By Candace Dempsey

Much of the case against University of Washington honor student Amanda Knox, trapped inside an Italian murder mystery, has vaporized in the six months she's been in the Big House.

Somehow this has escaped the attention of the international press, so eager to fabulate a sexed-up persona for the 20-year-old from Seattle. Nor has it caused a stir in her hometown.

Along with Rudy Guede and Raffaele Sollecito, she's suspected of participating in the Nov. 1 murder of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Perugia. Held without formal charges, they can linger in that limbo until Nov. 2008.

For Knox, there is hope. Not only did the Supreme Court of Italy recently throw out her so-called "false confession" because of her lawyer-less interrogation, but her defense team felt confident enough this week to file for house arrest.

If successful, she could be released within a week, but we have no crystal ball. It's like trying to predict whether Big Brown will win the Triple Crown or stumble like Funny Cide.

I trust the Italians to do the right thing, whatever that is (We still have not seen all the evidence.). But beware the zig-zag path. Beware Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, even though he's under investigation himself. He's capable of a June surprise. He could be hiding cards or even new evidence under his long black sleeves.

While we're waiting to find out about house arrest, let's update "What If She's Innocent?" the story in which I asked readers to step back and take a fresh look at the case against Knox.

1. The sex games and stir-fry mushroom party theory was tossed after a new post-mortem cast doubt on whether Meredith was raped.

2. Middleaged male reporters have finally stopped perving Knox's schoolgirl sex life. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears once again serve their needs. Meanwhile, the media shows zero interest in the sex lives of the two male suspects.

3. The robbery motive has sprung back to life, thanks to Rudy Guede, who is pointing the finger at Amanda. The Supreme Court has scoffed at his alibi, but he's singing arias to the prosecutor.

Guede first said Amanda wasn't there on the night of the murder. Next he said she was at the door and he heard her voice. Now he claims she was inside the house, quarreling with Kercher about money.

4. The international press hasn't noticed the dramatic improvement in Knox's legal battle. They're too busy listening to Rudy sing.

5. The Supreme Court in April said it's "indisputable and evident" that Guede took part in the murder. The role of the other two suspects remains a jigsaw puzzle.

4. Police had claimed Knox and Guede called each other on their cellphones before and after the murder. Guede didn't have a cellphone with him that night, his lawyer revealed.

6. Amanda's computer was damaged in police custody, so they can't evaluate her hard drive.

7. Alibis for all three suspects need clearing up. Questions, questions. We'd like to ask them questions.

8. The prosecution hasn't proven Amanda and Raffaele knew Rudy (although they may have known OF him, sure, it's a small town.).

We do know Rudy used to visit the boys downstairs in the girls' house. But did he know Meredith? He says yes, but nobody will back up his tale.

8. Rudy and Amanda remain in Capanne prison.

9. Raffaele has been moved to Terni. This week he acquired a glamorous new lawyer, Guila Buongirono

She says: "My client is very, very stressed by the whole episode. He feels like any other 23-year-old who is in custody for murder - he feels like the second victim.

"I have accepted this appointment because having looked at the paperwork I am convinced of his innocence."

10. Remaining evidence against Knox. Two blood stains in the small bathroom the two girls shared. Mixed blood in the bidet (well, they shared that too). A drop of blood of Amanda's on the sink tap. I'll be posting new information on that this week.

11. The suspected murder weapon looks iffier all the time. A kitchen knife found in Raffaele's apartment, it's supposed to have Knox's DNA on the handle and (the disputed part) Kercher's near the tip. In or out of evidence? Hang on. We should know for sure soon.

12. The bloody footprint. Rudy's or Raffe's? C'mon, polizia, decide. You're giving us vertigo.

12. Rafe's DNA on bra strap. Besides the footprint, this appears to be the only evidence still against him. Real thing or result of contamination (crime scene footage makes this appear to be a possibility, but too soon to call. We need more information).

13. Bogus: The La Repubblica interview with Amanda Knox. The "Amanda annoying other prisoners by singing Beatle songs" story (OK, we love that one. Why Paul McCartney songs, Amanda. Can't you see John Lennon is the man?). The infamous bleaching and cleanup stories remain unproven. The press hasn't mentioned them for ages, usually a very bad sign for conspiracy theorists. Let's wait and see.

14. Face-to-face hearing. Every reporter's fantasy, Rudy, Amanda, Rafe, together at last Well, actually it could be for the very first time, since the prosecution has yet to offer proof that this trio knew each other let alone conspired.

Nothing in the works yet, but a reporter can dream.

***
Photo credit (top): Madison Paxton

This is the 10th in a series.
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito: Alternatives to theft
Waiting for Meredith Kercher
Meredith Kercher: one murder too many
Thriller writer Doug Preston on Meredith's murder:
Amanda Knox: What if she's innocent?
Amanda Knox: Trial by trollarazzi
Meredith Kercher murder: Shouting at the table
Amanda Knox: What's Seattle got to do with it?
Meredith Kercher: Murder in our sister city

Copyright by the author. All rights reserved.

By Candace Dempsey

Reporters covering the Meredith Kercher murder seldom find reason to chuckle. But sometimes a theory is so ridiculous that we cannot resist.

For me, it's the robbery theory. Not to be confused with the now discarded sex games and stir-fry mushroom party theory. Don't even get me started on that.

No less fanciful: the idea that UW honor student Amanda Knox (who had plenty of bucks in the bank after working her butt off while going to school) and her well-heeled Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito helped Rudy Guede (a man they apparently did not know) kill Knox's flatmate because they were in dire need of cash.

It was Mr. Guede, of course, who put that idea into the prosecutor's mind. He's the one who reported Meredith's rent money missing. He's also the one whose DNA was found on her handbag.

Which brings me to this photo. Yes, that's my kid, but don't tell him. He's in college now and will be mortified. My point: He has large blue eyes with long eyelashes.

When he needs funds, he gives me a call. He delivers a sob story. I remember that cute little face and how hard he's worked to get this far in school.

So I reach for my purse.

American families usually feature two types of parents. In my house it's Soft Touch and Mr. Precise. Guess which one is me?

With daughters, it seems to work the other way around. I just heard of a daughter who simply waits until her dad goes to sleep and then empties his wallet. He doesn't discover the theft until he goes out to dinner himself and needs some cash.

So I was amazed when I learned this week that Raffaele supposedly helped rob Meredith because he was broke the night of the murder. At least that's one theory on the blogosphere.

In America, students call this being "temporarily without funds."

The solution is to call somebody up or knock on a friend's door and say, "Hey, can you float me a loan?"

I can't think of a case where being short on cash led a college student to say, "You know what? Let's just kill my roommate."

Nor can I imagine a parent saying, "Don't come to me for money. If you're so broke, then go out and rob somebody. Murder them if you have to."

And American parents are shelling out far more than Papa Sollecito, the urologist who pumps euros into Raffaele's bank account.

University is practically free in Italy. My son goes to law school in New York. Like Raffe, he's got a car and an apartment. No, he doesn't have Raffe's maid service, but we could offer him a personal chef and a masseuse for the amount we're ponying up.

You want sticker shock? Let's say your child was in law school at Columbia University, the nation's priciest.

You're looking at $43,470 in tuition and another $15,035 for room and board, multiplied by three years. Figure at bare minimum $175,515. Ouch.

Thank God for student loans.

When people ask if we have a second home, I say, "Yeah, it's in New York. That's where my son is going to school."

So here's how your typical American college student gets out of a financial bind:

The phone rings in the parental house:

--Mom, I messed up
--What?
--Yeah, I need money. Can you talk to dad because ... well, you know.
--What? You're supposed to be a budget. Did you ...
--Mom, I messed up. (Voice cracks). I told you that. I'm not proud of it. It's not like I ...
--Well, you know, that's not really an explanation.
--Do you want me to go into detail? Do you want me to show you receipts. Is that what you want? Don't you trust me at all?
--Of course I do. I just want to know ...
--Mom, I have to study tonight. Don't get me upset.
--Oh, my God. I forgot. Your finals. Oh, my God, Well, look, Dad and I have the money. We know you're a good kid, so ...

