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saw police cars in the yard at 7 via della Pergola and heard the news of Meredith’s murder.

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    “I Kicked the Door in, and Then I Heard a Scream”
    N OVEMBER 2, 2007, was a frigid morning in Perugia. Fog had settled on the Umbrian hills, and the damp air was bone-chilling. Around 11 A.M., the sun started to peek through the haze, and Elisabetta Lana went out to her garden on via Sperandio to check her roses. She heard a strange ringing sound under one of the bushes and decided to call her son Alessandro. The night before, a prankster had phoned to warn that there was a bomb in her toilet, and the elderly Signora Lana was quick to worry. Alessandro called the postal police, who came by Elisabetta’s just before noon. The two mobile phones they found under the roses were easily traceable. One had a foreign SIM card purchased in Leeds, England. The other belonged to
Filomena Romanelli at number 7 via della Pergola nearby.
    At 12:35 P.M. the postal police pulled into the yard at 7 via della Pergola looking for Filomena. Instead, they found Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito standing outside the house. Raffaele was wearing a jacket; Amanda was not. A mop and bucket stood propped against the tiny porch at the front of the house, and Amanda told the police that she was taking these to Raffaele’s apartment to clean up a leak under his kitchen sink. The police, accustomed to dealing with foreign students and their imperfect command of Italian, were sympathetic to Amanda. With no idea that they had stumbled onto a serious crime scene, the police were at first not particularly puzzled to find the pair standing in the yard, looking bleary and slightly ill at ease. Later, they would testify that the couple acted “startled and nervous.”
    Raffaele immediately told the police that something seemed to be wrong in the house. Amanda had seen blood in the bathroom and later found a broken window in Filomena’s room, so they suspected a burglary. When the police asked if he had dialed the emergency number, 112, Raffaele said yes, although phone records would later show that this was a lie—instead,
he had called his sister, a police officer in Puglia. If Raf had in fact called 112, the switchboard would certainly have forwarded the call to the Carabinieri (military police) and the investigation into Meredith’s murder might have gone very differently under the auspices of their crime scene unit, the RIS (Reparti Investigazioni Scientifiche). Instead, the postal police called the Polizia (state police), who called in their own crime scene experts, known as the ERT (Esperti Ricerca Tracce). The RIS and ERT are fierce competitors. The more sophisticated RIS tends to investigate Italy’s most violent crimes and Mafia hits. The ERT generally handles domestic violence cases, but is eager to prove that it is every bit as good as the RIS.
    While they waited for the state police to show up, Amanda called her Italian roommate Filomena and urged her to get home quickly. Raffaele made a late call to 112 in which he described the suspected break-in in whispered tones—that tape would later be played at trial. But by then, the state police were already on their way to via della Pergola. And the state police were far more constrained than the Carabinieri in what they could do without a warrant. They were also quick to trust Amanda and Raffaele and allowed them to lead investigators through the house. Carabinieri
officials later said they would have made them wait outside.
    Amanda told police that she had returned home from Raf’s apartment at midmorning and noticed blood in the bathroom, where she proceeded to shower. Raffaele showed police the broken window in Filomena’s room and explained that they had tried to open Meredith’s door, but it was locked from the inside. By then, Filomena had returned home with another friend, Paola Grande, along with their boyfriends. With Meredith missing and her two phones now on the kitchen table,