Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Meredith Kercher

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

A 21yo British woman is less than a month into a foreign exchange in Perugia, Italy when she is brutally murdered in her apartment. Everyone’s world is turned upside-down. And for the woman who found herself in the center of the storm -- and on trial for murder -- it has stayed that way ever since. My question is: Why, all these years later -- long after the courts have spoken -- are we still talking about Amanda Knox? For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-meredith-kercher/ 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is one that every Crime Junkie knows. I know you know it because I still get the strangest DMs from you guys about it, asking me if I think Amanda Knox did it. And spoiler alert, no, she didn't. And if you're still asking that question six years after the Italian courts gave her an unequivocal exoneration, then I don't think you know the real story, just the one

the media has fed you. To get to the truth, the proven beyond a reasonable doubt truth, you have to wade through a sea of salacious headlines and wild accusations that are still, all these years later, a distraction from what really happened. This is the story of the murder of Meredith Kircher. It's late morning on November 2nd, 2007. And 29 year old Filomena Rominelli is on her way to the fair with a friend when her phone rings.

It's her roommate Amanda, and she sounds a little scared. Amanda tells her that when she arrived to their flat in Perugia, Italy that morning, something seemed off. The door had not just been open, but like wide open. One of the toilets was unflushed, and there were a couple of droplets of blood in a bathroom sink. Amanda says that she left the apartment and is on her way back to her boyfriend's place now, but before she goes into like a full on panic, she thought she'd call and ask Filomena,

you know, maybe there's some kind of simple explanation for all of this. But Filomena doesn't have an explanation for any of the stuff Amanda's seeing. And Filomena's heart immediately starts to race. She tells Amanda she spent the night at her boyfriend's place, and she hasn't even been home. She knows Laura, another of their roommates is in Rome on business, but she suggests calling their other roommate Meredith, who she thinks is around. But what Filomena really wants her to do is go back to the apartment and see if anything

has been stolen. So Amanda says, you know, she's on her way to her boyfriend's place now. She'll ask him to come back with her and then she'll call Filomena back. So she says, okay, and hangs up. But the minutes tick by and there's still no call that comes in from Amanda. Finally, Filomena gives up waiting and just calls her herself. When she reaches her, Amanda says that she's just finishing breakfast at her boyfriend's place now, but that the two of them are just about to head back to the girl's apartment

and she'll call back once they get there. Amanda calls back a few minutes later to say that the window to Filomena's room has been smashed. So it has clearly been broken into. And she tells Filomena that she and her boyfriend have already called police. But Amanda says she took a quick peek around and it looks like Filomena's is the only room that's been tossed and it doesn't actually look like there's anything missing and that should make Filomena feel better, but it doesn't at all.

So she and her friend turn the car around and start back towards the apartment to check it out for themselves. Along the way, Filomena calls her boyfriend, Marco, and asks him to meet her there. And by the time she arrives, he's already there with his friend, Luca, and a couple of plainclothes police officers. Filomena jumps out of the car and races straight into the house and into her room to find even more chaos than she'd imagined. Her room has been completely ransacked.

The cabinet doors and drawers are wide open and emptied and all of her clothes are in a pile on the bed. The glass from the broken window is scattered everywhere and there's a big rock under her desk, which must be the one used to break the window. But looking at everything there, her roommate Amanda was right. It doesn't look like there's anything missing. Even her computer is still there. Now Amanda's room looks how it did when she left it, not tidy, but not a hellscape either.

And the roommate Laura's room still looks perfect too. The only room that they can't check is Meredith's because her door is locked. And I assume that means the locked door is strange or at least not typical. Yeah. Filomena knows that Meredith never locks that door for more than like two minutes at a time while she's like dressing or something. So it is strange. But what's even stranger is that the police officers who were there when Filomena arrived,

you see they actually have Meredith's cell phones. Phones like plural? Yeah. One is her British cell phone and the other one is actually one that Filomena loaned her to use just for like local calls in Italy. And so again, the strange part is these officers are not there in response to the call that Amanda and her boyfriend made about a break-in. They came because they found both phones in like someone's back garden earlier that morning.

They found out who they belonged to and were coming to like return them. So at this point, they're all kind of like looking at each other and the officers are like, well, you know, if you guys are saying there's nothing missing from the house, we're just going to go file a report for these phones. Except Filomena and Amanda are like, hold up, you guys have her phones, her door is locked and someone has broken into our house and you're just going to like leave like it didn't feel right to them. Yeah, seriously.

In Filomena's gut, she knows that they need to get into Meredith's room. They need to break down that door. But the officers there say that they can't do that. They're not the right people for the job. According to Amanda Knox's book, Waiting to be Heard, these officers are from the postal police and they only deal with like tech crimes. Again, this is why they're bringing back phones. They say they need to wait for the national police to arrive.

Filomena looks at Luca, the biggest of them all, and is like, you know what, you break it down then. So he lifts his foot and kicks the locked door once, twice, three times before the lock finally gives way and the door flies open. According to Ann Wise's reporting for ABC News, Filomena sees Luca turn sheet white and a moment later, Marco yells, Sangue, Sangue, blood. Filomena's eyes suddenly register what she's seeing. Blood, spatters and streaks, Meredith's duvet is on the floor next to her bed and sticking

out from underneath is a foot. The officers on the scene quickly get everyone outside and call for the homicide squad, who find a woman's body under the duvet in the bedroom, lying on her back and naked from the waist down. There is a large knife wound just under her chin and several smaller stab wounds to her neck. The floor around her body is covered in blood, not to mention smeared on the walls, the door handle, a bookshelf, and there are tiny droplets of blood spattered on the closet doors, which

investigators think happened when the woman coughed, choking on blood from the wound to her neck. There are two towels under her body too, both covered in blood, and there's a third towel on her bed along with her purse, which has blood on it too, and it's missing both keys and a wallet. Her clothes are also on the floor and those too are bloodied. Officers find three shoe prints in blood near her body and more in a trail through the house leading to the door, and they find one more bloody footprint and that's in the bathroom.

Unlike the others, this one was made not by a shoe, but actually by a bare foot. Okay, so you said nothing was taken, how has this been broken into, I guess where are the police's head, like what do they think the motive is? Well, I mean, again, you have that broken window, which looks like a start to a robbery, but to your point, hardly anything is actually missing, just mere these two cell phones and a wallet and keys. Again, the cell phones we end up finding later, it's not like the person's- I would say the cell phones aren't even really missing because the police have them.