Soft Touch calls Mr. Precise at work because that's where he's most calm and logical. Clients require it. Mr. Precise carries on for a moment, as any good parent would. But sooner or later he's going to say:

"All right, all right, tell him I just put the damn cash into his damn bank account."

Our son doesn't ask often, but he knows we're good for it. We both came from loving families without much cash. It was scary at times. Working while going to school is tough.

We want our child to have it easier, to have a better life. We also want him to reach high. That's the American dream. Most parents are willing to dig a financial hole for themselves if they can make that happen.

Now, let's say Soft Touch and Mr. Precise either won't cough up the funds or ask inconvenient questions. Time to tap emergency sources. I asked around:

1. Grandparents.
2. Friends
3. Aunts, uncles
4. Family friends
5. A former or present employer
6. Boyfriend or girlfriend
7. Former or present neighbor

Why would these people shell out, even if they must borrow the money from somebody else? They see the student trying to do something good with his life. They know how hard it is to budget each month, let alone across a whole school year. Nobody can pay for college these days via a summer job.

They remember how far they had to climb so they could say, "You know what? We have the money."

They also fondly recall the spectacular messes they got into at the same age (Yes, that includes Mr. Precise). Putting up a few hundred bucks for education makes them feel young and hip again. It's like they're thumbing a ride toWoodstock.

But most of all they want the student to end up like Benjamin Braddock in Charles Webb's classic novel about American life. They want him to do what Raffaele managed to do in prison this year.

They want that kid to graduate.

***
This is the ninth in a series.
Waiting for Meredith Kercher
Meredith Kercher: one murder too many
Thriller writer Doug Preston on Meredith's murder:
Amanda Knox: What if she's innocent?
Amanda Knox: Trial by trollarazzi
Meredith Kercher murder: Shouting at the table
Amanda Knox: What's Seattle got to do with it?
Meredith Kercher: Murder in our sister city

Copyright 2008 by the author.

By Candace Dempsey

It was April Fool's Day in Rome, on the steps of Italy's supreme court.

I didn't know how to find the room where the judges would decide whether to release the three suspects in the killing of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, way back on November 1.

So I asked the paparrazzi.

"Si, Si," the paps said, wanting to help if only out of boredom. But they didn't know either. It was 10 a.m. Their job was to wait all day by the lawyer's entrance in hopes of snapping, well, who exactly?

No one can take photos now of Meredith Kercher, a popular student from Leeds University. The three suspects are behind bars: Raffaele Sollecito, Rudy Guede and the lone American, Amanda Knox, Kercher's flatmate, from the University of Washington.

Frankly, the lawyers weren't that photogenic. They have to wear black robes over strange white shirts with floppy white strips dangling down the front.

Nor were they handing out colorful quotes. Here's what Luciano Ghirga, one of Knox's two lawyers, told the six gorgeous black-haired, couture-clad Italian journalistas from the wire services. Picture a tall, white-haired man with a nice big smile:

"No."
"I don't know."
"Speculation!"
"No comment."
"Nothing."
"Never."
"Stop asking me."
"You're kidding me."
"No."

Guede's lawyer, Nicodemo Gentile, said "pizza" when he saw me, because I'd met him in Perugia a few days before at Pizza Napoletana, not far from the house where Meredith and Amanda lived. His team is suing the American showboat lawyer Joe Tacopina for pretty much saying, "Rudy did it on his lonesome" in Panorama, an Italian magazine.

Gentile looks like Tony Soprano, only younger and with better suits. He's also from Calabria, not Campagna like Tony, and has a much softer accent. While he was eating the pizza in Perugia, the only thing he wanted to talk about was Tacopina.

"Tacopina .... fiction," he kept saying, in between bites. "Fiction."

I got into the hearing room by tagging along with Doug Longhini of 48 Hours Mystery, a veteran of the Natalie Holloway and Jon Benet-Ramsay cases. We were the only Americans who showed up. I didn't actually have a press pass, but handed the guard my driver's license and told him I was an Italian-American journalist from Seattle. He found my cover story and accent so entertaining that he let me in.

The hearing room was on the fourth floor of the magnificent building--white marble, carved wood and giant statues everywhere. The room itself was about the size of a wedding chapel, wood-paneled, with crystal chandeliers. There I met the most famous journalists on the case, Nick Pisa and Richard Owen, both from the UK.

Pisa works for the tabloids. He's a snappy dresser, short and tanned, with spiky hair. I couldn't manage to ask him a question. He was an Energizer bunny, jumping around, tossing rapid Italian into the phone. He never did take off his black trenchcoat.

Owen, from the Times of London, is tall and gray-bearded. He said all of the journalists had to "decamp" from Rome to Perugia for a month when the murder occurred and they were not thrilled. The tabloid people got to stay at the Brufani; the others at the nearby Locanda.

"So the quality press is three star; the tabloids are five. That's the way it works nowadays."

I asked if the reporters were in Rome just for the Kercher case and he said, "God, no, we all have a million other things to do. The Vatican and so on."

There was a rumor going around that Knox could be released that very day, if the judges decided to throw out her so-called "confession," but Owen said, "Not in a million years.

I left the building at lunchtime. The paps were outside, eager to chat, and insisted on pointing me toward a restaurant. "Go over there. Across the river. That's where the best food is."

I had pasta Amatriciania, with tomato sauce, pancetta, and Pecorino cheese. Like everything else, it tastes better in Rome.

When I returned around 3 p.m., the paps were gone and so were all the famous journalists. There was a padlock on the hearing room door. It was just me and the six beautiful Italian women from the wire services, sitting on a wooden bench with lion heads carved into the top.

Frank of Perugia Shock had told me it was probably a waste of time to go to the Roman hearing, because the judges seldom overturn the decisions of the lower court. Nor do they allow journalists into the room where the lawyers are actually arguing their cases.

Even the Italian journalists said I might as well leave, because all we'd get in the end was a one-sentence report from the judges, saying whether the suspects would be detained or released. But I decided to stay, because several of the women bought me tea from a vending machine and we started talking in Italian.

I have to say the journalistas were a cheerful lot, since we were stuck there until 8 p.m. Everybody got a little giddy toward the end.

"I know it's ridiculous, but I really like Seattle," one of them suddenly said to me in English. She actually giggled, which was strange in one so beautiful.

"Why?"

"Kurt Cobain. Grunge. It is magica."

Since they knew I was from Seattle, they were careful not to give me their theory of the case. "Sex and drugs" was all they'd say. They asked me to tell them something about Knox. They were surprised to learn that she is a small women. "We thought she was a giant," they said. They were also surprised that Knox has many female friends in Seattle, has no record of violence and is considered sweet. They kept repeating these details to each other, as if hearing them for the first time.

I was reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and a guard strolled over and asked if I knew that was a Clint Eastwood movie. One of the journalistas translated the title in Italian: Mezza-Notte nel Giardiano del Buono e Cattivo.

At another point, the guards pretended that the verdict had come in and that we all needed to rush downstairs. We fell for it, picking up our bags and scurrying into the hallway.

"Scherzo!" the guards said. Joke.

Everybody had a good laugh.

I was impressed that the proceedings took so long and were so dignified, since I had read so many disparaging things about the Italian legal system in the press.

At the end we got so weary that the guards took pity on us and let the most desperate among us smoke cigarettes.

Then all of a sudden, the call came. Everybody grabbed their cellphones and blackberries and we scurried downstairs to a small brightly lit room with a modern wooden table and chairs.

One of the beautiful women grabbed my arm and translated for me.

"They must stay."

"All of them?"

"Yes, all three."

Then the guards took us down the stairs and out of the building, everybody moving really fast, not paying attention to anyone else. I followed the black-haired woman who'd bought me the tea.

