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Crime House exists because of listeners like you want to support Murder True Crime Stories and get the best listening experience. Join Crime House plus and get both parts of each week's story dropped at once, completely ad free. No more waiting for part two. Plus you'll get ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories show page. This is crime house. First impressions are powerful. We know we shouldn't judge people too quickly, but sometimes we do it anyway. A wrong word, strange look, a moment of awkwardness, and suddenly that's all anyone remembers about you. Most of the time, a bad first impression just means an uncomfortable dinner party or night out. But sometimes the stakes are a lot higher. In 2007, a a 21 year old British student named Meredith Kercher was murdered in her apartment in Perugia, Italy. In the hours that followed, police turned their attention to an unlikely suspect. Meredith's American roommate, 20 year old Amanda Knox. Amanda wasn't accused because of DNA or a weapon or a witness. She was accused because of the way she acted acted. To investigators, her behavior seemed off. And once Italian tabloids got hold of the story, off suddenly turned into suspicious, then guilty, at least in the headlines. What followed was years of sensational press, grueling interrogations, and a legal battle that wouldn't be fully resolved until 2015. But for millions of people, that didn't matter. Their minds were already made up. To them, Amanda Knox would always be what the media made her. A cold blooded killer, the ultimate femme fatale. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. This is the second of two episodes on the murder of Meredith Kercher, a 21 year old British student who moved to Italy for a semester abroad and never made it back home. Last time I walked you through Meredith's final weeks in Perugia, where the friends she made, the life she was building. And the night everything changed. On November 1, 2007, she headed home after dinner with friends. The next morning she was found murdered in her bedroom. Today I'll get into what came next. Because the investigation that followed was almost as disturbing as the crime itself. Italian authorities zeroed in on two people nobody expected. Meredith's American roommate, 20 year old Amanda Knox, and Amanda's boyfriend, 23 year old Raphael Solichito. While the world's attention was fixed on them, the man who was actually convicted of killing Meredith slipped through the cracks, at least in the court of public opinion. It took years of trials, appeals and reversals to get to the truth. And even now, long after the case was officially closed, the cloud never fully lifted for Amanda and Raphael. All that and more coming up. On the morning of November 2, 2007, 20 year old Amanda Knox returned to the farmhouse she shared with Meredith Kercher and two other women in Perugia, Italy. The front door was wide open, there was blood in the bathroom and Meredith's bedroom door was locked. Amanda would later say that none of this struck her as strange. The door was sometimes left open. The blood looked like a few small smudges. Meredith sometimes locked her bedroom, so Amanda took a shower. Then she went back to her boyfriend Rafael Solicito's apartment for lunch and told him what had happened. He encouraged her to check on her roommates, specifically Meredith. When Meredith didn't answer her calls, Amanda and Raphael went back to the farmhouse together. And that's when things started to unravel. The window in Filomena Romanelli's room was smashed and the place had been ransacked and Meredith was still MIA. At around 1.15pm, Filomena's friend forced Meredith's door open. The police arrived shortly after. Inside they found Meredith murdered. Her face was covered in bruises and her throat had been cut. On the white sheets beside her, there was a bloody outline of the knife that killed her. Everyone was brought down to the station. Amanda, Raphael, Philomena and Meredith's British friends. And in the days that followed, several of those friends started telling police they were concerned about Amanda's behavior. According to them, she didn't seem grief stricken, she seemed almost energized. They said she spoke about discovering Meredith's body with something close to excitement. They also claim she spent most of the night in Raphael's lap, kissing and snuggling while everyone around them tried to process what had just happened. Around 3am Police reported something else. With no Apparent warning, Amanda started slapping herself on the head. Nobody at the station knew what to make of it. By 5:30am after more than 15 hours at the station, she and Raphael were finally released. But the questions about Amanda Knox were only just beginning. Still, early on, detectives suspected the murder was sexually motivated and focused on identifying male suspects. They combed