nourishing obscurity

This link takes you to all posts on this blog mentioning Meredith Kercher.  To save you the trouble, the best analysis, leaving my posts aside, is that of the latter commenters on Why I Think Amanda Knox is Guilty, where everyone leaves aside the infighting and starts to look again at the evidence itself.

Interesting snippets:

Meredith Kercher’s mother attacks Senator Maria Cantwell for trying to enlist Hillary Clinton in Amanda Knox’s appeal.

… and this:

The Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera accused America of over-reacting, saying: “Here we have rule number one for an American accused of a crime abroad – it doesn’t matter if they are innocent or guilty all that counts is their passport… America is just waiting to send a platoon of Marines over to rescue the poor girl.”

It added: “This same administration can’t close Guantanamo but it can find the time to attack the sentence in Perugia.”

… and this:

ROME – Amanda Knox diplomatically tip-toed around the furore in the US over her 26-year-prison sentence for murdering her British flatmate, saying Tuesday that she felt she had received a fair trial but that she hoped the guilty verdict would be overturned on appeal…

…”The trial was carried out correctly,” Knox told the legislator, Walter Verini, from the centre-left opposition Democratic Party. “My rights were respected.”

Mind you, in her defence here, this looks very much as if she’s trying to ensure her safety in prison and enhance her chances on appeal.  Can’t blame her.

How about this?

Professor David Canter, director of the centre for investigative psychology at Liverpool University, has argued: “Most bizarre murders, particularly those with a lot of sexual activity and if there are drugs involved, come out of a lifestyle that’s pretty dysfunctional in which there’s some build-up. So it’s unusual for apparently capable and functioning youngsters to get caught up in all this.”

This is the key point – there was very much a buildup.  The Seattle disorderly conviction targetted Knox, not any of the others at the party.  She was the instigator and the most brazen, completely at odds with the image projected by the PR company the Knoxes hired to present their daughter in a better light.  For PR image, read Tiger Woods.

When she was arrested, her manner was described as cold and detached. During the police investigation, a friend expressed the hope that Kercher had not suffered.

Knox exclaimed: “What do you think? They cut her throat… She fucking bled to death!”

Nice person.  And this:

A short story, entitled, Baby Brother, written by Knox when she was at the University of Washington in Seattle, also prompted suspicion. In the story, Knox writes about a young woman, drugged and raped by another young woman, and describes the victim’s pain in lurid detail.

This in no way indicates guilt but it does indicate mindset.  So the notion that there was no build up is patently untrue.  Knox’s whole demeanour throughout the trial was detached from reality and detached from concern for either the victim or for her own dire position.

Only when her PR people told her to be more serious did she alter her behaviour and stop flirting with judges.  What had she hoped to achieve with her flirtatious glances and returned glances?  What place have flirtatious glances in a brutal murder trial?  What place have cartwheels and splits?  What place has buying sexy lingerie soon after the killing and laughing and joking about it?

Classic sociopathy, not even on the edges of the syndrome.

This PR thing:

Knox’s parents hired a PR agency (David Marriott) and founded the Friends of Amanda Knox organization, composed of various lawyers and other well-placed friends who appear on television to essentially LIE about the prosecution’s case against Amanda. They say there is no evidence. In fact, there is plenty of evidence, both circumstantial and DNA. They attack the entire Italian justice system with xenophobic remarks.

Now I wouldn’t have resorted to capitalization in that way but this is one angry writer and I only include this as an example of how the Knox supporters’ strategy is both producing a camp of vehement Knox supporters who focus mainly on the DNA but is also producing a very angry anti-Knox camp which insists the evidence be considered and part of that evidence is undoubtedly her actions.  Actions are evidence.

An American, JMH27, wrote:

Writing from the U.S., many Americans believe this young woman to be narcissistic personality, and very likely sociopathic, as evidenced by the lack of empathy, emotions inappropriate to a given situation, a reveling in her celebrity status (very clear from her prison diary) and pathological lying. (To my knowledge, her prison diaries were never mentioned in the U.S. media, along with much of the actual evidence that pointed to guilt).

I suspect the murder was a result of narcissistic rage, which can indeed turn murderous, coupled with the effect of drugs and alcohol. Something as minor as a perceived interest by Sollecito in Meredith could have set it off. These personality disorders are very successful in convincing others of their internal reality (witness the family’s approach to heads of state; when there was American consular presence throughout the trial).

I sincerely hope the Italian court remains firm in its conviction. Let us hope it does not take the life of another person before her family comes to terms with her disorder, and the terrible consequences of its expression.

This comment above is in stark contrast to the vociferous tin-banging of the Knox supporters who are enlisting everything from senators to patriotism to have their way.  One can’t blame them.  Any parents worth their salt would try to get their daughter off and would play up the winning smiles and little girl in distress angle.