Suddenly we were on the streets of Rome, darkened now, with the scent of river water in the air. She was moving in the direction of my hotel, so I followed her. She wore a silver trenchcoat with crisscrosses on the back and had a cellphone pressed to her ear.

We scurried through the half-lit streets, nearly devoid of pedestrians, while she called in her story.

"Amanda Knox," I heard her say into the phone. "Raffaele Sollecito," she said after a while. "Rudy Guede."

Then at last came a name we had barely heard all day. It startled me.

"Meredith Kercher," she said, carefully pronouncing the Rs in the English style, so diffferent from the rolling Italian R.

"Meredith Kercher," she repeated, her voice trailing off, soft and regretful, into the Roman night.

Finally, finally, somebody had remembered.

"Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.'"--Edgar Allen Poe.

*************
Copyright 2008 by the author.
This is the eighth in a series:
Meredith Kercher: one murder too many
Thriller writer Doug Preston on Meredith's murder:
Amanda Knox: What if she's innocent?
Amanda Knox: Trial by trollarazzi
Meredith Kercher murder: Shouting at the table
Amanda Knox: What's Seattle got to do with it?
Meredith Kercher: Murder in our sister city

By Candace Dempsey
Copyright 2008 by the author. All rights reserved.

"You don't care about the victim." I've been hearing that refrain ever since I started covering the wildly controversial Meredith Kercher murder case in early November.

The truth is I can all too easily picture Meredith's final hours. I'm far from the only woman who can say that.

Rabid critics on the blogosphere say I'm interested only in poking holes in the prosecution case against Amanda Knox, the UW honor student suspected of participating in Kercher's murder. She has been jailed without formal charges since early November, as have her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and prime suspect Rudy Guede.

Amanda, critics point out, is "white and privileged." Unlike the prime suspect, smalltime drug dealer Rudy Guede, the only person whom police can place clearly at the murder scene, where his DNA was found on the victim's clothes and body. He has a history of breaking and entering and fled from Italy to Germany after the crime.

As for me, I wrote about the victim first. I sent Meredith flowers from Seattle, Perugia's sister city. She was a British exchange student in that lovely Italian hilltop town when she was murdered Nov. 1. Knox was her flatmate in the isolated cottage where she died. The latter has been held in Capanne Prison since Nov. 6.

Yes, I've experienced Act One of Meredith's tragedy. I can easily imagine her terror and helplessness.

Violent crimes are committed just for that reason. So the victim will occupy that undreamed of place. So she will understand what it means to be "held down," to be literally at "the mercy of another individual."

It is not Perry Mason, what happened to Meredith. It is neither Agatha Christie nor Hercule Poirot. Meredith's life ended like a smashed clock. Nobody can "know" her now. She will visit her family as my younger sister does, only in dreams.

For the record, I was 17 when I was attacked. I had a summer job waiting tables in Yellowstone Park. I knew nothing about life except what I'd learned from reading French, English, American and Russian novels.

Not only had I never been away from home before, but I had just started dating. My Italian-American upbringing was so strict that I didn't really understand how people had sex. The mechanics were confusing. Chekhov, my favorite writer, never explained. Nor was F. Scott Fitzgerald any help.

The perpetrator was young too. We were on a date.

He threatened many things and inflicted pain. But in the end he grandly announced that he would not rape me after all.

Actually, forced sex was not his primary motivation. He enjoyed showing "snobby young girls" how killing is done, how it can be accomplished without weapons and in a short time. He said all that.

I believe he had boundary lines he couldn't quite cross. Not yet.

This was what police call "a practice crime."

I know women who have been much closer to death than that. In fact, the girl who sat next to me in English class in college was murdered.

Joyce was a sweet, bubbly college girl from a small wheat town. Skinny and button-eyed, she came to class with a blue- and-white checked bandanna tied over her unruly brown hair, because the lecture started at 8 a.m. and she didn't have time to straighten it.

Joyce was last seen waving to a friend from a car traveling along Greek Row on a sunny day at a land-grant university out in the middle of nowhere.

That image haunts me. Because, of course, I was the lucky one.

Joyce has been forgotten, but women who survive such encounters do not forget. They hold the memory as far away from themselves as they can. They stay silent for fear of having their reputations trashed, for fear of being misunderstood, not believed or shouted down. They do not want to be asked, "Why don't you just get over it?"

In the endless debate over exactly how Meredith Kercher died, in the endless smirching of Amanda Knox's reputation, the sad reality of the crime is never acknowledged. One would think a woman getting murdered was a rarity. But, alas, it happens daily in every part of the world.

No knife nor gun was brandished in the near escapes other women have told me about.

Here was the key: One person was bigger and stronger than the other. One person was a bully and a coward (two character traits that always mesh). In every case, there was an element of surprise. The attack was swift and brutal. Nothing was ambiguous.

The man told the woman right away how things were going to be. No witnesses were wanted, no accomplices needed.

Women do not speak about these crimes because ignorant people will blame them. They will say she shouldn't have left the house. She shouldn't have worn that short skirt or that white lace blouse or those new spike heels. She shouldn't have slept with any man at any time unless he was a husband.

For years I said those kind of things to myself. If only I hadn't been so stupid. If only I had seen the red flags. If only I hadn't worn that yellow sweater, that bright lipstick. If only I had stayed home that night.

I've been a journalist many years, but have never written before about that night in Yellowstone. I still do not expect understanding. Nor do I want to be judged.

But maybe I've made some other woman feel less alone in the big bad world tonight.

Maybe someday she will tell her story.

Updates: Frank at Perugia Shock has interviewed Patrick Lumumba, the man falsely accused in the Kercher murder. CBS television's "48 Hours" will cover Meredith's murder in early April.

This is the seventh in a series:
Thriller writer Doug Preston on Meredith's murder:
Amanda Knox: What if she's innocent?
Amanda Knox: Trial by trollarazzi
Meredith Kercher murder: Shouting at the table
Amanda Knox: What's Seattle got to do with it?
Meredith Kercher: Murder in our sister city

Interview by Candace Dempsey. Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.

BREAKING NEWS: Reliable sources report that Amanda Knox is NOT being moved from Capanne Prison in Perugia to a prison in Rome. The other two suspects have been moved. I will post a news link when I find one. This Times of London story, linked to earlier, is incorrect.

Doug Preston is only too familiar with Judge Giuliano Mignini, the pubblico ministero (public prosecutor) holding UW honor student Amanda Knox, her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede as suspects in the Nov. 1 murder of foreign exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy.

Preston is a journalist as well as a New York Times best-selling novelist and "student of crime."

His newest work, The Monster of Florence, is a nonfiction tale about the infamous serial killer who plagued Florence during the 1970s and 1980s. Preston's book about this killer, who was never caught, will hit stores in June.

Preston first encountered Mignini, one of the prosecutors in the Monster case, when he started researching the crime. Mignini didn't appreciate Preston and his writing partner, Mario Spezi, poking into the facts. He had Spezi arrested and thrown into Capanne prison, where the three Meredith suspects are also housed, and accused him of being the Monster of Florence himself. Spezi has since been freed.

Preston was forced to leave Italy, an experience he recounts in The Monster of Florence.

"When I lived in Italy, I was the target of an investigation by Mignini in which he tapped my cell phone, bugged my writing partner's car and hauled me down to Perugia for an interrogation," Preston says. "He accused me of obstruction of justice, perjury, planting false evidence and even being an accessory to murder. I am still under indictment in Italy for a string of secret crimes."

In a bizarre turnaround, Mignini himself is now on trial for abuse of office and conflict of interest, even though he continues to prosecute the Kercher case, as Corriere della Serra revealed on Jan. 18.

"The Florentine prosecutor, Luca Turco, has accused Mignini of being 'in thrall to a sort of delirium' in his handling of the Monster case, in which he fantasized amazing and complex Satanic conspiracies," says Preston. "I believe the same could be said of his handling of the Kercher case, that he is suffering from some kind of delirium. "

Here Preston comments on the murder in Perugia as a crime writer, not a detective. The opinions expressed are his, ranging from the DNA analysis of key evidence to his take on Knox's MySpace page and his comments on whether or not the cottage that Knox and Kercher shared was bleached after the killing.