through photos from Meredith's Halloween night out, trying to put names to faces. Her beaming smile and vampire costume, faux bloody lip and all, made the exercise feel even more somber than it already was. At the same time, they were calling people back in for questioning. On November 3, they interviewed the four young men who lived in the downstairs apartment. One of them, a guitarist named Giacomo, had been in a situationship with Meredith. He was remarkably candid. He told police about smoking hash and openly discussed his sexual relationship with Meredith. Like the other male roommates, he had been out of town during the murder. His alibi was airtight. His interview stood in sharp contrast to Amanda's. During her second round of questioning, Amanda told investigators that Meredith hadn't been romantically involved with Giacomo or anyone else downstairs. She also denied smoking marijuana, something the police already knew wasn't true. It wasn't too surprising that a visitor would deny breaking the law in a foreign country. But it wasn't just Amanda's white lies that caught their attention. That Same day, on November 3rd, investigators took Amanda back to the farmhouse to walk through the crime scene. Before going in, they gave her paper slippers to wear to protect the evidence. According to investigators, Amanda responded by spinning around in them and giggling. That same evening, she and Raphael went shopping. Police had sealed her apartment, so she'd been wearing the same clothes for two days. According to a Perugia shopkeeper who came forward later, the couple was kissing while browsing the lingerie section. The same shop owner also allegedly overheard Raphael say, now we'll go home and have wild sex. Details like these spread fast through the local tabloids, which were already fixated on Amanda's behavior. And that scrutiny was making its way back to the investigators. Meredith's murder had drawn journalists from Britain and America who were demanding answers. Every day without an arrest felt like a failure. The autopsy hadn't made things easier. The coroner found two deep wounds to her neck, along with bruising consistent with a struggle. He determined that one of those wounds had killed Meredith, but couldn't pinpoint an exact time of death. He also found evidence of sexual activity, though there was no way to know whether it had been consensual. More than that, there was no DNA and no Clear motive. What they did have were fragments. There were a few faded shoe prints, the bloody silhouette of a knife pressed into the sheets beside Meredith's body, and some woolen fibers recovered from her clothing. At the time, investigators believed those fibers might actually be hairs, possibly from someone of African descent. The pieces weren't adding up yet, but by the night of November 5, police had made a decision. Amanda Knox was the key to solving the case. Their reasoning was mostly based on speculation. Some of Meredith's friends had told investigators the two roommates weren't getting along. Amanda had already lied about the drugs and about Meredith's relationship with Giacomo. And then, from the police's perspective, there was her behavior. The giggling at the crime scene, the kissing at the lingerie store, the hours she'd reportedly spent in Raphael's lap while everyone else fell apart. And there was one more thing. Hours before the body was found, Amanda had come home to a wide open door, blood in the bathroom, and a roommate who wasn't answering her phone. She'd taken a shower, gone to lunch, and only called the police after she and Rafael returned and found the smashed window. It was odd. And for investigators, odd was enough. They decided to bring Amanda and Raphael back to the station for another round of questioning. What followed was a grueling six hour interrogation. No cameras, no lawyers, no formal designation as suspects. According to the police, Amanda and Raphael were only people informed about the facts of the case. But they were treated like suspects from the start. Raphael was isolated first. His shoes were taken. A pocket knife he carried was confiscated. He was put in a freezing cold room and told that his shoe tread matched bloody footprints found at the scene. A few hours later, he broke. He told investigators he had lied during his earlier statement. Before he'd said Amanda was with him the entire night Meredith died. Now, he said she had left his apartment sometime between 9pm and 1 1am and that he wasn't sure where she'd gone. That changed everything. Late on November 5, or in the early morning hours of November 6, Raphael signed a formal statement recanting his alibi. After that, investigators immediately turned their attention back to Amanda. They pulled her phone records and found a text message she'd sent at 8:30pm on the night of the murder. Her boss, a Congolese immigrant named Patrick Lumumba, had messaged, saying he didn't need her to come into