Amanda Knox - Normal Teenager or Insane?

Some of the most interesting documents in regards to this case i found at

perugiamurderfile.org...

which includes this very lengthy and highly interesting email Amanda sent home shortly after the murder when the investigation was still going on.

The nice thing about it is that you do not have to rely on whatever the media want to tell you - guilty, innocent...."cold eyes", "killer" etc...who cares. So let's ALL the pre-judgement and opinions aside and JUST look at that letter.

I have to wholly agree with the Italian prosecutors there which painted a rather grim picture of Amanda's personality based on her diary and yes, this letter.

Please imagine yourself in that situation, your room mate was just brutally murdered in your own house, throat slit..possible burglary, rape etc...the murderer still around.

I think it is more than fascinating that there is no single bit of emotional response by Amanda in that letter. Instead, she is writing this letter down like a protocol - bare any emotions.

Heck, if i knew someone just got brutally killed (say, my neighbor etc.) to be honest i would FREAK OUT. I would be scared to death and stunned.

In Amandas letter(s), everything revolves about her. Not once ever does she mention how horrible it is what happened, no single time does she mention that she is freaking because a rape and murder just happened in her OWN house - A FRIEND OF HER!

Instead, her biggest concern is that she has no underwear because the police shut down the crime scene so she needs to go and buy some new underwear. Or she is complaining how terrible it is that she gets interrogated and can only eat some food from the machine - while her "friend" just got killed the night before, dying in a puddle of blood.

When she goes to the police station, while the whole town mourns and freaks about the dead of Meredith...she does cart wheels while she is waiting for the police to call her in.

I know that many already have an opinion (a subjective one, i might want to add!) - they think she is innnocent, while others come to the conclusion she is involved in the murder.

I only know one thing: For me it is highly "unusual" (to say it mildly) that a 20 year old girl writes such a letter and keeps high spirits, without the slightest concern or emotions after such a murder just happened. In fact, i think that most young people in such a case would be totally devastated, probably abort their abroad travel and just would want to fly home. Many might even need council after such an event. They would want to post and email about this horrible crime on their myspace/facebook etc. and email their parents in SHOCK and disbelief.

Amanda did NOTHING of that - the murder of the room mate she shared an apartment with did NOT touch her in the slightest.

The only time i saw her crying was when she was defending HERSELF in the trial, she shed tears about and because of her own situation.

reply to post by flexy123


I hear what you are saying, but shock affects people in so many different ways. I cold tell you so many sureal stories about soliders reactions after they had lost friends. We used to joke around when we were digging our mates from the ground after air raids. Pulling out body parts. A few minutes later, some of us would vomit, cry, scream. One guy pipped out all his finger nails after, looking for his mates missing ear.

It may be coldhearted of her or it could have been shock.

reply to post by flexy123


From the snippets I read (translated?) It appears to me that, regardless of her involvement with the murder, she is a classic, text book sociopath. Possibly a psychopath.

Actually, from some of the writings in her diary it appears that she doesn't even understand which emotions she doesn't have, and the diary reads literally like a letter to a jury.

i'm not buying this, just like I didn't by the other female murder case that got everyone so rifled up.

I just have to say that as far as I am concerned this story does not deserve the coverage it is getting in the BBC and Sky news and has been the top story until it puts me into a coma. The matter is settled the court has freed her, let that be an end to it!. With Russia and China uniting to veto a resolution on Syria in the UN, the Eurozone crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement going on, I think this story about one person is really not that important or interesting in any way shape or form.


Many thanks

I fail to see your point. She might have been in shock. Some people, when in shock, instead of freaking out just become very emotionally detached and distant. Some just go on as if nothing happened. Others curl up and cry. Nobody reacts the same to a similar situation.

She may as well be batguano insane, but that's the job of a psychiatrist to determine, not some armchair analyst.

I think she was just very immature. I'm sure there's a proper word for it. Like she was separate from reality or something.

