By Philip Willan

Perugia, Italy —The gentle sobbing of a female voice and a low monotone from the judge signaled the fate of the two defendants as the Meredith Kercher murder trial ended in high drama early Saturday.
The swelling sound of weeping and the repeated word “condanna” indicated that Judge Giancarlo Massei had found Perugia University students Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito guilty of murder, sexual assault and – in Knox’s case – defamation.
It was shortly after midnight on Friday and dozens of reporters were still trying to fight their way through the scrum of people outside the entrance to the Perugia courthouse when Massei delivered his anxiously awaited verdict: 26 years imprisonment for Knox and 25 for her accomplice Sollecito.
The two were also ordered to pay millions of pounds in compensation to the victim’s relatives.
The Kercher family wept silently as the judge identified the killers of their beautiful and talented daughter, but the focus of the tragedy had moved on to the relatives of Knox and Sollecito, stunned by the prospect of their loved ones being swallowed by an Italian jail for up to a quarter of a century.
As the American language student was led from the court weeping uncontrollably the only member of her family with the courage to confront the press was stepmother Cassandra Knox.
“Devastated,” was the word she chose. “I can’t put it into words that you could print. It’s absolutely unbelievable,” she told reporters in the medieval courtroom.
The family were expecting a very different outcome and Amanda had been in good spirits. “She was maybe a little confident, hopeful. We had a ticket and we were going home.”
Less surprised by the outcome was author and documentary film-maker Paul Russell, whose book on the case, “Darkness Descending”, is due to be published in Britain in January.
“It’s a fair verdict,” Russell said. The fact the court turned down the prosecutor’s request for two life sentences “obviously means the judge doesn’t believe there was premeditation, which fits the evidence. It’s more or less what I expected.”
The British and American girls’ Umbrian student adventure turned to ashes on the cold morning of November 2 2007 when a mobile phone thrown into someone’s garden led police to a whitewashed cottage in Via della Pergola.
　　　 Behind a locked bedroom door was the body of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, her windpipe crushed and her throat slashed with a knife. The Leeds University exchange student was lying on the floor, partially clothed and with one foot sticking out from under a duvet.
　　　 One of the last photographs taken of Meredith – Mez to family and friends – showed her dressed as a vampire for a Halloween party, with fake blood running from her lips. The macabre image may have inspired investigators to speculate that she had fallen victim to some kind of pagan blood ritual, as they grasped for a motive for the apparently inexplicable crime.
　　　 The people who would become suspects in the killing, Meredith’s American flatmate Amanda Knox, then aged 20, and Knox’s 23-year-old Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were already present on the scene of the crime.
　　　 They had discovered the front door to the house open that morning, drops of blood on the floor and in the corridor, and there was no response from behind Mez’s locked door, they told investigators.
　　　 Their confused and contradictory evidence, explained by the fact that they had spent much of the previous day smoking marijuana, would soon turn them from traumatized friends and eyewitnesses into the protagonists of a crime mystery that has exerted a grim fascination on the public in three continents.
　　　 The seemingly motiveless murder of a friendly, fun-loving young woman from south London in a picture postcard medieval Italian town had all the ingredients to captivate the media, who have flocked from around the world to the Via della Pergola “house of horrors” and to the cramped Perugia courtroom where Italian justice has attempted to puzzle out the mystery.
　　　 Even more gripping for the media narrative has been the paradoxical image of the central suspect, who, according to investigators, concealed a wicked heart behind an angelic face and a winning smile, the epitome of fresh-faced innocence framed by a shower of blonde hair.
　　　 Amanda Knox’s trouble began with her confused account of what she was doing on the night of the crime and took a turn for the worse as observers noted what they saw as a strange and inappropriate reaction to the tragedy.
As information emerged about her penchant for promiscuous sex, her drug consumption and her fascination for the macabre, she gradually turned into a suspect.
Her MySpace pseudonym of Foxy Knoxy took on a sinister light, as did her carefree online account of her sexual adventures, a video of her smiling drunkenly at a party and a short story describing the drugging and raping of a woman.
Raffaele Sollecito’s description of himself in his blog also became a source of embarrassment. “I am very honest, peaceful, kind, but sometimes completely mad,” the information technology student wrote. And a photo showing him swathed in toilet paper and clutching a large cleaver somehow looked less funny as magistrates accused him of murder.
A fascination with knives and with violent and erotic literature, in particular Japanese manga comics, would also help the prosecution as it began to build its case against him.