work that evening. Amanda replied in Italian with a phrase that translates roughly to see you later. Good night in English. See you later is a throwaway expression in Italian. It usually isn't it typically means what it says. Based on that message, detectives became convinced that Amanda had arranged to meet Patrick around the time of the murder. Because of the fibers recovered from Meredith's body, investigators had already been looking for an African male suspect. Now they had what looked like a connection between Amanda and her boss, who happened to be an African man, right around the time of the killing. The way they saw it, the pieces were coming together. And almost overnight, Amanda Knox went from a person of interest to the prime suspect. On this show, we're always digging for the truth. Yet modern healthcare remains one of the greatest mysteries of all. Everyone deserves real medical support. And that's why I want to talk about Mochi Health. 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Go to joinmochi.com Such an ordinary thing to walk home from high school. Her name was Mickey Costanzo. Just 16. She didn't have far ago. Seemed perfectly safe. Until it wasn't. What happened to Mickey? I'm Keith Morrison, and this is five Miles from Home, an allnew podcast from Dateline. Search five miles from Home to start listening now. By November 5, 2007, just three days after Meredith Kercher was found murdered, police in Perugia had convinced themselves they knew who was responsible. They thought Amanda Knox and Raphael Sollechito were hiding something. And with Raphael's alibi falling apart, investigators turned their full attention to Amanda. The text message to her boss, Patrick Lumumba, was their smoking gun. When they confronted Amanda about it, she held firm. She insisted that see you later didn't mean she was actually going to see him. It was just a turn of phrase. The police didn't buy it. They'd already found fibers on Meredith's body that they believed were hairs from an African man. If Amanda had met up with Patrick that night, it could tie everything together. Their theory was taking shape. Amanda had recruited her boss to help kill Meredith, possibly with Raphael's help. Adding fuel to the fire was Amanda's behavior in and around the police station, at least according to investigators. Beyond the kissing and cuddling with Raphael, officers reported that at one point, Amanda started doing yoga stretches. She'd been sitting in the hallway for hours. Officers later said that when one of them asked her if she could do a cartwheel, she did. One the female officers present said they found it nauseating to them. It deepened their impression of Amanda as flippant and indifferent, someone who wasn't taking the situation seriously. Amanda has since pushed back on that characterization, but at the time, it only made investigators more determined to break her. And what happened next is one of the most disputed parts of the entire case. According to Amanda, the interrogation that followed was brutal. She says that over a dozen officers rotated in and out of the room and yelling at her and pressuring her to confess. She claimed that some of them straight up lied, telling her they had hard evidence placing her in Meredith's room at the time of the murder. One investigator suggested that maybe she had witnessed something so traumatic that her mind had blocked it out. No matter what Amanda said, the police kept insisting she had met Patrick Lumumba that night. According to Amanda, a female officer even slapped her on the back of the head at one point, shouting at her to remember. The Perugia police flatly deny all of it. They say they never hit her and that her account misrepresents what happened in that room. But because the interrogation was never videotaped as it should have been, well, there's no way to know whose version is closer to the truth. But after hours of this, Amanda said she began to doubt her own memories. She started to think that maybe she was with Patrick that night. At 1:45am on Nov. 6, Amanda Knox signed a statement implicating Patrick Lumumba. In the document, she said she had met Patrick and Meredith at a basketball court on the night of the murder. She claimed Patrick had sex with Meredith, then killed her back at the farmhouse. The statement was vague and the timeline was thin, but it was enough. By 3am Patrick was in handcuffs. And he wasn't the only one. A key difference between the Italian and American justice systems is that in Italy, suspects can be held for up to a year without being formally charged. So while the investigation continued, Amanda Raphael and Patrick were all detained. When Amanda's parents heard the news the next morning, they were up in arms. They contacted the American Embassy, but there wasn't much they could do beyond arranging legal representation. They also hired a crisis PR specialist named David Marriott, whose work would