Yeah, right. And the scene kind of looks like potentially a sexual assault, but if that's the case, it certainly doesn't look like it was planned. So there are a ton of questions to answer and investigators are hopeful that the results of the autopsy will help them better understand what happened and to your point, why. And hopefully all of that will lead to the even bigger question of who. Now, in addition to those wounds I mentioned on her neck, one of which had been fatal. During the autopsy, the medical examiner finds bruising on her head, face, neck, and elbows.

According to the Forgotten Killer, a book by Douglas Preston and John Douglas, the victim also had defensive wounds on her hands. And there was also deep bruising on her right side, her forearm, hip, and leg. While the medical examiner can't say with absolute certainty, the time of death is estimated at about 10 p.m. on Thursday, November 1st. What he can say for certain, though, is that the victim, as suspected, is 21-year-old Meredith Kircher. So you mentioned sexual assault earlier.

Did they find any evidence of that? So I found source material that said there was no conclusive evidence of sexual assault, but then I also found others that said there was. So there's no consistency out there on this particular point. What I do know, though, is that the Emmy does find male DNA inside her vagina. And after some testing and comparison, they learned that it isn't from anyone Meredith was known to have a sexual relationship with. Okay, but I don't get it.

If there's sperm, that seems pretty cut and dried to me, that there was a sexual assault. What's the confusion with the source materials? So it's actually not sperm. It's just DNA. So if you really look closely at it, it's just skin cells. And you got to remember determining sexual assault is more than just DNA. You can have a consensual encounter that leaves DNA behind for hours, even days, depending on the circumstances.

I found an Italy magazine article that pulls directly from the autopsy report and says that a sexual act did take place or was attempted maybe several minutes before her death, maybe even several hours, but the Emmy looked for signs of forcible sex. So again, we're looking for like bruising, tearing that kind of thing, which either was or wasn't there, again, depending on the source material. Either way, investigators collect a ton of other evidence at the crime scene. According to the murder of Meredith Kertcher website, nearly 200 samples of DNA evidence came out of the apartment during the initial processing.

Now police expect to find trace evidence of Meredith, her roommates, the guy she'd been seeing. But along with that unknown male DNA found inside Meredith's body, there are unknown fingerprints and palm prints too. Some of them are even in blood and others police collected in key locations like the pillow that was under Meredith's hips. Now because they're in blood, these fingerprints could only be left by one person and that's the person who was with Meredith during her death, the person who killed her.

It takes police another couple of weeks, but finally they find a match for the unknown fingerprints found at the crime scene. The prints belong to a 20 year old man named Rudy Guede. You might also hear it pronounced g'day, but Rudy himself pronounces it guede. And Rudy's fingerprints were on file in Italy because the government keeps fingerprints for all immigrants to the country, including Rudy, who arrived at age six from Ivory Coast in West Africa. Does he have any sort of criminal record or anything like that?

He doesn't have a criminal record, but he had been investigated a few times by police, but not for anything violent. According to the Injustice in Perugia website, he had a history of break-ins and theft and in fact, just a week before Meredith's death, he'd been caught pretty much red-handed breaking into a nursery school after hours. The owner and two repairmen walked in to find Rudy holding a giant knife, one he had taken from the school's kitchen. When police searched his backpack that night, they found a hammer along with a laptop and

a cell phone that had recently been stolen from another location, a law office not far away, and a gold watch that linked back to yet another break-in just a few days before. And this wasn't even the first time he'd broken into that specific nursery school. The owner suspected that he was also the guy responsible for breaking in and stealing cash previously. I mean, if the theory is that he broke in to steal money or valuables or whatever and was maybe interrupted or caught, then this guy makes a ton of sense. Even his weapon of choice is consistent.

Well, and that's not even the only thing his crimes had in common, actually. You see, Filomena's window was on the second floor of the cottage, which is almost 12 feet above the ground. And there wasn't a balcony under it or anything, which means getting in through the window would have required someone who could basically scale the side of the house. And to be honest, it looks impossible, but it's exactly what Rudy had done during previous break-ins. So our police thinking this was just a random thing then, like he picked a house where the

lights were off and went for it? Well, actually, Rudy and Meredith knew one another, not super well or anything, but according to a Vanity Fair article written by Judy Bachrock, Rudy would sometimes hang out in the apartment below Meredith and smoke pot with the guys who lived there. That's actually where he and Meredith met just a month before her murder. So they know of each other, but they didn't really know each other, like just in passing. Yeah, exactly. So police have a really good potential suspect, one with an MO that matches the scene of the

crime and whose fingerprints are not just at the scene, but under the body in blood. It is a no-brainer for an arrest. There's only one problem. He's nowhere to be found. He'd been seen at a nightclub in the early morning hours of November 2nd, just after Meredith's murder, but after that, it's like he vanished. But investigators have an idea about how to find him. They approach a friend of Rudy's, this guy, Giacomo, and ask if he'll come down to the

police station and see if he can get a hold of Rudy. So on November 17th, this is now 16 days after the murder, Giacomo reaches out to Rudy from the police station via Skype, and police get lucky because Rudy takes the bait. Rudy tells his friend that he knows the Parisian authorities are looking for him, which is why he fled to Germany. He says he's got nowhere to live and no money, and he's terrified. He knows police found his fingerprints, but he insists that if that's true, they were left before the murder.

I'm sorry, they were left in blood. That's not how that works, dude. Yeah, well, I mean, that's just what he says at first. But over the course of their conversation, as Giacomo asked some questions about this thing that police found, or that thing the media said, Rudy's own version of events start to take shape. Rudy tells Giacomo that he and Meredith ran into each other at a mutual friend's place the night before the murder on Halloween.

The two of them got to talking and hit it off. According to a transcript of a call I found on the site run by the University of Missouri Kansas City Law School, Rudy says they made a plan to meet up the next night, November 1st. He says Meredith told him she already had plans with her friends, but that she'd bail early so they could, you know, meet up at her place and essentially hook up. Which he says they did, or at least they sort of did. Rudy says that they did hook up for a little while, but stopped short of intercourse because

neither of them had a condom. At this point, Rudy tells Giacomo that the kebab he'd had on the way to Meredith started to cause problems with his stomach and he had to use the bathroom, like badly. He says he was in there for a while, like almost three songs on an iPod playlist apparently, when he heard the doorbell ring. He says he didn't think anything of it, just figured it was one of her roommates or whatever, but then out of nowhere he heard this blood-curdling scream. Rudy says that it was so loud and he was so concerned that he practically leapt off the

toilet, pants not even pulled up all the way. It was pretty dark in the hallway, I mean they had the lights really low, but Rudy says that he was able to see a man holding a knife and he saw Meredith throw cut with blood everywhere. Rudy tells Giacomo about some kind of struggle between him and the guy and I've been trying to figure out how to like sum this up, but I think it might be better if I just let you read from the transcript and just keep in mind that this was translated from Italian so read slow. It says quote, I've got wounds on my hands because I grabbed his hand.