I remember my mum telling me about a house fire in her street once. Nobody was hurt but the firemen pulled out the huge family dog who was unconscious from the smoke. Spectators stood in a circle and watched the firemen try to breath life into him but sadly he died. But as they were doing this one of the daughters of the house, a teenager and the owner of the dog, glanced over to my mum from the crowd and gave her a smile and a wave. Needless to say my mum was shocked.

But I don't think this makes someone EVlL, some people are just strange in their ways, like they haven't been taught to behave properly, probably because they haven't been socialised enough. That's just my opinion, maybe there's a better explanation for it.

Everyone handles human emotion differently.

You dont know how she reacted in private. She could have been a hot mess in private.

I know for me the few funerals I have been to I didnt cry. I couldn't. I did while alone but not infront of others.

I mean I can only imagine what she went thru whether she knows what happened or not. It will cause someone to either freak out emotionally or shut off emotionally.

I know I tend to shut off emotionally when a death occurs.....I just don't know how to deal with it, maybe that was her case.

I dont know all that much about the case as I didn't follow it. I know it might sound mean but her and Casey Anthony got too much tv time. People are murdered every day and yet they were plastered all over tv and you know as well as I do its because they are pretty American girls and nothing else. No one murder should be thought of as more horrible than the other, all murder is equally as tragic and people forget the victims.

Some people deal with things differently. You also have to remember that she only knew her roommate for 1 month I believe. So it's not like she is emotionaly attached to the victim as she barely knew her. Either way...I agree some of her behavior was odd. Not sure what I would do in that situation. I don't think I would cry but I think you would be able to see that I was in shock or distress over the whole situation.

Meh, if she's been found innocent by the court, you gotta let it go. Its not up to people like you and me to judge her and fuel some kind of a social mob scene. Also...even if she was the killer so what? Dubya and almost all the presidents that started wars are killers too...what did you do about them?

reply to post by nusnus


I like this comment a lot. As I said I really don't care one bit about this case, there are much more important issues to discuss than this case, let it drop and move on, distraction on such matters is not useful.

Originally posted by mblahnikluver
Everyone handles human emotion differently.

You dont know how she reacted in private. She could have been a hot mess in private.

Of course we know how she reacted "in private". Her whole fricking LIFE and behaviour has been written down and noted when it comes to the time and circumstances of the murder, with the help of many witnesses. Every person she was with has been interviewed and asked ABOUT HER..many, many times.

People reported her as "totally being de-tached" if not "upbeat", making sexy jokes while she was buying underwear at the store, making out with her BF at the police station etc.. THE MURDER DID NOT EXIST IN HER MIND. She was still on this beautiful trip to Europe, her biggest concern was now how this murder would affect her further plans.

The last sentence in the letter

I still need to figure out who i need to talk to and what i need to do to continue studying in perugia, because its what i want to do.

because it's ALL about WHAT SHE WANTS TO DO - while the rest of the people around her coping with the murder which just happened right next door to her in her own house! She thinks its more important to point out that she "deserved pizza" after spending hours at the police...and worrying about what to do so she can continue studying. The fact that her room-mate/friend was just found with a slit throat..what about that? Where does she articulate concerns....or fear..or simply that she is IN ANY WAY UPSET about the murder?

As for the psychological analysis of the letter:

Heck yes, they DID use the letter in the trial and let a professional psychiatrist state his opinion. He said that she is dangerous, she has no emotions, everything revolves around her..she is mentally not even "aware" what happened, doesn't care. The reason why they considered her dangerous.

Originally posted by HawkeyeNation
Some people deal with things differently. You also have to remember that she only knew her roommate for 1 month I believe. So it's not like she is emotionaly attached to the victim as she barely knew her. Either way...I agree some of her behavior was odd. Not sure what I would do in that situation. I don't think I would cry but I think you would be able to see that I was in shock or distress over the whole situation.

I am a guy and i am NOT the most "emotional" one, you can believe me or can ask my wife

If someone would be killed in my own home or maybe a neighbor, even if i would not really know that person, i would freak.

reply to post by flexy123


You are intitiled to your opinion but fact is you were'nt there nor are you in the shoes of this young American girl to pass any judgement.

