintained her innocence, received a fair trial.
Then, in October , in a decision that made international headlines, an Italian court reversed the murder convictions of both Knox and Sollecito and they were freed from prison. On November 2, , year-old Kercher of Coulsdon, England, was found fatally stabbed in the bedroom of the home she shared with Knox and two other women in Perugia, the capital city of the Umbria region in central Italy.
Investigators said the British exchange student had been slain the previous night. After questioning by police, Knox, a Seattle native and University of Washington student doing her junior year abroad in Italy, was arrested. The American student, who was first questioned without an attorney or professional interpreter, said police coerced her into making the accusation as well as other incriminating statements.
During the nearly yearlong trial that followed in , Italian prosecutors charged that Knox, along with Sollecito and a third person, Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast native, had viciously attacked Kercher in a sex game gone wrong. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, which was reduced to 16 years on appeal. The case received extensive media coverage in the U.
In the Italian and British press, Knox was painted as a promiscuous party girl. However, in America, she was often portrayed in the media as an innocent abroad, a young woman who had worked several jobs to earn money to study in Perugia, where she had been railroaded by an overzealous prosecutor. Knox and Sollecito appealed their convictions, and at their subsequent trial court-appointed experts testified the original DNA evidence was unreliable and did not definitively link the young American and her former boyfriend to the crime.
On October 3, , a court in Perugia acquitted the two defendants of murder. The year-old Knox, who been jailed in Italy since her arrest, flew home to the U. Lawyers for the two appealed the convictions. Both were fully exonerated in
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