His comments are "speculation, but informed speculation," he says.

1. Who do you think killed Meredith Kercher?
This is a very simple rape and murder, to me obviously committed by this fellow Rudy Guede. All of the forensic evidence points toward him. He's a man with a history of petty crime, a known drug dealer. I believe he is the culprit.

2. But the prosecution has claimed this was a "group action" with the three suspects engaged in an elaborate sex game, resisted by the victim.
Look, I write thrillers for a living. And in my thrillers the person you least expect is the guilty party. But in real life, it doesn't work like that. There is no conspiracy here. In real life, murders are banal and obvious.

This case is no different than any other. I have seen the photos. This was a typical rape and murder scene. Sure, there will be loose ends.Even the most banal crimes have a puzzling element to them. No case ever adds up completely. People cannot expect that.

3. What do you think of Rudy's story, that Meredith invited him in for consensual sex?
I am familiar with a number of actual cases of rape and murder. The rapist's most common defense is 'The victim and I had consensual sex. I left, somebody else came in and murdered the victim. I came back, saw what had happened, got scared and ran.'

Let me tell you, this is the pathetic lie they all tell. In this case Guede says he has sex and then goes into the bathroom and puts on an iPod and listens to music on the toilet. He claims someone else comes in and murders the victim. It was a small house, but he doesn't hear the victim scream.

Well, you can still hear other sounds when you are wearing an iPod. You are going to hear a scream. When he finds her, does he help her, call the police, or call an ambulance, like any normal person would? No. He flees the country. Because, he says, he was afraid they would think he did it.

His entire story is, in my opinion, an obvious lie.

4. Do you think Amanda Knox played a role in the murder?
Amanda had absolutely nothing to do with the murder. The outpouring of abuse toward her is extremely disturbing. I am convinced she is innocent, and I cannot understand why there has been such a bloodthirsty rush to judgment.

The ugly anti-Americanism in the Italian and British press is perhaps understandable (although inexcusable), but why the same in America? Some of the comments posted in response to your blog verge on the psychotic.

5. How can you be so certain of her innocence?
Nobody can be completely certain in a criminal case, but the evidence is overwhelming that she had nothing to do with it. Absolutely not.

All the forensic evidence is weak against her. If you look at each supposedly damning detail, it all falls apart.

6. Give us some examples.
Let's start with the knife that is supposed to have Amanda's DNA and Meredith's DNA on it. That is the one found in the boyfriend's apartment. Well, Amanda handled all the knives in her boyfriend's apartment, so her DNA is going to be on that knife.

Then there is that speck of DNA on the top of the blade that is supposed to be Meredith's. But the Italian forensic lab says it has only a 20 percent probability of being hers. That is only one out of five.

So the police say, "Oh, the knife shows traces of bleach so it must have been washed to hide the crime."

But in Italy, as in the U.S., many dishwashing detergents contain bleach. Hence the unsurprising discovery of bleach on the knife.

Another example: Amanda lived in that little house. Her DNA is everywhere. It is mingled in with everything. So any blood on a surface in the apartment has a good chance of mingling with her pre-existing DNA.

Finally, some of the crucial forensic evidence was gathered a month after the murder, when the murder scene had been unaccountably rearranged and spoiled by incompetent investigators.

7. Most reporters, especially in Italy and the U.K., put her in the center of events.
That is The Scarlet Letter all over again. That is the witch-hunt, The Crucible, the sick mob tendency to see somebody proclaimed guilty before there has even been a trial.

Many of these reporters, even in Knox's hometown of Seattle, are simply rewriting and reporting what the Italian papers publish, which is based on information leaked from the prosecutor's office. They might as well put Mignini's byline on these articles for what they're worth.

8. What's your take on Knox's MySpace page, which has created a sensation in the British and Italian tabloids?
She had a normal MySpace page. I looked at it and there was just nothing special about it, despite all the hype. It's what you would expect of a college girl.

To me, she seems like a very nice girl. A really kind, wonderful girl. It is just so unlikely that a girl with no criminal past would commit that kind of crime. People like her almost never do.

When they do, they usually confess right away.

9. What about Raffaele Sollecito, the other suspect?
I looked at him and said right away, "This guy is not a killer. Are you kidding me?"

I think he is just as innocent as Amanda is. They are not protecting each other. They are innocent.

He seems like a perfectly normal nice Italian boy. He has not ever shown any sign of deviancy. He comes from a good family. He had a normal upbringing. He looks like a fine upstanding Italian ragazzo.

People like that very seldom kill people.

10. If the crime is so simple, then why is the prosecutor's theory so complicated?
Giuliano Mignini is a prosecutor who just falls in love with conspiracy theories. Nothing is simple. Nothing is what it seems.

Let me give you an example of this. My co-writer Spezi and I believe the Monster of span Florence is a lone psychopath. He killed seven couples, fourteen people. He mutilated the women and cut off their sex organs. Really horrifying.

A psychological profile prepared by the American FBI of the Monster stated that he is a lone killer. All the Italian forensic psychologists stated he was a lone killer. And all the evidence gathered at the crime scenes pointed to a single perpetrator.

But this is too simple for Mignini. He believes the Monster killings were the work not of a lone killer but a satanic sect dating back to the Middle Ages. His theory, based on nonexistent evidence, supposition and conspiracy logic, was that this sect was operating in high places in government and they needed female body parts to perform Black Masses.

All these conspiracy theories, they almost never happen in real life. And they do not happen to a girl like Amanda who has never been in trouble and had a normal life back in Seattle.

11. What do you make of Amanda changing her story? First she said she spent the entire night with Raffaele. After a long interrogation at the police station, sans lawyer, she said she was at the murder house, but stayed in the kitchen. When she heard Meredith screaming in the bedroom, she was so scared that she put her hands over her ears. Once she was in prison and had a lawyer present, she reverted to her original story.
Well, first of all, do not believe everything you read in the newspapers. You cannot trust anything coming out of Mignini's office.

In the Monster case, prosecutors leaked evidence to the papers that turned out to be false. One of the cops working closely with Mignini on the Monster case was actually indicted for falsifying the tape of an interrogation.

There is a supposed seal of secrecy over the Kercher investigation, but that allows the prosecutor to leak selective things to the newspapers while preventing independent journalists from exploring alternative theories.

So that is my advice to people: Do not believe everything you read.

12. So you think Amanda was at her boyfriend's when Meredith died?
Yes, I believe Amanda's story that she was not there. She has been very consistent except for that one departure. Look, if she was in the house that night, she would have called the police. She would have done what any normal person would do in that situation.

It was only at that one point, after 14 hours of interrogation, that she seemed to waver and say she was in the house with her hands over her ears. If she did indeed waver.

You have no idea what it is like to be interrogated. It is a frightening experience. It is easy to break you down.

Mignini interrogated me for two hours, demanding I confess to a crime I did not commit, and it was terrifying. He is a powerful interrogator.

I could imagine what would happen to a 20-year-old who has been pressured for 14 hours. She could break down and say things, anything, just to stop the interrogation. They really browbeat you.

12. Prosecutors haven't yet offered proof that Amanda even knew Rudy Guede, yet they contend the two exchanged phone calls before and after the murder. What do you make of that?

This is another "damning" piece of evidence leaked by the prosecutor's office that I would ask readers to treat with great skepticism.

This detail, for example, contradicts other information, also apparently released by the prosecutor's office, that Amanda and her boyfriend turned off their cell phones at 8:00 p.m.

Look through all the evidence leaked to the press and you will find many contradictions like this. As one distinguished judge said in the Monster of Florence case: "Half a clue plus half a clue does not equal a whole clue: it equals nothing!"

