Meredith "Mez" Susanna Cara Kercher
Her parents are John, a freelance journalist, and Arline, a housewife.
She was murdered at the age of 21 in Perugia, Italy, on 1 November 2007.
Rudy Guede was convicted for his part in the murder in October 2008.
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty in December 2009 but were acquitted on March 27, 2015.
Three weeks after Knox and Sollecito were convicted, Guede had his prison term cut from 30 to 24 years.
Resulting in a final sentence of 16 years.
Guede had his first 36-hours release on June 2016, after nine years of prison.
Resulting in a final sentence of 16 years.
Guede had his first 36-hours release on June 2016, after nine years of prison.
A Little Background
She aspired to work for the European Union or as a journalist.
In October 2007, she attended the University of Perugia.
She began courses in modern history, political theory, and the history of cinema.
She was described her as caring, intelligent, witty, and popular.
Last Sightings
Kercher's Italian flatmates were out of town, and so were the occupants of the downstairs flat.
That evening, she had dinner with three English women at one of their homes.
She parted company with a friend at around 8:45 p.m., about 500 yards from Via della Pergola 7.
The Discovery
November 2 2007 a mobile phone was discovered in the backyard of a house and turned over to the Communications Police.Around 12:30pm two officers of the Communications Police presented themselves at the cottage.
They discovered Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito at the doorway.
The couple told the police that there had been a burglary and there was some blood.They claim that they had called the emergency number of the Carabinieri and were waiting for them.
The Communications Police asked about the phone.
Amanda Knox said the phone belonged to her roommate Meredith.
Knox explained that Meredith had two mobile phones: an Italian phone that had been given to Meredith by Filomena, and a UK phone that Meredith used to communicate with her family.
Knox and Sollecito. now inside with the two officers of the Communications Police and show shows them Filomena's room and the bathroom where the blood was found.
The Communications Police inquired about Meredith's locked door.
Amanda had called Filomena and told her about the burglary.After receiving a phone call from Amanda Knox, Romanelli arrived at the flat.
Romanelli inadvertently disturbed the crime scene.
Romanelli had discovered that the two phones Kercher typically carried with her had been found in a nearby garden.
Romanelli became concerned and requested that the police force open the door to Kercher's bedroom.
The police declined.
Romanelli's male friend forced the door open, around 1:15 p.m.
The body of Kercher was found inside, lying on the floor, covered by a duvet.
Autopsy
Pathologist Luca Lalli, performed the autopsy on Kercher's body. Her injuries consisted of sixteen bruises and seven cuts. Several bruises and a couple of insubstantial cuts were on the palm of her hand.
Bruises on her nose, nostrils, mouth, and underneath her jaw.
Three pathologists from Perugia's forensic science institute interpreted the injuries, including some to the genital region, as indicating an attempt to immobilize Kercher during sexual violence.
The Case
Perugia Reparto volanti (Flying Squad) Detective Superintendent Monica Napoleoni said that the murderer was definitely not a burglar and that apparent signs of a break-in were staged as a deliberate deception.
The glass distribution made a proposed entry through the window impossible.
The presence of glass on top of the clothing strewn over the floor indicated that the room was ransacked before the window was broken.
Massei concluded that, based on Meredith's wounds and injuries there were two or more assailants.
A witness saw the three accused together on the night of the murder, meters from the cottage where the murder happened.
A witness testified that she heard a scream at a time compatible with Meredith being attacked.
A witness testified that she heard a scream at a time compatible with Meredith being attacked.
This scream was followed by the sound of footsteps running in different directions.
Some bloody footprints were cleaned while others were left untouched.
Some bloody footprints were cleaned while others were left untouched.
The door to Meredith's room was locked.
This would have required that Rudy turn and face the door to lock it.
Rudy had blood on his shoes but his tracks lead directly out of the cottage.
Some time after she died, Meredith's body was moved and arranged to make it more obvious that she had been sexually assaulted.
All this happened a considerable time after her death.
The evidence shows that Rudy left the cottage soon after the attack and never returned.
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
Knox and Sollecito were held in prison.
Their trial began on 16 January 2009.
The charges were that Knox, Sollecito, and Guede had murdered Kercher in her bedroom.
Knox and Sollecito both pleaded not guilty.
The prosecution said, Knox had attacked Kercher in her bedroom, repeatedly banged her head against a wall, forcefully held her face, and tried to strangle her.
The prosecution theorized that Guede, Knox, and Sollecito had removed Kercher's jeans, and held her on her hands and knees while Guede sexually abused her.
Knox had cut Kercher with a knife before inflicting the fatal stab wound.
She had then stolen Kercher's mobile phones and money to fake a burglary.