prove crucial in shaping how the story was told and received in the United States. Back in Perugia, investigators felt like they were building momentum. Amanda's statement was their centerpiece, but they had other threads, too. They believed Rafael's shoes matched bloody footprints at the scene. And they thought his pocket knife might be the murder weapon. Then, five days after the arrests on November 13, the whole thing started to fall apart. Both Amanda and Raphael recanted their statements. Raphael said he'd gotten confused about the timeline. When he said Amanda left his apartment between 9pm and 1am he claimed he meant Halloween night, not the night of the murder. Amanda insisted her statements about Patrick had been coerced. And the forensics weren't cooperating either. None of the fingerprints or DNA from Meredith's bedroom matched Amanda, Raphael or Patrick. The bloody shoe prints were too large to be Raphael's, and his pocket knife was too small to have made the wounds. So far, there was no physical evidence connecting any of them to the scene. Instead, all of it pointed somewhere else. 20 year old Rudy Guede had been a fixture around the farmhouse, a drifter and suspected burglar who hung around the apartment below Amanda and Meredith. The day after Meredith's body was found, he boarded a train to Germany. He spent the next week drifting between hotels until he saw his name in the news. Fingerprint evidence had linked him directly to Meredith's murder. That's when investigators asked Giacomo, Meredith's downstairs neighbor, to reach out. He eventually tracked Rudy down on Skype. Over chat, Rudy told a strange, halting story. He said he'd had consensual sex with Meredith that night. Then, while he was in the bathroom, he heard her being attacked. He rushed out to help, struggled with an unidentified man who might have been Raphael, then fled. But he was explicit about one thing. Neither Amanda nor Patrick had anything to do with the murder. The police had heard enough. They arrested Rudy in Germany on November 20, two weeks after the killing. And back at his apartment in Perugia, they found a shoebox for a pair of Nike sneakers, the same size and tread pattern as the bloody footprints at the scene. With Rudy in custody, police released Patrick Lumumba. But after spending two weeks in jail for a crime he had nothing to do with, his reputation was already damaged. He shut down his bar and sued Amanda Knox for defamation. Although he didn't come after the police, who could have easily verified his alibi. By then, patrons at his bar, Lechic, had already confirmed he was working that night. But even with Patrick exonerated, investigators weren't ready to let go of Amanda and Raphael. That's because they had two new pieces of forensic evidence they believed tied the couple to the crime. The first was a kitchen knife from Raphael's apartment. Tests came back showing traces of Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle. The second was the clasp from Meredith's bra, found weeks after the initial search of the crime scene. It appeared to have Raphael's DNA on it. Both results were contested almost immediately. Defense experts argued the samples were too small to be reliable and that the delayed discovery of the bra clasp raised serious questions about contamination. Still, investigators felt it was enough to keep Amanda and Raphael behind bars while they built their case. And the case they built was striking, to put it mildly. According to prosecutors, Meredith was killed as part of a sadomasochistic erotic game that went wrong. The theory cast Amanda as the instigator, someone driven by a deep hatred of her roommate. Prosecutors claim she and Raphael had held Meredith down while Rudy assaulted her, and that Amanda had then cut Meredith's throat afterward. All three allegedly staged the break in to throw police off. And that wasn't all. At one point, the lead prosecutor told the press he believed there may have been a satanic element to the crime. The Italian media took his words at face value. In the US an alternative narrative started to emerge. The Knox family's PR consultant had been busy, and the American press was receptive. They portrayed Amanda as an innocent young woman railroaded by a foreign justice system. It seemed like the truth was somewhere in the middle and still far from settled. But the prosecution's theory was lurid and largely speculative. It also directly contradicted the testimony of the one person confirmed to have been in the apartment that night. And meanwhile, Rudy's story kept changing. When he was first arrested, he said Meredith had invited him over that evening and complained to him that Amanda had been stealing her money. The two of them then made out for a while. Then Rudy went to the bathroom. While he was inside, he heard Meredith scream. He said he ran out and found a white man with a knife, someone who might have been Raphael. She