3.
So what was Amanda Knox’s problem? She was mismatched. She’s the innocent person who acts guilty. She’s Nervous Nelly.
Knox was—to those who did not know her—confusing. At the time of the crime she was twenty and beautiful, with high cheekbones and striking blue eyes. Her nickname was “Foxy Knoxy.” The tabloids got hold of a list she had made of all the men she’d slept with. She was the femme fatale—brazen and sexual. The day after her roommate’s brutal murder, she was spotted buying red underwear at a lingerie shop with her boyfriend.
In fact, the “Foxy Knoxy” nickname had nothing to do with sex. It was bestowed on her at age thirteen by soccer teammates for the deft way she moved the ball up and down the field. She was buying red underwear a few days after her roommate’s murder because her house was a crime scene and she couldn’t get access to her clothes. She wasn’t a femme fatale.2 She was an immature young woman only a few years removed from an awkward and pimply adolescence. Brazen and sexual? Amanda Knox was actually a bit of a misfit.
“I was the quirky kid who hung out with the sulky manga-readers, the ostracized gay kids, and the theater geeks,” she writes in her memoir, published in 2011 after she was finally released from an Italian prison.
In high school she was the middle-class kid on financial aid, surrounded by well-heeled classmates. “I took Japanese and sang, loudly, in the halls while walking from one class to another. Since I didn’t really fit in, I acted like myself, which pretty much made sure I never did.”
Matched people conform with our expectations. Their intentions are consistent with their behavior. The mismatched are confusing and unpredictable: “I’d do things that would embarrass most teenagers and adults—walking down the street like an Egyptian or an elephant—but that kids found fall-over hilarious.”
Kercher’s murder changed the way Kercher’s circle of friends behaved. They wept quietly, hushed their voices, murmured their sympathies. Knox didn’t.
Just listen to a handful of quotations that I’ve taken—at random—from the British journalist John Follain’s Death in Perugia. Believe me, there are more like this. Here is Follain describing what happened when Kercher’s friends met up with Knox and Sollecito at the police station the day after the murder.
“Oh Amanda. I’m so sorry!” Sophie exclaimed, as she instinctively put her arms around her and gave her a bear hug.
Amanda didn’t hug Sophie back. Instead, she stiffened, holding her arms down by her sides. Amanda said nothing.
Surprised, Sophie let go of her after a couple of seconds and stepped back. There was no trace of emotion on Amanda’s face. Raffaele walked up to Amanda and took hold of her hand; the couple just stood there, ignoring Sophie and gazing at each other.
Then:
Amanda sat with her feet resting on Raffaele’s lap…the two caressed and kissed each other; sometimes they’d even laugh.
How could Amanda act like that? Sophie asked herself. Doesn’t she care?
Then:
Most of Meredith’s friends were in tears or looked devastated, but Amanda and Raffaele made smacking noises with their lips when they kissed or sent kisses to each other.
And then:
“Let’s hope she didn’t suffer,” Natalie said.
“What do you think? They cut her throat, Natalie. She fucking bled to death!” Amanda retorted.
Amanda’s words chilled Natalie; she was surprised both by Amanda talking of several killers, and by the coldness of her tone. Natalie thought it was as if Meredith’s death didn’t concern her.
In an interview with Knox, Diane Sawyer of ABC News brought up that last exchange in the police station, where Knox snapped at Kercher’s friend and said, “She fucking bled to death.”
Knox: Yeah. I was angry. I was pacing, thinking about what Meredith must have been through.
Sawyer: Sorry about that now?
Knox: I wish I could’ve been more mature about it, yeah.
In a situation that typically calls for a sympathetic response, Knox was loud and angry. The interview continues:
Sawyer: You can see that this does not look like grief. Does not read as grief.
The interview was conducted long after the miscarriage of justice in the Kercher case had become obvious. Knox had just been freed after spending four years in an Italian prison for the crime of not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered. Yet what does Diane Sawyer say to her? She scolds her for not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered.
In the introduction to the interview, the news anchor says that Knox’s case remains controversial because, in part, “her pleas for innocence seemed to many people more cold and calculating than remorseful”—which is an even more bizarre thing to say, isn’t it? Why would we expect Knox to be remorseful? We expect remorse from the guilty. Knox didn’t do anything. But she’s still being criticized for being “cold and calculating.” At every turn, Knox cannot escape censure for her weirdness.
Knox: I think everyone’s reaction to something horrible is different.
She’s right! Why can’t someone be angry in response to a murder, rather than sad? If you were Amanda Knox’s friend, none of this would surprise you. You would have seen Knox walking down the street like an elephant. But with strangers, we’re intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.
While waiting to be interviewed by police, four days after Kercher’s body was discovered, Knox decided to stretch. She’d been sitting, slumped, for hours. She touched her toes, held her arms over her head. The policeman on duty said to her, “You seem really flexible.”
I replied, “I used to do a lot of yoga.” He said, “Can you show me? What else can you do?” I took a few steps toward the elevator and did a split. It felt good to know I still could. While I was on the floor, legs splayed, the elevator doors opened. Rita Ficarra, the cop who had reprimanded Raffaele and me about kissing the day before, stepped out. “What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice full of contempt.3
The lead investigator in the case, Edgardo Giobbi, says he had doubts about Knox from the moment she walked with him through the crime scene. As she put on protective booties, she swiveled her hips and said, “Ta-dah.”
“We were able to establish guilt,” Giobbi said, “by closely observing the suspect’s psychological and behavioral reaction during the interrogation. We don’t need to rely on other kinds of investigation.”
The prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini, brushed off the mounting criticisms of the way his office had handled the murder. Why did people focus so much on the botched DNA analysis? “Every piece of proof has aspects of uncertainty,” he said. The real issue was mismatched Amanda. “I have to remind you that her behavior was completely inexplicable. Totally irrational. There’s no doubt of this.”4
From Bernard Madoff to Amanda Knox, we do not do well with the mismatched.
4.
The most disturbing of Tim Levine’s findings was when he showed his lying videotapes to a group of seasoned law-enforcement agents—people with fifteen years or more of interrogation experience. He had previously used as his judges students and adults from ordinary walks of life. They didn’t do well, but perhaps that’s to be expected. If you are a real-estate agent or a philosophy major, identifying deception in an interrogation isn’t necessarily something you do every day. But maybe, he thought, people whose job it was to do exactly the kind of thing he was measuring would be better.