He tried to stab me and I still have the wounds on my hands, the signs, that are healing now, but I still have them on my hand. I tried to help her Giacomo, it's not that. My blood, no, I don't know if there's any or not because I didn't bleed. I didn't actually bleed, my wounds that I had, the guy just wounded me lightly. It didn't bleed, now I can't tell you, I tried to help her and if my prints are in the house, it's obvious because I touched everything, end quote. So he's saying he got cut, but not enough to leave blood at the scene, or he's not

sure about that, but his prints are definitely going to be all over and not just because he was there as a guest, but because he tried to help Meredith after her attack. Yeah, that's what he's saying and he goes on to say that the man who attacked Meredith basically ran for it. So he gathered up towels to try and stop the bleeding from the wound on Meredith's neck and at some point he says he realized he was in the middle of this horrific crime scene alone drenched in blood and that if he called for help police were going to for sure walk in and see this black guy covered in blood and think for sure he did it.

But he tells Giacomo he didn't do it, which is why in the end he says that he ran. I mean, but he could have made like an anonymous call or something, like this whole thing just seems really sketch. Well he says that basically his first instinct was to call for help, but he didn't have a phone to call from. Okay, but Meredith had not one, but two phones, right? Plus, the doorbell ringing, there is a broken window, none of that makes sense. I personally am not buying this for a second and I'm assuming the police don't either,

right? Yeah, they for sure don't think he's telling the truth about not being involved or any of part of this story, which is why they issue an international warrant for his arrest the next day on November 20th. He's stopped by authorities trying to board a train to Frankfurt without a ticket and while they have him, they run his ID and arrest him on the spot. It takes some time to get Rudy out of Germany and back to Italy, but on December 6th that finally happens.

So do they charge him for murder or are they still gathering evidence or what? They don't charge him with anything yet, but here's one way the Italian justice system is different from ours here in the US. Many suspects can be held in police custody for up to a year while the prosecution gets its ducks in a row to either charge him or not. What? Yeah, in the book I mentioned earlier, the Forgotten Killer, they say that in the US it's like 48 hours max and we've seen that, like we can hold you for 48 hours and we have

to let you go. It's always what I've heard, but this is not the US. This is Italy and frankly, the surprises are just getting started. In July 2008, seven months after his arrest in Germany, police finally charge Rudy Guede in connection with Meredith's murder. Two months later, his defense team requests what's called a fast track trial where a judge looks at the evidence collected so far and makes a determination about a suspect's guilt or innocence.

So it's a fast track because there's basically no jury? It's a fast track because there's no trial. At least not one we would recognize from our legal system. According to reporting by Phoebe Natanson and Ann Wise for ABC News, quote, a fast track trial procedure calls for an immediate decision based on the evidence already represented to the court and allows for a reduction of an eventual guilty sentence by one third, end quote. Oh, okay.

So that's why he wants a fast track. Yeah, the reduced sentence is definitely part of the appeal for a defendant. But Rudy's lawyers are hoping the verdict will come back not guilty anyway. They say that their client had nothing to do with the murder and that there are other possible scenarios that would explain the evidence at the scene. You mean his strange man in the hallway story? Yeah, that he just happened to be in her bathroom when some random guy broke in and killed her. But by the time the judge starts looking at the case, the evidence against Rudy is overwhelming.

He admitted to being in the room with Meredith while she lay dying. He admitted to fleeing the country within two days of the murder. Those skin cells found inside Meredith's body, those were found to belong to Rudy. His handprint was on the pillow under her body. The shoe print left in blood at the scene matched his shoes. And police also found his DNA on Meredith's purse, which contained the only items missing from the house that night. Listen, I hate to ask this question, but it's kind of been bugging me since you mentioned

it all the way at the top of this episode. The poop in the toilet. Was that his too? Yes, it was. And I mean, again, Rudy said that it was a result of a questionable kebab, right? Like, even in his version, like he left it there. But John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, who wrote a chapter in The Forgotten Killer, say otherwise. In fact, they say it's actually not that unusual for a burglar or a robber to have to relieve

themselves during the course of a break-in. Okay, what? Yeah. And listen, I keyed in on this right away since I remember the conversation we had earlier this year when we covered the set of Gaia murders in Japan, because the same thing happened. The suspect left poop in the toilet there as well. We were both like, couldn't wrap our heads around it. But apparently it's just like nerves or stress or something.

Okay, I mean, that and or the kebab explains why he pooped, but not why he left it there. Well, the theory John Douglas puts forward in the book is that Rudy was basically in the middle of this break-in when the urge hit. So he stopped what he was doing to go to the bathroom, and he was either just finishing up or about to finish up when Meredith came home that night. So I think he's putting forward that this was just supposed to be a burglary, but then Meredith potentially came home and interrupted the progress of it. And so he couldn't just like flush it down.

She'd know he was there. He needed time to figure out how he was going to get from the bathroom to either a window or to a front door without being seen and identified. That is so simple and brilliant. Right. Anyway, like I said, the evidence against Rudy speaks louder than his BS story, which is why on October 28th of 2008, just shy of a year after Meredith's brutal murder, the judge finds Rudy guilty and sentences him to 30 years in prison.

Of course, Rudy appeals the conviction, but the court isn't having it. They uphold the verdict, but at the same time, they reduce his sentence to just 16 years. For good behavior or remorse or what? Well, according to coverage from Tom Kington in The Guardian, it's because he's young and he has no criminal record. Especially not for remorse, which in a court context has as much or more to do with the person admitting their role in the crime as it does with being actually remorseful. And Rudy never admits to any involvement in Meredith's death.

