Is Amanda Knox Guilty?

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TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN:

On November 2nd 2007, police

in Perugia receive a phone call.

There's been a break-in.

When police arrive,

they discover a young woman

has been stabbed to death.

She's Meredith Kercher,

a British student,

a girl with everything to live for.

REPORTER:
Amanda! Amanda!

For six years,

her American flatmate, Amanda Knox,

has been the centre of

a media and judicial storm,

one of three people

accused of Meredith's murder.

Tonight, the central evidence

for and against Amanda Knox.

And, for the first time,

the audio recording of Amanda Knox's

prison interrogation.

HER VOICE BREAKS

Convicted, jailed, acquitted

and now found guilty once more.

It's time, say the victim's family,

for the case to be resolved.

We all definitely want

some form of closure,

and then we can all start

to remember just Meredith.

I was imprisoned

as an innocent person.

This programme contains scenes some

viewers may find upsetting.

Meredith Kercher grew

up in Croydon, south London.

In August 2007, a new

university year is about to start.

Meredith, now 21,

prepares to leave for

the ancient and beautiful

hilltop city of Perugia, Italy.

She was very

excited about coming to Italy,

looking forward to learning

more about Italian culture,

seeing the city of Perugia

and making new friends.

She really fought to come here.

She really wanted to be here.

Mez, as everyone calls her,

is studying European politics

and Italian at Leeds.

Now she has an

exchange year in Italy,

a country she's been in love with

since a school trip.

But saying goodbye to her sister

Stephanie isn't easy.

We were just talking on the sofa and

having a little cuddle goodbye,

and then I just remember

her suddenly crying

and saying that she was

going to be sad to go

but she was excited to come...and

I remember being quite taken aback,

and I thought, "Don't make me sad.

"I'll miss you but

you'll go and have fun."

She leaves on September 1st,

and quickly afterwards moves into

the upstairs flat of this cottage,

with three housemates - two young

Italian trainee lawyers

and a student on exchange

from the United States,

20-year-old Amanda Knox.

Amanda has travelled almost

6,000 miles from Seattle

on the Northwest coast

to study Italian in Perugia.

Photogenic, outgoing

and describing herself as quirky,

Amanda Knox loves

the Beatles and Harry Potter.

She's been studying at university

and has worked three jobs to

pay for her Italian adventure.

She is very different from

the quiet and studious Meredith.

While housemates, there's said

to be tension over Amanda's

supposedly casual attitude

to sex, money and housework.

Within weeks,

Amanda Knox lands a job in Perugia,

working as a waitress at Le Chic,

a pub owned by a popular musician

from the Congo, Patrick Lumumba.

TRANSLATED:
She gave me the

impression of a good person.

If she wasn't a good person,

she wouldn't have worked here.

That doesn't mean that her

relationship with clients

pleased me, because she

often talked to the clients

and I had to tell her

to get back to work.

On October 25th,

Amanda and Meredith go to a

classic musical concert together,

where Amanda meets

Italian student Raffaele Sollecito.

He looks like her favourite,

Harry Potter,

and the two begin

a whirlwind romance.

Described by friends as

intelligent and sensitive,

the handsome Raffaele

has come to Perugia

to study information technology.

A week later - October 31st.

It's Halloween, and in Perugia,

like every other university town,

it's party time.

It's one of Meredith's

favourite nights out

and she's dressed as a vampire.

These will turn out to be among

the last photographs of her alive.

Happy, full of life, and completely

at home with her new friends.

What happens on the night of

November 1st 2007

has been the subject

of two trials,

three appeals and

two supreme court judgments.

The story has more twists and turns

than the medieval

streets of Perugia.

Police in Italy are

searching for the killer

of a British exchange student

who was found dead

in her apartment in Perugia.

Officers discovered the body

of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher

in her bedroom

yesterday afternoon.

The story starts at nine o'clock in

the morning on 2nd November,

when a local woman finds

two mobile phones in her garden.

She takes them to the postal police,

which handles crimes involving

communication devices.

They quickly discover one of

the phones is registered to

Via della Pergola 7, a small cottage

just 500 metres away.

When police arrive here, they see

two students in the driveway.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.

They tell the police

the front door is open...

and one room has been ransacked.

Police go into the house.

One bedroom's a mess.

Clothes are all over the floor and a

large rock is lying near the window.

Shortly after

the postal police arrive,

at 12.51, Raffaele Sollecito

calls the elite police force -

the Carabinieri.

He doesn't mention that the

postal police are already there,

and says nothing's been stolen -

details prosecutors would later

claim are significant.

TRANSLATED:

Meanwhile, Amanda says she's

worried about her friend Meredith.

Her door's locked,

she's not answering her phone.

When the door is broken down, they

discover a beige duvet on the floor.

Beneath it, the battered and

bloody body of Meredith Kercher.

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini

arrives just after 2pm.

He finds Meredith

is partially naked,

her bra's been cut off and her

t-shirt rolled up above her breasts.

It looks like a sexual assault.

TRANSLATED:
When you

start an investigation,

you don't know what happened,

you have to slowly

reconstruct the situation.

Forensics teams work inside

and outside the cottage.

Right away, they think

it's a staged break-in -

glass shards are on top rather than

underneath the scattered clothes.

The large rock seems too heavy

to be thrown from the ground

to the first floor window

and too big to go through the

small crack between the shutters.

A handbag, jewellery case,

camera and laptop computer

are lying in full view.

There's a line of bloody shoe prints

from Meredith's room

to the front door.

And in the bathroom, a bloody

bare footprint is on the bathmat.

Over four days, investigators

collect more than 400 items

from the apartment, photographing

and filming their work.

When police bag

Meredith's bra for evidence,

they notice something is missing.

Somehow, the investigators

leave without the clasp -

a critical error that will

haunt the prosecution case.

The autopsy shows

Meredith has been strangled

and stabbed on

two sides of the neck,

possibly with

two different knives.

The second fatal stab

severed her thyroid artery.

There are 40 wounds -

too many, police believe,

for one assailant

to have inflicted alone.

The prosecution's

view of what happened,

later disputed by the defence,

is shown in this reconstruction.

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