'Amanda will get out eventually'
Edda Mellas, Amanda Knox's mother, talks exclusively to Simon Hattenstone about the honest girl she says she knows
Saturday, 27 June 2009
Edda Mellas looks down on the world from the peak of Perugia. With its green hills and blue skies, vineyards and olive groves, medieval churches and Renaissance frescoes, this is one of the most beautiful spots in Europe - but Mellas wishes she had never set foot in the damned place. She's standing outside the courthouse. "This is my home here," she says. Only two days previously, she stood inside the court as a character witness. She told the jury that Amanda Knox was a caring girl, a straight-A student, compulsively honest, a daughter she could be proud of.
Just a few miles away, Knox, 21, is confined to the local prison, charged with the murder of British student Meredith Kercher. She has been held in custody for 20 months, as has her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 25, who is also charged with Kercher's murder. To complicate matters, another man, Rudy Guede, is already serving a 30-year sentence for Kercher's murder after being convicted in a fast-track trial last October. He is appealing against his conviction.
It gets stranger still. The court sits only two days a week, it is due to take a two-month summer recess and the chief prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, is facing criminal charges relating to the infamous Monster of Florence murder case. In that case, Mignini argued that a satanic cult was responsible for eight double murders that took place between 1974 and 1985, although evidence suggested a lone killer. He is charged with allegedly planting bugging devices in journalists' cars and abusing his power to question reporters. He has denied the allegations, but if found guilty, he could face up to 10 months in jail. Bizarrely, Mignini has been allowed to continue practising throughout.
No wonder the world's media has devoured this story. It has everything - attractive women, jealousy, drink and drugs, questionable lawyers, violent sex and a ghastly throat-cutting. And, at its heart, it has two unlikely protagonists portrayed as a modern-day Hindley and Brady, student lovers united in death and deviancy. Or so we have been told. Despite the fact that the case is still being heard, due to Italy's disregard for subjudice and the ease of digital communication, the ghoulish intricacies of the murder have been debated worldwide. And nobody has been more discussed than Knox: there are websites devoted to her innocence, her guilt, her satanic smirk, her angelic smile, her penchant for Gatling guns and rabbit-shaped erotica, her devotion to mass and the Beatles song Let It Be. You name it. This is not simply trial by media, it's trial by Facebook and blog.
I ask Mellas what the past couple of years have done to her. She blinks into the sun and smiles. Briefly. Before her first sentence is out, tears are streaming down her cheeks. She apologises, saying she's not a drama queen by nature, and tells me she stopped eating when she heard Knox had been arrested. "I lost 30 pounds in three months, which was good because I was the heaviest I've been, but it wasn't good the way I did it." Mellas's younger daughter, Deanna, 20, has received anonymous death threats. And then there are the finances - they had been comfortably off, but now the family home in Seattle is remortgaged and they have any number of debts. But while Knox is in jail, her mother says, they don't have time to worry about the money.
"How bad has it been? Well, my mom lost her mom in the second world war when she was still young - she didn't get out of the way of a bomb quickly enough. It was a terrible time for her. She says this has been worse. It has devastated my whole family."
Edda Mellas, 46, was born in Germany. Her mother had fallen in love with a US serviceman, and when Mellas was six, the family moved to America. She qualified as a teacher, and by her mid-20s she was married to a successful businessman, Curt Knox, with a daughter, Amanda. A couple of years later, the marriage ended, and she found herself a single mother with two little girls.
Mellas displayed great resilience. She taught maths full-time in primary school, played football for two teams and even found time to return to university to earn a masters in education. When Mellas was 34, she surprised everybody by starting a relationship with a man 12 years her junior. She says IT worker Chris Mellas was always older than his years. He settled into family life, taught Amanda how to play the guitar, married Edda and became a model stepfather.
Amanda was super-bright, winning a scholarship to the prestigious Seattle Preparatory school. She was also a fine sportswoman - like her mother, she played defence for her football team. She had great pace, and at eight her team-mates nicknamed her Foxy Knoxy because of the way she read the game.
What kind of girl was Amanda? "Is Amanda," Mellas corrects. "She's not gone. She's always been a unique girl. A lot of kids want to conform, but she was always just who she is, and never worried about it. Amanda never had a huge amount of friends. She always kept a few people very close to her. She's also naive and not very street smart ... she lived in her head a little bit."
