Making Amanda Knox’s Timeline Alibi Work

The most concise timeline I've found on this murder so far, and interesting comentary from FinnMacCool...

April 16, 2009

Posted by FinnMacCool

on truejustice.org

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Amanda Knox’s first encounters with police and other witnesses the day after Meredith's murder go to the very heart of her credibility of her truth-telling about events, and of her guilt or innocence... in the crime.

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On Sunday, 4 November 2007, Amanda Knox wrote an email to a student welfare officer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Knox related her version of what had happened at the house on Friday the 2nd before the communication police arrived to establish why Meredith’s two mobile phones were tossed into a garden a kilometer away.

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This email was written while Amanda was alone and under no pressure. Copies went to various relatives and friends. For many of her supporters, it represents the essential truth of what happened, before Amanda was interrogated by the police and began changing her story.

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This analysis covers the period from noon to a quarter past one on the Friday, the day that Meredith Kercher’s murder was discovered. It compares the claims in the email with cellphone records for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the period.

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The contents of the email

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According to the email, Amanda and Raffaele were initially at Raffaele’s apartment at noon on November 2nd. The email describes how Amanda spoke with Filomena Romanelli and then tried to reach Meredith Kercher by phone.

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It then explains that Amanda and Raffaele returned to the cottage, where they found evidence of a break-in, alongside some bloodstains which Amanda had already noticed. (when?)

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They also observed that Meredith’s door was locked.

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After they tried and failed to break down this door, they phoned the police.

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After that, Amanda claims she called Filomena once again, who said she would return to the cottage.

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Cellphone records do not support this story nor do the police.

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Two police officers arrived at the cottage to investigate Meredith’s two phones, which had been found in a neighbor’s garden.

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The police claim they arrived at 12:25, and video evidence appears to support this.

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Amanda and Raffaele dispute the video evidence. They claim that the police arrived much later, after the call to the emergency services which Raffaele made at 12:55.

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Below, we look first at the scenario described by Amanda, followed by the scenario described by the police, with a view to determining what really happened in that crucial hour between noon and one.

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First scenario: Amanda Knox’s email is essentially true, the police account is essentially inaccurate.

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If we assume that the police are basically incorrect, and that Amanda Knox’s email is basically correct, in their respective memories of what happened on November 2 between noon and 13:15 that leaves us with several puzzling questions. Here are some of them:

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1. Where was Amanda at 12:08?

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At 12:08, Amanda calls Filomena. Amanda claims that she made this call from Raffaele’s house.
In his prison diary, Raffaele describes the same conversation as taking place at the cottage.

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Filomena says that Amanda explained, in that conversation, that she was at the cottage, and was on her way to fetch Raffaele.

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2. Why didn’t Amanda call Raffaele?

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Even though Amanda claims to have walked alone to the cottage, and to have been concerned enough about the bloodstains to want to bring Raffaele to have a look at them, she never attempted to phone Raffaele at all during the whole of that morning.

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3. Why did Amanda stop calling Meredith’s phones?

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Amanda first tried calling Meredith’s Italian phone at 12:07. At 12:08 she calls Filomena, who advises her to try Meredith’s phones. She doesn’t tell Filomena that she tried the UK phone just a minute ago (nor does she mention this in her email).

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In the email, Amanda says she called Meredith’s phones after speaking to Filomena – cellphone records support this claim. But she also says that the Italian phone “just kept ringing, no answer”.

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Her cellphone records show this call lasted just three seconds, and the call to the UK phone lasted just four seconds. (The WeAnswer Call service, which prides itself on how quickly it answers its customers’ calls, boasts that their average speed-of-answer is 5.5 seconds.)

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Next, Amanda claims that she returns to the cottage with Raffaele.

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But why doesn’t she try Meredith’s phones again? If the Italian phone was going to continually ring again – even for just three seconds – she’d now be able to hear it through the bedroom door (assuming Meredith had it with her).

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But this doesn’t seem to have occurred to either Amanda or Raffaele.

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4. Why didn’t Amanda call Filomena back?