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito said that they were at Sollecito's apartment on his computer.
They said they had dinner, smoked some weed, maybe had sex and then went to bed.
They said they slept until about 10:30 am the following morning.
Examination of Raffaele's computer and internet traffic shows no activity at all for the night of the murder.
Two different witnesses claim to have seen them in the vicinity of the murder scene.
At 5:32 am Raffaele's computer was used to listen to an MP3 file for roughly 30 minutes.
Amanda and Raffaele turned off their mobile phones the night of the murder, but at 6:02 am Raffaele's phone was turned on.
At 7:45 am that morning, a shop owner claims he saw Amanda Knox waiting for his store to open.
She headed directly to the cleaning supplies section when he opened the store.
The water spill was mentioned in Raffaele's 8:42pm phone conversation with his father the previous night.
There was no water to clean up in the morning so no need for a mop.
The mop was tested and nothing related to the murder was found.
The mop was tested and nothing related to the murder was found.
Amanda said she arrived at the cottage to find her front door wide open.
She claims that this did not alarm her since the door had issues.
The parking lot next to the house is often used for drug deals and needles and other drug paraphernalia are just discarded.
Her three roommates are away for the holiday so she and Meredith were the only two people who could have left the door improperly closed.
A black lamp on Knox's night table is her only source of light.
On the morning of November 2nd that lamp was missing.
The lamp was found on the floor of Meredith's locked bedroom.
Amanda explained that the light from her window was sufficient so she had no need to use the lamp and did not notice it was missing.
Amanda said enters her room at least three times that morning.
Meredith had her own lamp and her room had fixed lighting as well.
The position of the lamp when it was found in Meredith's room implies that it was used to illuminate the floor.
Blood that by Knox's own testimony she knows was not there the previous day.
Knox not only ignores the blood, at the conclusion of her shower, but she realizes that all the towels are missing she decides to use a bathmat that is soiled with someone else's blood to stand on and slide back to her room.
Knox not only ignores the blood, at the conclusion of her shower, but she realizes that all the towels are missing she decides to use a bathmat that is soiled with someone else's blood to stand on and slide back to her room.
The Luminol applied to the hallway and revealed both Knox and Sollecito's footprints.
Amanda and Meredith's DNA in a mixed sample in one of the footprints.
The police claimed that Knox had body odor which led to them questioning the her claim that she had just recently showered.
Amy Frost testified that hours after the body was discovered Amanda Knox told her that she never took a shower.
She told Amy that she had noticed the blood and this stopped her from showering.
After Amanda makes it to her room, she gets dressed and returns the bloody bathmat to the bathroom.
Knox then claims she went to the bathroom that was shared by the other two roommates, to use their hairdryer.
In this bathroom she notices that there is feces in the toilet.
Amanda Knox claims that she wasn't concerned.
She also doesn't flush the toilet.
She repeatedly mentions the feces to the police.
Amanda Knox's said she left the cottage and returned to Raffaele's where they prepared breakfast.
It was while having breakfast that she recounted the strange things she had seen at the cottage and then she became concerned.
In Raffaele's version Amanda Knox is already panicked when she returns to his apartment.
According to Raffaele Knox came running back to get him.
Raffaele eventually changes his story to he can't remember if they had breakfast or not.
Knox calls Filomena Romanelli at 12:08pm to report what she had discovered at the cottage.
This phone call was routed through a cell tower that covers Sollecito's apartment but not the cottage.
According to both Knox and Sollecito they did not discover the break-in until after they left Sollecito's and returned to the cottage.
Amanda called her roommate Filomena to discuss the break-in while still at Sollecito's.
Knox told Filomena that she was at the cottage.
During the 12:08pm call to Filomena Knox explains that Meredith is unaccounted for.
Filomena asks Knox to call Meredith.
Amanda had just called Meredith at 12:07pm and failed to reach her.
Knox makes a 3 second and 4 second call to each of Meredith's phones.
Knox later described this in her e-mail home as the phone kept ringing and ringing and that her concern increased with every ring.
According to Knox's version of events she got really concerned about Meredith after these phone calls.
According to Knox's version of events she got really concerned about Meredith after these phone calls.
Raffaele attempted to force open Meredith's door.
Knox ran to the neighbors who were not home to get help.
Knox tried to climb over the balcony to look into Meredith's window.
Sollecito then called the emergency response number.
Forty minutes pass between the two short calls to Meredith and Sollecito calling the emergency response number.
Evidence strongly suggests that Sollecito called the emergency number after the Communications Police had already arrived.
Sollecito gets questioned by the emergency operator and hangs up.
Sollecito gets questioned by the emergency operator and hangs up.
