Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: Amanda Knox & the Murder of Meredith Kercher 1

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

In November 2007, 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher was found murdered in her home in Perugia, Italy, just five weeks into a semester abroad she had spent months dreaming about. What should have been a straightforward search for justice became a global media spectacle, one that centered not on the victim, but on her American roommate, Amanda Knox. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy traces Meredith's life, her final days, and the chaotic scene that unfolded when her body was discovered.Head over to our Murder True Crime Stories YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@MurderTrueCrimeStoriesIf you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosYouTube: @murdertruecrimestories

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Studying abroad is supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime. You leave behind everything familiar, your friends, your family, your routine, and start over in a place where nobody knows you. It's exciting, it's terrifying, and for most people, it's an experience that changes. them forever. For Meredith Kircher, it was all of that. The 21-year-old British student had spent months preparing for her semester in Italy. She studied the language. She dreamed about the life she'd build there. And when she finally arrived in Perugia, reality exceeded the fantasy. She found new friends, had new experiences, and embraced a city that felt like it was made for her.

But just five weeks in, Meredith's adventure was cut brutally short. On November 1, 2007, she was found murdered in her apartment. What followed should have been a search for justice. Instead, it became something else entirely. Because as cameras descended on Perugia, they didn't focus on Meredith. They focused on her roommate. a 20-year-old American named Amanda Knox. And from that moment on, the story stopped being about a young woman who was killed and became

about the young woman who might have killed her. It took years to untangle the truth, and by the time it was over, more than one life had been destroyed. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end, but you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look.

Thank you for being part of the Crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, ad-free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. This is the first of two episodes on the murder of Meredith Kircher, a 21-year-old British student who moved Italy for a semester abroad and never made it back home. Today, I'll introduce you to Meredith, a bright and popular young woman who left South London for the ancient city of Perugia. I'll walk you through her first weeks in Italy, the friends she made, and what happened on the night of November 1, 2007. After a late dinner with friends, Meredith headed

back to her apartment for the last time. Next time, I'll get into the investigation and the circus that followed. Meredith's killer was identified pretty quickly, but Italian authorities also turned their attention to two people nobody expected. Meredith's American roommates, 20-year-old Amanda Knox, and her Italian boyfriend, 23-year-old Rafael Socholito. What came next was years of wall-to-wall media coverage, multiple trials, and a legal fight that went all the way to Italy's highest court. By the time it was finally over in 2015, one thing was clear. The world cared a lot more. about the drama than the truth. All that more coming up.

Meredith Kircher lived for adventure. She was the youngest of four children, born in South London in 1985, to an Indian mother and a British father. It was a lively, multilingual household, the kind of home where conversations spilled into different languages and no one sat still for long. Her dad, John, was a journalist.

He had written for tabloids like this, The Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror and had published books on acts like Guns and Roses, Madonna and Wham. Growing up around that world left a mark on Meredith. She wanted to be a journalist too, though she was drawn more to politics than pop culture. Even after her parents divorced in 1997, when Meredith was 11 or 12, she and her dad stayed close. She and her siblings lived with their mom, but they called John every single night. Their bond never wavered. Both of her parents watched with pride as Meredith grew into the kind of person who lit up a room. She had this natural ease with people, warm, funny, and sharp enough to hold her own in any conversation.

In school, she was popular without trying too hard, the sort of student who always ended up leading the group project, not because she asked to, but because everyone just looked to her. And she wasn't afraid to hustle either. As a teenager, she pulled shifts as a bar to. tender and worked as a tour guide, and thanks to her dad's connections, she even landed a spot in a music video for an indie rock band when she was 19. By 2007, she was studying European politics and Italian at Leeds University, still chasing that dream of becoming a political journalist. And then, at 21, she qualified for a scholarship that would let her study abroad

for a semester. She could go almost anywhere in Europe. chose Perugia. It was a deliberate choice. Perugia is a small, picturesque town in central Italy. It's full of ancient stone buildings, cultural festivals, and some of the best chocolate in the world. Meredith figured a quieter, more rural place would keep her safe and give her the chance to really connect with the locals. She wasn't looking for the chaos of Rome or Milan. She wanted something real. In the months before she left, she threw herself into studying Italian. She imagined the vistas, the piazzas, the long dinners with new friends. By the time she packed her bags, she'd already built the whole adventure in her head.