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In the 12:08 call, Amanda told Filomena she would try Meredith’s phones and then call her back. .
In the email, Amanda claims that she called Filomena back three quarters of an hour later – after Raffaele’s finished calling the police at 12:55.

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But cellphone records show that Amanda never called Filomena back at all.

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On the other hand, Filomena DOES call Amanda back – at 12:12 and 12:20. It’s not clear whether Filomena receives an answer to these calls, or simply leaves a message, Amanda’s email makes no mention of having received these calls.

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Then Filomena tries a third time, at 12:34, which is when Amanda tells her that Filomena’s own room has been broken into.

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5. Why doesn’t Amanda mention that she called her mother in Seattle?

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Her cellphone records also show that Amanda called her mother at 12:47 – but she makes no mention of this call in her email.

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Edda Mellas claims that she told Amanda to hang up and call the police – but Amanda makes no mention of this advice in describing their decision to call the police.

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The email describes the decision to call the police as something between herself and Raffaele, after she had tried to see through Meredith’s window, and after Raffaele had tried to break down Meredith’s door.

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But in the ten minutes before Raffaele calls his sister (an officer in the carabinieri), Raffaele has received a call from his father (at 12:40:03) and Amanda has made a call to her mother (at 12:47:23) – neither of which calls is mentioned in the email.

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Raffaele’s sister gives him the same advice that Edda Mellas gave Amanda: hang up and call the cops.

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6. How can the tour of the cottage and the arrivals of first Marco and Luca, and then of Filomena and Paola, all take place between 12:55 and 13:00?

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Raffaele makes the successful emergency call (lasting nearly a minute) at 12:54:39.

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Meredith’s UK phone is activated at Police HQ at 13:00 – as part of a conversation which the postal police at the cottage are having about that phone with staff at HQ.

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This conversation mentions Filomena’s arrival, and the information she’s given them about it being a UK phone.

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This means that we need to fit the following activities into those five minutes, if Amanda’s email is to be believed:

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The postal police arrive later than 12:55

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Amanda and Raffaele give them a tour of the cottage, including the suspected break-in and the bloodstains in the bathroom

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Amanda writes down Meredith’s phone numbers for them, on a post-it note which Luca Altieri notices on the kitchen table when he arrives

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Marco and Luca arrive (and they see the post-it note) and have a conversation with the police about the ownership of the phones

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A few minutes later, Filomena and Paola Grande arrive. Filomena explains to the police about Meredith’s phones (one lent by Filomena, and the other a UK phone)

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The postal police make contact with their HQ

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During this call, Meredith’s phone is activated (at 13:00)

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In addition, at some point, Paola sees Raffaele and Amanda emerging from Amanda’s bedroom – but it’s not clear whether this happened before or after 13:00. It could have been after.

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But even if we move this emergence from the bedroom to after 1300, there simply isn’t enough time for all those other activities to take place in a period of less than five minutes.

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Second scenario: the police account is basically accurate, Amanda Knox’s email is essentially untrue

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Let us take the opposite scenario, and assume that the police are basically correct, and that Amanda Knox’s email is basically incorrect.

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This then provides us with answers to those puzzles above, and also fills in some of the gaps that were otherwise missing from the timeline.

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We also find that this new timeline is supported by evidence from other witnesses.

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1. Where was Amanda at 12:08?

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Amanda was at the cottage, and so was Raffaele.

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Amanda was not telling the truth when she said she was going to fetch Raffaele – since Raffaele was in the room with her when she made the call.

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This matches with the versions of both Filomena and Raffaele, who both believed that the call was made from the cottage.

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2. Why didn’t Amanda call Raffaele?

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Amanda never called Raffaele that morning because they were with each other the whole time – just as they continued to be with each other every moment until their arrest (except when separated for interrogations).

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3. Why did Amanda stop calling Meredith’s phones?

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Amanda called from the cottage in the first place, so there is no longer a question of why she called Meredith only from Raffaele’s apartment.

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Also, she allowed the phone to ring only for three or four seconds because she knew that Meredith would not (and could not) pick up – she knew Meredith was dead.

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The purpose of making these calls was simply for them to appear on her own cellphone record, to help construct an attempted alibi.