Knox never calls Meredith again.
Knox calls her mother at 3 am Seattle time, 12:47 pm in Italy.
In a recorded jail visit she denies making this call to her mother.
All that had happened is that someone had broken a window and according to Raffaele taken nothing.
Edda also changes her account of the contents of that phone call after this conversation.
The prosecution strongly implied to the jury that Edda was perjuring herself when she testified.
On the stand Knox had trouble explaining the phone pre-dawn phone call home.
Amanda: "Yes. Well, since I don’t remember this phone call, although I do remember the one I made later, ah. But. Obviously I made that phone call. So, if I made that phone call, it’s because I had, or thought that I had, something I had to tell her. Maybe I thought even then that there was something strange, because at that moment, when I’d gone to Raffaele’s place, I did think there was something strange, but I didn’t know what to think. But I really don’t remember this phone call, so I can’t say for sure why. But I suppose it was because I came home and the door was open, and so for me."
"i ran outside and down to our neighbors door. the lights were out but i banged ont he door anyway. i wanted to ask them if they had heard anything the night before but no one was home. i ran back into the house. in the living room raffael told me he wanted to see if he could break down merediths door. he tried, and cracked the door, but we couldnt open it. it was then that we decided to call the cops"
He arrived at the police station shortly after 10 pm.
He was confronted with phone records that showed he had called the police emergency number after the postal police had already arrived.
Raffaele changed his story and said that he had lied at Amanda Knox's request.
He was at home alone.
Amanda had gone out and not returned until 1 am.
He said that she needed to borrow plastic bags in the morning when she left to do laundry.
He made a statement confirming her alibi late in the Hellmann trial.
For four years Raffaele refused to explicitly confirm that Amanda was with him on the night of the murder.
Even though the police didn't ask her to come, Amanda Knox accompanied Sollecito to the police station.
After Sollecito changed his story and left Amanda without an alibi, the police then asked if she would be willing to answer some questions.
Amanda Knox changed her story, saying that she was at the cottage when the murder happened.
She said that the murderer was her employer Patrick Lumumba.
He was arrested and spent two weeks in jail, before his alibi was confirmed.
Knox had an interpreter named Anna Donnino for her interigation.
Knox had an interpreter named Anna Donnino for her interigation.
She was offered tea, and since the interrogation took place from about 11 pm to 1:45 am, and Knox had arrived straight after eating a meal, it is unclear why food was needed.
It is standard police procedure to fingerprint those who have access to a crime scene, to exclude the ones expected to be found and focus on those that shouldn't be there.
As Knox was escorted to have her fingerprints taken, she became agitated and started hitting herself on the head with her fists.
Meredith was murdered beside her closet, but sometime later her body was moved to the middle of the room.
At the police station, and before this had been discovered, Knox said that Meredith had been killed by the closet.
She said that Raffaele told her that is where she was killed.
Raffaele never testified, so he was never asked about that.
It was announced that the victim's DNA had been discovered on a knife recovered from Sollecito's apartment.
It also had Amanda's DNA on the handle.
Sollecito claimed that Meredith had come over to his apartment, and that while he was preparing dinner he accidentally pricked Meredith with the knife.
Meredith had never been to Raffaele's apartment, and he had never cooked her dinner.
It was collected during the second search of the crime scene, six weeks after the first.
The defense alleged that the DNA arrived there by nonspecific contamination.
In the small bathroom immediately adjacent to Meredith's bedroom four drops of Meredith blood were found.
And a drop of Amanda's blood was found.
Also, three sample of Amanda's blood mixed with Meredith's blood were discovered.
She claims this was due to the several ear piercings she had made in the days prior to the murder, the blood having dripped from one or more of these piercings.
Police experts determined that the footprint was compatible with Raffaele Sollecito's.
Amanda Knox had a scratch on her neck that was present on the day after the murder.
Knox claims that the neck injury was a hickey.
When Raffaele Sollecito's apartment was searched, the police reported that it smelled strongly of bleach.
A shoe print made in blood was discovered on the pillow found under Meredith's body.
Two police experts testified that this print was made by a woman's shoe of the same size as Amanda Knox's.
Knox claims that the neck injury was a hickey.
During the search two bottles of bleach were found under the kitchen sink. The police interviewed Natalia, who started cleaning the apartment in September and said she had never seen the bleach.
Rudy Guede
Rudy Hermann Guede was 20 years old at the time of the murder.
He had lived in Perugia since the age of five.
In Italy, Guede was raised with the help of his school teachers, a local priest.
Guede, at age 17, was adopted by a wealthy Perugia family.
In mid-2007, his adoptive family asked him to leave their home.