He has always maintained his innocence. In 2016, Rudy was released from prison. Now many of you probably heard the name Meredith Kurcher before. You might have even heard Rudy Guede's name too, but you haven't heard this story because this story, the one I just told you today, is not the whole story. It's not even 0.01% of the story because the story of Meredith Kurcher and her tragic death in 2007 was completely and totally swallowed up by another story, overshadowed by another woman who found herself ensnared in a British tabloid, media driven web of lies about her

death that completely and totally changed the course of the investigation, the verdict, and her life. That person is, of course, Amanda Knox. Meredith's roommate, who along with her boyfriend, Raffaele, spent four years in an Italian prison serving time for a crime where, literally, all of the evidence pointed squarely at someone else, Rudy Guede. I wanted to tell you this story in a new way, in a way that cleared the path between the victim and the actual murderer.

But let me tell you, it wasn't easy because the coverage Rudy Guede got from his arrest to his trial, to his release, pales in comparison to the coverage Amanda Knox got before, during, and after her trial. And even though, in 2015, Amanda and Raffaele were both declared unequivocally innocent. Not not guilty, but innocent, by Italy's court of cassation. Even though the decision included a harsh criticism of the investigation for its many mistakes, missteps, and flaws, even though Meredith's real killer was identified, found, tried, convicted, and served his time, somehow it is still Amanda's name that is synonymous

with Meredith Kircher's murder. Not Rudy's. It's her face we could pick out in a crowd when I bet most of you couldn't even pick out Meredith in a photo lineup, and it's her innocence, all these years later, that people are still questioning. My question is why? I certainly don't know, and I haven't been able to find the answer either. So I decided to ask the person who knows this case, and the experience, and Amanda better

than anyone else in the world. I asked Amanda Knox for how insane and worldwide this case became, that it became known throughout many countries. I am still amazed that my name is the one that is most associated with this case, because if anything, I am an absolutely peripheral figure in the events that took place. I just happened to be Meredith's roommate at the time. Meredith had been raped and murdered, and it was brutal, and it was horrible, and nobody wanted anyone to walk away from that without being punished.

And the mere fact that my name was associated with this brutal crime was enough for people to have trouble unraveling my name from it. And it remains to this day that same problem. When people think of what happened to Meredith, they think of me. They don't think of her, they don't think of the person who actually did this. They think of me. If you're a crime junkie, then I know you've heard Amanda's story before. And I'm sure you have formed your own opinion on who she is and whether or not she's innocent,

regardless of how the courts have ruled. And again, I have my own opinions on the matter, and I think she's innocent. And I agree, but I see why people might still have questions about things, especially if they're just going off the headlines and haven't really dug into this case on their own. It's really easy to believe that prevailing narrative, that prosecution's narrative. Which became the media's narrative too, and the version of events we all came to understand as fact while this whole thing was unfolding, but it wasn't fact. So many of the things that we think we know just aren't fact.

Right, right. And I mean, like you said, we get questions about this all the time, and I know that something that comes up a ton is, you know, how could anyone walk into that flat that morning to find the door, you know, fully blown open, blood in the sink, and this unflushed toilet and be like, this is fine. Everything's fine. Right. Like people have questions from like the very moment this story starts.

And that's actually a question that I asked Amanda directly. I think that hindsight is 20-20. Everyone thinks that now that we know that there was a crime scene there, of course I would have reacted this way or that way, but I did not know that there was a crime scene to be discovered when I came home that day. I thought I was going on a trip to eat some truffles that day. And in the meantime, I'm not a true crime person. I was not that person.

I didn't read those novels. And so that really was the furthest thing from my mind. We do have the benefit of hindsight. And you know, you never think that the worst can happen or is literally happening to you in that moment or to someone that you know. And I know I at least, and I think everyone, you know, we try to write stuff off all the time because it's not even in our realm of reality that it could happen until it actually is happening.

And the fact of the matter is Amanda did know something wasn't right. I mean, she told me that as soon as she saw that unflushed toilet, she knew. She like bolted out of the apartment, almost immediately started calling police, her mom, her roommates, looking for somebody to help her process what she'd seen and either validate the bad vibes or talk her off the ledge. Because like you just said, like, we're looking for that excuse. Like someone to say like, oh, you're just, you're overreacting, like, because bad stuff happens on TV or in podcasts, but not to me.

And Amanda was so young at the time, too, young. And also let's not forget in a foreign country where everyone around her spoke a language she was there to learn. Right. And when I was talking to her, she talked about that, too. And for her, the chaos really began after she got back to the flat and then they kicked down the door and discovered Meredith's body. Filomena and her boyfriend were there alongside the cops trying to break down Meredith's door.

And when they do, Filomena screams, loses her mind. I don't know what she's saying. I hear a foot, a foot. I don't know what she's talking about. I think maybe she saw a foot. She's clearly in distress as they're like a severed foot in there. What is going on? The cops immediately say, get out of the house.

And so we all scuffle out of the house and I'm trying to figure out what's going on because everyone is suddenly talking in very rapid Italian. I'm looking to Rafael for help to understand what's going on. And what I'm able to glean in those first immediate seconds is that there is a body in Meredith's room. At first I thought they were saying that she was in the closet, that there was a body in the closet. And what I think they were saying now is that her body was covered by a blanket so that you

couldn't see her body, but there was blood that was on her closet doors or something like that. But at the time I was confused. I had no idea what they were saying. I thought someone had found a body in a closet. And so I'm sitting there going, is that Meredith? Is that someone else? What's going on?

No one's telling me anything. Filomena is hysterical. I'm mostly in shock because I've not seen what anyone's seeing and I'm not sure what anyone's talking about. I do know that I'm scared and I'm scared for Meredith and I'm scared for thinking, oh my gosh, what could have happened if I had been home? Could I be stuffed in a closet somewhere? So it was a very confusing time.

And that confusion didn't stop either, not for a long time. Amanda knew she was going to be questioned by police. But I mean, she's not just the roommate. She's also the person who discovered the crime scene. Right. And she and Meredith hadn't known each other that long, like six weeks or so. But they were friends and Amanda just wanted to help. She was willing to do whatever she could to help police solve this thing and get the killer

off the streets. Honestly, the only thing I thought was, I guess I'm going to talk to the police and tell them everything I know, which was very little. I couldn't imagine who could have done this. Even as I was spending those next few days in the police office, no experience whatsoever dealing with police, no understanding of what I should expect and how I should be treated. I just went along and did what people told me to do, which was show up day after day for hours on end to rehash the same questions over and over again.