In what way was she naive? "Her friends talk of a time they were on the bus together, and a seedy-looking character who was obviously mentally ill said something to Amanda and she started up this conversation. They were going, 'Amanda! You don't talk to ...' She always trusted everybody. That was my biggest worry about her going abroad. She was too trusting. All kids that age have this idea that nothing bad will happen to them, but most have a little more sense of self-preservation." Was it recklessness? "I wouldn't call it that. She didn't see the world as a dangerous place."
Knox went on to the University of Washington in Seattle to study creative writing, German and Italian. She wanted to see the world, and at university won another scholarship, entitling her to a year at Perugia's university for foreign students, studying Italian. In September 2007 she left for Perugia, where she shared a cottage with two Italian girls and Meredith Kercher. Knox kept in touch with her mother, telling her she was having a great time, learning the language, making friends with the girls - especially Meredith - and in late October she began going out with an Italian student, Sollecito.
On 2 November, she phoned home in a panic. She told her mother she had returned to the cottage after spending the night at Sollecito's and a window was broken. She thought there had been a break-in. Mellas told her to call the police. She phoned home a second time, saying that Kercher's door was locked and she could not be found. Then she phoned a third time, hysterical, saying a body had been found.
Knox went to the police station to help with inquiries. She didn't realise she was already a suspect, says Mellas. Her family in Germany suggested she fly out of Italy and stay with them while she was traumatised, but she refused.
"She wouldn't leave. The biggest mistake I made was not insisting on her getting out of there," Mellas says. Would it have made a difference? "Absolutely. They wouldn't have interrogated her all night. It would have made all the difference in the world. She wouldn't be where she is now."
Does she think of that often? "Oh, constantly." She sniffs up more tears. "I don't know I'll ever forgive myself for not getting her out of here. My cousin said to me, 'They're talking to her an awful lot - are you sure she's not a suspect?' and I'm, 'No, no, no, no, no, she was the one closest to Meredith, she's just helping them.' That was so stupid."
When Knox refused to leave, Mellas decided to fly to Italy. When she landed, she received a call from her husband, Chris, saying Knox had made a confession of sorts. She had apparently told police she had been in the house after all, she had heard the screams when she was in the kitchen and had covered her ears to blank out the horror. She named the killer as Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese man who ran the bar where she worked.
Knox soon retracted the confession, and went back to her original story. She told Mellas she had been interrogated all night, the police had hit her on the back of the head, screamed at her, refused her food, drink and access to a lawyer, said she'd never see her family again unless she revealed what she knew, and put words into her mouth. "It even came out in court that they suggested to her, 'Maybe you were traumatised and you don't remember you were covering your ears.' She said, 'Well, OK, maybe', but then she would say in the same breath, 'But that's not true', and they were like, 'It's OK, we'll just write it down and then you can go.' But it wasn't, 'You can go', it was 'OK, now we've got you.' She's been in prison ever since."
Jesus, I say.
Mellas gulps. "Welcome to our nightmare."
Lumumba had sent a text message to Knox's phone saying, "See you later", which the police interpreted as an appointment to murder Kercher. Lumumba was freed two weeks later when a Swiss academic gave evidence that he had been talking to him at his bar all night.
Meanwhile, the DNA of Rudy Guede, a small-time drug-dealer and Ivory Coast immigrant was found at the scene of the crime. It emerged he had fled to Germany after Kercher's murder. He was recalled, charged and convicted of her murder last October. And that, thought Mellas, was that - she would finally get her daughter back.
But Guede implicated Knox and Sollecito. He claimed he had had consensual sex with Kercher, gone to the toilet and emerged to see Sollecito killing Kercher. Although his version wasn't believed, almost a year after first being imprisoned Knox was charged alongside Sollecito. This time, Mignini, the prosecutor, suggested a new sequence of events - Sollecito had held Kercher as Guede had sexually assaulted her and Knox had stabbed her in the throat.
"Do you have children?" Mellas asks quietly. I nod. "Well, you know ... it's the worst thing ever... that we've been through." She stops. "No. We could be living the Meredith nightmare. Amanda will get out of there eventually. It could be worse."
Lumumba is now suing Knox, claiming that her false statement cost him his reputation and livelihood. I ask Mellas how Knox felt about implicating him. "She felt terrible that he'd been dragged into this. She beats herself up about the fact that she didn't have the courage to stand up to the police in the beginning."
The evidence against Knox and Sollecito seems flawed at the very least, being based primarily on a retracted confession and DNA evidence, the authenticity of which has been questioned by defence lawyers. A knife from Sollecito's house had a good DNA match with Knox at the handle, and had the faintest DNA link to Kercher halfway down the blade. Experts have ruled that this knife could possibly match one of the wounds to Kercher's neck, but definitely could not account for the other two. "It was a big knife, and in court an expert demonstrated it on one of those dummies you do hair on," Mellas says. "It was horrible. Looking at it, it was pretty obvious what it would have done to a person. It would have almost cut the whole head off. Awful." In fact, the main wound to Kercher's throat missed her carotid artery and, according to the judge, she took two hours to die.
