Read The Murder of Meredith Kercher for Free Online Page B

Lumumba had first met Meredith at Le Chic in October, when she had told him that she knew how to make mojitos , a Cuban cocktail that normally consists of lime juice, sugar cane sticks, mint and rum, after seeing that he stocked Polish vodka in the bar. He had purportedly invited Meredith to return at some point to make the vodka variation of the drink.
    Amanda had also told police interrogators that she had met Lumumba at a basketball court on the evening of Meredith’s murder, and that they had arrived at her villa at approximately 9.00 p.m.Lumumba, however, would later insist that he had spent the evening at his bar.
    At dawn on Monday, November 6, with Mignini and Perugia’s chief of police, Arturo De Felice, believing that they now had sufficient evidence, arrested Amanda and Raffaele and made a grandstand appearance before the press to announce the arrests. Naturally, the story quickly became the biggest news item to hit Perugia in years, and it did not take long for news broadcasts to proliferate around the world. The police chief named Amanda as the ringleader of the brutal crime, and said that Meredith’s murder ‘was probably a sexually motivated killing.’
    De Felice was quick to add that the trio – Amanda, Raffaele and Patrick Lumumba – had killed Meredith because she had refused to participate in an orgy that had involved the use of drugs. He praised the work of his detectives as ‘magnificent’, and said that the case was now closed after barely five days’ worth of work in which investigators had ‘worked around the clock’ to solve it because ‘the city needed a result quickly’.
    ‘It’s an ugly story in which people which this girl had in her home – friends – tried to force her into relations which she didn’t want,’ Italian Foreign Minister Giuliano Amato told the news conference.
    Whether Amanda had seen the line of questioning about Lumumba as an opportunity to shift suspicion away from her and Raffaele, or whether the events that she had described were true, was not immediatelyknown. The case was under judicial seal, at least officially, though it was obvious that the information that was making its way into the press was being leaked. The detectives had a summary of Amanda’s statement typed up and asked that she sign it, although it would later be ruled inadmissible because she did not have a lawyer present to represent her and also because the questioning had occurred in Italian. Nonetheless, it was deemed sufficient cause for investigators to arrest Lumumba and bring him in for questioning, which they did early on Wednesday, November 7. Before Lumumba’s arrest, however, some time on the evening of November 6, Amanda changed her story again and recanted her confession in a statement she wrote to the police.
    ‘In regards to this “confession” that I made last night,’ Amanda wrote in her statement, ‘I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion… These things seem unreal to me, like in a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened to me or are just dreams my head has made to try to answer the questions…’
    Amanda returned to the original version of the events that she had related to police during her first interviews, and stated that during the later, all-night interrogation she had been confused because investigators had asked her to imagine certainscenarios, such as other people who may have been interested in Meredith. She also alleged that she had been struck by the police during the latest round of questioning, which would serve to introduce charges of police brutality. As far as her accusations against Lumumba were concerned, the police interrogators had appeared angry and Amanda had struggled to find answers to their queries. It had been the police, after all, who had brought up the line of questioning regarding Lumumba as they