And to do so without an interpreter. There were times that there was someone here or there who could speak some English. But for the vast majority of the time, I was being asked to respond to questions in Italian by Italian speakers who were much older than me and authority figures. Meanwhile, I can talk about as well as maybe a 10 year old, but of course I have very limited vocabulary and again, I'm not reading true crime novels in Italian. I'm reading Harry Potter novels in Italian. So I can tell you the word for muggle, but I can't tell you the word for crime scene.

It was definitely a struggle, particularly because they would always isolate me when they were questioning me. It wasn't like Raffaele could be there and be my interpreter and often I would rely on him to tell me what was going on. Basically what they were telling me this entire time and they were building it up over the course of the days was that I was an important witness for them, that I was the closest person to Meredith, that I must know something, I must know somebody who wanted to hurt her. And again, I repeated to them over and over again, no, I don't know anyone who would want

to hurt Meredith. There are some shady characters around town, shady in the sense that they might try to give you a drink too many and take you home kind of thing, but not like a murderer. Now they may have been telling her she was an important witness, but by this time she was a lot more than that in their minds. She had become their main suspect, though even at its worst, the fact that she was being considered a suspect never even registered with Amanda. They never accused me necessarily of anything, like even when it was at its worst, like the

final interrogation when I was being questioned in the middle of the night for hours on end and I got slapped and I was being yelled at, none of them accused me of the crime. They accused me of knowing something, of knowing who had committed the crime and not telling them. So I told them the same things over and over again and finally they spent the final evening yelling at me telling me that no, in fact, I had likely witnessed this murder that I had amnesia because I was traumatized and that if I didn't remember, they kept telling me remember, you need to remember or else you're never going to see your family again.

You need to remember or you're on the side of the killer. It was this insane accusation as if I was purposefully not remembering, but then they were also suggesting to me that I had amnesia and that if they yelled at me enough, then maybe I would remember. It was very, very scary and intimidating and they suggested to me things like they took my cell phone and they said, hey, you have this text message exchange with this person named Patrick, who's Patrick, where did you meet with him that night? It says that you met with him that night.

Was he the one who did it? Who is Patrick? Did he go home with you? And over the course of many hours of this kind of questioning, I started to think that I maybe did have amnesia. I started to think, well, I have all the memories of being with Raffaele that night, but maybe those are rewritten memories that I'm trying to, you know, maybe my mind doesn't want to remember that I witnessed a murder.

Maybe that's the only reason why these cops are yelling at me. By the way, the Patrick she's referring to here is Patrick Lumumba. He was Amanda's boss who came up in this quote, unquote confession because police wanted her to explain why she had texted him and said that she would see him later that night. So if you're not familiar, basically the story goes that Amanda was supposed to work that night. He didn't need her. So she's like, cool, see you later, which to us as Americans is like, bye.

But I guess in Italian, it has like a very literal translation to I'm going to meet up with you later. So the police were like pushing her to explain him in this like rewritten memory. So she implicated him early on as being involved in the murder, basically saying that she was there and saw Patrick kill Meredith. But when they find Rudy's DNA, this whole thing kind of like fell apart and eventually he just drops out of the story and kind of gets like swapped for Rudy without much explanation. And this is yet another one of those points in Amanda's story where I think a lot of people

get so caught up was like, but she confessed innocent people don't confess, like how could this happen? But the confession doesn't even make sense when you know the real story. Right. And we've talked about shady interrogation techniques and coerced confessions before. And I think it's incredibly easy for us to sit where we are now and say, I'd never in a million years say something that wasn't true. I'd never confessed to a crime that I didn't commit.

But just like we have no idea how we might react coming home to the apartment on the day that Meredith's body was discovered. We also have no idea how we might react to an interrogation room under those circumstances. And under that kind of pressure. I mean, yeah, we're talking a different country of legal system you aren't familiar with, a language you're not familiar with on top of being young and scared and your friend just got murdered. And on the other side of the table are trained professionals.

They know all the tricks and techniques to get people talking. And whether or not those techniques are above board or not, like that's a whole nother discussion. I started to think that they must be right and I must be wrong. And I started to try to do what they asked me to do, which was remember. And ultimately what that ended up looking like for me was in a haze of exhaustion and under coercive pressure, I tried to imagine what could have happened that night. And what I was able to come up with was just a confused jumble of images that were patchwork

memories that I was trying to stitch together into some kind of coherent vision that they had proposed that involved Patrick. And finally they wrote it all down, they stitched it all together and had me sign it. And then went off to arrest my boss, Patrick the Moomba. And as soon as they stopped yelling at me, as soon as they gave me a break to like just sit in my chair quietly and breathe for a second, I realized that this was not a memory. This was not something that I was remembering, this was wrong. And I told them so.

And they said, don't worry, your memories will come back. They just wouldn't hear it. And they wouldn't hear it so much that I even asked for a piece of paper to write it down because I knew that they weren't listening to me. And I thought like, if I write it down, maybe they'll listen to me. But of course, I have horrible Italian. And so I do my best to explain, I know I said these things. I know I said that I remembered something, but I don't remember something.

I cannot go up in court and say, I remembered that Patrick did this. And they took that piece of paper, I don't know what they did with it. But they said, again, they just reiterated you have amnesia. And with time, your memories will come back. I'm convinced that they brought me in that night, that final night for questioning. Because they had tapped my phone, they knew that my mom was coming, that she was arriving the very next morning. And I think they thought this is our last chance to get Amanda when she's truly vulnerable.

And then they put handcuffs on me, told me that they were taking me someplace safe for my protection, that they had to put the handcuffs on me. It was a formality, and that I would see my mom soon. By the way, that someplace safe was prison. What? What a complete shock to the system. Yeah. You think you're going somewhere for your own safety, like a safe house or something,

but you're actually being arrested for murder? Well, here's the kicker, even as she is being put in prison. She didn't wholly understand why. She didn't know she was being accused directly of murder until later. Get this. They took me to prison, and the next time I saw those same police officers was when I was brought in front of a judge and finally, finally told days later that I was accused of being involved in this crime.

I did not know. It wasn't even like they brought me to court. They brought me to a different part of the prison and told me that I was finally going to see a lawyer for the first time, so the first time I ever encountered my lawyer was walking into this room with a judge and the same cops and the same prosecutor who had been interrogating me and my lawyer. I had two seconds to sit there and understand what was going on, and it was there at that moment when the judge said, you are accused of being involved in this crime.