And when she got there in late September of 2007, it was even better than she could have imagined. By pure luck, she found a place to say just a two-minute walk from the university where she was studying, a large stone cottage that had been a farmhouse about 300 years earlier. From the outside, it was beautiful. Clean white walls, pale, red-tiled roof, emerald green shutters. It looked like something off a postcard. The inside was a different story. There were four cramped bedrooms connected by a hallway so narrow that two people could barely edge past each other.

But Meredith didn't care, especially because she liked. the people. Two Italian women were already living in the apartment when she arrived. Filomena Romanelli and Laura Metcetti, who were both in their late 20s. Their English wasn't perfect, but it was solid and they were eager to practice. A third roommate, a 20-year-old American named Amanda Knox, moved in about a week after Meredith did. And before I keep going, I want to point out that most of the following comes from Nina Berlis' book, The Fatal Gift, of beauty. Her work was instrumental to this episode. The foursome hit it off right away. As native English speakers, Meredith and Amanda, seemed like natural allies. They were close in age,

both living away from home for the first time, and both outgoing and romantic in that way young people abroad often are. At first glance, they had a lot in common, but there were differences too. Meredith was there on a prestigious scholarship, while Amanda had taken a year off from the University of Washington to enroll in an independent study program. She paid for the whole thing herself, supplementing her savings with shifts at a local bar called Le Sheik. During the first few weeks of October, the house found its rhythm. Meredith and Amanda both went to morning classes at the University for foreigners, came home around 1 o'clock for lunch, and split off. Meredith to more courses, Amanda sometimes to the bar. At night, they went out, though not always together.

Meredith quickly fell in with a group of British exchange students who became her core crew. Philomena and Laura mostly kept to their own schedules. They were a few years older and had their own lives in Perugia, but they noticed what was happening between their two younger roommates. And what they saw was a friendship that was already starting to, come apart at the seams. According to Philomena, Amanda and Meredith were practically inseparable at first, but by mid-October, barely two weeks in, things started to shift. Both of them liked going out, but some of Meredith's friends would later describe Amanda as the wilder of the two, and Meredith began

pulling back. Amanda didn't seem to mind. She preferred hanging out with Italians anyway, trying to immerse herself in the language. She avoided the other Americans at her school and chatted up customers at the bar or the young men who lived downstairs in the farmhouse. Most of her new friends happened to be guys. That might have been part of the problem, at least according to Amy Frost, one of the British students in Meredith's scholarship group. Amy said that Meredith secretly thought Amanda was loud, a little rude, and kind of weird. She complained about Amanda's hygiene and how she walked around the apartment naked. According to Amy, Meredith was also uncomfortable with how casually Amanda brought men home for the night.

None of this blew up into some big confrontation, but detention was palpable, and the situation with the downstairs roommates might have only made things. worse. The four women lived upstairs while four young men, also students who were in permanent party mode, lived in the apartment on the ground floor. Depending on who you asked, either some of the guys or all of them had a crush on Amanda and Meredith, but none of them were as openly fixated as a guy named Rudy Guaday, a frequent house guest who kept showing up at the downstairs apartment uninvited. Rudy was 20 years old. Originally from the ivory coast, he'd lived in Italy since he was five. His mother wasn't in the picture. His father, Roger, was a construction worker,

and by most accounts, not the best parent. As a boy, Rudy went without warm clothes in the winter. He ate cold pasta alone while his dad was at work. When Roger wanted to discipline him, he locked Rudy out of the house. Neighbors in Perugia saw him sleeping on the streets as a little boy. Other nights, he curled up on the bare floor of the attic. Luckily, one of his teachers took pity on him. She started packing Rudy's lunches, taking him to church, and helping raise him in ways his father never did. By his teenage years, Rudy felt closer to her than to anyone in his own family. Then in 2004, when Rudy was 17 or 18, his father went back to the ivory coast for what was supposed to be a short visit, but a civil war prevented him from returning for four years.

Rogers' common-law wife was supposed to look after Rudy in the meantime, but without his father around, Rudy stopped listening completely. He quit school and left home. Through his elementary school teacher's connections, he landed with a wealthy local family who took him in. By all accounts, he was a polite, melancholy teenager, shy, rarely angry. His new benefactors got him into a prestigious prep school, and for a while it seemed like things might work out. But then he started to struggle, and instead of asking for help, he lied about his grades, about his tutoring sessions, about whether he was even going to class. It took months for his surrogate family to figure out what was really going on.

