Amanda Knox, who spent four years in an Italian prison before eventually being cleared of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, is still unpacking her own story.
Italian authorities thought they knew who killed Meredith Kercher in November 2007.
So they arrested Amanda Knox, a 20-year-old American college student who had been sharing a flat in Perugia, Italy, with the victim.
And Knox—who became the target of an international feeding frenzy far hungrier for salacious details than the truth—was subsequently convicted of murder, as was Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian computer engineering student she was dating at the time, and Rudy Guede, an Ivorian national living in Italy who said Kercher invited him home with her the night she died.
Knox spent almost four years behind bars before an appellate court found her and Sollecito not guilty in 2011. They were retried and convicted in 2014—Knox in absentia, having long since returned to the U.S.—before both were ultimately exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
But plenty of people just assumed the Italian cops got it right the first time.
“For all intents and purposes I was a murderer, whether I was or not,” Knox, who maintained her innocence throughout, told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in 2013. “I had to live with the idea that that would be my life.”
Her experience had been “surreal,” she said, “but it could have happened to anyone.”
An eerie thought, which she reiterated in the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox.
“If I’m guilty, I’m the ultimate figure to fear, because I’m not the obvious one,” she intoned in the doc. “But, on the other hand, if I’m innocent, it means that everyone is vulnerable, and that is everyone’s nightmare. Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing, or I am you.”
So Knox, now 38, is understandably still unpacking what happened all these years later.
The new Hulu limited series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, starring Grace Van Patten as the titular murder suspect, is the most expansive scripted telling of her story yet, weaving in all the cultural and sociological forces at work that led to Knox being painted as a cunning femme fatale-slash-ugly American wreaking havoc abroad.
“It’s easy to project things onto women because we’re objects of other people’s fantasies. And it’s not just men,” Knox told The Hollywood Reporter. “Plenty of women were invested in my persecution too. Where does that impulse to condemn and diminish come from?”
The series, which counts Monica Lewinsky as an executive producer, “is not a show about the worst experience of someone’s life,” Knox told the New York Times ahead of its Aug. 20 premiere. “This is the show of a person’s choice to find closure on their own terms and to reclaim a sense of agency in their own life after that agency has been stolen from them.”
Here’s a refresher on the bizarre true story behind The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox:
On Nov. 2, 2007, Kercher, a 21-year-old student from England, was found dead in the bedroom of the Perugia home she was sharing with Knox and two other Italian roommates.
Police found her body around midday, the flat’s open front door and smashed window seemingly suggesting there had been a burglary but which authorities later determined had been staged. Kercher’s bedroom door was locked and she was half-naked, her blood-stained bra cut to shreds and tossed aside.
An autopsy determined she died of hemorrhagic shock from stab wounds to the neck.
Knox told police that she had returned home earlier that morning after spending the night at Sollecito’s and saw blood on the bathroom floor, but just assumed one of her roommates had cut herself. She said the toilet was unflushed, an indicator to her that someone else was home.
The day after the murder Knox and Sollecito were captured on CCTV kissing and buying underwear at a trendy boutique called Bubble. The store handed the tape over to prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who had the couple’s cell phones tapped. The next day, Nov. 4, Knox and Sollecito were said to be laughing in the police station waiting room.
“If [the police] ask me to stay on over Christmas, I’m going to ask someone for help…I can’t stay at their beck and call forever,” Knox told a friend over the phone, per a cell phone transcription obtained by Vanity Fair, which also reported that she was overheard at the station lamenting, “They treat me like a criminal.”
Knox and Sollecito were arrested on Nov. 6.
Guede has repeatedly denied having anything to do with Kercher’s death. He said in a 2017 interview featured on the Italian series Madelette Storie that the British student had invited him over on the night of Nov. 1, 2007, after they hit it off at a club.
They fooled around, but didn’t have sex, he said. Guede said he had eaten a kebab that didn’t agree with him and, while he was in the bathroom for at least 10 minutes, he heard Knox’s voice and then a scream “louder than the music from my headphones.”
He left the bathroom and said that he saw a man and was also “101 percent certain Amanda Knox was there.”
Guede said on the show that he went back to Kercher’s room and her throat had been slashed. He tried to staunch the bleeding with towels, he said, and then fled out of fear—not just the scene, but the country. He said he picked Germany because that’s where the next train was going.
He told police Kercher was fully clothed when he ran off and that he left her bedroom door open.
According to police, Guede went back to his place after Kercher was killed, washed up, changed his clothes and went to a nightclub, and then a pub. On the night of Nov. 2 he went out dancing again, police said, and then, in the wee hours of the next morning, left for Germany—where he was arrested for Kercher’s murder on Nov. 20.
During Knox’s trial, tabloids called the defendant “Foxy Knoxy”—actually a childhood nickname referring to her agility on the soccer field co-opted from her MySpace page—while one Italian paper called her “Luciferina with the face of an angel” and the murder scene was dubbed “The House of Horrors.” Some media outlets perpetuated prosecutor Mignini’s theory that Kercher’s murder was a case of “extreme sex” gone wrong.
“I could have been the kinkiest person in the world,” Knox told Newsweek years later, “and it shouldn’t [have] mattered because it has nothing to do with the evidence of the case. The fact that I was accused of orchestrating a rape game—it was so absurd.”
Guede was convicted in 2008 of sexually assaulting and killing Kercher while “acting with others” and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but following an appeal the term was reduced to 16 years. He was released early in 2021 for good behavior.
Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murder and sexual violence on Dec. 5, 2009. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison and Sollecito 25 years. Knox sobbed when the verdict was delivered.
“While we always knew this was a possibility, we find it difficult to accept this verdict when we know that she is innocent, and that the prosecution has failed to explain why there is no evidence of Amanda in the room where Meredith was so horribly and tragically murdered,” her family said in a statement at the time. “It appears clear to us that the attacks on Amanda’s character in much of the media and by the prosecution had a significant impact on the judges and jurors and apparently overshadowed the lack of evidence in the prosecution’s case against her.”
Knox and Sollecito were found not guilty in an appellate court trial on Oct. 3, 2011, and subsequently released from prison.
Knox returned home to Seattle and resumed her studies at University of Washington. But prosecutors didn’t give up, and both she and Sollecito were found guilty again after a second trial in January 2014.
“In Italy, I’m a convicted murderer,” Knox, who remained free in the U.S. after the verdict was delivered in absentia, told her college paper The Daily. “That shouldn’t carry weight because it’s not true, but it does. We are social, that is what human beings are, we have a place in society and it seems like that is taken away from me for nothing.”
But on March 27, 2015, Italy’s highest court—the Court of Cassation—vacated her and Sollecito’s convictions for good, exonerating the pair after determining there had been “stunning flaws” in the initial murder investigation.
While she said at the time she was “tremendously relieved and grateful” by the court’s decision, Knox was admittedly scarred by the ordeal.
“This was at a moment in my life where I still felt limited and diminished, like nothing I could say would ever bring people to believe me,” she told USA Today ahead of the 2025 premiere of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. “I felt trapped in the identity and the story, the narrative that had been built around me, of the girl accused of murder. Even though I had been exonerated, that didn’t go away.”
After Knox and Sollecito were released from prison in 2011, the Kercher family said in a statement upon leaving Perugia for Britain, “Ultimately we accept the decision and respect the court, but we do find that we are left looking at this again. We are back at square one, left wondering what truly happened.”
But that was only the latest development in what was ultimately a Knox-centric saga.
“Mez has been forgotten in all of this,” the victim’s sister Stephanie Kercher said in the TV documentary Is Amanda Knox Guilty?, which aired after Knox and Sollecito were re-convicted in 2014. “Everything that Meredith must have felt that night. Everything she went through. The fear and the terror and not knowing why. She didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that.”
The author and activist married writer Christopher Robinson in 2018 and they’re parents of daughter Eureka, 4, and son Echo, 23 months.
And their eldest child is old enough to be curious about her mom’s past.
Her explanation goes something like this, Knox told TODAY.com: “It’s just, ‘When Mommy was young, Mommy went to Italy, and she made friends and she had fun, but then someone hurt her friend, and the police thought Mommy hurt her friend, and so they put Mommy in jail.’”
After which, she continued, “‘Mommy was in jail for a long time, and she was very sad. But then one day, Mommy proved that she was innocent and she got to go home, and then she met your daddy and had you and happily ever after.’”
Before you watch The Twisted Case of Amanda Knox, streaming on Hulu starting Aug. 20, catch up on some of the craziest true crime moments captured on TV:
We’re not sure what was more shocking about this six-part 2015 HBO series from director Andrew Jarecki: That real estate heir and accused murderer Robert Durst offered himself to be interviewed by the filmmaker for more than 20 hours over several years or that the show’s final moments caught Durst on a hit mic, burping uncontrollably, as he said to himself, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
While the allegations made against R. Kelly throughout Lifetime’s six-part 2019 docuseries were both shocking and sickening, nothing gripped us more than witnessing the attempted (and eventually successful) rescue of Dominique Gardner (seen above participating in this year’s sequel), one of the disgraced singer’s girlfriends, by her distraught mother Michelle Kramer. It was truly harrowing.
The one that really started it all. This 13-episode series from French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade following the trial of crime novelist Michael Peterson after he was accused of murdering his wife Kathleen in 2001 began as a 2004 miniseries before making its way to Netflix in 2018 with follow-up episodes, and it helped lay the foundation for all that have come since. The twists in the case are each stranger than the last, but none more so than the introduction of the (surprisingly plausible) theory that the true culprit was an owl. Yes, you read that right.
This three-part series, released by Netflix in late 2019, has all the crazy you’re looking for: internet sleuths with more skills than the actual police, a megalomaniac murderer upending every stereotype you’ve ever heard about Canadians while sending body parts to government officials in the mail, and a connection to the film Basic Instinct so brazen that your jaw will truly hit the floor when all is made clear.
The craziest thing about this 2016 CBS docuseries marking the 20th anniversary of the murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét was that anyone believed the investigative team would actually find something close to the truth. And the eventual allegation that brother Burke was the culprit eventually found CBS Corp. sued for defamation, seeking no less than $250 million in compensatory damages and no less than $500 million in punitive damages. The case was settled out of court.
Any true crime series that begins with a bank robber with a bomb cuffed around his neck dying during a televised standoff with state police when said bomb, you know explodes, is destined to either be unable to live up to that tragically bonkers inciting incident or one of the craziest stories you’ve ever heard. In the case of this four-part 2018 Netflix series, it’s the latter, thanks, in large part, to serial killer mastermind Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.
The craziest thing about this landmark 2015 series, the first of its kind Netflix had ever streamed, was the infuriating look at the failings of the justice system. Whatever you think about Steven Avery in connection to the murder of Teresa Halbach, there’s no getting over watching his 16-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey have a confession coerced out of him by interrogators with neither counsel or a parent present.
Source: www.eonline.com