Thursday, November 15, 2007

 Italy Caught in Middle in Kercher/Perugia "Sex" Killing: Brits want Blood, Yanks want Release

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Meredith Kercher, 21, from England was raped and killed by three acquaintances in Perugia, Italy  on November 1.

 

The suspects are  Patrick Diya Lumumba, 44, a Congolese Musician,DJ and Club Manager at Le Chic, (and an independent Event Promoter),  Amanda Knox, 20, American University of Washington student,  who worked many nights at Le Chic, (and was the roommate of Kercher) and her Italian boyfriend of a few weeks, Raffaele Sollecito, 24.

 

The British Press and Blogs have been calling for Italy to " stop dallying" have a quick fair trail and hang the "slut" Knox..

The American(especially the Seattle area) Press and Blogs have castigated Italian Police for seeming intent on releasing damaging information about Knox, and she is obviously the "victim" of incompetent police work, and they should release this "misunderstood" girl.

 

Amanda Knox has been at the center of the Investigation, and an unsympathetic person because she gave the Italian Police  three  contradictory version of the fateful night.

 

(1) Knox claimed that she was at the house of her 24-year-old boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

When confronted with images from Cameras overlooking her house in Perugia that captured the 20-year-old American student, known by her Internet name, "Foxy Knoxy", at 8.43pm on 1 November dressed in a light-coloured skirt and top, and with evidence from a bugged phone call to Sollecito, she "crumbled" and then she changed her story

 

(2) Knox claimed that she heard third suspect Lumumba Diya killing Meredith, 21, while she sat in the kitchen and covered her ears to hide the screams.

 

(3) Now Knox has again told cops she was nowhere near the flat in Perugia, Italy,

 

Knox says that her stories conflicted because she was so "high" she got confused trying to remember what had happened.

 

Police  say Kercher was indecently assaulted after refusing to join in a sex game, then stabbed three times in the neck before slowly bleeding to death in her room.The police found Knoxs fingerprint on Merediths face.

 

Kercher's  father John told the prosecutor that Meredith found Knox "eccentric and sure of herself". And she told her dad she was surprised to find Knox was "entertaining" men within a week of moving to Perugia.

 

Knox's image has also been "tainted" by her sites on Facepage, MySpace, and You Tube (that have now been blocked/taken down).

 

The only apparent blemish on her record during her student days in the US was a fine of $269 in June of this year for causing a public disturbance after a party at her home.

Yet, shortly after her arrival in Perugia three months ago, her social life rapidly descended into a whirl of heavy drinking, illegal drugs and easy sex.

Her pet "poisons" were vodka and strong marijuana - illegal plants were even allegedly found in the garden of the modest flat which she shared with Miss Kercher and two other students.  While in Perugia, she had posted a 30-second video on the YouTube website in which she and friends were seen drunk and rambling.

More disturbingly, however, she also wrote a series of bizarre short stories on her page on the MySpace website, including one in which two brothers talk of drugging and raping a girl.

At the time of Miss Kercher's death, Knox had a boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who is also accused of being involved in the murder.Yet she is also believed to have had flings with fellow students and older men who she met in local bars and internet cafes.Sophie Purton, a friend of the victim, has said that Miss Kercher was concerned that some of the men Knox brought back to their flat included some "strange types".

To boost her student grant, Knox had been working in a bar, Le Chic, owned and run by Patrick Diya Lumumba, 37, a Congolese immigrant. Lumumba, who is alleged by police to be involved in the killing, had apparently taken a shine to Miss Kercher but his advances had been rebuffed.

On the night of the murder, Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba, allegedly high on a cocktail of drink and drugs, are said by police to have gone to the flat in search of sexual kicks, and had hoped that Miss Kercher would join them in group sex.

Some sources suggest that Knox was the leader in her pursuit of exciting sex and was, in the words of one insider, "up for it". Others are convinced that she fell under the spell of older men.

Alibis  of both other male suspects are contradicted by intercepted cellphone conversations and global positioning.  

Knox's parents William, the vice-president of Macy's department store in Seattle, and Edda, a mathematics teacher, were divorced and have both remarried

 

PROFILE OF AMANDA KNOX in London Daily Mail

Photos available at Daily Mail Site of Amanda, her mother Edda Knox Mellas , her father William, Meredith Kercher, suspects Patrick Diya Lumumba (married),  Raffaele Sollecito, her home in Seattle, her flatmates 

Foxy Knoxy, the Girl who had to Compete with Her Own Mother for Men

Her father walked out when she was only four and her mother then married a toyboy... the disturbing past of the student accused of killing her British flatmate

London Dialy Mail
By Sharon Churcher 

November 11, 2007

 

She is a wholesome-looking young woman who, before her life exploded with the depraved killing of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher, had become adept at presenting two faces to the world.

To many of her teachers and friends in her home town of Seattle, Amanda Knox was a brilliant scholar, an accomplished sportswoman and the pious, morally-upright product of her strict education at a Jesuit-run academy.

Two years at a prestigious university followed, then her admission to the Perugia foreign language programme in Italy, where she met Meredith and shared a house with her.

Then there is the other, secret side of this most enigmatic of accused murderers ? the Amanda Knox who, ever since she was an impressionable teenager, has felt driven to aggressively compete with other women, most notably her own mother, for the attention of men.

Amanda's comfortable world was shaken to the core when, at just 14, the single mother whom she adored broke some astonishing news: Edda Knox announced that she had fallen in love with a man young enough to be Amanda's own brother.

Known in their closely-knit Seattle suburb as a prim school teacher, Edda, at 39, married Christopher Mellas in March 2002. He was only 27, according to their wedding certificate.