The prosecutor decided Knox was guilty and is now collecting the evidence against her, which, like the above, are all half-clues, carefully cherry-picked from the mass of evidence. This is not how a proper criminal investigation should proceed, as any homicide detective in the United States would tell you.

One other detail that American readers might like to know: in Italy, prosecutors are firmly in charge. They tell the police what to look for, where to go, what evidence to analyze, what evidence not to analyze. In America, the police work independently and are specifically trained in evidence gathering and criminal investigation.

In Italy, the police must do what the prosecutor tells them. As a result, many criminal investigations in Italy are botched by prosecutors who are judges, trained in the law, who have no background in criminal investigation, police work, or forensic science.

14. Police contend the cottage was bleached after the killing to remove evidence. What do you make of that?
Many common household cleaners and laundry detergents contain chlorine (also called bleach). If police chemists swept your house or mine for chlorine, they would find it almost everywhere. On the floors, in the bathroom, on windows, in the kitchen, on knives run through the dishwasher, in the laundry room, on your clothes!

In short, chlorine can be found on almost any surface that is regularly washed. It is a persistent and ubiquitous chemical which lasts a long time and doesn't biodegrade. Those Italian police chemists are recovering chlorine in parts per million quantities.

The "house was bleached" statement is another deliberately misleading "clue" put forth by the prosecutors to make Knox look guilty, when they know perfectly well it would not stand up in court.

This is the Duke rape case all over again. I would urge your outraged readers, especially those shrill ones from the U.K., to calm themselves down and try to exercise what little critical faculties they possess.

15. Is Perugia a dangerous place in general?
No, not at all. I think that Meredith probably had an expectation of safety when she was walking home alone that night. Italians do in general. Not in Rome or Naples, maybe, but certainly in Tuscany and Umbria. People are out and about. They walk everywhere. They feel pretty safe.

16. What do you think is going to happen to Amanda?
I am concerned. I am deeply concerned. I think she may be kept in prison until her trial, and I think quite certainly she will be acquitted. This happens all the time in Italy. People get held in preventive detention as "dangerous criminals" and then are acquitted and set free.

I am afraid she is going to spend quite a bit of time in jail unless the Italian system comes to its senses and replaces Mignini with a prosecutor not suffering from prosecutorial "delirium."

If it does, then she might get out early.

17. What about the other two suspects?
I think Guede acted on his own. The others are innocent.

By Candace Dempsey
Copyright 2008 by author. All rights reserved.

Since I first called murder suspect Amanda Knox innocent until proven guilty, I've become calm about death threats. I've been called a moron, a slut and a bloody fool.

When I said the University of Washington honor student deserved a fair trial and a moment of doubt, enraged readers called for my head.

One would think I defended a murderer, that 20-year-old Knox had confessed to and been convicted of participating in the sexual assault and stabbing death of British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, on Nov. 1.

The truth is Knox--whom Seattle friends describe as a sweet-natured girl who loves soccer, rock climbing and Beatles music--hasn't even been charged with a crime.

Nor have the other two suspects, Rudy Guede and Italian student Raffaele Sollecito (whom Knox dated two weeks). Although prosecutors have yet to come up with a clear link between the suspects, a strong motive or even a locked-down murder weapon, a three-judge panel has kept them behind bars since early November in the beautiful old hilltop town of Perugia.

Since Nov. 6, Knox has been held in Capanne Prison. Under Italian law, judges can hold suspects without charges for a year. Although they are considered innocent until proven guilty, Italy offers neither bail nor plea-bargaining. The trial could be as late as November 2008.

By all accounts this is a sensational, crazy-making case. Details that seem damning one day are never mentioned again or simply disappear, like the bloody shoe print that was said to tie Sollecito to the murder scene.

Meanwhile cherry-picked witness statements, seized diaries, videotapes, MySpace pages, paid for "exclusives" and other tidbits are fed to hungry reporters around the world, like red meat to ravenous Rottweilers.

The U.S. hasn't seen such a rush to judgment since the Duke rape case, which reporters also framed as a cautionary tale about affluent college kids running amok. I was among many Americans who thought at first the three lacrosse players were guilty of raping a black stripper, only to learn prosecutor Michael Nifong had run amok.

Not only had he ignored the lack of DNA evidence linking the boys to the crime, but also scoffed at two unimpeachable alibis. He was later disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation."

The players were cleared of all charges and also declared "innocent," an extraordinary legal step. They were victims of "a tragic rush to accuse," said North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper.

Do we really want to go there again?

Let's start by off-loading some unfair freight. The international press likes to say this case exposes the dark underbelly of international student life, pulling in a British victim and suspects from the U.S., the Ivory Coast and Italy.

They cast Kercher's death as a morality tale about unhinged sexuality and drug use among a new lost generation of privileged youths taking a year off from elite colleges to run wild in Italy under the guise of learning a new language.

Corriere della Serra framed it that way when analyzing leaked witness statements. Clucking at the social set in which Knox and Kercher moved, the newspaper says, "The picture that emerges from the statements of the men and women who knew Meredith and her friends is one of an extended group."

Well, that mirrors the "seek safety in numbers" advice my strict Italian-American mother drummed into me, but the Italian paper went on to scold:

"They are young people who moved to Perugia to study, live away from their families, and appear not to have any rules. They live by night, wandering from one party to another, often get drunk and smoke themselves into a stupor on hashish."

I would salute this analysis if we were talking about how hashish comes into Italy from North Africa or how to prevent drug dealers from peddling it in Perugia to college students too young to buy liquor or enter bars in the U.S. Or if the paper cited figures showing foreign students in Italy were prone to killing and other violent acts.

But the truth is college students everywhere are more likely to be prey than predators. They are loud and cocky, but also trusting and naive. Far from home, coping with language difficulties and cultural misunderstandings, they are vulnerable to scams and violence.

Just a year before Kercher died, a pretty Italian college girl vanished in Perugia. Sonia Marra, 25, is thought to have been murdered, but the police have neither found her body nor solved her case. The rumor is that she was pregnant at the time of her disappearance.

Before we buy Chief Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini's group conspiracy theory, let's consider a simpler tale. The same terrible, numbingly familiar tale played out all over the world, day after day.

The lone wolf sees a sheep and hungers for the attack. Wishing to escape detection, it holds back, waiting patiently. Then one day the wolf either comes across the sheep away from the herd or deliberately separates it from the others. Then the wolf moves in for the kill.

In human terms: A woman is alone in a house at night. Someone finds a way to get in before she can call for help. She is robbed and/or raped. Then she is killed, either to cover up the other two crimes or just for the thrill of it.

Let's begin our tale with the two beautiful college girls who for two brief months shared a whitewashed house in a walled town that attracts about 40,000 college students each year.

One is British, the other American. Both were expensively educated and raised in pleasant if not posh circumstances by loving families. Knox grew up in Seattle, went to strict Seattle Prep and was enrolled at the University for Foreigners in Perugia.

Kercher was a year older than Knox, from Coulsdon, Surrey. She went to the Palace School of John Whitgift and was an Erasmus student from Leeds University, studying at Perugia University.

What were they like, we wonder, before the blogosphere turned them into avatars of their former selves? One exalted into sainthood; the other, demeaned as a tramp.

What stories would they tell if they were free to speak?

So far their only trial has been in the press, where Knox's schoolgirl love life has been pawed over as if sex were a gateway crime to murder.

Thanks to British tabloid reporters camping out in Seattle and Perugia, we know Knox has no history of violence; otherwise they would have discovered it while rooting around in the garbage. Still, they insist she's concealing a sinister side, missed somehow by her many loyal friends in Seattle.

"It's much more interesting if a beautiful girl from America was somehow involved in this and had a complete personality change in a couple of months and became insane and a sex addict and a drug addict," her UW friend Madison Paxton told NBC Dateline last month.

"But if and when charges are brought a three-judge panel will render a verdict based on hard forensic evidence and not blogs and YouTube postings."

We can only hope.

