Because there was so much other evidence that making a big deal about this was likely judged not worth it. It would have gotten into a debate over if it was her or not. The shopkeeper was positive but there was contention over the color of her jacket that would have raised doubts.

yimyammer,

That she took the shower at the house is just part of her story. There is no reason to believe it was at the house except that she said so. It was her explanation for why she came home and found the B&E. The reason it is important is because she says she did this and yet it is so strange. People asked her why she didn't just shower at Raf's since if I'm not mistaken her packed bags were already there.

If she did or didn't isn't really important but since they clean though the night so would have been messy. I can't see going out in the morning after cleaning a crime scene and not not cleaning up first.

The mother changed her testimony at one point to cover for one of Amanda's lies. The mother challenged her on it at first out of confusion but then realizing that Amanda wanted the story changed the mother changed it. This isn't definite proof that the parents know but if you aren't stupid and your kid is asking you to commit perjury in a criminal case then you know they are involved. Likewise with conversations about the knife and the much discussed where does "there" mean conversation.

Plus unlike the rest of the world they have the unfiltered evidence and no one who knows the evidence can think she is innocent.

SGT RJ,

yes. We are just using lumonol because that is the product most people know but it is blue not red. I have no idea what the product they used was but it the purpose was to react with blood. There is a 2P2er who works in a crime lab. He showed up in the Robort Wone topic so I was hoping he would show up here as he would be able to discuss that aspect better.

If they used a different substance that detects blood but turns pink instead, then I would assume they followed up with swabs for DNA testing - was Kercher's blood really found all over the bathroom like that?

I'd have to look some stuff up but I can't think of a substance used by law enforcement that reacts JUST to blood, so obviously any test like this would require swabs to follow up to confirm a) that it's blood, b) that the blood is human and c) the DNA results for the blood. So what did those follow-up tests show?

Does anyone know if any fingerprints (other than Merediths) were found on these items? If so, whose were they?

Yes. It wasn't like they interrupted them on hands and knees or as the movie implies with a bucket and cleaning supplies.

The house was clean, their clothing disposed of, the only thing left that was incriminating was the bathmat.

The knife was from Raf's. Both roommates claimed the knife was not part of their kitchen.

That actually isn't true. The media reported that and two experts argued over this in the original trial but the original findings were that the defense expert was wrong. If you read the arguments for why the defense expert wanted to exclude the knife you'll see why he wasn't deemed credible. His contention was that all knife wounds have to involve shoving the knife all the way in which is obviously not the case but he was an expert for the defense and that is his job.

A lot. His entire knife collection. They were interested in a knife that was in a box and a knife that he had hanging over his bed but neither went anywhere. Not sure what percentage of the kitchen knives were tested but quite a few and possibly all. They even tested a butter knife found in a bush but that also turned out to be nothing.

Multiple weapons is not a certainty. There are blood stains that could've been the impression of a second knife but those are unclear. From the wounds themselves there is no evidence of a second weapon.

It's pretty rare for homicides by stabbing not to result in blood on the weapon from both victim and perp, particularly on knives without hilts, since the thrusting motion results in the hand slipping forward over the the blade, usually cutting the perpetrators fingers. I understand the one man (Guerde, but I could be butchering that name) has a few cuts on his fingers (consistent with the type of wounds usually seen in homicides from knives) - did Knox or her Italian boyfriend have any similar wounds?[/QUOTE]

Taken from a website about forensics:
"When committing suicide the person rarely kills them self with one clean stab or cut to the wrist or throat - there are mostly several hesitation cuts before the final, fatal cut is made. We can also determine whether a cut or stab wound was made by another person by looking at the position of it. If a person has been stabbed in the back, it is very unlikely, if not impossible, that they inflicted the wound them self.

