The Fatal Gift of Beauty; The trials of Amanda Knox by Nina Burleigh

Author:Nina Burleigh [Burleigh, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-58860-9
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2012-07-10T07:00:00+00:00

AFTER VIEWING MEREDITH KERCHER’S body, Mignini was directed to another room off the long, narrow hallway, the one with the broken window he had noticed from outside. Like the first room, a woman lived in it. Clothes were flung on the floor and on the bed, shopping bags were overturned on the floor, a large rock was wedged under a table. A laptop computer lay on the floor amid shards of glass.

Here the magistrate encountered Monica Napoleoni, the chief of the Perugia police murder squad. Usually sharply dressed in skintight street clothes like a vice cop, deeply tanned year-round, and with jet black, shiny hair swinging in bangs above her brows and cascading down her back, the policewoman’s style is part dominatrix, part Donatella Versace with a badge. Napoleoni doesn’t look or dress her part, but there is no doubt about her fitness for the job. Policing is the family business. Her father had been a Perugia police officer for decades.

Napoleoni, clutching a little notebook in her hand and a large Vuitton tote on her shoulder, ceased her investigations long enough to fill in the magistrate on what she had gathered so far. In court testimony, she shared her first impressions of the crime—including the idea that she immediately perceived that the break-in had been “staged”—with the world.

“I arrived with a doctor and a nurse—a woman doctor and a male nurse. The postal police were already there, and they told me they had arrived and found Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito outside the house, saying they were waiting for the carabinieri because there was something weird in the house.

“I entered the room immediately on the left, and I took one step inside and noticed right away that the breaking in couldn’t have been made from the outside. Pieces of glass had fallen on stuff that was on the ground. It seemed to me they had broken it after they went through the room. There were even pieces of glass on top of the windowsill outside. There was this big rock, I saw it almost completely, inside this Sisley bag.

“I went toward [the murder scene], and I made one step inside the room while the emergency doctor pulled up the blanket, and I saw this girl on the ground with her face to her left, her eyes open. And she had this horrible wound, it was horrible to see. I tried to photograph with my eyes what I saw inside that room, to understand what had happened.

“The girl was half naked, her shirt pulled above her breasts and lots of blood. There were splashes of blood on her breasts as well. One of her legs was slightly open. Then I noticed the desk with Vaseline on it in a little pot, closed on top.”

At the mention of Vaseline, the magistrate was confirmed in the instinct he had had about the body, displayed so obscenely to anyone at the door of the murder room. Italians use Vaseline for one thing only. And that thing—anal sex—is not normally discussed in polite mixed company.

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