Rudy dropped out of school in 2007 at the age of 20. His foster parents found him a job as a gardener, but he couldn't even show up for that on time. Eventually, his foster parents had no choice but to cut him loose. He bounced around after that, staying with some relatives for a few months, then drifted back to Perugia. He managed to rent his studio apartments, but money was tight, and when he made new friends, a mix of shame about his background and hatred of his father pushed him to lie about everything. He told people his dad was a wealthy computer programmer. Nobody questioned the story, but everyone could tell something was off. Rudy would show up out of nowhere, hang around for a few weeks, then vanish without a word.

He was evasive about where he lived. He skipped out on meals. Sometimes he asked a crash on someone's couch, and when he did, his friends woke up in the middle of the night to find him in a kind of trance, barking like a dog or pointing at an imaginary chalkboard like a teacher, still half asleep. It was sort of like sleepwalking, but he seemed slightly more aware.

Rudy told his friends he had to hide his keys when he slept at home, Otherwise, he would leave the apartment and walk for miles, then suddenly wake up with no idea where he was. But the sleepwalking was just the thing people could see. The issues brewing under the surface were a lot more concerning. For years, Rudy had survived by telling people whatever they wanted to hear. A different story for every room. A new version of himself for every friendship. But by October 2007, the gap between who,

Rudy said he was and who he actually was had become a chasm. And he was about to fall right through it. Prime House exists because of listeners like you. Want to support the show and get the best listener experience? Join Crime House Plus and get both parts of every serial killers and murderous minds story dropped on Monday. Completely ad-free. No more waiting days for part two. Plus Crime House bonus episodes every month exclusive to subscribers. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free on the top of the serial killers and murderous minds show page. By the fall of 2007, 20-year-old Rudy Guede was struggling to make ends meet in Perusia, Italy. His friends had no idea how bad things had gotten.

Rudy was too proud, or maybe too ashamed to tell them. But behind the easy-going facade, he was desperate. apparently desperate enough to start breaking into other people's homes. On the morning of September 27th, sometime after 1 a.m., a man matching Rudy's description, tried to burglarize a stranger's house in Perugia. The homeowner woke up and found the intruder ransacking the place, reeking of wine. He chased the man outside, but never called the police. Later, he spotted Rudy at a local bar and recognized him as the thief.

he still didn't report it. Seven days later, someone broke into a school in Milan, more than 250 miles away, and stole approximately 2,000 euros. But the thief didn't just take the money. He used the kitchen to cook massive quantities of pasta, then left the whole place trashed. This time, police were called, and over the next couple of weeks,

two more bizarre break-ins popped up around Perugia. The pattern was the same. The intruder either cooked food during the burglary or left objects arranged in strange, almost ritualistic patterns on the floor. Then on October 23rd, a teacher arrived at the Milan school on a Saturday to let in a plumber. She found Rudy sitting in an office calmly plugging in his laptop. He wasn't supposed to be there, that much was obvious, but what was strange was how he acted. He was totally relaxed and polite, as if he'd been invited.

Even as she called the authorities, he didn't flinch. When police searched his backpack, they found a gold watch, a set of keys, and a knife from the school kitchen. At the station, Rudy refused to explain any of it, except to say that he lived in Perugia. Authorities there told Milan police to send him home, so they reluctantly released him without charges. He was never tried for any of the burglaries, but law enforcement in both cities considered him their number one suspect. So by late October 2007, Rudy's life was in a freefall. He was broke, desperate, dodging police in two cities, and no one in his circle had any idea. And that's the thing about Rudy. He could walk into a room full of strangers and make everyone feel

like they'd known him for years. He was soft-spoken, relaxed, easy to be around. And that's exactly how he ended up in the orbit of Amanda Knox and Meredith Kircher. The guys who lived in the apartment below the women threw parties practically every night. They had an open-door policy. Anyone could swing by for a drink or smoke some hash, a form of marijuana common in Europe that's made from resin. It can be stronger than other forms of the drug, but has similar effects. Rudy wasn't much of a smoker, but he liked to drink, and sometime in October he just showed up. Nobody could remember actually inviting him. One of the roommates, Stefano, recalled seeing him for the first time at a get-together.

