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say that an hour later, they went out for a classic passeggiata, the late afternoon stroll Italians take around the center of town, returning to Raffaele’s before Amanda was scheduled to work at Le Chic. They had sex one more time, and then, Amanda says, she left around 8 P.M. to go home and get ready for work. At 8:18 P.M., Patrick sent Amanda a text message to tell her that business was slow and that she did not have to come in that night. She wrote back, in Italian: “ Ci vediamo più tardi. Buona serata —We’ll see you a little later. Good evening.” Both Raffaele’s and Amanda’s cell phones were turned off around 8:30 P.M. and turned on again just after 6 A.M. the next day. Amanda would later tell police that she went back to
Raffaele’s house, where they downloaded the movie Stardust and watched Amélie, made some dinner, smoked pot, and had sex. She described how they then took a shower together and how Raffaele dried her hair. But police computer technicians would determine that Raf did not download anything that night. At 8:40 P.M., his father called on the apartment’s land line, but no one answered.
    Meanwhile, Meredith relaxed at Robyn’s house with her friends Amy Frost, then twenty-one, and Sophie Purton, then twenty. They laughed and gossiped about the night before. Then they made a pizza and an apple pie while watching The Notebook on DVD. At around 9 P.M., Meredith said she was tired. She and Sophie left together and split up on via Roscetto, each heading to her own house. No one knows exactly what happened next, although police would eventually gather these confusing details:
    At 7:41 P.M., one of three closed-circuit TV cameras in the parking garage across from the girls’ villa captured the image of a man in a heavy jacket, wearing sneakers, heading toward via della Pergola. The camera caught him leaving twenty minutes later and again, after a half hour, returning in the direction of via della Pergola. The man was clearly white, not black, but
defense attorneys for both Raffaele and Amanda would later insist that this was Rudy Guede. At 8:43 P.M., the same video shows a woman in a white skirt—the prosecutor would claim that the woman was Amanda—heading home. Antonio Curatolo, then fifty-one, is a homeless man who spends his time on a bench by the Piazza Grimana basketball courts near the via della Pergola. He testified that he saw Amanda and Raffaele looking down toward the gate of the house around 9:30 P.M. He said they returned to the Piazza Grimana again at 10:30 and stood looking down over the railing toward Amanda and Meredith’s house. Then, he said, he saw them again shortly after midnight.
    Hekuran Kokomani, thirty-three, is an Albanian handyman who is also believed to be a drug informant for the local police. He testified that he nearly ran into a big, black garbage bag the night of either October 31 or November 1. What Kokomani at first thought was a bag, he said, turned out to be Amanda, Raffaele, and Rudy, which caused even the jury to burst into laughter. Then, he told the court, Amanda brandished a knife at him, and in self-defense he threw his cell phones and a handful of fresh olives from the floor of his car at her.

    Nara Capezzali, sixty-nine, lives in an apartment above the parking garage that overlooks via della Pergola. Her husband died in July 2007, and on November 1, she went to light a candle at his grave. That evening, she was lonely and sad. She flipped through the TV channels but didn’t find anything to watch, so she took her laxative and went to bed. Around 11:00 or 11:30 P.M.—she did not look at a clock—she woke up to use the toilet. On her way back to her bedroom, she heard a scream.
    “It was a woman’s scream, so blood curdling it made my skin crawl,” she would later testify. Then she heard what sounded to her like three or four people running up the metal steps to the top of the parking garage. She was upset all night. The next day, Capezzali