When examining cuts we can look at the direction the cut moves to help understand who the wound was inflicted by. There are some directions a cut could move in that would be impossible for the victim to inflict themselves, which points to murder. "

The problem I see is that in my case the area (chest below left breast) where my ex-gf stabbed herself it can't be ruled out that I didn't do it. Plus she didn't make several hesitation cuts before the final cut was made to indicate a suicide attempt.

This seems extremely bizarre to me.

Even knife-loving Psychos don't carry kitchen cutlery with them.

Assuming the three of them were all involved I assumed they were high and this just happened. Hard for that to be the case if that is the murder weapon.

He is not the one who cleaned. For the rest of the evening he was seen out at a nightclub, then fled to Germany.

Since he was known to Meredith, if barely, I see no reason why he would decide to attack her, and climb through a second-storey shuttered window (a couple of minutes after first breaking it with a rock) to access the house when just showing up at the door saying he was trying to find his downstairs friends would be enough to get her to open the door before forcing his way inside. While there is evidence of him in her room and the hall, there is none in Filomena's room, which makes me doubly suspicious of any scenario suggesting that he climbed through a window still bordered with shards of glass and left no fabric or skin behind.

He stood no more to gain materially by his involvement in the crime than anyone else. So it seems the agreed-upon motive is that he attacked her because he felt like it. Meanwhile this is insufficient and can't properly be called a motive when applied to the other two.

As I've said, the different standards of evidence applied to the lone black guy and the privileged white kids, especially within a single case, is very disheartening. All questions raised about their motive, their prints, their DNA could fairly also be asked about him, but in his case the bar is set much lower.

His DNA proves his involvement, but the lab is incompetent in handling their DNA.

His DNA was collected on 18 December, but Raffaele's was collected OMG 46 days later!!!!

His lies suggest a fatal corruption of character, while theirs are understandable confusion during a stressful event.

His motive is because he felt like it, but you can't even accuse the other two without first having a "real" motive. She was found guilty of accusing Patrick and never withdrawing the accusation -- what was the motive for that?

All the evidence which implicates them is considered unreliable, but the same evidence, even the same types of evidence, which implicates him is a slam dunk, case closed. I feel like his fate was sealed when they didn't decide to try all three together. He does deserve to be in prison, but so do they.

good question, I'd like to know as well

They tested for DNA. The only visible Meridith DNA in the entire bathroom was four spots that are refereed to as the mixed blood DNA because it was Amanda and Knox DNA together. That the bathroom was so sanitized is in itself suspicious.

You are correct that nothing reacts to just blood which was what the pro-Amanda side used to deal with the footprints. They went with fruit or vegetable juice which would have also reacted. The problem with that is explaining the location. It would be a pretty big coincidence that the only time these juice covered feet were present was from the murder scene to Amanda's room. If they were all over the house then fine I could at least start to take it into consideration but that they only appear where you'd expect bloody footprints makes the argument that it was a reaction with a different agent to incredible to believe.

The same could be said with the bathroom. Whatever the product was detecting it was something that someone had been covered in and cleaning up from. Now if there was an explanation of how the bathroom could have been covered in some other substance that reacts then we would have heard about it. Further, if the bathroom had not been cleaned we would have found considerably more DNA than was found.

That actually is one of the hardest parts to explain. Raf did carry a knife but it was one out of his collection not a kitchen knife. There homes were very close to each other but there is no explanation for how the knife got there that I know of.

Doesn't change the fact that Meridith's DNA was on it and there is no way for that to happen other than it being the murder weapon.

Can anyone point me to a decent cliffs of how Knox's story changed over the course of the whole affair? I didn't pay any attention to this story the first time around so I'm trying to catch up on the details now.

Well, the low levels of DNA in the bathroom are suspicious only if you know how often they cleaned the bathroom. If the bathroom was cleaned two days prior to the testing, and the chemical reacts with any kind of cleaning substance (the way luminol does with bleach), then all that red and the low presence of DNA would just be indicative of them having cleaned very recently.