Rudy introduced himself as Baron after the NBA point guard Baron Davis. The nickname stuck, and soon the downstairs guys started calling him the Baron. Before long, the Baron was a regular fixture. The next time Stefano saw him, Rudy was passed out in the bathroom, slumped over a disgusting toilet. Stefano tried to kick him out, but Rudy was too far gone to move. He ended up sleeping on the couch. A week later, he showed up uninvited to watch a Formula One race on their TV. The roommates were annoyed, but he seemed harmless enough.

He mostly just sat around, chatted, and drank, so... They let it slide. Eventually, Rudy met Amanda. And from the moment he laid eyes on her, he was smitten. And he wasn't the only one. One night, while smoking with the guys downstairs, the conversation turned to her. According to Rudy, every man in the room was talking about how beautiful Amanda was, imagining what it would be like to be with her.

Then, mid-conversation, Amanda appeared in the doorway. A few of the guys chuckled at the timing and waved her in. Later that evening, Meredith joined the Circle 2. Rudy was captivated by both her and Amanda. He spent the next few hours making conversation here and there, reading into every glance. He convinced himself Amanda was giving him suggestive looks, though their relationship never went beyond small talk.

Whether Amanda was actually interested in Rudy is an open. in question. But if she was, he was just one name on a long list. Another was Jocamo, one of the guys from the downstairs apartment. When Jocamo and a friend invited Amanda and Meredith to a nightclub, both women said yes. A long night of drinking and dancing followed. When the club closed, Jocamo went home with Meredith, while Amanda paired up with his friend. For Amanda, it was a one-night thing. But for Jocamo and Meredith, it was the beginning of a situation. ship, and as you might expect, things got awkward fast. There was a major language barrier for one.

Meredith spoke enough Italian to carry on a basic conversation, but Giacomo barely spoke any English. They could hardly even manage a phone call. That made it tough to figure out where they stood. Giacomo said he liked Meredith, but he claimed he wasn't the jealous type. In public, he actually went out of his way to avoid her, or maybe out of show. or maybe because he was embarrassed about dating foreigner, but one of his roommates thought he was more attached than he let on. Either way, Meredith felt possessive enough to notice when Amanda got

too close. According to one of her friends, Meredith believed Amanda was trying to steal him. And allegedly, Amanda didn't exactly help her case. Meredith's friend would later testify that Amanda told Meredith, I like Giacomo too, but you can have to. him. On that kind of remark, casual, almost dismissive, only deepened the rift. But by the end of the month, Amanda had moved on. On October 25th, she spotted a 23-year-old Italian named Rafael Solicito at a concert. She locked eyes with him and smiled until he came over to sit beside her. That night, after her shift at the bar, they went back to his place, smoked a joint, and slept together. For Rafael, it wasn't casual. He was a virgin and from day one he was completely head over heels.

Filomena described him as practically glued to Amanda's side. After October 25th, he followed her everywhere, and while she was into him too, she was clearly the one in control. Before long, Amanda stopped coming home to the farmhouse at night and stayed at Raphael's place instead. To the outside world, it looked like a real relationship. Almost. Amanda confided in Filomena that she felt a twinge of guilt. She had a boyfriend back in the States. They were technically in an open relationship, but she worried she was pushing the boundaries of their arrangement. Still, she wasn't about to push Raphael away. He treated her well. He made her happy, and for now, that was enough. By Halloween, the new couple had been together for about a week,

and Amanda decided to go out that night without Raphael. He drew whiskers on her face to complete her cat costume, kissed her goodbye, and stayed in. Halloween isn't much of a holiday in Italy, so to him it was just another evening. But in the UK, it's just as important as it is in the U.S., and Meredith had plans with her British friends, plans Amanda wasn't part of.

So, on the night of October 31, 2007, the two roommates headed out in different directions. Meredith to a pub with her crew, Amanda to the bar where she worked. What happened over the next 24 hours depends on who's telling the story. But one thing is clear. On November 1st, 2007, one of them wound up dead. The question that would consume investigators and the rest of the world, was who saw her last. Such an ordinary thing to walk home from high school.