How do you plead? I was just like, what? I'm accused of what? And in that moment, I just looked at my lawyer who I'd never seen before, and he was just like, don't say anything. I'm here because your mom hired me. Don't say anything. And I was like, okay, I guess I'm not saying anything.

And I wanted to see my mom, and they were like, you'll talk to your mom soon. Just don't say anything, and this will all be worked out. That's what I got. That's how I found out that I was accused. I just walked into a room hoping that something was going to be straightened out, and I was accused of this crime. Well, that's terrifying. Right?

And by the way, during that first court appearance, they didn't charge her with anything. But remember, in Italy, they can hold you for a year before they press charges, which is what was happening with Amanda. And all this time, the prosecution is like feeding information to the media and looking for opportunities to feed into the whole Foxy Noxie narrative that the world loved so much. Not just even looking for opportunities, but creating them. Looking back, those first two weeks that I was imprisoned, I was every night called into a private office to speak to the vice commander of the prison, this creepy old guy

who would ask me about my sex life. So at the time, I thought that he was maybe just being this creepy old man, because he kept asking me things like, what kind of underwear do you like to wear, and would you like to have sex with me? But he was also really prying about who I had ever had sex with and what the circumstances of my sex life was. And I think, looking back now, the vision that was percolating within law enforcement was that Meredith clearly had been sexually assaulted.

And they were trying to figure out how I could be involved in that sexual assault. And so they were trying to figure out who of any of my sexual partners could be involved in this rape and murder of Meredith. They were already constructing this idea of a sex game gone wrong. And so they were prying into my sex life to try to understand who might be involved in this crime, I think. But for me, at the time, I just thought, why is this creepy old man asking me about my sex life, whether or not I'd have sex with him, going with me to the doctors to hang

out there while they take samples of my DNA? There was a reason that the commandante was hanging around, and a reason that they took a blood sample. And this is one of these moments that really solidified in my mind how out of control the investigation had become. What they told her is that she had HIV, not because she actually had HIV, but they told her that in a ploy to get her to give them something that would help propel their sexual deviant theory.

But she didn't actually have HIV, right? No, not at all. And he, in response to that, was like, well, maybe you should have thought about that before you had sex with all those people. You should think about who gave you HIV. And so I went immediately back to my room and wrote down a list of all of the sexual partners I had ever had in my life up to that point. I think it was seven people my entire life.

And I wrote down what kind of protection I had used and how confused I was, how I thought I was dying, and the very next day, the Vichy Comandante came into my room with a couple other prison guards and confiscated everything that I had ever written on in those few weeks in my cell and confiscated that entry of my journal that had my list of sexual partners. And within days, that list was being broadcast in the media as this American whore who had slept with all these people while she was in Italy and participated in this sex game gone wrong. I mean, the whole issue of how sex was both portrayed in this case and also used to sell

this case in the media has always been deeply, deeply troubling to me because it wasn't just like a commentary on my sexuality. Like my sexuality was commented on like crazy to the extent that people were sexualizing me even as I was being walked into the courtroom and talking about what clothes I was wearing, but even commentary about Meredith's sexuality and how she was depicted as necessarily there was this whole like whore Madonna whore dichotomy where it wasn't Meredith was also a sexually active young woman and she was made out to be this like emblem of purity who she would never have casual sex and that's the only way a victim can be is a young woman who has

a boyfriend and is a serious young girl and she is a pure victim as if there's like something wrong with a young woman having casual sex while she's out in the world experiencing life and getting to know people like Meredith is also allowed to have a casual sexuality and that was erased as well. I think what Amanda is talking about here speaks to a larger social issue. One that I know was like especially hammered into us growing up in a super religious community, but one that all sex of society have kind of adopted that women aren't really allowed to be sexual or if we are it defines us or will be used to frame our story in whatever

way makes people most comfortable like you can be sexual and be a victim. You can be a sexual being and not be a devious monster but society often doesn't know how to deal with a woman's sexuality and so the media put Meredith and Amanda into boxes and Amanda was framed as this American enchantress with an insatiable appetite for sex who had not one but two men Rudy and Raffaele so far under her seductive spell that they didn't even hesitate to kill for her even as the evidence kept coming in that pointed unilaterally at one of their suspects Rudy and Amanda told me that the whole time this was happening she was just patiently waiting for everyone to wake up and realize that none of it made

sense that she wasn't involved and had never been involved in the murder of her friend. One of the more devastating things about this situation is so while I was sitting there basically waiting for sane people to rationally observe what was going on and to figure out that I had nothing to do with this and let me go home like I spent two years two years while the investigation was ongoing and the trial went through they took two years for me to finally receive a verdict. I was convinced that I was going home that it was only a matter of time that I just had to get through the process and that ultimately a independent group of people who were not

emotionally invested and had their egos involved in proving me guilty would rationally see that I had nothing to do with this so it was devastating to me when that turned out to not be the case and that however insane and nonsensical and bereft of proof the prosecution's theory was it was captivating or convincing enough to people to want to put me in prison for 26 years. But the conviction was overturned right? Yes eventually after four years in prison and she got to go home and that's the point at which Amanda finally kind of exhaled and thought okay it's actually over.

She could go back to Seattle and away from the British tabloid press and finally get back to her life except it wasn't over not even close. But I did not have an understanding about what my reality was going to be. I thought that once I was acquitted and more I hoped that I would be able to go back to my life again. I had felt like I had been removed from my life and the life that I should have been living that this was something that was completely out of control and in some prosecutor's imagination and I just wanted to go back to my life.

I just wanted to go back to being anonymous student Amanda Knox and I came home with this vision for myself that I was going to get to do that and it didn't take long for me to realize that that was not the case. From the moment I landed in Seattle there was a press conference waiting for me and helicopters following me on the way home and paparazzi stationed outside my family's house and we had to draw the curtains and hide and that went on for months and months. After a while they weren't camping out in front of my mom's lawn anymore but I couldn't go out on my bicycle to ride to school without the occasional paparazzo taking a picture

of me and it being plastered in the tabloids or being in the middle of class and having classmates take pictures of me and post them to social media with really unkind commentary and I realized painfully that I was an idea of a person more so than a person in people's minds. I was a character in this ongoing entertainment morality play and that I was always and forever going to be seen through the lens of this case and in particular this version of me in the public's imagination, the foxy-noxy vision of me, I was forever going to be in conversation with that because it was like this veil through which everyone would see

me and judge me moving forward. The whole time I was talking to Amanda I just found myself getting so angry about the way she'd been treated and how loaded the dice had been from the very start and I kept thinking why. Like why had investigators trained their sights so squarely on her and when I asked her she thinks she knows. The question of why has been one of the ones that has tortured me the most throughout this entire experience because it seems so clearly like this didn't need to happen.