As for the DNA on the bra clasp, I doubt there was lab contamination, but I still have a hard time giving it a lot of weight due to the time it took them to find it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Kercher's bra was cut off during the assault, and this was known at the scene, correct? I mean, I never made investigator, but I was a cop for six years, and I'm pretty sure that if there was a major piece of evidence in a homicide (like all the pieces of a victims clothing), we'd want to make sure we had all the pieces prior to leaving the scene originally. The fact that they missed it the first time (was it visible in any of the crime scene photos or video?) is problematic.

How did the boyfriend's DNA get on the clasp? I have no idea. Maybe the bra was in a basket of laundry and he picked it up thinking it was Amanda's. Maybe he touched it for some other reason while he was in the apartment, and she wore it before washing it. But since the bra was cut off of her anyway (wasn't it?), why would his DNA be on the clasp at all? And why wouldn't there be some blood on it, since if he participated in the attack he should have had blood on him, his or hers?

This is all just my opinion, and why I think there's reasonable doubt in this case. I don't think you should convict someone of homicide if there is so much confusion and misinformation from both sides of the case. I believe 100% OJ was guilty, but at the same time I understand why the jury acquitted him. Thinking there's a lot of questions that aren't answered about this case that give rise to reasonable doubt doesn't mean I necessarily think she's innocent.

I fail to see how we can know this with 100% certainty, it would depend on when the crime took place and when he was seen at the club, do we have a reliable source for his timeline of events?

Did you read the link I provided? He says he and Meredith agreed to meet at her place and she let him in.

I'm trying to break this stuff into bite size chunks, can we focus on the link I attached and what if any we can take to be true of his statements in the Skype conversation?

I'm confused by this statement, I was merely suggesting a potential motive for him could have been to cover up the attempted rape. I'm not stating this is 100% what occurred, I'm merely stating that it strikes me as a possible reason why he would commit a murder. The goal wouldn't be to "materially gain" from the murder but to cover up his attempted rape because she knew him and could identify him.

**I'm not trying to argue with you guys, I'm sincerely trying to wrap my head around this stuff, so please don't take my questions to be dismissive of your points or beliefs**

I've read through the last 20 pages or so of this thread and appreciate the time Henry and others have spent on explaining the details. I am wondering though if there is a simple timeline of events somewhere online that isnt hundreds of pages long. Its been hard to piece everything together, what they said happened, what Henry/others think really happened, in the order that it happened.

Thx for any help, much appreciated.

Well, that's not technically true, there's just no other way that anyone can think of or that seems to make much sense at the current time.

I'd be interested to know how they got the knife back to his place without some sort of blood transfer en route. Hell, how the hell did they not get blood transfer all over his apartment? There should have either been traces of blood or the entire front of the apartment should have lit up like an ocean under Luminol testing from them scouring the place down with bleach if they went from the murder scene back to his apartment without both of them cleaning up first. There's no way they could have participated in the killing then gone back to the boyfriend's apartment without a) cleaning themselves thoroughly first, including showering and changing clothes or b) transferring blood from the murder scene to the apartment, which would mean they should have either found blood or evidence of a significant cleanup at his apartment.

You're right, it makes no sense for anyone to walk around with fruit juice on their feet. But if the crime scene people didn't test for blood in the footprints (did they? if so what were the results?), then it really doesn't matter, because they were horribly deficient in their task. Luminol reacts with various substances, including but not limited to the iron in blood, bleach, copper, fecal matter, and certain compounds in soil. Ergo, a luminol hit by itself is essentially worthless - in order to meet basic standards for forensic evidence at trial, a positive luminol hit MUST be followed up by at least two additional tests - one to determine if the substance is blood, and a second to test for DNA (if the first test is positive). Another test may be performed in between those two (in order to determine if the blood is animal or human, a necessary test in some cases, such as when a kitchen knife tests affirmative for blood), but those two are absolutely essential if the prosecution is going to claim that the luminol footsteps are in blood, or have anything to do with the murder.