Guede said he met a couple of the Italian men from the lower level of Via della Pergola 7 while spending evenings at the basketball court in the Piazza Grimana.
The men who lived in the downstairs flat at Via della Pergola 7 were unable to recall how Guede had met them.
They did recall how, after his first visit to their home, they had found him later in the bathroom, sitting asleep on the unflushed toilet.
Guede allegedly committed break-ins, one during which he burgled a flat and brandished a jackknife when confronted.
October 27, 2007, Guede was arrested in Milan after breaking into a nursery school.
He was reportedly found by police with an 11-inch knife that had been taken from the school kitchen.
Guede went to a friend's house at about 11:30 pm on November 1, 2007.
He later went to a nightclub where he stayed until 4:30 a.m.
On November 2, 2007, he went to the same nightclub with three American female students he had met in a bar.
He then left Italy for Germany.
His fingerprints were found at the crime scene.
He was extradited from Germany.
He knew he was a suspect and wanted to clear his name.
He opted for a fast-track trial, held in closed session with no reporters present.
He told the court that he had gone to Via della Pergola 7 on a date arranged with Kercher, after meeting her the night before.
Two neighbours of Guede's, who were with him at a nightclub on that evening, told police the only girl they saw him talking to had long blonde hair.
Guede said Kercher had let him in the cottage around 9 pm.
Guede said that he and Kercher had fooled around, but did not have sex because they did not have condoms.
He claimed that he then developed stomach pains and went to the bathroom on the other side of the apartment.
Guede said he heard Kercher scream while he was in the bathroom.
Upon emerging, he saw a shadowy figure holding a knife and standing over her as she lay bleeding on the floor.
Guede further stated that the man fled, while saying in perfect Italian, "Trovato negro, trovato colpevole; andiamo" ("Found black man, found culprit; let's go")
The court found that his version of events did not match the forensic evidence.
He could not explain why one of his palm prints, stained with Kercher's blood, had been found on the pillow of the bed, under the disrobed body, since he had said he had left Kercher fully dressed.
Guede originally said that Knox had not been at the scene of the crime.
He later changed his story.
He claimed that he had heard her arguing with Kercher, and that, glancing out of a window, he had seen Knox's silhouette outside the house.
Who do you think killed Meredith?
Was it Amanda, her boyfriend or Guede?
Was it all three?
Was it someone else?
They did live in a sketchy neighborhood.
There was a serial killer in the area.
What about all the evidence?
I think all three were involved somehow.
Who actually murdered her and who were just the accomplices i don't know.
I think that Meredith's family didn't get the justice for her that they deserved.
I think all three should still be rotting in jail.
I think they should be there for the rest of their lives.
He later went to a nightclub where he stayed until 4:30 a.m.
On November 2, 2007, he went to the same nightclub with three American female students he had met in a bar.
He then left Italy for Germany.
His fingerprints were found at the crime scene.
He was extradited from Germany.
He knew he was a suspect and wanted to clear his name.
He opted for a fast-track trial, held in closed session with no reporters present.
He told the court that he had gone to Via della Pergola 7 on a date arranged with Kercher, after meeting her the night before.
Two neighbours of Guede's, who were with him at a nightclub on that evening, told police the only girl they saw him talking to had long blonde hair.
Guede said Kercher had let him in the cottage around 9 pm.
Guede said that he and Kercher had fooled around, but did not have sex because they did not have condoms.
He claimed that he then developed stomach pains and went to the bathroom on the other side of the apartment.
Guede said he heard Kercher scream while he was in the bathroom.
Upon emerging, he saw a shadowy figure holding a knife and standing over her as she lay bleeding on the floor.
Guede further stated that the man fled, while saying in perfect Italian, "Trovato negro, trovato colpevole; andiamo" ("Found black man, found culprit; let's go")
The court found that his version of events did not match the forensic evidence.
He could not explain why one of his palm prints, stained with Kercher's blood, had been found on the pillow of the bed, under the disrobed body, since he had said he had left Kercher fully dressed.
Guede originally said that Knox had not been at the scene of the crime.
He later changed his story.
He claimed that he had heard her arguing with Kercher, and that, glancing out of a window, he had seen Knox's silhouette outside the house.
Who do you think killed Meredith?
Was it Amanda, her boyfriend or Guede?
Was it all three?
Was it someone else?
They did live in a sketchy neighborhood.
There was a serial killer in the area.
What about all the evidence?
I think all three were involved somehow.
Who actually murdered her and who were just the accomplices i don't know.
I think that Meredith's family didn't get the justice for her that they deserved.
I think all three should still be rotting in jail.
I think they should be there for the rest of their lives.
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