Clearly there was no evidence to prove Knox was at all involved in her flatmate's murder, therefore she is innocent until proven otherwise.

And before any of you become envious of this girl should she make some big $$$; her family have spent more than USD$1M to get her a good lawyer.

As many people said, she may be in shock. Her reactions are not unusual to those in shock. Yes, even the detachment and the whole "I just wanna go back to study" part. Sometimes, it takes a while to "sink in".

Added to that, even if she is a psychopath, it doesn't make her a killer (just a person capable of it), and doesn't make her the killer of her friend. Being capable of something doesn't make you the person that did it.

reply to post by flexy123
you go home and find all your loved ones brutality butchered, how would you react? you can not even think as to how you would react unless you experience it lets hope you never do.

reply to post by bluemirage5

thats just the point isn't it , they got some high power lawyer to pull the case apart .
we have a lawyer here in the uk called mr loop hole , he specialises in getting the guilty aquitted of the charges
he uses loop holes and technical slip ups to clear his obviously guilty clients .

if this case had happened in the usa , yes i think she would have been found guilty.

what about her perjuring her self and trying to put the blame on an innocent man , that was not the actions of an innocent woman

Originally posted by tom.farnhill
reply to post by bluemirage5

 

thats just the point isn't it , they got some high power lawyer to pull the case apart .
we have a lawyer here in the uk called mr loop hole , he specialises in getting the guilty aquitted of the charges
he uses loop holes and technical slip ups to clear his obviously guilty clients .

if this case had happened in the usa , yes i think she would have been found guilty.

what about her perjuring her self and trying to put the blame on an innocent man , that was not the actions of an innocent woman

I am actually confident that she would never been found guilty in the states since "the evidence" (the HARD evidence) was simply not enough.

But regardless, the whole case STINKS..and it still stinks even after all those trials and appeals.

This is one of the main websites set up to provide information about the Knox defense. While the whole site contains some extremely interesting information, I would recommend that people read the opinion of the FBI agent Steve Moore - there are several pages dedicated to him and his opinion.

I guarantee after you read this, and the other info on the site, you will wonder how in the hell Knox and the boyfriend were EVER charged, let alone be convicted. The whole investigation and trial was corrupted and incompetent from day 1 - literally.

www.injusticeinperugia.org...

Please take the time to read through it - it will open your eyes I guarantee!

Hmm. I've just caught up with all this.
I remember watching all this when it first happened and having the initial gut reaction that she didn't do it. I usually go with that, I trust my intuition on matters of good and evil. I recall trying to wrap my head around how horrible it must be to go through this type of thing so far away from any family. Then I forgot about it until now.

I lived in a communal household for quite a while. The number of roommates varied from 4 to 6 at any given time. We had no leader in the group, we were all equals and shared chores and costs equally. I did not know any of these people before I moved there (I'm not sure how long Amanda knew Meredith?). I got to know them all, of course, but we didn't really "hang out". We never knew who was home, who was on vacation, who had their door shut reading, who was out partying, nada. It was understood among us that we did not invade each other's privacy by opening a closed door to someone's room, and we all shared two bathrooms. We only really talked over dinner. The front and back door were perpetually open and friends of friends of the roommates came and went randomly as well.

Had I come across a bloodied bathroom I would be first and foremost, disgusted. Second, worried that someone was hurt, and third (depending on how much blood) probably would have settled at something menstrual as well (our house was known to menstruate all together much to the dismay of the male mates). I would have knocked on the girls doors, but if I got no answer and no one was home, I would have went about my day, showered and gone to work! I may shoot out a couple texts asking if some of the roommates I actually talked to knew anything about it, but otherwise it would be business as usually. Much goes odd and unexplained when many people share a home.

I don't believe she knocked and then called the cops. I would find it much more likely she knocked, opened the door, saw what had happened, and then called. She left this out to protect herself, if it is the case.