If they didn't perform these tests (I'm starting to read more about the case, trying to find sites that are either neutral or contain mostly source material rather than opinions, and JFC is that hard to do), then it raises a huge question about the competence of the investigation. If they did perform these tests, then it would certainly demonstrate evidence that someone walked around and tracked Kercher's blood, in which case foot and shoewear impressions should be able to provide some evidence (either excluding or not excluding possible suspects, or even linking one suspect directly to the crime scene).

"Uhhhhh don't know what I think about your detective work there, Ed"

The forensics report in the appeal did not find any credible evidence that Kercher's DNA was on the knife. http://knoxdnareport.wordpress.com/

Haha, I just watched the video of the crime scene tech taking samples from the bathroom. At least twice she used the same swab to collect from two spots (on the same area, like the sink, but still), and holy ****, I sure hope she changed gloves after she picked up the bath mat otherwise every swab she took from then on forward is tainted. Jesus, you can't pick up a bath mat from a shared bathroom then consider a combined DNA sample on a later swab to have any evidentiary value whatsoever unless you can demonstrate that you took reasonable precautions to avoid mixing samples yourself.

Of course I don't know what the different labeled swabs came back with, so far all I know all the mixed DNA samples occurred prior to the handling of the bath mat, but that's really shoddy forensic work there.

Were the mixed DNA samples blood, or just mixed DNA? I think there's a way to differentiate a comingled blood sample but I'd have to check on that - that would be far and away the most powerful evidence, since the odds of two people bleeding onto the same spot in a relatively clean bathroom at two separate times would be astronomical. Two combined DNA samples showing up in a shared bathroom - IDK, would be interesting to see a control test for that. Get an average, ordinary shared bathroom and do some swabs and see what you get. I need to get a solid forensics textbook, I find this kind of thing fascinating.


Edit: You know, I don't know if Knox is innocent or guilty, but for everyone's sake I hope she's innocent, because the police made such crucial errors in the investigation (and the media appeared to try her before the trial, which happens here too, and should be stopped) that I doubt a conviction will stick, which if she did do it, is horrendous justice for the victim.

I hate shoddy police/technicians/prosecutor investigations, they turn the system into a giant charade and make any hope of real justice for victims into a farce.

If the reaction was to cleaning product that would not be the pattern. Further, they tested the other bathroom and it did not light up like that. Presumably they would use the same cleaning products.

It was originally under her body. If you want to discount it because it lay untouched you need to explain how Raf's DNA could have been transferred. There is absolutely no opportunity for that. DNA that was not collected for much longer than this is used all the time so long as there is no possibility of transfer contamination. The PR firm though pushed the delay in collection as in issue so strongly that people actually thinks it matters when it doesn't. DNA doesn't spontaneously appear if you leave an item unattended.

DNA is actually a lot harder to transfer than this. He was dating Amanda and in the house but outside of Amanda's room the only item that contained his DNA was the butts. Dry transfer requires considerable contact.

On any individual item I can see someone wanting to dismiss it but when you consider all the items together I can't imagine how any can. You'd need to have a series of very improbable explanations all be true while simultaneously accepting all the lies as innocent errors as well. If that was the standard no one would ever be convicted of anything.

Easily 2/3s of convictions in the States are justified with considerably weaker evidence than was available against them.

Is there a reason why It's impossible for them to have cleaned up/changed clothes and then went home after the murder?

Why would I presume that? When I've shared with roommates in the past we bought separate cleaning products for the areas we were responsible for cleaning. My understanding is that Knox and the victim shared the bathroom in the picture, while the other bathroom was shared by the other two roommates. Is that accurate?

And ultimately the "pink test" with whatever chemical that is is worthless without a follow-up test for the presence of blood. So that pattern isn't evidence of a cleaning product, but it's also not evidence of blood, so what the **** is it, and why does it matter?