shouting in Italian. They fought until eventually the man ran off and Rudy went to check on Meredith. He said he found her bleeding in her bedroom, tried to help, then washed his hands and fled. He said he didn't call the police because he didn't think they'd believe him. Six months later, in May of 2008, the story shifted. Rudy now claimed that while he was in the bathroom, he he heard Amanda enter the apartment. He alleged that she and Meredith had an argument that ended in a scream. The rest of his account stayed roughly the same. In October of 2008, Rudy's case went through a fast track legal process similar to a bench trial in the US he pleaded not guilty and repeated his latest version of events with one small adjustment. This time, he said he may have been outside the apartment when he heard Amanda and Meredith arguing rather than inside as he'd previously claimed. The judge didn't believe him. Rudy was sentenced to 30 years, the maximum available under the fast track process. Because he'd chosen that route, his sentence was lighter than the life term he could have faced otherwise. By that point, Amanda and Raphael had been sitting in prison for a full year, waiting for a trial that hadn't even started yet. Unlike Rudy, there would be no fast track for them. And by the time they finally faced a courtroom, the public had already reached its own verdict. Crime House exists because of listeners like you want to support Murder True Crime Stories and get the best listening experience. Join Crime House plus and get both parts of each week's story dropped at once, completely ad free. No more waiting for part two. Plus you you'll get ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories show page. In October of 2008, 21 year old Rudy Guede was convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering Meredith. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Just over a year later, in December 2009, he was back in court for an appeal hearing, hoping to get that sentence reduced. He still claimed he was innocent, but he'd also changed his story. Now for the fourth time in this latest version, Rudy said he'd seen Amanda Knox at the crime scene and that she. She was the one who set the whole thing in motion. The judge wasn't buying it. The conviction stood, but because of Rudy's age and the fact that this was his first charge, his sentence was cut down from 30 years to 16. Meanwhile, 21 year old Amanda and 24 year old Raphael had been sitting in an Italian jail for over a year and the media circus around them hadn't died down. If anything, it had only gotten uglier. Reporters were now painting Amanda as a devious puppet master, someone who had manipulated both Rudy and Raphael into killing for her. Desperate for material, the press dug deep into her personal life. Someone dug up her old MySpace handle, Foxy Noxy, a nickname her youth soccer teammates had given her. The Italian press translated it into a phrase that essentially meant wicked fox. But that wasn't even the worst of it. While Amanda was still in jail, prison staff told her she had tested positive for hiv, a result that turned out to be wrong. But in the meantime, she was pressured to write down a list of her sexual partners. That list was eventually leaked to the press. It was a disgusting invasion of Amanda's privacy. And the tabloids didn't even get what they were looking for. The total came to seven men, not exactly the scandalous number they had wanted. Details like that kept feeding the machine. And in Italy, public opinion had turned decisively against Amanda. The fact that she had accused Patrick Lumumba, an innocent man who spent two weeks in jail before being exonerated, led many Italians to believe she had been hiding something all along. In the US the picture looked different. The Knox family's PR strategy was working. They refused to engage with any journalist who portrayed Amanda negatively, which meant the reporters who wanted access to the family had to tell a more sympathetic story. Over time, two very different stories hardened into fact. In the US Amanda was a naive young woman failed by a broken foreign justice system. In Italy, she was a beautiful manipulator with a dangerous, hidden side. That's where things stood when the trial finally got underway In January of 2009, Amanda and Raphael were charged with sexual assault, murder, carrying a knife, simulating a burglary, and theft. Because their defenses were so intertwined, they agreed to be tried together, all except for one charge. Italian law allows civil suits to run alongside criminal trials, so the jury was also asked to rule on Patrick Lumumba's defamation case against Amanda. At the same time, the prosecution kicked things off with the graphic details of the murder. And their theory was the same one they'd been pushing for over a year. Amanda had overpowered Meredith in her bedroom as part of a twisted sex game. She and Raphael