Within a few weeks they had definitive DNA, fingerprints and footprints that were from Rudy Gade in Meredith's blood. This was a very, very clear case. I know that some people think that my prosecutor was a psychopath that just didn't care. That he was wrong and he just pursued the case so that he didn't have to admit that he was wrong. I don't think that. I'm not convinced that that's the reason why the prosecution and the cops pursued this

case against me despite all of this evidence pointing to someone completely different and that nothing pointing to me. I tend to think that it comes down to a more subtle issue of cognitive bias and what do I mean by that? There are lots of ways that we, because we're such intelligent, nuanced thinkers, human beings, there are tons of ways that we can very intelligently and subtly trick ourselves into thinking that we're doing the right thing when we're not. One of those biases is called the conservative bias where you have an idea about something,

in this case, Amanda is guilty, Amanda is involved in this crime. You get new information that challenges that assumption, but instead of totally revamping your assumptions or your beliefs about something, you instead try to incorporate that new information in such a way that it continues to confirm your already preexisting belief. In this case, the cops believe that I was involved or believe that they weren't wrong. Any new information that they came across in relation to the case was twisted to reconfirm their already preexisting held belief. This is ultimately what it all comes down to is investigators going into cases, if they

go in with a preexisting belief about what happened, they're going to find what they want to find. They're going to look for evidence to confirm that held belief and they're going to overlook evidence that suggests otherwise. So in the case of my prosecutor, when zero DNA evidence placed me at the crime scene, he said that I must have cleaned up my DNA. I must have cleaned up my DNA and left all of Meredith's blood everywhere and Rudy Godet's DNA at there, somehow been able to distinguish between my DNA and his in order to clean up

the crime scene and frame Rudy Godet. That was the ultimate idea of my prosecutor was that I tried to frame Rudy Godet to take the fall for this crime that I orchestrated and that Rudy Godet participated in but wasn't the ultimate responsible party for. That kind of mental gymnastics seems super extreme, but if anything, I've come to learn that we are all guilty of extreme mental gymnastics when it comes to beliefs, especially when they impact how we think of ourselves. So I think that my prosecutor thought of himself as a good investigator, as a good person, and

as someone who was doing his due diligence and his duty to this case. And the idea that he could have not only prosecuted, but even a little bit framed an innocent person because if you frame the case as no matter what the evidence says, Amanda's guilty, I think that he couldn't bring himself to believe that he could have been that wrong. And that's why he pursued the case to the nth degree that he did. That's truly an evolved way to look at the world, and I'm not sure I could be so forgiving after an experience like that. Listen, Amanda says it's been a process that she had to essentially rebuild her entire

life and her entire vision of herself from the ground up. Realizing that, I basically realized that I had to reimagine what my life was and what was available to me and who I was in response to everything. Because another thing that I didn't really want to acknowledge, but which was true, was that this experience had changed me. I had suppressed a lot of anger for years. In prison, I had kind of numbed myself to a lot of the more hurt and painful emotions that arose because of everything that had happened, because honestly, if I allowed myself

to feel all of the feelings of being wrongly convicted while I was still in prison, I would have lost my mind. I would have lost my mind. And I couldn't do that. I did not want this experience to change me and turn me into an angry, bitter person. So I numbed myself. That sort of anger became this simmering sadness that I just was sad every day. And then when I got out, I suddenly felt angry.

I was safe enough to feel angry. And that anger really couldn't be directed at any one person or thing because I understood that it wasn't just my prosecutor's fault. It was Rudy Gidey's fault. It was the media's fault. It was the prosecutor's fault. It was everyone's fault. It was my fault because I didn't know that I needed to call a lawyer and there were

a million ways that all of this could have gone differently and everyone was implicated in it. And there was no escape because it was ongoing. It was not that I came home and it was over. It's not over. It's not over today. So one of the things that I did take home with me was a more nuanced understanding of criminals because I just spent the last four years living alongside people who were guilty,

who had committed crimes and some of them horrible crimes. And I had a more nuanced perspective of how they had been in some ways, not to say that they weren't responsible for their actions, they totally were, but these were a lot of very broken people who were struggling with mental illness and neglect and abuse and drug addiction and a lot of people who had very, very bad choices and only bad choices in front of them and weren't people who had families who loved them, who visited them, so I came home from prison with a more nuanced understanding about the kinds of people who end up going to prison.

Even people like Rudy Guede. I think back on, I think about Rudy Guede a lot and I actually have a whole podcast episode devoted to the fact that he was released from prison not too long ago after 13 years and thinking about what do I, was there anything that society could have done to have put that young man on a different path so that he didn't do what he did to Meredith? And you know, I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know if he was, you know, if he's a psychopath and he would have inevitably hurt someone along the way or if he was someone who was adrift and didn't get the support

he needed in his developmental years and he spiraled out of control and ended up taking someone's life. I don't know. But these are big questions that are worth thinking about because the why matters. The why did something like this happen matters if we want to prevent it from happening again. Yeah, I have to be honest and say, I'm not sure I could rise that far above, like, and not just when it comes to Rudy and his prison sentence, but all of it. The police, the prosecutor, the justice system, the media, the public, everything.

Well, I think it all comes down to perspective and Amanda's is really evolved. In this whole tragic series of events, I'm the one who lived. So there's that, first of all. I got to go home eventually and it still haunts me to this day what might have happened if I had just, if I had never met Raphael and I was just, it was just me and Meredith home that night, what could have happened. And I wonder, like, if I had been home and we were together, would we have been able to fight him off or would we both be dead?