Still playing devil's advocate in regards to a lot of the comments here, I am incredibly unemotional in the face of death and traumatic circumstance. If one of my roommates had been brutally murdered I would be most concerned with getting the # out of that place and away from everyone associated with it. I would have said "Oh Katie! (for instance) It is absolutely disgusting what happened to her, I drank some of her wine once when she wasn't home, but she didn't get mad. She was pretty rad. I feel terrible this happened to her, we are all afraid" and that would have been it. I would have been terrified, yes. But If I didn't know the person there would not be much to say. God only knows what some of my roommates were involved with.

Now to totally flip the script, her first "statement" bothers me. The one where she thought she remembered being there and seeing Patrik and hearing screams. It bothers me because that is where I feel doubt but simultaneously sort of understand it. This conflicting statement in comparison to the others should be an obvious flag that she is lying, yet consider the circumstance. I give her a huge shadow of doubt here because I can't directly relate with the reasoning for saying she was there if she wasn't. I do however think, well if she were not a particularly strong person and being very young and in a foreign country, she might have thought this to be what she SHOULD say. Now we can get totally off and go into the realm of her having some sort of psychic vision as to what happened while she was being interrogated and then quickly realizing that explaining this sort of vision might just as well seal her fate as the insane killer. If that is anywhere near the case, I would retract my statement as well. How likely is this though? I am not one to say.

So here my gut instinct kicks in again in reading these statements, and feeling as though they are incredibly coached. I am left being truly undecided. Then I think maybe she was there, maybe she disassociated, maybe this first statement was a repressed memory of the event. I always come back to believing her and arguing for her in the end. I just wanted to present the idea that some of us react incredibly disconnectedly to insane circumstance, and that alone is not evidence that she in fact is guilty.

As for the diary thing, I think all diaries are self-absorbed by the nature of them alone. It depends on her personal diary style if her cold entries are normal or not. You would need access to the entire thing to get an understanding of what she chooses to share. When I kept a diary when I was younger, I actually left quite a bit of personal stuff out due to paranoia of someone else reading it. Some of the MOST traumatic events in my life will NOT be found within my old diaries. For what it's worth.

It was more than just a "feeling" about Amanda and Solicetto. The forensics found Amanda's bloody bare foot prints outside the room and Solicetto's finger prints on Meredith's bra-clasp.The prosecutor was just trying to understand those facts. The only reason those two are freed and Rudy is not is because of their lawyers.


Amanda Knox, ‘Foxy Knoxy’, reveals her lesbian trauma

A judge has been given new evidence about the death of British student Meredith Kercher

September 21, 2008


ON A cool autumn night in the Italian city of Perugia, Amanda Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito lay on his bed smoking cannabis and talking heart-to-heart. As she put it later, they were discussing “the kinds of people we were”.

Sollecito, a 24-year-old engineering student, confided to the American beauty known as “Foxy Knoxy” for her wily ways on the football field that he had been mocked at school because he liked watching Sailor Moon, a Japanese cartoon for girls.

Knox, 21, comforted him with a confession of her own about her teenage years in Seattle. “I told him how at high school I was just as unpopular because people thought I was lesbian,” she said.

This, at least, is how Knox claims to have spent the night of November 1. However, her handwritten account, which has just emerged, is sharply at odds with a police forensics report given to a judge last week. The report says seven “biological traces” place her not at Sollecito’s home but at the cottage she shared with Meredith Kercher, 21, a Leeds University exchange student.

Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede, a 21-year-old immigrant from Ivory Coast, stand accused of sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher, who was found in her bedroom the following day, half-naked with her throat cut.

The forensics report says the police used Luminol, a chemical that turns blue in the presence of blood, in their search for evidence. They found the prints of bare feet smeared with blood in Knox’s room and a nearby bath-room, it says. Not only that, but the prints matched Knox’s feet.

A further six biological traces belonged to her boyfriend Sollecito, including footprints outside Kercher’s bedroom, and 10 more came from Guede.

Investigators apparently discovered DNA from Knox and Kercher on an 8in kitchen knife belonging to Sollecito, which is believed to be the murder weapon. They found DNA traces from Guede on Kercher’s bloody pillow and from Sollecito on her bra strap. All three claim they are innocent.

