AMANDA KNOX. (2016) A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

 

AMANDA KNOX. (2016) A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY BY ROD BLACKHURST AND BRIAN MCGINN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

The murder of Meredith Kercher happened in 2007. The sensational and extensive news coverage largely passed me by at the time because I was a new mammy of a baby boy with special needs, otherwise I probably would have been all over that like everyone else.

Murder, sex, intrigue, mystery, blood- what’s not to get excited about, as English journalist Nick Pisa who covered the case says in the film, though personally I think this guy was a little too over-enthusiastic about getting his juicy sex-murder headlines. The press jumped on this case like a swarm of hungry wolves. The headlines became more and more lurid, with the journalists leaping on wild murmurings about devil worshipping, cult murder and kinky sex.

According to this documentary, the truth is a lot less fantastical and, sadly, more mundane, if you can use the word ‘mundane’ in connection with the death of a lovely, vibrant young woman with so much more to give than she was allotted the time for.

Amanda Knox and her co-accused, Raffaele Sollecito, their joint prosecutor Giuliano Mignini and the journalist Nick Pisa all talk on-camera about their memories of the criminal case that spawned a million newspaper headlines and made Kercher, Knox and Sollecito household words all over the globe, but not in a good way…

In 2007, the pretty British brunette Meredith Kercher was a student in Perugia, Italy. She shared a ground-floor flat with Amanda Knox and two Italian women. She was studying modern history, the history of cinema and political theory, and was obviously intelligent and bright.

This documentary is about Amanda Knox, so I guess that’s why there’s not much in it about Meredith Kercher beyond her status as the murder victim in this case. I’d love to know much about her, such as, who was she really? What was she passionate about? Whom did she love? Why did she choose to come to Italy to study instead of staying in Britain? Did she have a long-standing yearning to go there, maybe?

Was she shy or outgoing? Had she any pets, or had she ever known true love? Did she have a boyfriend at the time of the murder? None of these questions are answered here, so obviously we’ll have to look elsewhere for an insight into the life and loves of Meredith Kercher. Her grieving dad wrote a book about her, so there’s that, at least.

Knox, an American from Seattle, Washington, was an exchange student at the same University as Meredith. She and Kercher had only known each other for a few weeks, really, by the time that Kercher was found sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in her bedroom in the apartment on Nov. 1^st, 2007.

Though someone else, a man called Rudy Guede, was eventually convicted of Kercher’s death and sent to prison for it, Amanda Knox and her then boyfriend, Italian student Raffaele Sollecito, were also charged, tried and found guilty of complicity in the murder and were sentenced to prison for twenty-six and twenty-five years respectively.

The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, often referred to as ‘over-jealous’ because of the trouble he went to to secure convictions for Knox and Sollecito, seemed anxious to turn the case into a three-way sex murder, in which Guede raped Kercher while Knox and Sollecito held her down. Knox implicated a third man, Patrick Lumumba, her employer at a pizza place, but he was later cleared.

Knox claims in the film that she was bullied by police and even physically abused by them in their efforts to get her to confess. There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of physical evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the murder, and neither of them in the film get into why the police thought there might have been a ritual sex-murder-and-black-magic element to the case.

Amanda, who comes across as bright and sexually confident in the film footage of her before the murder, apparently didn’t do herself any favours by openly canoodling with her boyfriend right after what happened to Kercher.

The prosecution thought that this behaviour was odd and inappropriate and it led them to take a dim view of Knox. Pictures of her kissing Sollecito appeared in the media and a black-widow-spider-type, sex-mad femme fatale, nicknamed 'Foxy Knoxy,' was notoriously born. Talk about trial by media.

Her relationship with Sollecito was only five days old at the time of the killing. It appears to have been one of those highly charged, intense sexual relationships that ignite quickly. A love at first sight kind of thing. Some people, possibly the prosecution, seemingly saw it as a kind of amour fou, as the French say, a crazy love that can lead you to do crazy things. Like, a three-way sex murder, maybe…?

I didn’t like Amanda Knox at all in this film. She seemed cold, uncaring and insincere and I found it hard to believe her version of things, even though she’s been twice found innocent of the crime as well as twice found guilty. (There was a long, long road to be traversed through the highways and by-ways of Italian justice before the pair eventually attained their freedom and exoneration.)

Raffaele Sollecito, on the other hand, attractively long-haired with an Italian accent as sexy as a fridge full of Cornettos, seems guileless and genuine when he talks about how his life has changed forever because of his association with this case. Maybe that’s just me, however, thinking like a woman and favouring a good-looking and nicely-spoken guy over a less pleasant and more uppity female just because she comes across as a bit of a hard-faced cow.

Amanda Knox is not terribly likeable, but that doesn’t necessarily make a person a cold-blooded killer. As tempting- and easy- as it might be to convict her on the basis of her rather abrasive personality, we should probably bear that in mind before we pass a moral judgement.