I don't know. But one sort of perspective is I lost my freedom, I lost my identity, I lost, I lost a lot, but I didn't lose my life. And so the fact that I get to try to, and you know, I think this is something you guys probably talk a lot about on this podcast because it is true that in a lot of true crime, the victim's perspective is overlooked because one, a lot of times something bad just happened to a victim, like they didn't do anything to deserve what happened to them. And so their agency really is, the story is that their agency is stolen, their life is

stolen and their agency is stolen and they don't, their story just ended. They didn't get to have a story, they didn't get to have perspective about what happened. And as someone who survived this ordeal, I do get to have perspective, I do get to respond to what happened to me, I do get to have some kind of agency back. So that is, I remind myself of that when it feels like this thing is so overwhelming and that I will never, you know, I'll never, ever do anything in my life that will define me more than this thing that I didn't do, that I've been associated with. That's one of the sort of ongoing traumas of this experience is feeling like my identity

has been stolen from me and associated with things that I had nothing to do with and there's never, ever, ever going to be anything that I can do to change that. And you know, no one's ever going to be able to give me that time that was taken away from me back and no one's ever going to be able to take those images that I was shown out of my mind. But I do have the power to take all of that and respond. I do have the ability to put all of that experience into context as I move forward. I'm trying to live instead of a reactive life to everything that happened to me, a proactive

life given now everything that I've been exposed to. I now have knowledge about the world and about human beings that I would not have had were it not for going through this traumatic experience and that is empowering. That is a way to heal because it doesn't just feel like something happened to me. I can respond to it. Some victims don't get that opportunity. Of all the things we think we know about Amanda Knox and who she is, the whole seductress persona is the most wildly off the mark, at least based on Amanda's own description of

who she is. The short answer is that I'm a big nerd. I'm a big nerd. I have lots of cats and I spend a lot of time listening to Weird Al and watching Star Trek. If you had to encapsulate me in a very, very limited amount of time, it's like I cuddle cats, I know all of the lyrics to Weird Al songs and I watch a lot of sci-fi. There's that. If you really want to, if you are genuinely curious about what kind of person I am, I'm

actually quite an open book and I am very, very candid about my life and my experiences and my views and you can have access to them through my podcast Labyrinths where I talk about other people's cases but I also do a ton of empathizing and I also talk about my own experiences and thoughts and recently I did a whole episode where I talk about my miscarriage and I'm very, very candid about my experience of that and how I felt. She talks about her experience with wrongful conviction on her show as well as about what it's like for her to be bearing the burden of someone else's actions and she talks about Rudy Guay Day too.

If anyone wants to have an understanding of what happened to Meredith, they need to understand who Rudy Guay Day is, what he truly did and what happened to Meredith was the result of him sort of spiraling out of control over several weeks of breaking and entering into people's houses, stealing and if we want to prevent these things from happening in the future, we need to understand how young men who are adrift, who find themselves in the circumstances that Rudy Guay Day found himself in, how we can intervene before someone like Meredith becomes a victim of someone like that and I try to talk about these issues on my podcast Labyrinths because I know that it's not easy.

I think that in the true crime genre, there tends to be a tendency to just see things in a very black and white way like, here's the good guys, here's the bad guys, here's this thrilling story that has heroes and villains and I think that if anything, the true crime genre deserves a more nuanced take that grounds itself in the humanity of everyone involved so that we can better learn from these experiences instead of just be entertained by them. I think that the thing that people should remember is one, that people who are at the center of these events and these stories are people who have whole lives outside of this particular event that you have access to and one of the mistakes that we make when we look

at these stories is we look at that person through the lens of this worst experience of their life thinking that we should judge everything about them through that access point, through this lens and if anything, this worst experience of their life is something that came out of nowhere for the vast majority of these people and they are experiencing it from a whole different perspective. They are not entering into this event in their life thinking this is the defining moment of my life. This is a horrible thing that happened to me and now how do I as a real human being

process this event in my life in the context of everything that I've ever experienced and so that's a really important distinction and the other distinction that I think is and storyteller to storyteller, the major question that I ask myself in all journalism that I do whether it be writing for CrimeStory.com or looking at different people's cases and stories in my podcast Labyrinths is I always ask myself who has the most at stake in the story, whose voice truly matters, who has the perspective, the real human perspective having lived through this experience and whose voice has been denied, like who has been, who has had their agency taken away from them in this course of events.

Those are the people that I want to talk to and those are the things that I want to be careful to preserve because in my own situation I found that when the media looked at this story first of all they came into it with a totally preconceived idea about what story they wanted to tell about it. They came to me already knowing what they wanted me to say and just sort of waiting for that sound bite to wrap up, tie their little story in a bow for them so they could move on to the next thing. That has led to a great deal of misrepresentation and also harm.

It's just making it a very two-dimensional story whereas when I encounter someone and talk to them about a very difficult time in their life I don't approach them thinking I know what their perspective is or should be, I try to find, I always try to find no matter who they are, no matter what they've done or been through, I always try to find common ground so that I can establish their humanity which is inevitable and true and if you overlook it you're doing a great disservice to the truth. I try to be willing to understand their perspective because the vast majority of us have experienced things or responded to things happening to us, to the best of our ability even when we've

made mistakes and trying to put myself in the shoes of the person thinking that they're making the right choice even when they're making the wrong choice is important to understanding instead of just judging, try to imagine what it must feel like in that moment to think that you're making the right choice even if it's wrong. Be willing to have compassion for that person even if they've done something wrong and be willing to change my own thoughts about a particular event given this new information that has been given to me. All of that is putting the humanity of the figures who have the most at stake in a story

first and putting my sort of my own storytelling lens to the side for a moment and allowing someone else to tell their story and finding their story in the process. Her experience of actually spending time in prison has also led her into some interesting work. I'm on the board of something called the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice which is an organization that seeks to bring people who are not incarcerated into direct contact with people who are incarcerated so that there's not this sense of like there are those kind of people over there who I don't have to look at and think about and then there's me.

In fact, any one of us at any point could find ourselves in a position where we end up going to prison whether we did something or not but also we are all in this together. Society is a network and those who fall through the cracks of that net, we are all implicated in that and we are not, you know, it's not like there are just fundamentally different kinds of people, those who commit crimes and those who do not commit crimes. In fact, the vast majority of us are committing crimes all the time without realizing it first of all and second of all, those who do commit crimes are not just fundamentally bad people but a lot of people who have bad choices and not good choices to make. Listen, there's

no mystery in this story. The evidence clearly shows that Rudy Guede and only Rudy Guede killed Meredith Kircher but that story, Meredith's story, the real story has been lost in this vacuum of misinformation and tabloid-driven media coverage about this person who did nothing but discover the crime scene. I'm trying my best. I really am and I hope that that will come to define me instead of this thing that just happened to me. That's my wish for all victims, that they don't get defined by what happened to them but by how they respond. If you want to hear my entire conversation with Amanda, you can find that in our fan club. Just go to our website crimejunkiepodcast.com and click the fan club link to join. You can also

go there to find our blog post for this episode where you'll find all the source material. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?