They do their thing and the 19 judges did theirs.

Look at Anne Coulter‘s take on the evidence which Knox supporters insist is not there.  Note that they insist that the DNA was not in the room, which is not the same things at all. Look at this early and quite balanced take by Newsweek, before more evidence emerged.

Knox supporters say that her demeanour and behaviour should not be taken into account.  Oh really?  If someone comes to you for a job with your firm and both dresses inappropriately and acts inappropriately, betraying probable psychosis, do you ignore that in favour of her skills set, particularly if her referees all report drunk and disorderly and provocative behaviour?

Do you heck as like.  You’d be out on your ear for hiring her.  Of course behaviour betrays what a person is and what a person is – is very much part of the investigator’s art.  Holmes’ and Poirot’s methods have been noted by law enforcement.

You’ll point out that there is a difference between going for a job and a murder trial.

Well, there is and there isn’t.  I’ve been in the position of hiring staff and unfortunately, of firing them and it depends on the work.  In a sales job, you pay him off and get another.  In education, he could have done enormous damage, let alone the litigation of parents threatening to close the school and diss its reputation for many years.

So it is quite critical, even more critical when compared to a non-capital crime and the mechanism of appeal.  In educational hiring situations, you don’t deal in the namby-pamby.  You have to know and you have to get it right.  There are tools to help with this, statistical tools, tell tale signs, symptoms.  There is a panel of interviewers and they confer after the interview.  Not quite as critical as a doctor’s need to be right but still critical.

In one chapter of a book I wrote [pt III], I recounted, through one of the characters, some of the things I learned in this field :

‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘Exactly the opposite. You know the saying, ‘You’ll know them by their fruits?’ Each little anomaly, on its own, is indicative but not conclusive. But when several anomalies are combined, then that’s danger.’

‘So, why didn’t you pick her?’ persisted Nadine.

‘Because I observed and yet dismissed what I saw.’

And later, regarding the traitors who had been sprung:

‘Why didn’t I pick up on Emmeline and Alana earlier?’

‘Sometimes we’re blinded by close association with people. On the grounds that we’ve been working with them for a long time and that they appear to be our kind of people, we make the logical jump that they are, therefore, good people. We don’t really know that – we don’t know who has what hold over them. Are they more likely to betray that or to conceal it?’

And what of inappropriate behaviour for the time?

Carlo Maria Scotto di Rinaldi spoke to police two days after the couple were arrested on November 6, after recognising them on the television news. “They came into the shop and were there for about 20 minutes,” he said. “The girl bought a camisole and G-string.

“I heard her as she was choosing the underwear – particularly the G-string – and as they were ready to pay, in front of the till, she whispered, ‘Afterwards I’m going to take you home so we can have wild sex together’.”

No right, agreed, it doesn’t make her a murderess. and to suggest that this was just normal young person behaviour in this day and age is quite right – it is normal for certain types of people and indicates nothing else.

So?

So this.  It was the very day after the murder and it wasn’t the buying of the lingerie but the manner, the tone, the disconnect with what had happened.  This is most significant and in any other situation of a hiring or firing referred to above, it would be a large red flag.  Or are you suggesting that timing is not at all critical in murder investigations?

Whether she is actually guilty of the murder or not is not the point of this post.  Her guilt was mentioned in another post.  This post is about the “inappropriate” being a quite major factor in the deliberations, not at all irrelevant, as Knox supporters need to establish.

I can’t really follow the thinking of those who are doing their best to support this girl’s killer by latching on to the weakest point of the evidence – DNA in the room and making that the focal point by claiming there is no evidence.  What about the scrubbing and the taking of a supposedly innocent knife from the house to Sollecito’s apartment, where it was later found?

Why would they have scrubbed the entire place down with bleach for which Knox waited in the morning for the store to open?  Why would no trace of her DNA be found in her own house?  If forensic went to your house, wouldn’t they find some of your DNA?  Why not in Knox’s own house?  So Knox’s supporters’ vociferous claims that no DNA was in the house are citing the very evidence which accuses her.

If you were to come to my browser and see that the entire history and cache had been wiped, what would you conclude from that?  Come on, my cynical friends – be honest.

How does a knife from the murder house end up at the boyfriend’s place, scrubbed down?  Why would 19 judges who were consulted all be wrong, given their legal careers to that date?

If we’re going to talk of obsession – this looks like a pretty good example of it.

Anyone who knows this site and knows me knows that I won’t let a matter rest where there is a clear injustice perpetrated and where the victim is being ignored – witness the Samantha Geimer case.  Look at the tenor of all my political blogposts.  That’s what this thing is about.  Obsessed by helping get justice and closure for the Kercher family?

I plead guilty.

Filed under: Society & human issues