It's good to remember Italian police haven't finished sifting through evidence. The defense hasn't spoken. The prosecution keeps changing its theory of the crime. First it was "extreme sex," then a robbery gone wrong. Now it's a group activity with lurid sexual undertones.

Prosecutor Mignini is already under a dark legal cloud for the bizarre satanic ritual conspiracy theory he dreamed up for the Monster of Florence serial murder case, long believed to be the act of a lone killer.

His increasingly outlandish hypotheses for Kercher's murder would be comical if the crime weren't so cruel and grim.

Even to conspiracy theorists, Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede form a weird trio. Shouldn't they be better acquainted?

Before she enrolled at the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Knox had been studying German, Italian and creative writing at the University of Washington, which has 41,000 students.

Sollecito was a computer science major at Perugia University. They met at a classical music concert and dated nanoseconds.

He says he's never met alleged drug dealer Rudy Guede, a disco-loving drifter and amateur basketball player from the Ivory Coast.

Abandoned by his adoptive Italian family for bad behavior, Guede was caught breaking and entering a Perugia house in September at nighttime (according to Sky News).

Did Guede, who floated on the edges of campus life, even know Knox or Kercher?

If so, was he ever more than a bystander, an interested onlooker, a flicker in their busy social whirl? The police haven't told us.

We do know he's the only suspect that police can place for certain at the murder scene. He's admitted being there. His story is that Kercher invited him over to the two-story cottage she shared with Knox for consensual sex (a story police haven't bought).

Not only did he leave ample DNA all over the victim's bedroom and on her bloody clothes and body, but he also fled afterward to Germany, where he was eventually caught and extradited. Just this week his DNA was found on the victim's handbag, an indication that she may have been robbed, since she had taken about 250 euros out of her bank to pay her rent.

Meanwhile, the bloody shoe print that police said could have been Sollecito's vanished from the crime scene. Shortly afterward they announced with great fanfare that they had found a single speck of his DNA on a tiny metal bra clasp in Kercher's bedroom. It will be interesting to see what the judges make of this speck in court.

Although the Daily Mail has morphed the fresh-faced Knox into a super-human, man-eating, criminal mastermind, police haven't found her DNA in Kercher's bedroom, where she died after someone drove a knife through her throat. A savage blow that police originally said only a man. could have caused.

Both Knox and Sollecito have said that they spent the entire night at his apartment the night of the murders, a story she has clung to with one spectacular departure (more on that later). They watched "Amelie" on DVD, ate dinner, slept, showered, and read. Sollecito has said he was on the computer, but that's under dispute, like everything else in this confusing case.

Still, police have been hard-pressed to prove that Knox or the scarf-wrapped Sollecito ever left the apartment that night.

As for the murder weapon, police originally said they'd "confiscated a three-inch penknife from Sollecito that was "consistent with the fatal wound to Ms Kercher's throat." Well, that's not final proof, but it turns out not to matter.

Police soon centered on an eight-inch kitchen knife in the same apartment with a speck of Kercher's DNA near the top of the blade and Knox's DNA near the handle.

This begs the question: If the wounds were made with the flick knife, then how could they be compatible with the far larger kitchen knife? Could a knife that big really be driven through someone's throat?

Joe Tacopina, a criminal defense attorney sent to Perugia by 20/20 was allowed access to "Italy's top crime lab along with the case files from the prosecution and defense." He notes that Amanda's DNA would naturally be on the knife since she cooked in her boyfriend's apartment. He reports that not only does the DNA match on the knife have less than a 20 percent chance of being Kercher's, but it's not blood, just a human trace.

"That's not the murder weapon, because if you use that knife as a murder weapon, and as bloody as that crime scene was, you're not going to be able to clean off all the blood, yet leave some other transferable DNA," he says.

Is there another knife out there, more likely to be the murder weapon?

We know Guede carried a knife, but it too sounds suspiciously large to be the murder weapon.

The Times of London notes "Five days before Ms. Kercher was killed, Mr. Guede was found by police inside a children's nursery in Milan with an 11-in kitchen knife. He said that he had slept there overnight because the hotels were all full and needed the knife to protect myself from thieves.' He was freed, but stopped by police again shortly afterwards for allegedly possessing drugs."

As a woman, the first thing I notice about the house of horrors is its isolation. No parent would choose it for a daughter. It stands by itself on car-busy Via Pergola, outside the stone walls that encircle the city. Built over a green ravine, it's also adjacent to a car park. Drug dealers hang out on the nearby basketball court, as did Rudy Guede.

"There were always junkies and drug dealers around, especially in the garden and in our car park," one housemate told the Daily Telegraph. "We would come out and find syringes everywhere. I never felt safe there."

Yet the 21-year-old Kercher--intelligent, warm and popular--had plenty of protection most nights. "Mez," as her friends called her, lived in a bustling student flat. Not only did she share the four-bedroom, two-bath digs with Knox, but also with two Italian girls: Laura Mezzetti and Filomena Romanelli.

Four young Italian males bunked in the flat downstairs, and their comments afterward paint a picture of off-campus life.

"These boys, when interviewed, said they had all left Perugia between Saturday and Monday to return to their respective places of residence," says the judge's report. "Marzan Marco, Bonassi Stefano and Silenzi Giacomo at Porto San Giorgio and Luciani Riccardo to Bologna."

Kercher dated the guitar-strumming Silenzi. On the evening of the murder, he was at home with his parents on the Adriatic Coast.

A second-year international communications student, he has described Kercher as a beautiful, shy, quiet girl who was the opposite of the bubbly, outgoing Knox.

Kercher, on the other hand, complained to her friend Jade Bidwell about him, saying he was"unreliable" as a boyfriend.

After her death he became an unreliable character witness too, suddenly turning against Knox in tabloid "exclusives" (which usually means "paid for"), even though he originally spoke of her in words that echo those of her Seattle friends.

As the Times of London noted: "He said his impression was that Ms Knox and Ms Kercher had been good friends. 'Of all the people in their house they got on best together,' he said. Amanda was always outgoing. She started coming down to our flat almost from the start when we hardly knew each other.

"Sometimes she brought us cakes she had made. Other times she asked me to play music with her I play bass and she had just begun playing the guitar. She loved music, especially the Beatles."

Guede was known to at least one of the boys downstairs. Based on leaked police reports, the Daily Sun credits Stefano Bonassi with raising suspicions about him after the killing. Guede's nickname cited below evidently refers to Dejan Bodiroga, the Serbian basketball star.

"Police were thought to have been led to Guede by Stefano Bonassi, a student who lived in the flat below Meredith.

"In his police statement he said: 'One guy who came to our house was tall, thin and he always wore basketball shoes and baggy trousers, he was nicknamed Body Roga.'

Guede, who had convictions for drug dealing, was said to be popular with foreign students in Perugia."

The Kercher murder is chilling in its timing. If a stalker was eying the pretty foreign girls in the isolated cottage, then the long All Soul's Day weekend would be a perfect time to strike. Anyone familiar with the local culture would know all six Italians would probably depart to celebrate with their families.

They did, leaving only the two English-speaking girls at home. This was also the weekend that each of them had to draw 250 euros each out of their bank accounts to pay rent.

On her final day Meredith Kercher might have felt a bit under the weather. She'd spent Halloween night dressed like a vampire, going from party to party with friends.

At Merlin's pub, her friend Pietro Campolongo, 26, posed with her wearing a mask from the film "Scream."

Police, speculating Kercher may have met her killer that night, would later study the 250 photos from the party that Kercher and her friends posted on Facebook.

"There was a lot of people and we didn't know all of them," Campolongo would say. "Some were wearing masks."

"It's a scary thought," he adds, "but what if someone she met at the party followed her the next night?"

On her last day, both Knox and Sollecito were at the cottage to wave goodbye to her. She was off to eat pizza and watch "The Notebook" on DVD with Sophie Purton, Sadie Frost and Robyne Butterworth at Robyne's flat, 600 yards away.

Knox and Sollecito left the cottage at 5 p.m. and walked to his apartment. We'll leave them there all night, unless we hear otherwise.