No, DNA doesn't spontaneous appear. I already offered a possible explanation, which you discount because it wasn't forceful enough. Maybe he REALLY fondled the bra in the laundry before realizing it wasn't Amanda's, or even scratched himself enough to leave skin cells on the clasp. IDK. But to suggest that there's no other explanation other than that he helped take it off her during the attack, while also ignoring the fact that there's no evidence of blood transfer that would seem highly likely if the bra clasp was touched during the attack, seems nonsensical to me. Ultimately the prosecution is responsible for providing a reason for how the DNA got there, rather than the defense offer an explanation for how it did. If the prosecutions contention is that it got there during the murder, but somehow avoided blood transfer....WTF?

And yeah, to me a mistake like not finding the clasp in the first place, combined with some of the other mistakes, make me question the quality of the investigation. Kind of like what you said - one error is understandable, but a series of them makes you question the entire thing. So why is that no big deal for the prosecution, but overwhelming evidence of guilt for the accused?


Yes, that's certainly true. And plenty of innocent people are convicted then later have their convictions overturned. So....what's your point?

Yes. There is the normal estimate based on the body but also additional support from cell activity and witnesses who heard the scream. Someone was in the house hours after the murder and it couldn't be Rudy.

Yes that is Rudy's official story that he was there for a date and they killed her while he went to the bathroom. That story has changed very little although it likely is not all true it is more true than any other account. There is also the possibility he though hanging out was a date -- if you read 2p2 dating topics that happens quite a lot.

Staging a burglary in a way that matches the MO he used in a previous burglary is a pretty bad way to cover your tracks. There also is no reason why he would need to.

Likewise cleaning everything except the evidence that is yours is also not a good way to cover up a murder. Also you need to explain how he managed to clean up while also at a club.

The attack involved multiple people or at least someone with more than two arms so unless Doctor Octopus was in Italy that night we should go with multiple people.

Lastly the bloody footprint on the bathmat is a match to Raf not Rudy.

You can't re-test low count DNA so that is expected. Anyone making a big deal about this either doesn't understand what they are talking about or does and is intentionally trying to misdirect people.

He left and went to Domus nightclub until dawn; FoA use this fact to underline what a heartless dirtbag he is, but then have to deny outright the cleanup because they've acknowledged the lone wolf was somewhere else. While he was fleeing he bumped into a couple who testified to this fact at his trial. Another witness confirmed she heard people (plural) running away not long after the scream, via two routes (up metal stairs or down the road). Meredith's body was discovered in a position different from the one she died in. (Died on her side, found on her back.) She was covered with a quilt which had only a little blood, indicating her blood was mostly dry when it was placed on her. She died with her bra on (non-bloody parts of her chest where the bra was covering her while she was bleeding), but was discovered with her bra at her feet, with the clasp missing. The clasp was under Meredith herself, and was revealed to carry Raffaele's DNA.

Since we know that no one lingered after the deed was done, and that the scene was altered between then and morning, who could have done it while Rudy was at Domus? Is it at least conceivable that the people who cleaned up left some clues to their identities?

If it were someone else entirely, how is it they were so busy all night yet left no clues of their own?



I will read the link. I do agree he entered the house through the door and not the window. I also believe, that, like the others, he offered an innocent story to put the physical evidence in a more favourable, forgivable light. (Amanda similarly said Raffaele might have pressed her fingerprints on to the knife handle while she slept, and Raffaele made up some story about cooking with Meredith to explain her DNA on the other end.)


The attack, given what we know about it, required more than one attacker for it to go down the way it did. The reasons this is so are in the autopsy report. Since her pants were completely removed I presume this was an attempted gang rape that had to be aborted once Meredith screamed and was spilling blood everywhere. While there's no real "motive" for the attack itself, motive for the cleanup and staged break-in becomes much more clear, and I do agree with your take on that. The thing is, Micheli (and FoA) (and I, lol) agree that he was out creating an alibi for himself while someone returned sometime later to move stuff around.

Otherwise how did that bra clasp get under there?