I’m crushed that Italy has cemented a lie

Knox, who now lives near Seattle with her husband, Christopher Robinson, their daughter Eureka, 3, and their son, Echo, 1, argued that the court had upheld the slander conviction “as a consolation for the officials they were rebuking”.

She added: “It was incredibly embarrassing for all involved when the high court absolved me of murder and cited ‘sensational failures’ in the investigation and ‘culpable omissions’ in the prosecution … This conviction branded me a malicious liar … and allowed the Italian authorities to scapegoat me for leading the investigation astray, instead of owning up to their failures.”

• Town furious as Amanda Knox films TV drama of murder in Perugia

When Kercher, 21, was sexually assaulted and murdered in November 2007, she was on a year abroad from studying European politics and Italian at the University of Leeds. Knox, then 20, was studying Italian, German and creative writing at the University for Foreigners.

Knox maintained that she had stayed with her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who was 23 and a fellow student, on the night Kercher was killed, but that police became convinced that she had been in the flat.

Raffaele Sollecito after winning his appeal against the murder conviction in 2011

EPA

“Everything that subsequently went wrong in the investigation and prosecution — the tunnel vision, junk science, biased witnesses — flowed from that lie,” wrote Knox of the police’s belief. She was working at the time as a hostess at a pub, Le Chic, owned by a Congolese immigrant, Patrick Lumumba.

Although there was evidence of a break-in — a shattered window and a rock found inside — the prosecutor suspected that it had been staged. Another early lead were black hairs on Kercher’s body that police suspected came from someone of African descent.

“The police were convinced that I’d invited Patrick over, that he had assaulted and murdered Meredith, and that I’d staged a break-in to cover for him,” wrote Knox.

She said that the police interrogation remained the “most terrifying experience” of her life, more frightening even than her four years in prison.

“I was 20 years old, and was questioned for more than 53 hours over a five-day period in a language I was only just learning to speak,” she claimed. “I was berated, threatened, lied to, and slapped, and eventually my sanity broke … [The mistreatment] reshaped my sense of reality, and made it hard to know what was true and what wasn’t.”

The police deny that she was hit or pressured into making the statements.

She alleged that her interrogators lied that they had “hard evidence” placing her at the scene of the crime, and later suggested that she must have been so traumatised that she had blocked out the memory.

“After hours of being accused of lying, it was almost a relief to think that I really was suffering from trauma-induced amnesia,” she wrote. “But I still couldn’t remember anything other than spending the night at Raffaele’s … I still couldn’t imagine anything to do with the murder itself.”

Knox, who said the police had used a “minimising tactic” to make her think she was a witness rather than a suspect, said that she then — in a state of extreme exhaustion and upset — “blurted out” that the perpetrator was Lumumba.

Hours later, Knox recanted: “The ‘memories’ I’d been pressured into imagining didn’t feel real.” She was later handcuffed and taken to Capanne prison in Perugia, only realising that she was a suspect days later when she was officially charged with murder.

• Amanda Knox: I’m still on trial but Meredith’s killer is free and harming women

Lumumba had an alibi, and the forensic evidence later revealed that the hairs appeared to be wool fibres. The evidence now pointed instead to a local criminal, Rudy Guede, who would eventually be convicted of sexual assault and murder in a fast-track trial.

However, the world’s attention remained on the woman now dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” by the media, who has been through a legal nightmare ever since. A year later, she and Sollecito were convicted of sexual assault and murder, but were acquitted in 2011 when experts found the DNA evidence linking them to the crime was unreliable. Their acquittal, however, was appealed by the prosecution and they were re-convicted in 2014, before being cleared again in 2015. Knox’s slander conviction was upheld in each of the trials, but she overturned it in 2023, before being found guilty again.

Guede, who served just 13 years in prison before being released, has maintained his innocence and argued Knox and Sollecito were the true perpetrators. Knox pointed out a clear contrast with her own case. “In the midst of all this, there is someone who committed slander, though he has never been charged with it,” she wrote. “Rudy Guede falsely accused me and Raffaele of his crime after his arrest; in one interview from prison, he said that he was ‘101 per cent’ certain I was there the night of the murder … He continues to smear Raffaele and me.”

Rudy Guede served 13 years in prison

AFP

Knox said that she had allowed herself a day to “grieve” the final ruling in her case, but would now put her energy into campaigning to ban deception by police during interrogations in the US. It is already illegal in the UK.

While the result was not what she desired, for Knox Thursday marked the denouement of her ordeal. There is no such end for the Kercher family: as her father, John, wrote in his book about his daughter, Meredith: “For me and my family, no matter how many court cases follow, no matter how many hearings, no matter how many speeches and investigations, this can never be over. As she was in life, in death Meredith will forever be a part of our lives.”