Around 9.pm., Kercher told her friend Sophie that she was tired and wanted an early night. Sophie walked her partway to the cottage and said goodbye.

Kercher kept moving through the cold Italian night in that lovely stone-built town overlooking the famous rolling hills of Umbria, where red poppies blaze against the greenery every spring.

"Her likely route would have passed a basketball court that is a haunt for heroin addicts," says the Sun.

Up until that very moment, the slender Kercher had been what Americans call "a sparkler," a dazzling British girl with a bright smile that drew people toward her.

Now she did not have long to live.

Here is where Kercher's story meets Guede's. After his arrest, he admitted he was at the cottage that night. He claims he'd met Kercher at a Halloween party and she invited him over, a story no eyewitness backs up.

Guede also insists they had consensual sex and that afterward he went into the larger bathroom and sat on the toilet (where his feces were later found). Suddenly, he heard Kercher scream and ran to her assistance. He found Kercher bleeding to death and saw a fleeing Italian man, who told him he'd be blamed for the murder because he was black.

At 10:25 p.m. someone at the cottage used her cellphone to establish an Internet connection with her bank. Guede says he scurried out of there around 10:30 p.m., but he insists he wasn't the caller.

Police aren't certain when Kercher died. Just recently forensic scientists revised the time, "previously put at between 10pm and midnight on November 1, to between 9pm and 4am on November 2," says the Times of London.

The next morning Knox returned to the cottage before noon. In an email sent to friends and excerpted in the Seattle Times, she describes what happened next. The newspaper refers to her as "the student" because she hadn't been charged with a crime. Sollecito is the "Italian man."

"The student wrote that she came home Thursday after spending the night elsewhere and noticed the front door to the home she shared with three roommates was open. Her three housemates appeared to be out, she said. After taking a shower, she said, she saw drops of blood on the floor and a room that looked as if it had been ransacked. She began to panic when she checked Kercher's door and found it to be locked, she wrote.

"She then called the Italian man, who is now in custody, and together they called police.

"When the police came, they discovered Kercher's body in her room. The UW student was questioned throughout the weekend, she wrote to friends."

Knox told this same story to police when she was a witness for several days after the murder. She changed her story after she and Sollecito were picked up in late afternoon four days after the murder.

At 5:30 a.m., reportedly after 14 hours of interrogation, she told the tale that has made her famous on the Internet and branded as a liar nearly everywhere.

After this, whatever she says and does will be taken by many as further evidence of deceit.

In this version she is at the cottage. Her former boss at the Le Chic nightclub, where she worked several days a week, goes into the bedroom with Kercher. Knox stays in the kitchen. She hears Kercher scream and becomes so frightened that she puts her hands over her ears.

No lawyer was present during this interrogation. An interpreter was provided at one point. The document leaked to the press is brief and decidedly odd--rambling and incoherent in places. Very unlike the logically arranged and detailed narrative she provides in witness statements and in the email to Paxton.

This interrogation begs many questions. At what point did Knox know she was a suspect, not a witness? When was the interpreter brought in? Was the interrogation videotaped (Rumor says no). Was there an audio recording? (Perhaps). Who else was in the room? Did Knox ask for a lawyer? Had she been given a chance to rest? Food? Water? Bathroom breaks?

Most importantly: Why did she revert to the original version once she left the police station and could consult with her own lawyer at the prison? Why did she tell a tale that would put an innocent man into jail and only get her into deeper water?

All of these details will undoubtedly be thrashed out in court, if the case goes to trial.

Hostile readers often ask how I'll feel if Knox turns out to be a murderer.

Angry, disgusted, horrified.

But, no, I'll never regret saying she deserves a day in open court with a lawyer of her own choosing. We all deserve that.

I'm sorry police officers didn't have to read her a Miranda warning, especially given her age, rudimentary Italian and lack of criminal record.

Here's what would haunt me: What if she's innocent?

What if she's been thrown into jail, turned into an international sex toy, had her privacy violated and been demonized for nothing?

Worse, what if we discover she's been convicted of a crime she didn't commit?

How will we feel then?

***

Room for doubt:

1. Chief Prosecutor Guiliano Mignini's key theory.
He has cast Knox as the ringleader, based on the assumption that she had a key and was the only person who could have let the killer into the house.

This would be more convincing if:

* We were talking about a student flat, not Fort Knox.
* Clever burglars the world over hadn't mastered the art of getting into houses without keys. Serial killer Ted Bundy was a whiz at key-less entry. (He was, BTW, from Tacoma, not Seattle, as misreported by the foreign press.)
* The landlord and three other roommates didn't also have keys.
* We could be certain they'd never loaned a key to a friend.
*We knew nobody had lost a key and had a replacement made.
*Nobody kept a spare key in a flowerpot or under a mat.
* Kercher's keys weren't missing, including those to the downstairs flat that Silenzi had loaned her so she could feed his cats.

2. The bogus "bad blood between the flatmate's" theory.
A theory wildly popular in the UK is that Knox and Kercher didn't get along, and Knox (with no history of violence or bad temper) was so outraged that she sweet-talked the two men into killing Kercher.

So what was their relationship? Kercher's father says she told him "in a joking way" that Knox was "eccentric." She apparently complained at times about Knox's choice in men and housekeeping skills, eternal flash points between female roommates.

"There was a chart, but she never followed it," flatmate Romanelli says of the chores in her witness statement.

Yet none of the roommates speak of open fights, raised voices, thrown chairs or anything more than the natural irritation that women feel when sharing a bathroom, kitchen and living quarters. They never say they were afraid of the Seattle student or that she was an angry or violent person.

Most tellingly, we never hear of Knox complaining about Kercher, only the reverse.

In fact, Knox's Seattle friends invariably describe her as "sweet" and perhaps too trusting, a yoga loving, rocking climbing "nerd" who eats health food and prefers tea to alcohol.

The judge's report, based on interviews with the three surviving roommates at the police station, calls the two girls close.

"Romanelli had above all ties with Laura Mezzetti also because of shared interests, while the two foreign girls were close and had similar daily habits in that both were students who usually went together to the university and had the same circle of friends."

The Daily Mail and other tabloids have portrayed Knox as hostile toward other women and obsessed with men, yet she describes her mother as "my greatest hero" on her much-viewed MySpace page. In photos she posted before her arrest, she's usually paired with girlfriends or having fun at parties where both sexes socialize in typical American college style.

Just as Kercher did, Knox has a sister with whom she enjoys a close relationship. They were traveling in Europe together before the school year began in Perugia.

3. The lingerie buying.
A store camera at Bubbles in Perugia caught Knox and Sollecito buying lingerie several days after the murder, but like many of their actions, this looks more innocent when put into context.

Police sealed the cottage after the body was discovered, leaving Knox with literally the clothes on her back. Thus she bought or borrowed what she needed. Most people don't like to loan underwear even to close friends.

It also turns out Bubbles is a general store, not a lingerie store. The owner gushed to the tabloids afterward, claiming Knox promised Sollecito an evening of "wild sex" after the purchase. I find this odd. Neither had been arrested yet. Their faces weren't known. Were they really such a memorable couple, in a town with more 40,000 college students, exchanging little pecks in a corner?

Also, the reported dialog sounds suspiciously cornball, as if the gossiper had no idea how a real American college girl would talk and lifted it from silly U.S. sitcoms and teen party movies.

3. The robbery theory.
Early on a rumor floated that Guede was Knox's drug dealer and she'd stolen euros from Kercher's lingerie drawer to pay him. Supposedly Kercher caught her in the act. Then the petite Knox (at five foot three, the smaller of the two women) went ballistic and Kercher died in the ensuing scuffle.

The problem is police haven't proved Knox had a drug problem, that she had a dealer or, if she did, that Guede was the man. Nor have they explained why she couldn't just go to the bank and pay him off if he got that insistent.

Also Giacomo Silenzi, Meredith's boyfriend, has said girls in their social set didn't buy their own drugs.