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4. Why didn’t Amanda call Filomena back?

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This question can be answered if we accept the hypothesis that Amanda’s intention was for Meredith’s body to be discovered by Filomena and/or Filomena’s friends.

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When the police found the couple outside the property “waiting”, they were really waiting for the one living person that they had called that morning – Filomena.

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Amanda ignores the calls at 12:12 and 12:20 because she wants Filomena to arrive at the cottage and to be the one who makes the “discoveries” of the break-in, and the locked bedroom.

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So that when Filomena arrived at the cottage, Amanda and Raffaele (at the front of the house) could have said, “Oh, we decided to wait for you. Let’s go in together.”

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However, Amanda answers Filomena’s 12:34 call because the police are already at the cottage and have already discovered the alleged break-in.

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So now Amanda needs Filomena to arrive as quickly as possible – and at this point she tells Filomena about the break-in and the locked door.

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Unfortunately for Amanda, however, Filomena decides to call Marco and get himself and Luca to go there first – knowing that they will be able to reach the cottage much more quickly.

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Amanda tries to delay the breaking open of the room by telling the police, and by telling Luca, that it’s normal for Meredith to lock her own door.

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She does this because, when it comes to the breaking down of the door, they want the others to be the first ones on the scene - and we can see that when the door is broken down for real, Amanda and Raffaele withdraw to the kitchen.

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Unfortunately for Amanda, however, she can’t resist boasting later to Meredith’s English friends that she herself was the first on the scene.

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5. Why doesn’t Amanda mention that she called her mother in Seattle?

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Amanda’s email is essentially fictional.

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The police arrived around 12:30, which is when they said, and this is corroborated by the CCTV evidence from the car park (timed at 12:25).

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So the police have been in the cottage for about a quarter of an hour when Amanda calls her mother.

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Amanda is first called away from the police to answer Filomena’s 12:34 call, just as Raffaele is called away a few minutes later to answer a call from his father at 12:40.

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However, it is not until the arrival of Marco and Luca that they are able to escape to the privacy of Amanda’s bedroom, where they make the phone calls first to Amanda’s mother, then to Raffaele’s sister, and then the two calls to the police.

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Notice that Edda and Raffaele’s sister both give the same advice: Hang up and call the police. And that’s exactly what they do, in fact.

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However, in trying to create a fictional backdrop for making the emergency calls, Amanda forgets that she’s already called her mother.

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Now she tries to explain that she and Raffaele called the police because of their panic over the locked room – panic which seems not to exist when Amanda is telling Luca that Meredith usually locks her door.

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(Notice that in this version, we don’t need to believe that nobody can understand what Amanda says.)

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After making these calls, Amanda and Raffaele emerge from the bedroom, as described by Paola Grande.

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Paola’s memory of arriving at the cottage just before one is supported by the activation of Meredith’s cellphone at 1300.

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6. How can the tour of the cottage and the arrivals of first Marco and Luca, and then of Filomena and Paola, all take place between 12:55 and 13:00?

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It doesn’t. The tour of the cottage takes a more realistic fifteen minutes (roughly 12:30 to 12:45).

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The police spend ten minutes talking to Luca and Marco about the phones, and about the suspected break-in, and so on (roughly 12:46 to 12:55), while they await the arrival of Filomena and Paola.

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The girls arrive shortly before one, as the girls said, and as the phone records support, and explain the situation of the phones to the police (roughly 12:56 to 13:00).

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There follows another fifteen minute examination of the house, culminating in the breaking down of the door by Luca Altieri at 13:15.

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Conclusion

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This version may or may not be accurate, but at least it is supported by external evidence, not contradicted by it.

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It is easy to see why Judge Micheli’s report found that the cellphone records do not support Raffaele Sollecito’s claim to have called the flying squad before the postal police arrived.

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It is also easy to see why these timings undermine other stories told by the two defendants – such as Amanda’s December 2007 claim that she thought the postal police were in fact the police that Raffaele had just called.

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Such a claim is absurd, given that Battistelli contacts HQ with a status report less than five minutes after Raffaele’s 112 call was made.

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The bottom line is that this does not look promising for Amanda Knox.