Of course, Amanda heard the cruel gossip, that her mother had married a 'toy boy'. It intensified the feelings of rejection that had burdened her ever since she learned her mother had been pregnant with her when she embarked on her disastrous first marriage, which lasted less than four years.

And, looking back, it may well have been the turning point which ultimately culminated in Amanda allegedly holding down Meredith as her throat was cut with a pen knife during a sexual assault in which she died an agonisingly slow death.

Long before meeting Meredith, Amanda had begun to show a distrust of other women, which would manifest itself as she grew older in her inability to form close female friendships, outbursts of jealousy and increasingly rebellious and sexually aggressive behaviour.

Nearly all her best friends were men and, in order to capture the attention she so desperately needed, she tried to compete with them on their own terms. At Seattle's University of Washington, she would spend her free time on the football field, or join expeditions to climb the perilous peaks which rim the West Coast city.

She was beginning to host wild drinking parties and to take considerable risks in finding the men she hoped would help her emerge from her mother's shadow.

By the time she arrived in Perugia three months ago, she had begun to brag to other girls that she could pick up just about any man she fancied. They included an Italian called Frederico with whom she had sex on a train.

Italian authorities believe that, on that fatal night a week ago, Meredith may have become the latest and most terrible victim of her resentment of other attractive women.

They reportedly theorise that she had fallen out with the 21-year-old English girl because she expressed an interest in working at Le Chic, a bar where Amanda held a part-time job and allegedly met some of her seedy new men friends.

A long-time acquaintance of Amanda's family said last night: 'We live in an age when a lot of people don't consider it goofy for a woman to marry a younger guy. But Amanda was at a pretty impressionable age when this happened.

'The girl really had a pretty rough start in life. Her mom married a man young enough to be her brother. That's kind of a disturbing scenario for a teenager. Maybe it pushed her to the extreme.'

Ostensibly, Amanda's was a comfortable upbringing, but the family acquaintance says it was a struggle for Edda, both in terms of paying to give her daughter a private education and her own background. Edda herself bore the scars of a dysfunctional childhood. 'Edda's own parents had an ugly divorce,' the acquaintance said. 'I don't know if these problems can pass down the generations but it makes you wonder.'

Like many young women from broken homes, Edda appears to have wanted a baby to love. She gave birth to Amanda less than five months after marrying the girl's father, William Knox.

The relationship soon disintegrated and William petitioned for divorce, according to court records, which reveal that by 1991 he was remarried.

Despite their differences, they made Amanda and her younger sister Deanna, born in 1988, their priority. As a teenager, Amanda attended the Seattle Preparatory School, a Jesuit institution where fees now are #6,000 a year. Discipline was tight and pupils recited daily prayers.

Undoubtedly, however, Amanda sometimes felt she was in a tug of war between her parents.

After Meredith's body was found, Edda proudly said that Amanda grew up to be closer to her than her father. 'She tells me things first,' she said.

Amanda received good grades at school and was 'always smiling', according to pupil Dominick Balsoma, who said she was his first date.

Another family acquaintance said, however, that after Edda landed her new young husband - whose name she took, styling herself Edda Mellas - her older daughter began to subtly change. 'Amanda was prettier than Edda,' the friend said.

'But her mother had married this eligible guy and Amanda started to emphasise her own sexuality. Of course, this would have happened anyway at her age, but with Amanda I think it eventually became an obsession.'

She enrolled in courses in German, Italian and creative writing at the University of Washington.

Fellow student Philip Setran said: 'She did not seem to have many girlfriends. She would spend all of her time with the guys. She would come home looking like one of the guys, covered in mud after playing tag football.'

Initially, she gravitated to a group of studious, clean-living sportsmen.

She dated one, Kyle Samek, who went on to a long-term relationship with someone else, and then she struck up a friendship with another student, Ben Schock,which she implied grew into a serious romance. He, however, said they went out only casually and usually in a group.

Finally, friends say she found a steady relationship with student Andrew Seliber, a drummer in local band Missing Fingers.

He refused to comment to The Mail on Sunday. But a video clip that Amanda posted on the internet under the nickname FoxyKnoxy identifies him as one of three men with whom she is seen chatting. Slurring her words, and giggling and swaying as she talks to the camera, she jokes that she is drunk.

'Me, Seliber... just hanging out,' she wrote in a caption to the crude home movie. Notoriously, she also posted a sinister short story on the My Space forum about a young man who rapes a drunk woman.

Balsoma, who has remained a friend, conceded that he found this disturbing.

'Normal people can write horror stories, but it does suggest a side to her that might not have been public,' he said.

'It is possible that she fell in with the wrong crowd, but I cannot believe she could have been involved [with the murder].'

After arriving in Perugia, Amanda seemed to be going out of her way to taunt and annoy other women.

A fellow student at the Italian university said: 'When she introduced herself to the class she just went up to one random guy and didn't go up to anyone else. She talked a lot and laughed at her own jokes.'

According to police, Meredith had begun to be disturbed by her housemate's alleged promiscuity, complaining that she was picking up men, including one who was 'very strange'.

Among them was student Daniel de Luna, 21, from Rome, who had a onenight stand with Amanda last month after meeting her on a weekend in Perugia. He told The Mail on Sunday: 'Yes, I know Amanda, I met her a couple of times but I'm not saying anything to you.' But his friend Stefano Bonassi, who lives in the flat below the murder scene, told police in a statement that de Luna had 'a sexual rapport with Amanda'.

Amanda was also dating one of the two men accused in the case, Raffaelle Sollecito, 24. Detectives claim she has confessed to being involved in the killing, for which a local bar owner, Patrick Diya Lumumba, 37, has also been arrested.

Her lawyer insists she is innocent. And Edda, with whom she had such a strained relationship, has flown to Perugia to support her.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=492893&in_page_id=1770&ICO=NEWS&ICL=TOPART

 

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