held Meredith down while Rudy assaulted her. Then Amanda cut Meredith's throat. Afterward, the three of them staged the break in to throw police off the scent. To back it up, they brought in a string of witnesses. The first was a heroin dealer who claimed to have seen Amanda and Raphael standing outside the apartment for a couple of hours on the night of the murder. His story had some holes in it, though. He told the court there was a bus parked outside to shuttle students to the local nightclubs, which wasn't true. The bus had been there the night before on Halloween. It was possible he had the dates mixed up. Even so, he insisted he was certain about what he saw. The second witness was an elderly woman who lived nearby. She said she woke up at around 11pm that night and heard a terrifying scream right after. She allegedly heard two sets of footsteps running away from the building. Police considered her to be credible, even though she was hard of hearing. Finally, Meredith's British friends took the stand and testified that Meredith had complained about Amanda's hygiene and behavior in the weeks before the murder. It was enough to establish that the relationship between the two roommates had been strained. Then came the forensic evidence. The prosecution's centerpiece was the the kitchen knife recovered from Raphael's apartment. They claimed tests showed Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle. Their second major exhibit was the clasp from Meredith's bra, which investigators had found at the scene six weeks after the initial search. They said there were traces of Raphael's DNA on it. The defense hit back hard on both counts. The knife had tested negative for blood. The DNA traces on the blade were so small that experts said they couldn't be considered definitive proof of anything. And there was another problem. Experts had found a bloody knife outline pressed into the sheets beside Meredith's body. But the knife from Raphael's apartment was too large to match it. Prosecutors suggested a second knife might have been involved, but they never found one. Despite all that, the trial dragged on until the end of the year. On December 5, 2009, the jury returned its verdict. Amanda Knox and Raphael Sollechito were found guilty of murder. Amanda was sentenced to 26 years. Rafael got 25. Amanda was also found guilty of defaming Patrick Lumumba and ordered to pay him tens of thousands of dollars in damages. But in Italy, a murder conviction isn't the end of the road. The appeals process is more substantive than in the US Appellate courts can re examine the facts of the case, not just legal questions. So Amanda and Raphael went back to their cells and started preparing for the next round. The second round of proceedings began in November of 2010. And this time the court appointed two forensic experts from a Roman university to re examine the evidence. What they found wasn't good for the prosecution. It turned out that the kitchen knife had been tested under improper conditions and hadn't been stored in a sealed bag. More than that, researchers concluded there was no reliable evidence that Meredith's DNA was ever on the blade. And the heroin dealer who had placed Amanda and Raphael outside the apartment that night. The judge ruled his testimony wasn't credible and threw it out. By the time the dust settled, there was almost nothing left of the prosecution's case. The only forensic evidence still standing was Raphael's DNA on Meredith's bra clasp. But experts argued that even that had probably been contaminated. With their case falling apart, prosecutors leaned hard on Amanda's recanted statements about Patrick La Lumumba to paint her as a liar. It wasn't enough. In October of 2011, Amanda and Raphael's convictions were overturned. For the first time since the fall of 2007, Amanda, now 24 years old, was free to go home. She boarded a plane for Seattle, Washington and reunited with her family. It should have been the end, but the prosecution appealed and in Italy that meant the whole thing could start again. This round didn't involve a jury, which meant Amanda could stay in the US while it played out. That was a relief, but it also meant another two years of wall to wall coverage. More interviews, more tabloid fodder, more public debate about who she really was. Amanda mostly tried to keep a low profile. When she did speak to the press, she pushed back on the narrative that had defined her for years. She said the stories of her cuddling with Raphael at the police station had been exaggerated. And she explained that the giggling, the cartwheel, the behavior that investigators had read as indifference, well, it all came down to severe shock. She also said that at just 20 years old, she hadn't understood how her actions would be interpreted. Some people believed her, others didn't. In the US her base of supporters had grown steadily. But in Italy, the public remained largely