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Paola’s boyfriend, Luca Altieri, argued that they should not wait for a warrant. The police suggested that because they were on private property, the young men could break down Meredith’s door without repercussions.
    “With the police, we decided to break into the room,” Luca later testified. The police stood back, and Filomena and the others huddled behind him as Luca attacked the door. “I kicked the door in, and then I heard a scream. At that moment I saw a pool of blood with streaks coming away from it.”
    The scream was from Filomena, who had caught a glimpse of Meredith’s bare left foot. Amanda and Raffaele were also in the kitchen when the door came
down; they were the first to run out of the house when the group in front turned and bolted, screaming, from the kitchen. But from their position at the back of the crowd, there was no way that Amanda or Raffaele could have seen Meredith’s position inside the room. A few hours later, though, Amanda told the police and onlookers who had gathered outside the house that Meredith had been found in front of her closet.
    That was not the case. Police investigators would later determine—according to the trajectory of blood when her throat was cut—that Meredith had been in front of the closet on her knees when she was stabbed. But then her body was dragged a few meters to the side of the bed, her long hair leaving on the floor a swirl of blood that is clearly visible in the crime scene video. That’s where she died of asphyxiation, literally suffocating on her own blood. A pile of Perugia postcards that Meredith had written to friends sat on her night-stand next to a paperback book and a glass of water. The bra that had been sliced from her body was crumpled at her feet. But most notable to detectives was that someone had covered Meredith with her duvet after the blood on her body dried. The only bloodstains on the duvet came from her neck wound, not from the small drops that had splattered over her torso when she
was stabbed. Criminologists agree overwhelmingly that covering the body is almost always the mark of a woman, especially if it is done after the murder. That simple detail and the fact that Amanda described Meredith’s body in front of the closet, where she was murdered—not by her bed, where she was found—would stick in the mind of the prosecutors throughout the investigation.
    At 1:30 P.M., Italo Carmignani, a longtime journalist for the Messaggero newspaper in Perugia, received a cryptic text message from a trustworthy source close to the police: “ Ragazza morta via della Pergola, forse omicidio —Dead girl via della Pergola, might be murder.” It was the first of hundreds of leaks to various journalists eager to understand this complicated crime. ERT experts arrived from Rome that afternoon, and two videographers and a still photographer documented their painstaking collection of evidence throughout the house. On the soundtrack to the video, investigators can be heard discussing the evidence and swapping hypotheses about the crime. Patrizia Stefanoni, a biologist with the ERT, personally collected many of the samples she would later test in her pristine lab in Rome. Dressed in a white jumpsuit, she picked up
Meredith’s bloodied bra from the floor by the tiny elastic band between the cups.
    “This was cut right off her body,” Stefanoni said, shaking her head. “Imagine. And look, we’re missing a piece of the bra clasp.”
    The police collected the lacy black underwear that was rolled up at Meredith’s feet and checked the button and zipper of her blue jeans, but failed to find any evidence that these had been forcibly stripped off her body. They then lifted the comforter to look at Meredith’s slender body, nude except for the blood-soaked long-sleeved white T-shirt that was pushed up over her small breasts. Her skin was purple and red with bruises, and her chest showed the outline in small droplets of blood where her bra had been.