There is DNA evidence of Knox's footprints in the house (but she lived there) and shared DNA of the two girls in the bidet (again, no surprise - they both used it).
Meanwhile, in court, the case against Knox and Sollecito unravels bit by bit. For nearly two years we have heard that Knox was jealous of Kercher because she was so popular, but Kercher's friends testified that the two girls got on well and spent a lot of time together. "The only thing the girls said against her was that Meredith was surprised Amanda kept her condoms and a vibrator in a transparent bag by the sink, and that she talked of a boyfriend at home but had been with other men. They all said the two girls were close."
When Guede was trapped into admitting he had been with Kercher on the night she was killed (in a Skype conversation with a friend), he said he knew Knox, and she hadn't been there. He then changed his story.
It has also become apparent that evidence was withheld from the defence - a recording of two calls Knox made soon after the murder, to a relative in Germany and to an old boyfriend in America, in which she insists she is staying to help the police when they ask her to leave.
One thing that particularly disturbs Mellas is the way bloggers and newspapers have been free to assassinate her daughter's character. If Knox really was innocent, why was she smiling with such insouciance at the police station and doing cartwheels, they ask. Mellas says this was nine hours since Amanda had been told of Meredith's death, and the girls from the flat testified in court that she was distraught when she discovered what had happened. "The cartwheels? This is Amanda just being Amanda. As her friends would say, it's an Amanda thing. The police were still being friendly to her then, so she was stretching, and they were talking to her and she said, yes, she had been a gymnast, and they were like, 'Well, how's about a cartwheel?', so she did one."
Then there was a story she had written about a violent rape that she had posted on her Facebook site. "Ah, yes ... that," Mellas says. "That was for an assignment at university. Her friend Jessie had the same assignment, and she said Amanda's story is tame compared with hers. Jessie got a much better grade, but Amanda thought it was at least well written and she posted numerous of her writings on Facebook." Bloggers have also suggested that the photograph of Knox with a gun is disturbing, if not incriminating. Now Mellas is smiling: "It was a museum in Vienna. She was with my mother. All the tourists took pictures, and then there's one with my sister and my mum."
In December 2007, a month after Knox's arrest, the Daily Mail published a piece suggesting that Knox had become addicted to casual sex and the most potent form of marijuana, skunk. "You know, she wasn't perfect," Mellas says. "She shouldn't have been out drinking when she wasn't 21. She shouldn't have been smoking pot - it's illegal. But she was never one to go out and buy marijuana - if other people had it, she'd partake. No, she was a normal college kid."
Mellas believes the damage has been cumulative. "I don't think she was very promiscuous, but even if she was sleeping with everything that walked by her, that wouldn't mean you're a murderer. I guess you put all that little stuff together and you get a picture of a crazed girl, which is not Amanda."
Has she ever thought her daughter is guilty? "Never. Never ever." How can she be so sure that she knows everything about her children? "I'll tell you a little story about Amanda. Amanda doesn't know how to lie. If you were to ask her, 'What d'you think of my shoes?' and she thought they were hideous, she doesn't do the polite thing - she'll tell you they're hideous. Since she was five she'd do that. That's what I meant by unique. Some of those interesting social things most people do, she doesn't."
If the evidence was stronger against Knox, would Mellas still be campaigning for her release? "First of all, I think Amanda would tell us. She wouldn't want us to waste our time. But I'd make sure she had great legal representation. I'd do everything, I'd love my daughter, but I wouldn't be telling everybody she is innocent."
Knox hasn't complained about her treatment in prison. How is she coping? "Better than me. She cries less!" What does she do all day? "She studies, reads, writes letters. She's let out once a day to exercise. She cooks herself food. She had a camp stove, and she can now make pizza from scratch."
Has she changed? "Oh yeah! She's no longer trusting. That was a hard lesson to learn. None of us will ever be the same. But I think she'll go on to do brilliant things with her life. Her lawyer told me she could be an Italian lawyer - her Italian's that good now. She's talked about going in to helping people who have been wrongfully incarcerated."
As for Mellas, she can't wait until it's over and she can get on with life again. "I want to go back to being nobody from west Seattle, that's what I want to do." But what if Knox is found guilty? "No," she says, "I can't bear to think of that."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2009