"Usually, we got the drugs in the centre of Perugia, on the steps outside the church in Piazza 9 November, but I don't know the names of the pushers. We'd go into town and to get some any time we wanted it. I don't recall the women ever having any. Usually, us men brought the drugs. Joints, and alcohol as well. The women would often come home drunk."

Much has been made of the fact that Meredith withdrew 250 euros from the bank to pay her rent and Amanda had 215 euros on her person when thrown into jail. Yet Amanda lived in the same place and had to pay rent the same day. All she needs to do is present her bank records to prove the cash was hers.

4. The bleaching.
Police say Sollecito rose early the morning after Kercher's death to buy bleach. Both he and Knox say there was a flood in the kitchen the night before, which could account for the bleach. But that hardly matters.

At this point the whole bleach issue is a dog that won't hunt.

Do we know they took bleach from the apartment to the cottage? That they cleaned anything? It certainly doesn't look like it. Police in other cases can only fantasize about such an evidence-rich house.

DNA sufficient to get Guede extradited from Germany was found at the gory murder scene and in both bathrooms. A window was broken in Filomena's ransacked room. Somebody trashed one of the bedrooms in the boy's flat and left DNA there too.

Knox's quarters, which the police claimed had been cleaned to Martha Stewart standards, look like a typical student room, with papers and books. What of importance, we wonder, could she possibly have bleached?

5. The CCTV camera footage.
In early November, police announced they had dramatic footage showing Knox returning to the cottage on the night of the murder. Not only did the images turn out to be dim and proof of nothing, but Frank of Perugia Shock discovered the camera wasn't even pointed in the right direction.

He did his detective work the old-fashioned way, by actually walking the grounds.

"I went to verify, and I found out that that camera is pointed elsewhere, so you better doubt of what you read around everyday," he says. "It's true that in November a record came out showing a woman going out of the garage that looked exactly the shape and style of Amanda.

"But it wasn't her. Why should she have entered the garage? She just needed to walk from Piazza Grimana to the house."

This is the fifth in a series:
Amanda Knox: Trial by trollarazzi
Meredith Kercher murder case: Shouting at the table
Amanda Knox: What's Seattle got to do with it?
Meredith Kercher: Murder in our sister city

Update: 20/20's Joe Tacopina says,
"I think this girl's innocent." Knox's parents defend her. Also: Murder weapon bombshell. and Guede's DNA on victim's handbag.

Copyright 2008 Candace Dempsey. All rights reserved.

By Candace Dempsey

Time for another break from murder in Perugia.

Recall that I got lost in Yosemite near Half Dome in December. Do not try that at home.

Afterwards I felt shaky, but no richer in common sense.

I left the next day for a caving adventure in Calaveras County, hundreds of miles north, on the west side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I had expected them to look blue and pointy like the Cascades, but they're green and deceptively gentle-looking. I was raised on tales of the Donner party and it was a thrill to imagine myself lost up there somewhere and cannibalized.

Short of the Amalfi Coast or road to Hana, I haven't seen a dicier drive. Long, long drops on a narrow road with maximum exposure. In the late 1800s it provided transport into the famous gold country Mark Twain captured in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

He was living in Angel's Camp, hoping to strike it rich in the Mother Lode. Even today, this tiny town's a long way from anywhere. That's Main Street above, decked out for the holidays. Giant ceramic frogs perch on the sidewalks. Every year frogs show up to see who can jump the farthest. Winners get brass plaques buried into the sidewalks.

People also come here to gamble at the Indian casinos, check out gourmet resturants in the charming town of Murphys, tour the wine country (smaller and sweeter than Napa) and, yes, go caving.

I headed for Moaning Cavern, the largest public cave in California, one of many burrowed into the green fir-tipped hills. Bruce Brand practically lives in the place. He promised to get me down either by metal staircase or rappelling down a rope 165 feet.

I'd rappeled before but never into a cave. See, I suffer from claustrophobia. The idea of being closed into a cave frightens me. Bruce picked up on that. He's used to craziness. Once he was singing "Amazing Grace" to amuse himself inside the enormous cavern, and a group of tourists thought they were hearing an angel choir.

A cool guy named Jason went down first. He learned to rappel in the "special forces," so Moaning Cavern was nothing to him. He lives in a house trailer near Sacramento, where his mom runs a dog grooming business. He works on a fishing boat in Alaska half the year. He comes to Angels Camp to pan for gold and gamble in the casinos. When I met him, it was about 10 a.m. He'd been up all night gambling and hadn't been to bed yet.

He tied on his harness with expert hands and rapelled into the cave, like Santa going down a chimney. Then he disappeared into the web of tunnels that worm their way into the hills.

Meanwhile Bruce showed me the bones of children who'd died after wandering into the cave in the early years. That's when I started feeling claustrophobic. My fear of heights, which I thought I'd conquered, also tapped in.

Later I read that in the early 1900s, tourists were lowered into the cavern "with only candles or whale oil lamps to light their way. The bones of about 100 humans were found at the bottom of the cavern."

Bruce and I rappelled down into the half-lit cave. I was facing the wall so couldn't see anything. I was fine as long as my feet could touch the damp rock. But about halfway down, the wall curves in and Bruce said I'd have to complete the journey through space.

The minute my feet left the wall, I froze. I hung on the rope like a spider on a web.

Bruce waited a moment. Then he asked me to decide. Up or down?

Two lousy ideas. "Down," I finally said, because no way was I going to backtrack. I inched along, releasing inches of rope, until I jammed the harness. Bruce shouted out instructions. I managed to keep going.

When my feet touched ground, I sighed with relief and vowed I'd never do that again. But we all know I will. Next time with my eyes open. I hear there are enormous stalactites hidden in that cave.

Here's Bruce doing it the right way.

© 2008 Candace Dempsey. All rights reserved No quoting without attribution. No repurposing without permission.

By Candace Dempsey
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.

I don't know if UW honor student Amanda Knox is guilty or innocent.

On the Web, those are fighting words.

Accused of helping murder her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy, Knox has been undergoing trial by trollarazzi since she was arrested Nov. 6.

"Amanda Knox sounds like one of those needy, screwed up rich kids, wandering around Europe with her credit cards and thinking she's totally invincible. She's a stupid, screwed up girl who got in way over her head," says a commenter on alt-crime in November, wildly exaggerating Knox's middle-class upbringing.

Like many obsessed with Knox's unremarkable sex life, she based this description on one hasty British tabloid article, which was in turn based on caricatures of Knox's schoolgirl MySpace and Facebook pages. A date rape story written for a college class became a peek into a sinister, perverted mind.

Calling the 20-year-old Knox innocent until proven guilty is a sure-fire way to draw the wrath of the trollarazzi, the ragtag gangs of flamethrowers who plague the blogosphere. These trolls, says Wikipedia, post controversial messages "with the intention of baiting other users into a response."

To the trollarazzi, Knox is guilty until proven guilty. Even on the day after Christmas, they could not resist. They piled trash on a Seattle PI blog in her hometown under the headline "Are We Being Fair?"

One troll wished Knox a Merry Christmas in Italian, demonstrating the favorite tools of the genre: ALL CAPS. Multiple exclamation marks. Moral judgments. Sexism, bad spelling and stupidity.

HO HO HO!!!! BUON NATALE AMANDA, YOU CONSCIENSELESS TRAMP!!

In trolldom, it is okay to call a young woman you don't know a sociopath, serial killer, pathological liar or whore (one of the politer terms hurled at women who enjoy sex).

Those who feed the troll by disagreeing are called "idiotic," "moronic" and "unstable." Often trolls wish them murdered and/or sexually abused.

In trolldom, the petite Knox (five foot three inches) acquires a superhuman build and strength. She is able to mind-control the other two suspects, including her Italian boyfriend, Raffalele Sollecito, a scarf-wrapped cipher smart enough to say little to the press and less to the police.

In the tabloids Rudy Guede, who seems to be the most likely ki