Her name was Mickey Costanzo, just 16. She didn't have far to go. Seemed perfectly safe until it wasn't. What happened to Mickey? I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Five Miles from Home, an all-new podcast from Dateline. Search Five Miles From Home to start listening now, By Halloween night in 2007, the farmhouse in Perugia had become a pressure cooker.

A month of crushes, hookups, and quiet resentments had tangled the lives of everyone who lived there or drifted through. And the fast friendship between 21-year-old Meredith Kircher and 20-year-old Amanda Knox, it had started to cool off. So, instead of going out together, the two roommates split up, Meredith put on a vampire costume, fangs, a faux-bober. bloody lip the whole thing and headed to Merlin Pub with her British crew. While she was there, she may have crossed paths with Rudy Guetti. Meredith's friends don't remember seeing him that night, but Rudy later insisted he'd flirted with her at the pub, asking if she could suck his blood. If the encounter happened at all, it was brief. After that, Meredith and her friends left the pub and hit a nightclub where they danced until five in the morning.

As for Amanda, she dressed up as a cat and walked down to Lashik, the bar where she worked part-time. Even though she was dating Rafael Sula-Chito, she chose to go out alone that night. And according to the owner of the bar, he saw her cuddling up with two different men. Either way, after Lashik, Amanda bounced to a few other spots before eventually making her way back to Raphael's place around 2 a.m. The next morning, November 1st, She woke up early, left Raphael sleeping, and went back to the farmhouse. She was already there when Meredith stumbled out of her bedroom, hung over, with costume blood still smeared on her lips.

The two of them chatted for a bit. Then Raphael came over, and they all had a pasta lunch together. Around 4.30 in the afternoon, Meredith left for a British friend's apartment. Half an hour later, Amanda and Raphael headed back to his place. They downloaded the movie Amelie, had a late dinner sometime between 9 and 11 p.m., and settled in for the night. Then the pipes under Raphael's sink burst. They soaked up what they could, but he didn't have a mop. So Amanda told him she'd grab one from the farmhouse in the morning.

After that, the couple read for a while, smoked a joint, and went to bed. Meanwhile, Meredith was having a quiet evening with friends. she and three other exchange students watched the notebook at someone's apartment. They ordered pizza. Someone made an apple crumble. It was low-key. The kind of night where nobody's in a rush to leave. But just before nine, Meredith headed out with one of the other students.

She didn't say where she was going, but after such a long Halloween the night before, seemed pretty clear she was just having home. The two of them split up a few minutes from the farmhouse. Meredith continued on alone. She had two phones in her purse that night. One was her British cell, the one she used to call friends and family back home. The other was a spare that Philomena had loaned her for local calls.

At 8.56 p.m. Her British phone dialed her mom. The call never fully connected. It might have been a pocket dial, or the call might have been cut off for some other reason. There's no way to know. Either way, she made it back to the farmhouse soon after. About an hour later, the same phone dialed her bank in the UK.

Connected for a moment, then immediately hung up. By that point, Meredith should have been the only person in the building. Amanda was at Raphael's. Philomena and Laura were both away for the weekend. Even the four guys downstairs were gone out of town on vacation. The farmhouse was empty, but that just meant there was no one around to hear Meredith scream. What happened next is disputed, but here's what Amanda later told police. She said she woke up on November 2nd and went back to the farmhouse around 10 or 11 a.m.

The front door was wide open. She tried calling her roommates, including Meredith, to see if one of them had left it that way on purpose. nobody picked up. So Amanda figured someone had just stepped out to take out the trash and forgotten to close it behind them. She went to the bathroom. She shared with Meredith. There were drops of blood on the floor and the bath mat, a bloody smear, maybe a partial handprint on the sink. At first, Amanda assumed it was menstrual blood. It grossed her out, but she didn't think much of it, so she took a shower anyway. Afterwards, she went to the other bathroom, Laura and Filomena's, to dry her hair.

There were feces in the toilet. She didn't flush it. She just grabbed a mop and some cleaning supplies and headed back to Raphael's. She guessed it was around 11.30. Over breakfast, she mentioned the blood to Raphael, and he told her she should check on her roommates. Amanda called Philomena first. She said she was at her boyfriend's place and hadn't been home since the day before.