The two documents - Knox’s account and the forensics report - form part of the case in hearings in Perugia’s Renaissance-era law courts that will determine whether Knox and Sollecito go to trial. Guede has already asked for a fast-track trial.

At last week’s hearing, Knox sat in front of Kercher’s father John, her mother Arline and her sister Stephanie but never turned to meet their gaze.

According to the prosecution, Knox and her codefendants pushed Kercher to her knees in order to force her to take part in a sex game. When she refused she was stabbed three times in the throat.

The 30-page forensics report reveals some of the horror of Kercher’s last moments. According to its reconstruction of the crime, Kercher struggled to free herself as she was threatened with the knife before being made to kneel. She injured the palm and thumb of her right hand as she resisted, and the knife struck her on the neck.

One of the killers placed the bloodied knife on the bedsheet for a few moments. “This, together with bruises on her right elbow and forearm, indicates that several attackers sought violently to constrain her with the aim of preventing her from fending off the blade,” the police scientists say.

Traces of Kercher’s blood show she was killed in front of a cupboard and then she either crawled or her body was dragged for 20in towards a chest of drawers. Investigators believe the killers may have tried to dispose of the body, or moved it to hide evidence.

The crime scene was wiped clean and rearranged to make it look as if a robbery had taken place. The body was covered with a quilt and a sheet, apparently so that the killers would not have to look at her.

Claudia Matteini, a judge in charge of earlier hearings, wrote that Kercher was “subjected to several acts of violence, characterised by extreme cruelty in a hideous frenzy, surely a sign of personalities who were perverse and lacking in any inhibitions.”

The judge expressed her “dismay and apprehension” at Knox’s cold manner after the murder. She was struck by a woman so young “finding it so easy to control her state of mind”.

Knox was imprisoned after she confessed she had been in the cottage at the time of the murder and that she had been in the kitchen and had covered her ears to stifle the sound of Kercher’s screams. She then withdrew her testimony, which has been ruled inadmissible by Italy’s supreme court, on the grounds that no lawyer was present.

Soon after she was jailed on November 6, Knox wrote the two-page account in which she described the supposed conversation on Sollecito’s bed.

“This is what happened - I swear it,” she wrote. She spent the evening at the home of Sollecito. “I checked my e-mails on his computer for a time and then I read him a bit of Harry Potter in German. We watched [the film] Amélie and we kissed each other a bit,” Knox continued.

After dinner, Sollecito said he wanted to smoke cannabis and the two talked on his bed “about the kinds of people we were”. Knox added: “Raffaele told me about his past. About how he had a horrible experience with drugs and alcohol.”

Claiming in her account to have consoled Sollecito when he blamed himself for not having been at his depressed mother’s side before she committed suicide, Knox outlined her own philosophy of life.

“I told him that life is full of choices and that these choices are not necessarily between good and evil, but between what’s better and what’s worse, and that what we all must do is that which we believe is best.”

Knox concluded: “It was a very long conversation but it happened and it must have happened while Meredith was being killed.”

Both Knox and Sollecito have the support of strong defence teams. Knox’s team includes her family in Seattle, backed by a public relations adviser, and two lawyers and two forensic experts. Sollecito has his father, a urologist, and three lawyers including Giulia Bongiorno, who has defended the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti against mafia charges. In contrast, Guede has two local lawyers to speak for him.

Kercher’s family have briefed the Florentine lawyer Francesco Maresca, and have given only a couple of short news conferences at which they have confined themselves to reading prepared statements.

On the eve of last week’s hearing, Kercher’s sister Stephanie read out a statement in a steady voice at a Perugia hotel to say the family was “pleased that we have reached a new phase in the process, hoping that justice will soon be done for Meredith”.

But justice for Meredith Kercher and her family will take some time yet. If, as expected, Knox and Sollecito are sent to trial, the case will not begin until December or January, a legal source said. The trial could last up to eight months, and would probably be followed by an appeal to a higher court and then to the supreme court, with a final verdict in late 2009 at best.