But the first person formally to become a suspect, arrested and detained for two weeks, would actually turn out to be innocent.
Congolese bar manager Patrick Lumumba first comes into the story in Amanda’s blog. “Speaking of working, I’ve been working every night… at a bar called Le Chic. It’s a really small place owned by this man from the Congo. His name is Patrick,” she wrote. “I’m actually at one of my happiest places right now.”
It would be a less happy memory she would consign to investigators during a prolonged period of interrogation by the police, during which, she claims, she was confused, frightened, intimidated and denied access to a lawyer.
Meredith and Patrick, she said, had gone off together to Mez’s room on the night of the crime.
“At a certain point I heard Meredith screaming and I was so frightened I put my fingers in my ears,” she told the police. “I’m not sure whether Raffaele was there too that evening but I do remember waking up at his house in his bed and that in the morning I went back to where I lived, where I found the door open.”
Amanda had fingered the wrong black man, however. On November 20 2007 police arrested Rudy Guede, a 20-year-old drifter from the Ivory Coast who had lived in Perugia since the age of five.
A blood-stained fingerprint on a pillowcase placed him on the scene of the crime, as did DNA evidence that indicated that he had had sex with Kercher before her murder and faeces found in the toilet.
Guede had fled to Germany. On his return he admitted to investigators that he had been with Meredith in her flat, but denied having sex with her or killing her.
When he emerged from the toilet a young man carrying a knife and resembling Raffaele Sollecito brushed past him, he said. Amanda had also been present and he had heard the two women quarreling about money.
Fearing he would become a convenient suspect because of his colour, he fled the scene, leaving Meredith to drown in her own blood.
Magistrates didn’t believe him and he was sentenced to 30 years for murder and sexual assault at the end of a fast-track trial.
The separation of the case against Guede, for whom there appeared to be incontrovertible forensic evidence of involvement in the crime, has inevitably curtailed the possibility of exploring the relationship between the three suspects and their joint responsibility – as argued by the prosecution – for Meredith’s murder.
As the three suspects underwent their separate trials in Perugia, Italian justice found itself on trial as well in the court of international public opinion.
While the British press has tended to empathise with Meredith and highlight salacious aspects of “Foxy Knoxy’s” private life, observers in America have sided with the fresh-faced girl from Seattle, contending that she has been harshly treated by Italian justice, rail-roaded into implicating herself in the crime and accused of an horrific offence on the basis of speculation and innuendo.
Lead prosecutor Giuliano Mignini has become a particular focus for criticism.
His links to the controversial Rome blogger Gabriella Carlizzi have been a cause of embarrassment, raising the prospect that some of the wildest conspiratorial aspects of his reconstruction of the crime may have flowed from her online pen.
His early claim that the murder could have been a “sexual and sacrificial rite” to mark the occasion of Halloween appeared to echo Carlizzi’s contention that the killing was a sacrifice organized by a secret Masonic sect, the Order of the Red Rose.
Francesco Bruno, one of Italy’s leading criminologists, is critical of Mignini’s handling of the case.
“In my opinion the investigation started off on the wrong track and resulted in two young people being held on remand for a long time on the basis of doubtful evidence. At the very least they should have been released on bail.”
Bruno said Knox and Sollecito did not fit the profile of youthful assassins and there was little evidence to link them to Guede, who was probably the real killer.
With no motive, no confessions and no eyewitnesses, the prosecution reined in its wilder esoteric murder scenario, painting a picture of conflict between Knox and Kercher and speculating about a drug-fuelled group sex session – imposed on Meredith — that spun out of control.
In the absence of witnesses, the key battle was over forensics, with the prosecution citing traces of Meredith’s DNA found on a knife blade in Sollecito’s home and traces of the Italian student’s DNA on the clasp of Meredith’s bra.
The knife is incompatible with Meredith’s wounds, the defence retorted, and the DNA sample on the bra was the result of contamination because the evidence had not been properly conserved.
Amanda’s unjust accusation of an innocent black man and the artificial staging of a break-in – with glass from a broken window scattered over objects that had already been rummaged through by an imaginary thief – was further evidence of her guilt and the lengths to which she had gone to conceal it, Mignini insisted.
Sollecito’s defence lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, set out to demolish the prosecution case with a spectacular display of legal oratory.
Quoting sources ranging from Plato to a popular composer of children’s songs, she described Knox as “the Amelie of Seattle”, a naïve innocent who saw the world through the eyes of a child, just like the heroine of the French film “Amelie”, that Knox and Sollecito had watched together while someone else was committing murder.