skeptical and so did the courts. In January of 2014, a Florence appeal appeals court reconvicted Amanda and Raphael and increased Amanda's sentence to 28 and a half years. They had one option left. In 2015, the case went to Italy's highest court, a panel of five judges who would review the evidence and the outcomes of every preceding trial. After seven and a half years of legal battles, neither Amanda nor Raphael knew what to expect. The early optimism was long gone. Now they were just cautiously hopeful that the judges would look at the evidence and follow it where it led. In March of 2015, they did. Amanda Knox and Raphael Solle Chito were acquitted, and not just on a technicality. The court went further, stating Categorically that the two were innocent. The judges found there was no evidence placing either of them at the crime scene and cited serious investigative failures by law enforcement. It was the best possible outcome. And for the Perugia authorities, it was a damning one. Since then, Amanda and Rafael have gone in very different directions. Rafael has mostly stayed out of the spotlight. He earned a master's degree and built a career as a software engineer. In a Rare interview in 2022, he said he's still haunted by what he went through, including the six months he spent in solitary confinement. But he said he's found a way to move forward. Amanda has also found a way to move forward. In 2020, Amanda married an author named Christopher Robinson. Over the next few years, they had two children together. And unlike Raphael, she's stayed in the public eye. She became a writer and an advocate for people wrongfully convicted of crimes. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Italy to pay her the equivalent of $20,000, ruling that she had been denied a lawyer and a competent interpreter during her interrogation. Her defamation conviction for accusing Patrick Lumumba initially stood, and even after years of appeals, an Italian court reconvicted her of slander in 2024. But she's continued to challenge that ruling. While Amanda rebuilt her life, Rudy Guede was still serving his sentence. In November of 2021, after about 14 years behind bars, he was released early for good behavior. But that wasn't the end of his legal troubles. In 2023, he was accused of sexually assaulting an ex girlfriend. He denied the charge and is set to stand trial in May of 2026. Whatever happens, his name will probably be in the news again soon. And in a way, that's fitting. Because Even now, nearly 20 years after Meredith's murder and a decade after the final acquittal, this case refuses to go away. A lot of that comes down to how it was covered. The tabloids turned a murder investigation into a soap opera, and many people who should have known better played along. Countless individuals fed shady, unverified stories to the press, and the press printed them. The public's appetite for scandal did the rest. In the middle was Amanda Knox. For years, she was smeared as a sexual deviant, a cold blooded manipulator, a killer without remorse. In some ways, her reputation was dragged through the mud, even more aggressively than Rudy Guede, the man who was actually convicted of killing Meredith. But Amanda wasn't the only one who got lost in the noise. Meredith Kercher did, too. Amid all the trials and the headlines, and the competing narratives. The woman at the center of this story, the one who lost her life, faded into the background. Most people know Amanda Knox's name, but they can't tell you much about Meredith Kercher. In 2012, Meredith's father, John, tried to change that. He wrote a book called Meredith. It was a tribute to his daughter and a reminder that this was always Meredith's story, even if the world forgot that. On November 1, 2007, a 21 year old woman with her whole life ahead of her was murdered in a city she had chosen because she thought it would be safe. What followed should have been a focused, careful search for justice. Instead, it became something else. A spectacle, a competition, a race to sell the most dramatic version of events to the largest possible audience. Meredith's family put it simply, this can never happen again. Because when it does, it's the victims who pay the price. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference and to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode early and ad free. We'll be back on Friday. True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Terrell Wells, Cassidy Dillon and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Crime House exists because of listeners like you want to support the show and get the best listener experience. Join Crime House plus and get both parts of every serial killer's and murderous minds story dropped on Monday completely ad free. No more waiting days for part two plus Crime House bonus episodes every month exclusive to subscribers. 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