Then Amanda tried Meredith once, twice, three times, no answer. At that point, Amanda was officially worried, so she and Raphael went back to the farmhouse and started checking rooms. When they got to Filomena's bedroom, they found the window smashed in. There was glass all over the floor. Amanda was terrified that someone had broken in, but she didn't go inside Philomena's bedroom. Instead, she looked around the den in her bedroom trying to figure out if anything was missing. Nothing seemed to be, but Meredith's door was locked. And according to Amanda, Meredith only locked her room when she was showering in the bathroom they shared.

Amanda ran downstairs to see if the guys in the ground floor. floor apartment had heard anything from Meredith. Nobody was home. Back upstairs, Raphael tried to kick Meredith's door down. It wouldn't budge, so he called his older sister, who worked for the local police. She told him to dial the emergency number. He made the call, then he and Amanda went outside to wait. What they didn't know was that a different branch of law enforcement was already on the way. The postal police, a division that mostly handles cybercrime and financial fraud, had been called hours earlier. That morning at around 10 a.m., a neighbor had found the phone Philomena loaned Meredith lying out in the garden. Around noon, a second neighbor found

Meredith's British cell in the grass nearby. Both were turned over to police. Officer Michele Bateselli was dispatched to return them. So by pure coincidence, right around 1230 p.m., just after Raphael and Amanda had called for help, they looked up and saw a postal police officer walking toward them. Raphael explained the situation, and Bateselli followed them inside. Just as they were walking in, Philomena and Laura pulled up with two of their male friends. suddenly there were seven people crammed into the small apartment, and things only got more chaotic from there. Filomena was especially shaken.

After all, her room was the one with a smashed window. She rushed in and started going through her things, trying to figure out what was taken. But here's what didn't make sense. The intruder had tossed her clothes in electronics everywhere, yet nothing appeared to be missing. Her jewelry was all still there. And that detail nagged at everyone.

But right now, there was a bigger problem. Meredith's door was still locked, and no one had heard from her. The roommates begged about Estelle to break down the door, but he refused. As a postal police officer, he didn't have the authority to damage property without opening a formal investigation. And at that point, he wasn't even sure there was a crime. crime, the window was broken, sure, but Filomena said nothing was stolen. There could have been an innocent explanation. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Philomena's friend, a large man named Luca, decided to bash the door himself at around 1.15 p.m. It took him several Spartan kicks

and a hard shoulder to finally get it open. Inside, a pile of white sheets lay crumpled on the floor, soaked through with blood. Next to them behind the bed, a single bare foot poked out from under a blanket. The women screamed and ran into the hallway. Only Bada Steli and Philomena's boyfriend, Marco, stayed in the doorway. According to Marco, the officer stepped inside and lifted the blanket, but Bostelli later said he never looked at the body.

Either way, the regular police arrived shortly after, Chief Monica Napoleoni of the Prussia murder squad was first on the scene, accompanied by an emergency doctor and a nurse. Napoleon went to Filomena's room before anything else, and what she saw didn't sit right. The glass from the shattered window was lying on top of the scattered clothes, not underneath them. Shards were on the outside sill, too. To her, it looked like someone had ransacked the room, first, then broken the window to make it look like a burglary. She hadn't even seen the body yet, and she already suspected the break-in was staged. Next, she went to Meredith's room.

Napoleoni stayed by the door while the doctor rushed in and pulled back the blanket. Meredith was lying on the floor, partially covered. There was blood everywhere. Her throat had been cut. By the time, Napolioni stepped back outside, the press had already descended. Reporters and camera crews were gathering at the edge of the property. Most of the roommates and their friends were huddled together near the entrance, crying and holding each other. But Amanda Knox and Raphael saw the Cheeto weren't with them. They'd stepped off to the side, away from the cameras.

According to Napoleoni, she watched as they pulled each other close, then started kissing. Whether Napoleoni actually saw them making out or just got a brief moan of comfort between two people in shock would itself become contested. But in that moment, it was enough to put Amanda and Raphael

on her radar. And it was only the beginning. In the weeks and months ahead, Amanda and Raphael's behavior would overshadow almost everything else about the case. What started as a murder investigation was about to become a media circus, a diplomatic crisis, and a legal nightmare all at once. And the truth, that was about to get buried under all of it.

Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the murder. of Meredith Kircher. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios here at Crime House. We want to thank each and every one of you

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